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Dodgy Tactics

A couple of near misses this morning made me think about how we navigate oncoming foot traffic.

My ten-cent theory for the last couple of years has been that people take cues from other people’s eyes to determine which way they’re going to veer to circumvent a given human obstacle. This led me to believe there would be more awkward shuffling as people double-guessed each other’s path in the summer, because everyone’s wearing shades and you can’t tell where people are looking. Observational data collection for this aspect of the theory will have to wait for a few months.

The mechanics are a bit more complex: two people are looking where they are going. They are primarily scanning for openings, and calculating the velocities of people converging on the openings. When a collision is imminent, person A scans the head of person B to see where its scanning. B is generally scanning over one shoulder or the other of A, so A goes in the opposite direction to the best of their ability. This process short circuits if A and B scan each other at the same time, because they’ll both be waiting for a cue. As they get closer, a sharp turn of the head will signal the other, and they’ll diverge. Sometimes this need to be a full body gesture, and sometimes a Hail Mary dodge is necessary. If all this fails, or competing Hail Marys collide, you’re reduced to the stop and shuffle.

This morning, my subject B went with a full body gesture and brought this all to mind, so I watched the rest of the pedestrians on my commute, trying to see how often this theory held up.

A keen reader will note the basic fallacy of my first assumption. Most people just aren’t watching where they are going. Much of my commuting experience comes from midtown, a virtual wasteland of any human-oriented community structure. It’s business, food, and terrible bars, with wide and crowded sidewalks, the only purpose of which is to serve people in a hurry. Tactical navigation is the only thing to think about. Chinatown paths are narrow and full of residents and things to buy, so a high percentage of people are street and window shopping.

However, at the points before and after the worst of the market areas, the theory seemed sound: there were subtle but noticeable tilts of the head indicating on which side of me the oncoming traffic intended to pass, and even after checking for traffic at crossings, the head would come back to indicate its intended path.

Still, further research is necessary.

» Future research accessory

Forget it, Jake

Certain rules get dropped in favor of getting around or making a buck in Manhattan. If jaywalkers were vigorously prosecuted, the NYPD would be rich in a day. Reddish-orange light-running is usually kosher as long as you weren’t explicitly trying to kill a Jew. Peddling questionable goods wherever and whenever is usually a safe bet, though directly at odds with the commuting effort.

Chinatown turns this casual lawlessness up to eleven. Walking along the blurry and blurring borders of Little Italy and Chinatown is walking through a narrow bazaar of stacked clothing, buckets of trinkets, and crates of food. It’s hard to tell what’s being loaded into the stores and what’s being sold on the spot. Sometimes it’s being distributed to the street dealers: one crowd of peddlers gathered around a trash bag full of purses had a member whose job it was to fend off interested tourists with shouts of, “No sale! No sale!”

I recognized the shouter from the Starbucks team. She doesn’t work at Starbucks, she works the sidewalk just outside. I assume she and the rest of her team recognize me by now, which is why I don’t hear “watches, rings, watches, rings” muttered quietly in my ear as often as I did when I first started getting coffee there. As far as I can tell, they’re selling approximately the same thing as the blocks of nearly identical stores selling knockoffs or otherwise acquired items, some in the window, some in the rooms you have to ask six or seven times to see.

The confusion caused by the masses of people trying to sell you things on and off the street is roughly doubled by the hosts at the Italian restaurants trying to assure each passing tourist that the restaurant just to the left is the very best Italian restaurant out of the thirty or so that are holding up against the Chinatown onslaught. The only way to navigate or hold a conversation among the turmoil is to create a sensory blind spot and not give any indication that you can see or hear anything that isn’t in the dead center of your vision. It’s also important to do this, since the rules of right-of-way seem to be whoever got there first by not backing down. The roads tend to be 50% sidewalk, and there’s often no way of knowing if that’s because it’s currently safe or if it just happens to be that way because some delivery guys took over a section street, and will at any moment release a stack of angry traffic, or just run you down themselves with an overloaded hand trolley.

It’s Chinatown.

