Benjamin Kabak

The MTA's familiar bucket seats aren't wide enough for most New Yorkers. (Photo by flickr user bitchcakesny)

The 2 and 3 trains out of Brooklyn represent a chunk of my daily ride to work, and when my office moves to the West Side, I’ll be riding those trains for longer. In the morning and in the evening, I always root for the 2 train to arrive. It’s not the overall experience of the new rolling stock per se, but rather it is the seats. The bucket seats on the 3 train — as well as various other cars across the system — just do not work.

New Yorkers, you see, just don’t fit into the bucket seats. It’s not that New Yorkers are getting wider. Some are; some aren’t. But rather, the seats themselves aren’t wide enough for a normal sized adult who rides the subway, often with coats and layers. While the bench seating feels more natural, even in tight squeezes, the bucket seats are inefficient, impractical and uncomfortable. People try to squeeze into their perfectly defined spaces only to find the lip of the seat digging into certain areas where things should not dig.

As transit agencies are planning for next-generation rolling stock, the subways at least have done away with the buckets. All new cars have the bench seats. Yet, commuter rail cars still have something approximating bucket seats, and as car configurations are redesigned to conform with wider bottoms, seating may be a victim. Christine Haughney of The Times explored this conundrum yesterday. She wrote:

Each time an agency decides to purchase new trains or buses, it must consider whether to make its seats wider, knowing that a decision to do so could come at the expense of passenger capacity. New Jersey Transit has a five-year plan to add 100 double-decker train cars that have seats 2.2 inches wider than the 17.55-inch seats found in its single-deck trains; the seating configuration has been changed to two seats on either side of the aisle, rather than three on one side and two on the other. Amtrak intends to introduce “designs that will be able to accommodate the larger-sized passengers” on 25 new dining cars starting next year, said a spokesman, Cliff Cole.

But while transit agencies consider the needs of heavier passengers, they do not always yield to them. Over the past half-century, the width of New York City subway seats has not changed much, said Marcia Ely, assistant director of the New York Transit Museum. If anything, the seats have occasionally gotten smaller — and immediately encountered resistance.

Joseph Smith, who retired in 2010 as a New York City Transit senior vice president who also oversaw bus operations in the city and on Long Island, said that the agency once had to abandon plans to introduce Mercedes-Benz Citaro buses, which are popular in Europe, after riders complained about too-narrow seats.

Haughney’s article focuses on how transit agencies and the federal government are changing their requirements for weight distribution as well. Metro-North’s M9 cars will require double seats that can handle loads of up to 400 pounds while new federal crash-test standards for buses require 175 pounds and 1.75 square feet per person, up 25 pounds and 0.25 square feet over previous standards. “It’s clear that the US population is getting heavier,” Martin Schroeder, an engineer with the American Public Transport Association, said to The Times. “We are trying to get our hands on that and figure out what is the best average weight to use.”

This is are just a polite way of dealing with the reality of expanding waist lines, but that’s a genuine concern on public transportation (or anywhere, really). We’ve all been squeezed in the middle of people who are wider than the bucket seats or find ourselves underneath someone trying to sashay his or her way into a space that just isn’t big enough. It’s a hazard of the job, so to speak.

On the other hand, though, the increasing weights of passengers will require different federal standards which will require heavier and more plodding vehicles. We’ll lose seats on trains as New Jersey Transit, for instance, plans to cut out a third seat on some new cars, and we’ll lose speed as buses and rail cars, like their passengers, become heavier to cope with the added weight.