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.
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