Cohesion In Public Transportation

People behave a certain way in a public space according to what they are taught is an appropriate social manner. Public spaces forces the individual to accept the proper social norms of conduct and to adhere to them. Public transportation is one of those public spaces that is interesting to observe because the people within the public transportation system are forced to interact with one another, when they may have never needed to interact with each other before. The public transportation system of Williamsburg gives a good depiction of this interaction through the patrons that use the public buses. People who use the public buses in Williamsburg can be put into three categories: the William and Mary Students, the service workers, and the elderly …show more content…
This perception of race affects how people will behave once there are in the public space, especially on public transit where people are enclosed and forced to interact with one another. Danielle T. Raudenbush’s writing called Race and Interactions on Public Transportation: Social Cohesion and the Production of Common Norms and a Collective Black Identity (2012), examines the interactions on public transportation to analyze social cohesion in members of the same race. They explains that the “manifestations of social cohesion that occur on public transportation in black areas are of important consequence in that they lead to the (re)production and negotiation of common notion of a particular black reality and collective black identify” (Raudenbush 2012:457). The study was done through an inductive approach. They analyzed though observations the passengers on the Chicago Transit Authority public transportation system (Raudenbush 2012:459). The research was conducted over a period of eight months, which consisted of observations and spontaneous conversations (Raudenbush 2012:459). Raudenbush was measuring the interactions of the patrons on a scale of avoiding interaction to having in-depth conversations with other people. The finding concluded that in poor, black areas of Chicago there are higher levels of social cohesion; and that there are “lower levels of social cohesion in more affluent, white areas (Raudenbush 2012:471). One of the final claims made by the author was that “there is more social cohesion between strangers on public transportation among blacks in a majority-black areas of the city than among whites” (Raudenbush 2012:471). The relevance of this study is that it presents a different understanding of the behaviors of patrons on public transit. While the previous study showed the animosity in some behavioral attitudes in a public