Who’s Sitting Next to You on the Subway? An R Train in September | Hacker News Reader

Who’s Sitting Next to You on the Subway? An R Train in September

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219 pointsfern12100 comments

This is great. People everywhere I go are incredibly friendly, especially in New York. It's always fun to take a moment, act like a human, and talk to people. Not because you want to sell them anything or buy something, but simply because being social is part of being human.

One of the things that bothers me about individual automobile travel is how isolating it is. I want to interact with people and experience local art and culture, of which there is a lot in the NYC subway. We're a communal species.

> One of the things that bothers me about individual automobile travel is how isolating it is. I want to interact with people and experience local art and culture, of which there is a lot in the NYC subway. We're a communal species.

You can make phone calls and listen to local podcasts in a car. You get better exposure to architecture, nature, and automobile design in a car than in an underground train.

>I want to interact with people...

You must be riding other trains because on the trains I have ridden, everyone is extremely efficient at avoiding eye contact.

That's mostly true, but then try living for a few years in Germany and then your perception of what it means to avoid eye contact will vastly change :)

I'm a German living in Germany. Can you clarify your comment for me? :-)

As a Dutchie who just spent three years in Germany... You are perceived to be very closed, at least initially. Nice when you want to be left alone, going about your business. Not so nice when you are used to more interaction with strangers.

I'm from Scandinavia and it's pretty much the same.

There's a whole other level - try riding the subway in Seoul if you look like you're definitely not Korean. It's like you're invisible and inaudible.

Real life is so much more interesting, IMO. Also there's far more that you can only experience by walking or riding a bike around the city.

There are things you only experience scooting around the city, but there are things you only experience when you get at least 30 miles out of an urban area. And there are things you only experience if you go on a full-blown roadtrip.

I think there's a lot to find interesting out there. Generally I only feel limited by my curiosity and imagination.

If you're on a road trip across a "boring" part of the country, chat up a trucker at a rest stop. Ask how the business works, how they got into the business, how things changed since they started, what their bosses seem like, etc.

Yeah, and try doing it on a bicycle. I biked across the US (SF to NYC) last summer, and it's something you simply cannot replicate any other way. There is so much more to the world when you hear the sounds, smell the smells, and have spontaneous conversations with people ("you're on a bike? going to where? what?").

> You can make phone calls and listen to local podcasts in a car. You get better exposure to architecture, nature, and automobile design in a car than in an underground train.

You can listen to podcasts and music on a train as well. You can even make phone calls (much to the annoyance of the rest of us). Some of us spend a lot of our train time above ground. Some of the views from the NYC subway in the parts when it's not a subway are fantastic.

Ha ha is that how you aspire to feel when you travel in public or how you actually feel? Because it sounds nice but then you try it and you realise many fellow people are unpleasant, annoying or offensive.

It’s obviously a mixed bag (and sometimes dreadful), but IMO it’s a lot more fulfilling to live and travel in the real world among real people than some aseptic Uber-only lifestyle (which many of my friends unfortunately prefer).

It can be entertaining to get out and see the people in a place.

You experience life however you choose to experience it. If you go around with a shitty attitude about things, you'll probably have a shitty experience.

Yeap. Which means your experience of individual automobile travel as isolating is solely due to your attitude about it.

> unpleasant, annoying or offensive.

You define pleasantries, annoyances, and offenses, and that attitude of setting yourself above so many others by default without spending the time to understand their unique human stories is going to cut you out of many fullfilling human experiences.

I can only imagine you have a far more difficult life than I, if your world is populated by such annoying characters.

There are only so many times that your morning commute can involve someone standing in your face for minutes screaming about how he's going to stab you in the chest, or you can watch some guy beat his girlfriend to a pulp in front of you.

People in suburban DC are beating their girlfriends to a pulp on the subway regularly? Uh huh... sure.

Those are the last two things that happened to me when I rode Metro, waiting for a change at l'Enfant. So, I don't know about regularly, but after that, I was done with Metro.

I take the bus everywhere and that's not been my experience at all. Might depend what city you're in.

I love interacting with strangers when the median interaction doesn’t involve a homeless person asking/threatening you for money. I would emphatically not describe the NYC subway as a good social experience. (Speaking from personal experience as of the last five minutes.)

If you think the NYC Subway is bad, you should try the light rail in smaller cities where most people don't use transit at all.

New Yorkers have no idea how good they have it.

Once you've used the Tokyo metro it's hard to get that same sweet high on MTA. Tokyo trains are so clean the seats are able to be cushioned and the trains are always on time.

http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/51f8a431851a4701b610b25c70dfd14e/t...