Drizzle

When commuting to work from my girlfriend’s apartment, my morning ritual involves a small cup of extremely expensive coffee from a small coffee place three blocks north of her building. It takes two or three minutes to make, because it’s brewed a cup at a time and because it wouldn’t be a luxury item if it was expedient. Once I have my coffee, I sit on the step of a store a couple of doors down. This store has been under construction or deconstruction for a year or more, so I don’t think anybody minds. This whole process takes about ten minutes, after which I do the ten minute walk from the shop step to my office.

Today, the first ten minutes happened to be the ten minutes the sky took to turn from sunny and clear to gray and beginning to rain.

Actual rain changes the walking dynamic into a scurrying maze of death and hate, but pre-rain drizzle has the less dramatic effect of magnifying preexisting commuter habits. Fast walkers lengthen their strides, opportunists break into dashes more frequently, the lost sheep look a little more lost as they eye the sky. A few people already have umbrellas up. The curb creepers edge closer to death, looking for openings. The people who have to work outside and don’t care about anything continue not to care, but except for them, the pace of the street ratchets up a couple of cranks as everyone tries to shave thirty seconds of the minutes between them and their target door.

Overall, it worked out well for me. The drizzle dispersed the mini-clusters of people looking over stolen or knockoff goods along Hester street, and brought the amblers up to speed walker status. For some reason the lost sheep seemed to have wandered their way into another time frame: one woman took a full thirty seconds to traverse the S-curve she was following in front of a delivery truck trying to make a right turn, and a man who couldn’t have been over five feet tall managed to block an otherwise unobstructed sidewalk with a cane and a single plastic bag. I wondered if this was some kind of obscure martial art.

The only things that become more dangerous in pre-rain conditions are the bicycles. Cyclists already eschew law and order in favor of speed, and when the rain is coming, the space reserved for their sense of superiority is annexed by their already amply housed sense of entitlement. Fortunately, they remain a bigger danger to themselves than anyone else, but it’s important to stay out of the bike lanes.

I got to work with only a light moistening, which I dried off with the my edition of the company shirt somebody ordered without asking anybody what size they wore. The rain stopped two minutes later.

» How I made myself feel better today

456

I’ve ridden a lot of trains at rush hour in NYC. The least crowded was the PATH to Jersey, because I was taking it in reverse, since nobody actually lives in Brooklyn and works in Jersey. I regularly had an entire car to myself. The ads were the best part: one advertised condos in Hoboken by pointing out that if you live on the Jersey waterfront, you get to look at the Manhattan skyline, whereas is you live in Manhattan, you have to look at Jersey. They had a point. Another ad proclaimed, “Have you talked to your kids about drugs? Because their friends are.” The grammatical problems with these two sentences made me grind my teeth for a year.

The exact opposite of this advertising meditation commute was taking the 456 uptown from 14th Street at nine in the morning. I’ve never seen anything like it outside of dystopian-future cinema. A lucky day involved getting down the stairs and making the third train. Often, there was a line just to get to the head of the stairs, and you could spend five minutes on them before you got to the platform below. When there was room for them, MTA officials would move people around and clear entrances with flashlights and shouting. I mentioned the tipping point previously; that was every second on the 456 line once you got close to it.

People snapped on a regular basis. I witnessed the most impotent fight of all time, as two men yelled at each other over the impenetrable press of people between them, unable even to make a threatening gesture because their hands were pinned to their sides. Once when I was working my way to an acceptable spot on the train, I briefly got caught on a woman’s purse. She yanked it away angrily and shouted, “Excuse me is a word!” This is false, but I wasn’t going to correct her in such an unstable environment.

The 456 at 14th is also the loudest of all train stops, reaching 106 decibals, which starts causing hearing damage after 30 seconds. The screeching achieved by every single train is equivalent to having headphones made out of two hungry babies. People who just say, “gimme a second” into their cell phones and don’t blink when multiple ambulances go by still flinch when a slow 6 train pulls into 14th Street.

If you’re not from the city, the 456 is the green line on the subway map. Avoid.

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.