Patrick of Transport Blog links to this story, drawn to his attention by this promising rival/collaborator to/with Transport Blog.
So that, when trawling through the Samizdata archives in 2085 you may learn what this story was about, it is an advert by a car making enterprise called “General Motors” featuring a bus with “CREEPS AND WEIRDOS” on its sign machine instead of saying its destination. (I know what you’re thinking: what’s a “bus”?)
“Truth in advertising” says Patrick. Indeed. This advert says something extremely true and important about public transport, which is that not all of the public are very nice or companionable people. So obviously the advert can’t be allowed and General Motors have been made to withdrawn it. But it looks like the blogosphere will immortalise and universalise the message. Congratulations GM. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if they provoked the row deliberately, in order to help them make their point wihtout having to go on paying for it to be said. And in Canada! The horror.
GM is famous in public-transportophile circles for having bribed and corrupted buses and trams into perdition in the USA and replaced them all with the hated (by everyone except the non-creep non-weirdo public) motor car. The more I study this argument, the more I think that GM is the messenger being blamed for the message, the message being that most Americans prefer cars to buses and trams and for good reasons. Whereas buses and trams are quite good for getting new American places to live and work in started, they are not very good for serving all the people who subsequently go to live in these new American places, because American places are, generally speaking, big dispersed smudges rather than arranged in neat bus and tram friendly lines.
And the rest of the world is now following America into this argument. The only “public” transport issue of import now is not how to replace cars, but how to make the car system far, far better, which can’t happen while the infrastructure remains in “public” hands, which can’t be changed until the public sector is bullied into introducing road pricing, because that way there’ll be an income stream to privatise.
One of the many benefits of the new London road pricing scheme – crude and intrusive though it undoubtedly is – is that London buses now go a bit less slowly.
I hate blogging sometimes. You start out doing something short and frivolous and fun, and you end up with something long and profound and wearisome. It’s a bit like life, isn’t it?
I previously commented on this General Motors Canada ad campaign when it was posted by Prentiss over at his linguistic blog.
Briefly, I have never met a single creep or weirdo in thirty years of travelling by bus in several countries. I have however seen creeps and weirdos driving cars – either aggressively at pedestrians – or ‘friends’ who gave me a lift and then decided to drive dangerously – and a handful of the kind people who gave me lifts when I hitch-hiked were weirder and creepier than anyone I have ever seen on a bus.
No-one on a bus has ever robbed me or demanded I have sex with them. Car drivers have done both these things with me. I have never been on a bus with a driver deliberately banging his vehicle against the front and back of other vehicles on a crowded road for fun. I have been in a car driven by someone who did this.
My personal conclusion is that public transport civilises people and that driving cars makes people weird. The strong belief of car-owners that buses are crawling with rapists and thieves seems the strongest evidence to me that car-drivers are weird creeps – they become increasingly isolated, increasingly paranoid, wild-eyed purveyors of urban myths about people they no longer meet.
Look within yourselves, weirdos!
And as I said at Prentiss’s, the General Motors Europe-based (but American) CEO who screamed foul-mouthed abuse down the phone late one night at a very quiet, courteous American journalist friend of mine, tells me that many of the people who make cars are as creepy and weird as some of the people who drive them.
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I think that advert is hilarious!
It is pretty funny, Perry, I agree. Both intentionally and unintentionally (it gives away so much about car drivers)!
Reminds me of that wonderful, quaint sentence of Mayor Ed Koch – what was it he promised? To get the “weirdos and oddballs off the streets of New York”? Vintage stuff.
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Mark says:
“Briefly, I have never met a single creep or weirdo in thirty years of travelling by bus in several countries…”
I wish all you public transport advocates would let me into your club. The public transport *I* have to use is regularly disgusting, scary or both.
Last week’s prize was a drunken, stinking, raving lunatic who, having recently peed himself, boarded a London tube and proceeded to hurl abuse in the face of every female he could stagger up to.
Still, I suppose the public transport fanclub has its own fleet of weirdo-free vehicles. That’s the only way I can account for these reports of serene travel.
I didn’t say serene, but I lived in London four years, using public transport every day, and no-one smelling of urine yelling abuse ever got on any vehicle I was on. None of the other cities I’ve lived in either.
I did meet those car-drivers that tried to rape me, and the ones that succeeded in robbing me, though.
And what do you suggest for those people who live in places where there is no public transportation? Where distances are large and population is small and even the government won’t subsidize transportation? Perhaps people shouldn’t be allowed to live in such places?
It seems clear that all people who either ride busses or drive motorcars are and/or are not creeps and wierdos. Sweeping generalizations help…how?
Not suggesting anything Lars! I’m just against the sweeping generalisations proposed by General Motors, just like your good self. I only tried to stick to my 1st-hand experience of bus passengers and motorists, and what I heard 2nd-hand from a good friend about foul-mouthed senior General Motors executives.
