Being that I am from the small suburban town of Lawrence, on the south shore of Long Island, I was never really familiar with the City’s subway system until my first day of freshman year. The Sunday before school started I moved into a one bedroom apartment in downtown Manhattan, and was finally able to call myself a “city girl.” As exciting as this was, adjusting to the City life added a whole new level of stress that accompanied those first-day-of-college nerves. When my first day of school finally arrived later that week, I made sure to estimate how long the subway ride to school would take. I decided that it would take no longer than 20 minutes to get to Hunter College from Astor Place, and so just to be safe, I left to school 45 minutes before my first class was scheduled to begin. With my newly purchased metro card in one hand, I hopped on my very first subway ride to school on the 6 Train that day. While the subway ride that day took a few minutes less than I had estimated, the ride nevertheless felt endless. To say the subway that day was packed is an understatement. At each stop, more and more bodies flooded into the subway car, regardless of the lack of breathing space available to the rest of us. What I realized on that day may seem cynical and perhaps a bit dramatic, but I found that many people become their most aggressive versions of themselves when piling onto the subway each morning. Since there are no legal constraints on the number of people that may enter each subway car (and if so such would be difficult to enforce), more people push and squeeze their way onto the subway than can fit. This is especially frustrating when the subway is delayed, which happens constantly. While this may seem to be a trivial complaint, it is a struggle I have dealt with almost every day since that first subway ride – since I am always commuting to school during rush hour. Furthermore, being that I get extremely claustrophobic in crowded spaces, this makes my daily experience with the NYC transit system extremely frustrating and almost unbearable.
-Nicole Schneider
