We need to bring back public civility, on the LIRR and everywhere

Common courtesy?

How about common rudeness?

Long Island Rail Road riders know the truth: It's no longer uncommon to see commuter rail passengers misbehaving. They put their feet up on seats, talk loudly on phones, listen to videos at full volume, even clip their toenails as other passengers grimace.

Perhaps the LIRR needs a discourtesy car for all of the boorish, self-centered riders who have forgotten how to act in public.

Poor behavior in public isn't new — and it isn't limited to public transit, though it may be more obvious on trains where people can't move about as freely to escape these displays of bad manners. We see the lack of etiquette every day — on the roads, in airports and airplanes, in the way we treat one another in restaurants and shops and parking lots and gas stations. It's "Me First" or "Me Only," an attitude that means anything goes as long as the inconsiderate individual gets what he or she wants. When you're in your own world, you pay no attention to others who occupy it. 

Such ill-mannered behavior has become more pervasive in recent years, and markedly worse since the pandemic, when we spent so much time locked down and apart from other people that some of us apparently forgot how to behave around one another. On the LIRR, as a recent Newsday story noted, riders have taken their lack of courtesy to new depths, vaping on trains, blocking aisles with large electric bikes, even wiping windows with wax they pick from their ears. Ew.

Recent efforts by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to highlight and stop that behavior, including a "Courtesy Counts" public awareness campaign that featured posters with catchy slogans, have done little to change the dynamic — perhaps because riders are immersed in their phones and tablets and laptops, self-isolated from the world around them. The MTA might need to find a way to put such messages on riders' phones after they board the train, so they at least have a chance of seeing a reminder of the importance of good behavior before they take off their shoes and grab the nail clipper.

But the best way for us to return to a state of civility is for each of us to take a little more responsibility for our behavior and to care a bit more for those around us. All of us — the offenders and the offended — need to look up from our phones, see each other, make eye contact, and say hello.

Then we all need to show each other some common courtesy.