In this age of the ubiquitous speakerphone, British public transport has become an auditory hellscape: it seems impossible to hop on a train for a couple of stops without listening to someone scroll through TikTok on maximum volume, watch the football highlights, or even conduct a Zoom meeting – all without headphones.
Today, however, TfL has launched a poster campaign: it encourages Tubegoers to “be considerate” of fellow passengers and always plug in their headphones. No one is expected to sign up to the social contract for free these days, so if you engage with the campaign on Instagram, you can win one of five pairs of headphones. When civic conscience fails, there’s always bribery.
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The science backs it up: most electronic noise is recorded and conveyed using soundwaves that are flattened for transmission, which are much harsher on the human ear than the soundwaves caused by natural conversation with someone present in the room. If you’re blasting your chat by speakerphone so that the rest of us have to hear it, don’t justify yourself by claiming it’s just “like having a normal conversation”. Our ears have not evolved to cope with this level of sonic stress.
Earlier this month, the Observer newspaper sent me out to talk to “headphone-dodgers” in public spaces and politely inquire about their reasons for playing sound without headphones. Once I’d got through the first few angry confrontations, and worked out how to initiate a friendly conversation in which it was clear I was simply trying to understand people’s changing behaviour, a pattern emerged.
As much as anything else, this is the legacy of a Covid pandemic that redrew our sense of kinship into the narrowest of household “bubbles”; one that prioritises social bonds with our immediate peers and dismisses concepts such civic and national community as irrelevant. It is exacerbated by a digital revolution that has allowed us all to find our online tribes – and to ignore the people sitting next to us in the flesh.
There are serious legal problems that will need addressing if such fines are to be extended – the one notable prosecution for noisy speakerphone use, which took place in 2023, depended on the “Single Justice Procedure”, a controversial behind-closed-doors process without juries which the Labour Government has promised to “fundamentally reform” unless improvements are made.
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They looked at me in bafflement: the new government’s intray would include a homelessness epidemic, an NHS crisis, and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, “and you want me to introduce legislation to tackle some annoying noise?”
O’Brien, though, reverts to proposing a noise ban on public transport, without addressing the difficulties in enforcement I have touched on above. Such a ban would also impose an added burden on the British Transport Police, which is already struggling under the weight of anti-social behaviour on trains. Just this Monday, the BTP Authority released figures showing that violence against women and girls on trains has risen by 59 per cent since 2021 – redeploying officers to police iPhone use is unlikely to help.
Campaign posters on TfL are only a small start. Keir Starmer’s Government is wrong to ignore the problem.
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