A Study in Bus Stop Etiquette
I’ve started to take the bus again since the snow fell and I’ve observed some interesting behaviour at the bus stop.
Bus riders generally board the bus in the same order they arrived at the stop. People will generally keep their distance from each other before the bus arrives. Some may even wander around. But if the group sees the bus approaching, they will form a line in that order prior to the bus arriving. That is the common behaviour, but there are plenty of exceptions.
The exceptions I’ve noticed seem to occur when there is a large number of waiting people and the physical space of the stop is quite large. For example, one bus stop is on a wide sidewalk and there were approximately 10 people waiting. In that case, I didn’t see the above behaviour — instead, there was no line formed and everyone essentially funneled into the door in no particular order. When the bus stop is on a narrow sidewalk, though, the space forces an ordered queue well before the bus arrives and people board in order.
Do people think that no one will notice them “butting” into the line if the there is a significant crowd? Surely, they can remember the order in which they arrived (i.e., “those people where here before me and that person came after me”). And since the natural behaviour in a smaller group is to board in order, their behavior must be due to the number of people.
Interesting? Perhaps not, but I get a kick out of it everytime I see it.
The underlying question for me is: How universal is this behaviour? Is it only a Canadian thing or do you see it in other western societies? It’s definitely not what you’d see in Israel (where, for example, there’s a crush of people at a movie’s concession counter with no queuing of any sort!).