Quiet car discussions continued

Last month I wrote about Amtrak's Quiet Car (apparently it's a proper noun) and some of the  rules of social order discussions that have been popping up about noise levels and reprimanding violators. I've come across a couple other things since then.

In an article in The Atlantic, Andrea Bartoli at George Mason University's School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution provides an interesting take on the social structure of quiet car space:

"Fundamentally, the Quiet Car is a perfect microcosm, because you have all the elements of a primordial society," Bartoli says. "You're not in a family. You're not in a work environment where someone is more important. You don't have responsibility or power structure. You just have anonymous people sharing the space."

Bartoli's approach to dealing with offenders is to walk up to them and point to the Quiet Car sign, what he calls a "silent reminder." Apparently this works about two-thirds of the time. In the other one-third of instances, people respond in hostile ways and conductors or fellow passengers get involved. I suppose two out of three isn't that bad - though a seventy-five percent success rate isn't an unreasonable expectation for a conflict resolution expert (I think).

In discussing the quiet car violators, Ta-Nehisi Coates is less conciliatory in understanding people's behaviors:

These people are almost always dealt with by a conductor or other passengers. But I've never quite been able to figure out why they come to the Quiet Car. It's not a matter of not knowing the rules, so much as a matter of not caring. It's almost as if the offenders regard the regular cars as a public lavatory, and the Quiet Car as a private bathroom where they may repair to handle their shit.

He likens a cellphone conversation on the quiet car to a drunk person in a bar using racial epithet, which I found a bit much. I felt like he was mashing together two types of social interactions he hates, but that really are not analogous.

On a different (yet kind of related) topic, while I obviously don't think anyone should be using racial slurs or swearing at Coates' wife, I do have a soft spot for the life story folks he describes. Since I can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone, I usually hear at least one life story a day. It's a habit that borders on a compulsion and I should probably curb the urge, but I've talked to some unexpectedly interesting people - an excommunicated Mormon, a troubled former child star, and a cat hoarder, for example. I'm fascinated by the everyday stories me as much as the more unusual ones - accounts of familial relations, parenthood, work, aging, and sickness. (Recently, a woman told me about losing seventy pounds after struggling with her weight for years and the ways in which her life has forever changed. It was very moving to hear.) In any case, I hang out in cafes a lot and not bars and so my people, if anything, are over-caffeinated. Maybe chatty drunk people are a whole different story.

(via The Atlantic)

Collaborative consumption in Vegas

I've become a bit fascinated with this whole idea of collaborative consumption (also known as the sharing economy) lately and the arguments that it alters notions of ownership, fosters trust and a sense of community, and can potentially change the social and physical landscape of cities. Some of the discussions are convincing and others are less so. For me, it's partly that a lot of very disparate things are grouped under the general category of collaborative consumption. When money is part of the "transaction," very different dynamics and sets of expectations emerge (for example, Airbnb versus Couchsurfing). I'm far from an expert on collaborative consumption, but I'm interested in seeing how things evolve and the concept is refined or redefined.

Some mobility-related, peer-to-peer car sharing examples of this new culture of sharing are Zipcar, Getaround, RelayRides, and SideCar. Downtown Project is the brainchild of Tony Hsieh of Zappos. It's a $350 million plan to revitalize Downtown Las Vegas through increased urban density and a mix of industries and creative communities. Yesterday, Project 100 was announced, the transportation part of this initiative:

Project 100 is the code name for a complete transportation system designed to let you get rid of your car and be more connected to your neighborhood. It includes on-demand cars with drivers, shared cars you can drive yourself, bikesharing, shuttle buses and more. The experience is simple: open an app so we know where you are and tell us what zone you want to travel to. With that information we’ll give you a set of options, for example, 1 – Be picked up by a driver in a Tesla in 3 minutes, 2 – Drive yourself in a low range electric vehicle that’s 0.2 miles away, 3 – Grab a bike that’s 0.1 miles away or 4 – Hop on the party bus that will be near you in 4 minutes. 

They have indeed teamed up with Tesla for the car part of the program. I'm curious to see how the system plays out and the types of social interactions that emerge from the people-people and people-mode relationships.

(via TIME, The Atlantic Cities, TED, Green Car Reports)

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)