Problem is, the two transport groups are a little bit mutually exclusive – the more car-owners the fewer people on buses, and the more scared car-owners are of who is (or who they think is) on those buses. And of course it cuts the other way – if we had a lot of cheap, efficient public transport, there’d be fewer cars bought, and those who really needed a car might have to pay more for them.
Some people (for example in remote districts) will always need cars. Some other people (the very poor, plus everybody else in cases where motorist freedom causes traffic jams) will always need some public-transport alternatives.
I only wanted to say that this quite amusing GM Canada advert not only does not meet with reality as I experienced it – it is in fact completely the other way round from reality as I experienced it.
Two men driving a car they owned punched me in the face once and took my money (the robbery I refer to above). I have never had anything that bad happen to me on a bus. Which type of person sounds to you more authentically creepy and weird?
Mark writes:
“I didn’t say serene, but I lived in London four years, using public transport every day, and no-one smelling of urine yelling abuse ever got on any vehicle I was on. None of the other cities I’ve lived in either. ”
That Kensington-Chelsea bus, eh?
In all seriousness, I didn’t make that incident up. It happened on a tube aimed at Brixton, sometime around 6.00 pm last Monday.
Me? Just relieved to have my car back from service. All being well it will be another year before I have to put up with such a dangerous, expensive and disgusting means of transport again.
Here are some of my experiences from travelling on trains over the last couple of years:
witnessing a fight
witnessing vandalism
witnessing someone urinating in the train
witnessing people smoking
witnessing people smoking a joint
sharing a carriage with an aggressive drunk
sharing a carriage with a whole bunch of aggressive, drunk football supporters
dealing with beggars
And that’s just the slightly out of the ordinary. just about every time I get on the train it is dirty, litter-strewn, vandalised and graffiti-ridden. And a high proportion of passengers seem to think there is nothing wrong with turning up their personal stereos and putting their feet on the seats.
In short, if I could afford it, I’d buy a car tomorrow.
I would, however, say that from my limited experience buses do seem to be slightly better – especially the single-deck variety. Night buses, however, are a different story.
Of course I understand Patrick and G Cooper! Just as long as you understand why, given my experiences, I feel safer among public-transport passengers than among motorists?
Sounds bad Patrick – of course I have shared carriages with at least rowdy drunks, though none ever threatened me (or punched me like that motorist) and I don’t like smoking either, no. The other things (urinating, fighting) I have never seen on public transport, though I’m sure they happen.
Oddly enough, the only two fist fights I’ve ever witnessed in my life were both between motorists who were in separate daytime road-rage incidents who then got out to scrap, during my 4 years in London. One in about 1987 near Archway (which involved three folk rolling around on the sidewalk/pavement and exciting things like biting!), the other in about 1990 near South Ken which consisted of lots of screaming and waving around of a baseball bat by one man at another.
Rowdy lot, you car drivers!
Mark wrote:
“Rowdy lot, you car drivers!”
Yes – it’s having to cope with all this statist control freakery ‘traffic management’, you see. Brings out the beast in us, it does…
Incidentally, I do agree that you see truly atrocious behaviour from drivers. It’s just that I find my chances of avoiding trouble when I am holding the driving wheel greater than I do as a hapless passenger.
I also have great problems with the statist/socialist public transport lobby – most particularly the loathsome Stalinists at Transport 2000, whose sinister influence is growing by the month. I do hope that the fine team running this blog turn their withering gaze on that subject at some point – it really is one of the most pressing intrusions into personal liberty being experienced in the UK today.
The vast majority of violent or near-violent incidents i’ve fallen victim to in the last 10 years have been with car drivers, usually over their behaviour on the road. I’ve never owned a car, so have used public transport regularly for years, & I’ve never got into any kind of trouble, at least with members of the public!
I know only one person who regularly takes public transport and has experienced any kind of violent incident on it, out of just about every London acquaintance i have. In comparison, I only know a handful of people who drive regularly, and in the past 3 years one of them has had his car stolen twice, and been mugged once getting out of his car.
Seems to me that many of the arguments presented here against public transport are about just not wanting to come into contact with the society you actually live in, trying to isolate yourself in a safe hermetic bubble. Certainly, there are people on the tube/bus who can be scary, but genuine incidents are so rare. The ad smacks of prissy yuppies who don’t want to share space with the single mum & her baby, or the kid with the pink mohawk.
To me, public transport in cities just makes sense; in my experience, towns that have good public transport are much more of a joy to live in. Car-domination tends to kill the streets, and make everyone retreat inside. Deserted streets make perfect hunting grounds for all sorts of malevolent freaks & weirdos.
yes