Time to clamp down on 'headphone dodgers'?

Most Britons believe people who play loud music and videos on public transport should be fined as patience with "headphone dodgers" appears to be running increasingly thin.

A YouGov poll of 6,815 Britons found that 62% of us "strongly support" or "somewhat support" the proposal for stricter measures put forward by the Liberal Democrats. In a separate survey of more than 2,000 UK adults, conducted by Savanta, 38% of respondents had come across fellow travellers playing music out loud on their phones.

'Phenomenally rude'

Such headphone dodgers may not be the "biggest problem" with public transport, said James Hanson in The Spectator, but they're the "thin end of an increasingly large wedge". It's not the "noise itself" that's an irritation but rather the "lack of common courtesy". As a nation, we "used to pride ourselves" on politeness, but now we have to "suffer the daily indignity" of a "full-volume rendition" of some "muppet's" playlist.

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As an annoyance, it has been going on a while. Playing anything without headphones is a way of acknowledging that your enjoyment is more important than "anyone else's feelings", said Rebecca Reid in The i Paper in 2023. It's "an act of aural aggression" and one of the "truly morally indefensible" things someone can do.

Worse, it is "not a few lone wolves", wrote George Chesterton in London's The Standard, it's a "cultural phenomenon" and "phenomenally rude", as well as the "surest sign yet" that we are heading for a "post-apocalyptic cursed earth".

'Pure cowardice'

This sort of behaviour used to be "rare", wrote Adrian Chiles in The Guardian. If anyone was "watching or listening to something", they'd use headphones and if a "bit of tinny noise" were to "leak out" occasionally that was really "as bad as things got".

So what's changed? Do the culprits think it's acceptable or do they know it's "unacceptable" and don't care? Is it a "giant two-fingered gesture" that wordlessly poses the question: "I know this is out of order, but what are you going to do to stop me"?

It's "hard to pinpoint a date" when it became "socially acceptable", wrote Stephen Bleach in The Times 12 months ago, but in the past couple of years, many of us have seen "this kind of heedless noise pollution" become more and more "normalised". In response, the majority go for the "classic British tactic" of the "passive-aggressive hard stare" that achieves nothing. We could put our "inaction" down to "innate reserve" but "I suspect that most of us know, deep down", it's "pure cowardice".