Transit Culture: Ethnography of the L.A. Transit System

Los Angeles is well represented by its interwoven public transit system. An array of individuals exhibiting their own understanding and appreciation of various cultures utilize these services each day. In doing so, they create another culture which I am able to see as I take the usual route from Los Angeles to the Valley.
Every day I travel this same route: a course from the Blue Line to the Red to the Orange to one of two buses all the way to CSUN. Each day there are usually the same kind of people riding the various trains and buses. These are professionals on their way to work and students on their way to school. On this day, there was no difference though none of the faces looked very familiar. Most people sat while a few, both male and female, stood. When a woman pushing her child in a stroller boarded, the man sitting on one of the seats stood to offer her a place. This does not happen again for the remainder of the Blue Line trip. When there were no seats, boarders simply held onto the safety rails and stood. None of these were mothers, however.
On the Red Line, a broader range of individuals come within view. On this day there was a homeless man seated with his large bundle of worldly possessions. None of us boarding took the seat beside him. From where I sat, I assessed the oncoming traffic at each of the many stops until my destination was reached. The younger people boarding were sometimes with skateboards and lobe-elongating earrings. Others held books or carried what looked like heavy backpacks without much of an identifiable style to their dress (neither goth, preppy, skater, glam, or anything else). Most of the girls, myself included, wore some form of makeup. I noticed a considerable amount of these young adults, male and female, displayed some kind of tattoo sported upon their bodies. This while the adults carried sack lunches, more times than not, the women, purses and the men maybe a messenger bag. One man wore a fannie pack.
What I noticed in transitioning from my ride on the Red Line to the Orange was how most people were silent, even with the overwhelming noise of the train passing through the tunnel all around. On the Orange Line this silence continued, only broken by a group of teenagers boarding at Ventura. They talked and laughed above the noise of the transit line’s passage and many of the silent riders stole glances their way. A few of the very same silent people on this route, in fact many of them, turned out to be headed exactly where I was headed: CSUN.
Though I have gone this route for… a while, I’ve never paid much attention to the silence and disconnect heavily imposed upon the bus riders. I never considered how this and the other typical characteristics of a long transit route reveal just how many cultures can be cultivated in any situation which holds an amount of people forming a group. Culture needs only people to formulate it. These people of all different backgrounds both socially and culturally, come together each morning to constitute the necessaries which make up a culture.
From what I understand, “culture” is the product of our various systems of language. According to the philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure, we live in a system of signs, signifiers, and those things which are signified, the framework for language in substance and purpose. The signs are a composition of concepts and vocal representations/images we see. Saussure breaks down this term by using the words “signifier” and “signified”. What we say, or the accepted word we use to identify some object or thing we see, is the signifier, while what is tangible represents the signified. This is an arbitrary relationship, in his view.
In understanding this I was able to consider that we use language comprised of these signifiers to go beyond labeling things we see. We use it to build up a system of the acceptable and anathema as well. Our parents tell us not to touch the stove, a box-shaped object we see with knobs and other things adorning it, and we know not to touch it for fear of being burned. But then, we also know not to do certain things just through observation. One man stands up for a mother and her small child on the train, and the rest of us riders understand that this is just the right thing to do. Some of us will do just that when we see a woman in need of a seat for herself and child, others may not. But it is well known that this is spelled out in the “Rider’s Etiquette Handbook”. We see a homeless man seated and automatically all boarders know to avoid him. He could be smelly, or hostile, or… most of us don’t get close enough to know, understanding that he is one to be avoided, given culture’s rules about making something of oneself to be worth something. There is silence, relative quiet at the least, because this too is the right way to conduct oneself around strangers unknown.
Because the signifiers and signified are so arbitrary, it seems, a consensus can be easily reached which associates a homeless man with the negative nature behind such a label and, thus, the more positive term “business man” is made positive. The same with “student” and “mother” and “worker”. All are more positively conceived of than “homeless man” because of the arbitrary relationship between them. Just as Saussure says, there cannot be a positive sign without the negative to compare it with. On the bus, “loud”, “and, “bawdy” all mean the same bad things. “Silent” and “quiet” on the other hand, are good.
What I mean by all of this is that the places we go have their own culture within their walls and vitals which becomes engendered within us the moment we mix ourselves into that particular community. The transit system, at least on my route, has these particular elements comprising its culture. Though the relationship between the signifiers and signified aspects made here on the train are arbitrary, they are weighty enough to convince each rider each day to adhere to the rules. I abandon my Transit culture the moment I enter campus or come home each day. And in so doing I and all my fellow riders abandon one system, one culture, in exchange for another until the next day.