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Monthly Archives: January 2012

The Tipping Point

Today, in some misguided attempt to be healthier, I forwent my morning coffee and cigarette until after I’d braved the subway. Or, I got up late and didn’t have time to make coffee and I can’t smoke a cigarette until I’m working through my first cup. One of those.

The mind of pack-a-day smoker prior to his first cigarette is like superheated water. Placid crystal until you introduce the slightest impurity, whereupon it boils explosively. By the time I left the apartment, I’d already snapped once trying to put on a wool sweater about a size and a half too small. I spent the fifteen minute walk trying reclaim my mental purity for the first train.

Despite the wait, I didn’t even bother trying to get on the first train. A close friend of mine wandered by and took out his headphones to say, “Are you one of those people who likes to chat with their friends on the train in the morning?”

“Well, sometimes, but I haven’t had coffee,” I tried to say, though it came out closer to, “Well vshwom bu haven’ts coffshe.”

He nodded and put his headphones back in. “Great, I’m going to stand a ways down.”

Relieved, I managed to get on the second train. It was crowded, but there was breathing room.

The next stop removed that breathing room.

The next stop was the tipping point.

The tipping point on the NYC subway is when you go from trying to make room to holding your ground. There is no more room, and any room conceded to new bodies is taken by squeezing and contorting existing bodies. In this situation, if you don’t hold your square foot of ground, you’ll be bent over someone who’s hanging off the overhead handrail trying not to shove their crotch in the face of someone lucky enough to have a seat. In addition to the damage this will do to your spine, your bag is already between your feet at this point, and any further loss of ground means losing your bag. You also won’t be able to make sure your wallet is still in your pocket without copping a feel from whomever is pressed against your back. In this quiet mosh pit, elbows start to tighten out of necessity, and the desperate calm begins to fray.

The train was slow. At 14th Street, where half or more of the train’s occupants disembark, they peel out slowly. I and the guy who I’m preventing from checking for his wallet both have to bend down to get our backs. This process is equal parts tango and yoga in slow motion, as we drop by inches into the opening space around us, grab the first part of our bag we can get a grip on, and make for the door before the tide encircles us and we have to fight through it again.

As a woman cuts to the left while dashing down the stairs and against the flow of the recently freed, I growl at her, but refrain from sticking my foot out. The line at Starbucks doesn’t even register as an inconvenience.

Persistence

The kid directly in front of me in the turnstile line is already in rough shape. For some reason, this entrance to the Canal Street station is always less a line of people than a confused amoeba trying to navigate through a sieve. Even hardened commuters’ eyes get twitchy here. The kid looks like he’s trying to stay above it all, the way teenagers do, by looking mopey and sullen. I believe he’s stoned. In thirty seconds I will be sure of it.

It’s one of those moments when you just can’t believe you share a species with some of its members. The kid has a skateboard strapped horizontally across his backpack. Due to his slouching, he’s stopped by the waist high portion of the turnstile after he slides his card through the reader. He simply straightens his body, and, perhaps believing that the apparent similarity of width between the lower and upper portions of the entry is merely an optical illusion, walks forward and is again stopped when his skateboard hits the sides. He looks confused. I move on, wishing it was less crowded so I could see the fallout.

Nothing boggles my mind more than a human failing to understand object persistence. When I left, he was backing out and into the angry amoeba behind him. For the sake of the species, I hope he turned sideways, but I can picture him trying another turnstile.

Contrarians at the Gate

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.