These subway seats were clearly designed for people skinnier than most New Yorkers. (Photo by flickr user dysolution)
Whenever I find myself on a 1980s-era subway car, I always marvel at the width of the bucket seats. I’m the right size for my height, and I’m in good shape, if I do say so myself. But no matter what, I can’t squeeze myself into the confines of a bucket seat. A part of me — my arm, my jacket, my hip — will spill out over the edge of my designated seat, and someone will either be unable to sit next to me or find themselves uncomfortably squished.
This drama repeats itself millions of times throughout the city on a daily basis. Folks larger than I am find a space with three bucket seats capable of seating just one, and those annoying two-seaters on the R68s end up with one person and half a seat remaining. In the winter, when bulky layers and bigger coats add to our heft, the situation worsens. And forget buses. Those don’t have enough leg room or customer space for even the Kate Mosses among us.
For certain modes of transportation, space determinations are made at the governmental level. The MTA decides how crowded, in terms of pure numbers, a subway car can be before it is deemed to be full. Right now, those load guidelines dictate that a train car is full when every seat is taken and 25 percent of the passengers are standing. But just how much space should one person take up?
Right now, for safety standards, the Federal Transit Administration establishes space guidelines for buses, and as The Times recently reported, those could change soon. Michael Cooper reported last week:
Bus riders are currently estimated to weigh a mere 150 pounds when federal regulators test new buses. But that is about to change, if the Federal Transit Administration gets its way: the agency issued a proposal this month to increase the assumed average weight of bus passengers to 175 pounds so that its tests will “better reflect the actual loads that buses are already carrying in service today.”
Exactly why the estimated weight of travelers should differ slightly depending on whether they go by land, sea or air — calling to mind those scales in planetariums which show that Earthlings weigh less on Mercury, but more on Jupiter — is one of those mysteries that are sometimes puzzled over by close readers of The Federal Register. But the trend line here is as clear as the nation’s widening waistlines: Americans are getting heavier, and federal safety regulators must take that into account.
Federal officials said that they believe the current 150-pound standard for bus passengers comes from a national health survey dating to the “Mad Men” era…The transit agency is proposing another change for its bus tests: it wants to assume standing straphangers take up 1.75 square feet of floor space, up from the current 1.5 square feet “to acknowledge the expanding girth of the average passenger.”
Even the 175-pound figure is a bit generous. As Cooper notes, “the mean average weight is now 194.7 pounds for men and 164.7 pounds for women.” Most of us would be cramped on a bus in which the assumed average weight is only a handful of pounds more than my own.
Also laughable are the current standards. According to the feds, they’ve been in place since the early 1970s and are based on numbers from the early 1960s. No wonder everyone seems cramped.
On the subways, under the purview of the MTA, the obvious solution involves bench seating, and the new rolling stock certainly incorporates that idea. What we lose in seating space due to those who take up more than their fair share, we gain in comfort. Buses, though, have a long way to go, and while allocating 1.75 square feet of floor space to a bus rider instead of the current 1.5 square-foot standard would improve conditions, the bucket seats remain uncomfortable for everyone.
29 comments
This is just a really big reminder that Americans are all obese, and need to lose weight!
Definitely not all Americans, but a lot of people do need to exercise regularly.
and the funny thing is NYC is hardly up there in terms of being a fat city. Sure, collectively weight has gone up. But thanks to all that walking and stair use the average city dweller encounters, obesity is not anywhere near as bad as it is in the car-dependent South or West.
I don’t think that’s true anymore (check out this 2005 press release). Obesity rates have skyrocketed in the past decade in NYC.
really, this is the 1st thing you say. that americans need more exercise & to lose weight. thank you for the fat phobia and the refusal to note that in the 2.5 generations since the 60s we are taller & larger people than we ever were before.
perhaps the mta just needs to use more realistic ways of seeing people rather than an idealized weight target that dare i say is full of nostalgia.
as benjamin says the bench seating is a good way to go.
a better way would be to also run more trains to provide seats for all, but we all know how that idea is going to go over right now.
That’s physically impossible – during rush hours, providing seats for everybody would require doubling or tripling service on most lines, and there’s simply no way to fit that many trains on the tracks. (And if there were, think of what would have to happen to the fare to buy all those cars and to hire all those train operators!)
Although I agree that simply asking people to lose weight is no quick fix, it does acknowledge the main issue here — obesity. Yes, we’re not going to reverse the obesity epidemic anytime soon (I agree that the MTA needs to redesign the seats), but to blame recognition of this fact on “fat phobia” is shortsighted and probably part of the logic behind what made Americans “larger people than we ever were before.” I realize this is mostly off-topic, but the moment we believe that “idealized weight” is “full of nostalgia” is when we’ve lost. Here’s to years and years of gluttony and worsening health! Oh yeah, and crowded subways too…
the main issue is not obesity. though i agree, many people could use losing weight. the main issue is using 1960s datapoints as the baseline for seat size.
as i said before, in the 3 generations since this time, we have grown taller and wider as a culture. this is not new, nor a short term trend, but an on going function being a wealthy western culture.
pining this on the “obesity epidemic” is lazy thinking and does not take into account the myriad of other issues that leads to uncomfortable subway/bus rides.
just like the MTA needs to get with the 21st century in payment options, communications, etc, it needs to get with the times of the size of its riders. and use current datapoints when factoring seat size.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, because I didn’t want to reply harshly to your “fat phobia” comment. So, instead of ranting about how the fat-acceptance movement is on par with the smokers-unite bullshit, I’ll just go with this:
Yes, there is “a the myriad of [sic] other issues that leads to uncomfortable subway/bus rides.” Top on my list is being sat on by a morbidly obese person who is trying to cram into a space that is obviously too small.
