Too-be much to take

A couple of years ago I had a temp job a forty-five minutes away from home, and I hated the drive, because other drivers are such wankers. If only I'd known that two short years later I would have no car, and other people on public transport, are also wankers, but - crucially - without the calming barrier of a whole car or two between us. Then I would have been grateful for the drive.

To commemorate this I have created this list of the most significant sins committed by people on London's (in other ways really very good) public transport system. Most of these could be avoided by the simple expedient of people considering for a tiny second that actually, other people exist. These are in order of their coming to me, rather than in order of infuriatingness. They're all unforgivably infuriating.

1. Sitting on the inside seat on the bus when it's very busy and either pretending not to see anyone else (annoying) or just looking at you with the dead-eyed impudence of 'I'm not going to move and you're not going to ask me, in case I kick off' (very annoying).

2. Standing in front of the window in the door on a packed Tube carriage. That's EVERYONE's air. Stop using it all.

3. Holding onto the overhead bar with two hands in the Tube carriage vestibule (parallel to the doors), taking up loads of room. Funnily enough, I only ever see men doing this. One day, I will break, and start tickling.

4. Corollary to 3: people who lean on an upright pole (Tube and bus). Other people are also trying not to fall over, you know.

5. [Tube drivers] When the Tube stops and they don't say anything for about five minutes, while I break into a sweat and fan myself with a bookmark, trying not to elbow other people in the face, and start contemplating whether I would take my heels off I had to walk to the surface and whether I have suitable receptacles in my bag for weeing into, if it came to it, and whether there's enough water in everyone's bags to keep us all alive if we pooled it. Essentially, not being given information quickly makes me assume I need to start planning to recreate human civilisation on the Northern line, halfway between Waterloo and Kennington.

6. People with buggies on really busy buses who never appear to consider for a moment that they might want to fold the buggy up. Even though it says on the sign that in busy times they may need to fold up the buggy to make space. It's part of the social contract of public transport, same as getting up for people who need the seat more than you. You can tell because signs ask you to do both things. (If you've bought a buggy you don't know how to fold up, there's no hope for you. You probably ought not to have bred.)

7. PDA. Especially on a commuter Tube in the morning.

If you do any of these things regularly, I hope you will rethink your ways. Failing that, I hope TfL comes up with a way of catapulting you off all public transport based on facial recognition technology within my lifetime.