Push back!

One of the little idiosyncrasies of commuter behaviour on Singapore's subway system (aka the Mass Rapid Transit or MRT) is the preponderance of impatient, inconsiderate chuckleheads who insist on pushing their way into a train before alighting commuters have had the chance to, well, alight. They do this even when the train is jam-packed, ignoring the plain fact that if no one gets off the train, there won't be space for them to get on it.

I'm not sure if this is a uniquely Singaporean phenomenon, but the fact that some years back, the guys who run the MRT decided they should paint helpful arrows and queue lines on every station platform to direct commuter traffic off and on the train, suggests that it is a problem indeed.


200402 train platform
Taken and uploaded by superciliousness.
Despite these arrows unmistakably indicating that boarding commuters should wait on either flank behind the line and leave the middle ground clear for alighting commuters, anyone who takes the train today can tell you that there are still plenty of schmucks who plant themselves squarely over the centre arrow, ready to storm the train once its doors open, as if their very lives depended on it.

Have you been elbowed rudely by someone going in the opposite direction as you tried to get off an MRT train?
Have you staggered back onto the train despite trying to get off, because some charging bull of a commuter had pushed his/her way in with such vehemence?
Have you worried for the safety of the children/elderly persons/pregnant women around you who might be dangerously thrown off balance by such aggressive train-boarding tactics?

Then it's time for you to do something about it: Push back!

It's quite easy, really. All you have to do is to steel yourself for the fact that the commuters boarding the train may indeed engage in such nefarious boarding tactics. When the train doors open, stride confidently forward with the full certainty that you have to get off before anyone --- no matter their age or urgency to get to their destination --- gets onto the train. If someone encroaches onto your alighting space (i.e. the area around the centre yellow arrow) and their body comes into contact with yours, feel free to push them back with just enough force that you can disembark as you need to. We're not starting fights here, we're just maintaining a comfortable degree of privacy or space around our own body.

If you're feeling up to it, you may wish to say something like, "Excuse me, you can't get on unless you let people get off first." Although you may be tempted to punctuate your remark with words like "asshole", "dickhead" or "crazy person", refrain from doing so. At most, just think those words in your head. I reiterate: we're not trying to start fights or get arrested here, we're just reminding people that the way our universe is ordered, trains have a finite capacity and no amount of forceful pushing will in fact transcend that simple law of physics.

And only, only push back if you have first been pushed.

I say all this because I'm startled at the number of startled responses I get when I tell people that I push back --- yes, little old me, who can barely lift a 1 kg bag of rice. Just last week, I was able to halt a woman larger than me in the middle of her train-charging maneuver because I simply kept moving forward even though she got in my way.

Of course, as Polite, Nonconfrontational Asians, all this doesn't come intuitively to most of us. We're inclined to pause, step back, step aside --- and let the schmucks have their way.

But why should we? Because they're ruder or brassier than us? We don't have to stoop to their level by pushing our way out of the train; we simply have to remind them that, hello, human body, standing right here.

Stop getting pushed back into the train when you're trying to get the hell off it. Push back!

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