The Global Citizen's Guide To: London Transport (part 5)

The escalator:

It's really quite simple: if God had intended for you not to move your ass, He wouldn't have given you legs. Seriously, it's not very difficult- if you can walk up the stairs in your own home, you can walk up an escalator. This has two main advantages: it helps tone your thighs and butt, and it keeps human traffic moving. If you do indeed decide to walk up an escalator, though, please keep to the left. No, no, your OTHER left.... in this way, you leave the right side- no, no, your OTHER right...- free for those who are less mobile, those carrying young children or bulky luggage, and those lugging 60-piece crockery sets from Argos.....

OK? So, to summarize:

1. WALK up/down escalators.
2. WALK on the LEFT side.
3. STAND on the RIGHT side.

Go on, try it.......

The Global Citizen's Guide to: London Transport (part 4)

Claiming a refund:

You will recall that we covered the intricacies of the Northern Line in part 3, which should serve as a rough guide to prepare you for when you actually need to use it. Of course, you will also find that when you actually need to use it, most likely it won't be running, so it might all be moot. However, in such cases you may want to claim a refund. The Passenger's Charter stipulates that in the event of a line not being operational for at least 3 hours, tube operators must provide a refund to passengers who hold a travelcard valid for a week or longer (or something roughly along those lines). This being the case, I thought I'd try it out a couple of weeks ago, when the line was closed for two days due to drivers refusing to operate trains on safety grounds. Having had to spend two days working from home (not in itself a bad thing, I might add), I was pleased to be informed by my newspaper that I could claim back the price of my tickets and was duly pointed to the Transport for London website, where I was impressed to find out that I could process my claim online. I have since discovered that there are only 3 reasons why you might actually want to do this:

1. You have nothing better to do.
2. You're a sucker for online form-filling.
3. You feel so wronged that nothing else, not even world peace, could possibly appease you.

I, it seems, fall into none of these categories; the pain involved in filling in the stupid online claim form will, I imagine, have residual psychological effects for years to come. I won't bore you with the details of how you have to claim each trip separately and go through the agony of completing your details (yes, the same ones I entered just 5 minutes ago....) time after time after time, only to realize that the form uses some funky java thing that's not compatible with your browser, so that you have to do everything again etc., etc., etc...

Needless to say, I wasn't really expecting to receive my refund, so I was pleasantly surprised when an envelope from Transport for London came through the post last weekend. "Great!" I thought. But that only lasted until I opened the envelope, wherein I found two vouchers each worth the value of my single ticket on the Northern Line. How stupid is that? I have to have a travelcard in order to claim, upon which I receive vouchers for two single tickets, which I will never use because I already have a friggin' travelcard!!

Such logic makes our trains go round............