2005-07-25 - 1:58 p.m.

I missed the second round of London Underground bombings through a happy accident of fate - my parents (staying on another week) drove my brother and I to the airport, rather than sending us on the tube. Fortunately, no one was hurt this time, but it's odd to think that I may have just escaped death. Not frightening or even disturbing - just odd. How many times do we unknowingly escape death?

On a lighter note, the Underground is fantastic, especially when compared to Boston's T. The highlights:

• Comfortable plush seats - I suppose the T could reasonably put in some nice seats. However, they'd soon be torn apart and caked in horrifyingly unmentionable substances, so it's probably better not to waste the money.
• Train status displays - In each station, there's an LED display telling passengers when the next train will arrive. This is mindbogglingly fantastic. The only time the T tells passengers when trains will arrive is when you've been standing on a crowded platform for thirty minutes and they inform you that the train is about to pull in. THANKS GUYS.
• Clean - Everything is clean. Meanwhile, I'm wary of touching any surface in the T stations and on the trains themselves, especially poles and railings.
• Visible employees - I saw plenty of Underground employees helping out passengers and generally keeping an eye on things. In two years of riding the T nearly every day, I don't think I've seen a single non-driving or -token selling employee. Not even during the Democratic National Convention, where we were promised Gestapo tactics on all public transportation.
• Generally better clientele - We did have a minor bomb scare while I was on the tube: there was an abandoned bag in one of the cars; an announcement was made for that car to evacuate and *everybody left*. In Boston, no one would have left, and not only because the intercom wouldn't have been working anyway. People who ride the T are just mean. They don't give up seats for the pregnant or disabled, they block exits, and many times I've been on a train or in an enclosed platform where someone is smoking, despite the five hundred or so NO SMOKING signs posted around.

The only advantage Boston transportation has is this: When we were staying in London, we had to make special arrangements for parking because a slew of "resident parking only" zones had gone up without warning. The small hotels and inns were understandably upset and were in the process of petitioning the mayor, very politely, for special exceptions to that rule. If this had been Boston, people would have been knocking down the signs and storming into the mayor's office to call him lewd names, bless their tattered little hearts.