Increasingly sad state of London Underground trains - graffiti and disrepair

[Meerkat]

Target a small number of culprits, give the police serious tech support and the threat of proper jail time and lots of community service cleaning graffiti, and offer sentence reductions and rewards for grassing culprits who can then be watched and caught in the act.
Proper punishment, knowledge that they are a target for people with wide resources, and the fear of grasses, is the way to squash most problems.
A bit of international co-operation is needed to identify the travelling culprits - the bar for banning entry to the country is much lower than that for conviction AIUI?

 

[Mawkie]

Proper punishment, knowledge that they are a target for people with wide resources, and the fear of grasses, is the way to squash most problems.

I think the forum underestimates the notoriety graffiti artists enjoy in their own community (and seemingly wider community too). Daniel Halpin famously served time for his dreadful tags, and went on to sell his 'art' and join up with others to form exhibitions for further financial gain. So the conviction did nothing at all to stop him.

Long Dark Tunnel: An Immersive Journey with 10FOOT, TOX, and FUME, London

Attending the first opening private view of the ‘Long Dark Tunnel‘ exhibition was an unforgettable experience that exceeded the hype, daring guests to dive into the world of three legendary kings —10FOOT, TOX, and FUME. The newly revealed secret venue, located just steps from the third exit of...

www.graffitistreet.com

A bit of international co-operation is needed to identify the travelling culprits - the bar for banning entry to the country is much lower than that for conviction AIUI?

Surely this is a joke? You can't possibly think there is going to be some kind of Interpol exercise for some tags?

 

[Horizon22]

Well something is broken in the funding system then. TOCs have to pay a fortune for graffiti cleaning, but they fund BTP in the most part.
I was actually thinking there's a gap in the market for a private investigations firm to be paid by the train maintenance companies (like Hitachi for example) who have train maintenance contracts with the TOCs. They could do an investigation and the do private prosecutions. Similar to what supermarkets are now doing for shoplifting.

You could argue the “funding system” for the railway has been broken for years but I fear that will be wildly off topic!

 

[Meerkat]

I think the forum underestimates the notoriety graffiti artists enjoy in their own community (and seemingly wider community too). Daniel Halpin famously served time for his dreadful tags, and went on to sell his 'art' and join up with others to form exhibitions for further financial gain. So the conviction did nothing at all to stop him.

Clearly the punishment wasn’t enough, and the monetisation needs to be stopped.

Surely this is a joke? You can't possibly think there is going to be some kind of Interpol exercise for some tags?

Why not, if they are doing enough damage and there are teams working on it anyway they may as well cooperate.

 

[mrmartin]

Just because a handful of people have done time and didn't stop doesn't mean there is a very significant deterrent effect to others. And tbh repeat offenders should be the easiest to catch; you have their details, you know what their tag looks like, should be pretty trivial. Especially when they do interviews with national newspapers confessing to continuing!

From my reading of various things the UK used to be seen as a very "harsh" country for graffiti punishments, but it seems to me over the last decade or so the police have given up trying to catch people.

And to be clear; I'm not suggesting we divert all of BTP to catching taggers. I strongly believe a group of 5-10 officers could make enormous headway in it given it is so few people committing so much damage.

Unless the courts are prepared to give these graffiti vandals actual prison time, I fear there is little to be gained by catching them in the act.

What is really shocking is it's often the same locations over and over again where trains are getting vandalised; it must be worth investing in a higher level of security at those locations.

I definitely agree that rolling stock thus vandalised should be pulled from service and cleaned immediately, even at the expense of a higher number of cancellations. It should also be made clear exactly what the reason for the cancellation is - it would help generate some pressure in society against such acts in the first place.

Any pictures published online of the results of such vandalism should have the details blurred out - that way we can see the extent of the damage without giving the individual vandals the publicity for their scrawlings that they seek.

The thing is the courts WILL give them serious prison time (and used to regularly, but it seems the police have stopped catching them).

Criminal damage (other than by fire) value exceeding £5,000/ Racially or religiously aggravated criminal damage – Sentencing

www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk

Graffiti like this is in the highest category of culpability - it's pre planned and by nature tries to do the most damage as possible. It's also probably in the highest level of harm because of the value and the economic and social impact of the offense (taking trains out of service etc).

As such the sentencing guidelines state 6months minimum prison - 4 years jail time, with the starting point being 1 year 6 months. Given that a lot of the aggravating factors will apply it is actually very difficult for the judge to not give serious prison time for this kind of stuff.

