themodelcommuter

Wikipedia defines Commuting as

The process of travelling between a place of residence and a place of work.

I would be more inclined to define it as

A form of legalised, self inflicted torture that is usually a necessary part of working (which is, of itself, a form of legalised torture).

The Problem

Every day the City of London has its population increased from under 9,000 to around 320,000. Many of those people travel in on poorly run, underfunded rail services operating on hopelessly antiquated track using a failing infrastructure. Most of these people are unhappy. All of them annoy me.

The Cause

Commuting into and out of London is a hideous endeavour that sucks up precious minutes of our lives each and every working day. People are either tired due to it being early in the morning or tired after having done a full days work and what with the overcrowding, delays and cancellations they get short tempered and impatient.

People also seem to be becoming more and more inconsiderate towards their fellow commuters. The prevalence of personal stereos and mobile phones has made people insular and unaware of others. People no longer consider how their actions affect others which just adds to the general malaise.

These factors create an air of misery and oppression while commuting making it worse than it needs to be. It is a vicious circle that millions of people are locked into every day.

The Culprits

It would be nice to believe that there was some small, easily removed cadre of bad commuters who were causing the problem. After all, ask any London commuter and they will tell you how bad other commuters are but not one of them will admit to being at fault.

The reality is that everyone is at fault. The zombie like state that commuting induces turns people from considerate human beings into complete idiots who’s very right to exist is questionable.

Not all the blame lies at the feet of the commuters however. In London a large percentage of the blame must be apportioned to the transport companies and their seeming inability to run a public transport service.

The Solution

There have been many attempts to get London commuters to smile, talk to each other and generally interact with each other in order to improve the quality of their commute. These endeavours are doomed to failure since we just want to get to work quickly and with the minimum of fuss. We don’t want to be forced into interacting with each other as this only causes us to feel uncomfortable and ill at ease.

The only solution is to identify acts that are considered to be unacceptable behaviour and stop them from happening. If we can house train cats and dogs surely we must be able to educate commuters who, for the most part, are normal upstanding members of the community.

Since my preferred method of disproportionately extreme physical punishment is currently considered illegal by the UK government I am forced instead to ‘name and shame’ via this site. I also hope to garner support for the Commuting License which i feel would help to considerably reduce the amount of reprehensible behaviour displayed by commuters.

The policy of ‘name and shame’ also extends to the transport companies since they already have operating licences which appear to be completely ineffectual and I can think of no other way of punishing them (implementing large fines would only further reduce the amount of investment into the infrastructure when it badly needs more cash).

The Model Commuter

The ideal of the model commuter is not an impossible one and is something that all commuters should be striving to achieve. By understanding what is and is not acceptable behaviour and making a conscious effort the world can be made a better place for literally millions of people. In case there was any doubt, any behaviour listed on this site is considered unacceptable.

Using This Site

Using this site is simple. If you are a commuter and you recognise any of the behaviour described therein as something you do or have done stop doing it. Its that simple. At best its annoying and at worse its putting me in a bad mood and causing me to wish bad things upon you, your family, your loved ones and friends.

Locale

For those who haven’t guessed already, this site is London centric. No doubt the anecdotes presented are global in relevance, however, for the benefit of foreign visitors the spelling and humour on this site are English (as opposed to American).