Bus Passengers Face £100 Fines For Playing Music Aloud

Fines of up to a hundred pounds can now be issued to anyone playing music or videos out loud on a bus, part of a package of new powers aimed at antisocial behaviour. In Haddenham, where the buses turn up and do the thing buses are supposed to do, the announcement was received less as a warning than as an invitation to expand the scope.

Within a day the shelter at the train station had produced an unofficial supplementary list, written on the back of a flyer and held on with the kind of tape that defeats weather. Loud music was on it, but only in fourth place. Above it sat open-mouthed chewing, the licked finger used to turn a page, and the noise a man makes when he finishes a sandwich and wants the vehicle to know about it.

"The music one is easy, that's the government doing the obvious bit," said Delia Harkaway, a retired piano tuner who rides the service twice a week and sits where she can see everybody. "The finger lick is the real crime. A man licked his thumb near Aston Sandford once and I heard it over the engine. I have not been the same since, and I would like that reflected in the tariff."

Not everyone is in favour of the drift. Ronnie Capp, eighty, a goth since before most of the route existed, rides into Aylesbury in a studded leather jacket and chews gum with a slow, deliberate confidence that has outlasted several timetables. "I have been chewing on public transport for six decades and nobody has died of it," he said, resettling the jacket. "If they want to fine me they can fine me. I would frame it. Put it next to the others."

A younger passenger who works in Thame and owns headphones costing more than his coat said he supported the music fine without reservation, then admitted, under no real pressure at all, that he hums. He described the humming as involuntary and tuneful and said he would accept a reduced penalty, possibly a warning, ideally a compliment.

The parish council has not adopted the supplementary list, on the grounds that it has no power to fine anyone for anything, a limitation it describes in the minutes as ongoing. The list stays on the shelter regardless, consulted daily, amended weekly, and treated by regulars with the solemn respect usually given to a document that means absolutely nothing.

The Herald's position, for what it is worth from a paper that chews loudly in its own office, is that the buses here are good, they come, and anybody who ruins one with a phone speaker deserves whatever the law has in mind. The finger licking we will defend to the last.