Lovely spring day that it is, this afternoon I thought I’d go over to Canary Wharf to see what was going on around there. Nothing too noteworthy really, taking the Superloop bus which now runs from Blackheath to the Isle of Dogs. To get back to the south side of the river though, I thought I’d use the foot tunnel which goes down to Greenwich. I like those foot tunnels under the Thames as they sort of have a historic, eerie atmosphere to them. The only problem is I never know whether I’m going to be able to use them as most of the time one of the two lifts is out of order, so I need to take the DLR back instead. This afternoon, however, I was in luck and I got back to Greenwich without an issue.

I feel I need to say, though, that it really annoyed me that there were five or six people also in the lift who were perfectly capable of using the stairs. I know I keep returning to issues like this, but it winds me up: if only people who needed to use such lifts were allowed to use them, they obviously wouldn’t break down nearly as often. The same goes for the lifts at the foot tunnel at Woolwich and across the entire transport network. But because people can’t be arsed to use the stairs, lifts get over used, break down, and guys like me are left stuck. It is one of my bugbears, but it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem, and I seriously wish something would be done about it. Part of me wishes there was some kind of penalty for using a lift when you don’t strictly need to – perhaps then people would realise that, to guys like me, they’re more than just convenient ways of scaling or descending heights.