Any material that can’t be power washed won’t work for the NYC subway.

To call those seats a bad idea for New York would be the understatement of the century.

I wouldn't compare Tokyo's transit to New York's for the same reason I wouldn't compare almost anything else in Japan to its counterpart in any city in the U.S. It's a wildly different culture. Comparisons are fun, but sort of meaningless, because no city in the States will ever be anything like any city in Japan.

Which is too bad. Using Japanese trains was wonderful (we specifically avoided traveling during the height of rush hour, though). It what I picture when I'm trying to think positively about using public transit.

You're focusing on the trains, but it's really the culture that's different, and that extends to all kinds of things. The trains are just one example.

But that's why there's no usable information here. We don't have the Japanese culture, so we're not going to get their trains.

Can you imagine the lawsuits if we were to have staff push people here? https://youtu.be/E7kor5nHtZQ

By the way, as bad as things are in New York MTA, I find it much better than the stupidity of the path train (panynj). We have like four routes to manage and we can't do that properly.

I was commenting on the fact that "no city in the States will ever be anything like any city in Japan", using the trains as an example of why I'd say that. I could've just as easily mentioned other aspects of that country that I found pleasant, but trains like a good focus, since that's what the whole post is about.

Do you live in NYC? Spend actual time in the subway? How long?

I live in NYC and take the subway almost exclusively.

Depends on how fucked up the subway is and what line you're taking, some days it's an hour a day, some days it's 2 hours a day, but I never spend more than 2 hours a day on it.

I used to spend quality time going from Forest Hills to various Manhattan destinations. It worked just fine, but wasn’t some idealized gathering place for humanity.

As a response to the children comments who don't believe this...

I also love the (NYC) subway when it's not completely packed. I very rarely interact with someone on the subway, but the people-watching is fascinating -- I can't think of anywhere else in the world where you can see such a cross-section of humanity, of so many races, cultures, clothing styles, income levels, and everything else.

And I feel the same way about automobile travel being isolating. In the subway, it's not about interaction, but you feel a little bit more a part of humanity and all the interesting people doing all their interesting things.

And once in a while, you do interact-- often out of the blue, and briefly, but those conversations can be much more real than anything you'd expect.

I'm not approachable by any means, but I've had interactions where people told me about losing a significant other, how uncertain they feel having just moved to the city, dealing with illness, etc.

My impression is that many areas where the culture is social/polite, brief interactions with strangers are usually pleasantries and small-talk. Perhaps some in this thread had such experience, and are unsure how a place where the people are seen to be so rude to strangers can possibly have positive, enriching, interactions with strangers on a packed subway.

> My impression is that many areas where the culture is social/polite, brief interactions with strangers are usually pleasantries and small-talk.

We have pleasantries and small-talk as well as the occasional deeper interaction. It doesn't have to be either/or.

>In the subway, it's not about interaction, but you feel a little bit more a part of humanity and all the interesting people doing all their interesting things.

I rode the Blue line in the DC metro area for 5 years, from Arlington/Alexandria to Farragut West. Coming from car-centric LA, I hated many aspects of it at first (walking on icy sidewalks, sitting next to people picking their noses, etc).

But it was a fascinating exercise in people-watching, which I love. I saw so many of the same people every day - a young man with ankylosing spondylitis (which I didn't even know of, prior to seeing him), a grumpy-looking lady who always wore black flats with no socks, even when it was snowing, etc. It was always interesting to see who gave up their seats to pregnant women, and who was too buried in their smartphone.

One time, the Blue line got stuck before the Rosslyn tunnel, and I saw one guy get so worked up about it, I thought he was going to have a meltdown. Then, there was an elderly Korean man who would get on at different stops, and start singing in Korean, and you would see people from all walks of life trying to exchange furtive glances with one another. I kind of miss it, at times.

Commuting by bike is also a much more communal experience.

Its easier to stop and help or talk to someone when you're not enclosed in a box. My best experiences are stopping to help people with punctures and once while waiting at a junction stopping for a chat with a friend that I had not see for a while.

> It's always fun to take a moment, act like a human, and talk to people.

I find this very American behaviour. Talking to strangers (unless in a social event) is considered weird and not socially acceptable in large parts of Europe.

In 20+ years of daily public transport usage, I've had maybe a dozen interactions with random people on trams and busses outside of standard "where does this line go" or "is this your stop" conversations.

I live in Tokyo and have done this quite a bit, but it makes me feel like such a Gaijin that I don't do it anymore.

出る杭は打たれる The nail that sticks out gets hit.

Maybe that sentiment has sunk in. Perhaps loneliness is a pervasive feature of living in a big city.

