A few weeks ago I barely made it on to a crowded commuter train where the only empty seat was beside a man whose numerous devices and cables were sprawled all over it and the table. Apart from that, one of the devices was blaring music loud enough to drown out a small city – which probably explained the generally uneasy atmosphere. I gestured at the seat; he immediately cleared the space. Encouraged, I leaned over and asked if he could use headphones. At this point every passenger in the carriage ostentatiously gazed out a window. But instead of a showdown, the man apologised, packed up the kit and fell asleep.
What was notable about his reaction was the look of surprise rather than irritation. It was as if he had snapped out of a reverie, or as if no one had ever suggested he use headphones on public transport before.
Regular transport users will recognise the scenario. Interminable phone conversations, dreary 15-minute voice notes, chirpy influencers, whipsaw bursts of TikTok, all conducted at full volume. To describe it as an assault on the senses may be overstating the problem (forbearance often depends on journey length) but one stressful element for the captive listeners is processing their internal, seething cowardice. Another is the anticipation of intervention by a furious passenger. But the point is that intervention rarely happens. Mainly people simmer and do nothing.
In advance of this week’s local elections in parts of England, a poll commissioned by the Liberal Democrats asked people how they respond to such behaviour. To no one’s surprise, more than half said they wouldn’t feel comfortable asking someone to turn down their music on public transport. Among women that rose to two-thirds.
I leaned over to the man beside me and asked him to put on headphones. Everyone looked away
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Whether this reflects the large swathe of people who fear a violent response or merely being outed as uncool control freaks is unclear. Perhaps that’s because it’s a relatively new phenomenon. Pre-pandemic the notion of blaring your highly individual content in a public area wasn’t unheard of but it hadn’t yet been normalised. While everyone was fixated on their phones they rarely played them out loud or conducted lengthy high volume conversations on them without headphones.
Maybe it’s a hangover from lockdown when people handed their entire lives to their magical devices, right down to having Friday work drinks over Zoom. Perhaps that explains the young man’s surprised response to the headphones request, as if that spell never quite lifted.
Volume levels can be subjective of course. The silence and lack of engagement in public areas delivered by phone-obsession undoubtedly make one man’s noise seem all the more intrusive. And it could be argued that someone conversing loudly on speakerphone is no different to having a couple of benignly drunk people a few feet away.
The difference is you might have a laugh with the in-real-life drunk people but no one ever laughs at someone else’s full-volume chaotic, stop-start video clips or grumpy exchanges about who’s rostered for the weekend shift. Some captives are driven to acquire noise-cancelling headphones if they can afford them, thereby plunging society ever deeper into the all-about-me tech bubble.
So, ultimately, who gets to decide ? Should silence be declared for the long-distance commuter with a laptop trying to get work done or should the ground be ceded to the one revving up for the day with a blast of Charli XCX?
Sensing some cut-through from “the silent majority”, the Lib Dems are proposing a ban on anyone who booms out songs and TV shows on public transport, or at stations or bus stops and plan to enforce it with fines of £1,000 (€1,175).
It’s hardly an original idea. Three months ago in France, a middle-aged man was on a call with his sister in a quiet area of Nantes station when a railway employee threatened him with a €150 fine if he didn’t turn off the loudspeaker. When he didn’t pay up on the spot the fine soared to €200. Lawyers have been engaged.
Portugal’s transport authority has just announced fines of between €50 and €250 for passengers making excessive mobile phone noise, also known as an offence against civility.
In Ireland, an Irish Rail internal email obtained by the Irish Independent a couple of years ago revealed that an initiative for “quieter coaches” was leading to confrontation with passengers involved in loud chatter or using their phones. On the other side were those passengers who mistook “quieter” for total monkish silence. Staff discussions concluded on a philosophical note that “Irish culture can be slow sometimes to conform” to anything that is new or different.
But civility is hardly a novel concept. Most people can identify it when they see it. Sometimes noisemakers just need a nudge. For the more seasoned ones, rather than staring out the window perhaps the silent majority just needs to step up en masse and say “would you mind …?”
