I confess that, until I got to college, I basically never used public transport, but between dealing with Duke’s massive bus system, making numerous trips to Boston and Washington, D.C., and living in New York City, I feel somewhat qualified making the following statement:

New Yorkers are brutish morons.

I say this not in the general sense. One-on-one, they’re all amicable, intelligent folk. A bit chatty, perhaps, and occasionally in rather a bit of a hurry to get wherever they’re going (which inevitably has greater importance than wherever you are trying to get to at the same point in time), but generally nice, thoughtful people. But throw them in front of a subway car and…

…well, you’d have a florid puddle of drying blood.

So let’s instead say that if you place them beside a subway car, then you end up with a cluster of people who are a walking demonstration that people sometimes have difficulty thinking further ahead than, say, about 250 milliseconds.

Here’s the problem: chances are pretty good—hell, depending on the time of day, even high—that the subway car currently has people inside, and, equally important, that at least a few of those people wish to exit the car. Further, at least in this universe, it’s fairly safe to bet that the people currently in the car trying to exit take up volume. So, rationally, the right thing to do, in order to get into the train as quickly as possible, is to let the people on the train get off, which frees up space, and then enter the subway car, once there’s more space available and the doorway is clear of people trying to leave.

Citizens on the D.C. Metro have figured this out.

Bostonians on the T, comically poor drivers though they may be, have figured this out.

Even Duke students, with the exception of the East-West bus around lunchtime, have figured this out.

New Yorkers, on the other hand, pile up right next to the subway door, and, the moment it opens, try to start a fusion reaction by walking into each other as forcefully as possible. They willingly shove people trying to exit the subway car back and push people out of the way in the name of getting inside as quickly as possible, and then—here’s the kicker—stand right next to the door so that they will be able to exit easily at the next stop, which in turn blocks the people behind them from entering and makes it even more difficult for the poor saps trying to get off from actually doing so. That’s right: they know that the same discourtesy they just inflicted upon everyone else will be revisited unto them at the next station, so, rather than simply not doing that again, they instead compound the situation so that they’ll have an easier time muscling past like-minded folk. Add it all up and I’d say that maybe half the riders on the subway car at any given point actually wanted to get off at the previous stop.

My proposed solution? Simple. If you’ve ever rented a car, you’ve noticed that the entrances to the lot have spikes coming out of the ground. These don’t hurt cars coming in, because the spikes are angled into the lot and have flat outside edges such that a car entering the lot can push the spikes into the ground without damaging its tires. A car coming out of the lot, on the other hand, will lose its tires as their soft rubber comes directly into contact with the sharp points of the spikes. To avoid this, the gate attendant simply has to manually lower the spikes when someone has been authorized to exit the parking lot.

All I propose is that we use these exact same spikes on that yellow part of the subway platform, facing away from the subway car. People exiting the train never, ever have a problem, because the way their foot lands will push the spikes down safely, but people trying to enter the train will end up with impromptu acupuncture. Only once everyone has successfully disembarked the train does the conductor lower the spikes so people can finally come in.

Of course, this solution would actually be effective, and therefore won’t ever be implemented, but I can at least dream.