Yet most of the time, I find that, on an 8-seater bench, all 8 seats are filled. So I guess people manage, and they prefer to sit with some discomfort than to pretend there are fewer seats and to force somebody to stand.
I’ve never had a problem with leg room on buses. I never even realized it was an issue.
That’s off-peak. Rush hour guidelines call for 3 square feet per standing passenger – a total (including seated passengers) of 110 per IRT car and 145 or 175 per IND/BMT car. And that’s a scheduling guideline (NYCT will add more service, if possible, when loads exceed those guidelines) – it is physically possible, and safe, to squeeze many more people into a car.
Tell that to the eighth person who arrives at the 7-seater bench!
No transit agency schedules for 1.75 or 1.5 square feet per standee, and you probably never see a bus or train that crowded. The issue here is how many people a bus is designed to safely accommodate before the floor collapses.
For any given transit vehicle, there are essentially four distinct numbers: the off-peak loading guideline (how many people the transit agency schedules for outside of rush hours), the rush hour loading guideline (how many people the transit agency schedules for during rush hours), the crush load (how many people can physically fit inside), and the design load (how many people the vehicle is structurally designed to accommodate).
These are the Kawasaki cars like the ones on the A Division? Those were a problem the day they arrived–I thought the explanation was some missed signal between the TA and the Japanese maker. Twiggy couldn’t wiggle into those seats.
perhaps “larger” people should watch what they eat and exercise a bit more before we simply “accomodate” them
that being said, I do agree that bench seating is better.
please define “larger”
Johnny Bench called.
I actually kind of like the bucket seats because they force people to not act like jerks and take up more space than they could fit themselves into. Yes, it might be often uncomfortable to have the person next to you jabbing their thigh against yours for a half an hour, and we’ve all seen someone taking up 2 seats, but most of the time it “works.” 8 people sit in the 8 seats, instead of 5 people lounging on a flat bench of the same width.
The rise in obesity in the US is primarily due to exercise and diet, both of which are modifiable, and obesity is the biggest public health problem we face in this country today. As small as it may be, “I can’t fit into a seat on the subway!” should be encouragement to folks that need to modify their diet and exercise regimen.
I’m 5’11” and 130 pounds, and I have trouble squeezing into a seat sometimes if I’m wearing a jacket. It ain’t just fat people with this issue.
I can kind of understand the screw-up with the R-62/R-62A seating, because that was a matter of trying to squeeze one extra seat into the space between the doors on A division cars that had never had bucket seats before. But the R-68/R-68A problem is inexplicable, because the MTA already had precedent on how wide to size the seats based on the R-44 and R-46 cars.
The Path PA-5 cars are also made by Kawasaki,and also have bucket seats. Does anyone know if they are the same width as on the subways? They do seem more comfortable, but that could just be due to the trains themselves, and not the seats.
(On a side note, PATH has heated seats. It took awhile for me to realize that it was heated, and the warmth wasn’t from the person who sat there before me. Still feels a bit odd, though).
The subway also has heated seats. I don’t like them – when it’s cold enough for the heat to turn on, I’m already wearing a heavy coat, so I don’t want to sit on an oven.
I 100 percent agree with this. If I find myself on a seated subway seat during winter, I’ll often get up. It’s just too hot for the amount of layers and clothing I have on.
The flip side is that, at least on some cars, the ventilation seems to be a bit better if you’re sitting than if you’re standing. (So stand on the seat, maybe?)
I do find that some (not all) car types are overheated in winter. When people are dressed for the cold, a good target temperature on the train is probably around 55.
I have mixed opinions on the bench. The lack of defined seats definitely allows more “spread” than you would see with the buckets. But it could also allow tighter seating patterns as well, particularly outside of bulky jacket season.
A related funny note: I still chuckle over giving up my bench “seat” to the heroin-thin hipster couple on the L a few weeks back. I got on at 8th Ave and sat down no more than six inches from the door rails. The rest of the bench was already full. When I got up just two stops later at Union, this rail-thin couple looked at each other and both sat down where I was. I’m 5’10” and 160lbs.
What would you rather have? An r68 B with bucket seats that has seating for 20 in between doors.Or an r40 m that only has at the best 12.I don’t know.I would rather have the R68.
Except for the part that you cannot move from car to car.But that’s off topic already…
The IRT used to have flat bench seating. They had all sorts of nice respectable reasons to put in the buckets. … they put in the buckets so that you couldn’t comfortably lay down on the bench and take a nap between two ends of the line.
Lying down would have been especially tempting with the old padded seats!
What I like best about the buckets is that they help everyone to stay “centered.” On those polished new benches, the momentum of a start or stop sends people sliding into each other–it takes a lot of concentration to anchor oneself.
This is the exact reason I hate the bucket seats. If just one person has a coat or is bigger than normal, it forces everyone else off-center, and that’s really uncomfortable. The bench seats let people adjust better, even if the same number of people sits in the same space. There are always people who take slightly less than average space – couples, very thin people, children – who can compensate for the larger people on benches but not in bucket seats.
I’ve been skinny and I’ve been fat and in all that time, I ALWAYS had a problem with the bucket seats. They are not practical for NYers of any size. Forget being fat, what if you are the “right size” but you still have a big butt? Your butt will go into the next seat no matter what you do. The seats on the new trains are great because you don’t have to worry about sitting in the next seat. I look forward to seeing what will happen with the trains and buses, especialy buses.
[…] 5. Not how Americans have gotten larger over time. […]