Social drama on the quiet car

I've seen a number of articles and op-eds recently about quiet cars, such as Amtrak's offerings on a number of its routes. Much of the discussion is about violators of the quiet cars policies - policies that are kind of official, but not really, and sort of enforced, but not entirely. The relative vagueness of the boundaries and the enforcers has manifested itself in confrontations between passengers. In the New York Times, Tim Kreider describes an exchange between two passengers (the man being what some call quiet car "vigilantes"):

Not long ago a couple across the aisle from me in a Quiet Car talked all the way from New York City to Boston, after two people had asked them to stop. After each reproach they would lower their voices for a while, but like a grade-school cafeteria after the lunch monitor has yelled for silence, the volume crept inexorably up again. It was soft but incessant, and against the background silence, as maddening as a dripping faucet at 3 a.m. All the way to Boston I debated whether it was bothering me enough to say something. As we approached our destination a professorial-looking man who’d spoken to them twice got up, walked back and stood over them. He turned out to be quite tall. He told them that they’d been extremely inconsiderate, and he’d had a much harder time getting his work done because of them.

“Sir,” the girl said, “I really don’t think we were bothering anyone else.”

“No,” I said, “you were really annoying.”

“Yes,” said the woman behind them.

“See,” the man explained gently, “this is how it works. I’m the one person who says something. But for everyone like me, there’s a whole car full of people who feel the same way.”

Fred Jandt at Mass Transit describes his conflicted feelings as someone who appreciates the quiet car amenities, but not the admonishment that comes along when one passenger decides to enforce the rules of social order:

But here is the thing — most quiet cars allow you to speak quietly. They don’t demand silence. But other riders sure do. I know that I’ve been shushed into silence on a quiet car when I was having what I thought was a politely subdued conversation with the person next to me

These interactions are extremely interesting and I wonder if transit agencies will firm up the rules or start stricter enforcement. What I also think is interesting, however, is the class privilege aspect of this whole issue. This is happening on commuter trains and not, for example, on buses. While it is possible to designate a quiet car on a train because there are multiple cars (which is clearly not the case on buses), the attitude toward "amenities" is very different. We most often think of the physical amenities of transit (shelters, benches, easily accessible vehicles, etc.) and service amenities (on-time arrivals, minimal out-of-vehicle time, easy access to travel information, etc.), but less about social amenities. Yet these less tangible and less measurable qualities of transit travel contribute significantly to the overall travel experience of passengers.

I found in my own research that the looseness and tightness of social spaces (based on Erving Goffman's ideas about behavior in public places) varied significantly between local and Rapid buses, with local buses being much, much looser both in terms of the range of acceptable behaviors and the regulation of social order by others engaged in those spaces. The hierarchy of modes - with local buses at the very bottom - and the perceived stigmas (hence references to the bus as the "loser cruiser") mean that there would never be an attempt to develop the kind of rules on buses around noise that we're seeing on these trains. Nor would bus riders, particularly on local buses, feel compelled to police that space. It's just a reality that buses are where you'll hear about people's experiences with drug addiction, prison, relationships on the rocks, and unintended pregnancies.*

* All things I heard while conducing my fieldwork.

(via New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mass Transit)