A woman fiddles with her all-too-ubiquitous iPod earbuds. (Photo by flickr user Ed Yourdon)
When thinking about the New York City subway, “quiet” isn’t the first word that comes to mind. Brakes squeal with friction, public address systems screech with feedback and heating systems drone on and on and on. Inside the car, sounds filters from all corners. Music leaks from poorly designed iPod headphones; cell phones blare. It isn’t loud, but it’s an annoying cacophony of noise.
But are the cars missing the right kind of noise? In a guest column in the Daily News, Alex Marshall of the RPA makes exactly that argument. The subways, he says, are not filled with the right kind of social noise. He writes of a time when people would talk to strangers and each other on subway cars. Today, we bury our noises in Kindles and hide behind headphones.
Picking up the thread from the brouhaha over the New Jersey Transit quiet cars, Marshall says an element of old New York is lost as people turn away from each other and toward technology. He presents what he calls a modest proposal: The Conversation Car.
In this train car (or bus section) one would be assured, upon entering, that fellow passengers are ready and willing to chat. Putting speakers against your ears or a screen in front of your face would earn frowns as severe as those now cast at someone who conducts a business call in a Quiet Car.
This would, first of all, help in some measure to restore the dying art of conversation – especially the spontaneous kind, when you haven’t already prepared your stock answers about all matters mundane. And it would also restore that measure of accidental contact for which New York is famous. After all, the person jammed next to you could be from Sweden. Or from Queens. Or a Swedish queen. But if you’re just zonked out on your iPhone, you’ll never know.
There will be some rules in my proposed Conversation Car: no insults (hard for some New Yorkers, I know), no overly aggressive come ons, no street preacher crazy talk. Just ordinary people enjoying incidental, temporary company instead of plugging in and tuning out.
A dose of conversation might just be the new, much-needed antidote to our solitary digital domains.
I have to wonder if the idea of spontaneous conversation on the subway is one of those overly sentimental appeals to a nostalgia that never happened. On very rare occasions have I struck up conversations with strangers in a subway train, and most people would rather be left alone as they ride home. For decades, most straphangers didn’t even feel safe enough making eye contact with others in their subway cars, and skeptical New Yorkers of a certain age still avoid staring in the subways.
Still, Marshall’s bigger point is one I’ve focused on over the years. There is a certain level of etiquette entirely missing from underground. Maybe if we talked to each other, we’d remember that our fellow riders are people like us too. It’s rude to assault a subway car with sounds for your personal MP3 player, and it’s rude to drop half-eaten food on the floor. That’s a lesson we can learn without attempting to strike up an awkward conversation with someone who probably doesn’t want to talk anyway.
22 comments
It’s BS. Last night four kids were hopping up and down, laughing and chanting, pretty loudly. It was a little annoying and I wished for a few minutes we really were in a quiet car. But it was a temporary, interesting change to the rattling of the car, and in part, made my day unique.
There are plenty of people who engage in conversation with strangers- the art isn’t lost, you just have to look for it. However, this article you ink to says “Let me admit that the fault lies as much with me as with the people around me.” Maybe he’s a rotten conversationalist, and not just glued to his kindle?
Often enough we’re all just trying to get on with our day- to get to the next thing- home, work, kids, appointments, whatever. I don’t need to be pushed into being social just because someone thinks I should.
To your points- so is it our collective fault for ignoring each other? Probably. Is enforced chit-chat going to keep people from littering? No. Will it make the world a better place? Again, no. Am I going to harangue strangers for being jerks? Probably not. But give me a videocamera and let me put it on YouTube, and then we might see more responsibility- enforced by shame.
Is burying your nose in a book on the subway better than burying your nose in a Kindle?
I see people talking to strangers on the subway every once in a while. Commuters seem to be the quietest ones, compared to tourists or people just going out somewhere. And the quietest portion of the subway seems to be Manhattan below 59th. I think it’s the case that people are most comfortable talking to people they have something in common with, and when you are on the New York subway it’s perhaps the least likely place in the world to find someone you have a lot in common with. And then there is a language barrier – I would guess 20% of New Yorkers don’t speak enough English to hold a conversation.
