The punk diary considers London’s boldest infrastructure decision since the bus lane
Someone at City Hall has discovered paint. Not new paint. Not clever paint. Just paint, in yellow, applied to existing roads that already had, by my count, an underground, an overground, buses, trams, riverboats, and at least one cable car nobody I know has ever used.
The Announcement
According to the writeup I read on the Political Desk’s account of London’s newest transport fix, the city has apparently solved its transport woes with a tin of yellow paint. I have been in this town nine years, I have taken the Overground when it was actually running, and I can confirm that a lot of very expensive infrastructure already exists here. What we appear to have been missing, this whole time, was paint.
I mentioned this to the drummer, who does deliveries on a moped between rehearsals, and he laughed so hard he nearly dropped his helmet. He says the paint will not fix the pothole outside the rehearsal studio, the one that has swallowed two of his mirrors this year alone. I told him that is not the point. The point is announcing something. The pothole is a separate department.
A Brief History of Fixing Things By Announcing Them
This is not new. British governance has a long and distinguished history of solving problems through the medium of a press release. You do not need to repair the thing. You need a press release that describes the thing as repaired, ideally with a photograph of someone in a hi-vis vest looking pleased.
I brought this up with Siobhan, who is basically me but writes for the crime desk under a different byline, and she pointed out that punk itself started partly as a reaction to exactly this kind of gap between what is said and what is true. So really, this yellow paint scheme is the most punk thing the council has done all year, even if it did not mean to be.
There is also the small matter of the colour choice itself. Yellow, apparently, tests well with focus groups as a colour that signals attention without alarming anyone the way red might, or boring anyone the way beige definitely would. I did not know transport policy involved this much colour theory. I assumed it involved tarmac and possibly a spreadsheet. Turns out there is a whole design brief behind it, and somewhere a consultant billed a very healthy sum for recommending a colour that already exists on every taxi in the city.
Reading Around
I had a scroll through Cyndi Himmelstiere’s Shoreditch dispatches afterward, because I needed to read about a part of London where at least the graffiti is intentional. There is something reassuring about a neighbourhood that is honest about being a mess. Shoreditch does not pretend the mess is solved. It just sells you a flat white next to it.
I also caught up on the health section, mostly because reading about the transport plan had given me a headache, and I wanted to know if that was normal. Apparently it is. Apparently a lot of Londoners get headaches this time of year, though I suspect ours has a specific, yellow, paint-shaped cause.
What the Rehearsal Room Thinks
Everyone in the band has an opinion, obviously, because everyone in this city has an opinion about transport, it is basically our national sport once you take football off the table. The guitarist thinks the paint is fine as a stopgap. The bass player thinks it is a distraction from the fact that half the buses she takes are still late. I think, personally, that if the council wants to impress me, they should try fixing the lift at the tube station near the venue, which has now been out of order for longer than some of the bands I have been in.
The Consultation Nobody Attended
Apparently there was a public consultation before the paint went down, which is standard practice, and which in this city usually means a folding table outside a library on a Tuesday afternoon attended by exactly four retirees and one man walking a dog who wandered over out of curiosity. I do not say this to mock the process, only to note that by the time paint reaches tarmac, the consultation stage has usually involved roughly the same number of people as a small house party, not the several million residents the decision actually affects.
The bass player, who used to work in local government before she discovered she preferred an audience that occasionally applauds, says this is completely normal and that most infrastructure decisions in this country get made by a genuinely small group of extremely tired people working from a spreadsheet, which she finds oddly reassuring rather than alarming, because at least it means nobody with a strange personal agenda is likely to be behind it. Mostly, she says, it is just tiredness and deadlines.
Final Thought From the Rehearsal Room
We finished the set, packed the gear, and the drummer’s moped mirror survived the ride home, mostly by luck. The pothole remains unpainted. The main roads, I am told, now gleam. I look forward to the follow up announcement, presumably involving a second colour.
