Hello – it’s Ed Philp once more. Andrew has kindly allowed me to use German Joys as a soapbox to vent frustration and ask for comments on a proposed solution. The topic today is behaviour on Berlin public transit. I can’t speak to public transit in Kassel or Ludwigshafen or Hamburg. I know Berlin is known as being rude and impersonal in comparison to other German cities, but I’ve typically found Berliners to be reasonably polite and at least pragmatic in their dealings with others in most of my experiences in this city.
Not so in respect of the S-Bahn and the U-Bahn. There are certain habits here that drive me up the wall. For one, people almost invariably bunch up into a knot right by the door and obdurately stand there regardless of whether they are travelling for two stops or six. In doing so, they inconveniently block up the train and effectively prevent people from passing in or out of the doorway area. It is immensely frustrating to watch an S-Bahn train arrive – the doors open, and you are faced with a wall of people, and you can see that lots of space exists to stand in the seating areas between the doors.
In other cities, particularly London, but also Chicago and Toronto, and even Prague, people using public transit show considerable sensitivity to the fact that a lot of people are attempting to use a facility with limited comfort. In essence, people generally act like they are on public transit, where things only work efficiently and politely if passengers actively stay aware of the intentions of others. In Berlin, the opposite seems to apply. I have never seen so many people push their way onto a train where it is clear that the car hasn’t yet disgorged the passengers trying to exit. I’ve never seen so many people stand resolutely in the doorway inside the car even though half the train is obviously trying to exit. The solution is always to get off and stand right by the door, getting back on and usually claiming a seat as soon as the exiting passengers have left. I’ve also never seen so many people get up from their seat to head for the door in the middle of the train trip to the desired station. This means that these passengers, who want to be right up next to the door when the doors open, end up stumbling through a moving train, often stepping on others and bumping into people. The stop times at stations in Berlin aren’t leisurely, but they are also more than sufficient, even at peak hours, for people to exit and enter the trains.
On a side note, my wife has been visibly, heavily pregnant for the past three months. She travels on the S-Bahn almost every day. Only a handful of times has anyone offered her their seat. I also rarely see this happen in respect of the elderly or disabled. It happened to her without fail on our last trip to London on every crowded tube car we entered.
Why are Germans so astonishingly bad at using escalators, where one woman blithely standing on the left will block forty people who want to walk by – and no-one says anything?
Finally, where did the absurd tolerance for beggars on public transit come from? I know that Berlin is a tolerant city and that most are well aware that large numbers of people here are not especially well off. But the number of people who were filthy, dishevelled and incoherent who stumbled through the trains this summer asking for spare change was very high (and only a couple of them were former Lehman employees). I’ve never once seen anyone from the transit authority step in and encourage an unwashed reeking drunk who is clutching or barking at passengers for spare change to leave the train, and for that matter, I’ve never once seen a ticket controller and a beggar or homeless newspaper vendor in the same car at one time. What is up with that?
In almost all other aspects of public life, Germans act in an exemplary (often too exemplary) fashion, with enormous sensitivity to the fact that they are in public. If you drop a piece of litter in a German city, you can expect to be accosted and asked to use a garbage can. If you sit in your car running with the motor on, invariably someone will tap the window and tell you to shut the engine off and stop polluting the environment. Good luck not being lynched if you use your mobile phone in a library, walk in a bike lane, jump a queue or cross on a red light with small children nearby. Why do simple rules about accommodating others completely and utterly break down on the Berlin public transit system? It isn’t a class thing: Berliners of all walks of life, age, income level and degree of intoxication use public transit at all hours.
I suspect that it is the absence of visible, listed rules or guidelines. It isn’t that people would read the guidelines and suddenly figure out that they have been blocking the doors of subway cars for the last ten years. Instead, guidelines would visibly make it clear to everyone else that there is a set of expectations for behaviour on public transit. Acting in a way that violates these expectations gives rise to justified public ire. If there is one thing that a certain very common breed of Germans (which are disproportionately represented in the public service) absolutely revel in, it is pointing to a rule and informing someone else that they are breaking it. I suspect that if the Berlin public transit authorities published more Richtlinien (not Verordnungen!) on how to behave in a streetcar or subway (without a friendly child-appropriate mascot), we would suddenly see a decrease in poor passenger behaviour. Simple “walk left stand right” (links zielorientiert laufen, rechts planlos herumgucken?) signs on escalators would help, as would designated seating for the pregnant and infirm.
I remember being told that about a decade ago, the Berlin subways changed the announcement that “the doors are opening – stand back” to include “please”, and that this change was actually debated. Maybe my expectations are too high, and maybe Berliners actually enjoy the pushing and shoving and resolutely ignoring other people that accompanies a trip on a crowded S-Bahn here. I think the small change of some signage could be a help though. Any thoughts on this from Andrew’s readers?
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