Phone signal went live this week across a quarter of the underground system in the capital, mainly in central London, with further coverage planned by the end of summer. This is great news for people who can’t go five minutes without talking, and bad news for everyone else. The previous lack of network coverage was just about the only thing keeping us civil.
Across all transport networks, there has been a radical divergence in etiquette since the pandemic. That period, when there was minimal occasion to share space with strangers, introduced a lot of complexity to a system that was already badly codified, and somehow erased all the tacit consensus we’d reached beforehand.
