For some time now bus conductors seemed to be disappearing from the city's buses under a system called "self-service bus rides", where passengers were supposed to pay for their tickets themselves without the need of a conductor.

But lately conductors have been making a comeback. If this is not an attempt to relieve unemployment, it must be because the four-year-old bus self-service system has failed to function properly, if not totally borken down. I recall a newspaper story in the initial months of the new system telling of the discovery in the coin collection boxes of "money for the nether world" (mingchao, the paper money Chinese people burn in memory of dead family members) and various kinds of gaming chips instead of coins.

Such news is in keeping with the times. One bus company in Shenzhen reportedly receives an average of 15,000 yuan each month in fake or substitute money (Shenzhen Special Zone Newspaper, April 17).

Today, in Shanghai there is not even mingchao or gaming chips in the coin collection boxes - some people aren't paying anything at all.

So the bus conductors must go back to work. But even with bus conductors, things have not changed. Some people neither insert the coins nor buy a ticket from the bus conductor, even when requested. This often happens when the bus is so crowded the bus conductor cannot get to newly arrived passengers to make them buy a ticket. And often when the bus is less crowded, the conductor may be unable to recognize who has and who has not paid the bus fare.

I remember when I was a child, we had bus ticket examiners, who would ask passengers to produce their tickets as they alighted from the bus. But it seems ages since we saw them. However, the other day I saw on a bus, much to my surprise, that, coming along behind the bus conductor was the long-vanished bus ticket examiner, asking everyone to produce his or her ticket for examination, I really wanted to say to him: "Hey, welcome back to work, too."

It seems that the buses have become a testing ground for public morality - as if paying for a service one receives should ever be a test!

But it could be a test when, firstly, compared with prices of other items and considering the low incomes of many people, it is fair to say that public transport costs in Shanghai are high, and, secondly, people have not yet achieved, or have not been educated sufficiently, to have a proper sense of morality.

The self-service bus system was originally intended to give people the sense and convenience of self-governance. But if people ever want to be self-governed, and to be free from external intervention, they must make an effort to render that intervention unnecessary.

But if conditions are not yet ripe enough for that, do not introduce a system which ends up being eroded by everyday compromises and never ending games of cat-and-mouse.

Or in other words, when it has to be a test, do not ask the invigilator to stay away, especially if there are some students who always cheat, often cheat, have to cheat or will cheat for any reason.

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