Why backpacks on transit are so irritating

Anyone who regularly uses transit will have cause to hate one particular item: backpacks. The scenario I’m referring to can be encountered pretty much anywhere in the world with access to public transit. Someone wears a backpack onto a crowded bus, train or flight, oblivious to the nuisance it poses to those around them. They whack heads as they turn, they crowd the people sitting or standing directly behind them, their backpack gets caught in closing doors.

I’m pretty sure this last situation is to blame for the lengthy addition to my commute last week, which was a good 20 minutes longer on Thursday than the 70 minutes it usually takes me to get to work. I’d hopped on the tube and was waiting for the train to depart when the doors closed and then reopened. For anyone who lives in London, you know this is a sign that someone’s bag or coat has been caught in a closing door. Sure enough, the driver made an announcement a few seconds later. ‘Dear customers,’ he began.1 ‘Someone has just run onto the train, causing their bag to get stuck in the door. I’m going to have to reset the doors, which will take some time. It’s very important that you do not try to enter the train when the doors are closing.’

As we all knew the drill, everyone sighed and settled in to wait. Meanwhile, as the doors were still open, more and more people began to pile on the train, which is usually not terribly full at 7.45 in the morning, being the end of the line. Eventually, with the train now about as crowded as one ever gets in London during the morning rush hour,2 he made another announcement. ‘Dear customers, the doors will be closing shortly. Please ensure that your bags and coats are clear of the door. I’m very sorry for the delay, but this was due a customer in carriage number four entering when the doors were closing and their bag getting caught in the door, which has caused us a 15-minute delay.’3

Everyone held their breath, the doors closed smoothly and we were on our way. Unfortunately, the train was now so crowded that there wasn’t much room for people to get on at the next stop. However, it was clear the driver had decided this trip was going to be a teachable moment because we got another announcement. ‘Dear customers,’ we heard again, in a somewhat more strident tone. ‘Please ensure that all bags and coats are away from the door and please do not try and enter the train. I cannot leave the station until the doors are clear. Please be considerate of your fellow passengers, because someone in carriage four has already caused a lengthy delay.’ He continued in this vein at virtually every stop, berating us for the repeated infractions with bags and coats.4

Meanwhile, in my train carriage, a woman wearing a backpack that can only be described as brick-like (rectangular, rigid and made of leather) repeatedly crowded the poor woman standing directly behind her, who looked annoyed but said nothing. ‘I wonder if I’m in carriage number four’ I thought to myself.

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Although we experience a variety of irritations on transit, backpacks are widely considered to be the most annoying. For example, according to a survey by the Japan Private Railway Association reported in Japan Today in 2018, bag placement etiquette was voted the most inconsiderate behaviour on transit, exceeding even talking in loud voices, manspreading, and refusing to move when the doors open to allow other passengers on and off. Notably, concerns were not primarily related to people putting their bags on seats (i.e., she-bagging), but rucksacks carried on the back or shoulder bags slung at the side.

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the assessment, what makes backpacks anthropologically interesting is that the issues they cause have very different roots from most of the annoyances we experience on transit. As I’ve previously discussed, many behaviours we find irksome relate to people treating public space like private space: using their phones without headphones, doing their makeup, and so forth. Failures in backpack etiquette, on the other hand, stem from an entirely different source—a lack of spatial awareness. Of course, the result is the same insofar as you still impede on other people’s space, albeit in the most physical of senses, but the origin is different.

If you’ve ever carried a backpack on transit, the chances are high that you’ve worn it inappropriately at some point. (I know I have.) But this says more about the nature of backpacks themselves than the people wearing them. Backpacks are a distinctive object because they are designed to conform to the human body.5 Writing about backpacking, the communications scholar Tracy Stephenson Shaffer has argued that this ‘intimate connection to the body’ is what makes backpacks fundamentally different from other types of luggage.6

According to the tourism scholars Neil Walsh and Hazel Tucker, this means that backpacks enable certain kinds of movements and confine others. For instance, bending over with a heavy backpack on is generally unwise.7 Walsh and Tucker also point to the ways in which backpacks transform our posture and carriage—we don’t hold our bodies in the same way when wearing them. As they observe of the experience of wearing one, ‘It took me a while to get used to the heaviness and the awkwardness, to the feel of this thing. I knocked a vase as I turned.’

The issues we experience with backpacks on transit stem from the fact that they are physically connected to our bodies but don’t, for the most part, become part of them. On one level, this seems inevitable—a backpack, being an object, can’t possibly become part of our bodies. However, the work of the French philosopher and phenomenologist8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests otherwise.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explored the significance of the body as the basis of perception. Core to his arguments was the concept of the body schema, which is basically the enduring, pre-conscious sense we develop of our bodies. For example, the fact that we can pass through doors without having to constantly check their width against our own is the result of our body schema.

Interestingly, our body schemas can incorporate parts of the body we have lost, which helps to explain the ‘phantom limb’ sensation frequently reported amongst amputees. But they also can (and often must) incorporate objects. Merleau-Ponty gives a variety of examples of this—like a blind man’s walking stick, which has ceased to be a separate object and has effectively become part of his body as he uses it to ‘sense’ the world around him and thereby extend his perception.

Another example Merleau-Ponty provides is of a woman wearing a feathered hat, who, without any conscious effort or calculation, keeps a safe distance between it and the things that might damage it. He suggests that the woman comes to ‘feel’ the feathered hat in the way that we feel where our hand is. In his words, ‘‘To get used to a hat… or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body.’

This insight hits upon precisely why backpacks are a menace on transit. For the most part, backpack wearers haven’t incorporated their pack into the bulk of their own body. And because of this, they behave as if their body is its regular size, although it has now effectively doubled in diameter. Thus, the problem actually isn’t the backpack itself, but the fact that it remains a foreign object—and, being located on the back, one that’s particularly easy to forget about. In fact, I would hazard a guess that actual backpackers are much better at navigating transit with backpacks on than the rest of us, despite the generally bulkier size of their rucksacks. As the movie Wild illustrates, part of becoming a backpacker is becoming one with your backpack.

This suggests that if you want to wear your backpack responsibly on transit, the secret may well be to wear it more rather than less. Wear it at home, wear it at work, wear it when exercising and you’ll soon be navigating crowded buses and trains without causing whiplash in innocent bystanders. And if you’re not prepared to do that? Then do us all a favour and remember to take the damn thing off and put it at your feet!