I think a lot of unreasonability on this subject is a question of perception. People who are not interested in children (mostly men) literally don't see them unless they are completely unignorable, which is mostly when they are behaving badly in a public place. New and impending fathers are often shocked by how many young kids there are on the streets because they'd never noticed them before. Likewise childfree men tend to believe that all under tens scream all the time because these are the only ones they notice - they typically are overimpressed by their friends' totally normal kids when they happen not to scream all the time. On the other side, parents of small kids rapidly gain the sanity-saving ability to screen out noisy children, and only react to noises which require them to take some action. Tiny in particular is a very noisy baby, but I don't register this because most of it's happy noises which needn't concern me - I constantly find myself taking him somewhere with lower noise levels and realising slightly too late that he's making disgusting raspberry blowing noises. Routemasters were killed off for two reasons - they needed conductors, which made them expensive, and they are not accessible to wheelchairs and unfolded pushchairs. In practice, the wheelchair bays in modern buses are used far more often by pushchairs than by wheelchair users (the situation is similar for other disabled facilities, lifts, ramps, large doors, large ground floor loos etc). Jonathan Glancy wrote a deeply obnoxious article in the Guardian a long time ago which still makes me seeth when I think of it - he seems to want a London which is a combination between Hollywood Dickens and Logan's Run, full of fit, thin, childless young people - the aesthetic qualities of the Routemaster far outweighing its actual virtues for people transport.
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chiming
Re: Swimming against the tide
Date: June 16th, 2005 11:30 am (UTC)From:On the other side, parents of small kids rapidly gain the sanity-saving ability to screen out noisy children, and only react to noises which require them to take some action. Tiny in particular is a very noisy baby, but I don't register this because most of it's happy noises which needn't concern me - I constantly find myself taking him somewhere with lower noise levels and realising slightly too late that he's making disgusting raspberry blowing noises.
Routemasters were killed off for two reasons - they needed conductors, which made them expensive, and they are not accessible to wheelchairs and unfolded pushchairs. In practice, the wheelchair bays in modern buses are used far more often by pushchairs than by wheelchair users (the situation is similar for other disabled facilities, lifts, ramps, large doors, large ground floor loos etc). Jonathan Glancy wrote a deeply obnoxious article in the Guardian a long time ago which still makes me seeth when I think of it - he seems to want a London which is a combination between Hollywood Dickens and Logan's Run, full of fit, thin, childless young people - the aesthetic qualities of the Routemaster far outweighing its actual virtues for people transport.