Poor infrastructure breeds its own etiquette

Lamenting the recent rash of pay-to-jump-the-line enticements pushed by amusement parks and ski resorts as well as airlines, "Matthew J.X. Malady" (that's a pseudonym, right?) writes an eloquent tribute to the eroding social achievement of the queue:

This process [of forming lines] may not be fun, but it’s fair. Curse lines all you like, but we would be doomed without them. Unless you’re simultaneously the strongest, smartest, fastest and most universally capable human being on the planet, you should be thankful that lines exist and that, for the most part, people use them in ways that make life less miserable, not more. Which is to say the line is not a persistent social nuisance. It’s one of our most noble collective achievements.

I came to this via Timothy Noah, Jeremiah of inequality, and was led in a Twitter exchange to think about a relative bright spot where the new classism has not yet penetrated: commuter trains. I ride New Jersey Transit into Penn Station in New York, a prime example of inadequate U.S. infrastructure which, on the plus side, has induced regular commuters to develop their own complex, site-specific queuing etiquette.

Rat race or fluid human dance?

Way back when, while teaching freshman composition, I used to sometimes assign an essay by Tom Wolfe in which he stood on the mezzanine balcony at Grand Central Station with a social scientist who compared the commuters below to rats. "Listen to them squeak," the guru said -- and sure enough, Wolfe reported, there was a regular squeak of pivoting soles.   This was, we were given to believe, the rat race made literal.

Shrieks on a Plane

Professor Bainbridge warns that unrestricted cell phone use on planes is on the way. Everyone who doesn't have the luxury of shutting off a hearing aid knows how bad this will be. And yet, there may be cause for all-too-distant hope. As a 10-year commuting vet on New Jersey transit, I’ve noticed an evolution in cell phone use on rush-hour commuter trains: most regular commuters do keep it down. Their fellow commuters have perfected the slow head-turn and glare, and the occasional ‘can you keep it down?’; most of us have grown at least marginally sensitive to the common interest in peace. It’s different, though, on weekend and off-peak trains: grandma doesn’t have a clue, teens don’t care, show-and-shopping excursionists are oblivious. I imagine that plane passengers will unfortunately be more like the off-peak crowd, except maybe on the major biz shuttle routes.

Attention, passengers: earplugs are cheap and reasonably effective, if a bit uncomfortable. They're not really good enough if the yakker is right next to you.