The standard of public transport in a country like Singapore is frankly superb. I can get from one side of the island to the other in under an hour on the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit), costing me a couple of dollars at the most. The bus routes make for a more leisurely journey, but so long as I have got a seat, I am perfectly content simply gazing out the window until I reach my stop.
Rush hour (Image credit: usthavealook/iStock)
As with any city, when rush hour hits, the atmosphere on public transport systems takes a turn. Everyone’s post-work exhaustion has put a strain on their patience and the journey time between each train stop becomes a grand exercise in trying to simultaneously maintain your balance while trying to strategically shift yourself into a position that will make it easier for you to get off easily at your stop.
This window of time is very brief – two to four minutes at the most. Yet, during peak hours (say, at the end of the work day), those one hundred and twenty seconds feel like an eternity. You look for something, anything to pass the time. Browse around the train and you will find virtually every single person plugged in to a device. I would be lying if I said I had never vicariously watched a Korean drama over the shoulder of the businessman standing in front of me (without sound nor subtitles to help me understand what in hell was going on) or cheekily glanced at what the woman next to me was typing on her phone.
If you plotted patience against transport efficiency on a graph, you would see a definite negative correlation. The faster I expect to get there, the edgier I am – counting down the stops until I reach my destination. Just like the moment you lock a bathroom door and suddenly become all the more desperate to pee. The need for instant gratification becomes tantamount.
So, in a last ditch attempt to relieve myself of the frustration, I turn to my phone and flick open Instagram to scroll through the latest posts. I plug in my headphones and shake my iPod furiously to enable the shuffle mode (before inevitably fast forwarding through the already shuffled song until I stumble across something I’d actually like to listen to).
As I hit the mid point between each train stop where the 3G signal inevitably weakens, I glance up and around at the others around me while waiting for the app to buffer and I used to scoff at how people could not last a simple journey without resorting to their technology, despite being guilty of it myself. Yet, every time I plug in, before I know it, I’m three stops farther down the line with only a couple more to go and the journey feels more bearable.
I have tried to shift tactics lately by packing a book to read en route and while I do prefer it to draining my phone battery by switching on pointless apps, I discovered another obstacle. Putting the risks of travel sickness to one side, reading is actually surprisingly difficult to do. And it’s not to do with the start-stop movements of the train either.
No matter how absorbed you may be after thirty seconds of reading, the moment the jingle and the human-yet-robotic voice notifies you that you’re approaching your next stop just moments before another announcement to state that you have reached said next stop, your focus is dragged back to the very same place you were so close to mentally escaping from.
It’s not that everyone on board cannot face a short journey without being online in some way or other. It’s that by tuning in online, you can tune out from the frustrations of where you are. The same way I rely on music to distract myself from the utter exhaustion of running on a treadmill, it makes whatever I am doing that much more bearable.
It begs the question – do we do it because we cannot stand the boredom or because we cannot stand that perpetuating feeling of being ‘so close yet so far’ throughout the whole journey?
Is there something psychologically triggering about the environment of an underground transport system that makes us so much more impatient? Being cast in tunnels of darkness while bathed in fluorescent light surely can’t help. Actually, whenever the train lines go over ground, the atmosphere within each train car does feel calmer. If I opt to ride on the bus, I am more than happy to simply gaze out the window without constantly checking if my phone’s notification light has just flashed or whether it was simply light reflecting off the screen.
Clearly, I am not proud of how my patience drops during even the briefest of journeys. I still find myself resisting the temptation to tune into my iPod, and choosing to people-watch instead. But I do understand why people choose to do it. However, it’s a whole other world of frustration when dealing with those that stay ‘tuned out’ when they step off the train!
