By Foot or by Bus, Londoners “Get On With It”

They’ve defied Hitler’s Luftwaffe and toughed out bombings by the Irish Republican Army.

Now a new generation of London commuters, although increasingly weary and wary, say they’re determined to “get on with it,” despite a string of attacks that have played havoc with this city’s public transportation system.

“They’re sick to death of it, really,” said Lucas Pitts, 31, who works in a legal office off Bloomsbury Square. “They’re not willing to let it get in the way.”

Transit officials say ridership on the Underground, or Tube, as the subway is called, is down about 15%, commensurate with the number and importance of stations that have been shuttered from two rounds of bomb attacks.

Friday morning, that number was 24 out of a total of 275 stations, which are normally used by 3 million riders a day.

By afternoon, however, one more station had been added to the closure list, after police chased and killed a suspected terrorist at a southern stop on the Victoria Line.

During the evening rush hour, commuters were greeted by news rack placards screaming, “Terrorist Shot Dead on Tube.”

Attacks apparently aimed at demoralizing the city have flushed tens of thousands of Underground commuters out into the daylight, even as police vehicles and ambulances screech through car-clogged streets.

Many of those unwilling or unable to navigate around the closed stretches of five Tube lines have jumped on a bus, adding to the competition for seats on a system that, at more than 6 million daily riders, is Europe’s busiest.

The city’s famed red double-decker buses were jammed Friday at stops around Hyde Park and the Marble Arch, under which scores of police officers in fluorescent vests waited ominously in rows of white emergency vans for the next call.

“London commuters are known to be a resilient bunch,” transit system spokesman Graham Goodwin said. “We have not seen any widespread reluctance to use the system.”

Yet even habitual Tube riders like Dennis, a 39-year-old banker who waited at the Earl’s Court Station in West London early Friday, confessed to being on edge.

“You’re much more conscious of people around you ... but you have to put the wheels back on the bike,” he said. The man declined to give his surname.

Although an older generation drew on memories of Winston Churchill defying Hitler’s air raids during World War II, commuters such as Dennis attributed their resolve, despite jitters, to having gone through the IRA bombings of the 1970s.

Still, not everyone exhibited the proverbially English stiff upper lip.

“I’m so worried. You can’t live like this,” said Debbie Gordon, 40, a tailor who travels from her home on the western outskirts of London to the central city every day. She and her husband stood at the Earl’s Court Station, watching Tube cars come and go but unable to screw up the courage to board one.

“For the last two weeks,” she said, “I’ve been trying to travel to work over ground.... It’s been terrible, I just don’t feel safe, I have a headache all the time.” Her husband is -- or rather, was -- a London bus driver.

Cyril Gordon, 45, said he had quit his job since the surge of violence on the city’s transit systems.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m not going back on the buses,” he said.

Echoing those concerns, leaders of two of the city’s three transit unions met Friday with London Mayor Ken Livingstone, demanding stepped-up security for employees.

Meanwhile, thousands of Londoners who have temporarily forsaken the Tube were doing what would be unimaginable in Los Angeles: walking to work.

Theresa Slanina, 24, said one of her colleagues at a King’s Cross area health clinic had been so “freaked out” by the bombings that she is going to great lengths to avoid the Tube.

“She takes the overland rail to Victoria Station and then walks an hour and a half to work,” said Slanina, a Vancouver transplant.

Pitts, who works at the Lane & Partners Ltd. law firm, said the normally quiet streets of the capital have been swelling with people.

“And they’re seeing parts of London that they haven’t seen before

Not that he’s pleased. Pitts started walking to work months ago to save money and, oddly, time. He recalled trekking blissfully through the city with little more company than his iPod.

Now, he said, “people get in the way more because they don’t know what route they’re taking.” Tourists? Hardly. They’re just Tube rats out of their element.

“You’ve got die-hard Londoners not sure what route to be taking,” he said.

Times staff writer Janet Stobart contributed to this report.