The 6:18 New Haven Line train stopping at Mt. Vernon, Pelham, New Rochelle, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, Rye and Harrison will have all its seats taken by 6:15, so after 6:15 there is SRO. If you come before 6:15 and you are heading towards Larchmont, I have some helpful tips on maximizing your comfort for the ride home:
(1) Sit next to black people. Black people tend get off at Fordham or Mt. Vernon while white people tend to get off at Pelham, New Rochelle, Larchmont, Rye and Harrison. By sitting next to a black person, you maximize the chances that the seat next to you will be vacated early in the ride, thus allowing you more room to sprawl and reducing the chances of you falling asleep on the shoulder of the person in the adjacent seat, drooling on their neck, and being given an inconspicuous nudge awake, after which you spend about five seconds getting your bearings and then the humiliation sets in, and so you make sure to lean way towards the other direction when you rest your eyes but in doing so you just end up falling asleep on the shoulder of the guy sitting on that side, and so on and so forth.
(2) Sit next to women. The obvious: women tend to be more petite. Sitting next to a woman will give you more of a buffer zone, and thus more sprawling room. A less obvious benefit of sitting next to women is that they tend to have more respect for seat boundaries than men. When sitting next to a woman she will be sure to keep her body upright and will keep her coat, bag, and any other belonging neatly filed on her lap and is sure to tuck any over-spilling sleeves or cloth within the plane of the seat divisions. Men tend to have less respect for the seat divisions, and will often sprawl their legs as far as possible without making physical contact with your legs.
(3) Asses your tolerance for risk, and choose a bench accordingly. The 6:18 has two types of benches: three seaters, where there third seat is a half-backed-midget-seat, and two seaters. If you have your pick of either type of bench, first be sure not to pick the midget seat if you have another option. The midget seat might seem alright at first glance, but after you sit down and start getting sleepy and you see all the people around you leaning back in comfort, you become so desirous that you’ll often do a false head-lean, where, despite your better knowledge, you sort of lean your head back with a deluded expectation that there will be a cushion there to put your head and neck at ease, but of course the delusional hope is never realized and you get frustrated until your are completely consumed by the fact that your head has no place to rest, and all you can think about is your flimsy neck muscles propping up your head and all the effort you are putting in and how nice it all could have been if you just chose the seat with the back. Now: assuming you are wise enough not to choose the half-backed-midget-seat your next choice would be either window two-seater or window-three seater. I will not go into the advantages/disadvantages of choosing either (for the sake of brevity). Suffice it to say that either choice is rational, but the choice should be made according to risk tolerance.
(4) After you enter the vestibule, head towards the group of seats in the direction opposite to that which you were walking as you walked on the platform next to the train. By doing this, your path, from entering on to the platform in GCS all the way to your seat, should look like a cane; you are going straight down the platform and then Uing into your seat (e.g. if you are walking down the platform and the train is on your right, you make a right into the train door, then once in the vestibule you make another right and sit down in those seats). The reason why you should do this is because people, for some reason, tend to continue walking into the train in the same direction they were walking on the platform (e.g. if you are walking down the platform and the train is on your right, and you make a right into the vestibule, most people will turn left, thus heading in the same direction they were walking down the platform -- it looks like a cubing function). I’m not sure why people do this, but I suspect that it has something to do with a subconscious desire to continue on a similar a path as possible, like a psycho-kinetic version of momentum, I suppose. Anyway, by not falling for this psychokinetic blunder, you maximize your chances of having the seat next to you not taken, allowing you to sprawl.
(5) From my experience – this tip I’m a little less confident in than the rest – you want to go three-quarters of the way down the platform to find the car with the fewest people. The theory goes that some people are just lazy and so they take the first few cars, and some people think they will get the least-crowded car if they walk a little, so they walk about half way. But the people that figure they should walk three-quarters of the way are so hardcore that they figure they might as well go all the way, since surely nobody but them would be willing to walk that far down the platform, where –who knows! – there might be giant mutated rats, and breeds of cold war era dwarf-men that chose to hide in the GCS tunnel because of their apocalyptic predictions related to ICBMs and the like (and surely these are the people, who, when they existed in the supraterranean world, sat comfortably on the half-backed-midget-seats and all was right as rain), and so the brave souls can’t puss out at ¾ of the way. So then there is dearth of people who would go three quarters -- and only three quarters – of the way down the platform. Or so the theory goes.
Bon voyage.
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