The social etiquette of offering seats on public transit
A few weeks ago, during a crowded morning commute, a woman got on the tube and immediately said to me, ‘I’m pregnant. Can I have your seat, please’, pointing to her badge—the only visible sign of her pregnancy—as she spoke. Given that I was not sitting in a priority seat, I was a little taken aback by the request, which was presented more along the lines of a demand. I relinquished the seat, although I felt vaguely resentful about it, based on the sense that I had little choice but to comply. ‘Why has she singled me out?’, I wondered for the next twenty minutes, as the woman, clearly not in any physical distress, shopped online on her phone.
Convinced that the woman had been presumptuous, and that my slight sense of aggrievement would be universally shared, I soon learned differently when I polled friends and family about the incident. For the most part, while people who had never been pregnant questioned the woman’s sense of entitlement to demand any seat on the train, those who had given birth were highly sympathetic to her plight. The latter group generally informed me that they would have given up their seat without hesitation, and would have been mortified by the fact that they hadn’t offered it in the first place.1
Of course, whether I would have voluntarily offered the seat or not is a moot point, because the woman requested it as soon as she stepped in the carriage. Notably, no one I polled from the latter group had ever done this themselves, although one had had someone else make an unsolicited request on her behalf. Moreover, several women indicated that they had hesitated to even ask for priority seats while pregnant, although they tried to make their condition obvious in the hopes that the people sitting in the priority seating area would feel guilty enough to move.
Having spent some time delving into the topic online, it does seem to be the case that pregnant women generally rely on the courtesy of others, rather than making direct requests for a seat. For example, one guide to getting a seat on transit while pregnant lists tactics such as wearing a ‘Baby on board’ badge, patting your belly and trying to make eye contact with fellow passengers, and, as a last resort, ‘Start by locating the priority seating. Next, ask’.
A Mumsnet poll on the topic of pregnant women requesting seats on transit similarly highlights that while most women think it’s reasonable to make such a request, they typically restrict appeals to the priority seating area. To quote the woman who started the thread, ‘If I’ve felt like I needed to sit (usually in first trimester more so than later on, but am now hitting the point where I may need to start again)—I just edge towards a pair or group of priority seats and ask “Would someone mind letting me sit please?”’
Still, a full 15% of Mumsnetters surveyed thought such requests were unreasonable. According to one,
‘The problem with asking is who do you ask? You may feel that you deserve a seat, which you possibly do, but the person sitting in the seat may also have reason to need it. If I was sitting in a seat, and someone asked for it, my reply would be that I would have already offered if I didn’t also need it (which is true)’.
A Reddit thread on the topic similarly highlights these dynamics, questioning whether pregnancy and newborns automatically trump medical conditions that make standing a problem but might be less visible to onlookers. To quote one Redditor,
I was on a tube a few years ago and a woman with one of those baby carriers that you wear got on, marched over to the priority seats and very pointedly said ‘Hi’ and just waited for the person in the seat to move so she could sit down. Not all disabilities are visible and it really irritated me that she was so rude about wanting the seat, not considering the person may well have a need for it. (There were other seats free in the carriage, so she could easily have sat elsewhere, too.)
The problem of how to ascertain who actually needs a seat is illustrated in the above poster, which can be found all over the tube in London. Readers are admonished to ‘please look up and check if anyone needs a seat more than you’, followed by the reminder that ‘not all disabilities are visible’, thereby creating an irresolvable paradox for anyone who isn’t a mind reader.2 It’s for precisely these reasons that badges have become more common—not just ‘Baby on board’ badges but ‘Please offer me a seat’ pins, although the latter remain comparatively rare.
This suggests that the dynamics of seat etiquette are far more complicated than they first appear, which is presumably why social norms emphasise offering seats rather than asking for them. Notably, the only other time I have witnessed someone ask for a non-priority seat was when a five-year-old boy got on the tube with his dad and asked the woman next to me ‘Can I have your seat?’ Everyone within hearing distance smiled and his father immediately made apologies for the boy’s behaviour.
The woman good-humouredly responded that she had a boy of the same age herself and understood about ‘tired little legs’. She then relinquished her seat and the boy blithely sat down, with his father embarrassedly prompting him to ‘thank the nice lady’.3 Still, that everyone smiled—presumably at the boy’s cheek—suggests that we have a hierarchy of deservingness in terms of who is entitled to seats on transit and who is not.
One of the few investigations I’ve seen on the topic of seat etiquette and deservingness can be found in the work of the anthropologist Anru Lee. Based on her fieldwork in Taipei, Lee has explored the frequent public controversies surrounding seat etiquette on the city’s mass transit system. In one case she discusses, images had been posted on social media castigating two high school students who had not yielded their seats to a mother and her two young children. In another highly publicised case, a middle-aged woman had forced a healthy-looking young man to give up his priority seat, although it turned out that he was visually impaired.
