What's the craziest thing you've seen on public transportation?

An entire international high-speed train was delayed for almost 2 hours because Karen got the police called over having too much foam in her beer.

Someone planing out a snuff and CNC porno shoot with some woman threw the phone that is being shot in a former ww2 bunker with nazi uniforms and BD dildos

I jooed.on at my.stop and then get.off at my stop and that was it...weird shit huh!

Idk if this counts as crazy but one day a guy went up to me and said "hey I'm about to smoke meth. Its probably going to smell so you can change seats if you want to." And then I did and that was basically it.

Nothing that crazy I guess, but two events I remember:

• A small fire broke out next to the tracks and the train driver actually stopped the train and got out to extinguish it
• A train busker played so loudly and terribly that a group of random passengers got together to shove him out of the train at the next station.

On the NYC subway a guy was taking up two seats, he pulls out a notebook and starts (screaming) reading from it. It was all about some conspiracy that got him kicked out of Columbia University. People started moving away from him. At the next stop a guy gets on the train and says to "hey psycho you really need two seats" the crazy guy slides over freeing up one of the seats and then goes back to yelling.

I was sat opposite a woman who had a grocery bag filled to the brim with crisps packets, or so it seemed. She started out just munching on crisps, mouth fully open, shoving her hands in there. She emptied two packs in between two stops (metro). Efficient.

When she had enough she started rumaging frantically through her bag for a solid 20 seconds, and then triumphantly dug out a can of whipped cream (squirty cream format for my UK friends), opened it, and just emptied the whole thing in her mouth in one go!

It was in France, of all fucking places.

i had a dude walk up to me and say "never just take unsolicited advice"

possibly the best advice i ever got. total mindfuck though

I watched a guy chug a bottle of orange Listerine, ramble incoherently for ten minutes, then proceed to have uncontrollable diarrhea all over the seat before getting off the train.

I watched a lady bring a small dead bird in a ziploc onto the Metro in Montreal and then proceed to pluck its feathers onto the floor.

and we aren't talking about your game hen or a quail here or something. I'm lalking about a fucking sparrow or something like that.

Back when I was in college I road the bus every day. Nothing even remotely as crazy as most of the comments here describing happened that I witnessed on those hundreds of bus rides There was the dude wearing a parka when the heat index was over 100, or the guy weeping holding a bouquet while heading into a residential area and those are honestly not that interesting because shit happens but I do have one story:

One fairly quiet bus ride I was seated in some of the sideways seats near the front and a lady seated across from me was reading a newspaper. My eyes are drifting as I'm listening to a podcast and suddenly I realize on the front of the paper this lady is reading is a photo of my dad. I asked her "excuse me, could I look at that paper quickly? That's a photo of my dad there and I want to see what he's been up to to get in the paper but hasn't told me" and it turns out he helped run a Wikipedia edit-a-thon event at a local library to help encourage new contributors.

In Halifax, two teenage girls talking on the bus. One girl was describing how her boyfriend fucks her. Very graphic.

Once an old guy asked me to hold the door for him when the train stops so he can stand up and get out. I did but he took very long to stand up so I instinctively went to help him, the door closed and the train went on. So we both excited at the next stop and wanted to get the train back. It was the worst possible stop because the walk was crazy long and the old guy crazy slow. Me being way too helpful, I walked with him and he told me about how his family never visits him anymore and all kinds of trouble in his life, while one train after the other passed by. Eventually we arrived on the other side, got back to the original stop and exited. I escorted him to a taxi. He was very thankful for the adventure and I was a few hours late to work.

Waiting for a matatu and one dude starts beating the shit out of another. Two separate times.

Cool dude gets on near Bakersfield, sits next to me, drinks a 12 pack and tells me how he murdered people in prison.

Various people smoking crack, meth, and fety on trains and buses

Dude gets asked to turn his music down, goes on escalating and frankly impressive rant for 10 minutes about how he’s going to cut the guys head clean off with his machete

Various guys jacking off

Various rants against every race

Spent 90% of my life taking public transit and I love it. Big public transit fan and I wish people would intermingle more in general.

But, if you talk loudly or listen to music on the tinny speakers on your phone, you are the scum of the earth in my eyes. I’d rather have a dude strung out on heroin on the train than you, absolutely no hint of sarcasm.

I bumped into a friend who is cop in the British Transport Police at a station while he was working. While I was there somehow a happy-drunk guy fell between a train and the platform and got stuck. That's not the crazy part.

The crazy part is the four separate people who all ended up getting arrested because they attacked my friend and the other responders trying to free the stuck man - physically kicking and trying to drag them away - because he/they wouldn't order the train to leave the station and it was making them late. Four separate people, all apparently sober, all absolute psychopaths who would happily see someone mangled by a train so they wouldn't be inconvenienced, and so utterly convinced of their righteousness that they were prepared to physically attack police officers and paramedics.

I was later told this is pretty normal when there's a "one under": aside from the person who fell getting injured or dying, the biggest immediate problem is a handful of narcissistic cunts who interpret the whole thing as some kind of personal insult. It really shook me that anyone could be like that.

