I guess you took my "assigned seating" literally. I obviously didn't mean _seating_ but more of an assigned spot in a train car. The point of an assigned spot is that there can be different designated areas for different people – elderly, women, kids, disabled, those with cycles, those with luggage, general etc. and now with Covid19, these assigned spot density could be appropriately adjusted.

I still don't see how that would help. What does adjusted mean? The problem is there isn't enough capacity, yeah they could just reduce how many people can take the train, that means people being late to work or otherwise with an impacted schedule.

And they already know which train routes at which times are crowded, if they could just add more capacity they'd have already done it.

Most stations already have posters telling you:

- which cars are normally less crowded

- which cars are recommended for getting off at a certain station, based on proximity of the exits at that station to each car

Google Maps (as well as other apps) also show similar information when asking for transit directions (for the former it only gives you the average on the whole train, not by car)