Two years ago I got on the NYC subway, the 3 train, headed to work near Columbus Circle, and after a few recent arguments (people stepping on my feet, accidentally dumping water on me) I'd resolved to be more zen during the crowded morning rush hour. I'd just read this article (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2960791/Commuter-swe...) that morning about a guy who said FU to a commuter, only to be interviewed by him later that day, and I said, I have to be more tolerant on the subway.

Anyway, I sat in the last seat reading a book when, at Chambers St, a large middle-aged white woman sat down next to me and elbowed me in the stomach -- hard. Dude on her right immediately got up, wanting no part of it, and she slid over, taking up both seats, then proceeded to mutter profanity at me. "F'ng a----. Motherf----er." etc etc.

Not even sure why she was mad at me, I guess she wanted more room, but I was on the end and I'm relatively skinny (32" waist, FWIW) so I'm not sure what the beef was. Just crazy, I guess.

Normally I would angrily confront a stranger who just punched me in the stomach and started swearing at me for no good reason but I thought, "Hey, I just resolved a few hours ago to be zen on the subway, am I going to break my new resolution on the first day?"

Fast-forward through the rest of the subway ride, I said and did nothing while she kept muttering profanity (and staring right at me). We got off at the same stop but I grabbed a beverage while she went her way.

Five minutes later I entered the lobby of my office and there she was. She turned around, saw me, and went white. as. a. ghost. I was worried I'd have to call 911.

Turns out she was a contractor who had just started at my company that week, and her direct boss was a good friend of mine.

My friend didn't fire her (right away, anyway) b/c she needed the help and just found the story funny but they did end up terminating her two months later because (surprise surprise) she had an anger problem. They actually waited for her to leave for the day, then called her and told her not to come back in b/c they were afraid of what she'd do in person.

Moral of the story: don't get into commute rage fights. They're not worth it! And you never know who you're getting into a fight with. Be nice to people on the subway.

Plus you will be filmed and put on YouTube if the confrontation lasts more than a moment. This alone is enough to inhibit me.

Anyone who would do that has some mental health problems.

That's really weird, best to just avoid and not engage.

EDIT: to anyone who thinks that by 'engaging you're going to help' I suggest you're probably wrong. Someone randomly punching others, staring at them and shouting profanities is not going to be 'convinced' of anything, especially in that state. Also I'll double down and say that anyone that does that has a problem that needs addressing. That is way outside the bounds of 'I'm having a bad day' or 'In a bad mood' or 'I was triggered' etc..

I once tried to engage in a ‘Deepak Chopra’ way and asked if the person (15-17 year kid) needed any help, and started offering unsolicited advice about staying calm and being friendly to people. The situation escalated pretty quickly to the point he went crazy on the entire subway car and started using profanity against anyone who even looked at him. Note to myself: don’t engage. World is not the same as what you see in movies or tv shows.

I am generally on your side of the argument. Non the less. There is this voice inside my head that asks, if by not countering such antisocial behaviour we send the signal that this behaviour actually is ok.

When people learn that they get what they want by acting as assholes, why should they change?

In Germany we had a saying that it takes a whole village to raise a child. But these days if you tell a anti-social kid on the train to be more civil the parent tends to scold you.

If the group on the train could band together, show the kid some love, and actually help him, that would be amazing. Unfortunately, "countering" behavior in these situations often involves a kind of adversarial mentality that just pushes the real problem deeper. The same action taken out of love versus enmity can lead to vastly different outcomes.

Having now spent some time in a proper city, I'm pretty well in agreement with this. Though I often find it's more of a shocking display less often than it's actually violent. It's a tough thing to pinpoint in people though. Is this person going to be violent or are they just dealing with a voice in their head? More often than not, when I've spoken with these people it's been an amicable interaction and they're just dealing with their situation. This would likely be different if I weren't trying to treat them as an equal—which they are—and instead attempting to give them "advice" or confronting them.

For those who think otherwise, try putting yourself in someone else's place. What would it be like if heroin was the only thing silencing the voice in your head telling you to kill yourself or others? What if the system that aids you alternative ways of dealing with that condition was non-existent? What if all those things are true, but also your family is dead or has abandoned you?

My father was a teenager walking to a job interview and tried to hitch a ride. He called someone an asshole for not picking him up. When he got to the job, that person owned the shop.

I think he actually still got the job.

Another reason to go Zen is that it does not get you there quickly if you go all confrontational on someone.

As a cyclist I never get into altercations but others do. I wonder how it will work out for them the next day when the road has to be shared again.

I've heard from a few cyclists about people they cycled with who got into pretty violent fist fights with some people, some even had to call an ambulance after that.

