Could a 'quiet car' work on the subway? The Q train tried one last week

We've all been in a subway car where a single loud person made the ride worse for everyone. Can one quiet person make it better?

That's the question artist, writer, and climate educator Nicole Kelner set out to answer last week when she boarded the Q Train and silently declared it “The Quiet Car.” Wearing a conductor’s uniform of a cap, a tie, and her dad’s old button down, she set up a homemade (and collapsible!) free library, taped up signs, sat down and started knitting.  

As she was putting up the signs, an MTA worker stopped her and said, “You know you're going to have to take those down, right?” Kelner was worried. “I thought, ‘Oh God, are we getting stopped before we even start?’ ” 

Luckily, he immediately clarified that it was okay if Kelner took the signs down when she got off.

“I was relieved”, she says. “It was really cool to see it was okay enough to do by the city, or at least by this one guy.”

The Quiet Car is Kelner’s subway experiment promoting mindfulness and her new book, Quietest Places in New York City: Finding Calm & Peace in Urban Chaos, an illustrated guide to finding calm in the five boroughs. It evolved from her Substack, a decade of mindfulness practice, and a search for quiet in NYC that led to a Google Map with more than 2,000 starred locations. Kelner combed through them to curate her 67 favorite spots. Over half of these are green spaces, and she also includes hidden waterfall parks and quiet cemeteries, libraries, bookstores, cafés and more. Locations are paired with original watercolor illustrations, historical details, and simple mindfulness prompts that encourage readers to slow down and notice their surroundings. It’s small enough to carry around and fun to flip through. 

Kelner has hosted The Quiet Car twice before, in April and June, both drawing nearly 100 co-participants taking over a train car for half an hour from 96th street to Union Square. She taped up 8x11 signs on the poles and windows, with instructions modeled after the Q train symbol, encouraging riders to “enjoy the quiet together” and “take a free book.” Attendees were instructed to "Bring something to read, do, or create quietly together.” 

The only rule: no phones allowed. 

Kelner didn't really have to enforce this rule during the first two Quiet Cars. There was such a critical mass of fellow experimenters that people would board, notice the signs, sometimes scan the QR code and naturally adopt the tone of the car. Even if they weren't phone free, they were mostly quiet.

“People brought all sorts of things — a lot of people read, journaled or sketched. I knit,” she said.  “Someone brought a portable backgammon set and played with friends. Two women brought a crossword they whispered over together.” 

By the end of that ride, the quiet car had grown quite powerful. 

“When we poured off at Canal, we took up too much space when we got off the train,” Kelner said. “It was a fire hazard. There were so many of us that it was scary!”

She took inspiration from Amtrak’s quiet car, a respite for less-grating travel that you can also find on NJ Transit and MetroNorth. But for this latest Quiet Car experiment, she took a cue from the Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh's teachings about the rippling effect of one person’s calm. In the past, she’s advertised the event and brought out 100 of her own attendees; this time, she wanted to be like that monk and see if she could do it with just herself, her homemade library, some 8x11 printouts and a single poster. 

“I wanted to ride it myself, to see if me, as a single person, could transform a whole subway car into a quiet car,” she said. “I was inspired by a quote from Thích Nhất Hạnh about Vietnamese boats: ‘When the crowded boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked, all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive.

Kelner said she loved that concept.

“I asked myself, ‘Could that work in a New York City subway car?’ ” she said. “ ‘Could I be one quiet person and that calm ripples out across the car? Is this enough guidance for strangers to even understand what's happening, without the critical mass of people?’ It was definitely an experiment!”

Invisible gorillas in the mist

On the most recent Quiet Car experiment on July 22, I boarded the Q train at Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn and rode it to 96th street, the last stop on the train. Kelner knitted next to her library and her signs. But beyond that, there was no active intervention and no explanation of what was going on.