Public transportation is a social laboratory of the post-car America.
Public transportation is a social laboratory for the post-car, post-ownership America. Charles Mudede

According to a poll Seattle Times conducted of commuters in its newsroom, the three top bad behaviors on Metro are: yakking on a cellphone, carrying a huge bag or backpack, and morning commuters who smell heavily of the joint they smoked before boarding.

We can dismiss the second gripe first, because it is snobbish. Most of the local people who have big backpacks and duffel bags on the bus are not hikers but homeless men and women. They have to carry these massive things around because they have no place to store their belongings. All it takes is a moment of reflection to see very clearly that this (a lack of storage) is a consequence of not having a home. If you have a place to stay, you can not only sleep and rest in this place but also leave your possessions there.

As for the third gripe, as long as a person is not smoking on the bus, there's no real problem smelling strongly of the sticky icky ("OOO WEE"). The first gripe, however, is justified.

Few things on the bus are more irritating than hearing a person talk into a cellphone. I think this irritation has its roots in evolution. We can tune out a conversation between people who are physically present to each other. This kind of thing has been going on since the dawn of humankind. As for a person talking to someone who is not physically present, this kind of thing can't be so easily removed from our attention and placed in the background of our being because, since the dawn of humankind it has alerted us that something is not altogether right. A person who talks to no one is showing signs of having lost his or her mind. And a person who is not present to themselves can be a danger to others. And what exactly does talking into a cellphone sound like? Like you are talking to yourself.

But we also have the luck of living at a time when there are so many silent ways to communicate on the ubiquitous smartphone (text, Gchat, Messenger, and so much more). Why do you need to actually talk to someone at the end of the line? It makes no sense. This sort of activity should be discouraged or even punished.

And this gets me to my point: As we become more and more dependent on public transportation, we will need a kind of ruthless Stalinism to minimize or eliminate anti-social behaviors. The individualistic habits promoted by car culture and, in general, American ideology, have no place in the shared transportation of the future.