Every day I’ve come home at rush hour for the last seven years, someone has pushed open the emergency exit gate. At first I thought these people were just trying to be cool and contrary, as in, “Yo, cat, I’m a New Yorker, these rules don’t apply to me,” but once my blood turned to coffee and the last of my nerves were shredded and I actually became a New Yorker, I realized it’s for the best. Several hundred people get out at my stop, and stuffing them all through three turnstiles is like getting wet salt through the crusted holes in a Applebee’s shaker. Another hole can’t hurt.
Though I often go through the opened gate, I never open it, as that would violate the principle of least effort I apply to all my commuting. It takes slightly more effort to open the gate than to push a turnstile, and no effort at all to walk through an open gate, so strict application of this principle dictates always walking through an open gate, and always opting for the turnstile if nobody else has opened it. It also sets off a really fucking annoying alarm that I could live without.
Recently, however, I’ve been going for the turnstile even if the gate is open. Most people shoot for the gate, because the gate tends to be a faster exit, and this is in line with the equally important principle of fastest commute. But at a critical mass of commuters, this stops being true, precisely because enough people think it is true, so you have a trickle of commuters flying through the turnstiles, and a thick line shuffling through the gate. Furthermore, people are coming at the gate from two angles, and though it appears the gate can handle two people going through at once, this never happens due to the alarming space-consumption-to-body-size ratio most New York commuters display, so you get microsecond delays whenever two people make for the gate and discover this. This double bottleneck slows the gate exit to a degree at which even if the gate is strictly closer to the point where I exit the train, I can skip a line of thirty people to go through a comparatively untouched turnstile.
Even with a firm grasp of the principles of commuting, context and commuter density must always be factored into calculating the net benefit of your tactics.