When a passenger boards a London bus, appears agitated, speaks in a language other than English, and the driver reacts, you can see it if you pay attention. Not with a vacant expression. Not by shrugging. simply replies in a natural, almost casual manner, and the passenger clearly becomes more at ease. In this city, it occurs dozens of times a day, and hardly anyone records it.
This is not promoted by Transport for London. No press release has been issued. No banner for the campaign. However, something subtly amazing is taking place somewhere between the more than 700 routes and the 176.8 million bus trips that Londoners make each month. Between them, the people behind those wheels, whom the majority of passengers hardly look at, speak nearly forty different languages.
Contrast that with Montreal. When a Pakistani graduate student asked the bus driver for the time in English in 2009, she called the police and cleared the entire bus. The student claims that after the driver, who works in a province where French is the only official language of employment, told him she didn’t speak English, she later demonstrated that she did. The situation got out of control. coverage of news. statements about politics. A simple verbal exchange on public transportation caused a brief rift in the city. Many observers were not impressed by the language law or its bureaucracy. It was the fragility of the entire situation. Just one phrase. One rejection. There were twenty stranded people.
In this way, bus drivers in London are doing something that is largely ignored because it is effective. One small example of the human texture within TfL’s workforce is Eddie, a driver who is well-known to his coworkers for both his punctuality and his Jollof Rice. Shana, who has been a driver for eighteen years and recalls being one of the few women in the garage when she first started, claims that the conversations—the regulars, the quick exchanges, the moments of real human contact—have always been her favorite aspect of her job. Both of them might not consider themselves cultural ambassadors. However, they are nearly exactly that.
TfL collaborated with the non-profit organization Neighbourly Lab, which focuses on social connectedness, to measure something that seems almost too easy to research: the frequency with which passengers genuinely acknowledge their driver. The results were instructive. When they board, only roughly two out of ten passengers say hello to the driver. When they depart, less than 10% say “thank you.” This implies that a huge, silent transaction—one person carrying another across the city, frequently over a language barrier—is taking place somewhere in those tens of millions of trips, and the person being carried doesn’t look up.
This seems to be a reflection of how London views its service workers in general, especially those from immigrant communities, who make up a sizable portion of TfL’s bus staff. These are people who came to this city speaking Yoruba, Urdu, Twi, Somali, Arabic, and dozens of other languages; they learned English; they took jobs requiring extraordinary patience and navigational memory; and yet they are able to calm an anxious elderly passenger or greet a perplexed tourist in a language they know. It is not a policy to be multilingual. It’s simply the city manifesting itself.
The extent to which TfL actively considers linguistic diversity in hiring and route placement is still unknown; in Montreal, it has been reported that bilingual drivers were quietly assigned to tourist routes and English-speaking suburbs. It is worthwhile to inquire as to whether deployment in London is shaped by something comparable, more natural or intentional. However, it appears clear that it is carried by the drivers themselves. There is no manual for the forty languages. The people contain them.
You get the impression that London’s true integration story isn’t occurring in government reports or diversity targets when you watch this play out, which happens every morning on every route in every borough. At six in the morning, a driver from Ghana and a passenger from Bangladesh figure each other out in under thirty seconds at a Peckham bus stop, and the bus continues on.
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