 

[Gostav]

Just because a handful of people have done time and didn't stop doesn't mean there is a very significant deterrent effect to others. And tbh repeat offenders should be the easiest to catch; you have their details, you know what their tag looks like, should be pretty trivial. Especially when they do interviews with national newspapers confessing to continuing!

These active people and groups generally have a high level of knowledge and means to avoid anything from appearing as evidence, such as in public videos, where any parts that can show physical features are covered. After each operation, they will dispose of all clothes and shoes to ensure that individuals cannot be tracked and always wear gloves when handling spray paint cans to ensure that no fingerprints are left. Basically, their experience on Reddit is that it is difficult to locate them personally unless they are caught in the act.

These measures make it difficult for the police to obtain solid evidence or even confirm their identities, and if they return to continental Europe immediately, it will make the investigation impossible.

 

[Pegpilot]

So sad to read this thread. I was part of LUL's efforts to combat graffiti in the early 90s and it seems we've learned nothing. We engaged back then with our friends in New York where, in the 80's, graffiti was out of control and definitely impacted seriously on ridership as the local population perceived the network to be effectively lawless. The MTA took a hard line approach and refused to release "bombed" cars for service (denial of the oxygen of publicity) and slowly clawed back the network. Check out the book "Subway Art" which explains the psyche of the "artists" in great detail. But an effective response requires leadership and commitment, and right now that seems in short supply - I was saddened at the state of 09 stock on my last visit to the capital in November.

 

[Meerkat]

These active people and groups generally have a high level of knowledge and means to avoid anything from appearing as evidence, such as in public videos, where any parts that can show physical features are covered. After each operation, they will dispose of all clothes and shoes to ensure that individuals cannot be tracked and always wear gloves when handling spray paint cans to ensure that no fingerprints are left. Basically, their experience on Reddit is that it is difficult to locate them personally unless they are caught in the act.

These measures make it difficult for the police to obtain solid evidence or even confirm their identities, and if they return to continental Europe immediately, it will make the investigation impossible.

That’s why you need informers and tracking. Catch them on site.
Re interior tagging - is any of the Underground onboard CCTV live linked to a control room?

 

[Mrwerdna1]

So sad to read this thread. I was part of LUL's efforts to combat graffiti in the early 90s and it seems we've learned nothing. We engaged back then with our friends in New York where, in the 80's, graffiti was out of control and definitely impacted seriously on ridership as the local population perceived the network to be effectively lawless. The MTA took a hard line approach and refused to release "bombed" cars for service (denial of the oxygen of publicity) and slowly clawed back the network. Check out the book "Subway Art" which explains the psyche of the "artists" in great detail. But an effective response requires leadership and commitment, and right now that seems in short supply - I was saddened at the state of 09 stock on my last visit to the capital in November.

I think you make some excellent points, a sad state of affairs, indeed.

I haven't engaged on this forum for quite some while now, but I was searching the web for any reaction to the current state of the tube. I have to say that on my two recent visits to the UK (I live on the continent right now), I was quite taken aback by how run down the Bakerloo Line Stock in particular seemed and I was also struck by how much graffiti there appeared to be. Stations and platforms seemed more or less similar to a few years back, if perhaps a bit grimier than before. But the difference in the rolling stock was truly staggering. I hadn't travelled on the Bakerloo line (or Tube for that matter) for quite some years before then. In fact, it may have been as far back as 2019, but I certainly don't remember much in the way of grafitti back then. The Tube may never have been as pristinely clean and tidy as the Vienna or Oslo Metro, but I do remember trains being a lot cleaner and in better nick pre-Covid, particularly around 2012/2013. So things do appear to have got a lot worse in the past few years and, it would seem, increasingly so.

Having read through the replies on this thread (pages 1 through 9), I thus conclude the following:

