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.
Over the past few years, I’ve often touched upon the idea that New York City is essentially giving away space for free. Despite wallet-busting rents, obscenely high taxes and a cost of living nearly unrivaled elsewhere in the country, the city has no problem turning over valuable street space to empty parked cars. It’s an ugly inefficient use of space.