Personal space is tough to find in the Shanghai Metro during rush hour. (Photo by flickr user Marc van der Chijs)
I am perennially about a week behind when it comes to reading the New Yorker. They arrive in my mailbox too frequently, and there’s always too much to read. So this afternoon on the way home from work, I wrapped up Nick Paumgarten’s technically adept look at elevators.
The piece spends a lot of time looking at the science and technology behind elevators while focusing on Nicholas White’s harrowing tale. White was, in 1999, stuck for 41 hours in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill building, and he’s never been the same. (On YouTube, you can find the rather harrowing security camera footage from White’s ordeal.) During the course of the technical details about the elevators, Paumgarten dropped in an interesting passage about how the folks behind our urban conveniences figure out how much space is enough space. It, of course, relates to the subway:
If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”
Moving beyond the technical — I would love to meet a proxemics expert — this brief passages lets us in to a dreadfully obvious secret about the subway: Packed train cars are psychologically taxing on the vast majority of people because there just isn’t enough space. Worse still is the fact that schizophrenic people prefer fifteen times more space that non-schizophrenics. No wonder the subways seem packed with crazy people sometimes; we’re in their space.
Day in and day out, New Yorkers choose to subject themselves to the psychologically taxing demands of a subway ride. We cram ourselves into cars that are too hot or too cold, cars that have annoyingly whiny PA systems (the old R40 Slants on the B line come to mind), cars without enough space to move without jostling or, worse yet, smelling the person who’s just too close to us.
Even in subway cars with space, we still feel the encroaching others in our personal space. Everyone knows that familiar feeling of resentment when a passenger stands just a step or two too close to you in a half-empty car. That’s your touch zone coming under attack. Tell them to back it up to the persona-comfort zone.
This psychological disturbances are why people in the New York City subway systems seem generally unfriendly. It’s why people won’t make eye contact with each other and why two people attracted to each other won’t attempt to strike up a conversation. It’s also why subway riders get a rush of calmness and serenity upon leaving a crowded train and finding their ways aboveground at rush hour. There’s just not enough space.
11 comments
Take into account delays that prolong many trips, lurching over crooked track, stops and starts, and I find it tough to be holier-than-though toward NYers who make the decision to drive.
From a purely psychological viewpoint, sitting in rush hour is infinitely more infuriating than a crowded subway.
Which crooked tracks are you going over? I take the B over the Manhattan Bridge every morning. That’s a notorious “crooked track” area, but it’s a pretty smooth ride.
This is why, even if I make eye contact with someone, I don’t say anything, because these days people will freak out over anything. I am pretty friendly on the subway, but there are just to many people that go bonkers over little things that I just dont take any chances.
Besides that, when I was 4 and and took my first of many subway trips with my mom, she always told me not to look at anyone or talk to anyone. Guess it kind of just stuck with me.
I know you don’t often get the choice, but I wonder if personal space needs change depending on space available in front of and behind a person? I don’t know which is worse, having someone breathing down my neck or having them two inches from my face.
And there are more strollers on the subway than I remember in past years–even during rush hour parents take these on the trains. I’m not saying it’s wrong, just remarking on another factor in the crowding. Nor did I have a particular section in mind when I commented on crooked track. Obviously it’s way better than it used to be during the red flagged 80s days.
Quite a while ago, in the mid-90s, and on account of an after-work errand, for a few months I had to drive my Civic a few days a week to work near Penn Station. It wasn’t so bad! I liked the privacy, listening to the radio, being above ground. Traffic moved, I don’t remember the trip ever taking an outrageous amount of time.
Still, I have little psychological problem with the subway. And I see people checking each other out all the time. I’ve seen people smile those small smiles of commiseration occasionally, or at a cute child. The ones I mentally curse are the self-absorbed bible thumping preachers (aka “lunatics”), the beggars, those supposed advocates of the destitute “informing” us they have a sandwich to hand out, but which is just a thinly veiled coverup for panhandling. And, maybe, the loud, foulmouthed louts and loutettes acting out their young-person resentments and need for attention.
But the psychological stress thing–I think it’s exaggerated. There’s as much amusement to be had riding the subway as there is annoyance, if you keep your eyes open.
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Out of the 5 days a week I work, i get a sick passenger once or twice every 2 months and many times it is a person who just feels too crowded and feel fine after people just move back.
I guess this will get worst over the next few years when more people move over here. I still don’t quite understand why so many people are moving to NYC when it costs so much to live here.
I do know one thing: gas prices go up and driving into work becomes too expensive, the next thing you know there are more people on the train. I think the funny thing is that whether or not we get more people in the city, or more traffic because more people try to drive, the subways are going to get taxed after people realize they get to work faster on the train.
The worst case scenario is that their is so much traffic AND we get more people living or coming to work in the city AND gas prices go up too, the trains will be the only real way to get to work… now that would be pretty horrible. The trains will be beyond capacity.
Not to dis the subways in any way–I have always been a subway fan and always will be–but if it’s at all within a person’s physical capacity and the distance is 5 to 8 miles each way, give or take, and now that the weather is turning fair, why not try bike commuting? My folding bike goes into buildings with me quite easily, the ride is approximately the same duration as the train, it gets me outdoors which is pleasant, and the cost of the bike will be paid back after about a year. Even if one decided only to use the bike on nice days, it still makes a change from public transit. (I know this is a bit off topic, but if someone finds the subway psychologically stressful it might be beneficial to them, and of course the more people try it the more room for others in the overcrowded trains.)
Hey paulb, I’m in the market for a folding bike and i as wondering what kind you have? I’m looking at these Downtube bikes (http://www.downtube.com/ss-index.html) and wonder if they’ll hold up for commuting to and from work in nyc. and also if they’ll be too heavy for someone who is petite to carry on and off the subway if need be. any advice you can give would be great!
To me at least, bikes are harder to store. My room is barely big enough to fit me in; a bike is out of the question. If I store it outside, it will get stolen no matter what I do.
Also, bike capacity isn’t very good. Bikes don’t brake very well, so bike headway is if anything worse than car headway. Bikes fit in narrower lanes than cars, but that will only increase the headway. Even in Hanoi, where bicycles and motorcycles are so common they have dedicated lanes, a study shows that on a lane of about the same width as a car lane, capacity is about 3,100 motorcycles per hour. This compares with 32,000 on an IRT track.
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