• The Tube is generally in a worse state now than just 5-10 years ago (i.e. pre-Covid). Hard to say when it may have had its heyday in terms of state of repair & cleanliness, but perhaps somewhere around the early 2010s, would be my speculative guess.
• The Tube is still in no way as bad as it has been in the past, for instance in the late 80s, but it is seemingly getting progressively worse.
• The reasons for this gradual decline are somewhat complex, but appear to be a combination of:
  • bad management - the available funding is not allocated as well as it could be and, despite budget constraints, there seems to be little attention given to prioritising cleanliness and proper maintenance, particularly combatting graffiti, over other matters. Various posters have pointed out that given various rolling stock is either in need of constant repair (1972 stock) or in the process of refurbishment (1992 stock), this may warrant prioritising service levels over combatting grafitti, from the perspective of the operator. I wholeheartedly disagree, however. I believe that it is precisely this permissive attitude, a definitive slip in standards, that is, in addition to foolish social media trends, driving and further enabling vandalism to spread like wildfire. I don't think this is a matter of politics either. It is simply a case of observing what works and what doesn't and as had been pointed out, proper and decisive action is the only way forward. Moreover, failure to do so can have serious negative impacts on ridership, as the public, rightly or wrongly, may start to perceive the Tube to be increasingly a place of lawlessness, much like they did in the 80s.
  • lack of funding - fundamentally driven by succesive governments' ideological fixation on keeping subsidy low - but further exacerbated by disastrous changes to the funding model brought about by the previous conservative government, combined with the loss of most operating income for a prolonged period of time during the pandemic, without proper - functional - compensation by central government, have no doubt crippled Tfl's ability to make urgent long-term investments in proper maintenance and day-to-day operations.
  • bad governance structure and decisions - "managed decline" - particularly a string of flawed PPP projects that extracted profits from a supposedly publicly run system but culminated in worse overall service and particularly maintenance, including many bad decisions, seemingly insignificant at the time but whose negative knock-on effects would first rear their ugly head years down the line - that time unfortunately being now.

Fixing this whole mess seems far from straight forward, but I suspect a combination of thoroughly shaking down the management tree, coupled with a boost in funding could work wonders. More importantly though, the public, that being Londoners and visitors to the capital alike, need to make their dissatisfaction known and demand the government and Tfl take action.

 

[Mikey C]

I was on the Bakerloo line today, and every carriage of my 72 stock train had some tagging INSIDE.

That's simply not the case for most lines. The Northern Line 95s may look a bit grubby outside, but there's no regular graffiti inside or outside.

And on National Rail, Southeastern trains for example operate through some challenging areas, but I never see graffiti inside their metro trains.

 

[Wolfie]

I was on the Bakerloo line today, and every carriage of my 72 stock train had some tagging INSIDE.

That's simply not the case for most lines. The Northern Line 95s may look a bit grubby outside, but there's no regular graffiti inside or outside.

And on National Rail, Southeastern trains for example operate through some challenging areas, but I never see graffiti inside their metro trains.

The Central line is no better.

 

[styles]

I suspect they'd need heavy investment in covert surveillance, an expense and installation operation which likely wouldn't go unnoticed to the taggers.

The Met can't even seem to track down the people cutting down traffic lights with ULEZ cameras on them. I wouldn't especially fancy the BTP's chances of cracking the case of graffiti artists. Resources are likely just not there.

 

[Mawkie]

I suspect they'd need heavy investment in covert surveillance,

They really don't. The taggers don't respond to overt surveillance! I've literally reported them in the act, and it made no difference.

There simply isn't a police response available, for whatever reason.

 

[Thirteen]

Londoners can't exactly abandon the London Underground in protest given how crucial is it to the capital.

 

[Russel]

They really don't. The taggers don't respond to overt surveillance! I've literally reported them in the act, and it made no difference.

There simply isn't a police response available, for whatever reason.

CCTV surveillance must be a deterrent, otherwise the Overground stock that operates on the northern end of the Bakerloo, which I suspect is where a lot of the tagging happens, would also be effected.

 

[Recessio]

CCTV surveillance must be a deterrent, otherwise the Overground stock that operates on the northern end of the Bakerloo, which I suspect is where a lot of the tagging happens, would also be effected.

Agreed. The graffiti is noticeably worse on the Bakerloo, Central and Picadilly lines that don't have CCTV, compared to newer stock with CCTV. On Thameslink class 700s, it's also often noticeable that the toilets are really badly tagged, whereas the rest of the train (with CCTV) is in a much better state.

 

[Russel]

Agreed. The graffiti is noticeably worse on the Bakerloo, Central and Picadilly lines that don't have CCTV, compared to newer stock with CCTV. On Thameslink class 700s, it's also often noticeable that the toilets are really badly tagged, whereas the rest of the train (with CCTV) is in a much better state.

The last few 700s I've been on look like the toilets have been cleaned up, maybe TL are starting to tackle the issue.

