Economy
A Brief History of Subway Etiquette Campaigns
We’ve always been pretty bad at being nice in transit.
“Time was when no one would cough in another’s face or sneeze uproariously in a public place,” a newspaper columnist lamented in 1926. But that was “before the subway era, when in public places there were gentlemen and ladies.” That is to say, any sense of rider decorum was destroyed the instant they jostled for room in a subway car. Instead of gracious “pleases” and “thank you’s,” you had snot, germs, and rudeness.
Almost as soon as city dwellers began packing their bodies into subway cars, transit agencies realized that we could—and ought to—be better at it. Riders thought so, too.