According to Lee, the public shaming around priority seats means that they frequently remain empty, even during Taipei’s rush hour, because everyone—except primarily the elderly—fears being forced to prove their deservingness to sit in them. For example, a man with a tumour on his thigh that made standing difficult recounted being forced to pull his pants down to prove his right to sit in the priority seating area after being accosted.
As Lee notes, the debates about who is entitled to priority seats raise a number of questions about the nature of need. In her words,
What is ‘need’? How is need defined? Are there different kinds of needs? If so, is there a rank order among these different kinds of needs and, by extension, among people associated with these needs? Accordingly, how can we identify those who are in need? Given that one’s appearance is readily visible, age-related inabilities (such as from the condition of being old or very young), not surprisingly, are among the most easily recognizable registers of need.
One local response to this dilemma has been to propose the abandonment of priority seats entirely, based on the premise that ‘all seats should be priority seats all the time’, with everyone practicing compassion for their fellow passengers, regardless of where they are sitting. However, those opposing the change observe that priority seats were established precisely because most people were not motivated to give up their seats voluntarily, so infrastructural accommodations were required.
Still, there’s little question that the very existence of priority seats means that for many of us, the sense of obligation to offer a ‘regular’ seat to people in need is correspondingly lessened. As Lee observes, the consensus to emerge from the public debates about seat etiquette on the Taipei transit system was that ‘yielding one’s seat was a virtue but not an obligation, especially when the seat one was occupying was a regular seat but not a priority seat’.
Others have suggested that the answer is a proliferation of stickers and badges to make everyone aware of ‘hidden’ disabilities. For example, the aforementioned Taipei man with the tumour on his thigh suggested in one public discussion that ‘Maybe we should start offering different kinds of stickers—“Sticker for the Elderly,” “Cancer Sticker,” “Sticker for Heart Diseases”’.
But, of course, not all people want to wear stickers declaring pregnancy or a disability—or necessarily feel that they are hampered by such. Indeed, my 76-year-old father would probably be offended if offered a seat on transit, because he’s fitter than most 45-year-olds.4 Nor does this resolve the problem of who deserves priority in the context of competing claims. Does cancer trump heart disease? Does pregnancy trump a walking stick?
In sum, it’s probably understandable that some people might decide to avoid the issue of competing claims for priority seats by simply requesting a regular seat instead. But the problem is that yielding seats on public transit lies at the nexus between individual virtue and social obligation and, for better or worse, the formal arrangement of seats into regular and priority areas serves to reify the divide.
This was precisely the source of my resentment with the pregnant woman’s request. By pre-emptively asking at the outset, she had transformed something that I deemed to be a gift expressing individual virtue and generosity into an explicit act of social obligation. Thus, while this is clearly an instance of ‘Ask and ye shall receive’, if you approach someone sitting in a regular seat on transit, don’t be surprised if your request is completed with slightly ill grace. Because no one likes to be robbed of the saintly glow—no matter how illusory—of voluntarily sacrificing their seat.
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And, moreover, that perhaps the asshole in this situation was not the pregnant woman, but me, for being slightly annoyed by the request.
Making the ad even more redundant, its target is clearly people who are looking at their phones, who are presumably not going to see it by dint of the fact that they are looking at their phones. In fact, I suspect that one of the reasons the pregnant woman targeted me in the first place was that I was one of the few people in the carriage not glued to a mobile phone. Obviously, this is now making me reconsider my aversion to using them. (Er, just joking. No, really!)
She was indeed a nice lady, because I would not have given up my seat to a demanding five-year-old. Still, in light of the fact that most children’s first exposure to the dynamics of public seating is the game of musical chairs, I can understand his confusion.
Indeed, I must say that I found it rather disconcerting to be offered a priority seat last week on the tube myself, presumably because the young guy offering it thought I was either pregnant or old, or, god forbid, both. As I am 49, this would imply that I am either carrying more weight—or city miles—than I thought. Simultaneously touched and affronted by the offer, I vigorously turned down the seat, although I took the next regular seat that became available.
> perhaps the asshole in this situation was not the pregnant woman, but me, for being slightly annoyed by the request.
Mrs. Apple Pie has had 6 children and she tells me that in the situation you describe, the pregnant woman was pushy and taking advantage of the good will of others.
Personally I think society can withstand this up to a point, but when it happens too frequently to sustain the feeling of what you call a saintly glow, you end up with a fragmented, frustrated society like America. :p
Thanks for the kind reception of my comments.
I don’t know whether people in England eat or at least carry home “take-away” food onpublic transit, but another bugbear of mine is visibly grease-sodden food in paper bags or boxes, and the greasy fingers holding them, inevitably touching seats and poles!