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Comment by brndnmtthws | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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.

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.

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