Interesting post, I’m glad to see more and more people realizing the world is moving faster and faster but we give less time to each other, I just stared reading Alone Together addresses this issue.
In Copenhagen, local bus service puts hearts or something on two seats of each bus to encourage singles to sit in them and flirt. It’s a cute little gesture that makes a lot of people smile. Now, just have to convince the MTA to be cute…hmmm….
http://www.good.is/post/copenh.....ove-seats/
Hmmm, I’ve been riding the subway for the last 18 years, and that doesn’t count 4 years of high school in the 80’s. I rarely ever shared any words with strangers, ever. What age exactly is he talking about, the 1920’s??? My first subway experience, commuting to high school in the 80’s, I listened to my walkman and read the newspaper or a book.
I admit I’m not a subway regular, but whenever I do I don’t really have conversations with strangers. Maybe a tourist will ask for directions, but that’s about the extent of it – and it hasn’t changed over the past 10-15 years. iPods and Kindles are just replacing Walkmans and paperbacks/newspapers.
It’s Alex Marshall, who used to write for Streetsblog. My impression of him is that he would like people to talk more to each other no matter what the situation.
this is a fantastic idea.
Better Underground Living tried to do something similar about a decade ago — declaring the first car the “singles” car
http://www.newsweek.com/2002/0.....-love.html
Interesting post Ben!
I would like to point out that even the subway chatter runs in cycles. I’ve noticed that the trains are eerily silent during morning rush hours. During Friday and Saturday nights however, they’re filled with all sorts of chatter, mostly because party goers are coming and going from parties. It’s literally a different scene.
And because people tend to be having a good time, they’re generally more receptive to striking up conversation with strangers.
The most chatty time on the subway? Try riding on New Years Eve before the ball drops, and the first few hours of the new years.
The Subways are in many ways a microcosm of New York. A large social conveyor belt. We don’t want to talk to each other when we are going to work, school, or other business. But when we are relaxing and free, we don’t have any problem with it.
Im reminded of an out-of-town friend a number of years ago remarking about how everyone on the subway seemed to be reading. That has diminished too, with various electronic media proliferating, tho’ of course e-books have replaced more visible newspapers and other print.
The point of tourists being more garrulous is true, in part because they’re usually on vacation and having fun, and are, I think, struck by the novelty of traveling with hundreds of other people rather than behind the wheel in their usual solitary car-potato mode.
Then, of course, there’s the occasional odd occurance – say, a rat running across some slumbering dude’s face – that can spark social interchange……
I’ve been riding the subway regularly for 50 years now and I can never remember it being a particularly “social” or “chatty” environment. I’ve gotten through my daily commutes mostly with books but also magazines.(Indeed, I’ve read through the great works of Western literature mostly on the subway.) The only time people become “chatty” – as far as I can tell – is when there’s some snafu and we’re trapped between stations, whatever. Then the comments begin: “we’re paying good money for this shitty service!” “And to think they’re going to raise the fare next month!” “The leas they could do is tell us what’s going on.” “You’d think they could keep the heat, or AC in working order.” etc, etc.
No thanks – I’ll keep reading Tolstoy or Shakespeare rather than chatter inanely with random strangers.
This is a joke, I assume. The overwhelming majority of subway riders are on the subway to get from point A to point B, not to socialize. In the morning rush, when the trains are most crowded, virtually everybody (well over 99%) is silent, ignoring leaky headphones (which I dislike as much as the next guy, but there’s nothing social about headphones).
Yet this guy wants to convert one car of each train – 10% of the capacity on a 10-car train – to a “Conversation Car”?!
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Are you f***ing kidding me the subway trains are very noisy I could imagine living next to an elavated subway it must be difficult with all that noise & when you’re under an elevated subway you can’t even hear a phone conversation.
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