Are you a “headphone dodger”? Transport for London (TfL) might finally be cracking down on your antics.
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.
Railway byelaws already prohibit the playing of music “to the annoyance of any person”, but most national railway lines have done little to address the problem. Last year, The Times asked eight train companies for their policy on phone noise and only three bothered to even respond.
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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Is the plague of smartphone noise really having an impact on our quality of life? Almost certainly, yes. According to TfL, 70 per cent of us find it disruptive when fellow passengers play loud music and hold phone conversations without headphones. This isn’t just reflective of mild annoyance: listen to an LBC phone-in or scroll through London’s Reddit forums, and you’ll find eye-popping anger about the aural irritation this kind of noise causes the rest of us.
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.
So will a poster campaign make much difference? Almost certainly not, although it’s a step in the right direction. The underlying attitudes beneath selfish phone use on public transport reflect a much wider change in the post-Covid social contract. Although politicians have finally cottoned on to the problem, it will take deeper cultural shifts to rebalance our attitudes to the people around us.
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.
Stories of forgotten headphones were, of course, legion. There was the inevitable chap who assured me that headphones give us cancer. But amongst those who had forgotten their headphones and still couldn’t resist their phones, the majority of people I talked to expressed an immediate social pressure to respond to peer groups who were sharing memes, work notes and sports clips in real time – a pressure which overwhelmed the obligation to recognise the needs of people in their shared space. They recognised that noise annoyed the people around them, but they cared more about the friends expecting them to return a voice note.
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.
Our more thoughtful politicians have begun to realise this, even if they have yet to develop convincing strategies to tackle the problem. Recent policy proposals from both Lib Dems and Tories amount to little more than sketchy promises to roll out on-the-spot fines. These will be difficult to enforce and lack the robust legal thinking one might expect of a serious manifesto promise closer to a general election.
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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Nonetheless, we should be grateful that someone is thinking seriously about audio pollution as social blight. Shortly before the last election, I asked a politician close to Keir Starmer if Labour could do anything about the issue in government.
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?”
In many ways, they were absolutely right: Britain is profoundly broken and we are no longer a country that can afford luxury policies. Yet as I’ve written before, the importance of tackling anti-social behaviour was something that Starmer’s forbear, Tony Blair, understood on a fundamental level. This is something that the always-thoughtful Tory former minister Neil O’Brien also understands, using his Substack to place the campaign for a ban on noisy phone music in the context of Bill Bratton’s famous “broken windows” theory. Come down hard on relatively minor crimes, the theory runs, and you slowly create a society where serious crimes cannot flourish so freely.
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.
But he is right to be thinking seriously about auditory pollution as an act of anti-social behaviour. “Headphone-dodging” isn’t just an act of temporary selfishness; it speaks to a refusal to recognise ourselves as part of a co-operative society. It is a social phenomenon that stretches across our shared spaces and public parks – not just public transport – and needs to be addressed culturally.
Campaign posters on TfL are only a small start. Keir Starmer’s Government is wrong to ignore the problem.
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