My suggestion is to always apologize even if you're not in the wrong, because getting into fights, or even angry, for silly things like that is not worth it.

One time I was biking behind a man who flipped off a pickup truck after it did something inconsiderate on the road. Then driver of the truck tried to ram him and almost succeeded. That really brought home to me that there are contexts where expressing your anger can be really counter productive, no matter how justified it is.

Yes actually that was kind of how I learned, a van driver angry at me cutting up a learner driver. I had merely scooted down the inside of the learner driver's car at the lights, but I had actively thought beforehand about whether to do so and I thought it better the driver cope with real world cyclists and we do get to the 'bike box' at the front (UK roads).

So van driver took offence and chased me at high speed down a dual carriageway and on the bike/pedestrian path. I had to swap to the fast lane to get traffic between myself and the van, plus I pulled a calf muscle and had to put my feet up for a fortnight. Oh, I also had to take a different route to work.

I hadn't been the one with 'road rage', however I was riding quickly and I had put myself before a more needy road user when I could have held back. Why Mr Van Driver decided to boil over about it I will never know, but he had quite a posse in the van and they were having great fun throwing things at me. Maybe they routinely got a kick out of beating up cyclists, making a sport of it.

It is extraordinary what moves you consider safe to make on a bicycle in fast moving traffic when there is a van trying to kill you. The game of 'Frogger' seemed to offer greater life expectancy.

Having seen the darkside of confrontation I really saw no reason why anyone would want to do anything at all that could incite a genuine road rage incident such as what I had been subjected to. Absolute terror, but at the same time extremely thrilling as I did manage to deftly manoeuvre my bike to get bollards or vehicles between myself and the van of doom in ways you really need the adrenaline for.

Incidentally I escaped by doing a last minute 'cyclist only move' at a roundabout - a sharp right going against traffic to enter an industrial park. I took a few moments to collect myself and gingerly made my journey to work to find myself there very early!

The fact we are all on the subway for the same basic purpose subliminally provides a democratizing, unifying and human environment.

The person next to you is different than you but is also the same as you. The person is real - not a media concocted persona based on how the person may look, what groups he may belong to or how the media interprets and communicates her assumed motivations.

Digital is great but there are still 24 hours in the day, so the opportunity cost for many of us, including me, is often human interaction. I for one am trying to increase my time with humans on the R train, and decrease my time with personas on social media.

I don't know. It's hard to feel magnanimous when you have an armpit in your face and someone else is blocking the door to get off the train.

> human interaction

Honestly, my relationship with the person next to me on the train feels more like the relationship between two cows on a cattle car.

Maybe you're riding a different line at a different time of day or something.

I feel the same way with the exception of traveling as a tourist and you're taking more time to know and absorb your surrounds.

In most other cases the cattle car cows analogy is pretty apt.

Except from an individual experience a train is one of the least efficient methods of travel.

Long waits at each stop, and tons of stops in between me and my destination, never reaching top speed for Long...

Meanwhile when it does stop I still need a car or bus to get to my destination. This is true in European cities as well, where the stop count gets absurd.

With all the stops it's still way faster than driving through midtown at rush hour. And I don't know where you're going in NY or whether you're capable of walking, but pretty much any destination in Manhattan and large swaths of the outer boroughs are within a 10 minute walk of the subway. I would not count that as needing a car or bus to get to your destination.

Many years ago, my friend and I play something we called the N train game. Traveling from Manhattan into Queens, we would guess which stop the white people would get off in Manhattan. Only us "ethnic" white people went into Queens, the rest (American white for lack of a better term) did not.

Now all of that is over. Everyone got pushed into the outer boroughs. There is a hipster bar next door to the building I was born in. Unimaginable twenty years ago. I left my hometown due to cost. Twice the price for a city that is half as fun as it used to be. But this article still shows the amount of diversity in the city.

I think “Anglo-Saxon” is the term you’re looking for

Probably not, at least in the sense of literal English heritage.

There's definitely a White American identity, which is an innovation owing to suburbaniztion and television. Previously ethnically diverse white people assimilated as they left ethnic enclaves for the burbs. And for white people with deeper American roots, migration broke down regional American identities. It's a concept known as ethnogenesis.

While some insular white American identities persist in rural and small town America (Appalachian and Cajun come to mind), it's largely recent immigrants contrasting against a monolithic White American identity.

I don't think being part of what I would call "Anglo-Saxon culture" depends on literally descending from the historical Angle and Saxon tribes -- it just means "the culture of typical White Americans" (or New Zealanders, Australians, Canadians, etc.)

It's interesting as a percentage how many artists/musicians there are.

