Bus Drivers Are Tired of Your Moral Theater

I have a simple message for the neighborhood’s bus philosophers: if you want cleaner streets, start by not turning Bus 120 into a seminar room for your bruised conscience.

The drivers on the route through Wedding have seen the full commuter zoo. The Hackneyed Left with their canvas bags, damp hair, and little mouths full of civic virtue. The self-appointed transit ethicists who board already offended, as if a BVG bus were a tribunal and the driver had personally broken into their apartment. The posturing regulars who plant themselves in the aisle discussing solidarity while blocking the door like a cheap revolutionary barricade with sneakers. And the loudest of all, the people who insist they are defending public space while refusing to make a single inch of it for the exhausted man in the front who is trying to keep forty strangers from becoming a lawsuit.

One driver, speaking on condition of anonymity because he once got cornered by a passenger who wanted to “de-escalate” a boarding dispute by talking at him for eight consecutive minutes, said the job is not hardest when the bus is full. “It is hardest when everybody thinks they are the conscience of the city,” he said. “They want calm, they want order, they want dignity. Fine. Then pull your backpack off the seat, stop leaning into the doorway like you’re posing for a pamphlet, and let me do the job without your little performance art boner for public virtue.”

That is the trick, of course. Everyone wants a civilized city, preferably one with climate stickers, anti-racist slogans, mixed neighborhoods, and that beautiful little stain of self-regard that lets them feel historically advanced while they ignore the woman with a stroller behind them. Nobody wants to be the one who yields the seat, lowers the voice, or stops filming the driver like he is an overworked extra in their personal Godard remake. The same people who lecture about solidarity on the ride home will fight a stranger over a backpack space with the tenderness of a landlord chasing interest payments.

The district office has already done what district offices do when confronted with human beings: it has issued more “awareness,” which is bureaucratic chamomile poured over a wound that still needs stitches. BVG, for its part, keeps asking passengers to respect staff and avoid confrontation, a request that in Berlin lands with the erotic fragility of a man begging not to be embarrassed at the urinal. Respect, here, is treated like a limited-edition product. Everyone is theoretically in favor of it; few are willing to pay for the full experience.

And yes, the hypocrisy is deliciously filthy. The city’s loudest critics of rudeness are often the first to arrive with elbows out, faces set, and principles hanging open like a cheap coat in a hallway. They talk like a reading group and behave like a parking dispute with skin. They can recite the language of care while standing directly in the way of care getting anywhere at all. Their politics are so intimate they can barely keep their hands off the nearest stranger’s throat, metaphorically speaking, which is of course exactly how they like it: close enough to feel righteous, far enough not to be useful.

In Wedding, this is all more visible because the neighborhood refuses to flatter anybody. The line from Leopoldplatz to the next stop is a little museum of social contradiction: schoolkids with too-loud phones, pensioners clutching Aldi bags, workers with grease under their nails, office people pretending they are not gentrifying the air itself, and the little committee of moralists who think their correct opinions should exempt them from basic transit manners. They are not the future. They are a delay.

BVG buses do not need another cleansing ritual from the morally available. They need adults who understand that a public vehicle is not a stage, not a confessional, and not a place to mount your personality like a wet flag. If you want the driver to get everyone home safely, let him drive. The rest of you can sit down, shut up, and let your righteousness catch the next bus—preferably one with fewer elbows and less self-love.