This would explain how so many people on public transit find it acceptable to play cellphone speaker music, eat stinky food, cough, sneeze, have loud phone conversations, etc.

And if you feel alone on the train or at the bus stop, you probably are not an attractive woman. Empirically speaking, most of us under the age of menopause are attractive :(

There are also bad drivers, so perhaps feeling alone in the car has some issues too.

Even better, it's alone time that's not constrained to keeping your eyes on the road. You could read a book, play a handheld console, browse your phone, etc.

Or you could spend that hour holding on to the railing because the car is so full there's no seat, there's no personal space to hold your Kindle, and there's no consistent network connection that would allow you to consume anything but the smallest content.

(I would say that's a reasonable capsule summary of my commute from Bowling Green to UES via the 4/5/6 unless I decided to stay at work for an extra 90-120 minutes to allow the rush hour crowd to clear out. Naturally all bets are off if the Yankees are playing.)

Granted, the 4/5/6 is an outlier; due to being the only subway line running the full length of Manhattan's East Side, it carries (or carried) more people than DC's entire metro, and more than Boston's, Chicago's, and San Francisco's combined, which would round out the top 5 rail systems in the US in terms of passengers carried.

The vast majority of rail lines that exist or would be reasonable to build in the US would not have this problem.

For offline content, click the Pocket icon in your Firefox address bar to save an article for later.

Bring a book, have music and other content stored locally on you phone.

Listen to music with your phone in your pocket. You don't have to stare at a screen 24/7.