A yellow Regiojet company train arrived at a train station in Kojetin. It is a company which consider itself to be a premium one in comparison with a state-owned Ceske drahy. I could see the train was quite empty from the platform. I got on the train which had stopped right in front of my eyes. The journey takes around one hour as it is written in the train timetable.
I entered a compartment, it was totally empty. I took my camera out. I was reading a manual. I was studying infinite number of setting options. I started to feel a train conductor should come over. The feeling was carrying on and nobody was coming over.
After a while somebody decided to come over. The person opened the compartment door and asked: “And do you actually have a train ticket?” I showed my ticket to her. She pushed the door to and opened it a little bit more again and added: “Go the carriage number four or five next time.”
I asked myself why. Why?
Once I met an older woman on a train. She is lightly disabled. She told me about her experience travelling on trains in the 80s. It was difficult for her to walk to the centre of a train carriage. There was always a compartment for disabled passengers at the beginning of the train carriage. It had happened to her multiple times that passengers sitting in the compartment refused to release seats for her. It even happened that some of them told her: “You don’t look like you have any kind of a problem.”
Today’s system has many rules for everything and they are broken. It makes sense because many rules don’t make sense.
After getting off the train I asked the same person: “What’s the point to move to another carriage if this one was almost empty?” and she answered: “There are rules for it.”
30 years have passed since the 80s. I ask myself if we need rules to know that we should release a seat to other passengers when necessary? Do we need rules to know that this is good to do?
I want to believe it is not necessary. However the rules take away our chance to decide on our own how to handle situations around us based on our own values. Thus we can’t expect any progress in good manners when we don’t have the power to decide about them.
Not having a mask against Covid wasn’t a problem for the lady, even though there are rules for it. It would be a vested interest for her. It would make her life less comfortable.
