(Why do “suit” and “purple” choose to stand?)

There is a better way to add capacity and reduce crowding in the subway car, however. Make the damned seats wider! What people do right now — due to some kind of human repelling force — is to skip every other seat unless the situation is really saturated, because it’s impolite and uncomfortable to squeeze next to/in between people. So MBTA ends up with half the designed seating capacity and the overflow just stand, sometimes right next to/blocking an empty seat. Just remove one seat per row and the number of seated people may increase dramatically. This applies to classrooms and other contexts, too.