Your Car Is Your Living Room

And maybe that's the problem

Back on our way home from Japan—I like to read about the place I’ve been while I’m still there or waiting at the airport or something—I was reading some online posts and threads about tourist behavior in Japan, etc. One of them was about behavior on trains and public transit, and someone said something like, “Why can’t people just ride the train? That’s all it’s there for.”

In other words, it isn’t there for you to eat, or play loud music, or perform for money, or whatever people sometimes do on trains. I’m not sure that comment specifically had to do with Japan, because behavior on Japanese transit seems pretty quiet and orderly (despite the experience being frenetic). But it stood out to me: that’s all it’s there for. The train isn’t really a public space per se, like a park or a square, nor is it a private space, like a living room. It’s just a vehicle.

Which is interesting, because in one sense the car is “there” to ride—to get you from A to B, only with you instead of the train operator driving. But in another sense, the car isn’t just a vehicle. It is your living room, your dining room, your inviolate private space. Which raises two thoughts: one, treating transit as absolutely nothing but a vehicle to get from A to B deprives city dwellers of an analogous space to a car.

And two, in tension with this, is that maybe your car shouldn’t be your dining room and your living room and your inviolate private space. Maybe there really is something fundamentally unfair about public money paying for public roads which are then traversed by comfortable, private, self-contained vehicles.

And a further thought: maybe the phenomenon of people behaving rudely or inconsiderately on public transit is actually them treating transit like a private automobile? There are no rules when you’re in your car, except the ones that govern the road and the ones you impose on yourself to keep the car neat, if you want to.

Instead of the car being some mark of respectability, maybe the car teaches us to be selfish and less aware of how we behave in public by blurring that line and giving us less practice for existing in public spaces.

Maybe the issue of bad behavior on transit isn’t “These city people don’t know how to behave in public,” but rather that bad behavior on transit is what happens when you treat a public transit vehicle as if it were your car.