The Letter of the Byelaw

It is as clichéd a topic of British conversation as the weather or how to make the perfect cup of tea. It makes commuters’ blood boil. It leads to tutting, stern looks and occasionally even fisticuffs. And, in most forms, it is actually a criminal offence.

I am talking, of course, about rudeness on the Tube. For reasons that I am sure we are all familiar with, travelling by Tube can often be unpleasant enough without your fellow passengers making your experience worse with their unmitigated self-centredness. What you may not know is that many of the things you probably find most annoying are criminal offences under the Transport for London Rail Byelaws. Standing on the left? Proscribed. Entering a train before everyone has got off? Illegal. Holding a door open? Forbidden. Even the increasingly prevalent scourge of the mobile phone music playing imbecile is covered, as the use of ‘any instrument, article or equipment for production or reproduction of sound’ is against Byelaw 7.

Everyone using the London Underground, London Overground and Docklands Light Railway networks must abide by these laws, and breaching any one of them is punishable in a magistrates’ court of a fine up to £1000. That’s a lot of money for standing on the wrong side of the escalator. In fact, I would be surprised if any cases under these byelaws had made it to the courts in the last ten years. The byelaw most commonly used by LU staff is probably 7(2) which allows us to eject beggars, unlicensed buskers and unlicensed charity collectors from our railway, but of course these cases are run-of-the-mill and never get so far as the court system. Perhaps if LU, the BTP or even a passenger group made some effort to prosecute someone for what I would call the ‘rudeness’ offenses like playing music out loud on one’s mobile, the publicity resulting from the case (and hopefully large fine) would dissuade people from being rude next time they were travelling about the system. Then again, given how idiotic these people are in the first place, perhaps it wouldn’t.

The reason I came to looking all this up is that I was on a District line train going to work on Friday when I was confronted by a group of Imperial College Medical Students raising money for their annual “RAG” drive. Their spiel was announced at the top of their leader’s voice before the group of five thrust their buckets in the face of everyone in the carriage. I felt that I was probably supposed to throw them off, but I was not sufficiently sure of my footing to actually stand up in the middle of the young man’s speech and declare that, as an LU manager, I was kicking them off the train. In hindsight, I was foolish not to do it, but at least I’ll know for next time. If you were on that train with me, I apologise for my inaction!