If you like this you’ll like humansofnewyork

The guy who started it quit his job and decided to do something like 1,000 interviews or something like that with no real goal. a portrait of each human and asked the same line of questions but they usually got more personal.

Turned from a website to coffee table books and now makes millions and has a penthouse in the city.

Also lookup New York nico.

Reminds me of the book "Up in the Old Hotel?".

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210783.Up_in_the_Old_Hot...

Did they do this on the weekend? I ride public transit every day of the work week. I see lots of the same people. I don't understand how the answer to the question of "Where are you going?" is not "work" more often.

well it's obviously not in rush hour due to the few people standing, so I'd bet it's the weekend or middle of the day

If it were rush hour, there wouldn't be enough room to write notes on a moleskine, let alone have a conversation.

One of they people said there was no school that day. It's safe to assume it was on the weekend.

I started a subreddit a week ago on a similar premise. I like how simple these interviews are and how they paint a human picture. We hardly know each other, and I feel like that causes a lot of issues. I also liked playing the game of trying to read their backstory by the picture, then seeing if I was affirmed by the blurb. I got the methadone guy because his gruff look, nails, and torn bag. I was disappointed by the ebony Cleopatra blurb, I thought I was going to be in for a ride there.

I was on the subway a few months ago when this mother left her kid at a different stop accidentally ( I'm sure he was safe ), maybe not the nicest thing to do, but I was in NYC for taking pics and got the moment here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BUlPWUMguSmtfh86RQymrzWcPC4L9YH8...

Where can I see this subreddit?

https://www.reddit.com/r/FacesOfAmerica/

As I said, I just started it, so it has nothing yet, but I did find it serendipitous that this piece touched on a similar thing.

Your Instagram link 404s for me.

Probably his account is private.

Doh, I did noobishly link a private instagram post. Here's a imgur version ( not the best quality ): https://imgur.com/a/iXYby

This is what I wanted http://windowshots.reddit.com to be, but despite everything I could think of to try to shape the community, it mostly turned into a competition for prettiest vista.

Since when is [subreddit].reddit.com possible?

2005

This is a great idea. Got me imagining living all these other people's lives.

https://www.reddit.com/r/windowshots/comments/2v53wb/1_am_th...

"How do you like living in New York? I feel like my life is going according to plan. Everything is in my control, so I think that is a good feeling. "

...uh oh. Quarter life crisis in 5...4..3..

lol

Awesome journalistic idea + execution, but so much scrolling back and forth. Would have been neat with some mouseover popups or something similar.

Yeah, I was kind of thinking, what if each picture stuck to the top as I scrolled. Could have been a good opportunity to do something clever with web presentation.

Wow, they actually found a running R train.

I think you are mistaking the R for G

It's been years since I've lived in NYC. Is G still the ugly sibling of every other line?

Its service is better than its reputation. The trains are still short, and they still don't run often enough, but it seems to roughly follows its schedule. Data seems to back up my anecdotal experience: https://www.metro.us/news/local-news/new-york/nyc-subway-bes...

The G train saves lives.

https://twitter.com/kchoudhu/status/909648674958872576

where time goes to die

The diversity of occupations is refreshing. I imagine New York City is particularly unique in this respect. Are there cities that are similarly diverse in occupations ?

Basically every U.S. city has people in each of those occupations. In fact, most of those occupations are more or less essential in every city. There might be a few more people in creative occupations than is typical in the U.S., but that sort of thing varies withing NYC, even. Riding a different train in a different neighborhood at a different time of day will have more mechanics, doctors, or engineers.

Outside of industry towns I think it's the opposite that is rare - a large city will almost always have a diverse workforce. Perhaps the Bay Area (which is not "one" city) is unique in that it's largely centered around technology. Even then I bet it's still fairly diverse.

If you like this, you will enjoy this: http://www.humansofnewyork.com/ -- many touching stories and great portraits. The author started in NY but has traveled the world, doing the same type of short interviews with people in Iran or Iraq.

I think you will really find the website humans of new york to be interesting if you are into NYC and looking at people.

It's funny when we take a moment to behave like a human being with all people. It is not necessary to gain any benefits from this behavior but we gain by being social which is a part of being human.

> What’s your biggest fear?

> I’m afraid I’ll die before I can upload my brain to the cloud and live forever in a video game.

If you think that's a good idea you should watch "Black Mirror".

To convince me otherwise? Seemed grand to me.

Let's automate it: "Who is X next to you in Y" - and there are tons of ideas for articles actually!

I take the N/W train into the city every day. You'd be crazy to talk to other people on the train. Everyone has the attitude that they don't want to be bothered and to just have a peaceful commute.

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