I got a message from Dawnise last night, about twenty minutes after she left for an engagement, that she was on the Tube but the train was delayed – stopped between stations. She wasn’t confident she’d make it to Trafalgar Square, nominally a thirty minute journey, on time.
The Tube has been part of London life for 160 (one hundred and sixty) years and as we viscerally discovered the first time we were in London on Christmas proper, a day when mass transit is shuttered, it’s the vascular system that makes the city work.
As I was texting with Dawnise (fortunately there was cel coverage where her train was stopped between two stations) my thoughts turned to the occasional news story about people stuck on trains for hours at a time.
And then those thoughts went straight to the first episode of Connections, the late 70’s series written and presented by James Burke. If you haven’t seen it, you should stop reading this and go watch the first ten minutes of the first episode. If those ten minutes don’t make you watch the next ten, and the ten after that well, I dunno what to tell you.
I could almost hear Burke’s narration in my head as Dawnise sat on a train, stuck between two stations because of what Transport for London (TfL) described as a “signaling fault at Camden town.”
In the first Connections episode, The Trigger Effect, Burke describes the Northeast blackout of 1965, using it as a case study in how we’ve become dependent on complex webs of technology that had already become, in the 1970’s, so highly specialized that only the people who made them understood them.
Because the blackout affected the northeast, it affected New York. And because the story involved New York, it involved the New York subway. The 120 year old New York Subway system is to New York what The Tube is to London.
Both are relied on by millions of people every day, who ride it with rarely a second thought about the incredibly complex systems that make the whole thing work.
Millions of people every day, who willingly and confidently walk into what Burke calls a “technology trap.”
And when the trap springs, many of them sit pat for a surprisingly long time before they think to try to escape…
Then I got a message from Dawnise that her train was moving again, and I stopped thinking about technology traps and started thinking about what I could make for dinner.
In the end, Dawnise spent about an hour and a half on The Tube, only getting as far as Camden Town, a couple stops from home.
When her train finally arrived at the station platform, she got off, walked across to the northbound platform, and boarded a train home.