BLUE LINE JOURNAL : In the City of Cars, This Takes Some Training

Dr. David Cundiff had seen the sign--no eating, no drinking, no smoking. But he boarded the Tuesday morning Blue Line before breakfast, so he faced a choice: Obey the rule or obey a more basic imperative.

As the train pulled out of Long Beach, heading toward Cundiff’s clinical office at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the doctor reached into his carry-on bag and pulled out a banana. He looked straight ahead as he ate, chewing quickly. He tucked the peel away as if it were contraband and reached for a peach.

“A little furtive,” he conceded, taking an ample bite and holding the peach out of sight as he talked. But this was a new moral question, one that Cundiff had not yet resolved as he zoomed north during his first ride on Los Angeles’ new mass transit rail line. “I always eat breakfast in my car on the way to work,” he explained. “I don’t know. If this doesn’t work out, I may have to eat while I’m waiting for the train.”

As the gleaming new Blue Line trains whisked from stop to stop, from suburb to inner city, a sort of etiquette was developing: the unwritten rules of rail car behavior. This was something entirely new in Los Angeles, where most commuting has been done in the relative privacy of automobiles.

Entirely new issues were arising by the minute: Do you eat? Do you talk to the person on the neighboring seat? Should men give up their seats to women and children? Is your deodorant working? Is your seatmate’s? And, if not, what then? Should you--can you--open a window? Should you complain to a mother if her toddler is dripping saliva on your sport coat?

On one jam-packed train leaving downtown Monday evening, standing passengers filled virtually every foot of floor space. The rules seemed to be: Never give up a seat, but talking is OK. Riders loudly swapped stories and opinions of commuting. Two women who had engaged in a long conversation shook hands as one stood to exit at her stop. One tall young man told a series of jokes and was filmed by an enthusiastic listener with a video camera.

A 3-year-old girl sitting in her father’s lap began emitting a series of squeals in the pitch of an air-raid siren. No one dared complain, nor did the father try to quiet her. Eventually, the girl began a shrill fit of crying, and one standing passenger fixed the father with an icy glare. The father then shushed her.

In cities where mass transit is more firmly established, such minor clashes occur constantly; a code of behavior has developed over time. In New York, for example, there are unwritten rules against carrying large objects onto a train during the rush hour. There seemingly are similar rules against starting conversations with other passengers, or even making eye contact.

“If someone makes eye contact or speaks to me, I can tell it’s an out-of-towner or a mentally disturbed person . . . or both,” said veteran subway rider Gail Collins, who has written about the subject as a columnist for the New York Daily News. Bodily contact is also governed by unwritten rules, she said.

“If you’re about to stick your elbow into somebody’s eye, you say, ‘Excuse me.’ It sort of takes the curse off. It’s like (the poke in the eye) doesn’t count.”

Not surprisingly, however, the prevailing etiquette can break down. Collins has seen New York commuters carry aboard strollers, bicycles, an eight-foot tree (on one occasion), and even a German shepherd in a wooden crate. Twice, someone has tried to rob her--once successfully. She has yelled at seat-hogging men and taken the heat herself from a vagrant. Why? She was eating a garlic bagel, a flavor that incensed him.

In Chicago, it is even worse, if that is possible. At least that is the opinion of transportation writer Len Hausner of the Chicago Sun-Times, who says: “Believe me, there’s no one ruder than a (train) rider in Chicago.”

Once, Hausner watched a woman board the morning train in her nightgown. “She took quite a while to do her hair--took the rollers out and everything. Unabashedly, she took off her nightgown--she had a bra--and got dressed: a business suit, panty hose, high heels.

“She didn’t look bad when she went to work.”

The passengers who watched her were aghast, but “you just don’t say anything,” Hausner said. “If you do, you’re the freak.”

As Los Angeles lurches into the mass transit age, it can look forward to these sorts of high adventures. In the meantime, on the second commute day of the Blue Line, the sorting out of rules was framed in less spectacular moments. Admit it: We’re novices.

On the Tuesday midmorning Blue Line in Los Angeles, Dianne Lopez, 35, of San Pedro, could be found reading a newspaper. She kept it neatly folded, out of the way of other passengers, and followed the caveat against drinking or eating.

“Since I can’t drink coffee, I read,” she said.

Nearby, 29-year-old banker Kevin McKenna watched passengers come and go on the half-filled train. “You can tell the people who are not used to public transportation,” he observed. “They stumble awkwardly to their seats. They don’t know whether or not to sit down next to someone.”

On another train, several passengers entered into a sort of round-table discussion on train etiquette. Helga Dammann, a tourist from Germany, had just turned her knees to allow Philip Friedman, a Brooklyn-raised resident of Hollywood, to take the seat beside her. Friedman commented on the sleek cleanliness of the new trains and remembered that drunks were always a problem on the subways of New York.

“And they tend to be boisterous,” he said. “The subway environment doesn’t contribute to tranquillity.”

“That’s true in Germany,” Dammann added.

Edward Fredericks, a product of inner-city Los Angeles, eavesdropped and talked about his fears of real crime on Metro Rail. “Are these windows bulletproof? That’s what I want to know.”

(They are not, Metro Rail officials say.)

Friedman watched through the window as the scenery whisked by. He said he hoped that the L.A. rail cars would stay clean, friendly and well-mannered. He was glad to be away from those New Yorkers who would spill their carry-on packages across the seat next to him, or who simply stepped aboard the train and spit on the floor.

“It won’t get that bad here,” he predicted, wincing at the memory.