[URBAN NOTE] "Subjectivity around space complicates TTC debates over transit crowding"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Oliver Moore reports on the infuriatingly complex role of subjectivity in gauging transit crowding.

There’s crowded and then there’s crowded.

Take a Toronto subway train during the morning rush, put it on one of London’s busiest routes and they’ll get 20-per-cent more people onto it. Put the train in Tokyo and the passengers per square metre will jump to half again as many as Toronto.

These are comparisons that undermine the regular refrain that Toronto’s system is bursting at the seams. But they also reflect the highly subjective question of what it means to be crowded.

“We’re used to people touching us on all sides. You just go into a zone where your normal boundaries about personal space get changed,” said Lianna Etkind, with the British advocacy group Campaign for Better Transport. “When you’re squeezed in on all sides … it’s unpleasant. But it’s seen as normal. That’s a normal part of peak-time commuting.”

The amount of space people feel they need varies from country to country and city to city. It evolves with changing human behaviours – a vehicle can hold fewer passengers if they’re looking at their phones – and attitudes.

Even within a transit system, passengers will have different ideas of what is too crowded. During the busiest period one recent morning at Bloor-Yonge station, about half of the people waiting on the platform got on each train. But who got on was often the result of individual judgment. Some people would look at a heavily laden train and decide to take their chances on the next one. Others were determined to squeeze their way on, regardless how tight the fit.