 

[Horizon22]

CCTV surveillance must be a deterrent, otherwise the Overground stock that operates on the northern end of the Bakerloo, which I suspect is where a lot of the tagging happens, would also be effected.

Most of the tagging probably happens at sidings overnight where trains are stabled so not necessarily.

 

[Thirteen]

Agreed. The graffiti is noticeably worse on the Bakerloo, Central and Picadilly lines that don't have CCTV, compared to newer stock with CCTV. On Thameslink class 700s, it's also often noticeable that the toilets are really badly tagged, whereas the rest of the train (with CCTV) is in a much better state.

The S Stock has CCTV so it's surprising it has lots of etching damage on the windows. The corrosive damage is trickier to deal with since it is done when trains are stabled.

 

[Russel]

Most of the tagging probably happens at sidings overnight where trains are stabled so not necessarily.

What, internally?

 

[bluegoblin7]

Most of the tagging probably happens at sidings overnight where trains are stabled so not necessarily.

You would be surprised, as @Mawkie will no doubt attest...

 

[bramling]

You would be surprised, as @Mawkie will no doubt attest...

Certainly plenty is happening whilst trains are in service - and this includes external.

What is possibly different is that the perpetrators nowadays seem to be brazen enough to do it in full view of other passengers, and quite probably a good proportion of those other passengers wouldn’t give a toss anyway.

 

[Horizon22]

You would be surprised, as @Mawkie will no doubt attest...

Sure. Mostly it will be towards end of service and end of the line when there are relatively few passengers about.

 

[bluegoblin7]

Again, you would be surprised.

 

[ScotGG]

It seems a matter of time until it starts to spread and impact the Liz line. That'll be terrible PR for TfL and then some in power may wake up

 

[londontransit]

It seems a matter of time until it starts to spread and impact the Liz line. That'll be terrible PR for TfL and then some in power may wake up

Its trains do get graffiti but thankfully its not widespread like the other lines. Its core stations have graffiti which largely remains as 'ghosts' because cleaning the station panels doesn't really work. TfL is increasingly using decals to cover up these because its the easiest way to deal with unwarranted stuff. The decals it uses is off the shelf. Alas it would be expensive to have a full stock of dedicated decals for each line and to apply these only for the trains to get more graffiti which creates a huge expense if decals are constantly used. TfL doesn't seem to be able to get a grip on the matter and the only tube lines that seem graffiti free are the Victoria and Waterloo and City - largely because these are entirely underground but also because Northumberland Park depot is very secure and that makes a huge difference.

 

[announcements]

Agreed. The graffiti is noticeably worse on the Bakerloo, Central and Picadilly lines that don't have CCTV, compared to newer stock with CCTV. On Thameslink class 700s, it's also often noticeable that the toilets are really badly tagged, whereas the rest of the train (with CCTV) is in a much better state.

However, the CCTV is discreetly housed on the other lines, so unless these graffiti artists are train buffs or reading forums like this, I just wonder if they know or even care about the CCTV.

 

[Recessio]

However, the CCTV is discreetly housed on the other lines, so unless these graffiti artists are train buffs or reading forums like this, I just wonder if they know or even care about the CCTV.

Some of the most prolific artists are train buffs, or at least very familiar with the network and particularly the security arrangements.

 

[Wolfie]

Certainly plenty is happening whilst trains are in service - and this includes external.

What is possibly different is that the perpetrators nowadays seem to be brazen enough to do it in full view of other passengers, and quite probably a good proportion of those other passengers wouldn’t give a toss anyway.

It's probably more that those other passengers are concerned about being assaulted or even stabbed rather than that they don't give a toss.

 

[Wivenswold]

Fewer police resources leads to fewer suspects being caught which empowers those who think they'll get away with the crime. Plus less money available for running repairs so the less noticeable tags and etchings don't get removed very quickly.

Better times will only come once kids feel like valued members of society and when they have a lot to lose (a job, a home, a family) from doing petty crimes like this. At the moment the youth get critisised for sitting at home playing computer games and watching You Tube but when they go out they can't afford to go places and there's nowhere specifically to go anyway.

The whole system needs to be dumped and reset, starting with taxing significant wealth and closing all the tax loopholes that all the big corporations are currently legally allowed to use.
Sorry, went off topic but sociology, the study why sections of society behave in a certain way is far more complicated that othering disaffected kids as bad eggs. Dr Breeching did more damage to the railways with his fraudulent passenger statistics than an army of graffiti artists ever did, but he didn't spend a day in prison.