What Makes Some Train Station Waits Better Than Others?
Penn Station in New York is as busy as it is cramped. The crowding gets particularly awful once track numbers are announced and everyone scrambles to form a line to board. ...People wait for a track number to be announced, then jam toward the gate in a chaotic line that's easy to cut and hard to bear.
Everyone handles waiting on lines with varying degrees of composure, or lack thereof, but there are some universal rules for what we hate about them. The M.I.T. professor Richard Larson, sometimes known as Dr. Queue, described three of them in his famous treatise on the subject from 1987. As Larson's "queueing theory" makes clear, it's not the length of the wait that bothers us so much — it's what might be called the personality of it.