The Smoking Carriage of the Mind

Saw a thread the other day about someone smoking on a train, complete with photo evidence, and the usual pile-on in the comments. What got me wasn’t the smoking itself. It was the number of people who piped up to say they used to do exactly this as teenagers in the 80s and 90s, and how normal it felt at the time.

One bloke described being fifteen and having an old European man call him “a pig, a big pig” for smoking on a train. He said he never did it again. Someone else remembered a smoking carriage on the Blue Mountains line that stank so badly even the smokers wouldn’t sit in it for the whole trip. Another person mentioned smoking around pregnant women at work and looking back on it now with something between embarrassment and disbelief.

That’s the bit I keep chewing on. Not the transgression, but the gap between what felt normal then and what feels unthinkable now. My dad smoked in the car with the windows up, kids in the back seat, and nobody thought twice about it. Hospitals had smoking areas. Pubs were basically saunas of Winfield Blue. You’d come home from a night out and your clothes needed to be aired out on the line before you could stand to be near them again.

None of that was that long ago. It’s within living memory, which is the unsettling part. Norms don’t creep, they lurch. Something is completely fine, then a decade later it’s the kind of thing you’d get filmed doing and mocked for online.

I think about this a fair bit in relation to work, actually. Things I did without a second thought ten years ago in IT, deploying stuff on a Friday afternoon, storing passwords in a way that makes me wince now, would get you a stern chat from security today. Standards move. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes because someone got sued and now there’s a policy document about it.

The thread had the usual argument about enforcement too, whether PSOs actually do anything, whether Melbourne’s “weak justice system” is to blame, whether anyone would have the nerve to say something to a stranger smoking on a train today. I don’t know the answer to that one. I like to think I’d say something. I also know that thinking it and doing it, at 11pm on the Belgrave line, are different exercises entirely.

What strikes me is that the smoking ban on public transport, on trains from the 70s, in pubs and restaurants much later, actually worked. It wasn’t a slow cultural shift that happened on its own. It was a policy, backed by evidence, that people grumbled about and then got used to. Even lifelong smokers in the thread admitted the pubs are better now. That’s not nothing. It’s proof that a fair few of society’s rules exist because someone did the maths on lung cancer rates and decided enough was enough, and the culture eventually caught up.

I don’t think that means every problem on public transport gets solved the same way. Vaping teenagers kicking off at bus drivers is a different, messier problem, tangled up with mental health, cost of living, and a transport system that’s stretched thin on enforcement. But it’s worth remembering that things we now consider obviously correct, no smoking indoors, seatbelts, not driving after six beers, all felt like nanny-state overreach to someone at the time. Sometimes the standard you walk past isn’t the one you’re stuck with forever. Sometimes it’s just the one nobody’s got around to changing yet.