Save That Seat

While we in India struggle to provide a basic metro-rail system to the most visible of our cities (Delhi has one which probably would be overloaded the day it connects the entire city and ppl actually decide to use it and Mumbai: with all due respect to Mumbai and the Mumbaikars, if you are have ever visited Mumbai you would know what a torture trip a ride in the local can be), our brethren and sistren in developed US of A have another concern - the middle seat. People are actually debating whether the middle seat shud remain or go. Here is an article from NY Times June 5 issue. Am pasting the content here as the paper's site needs a loginID and pwd to be able to read such valuable and enlightening opinions. Here goes...


In the gently rolling landscape of the suburban commuter train, the middle seat is forsaken territory. Unloved and overlooked, doomed never to be a favored aisle or beloved window, it is always empty, except at rush hour, when it is a refuge for losers - for the people who are too late, too slow, too tired to object to being cold-shouldered by sleepy strangers left and right. Should you ever feel the perverse desire to relive the childhood misery of losing at musical chairs, just get on the 5:41 p.m. to Hicksville at 5:39. You'll have to stand. Or take a middle seat.
None of this, however, is any reason to make the middle seat go away.
In a front-page article last week, Patrick McGeehan of The Times reported that transit agencies around the country are eliminating middle seats, having decided that they are underused and a waste of space. Cranky commuters sometimes like to complain that railroads are run by stupid people, and with decisions like these, the officials seem almost desperate to prove them right.
What has been ignored in the quest for maximal passenger-packing efficiency is that the commuter is not a tomato. The commuter is a human being, and the suburban rail car a delicate psychological battleground, a society of sleepy, depressive people jockeying for scraps of comfort and solace. In this confined world, 18 or 19 inches - the width of an empty middle seat - is a sanity preserver, a cushion against oppression, a bit of emptiness no less necessary or precious than a landscaped highway median, a deserted beach or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The meager pleasures available to a commuter include being able sometimes to stretch out, to place newspapers and coffee cups somewhere besides the lap, and to retreat into the quietude of one's own thoughts. There are, too, people who travel in groups of three or more - families with children, neighbors, card-playing work buddies. They also deserve the option of a convivial three-seat ride.
Going two by two is fine for Noah's ark, kindergarten recess or a wedding procession. But in a two-seat-by-two-seat car full of snarly business types, cellphone jabberers, sneezers, wheezers, and extra-large people with shopping bags roaming the aisle like a flotilla of fat-bottomed boats, the heavens cry out for justice.
For mercy.
For three seats across.