Santacon and elf con crossed tracks at a train stop. For some reason there was also a train full of clowns and a few mime artists all on the same train.

A woman jumped while I was waiting for the train at my home station. It wasn't pretty...

hoo boy have I got a story for you!

It's my first day heading to work after moving to a new apartment. I get on the bus around 7 AM. My guide dog (Guide Dog 1 from a previous post) is under my seat with her head poking out a bit into the aisle.

A few stops down route and this drunk lady gets on and sits right next to me. I'm a little annoyed but it's public transit and a lack of personal space is par for the course.

"Oh, a doggy," she slurs in Spanish, attempting to pet my dog's head. Unfortunately she misses and starts petting my leg instead. I jump up and relocate to another seat, but not before telling the woman "Please don't touch my dog, and don't touch me either." The rest of the ride she's groping the air in the general direction of my dog.

Some other anecdotes in no particular order:

• Someone in the back of the bus screaming "It's my birthday WOOOOOOOO!"
• A lady ranting at the driver to stop for a good 20 minutes because she has to pee
• A smelly bum falling asleep on my shoulder

I have to mention a time where I was probably the strange one: after the lockdowns ended but while masking was still common, I would wear a full respirator with face shield, basically a gas mask, while on the bus. My rationale is that a normal paper or cloth mask stops the wearers germs from getting out but doesn't do so well at stopping them from getting in. I can't see who is or isn't wearing a mask, so I'm going to wear something that WILL protect me against the non maskers.

EDIT:

Oh and the time my bus got cut off by another bus and the driver got out and started yelling at the other driver. I was already within walking distance of my destination, so I just noped off the bus before it could escalate.

EDIT 2:

same bus as the drunk dog petter, this guy would get on at the stop after mine. I called him Mr. Bucket because he always carried this large white plastic bucket that smelled absolutely foul.

EDIT 3:

I get on a bus (different city) while wearing a lanyard with a name badge on it. I forget to slip the lanyard under my shirt, and this lady leans in and grabs the lanyard to examine the card.

Her: "You're from [name of place on the lanyard]?"

Me, unable to lie at this point: "...yes".

A dude approached me letting me know he was the Blue Elf, he was dressed in a childish vibrant flat colors, but nothing too out of the ordinary. He told me he was an artist traveling for an exchange and that he was known for giving away blue puzzle pieces, of which he gave me one. Said goodbye a couple of stops later. He left me utterly confounded. Once home, I looked it up on the Internet and confirmed all his story…

Guy getting mad at the conductor for calling him sir because only a priest can be called that.......

Someone sprayed ME with a bottle of water. I was on my phone, and when i looked up this old lady was spraying water over her shoulder without looking and hit me directly in the face! When i asked what she was doing she walked over to me saying someone had cursed her, and her reflection in the window was facing the wrong way so she decided to spray "holy water" over her shoulder.

Thankfully after getting a COVID test done (this was in 2021 mind you) it was in fact just water.

I stared at my wife's cleavage while riding the train once. Otherwise it's all been pretty chill.

Guy had a baseball bat with nails on the crowded greenline in Boston. Pretty sure it was used for holding multiple plastic bags on his shoulder, but it was still kinda freaky

I took the Bart in San Francisco every day for a decade, definitely saw some things. Saw a guy take a shit between the cars. Saw someone flip off the rails and kick someone in the head.

The one I remember the most was during a busy morning commute, I had my headphones on and I see this older guy pushing through people to follow this younger woman. She kept moving up and down the train to get away from him. After seeing this a few times, I stepped in front of him and told him "I don't know what's going on, but she clearly doesn't want to be near you, so you gotta leave her alone". He snapped at me screaming that it was his daughter and I need to stay the fuck out of their family situation. Myself and a few others blocked him, and he got off at the next stop. When I asked the woman if she was okay, she said she had no relation to the guy and had never seen him. Scary stuff all around. Im assuming he was mentally ill and had some previous drama about losing his daughter, and something triggered in his brain when he saw that woman. I thought for sure I was gonna get stabbed that day, and if the train wasn't so crowded I think things would've ended a lot differently.

All the people still refusing to do anything but drive massive empty cars by themselves when directly adjacent to and around mass transit.

On a trip to San Francisco, the quintessential "gay mecca" of the USA I was on a bus making my way over towards Haight area (then planning to go visit Castro street aka the actual gayest part of San Francisco) there were a group of men on the bus going on a bigoted rant specifically about homosexual men ruining the country and going to hell and all that fun stuff on the LGBTQ+ agenda.

Like, I'd expect to hear that kind of stuff in the middle of Oklahoma's rural hellscape (sans the bus part). But in San Francisco of all places?

Got a few that come to mind:

Three young guys, I would guess in their early twenties, were being obnoxious in a silence compartment. Other people noticed but nobody went beyond casting disapproving looks. One of the boys defiantly started asking the other passengers one by one if they found the boys annoying. The first few people cowardly denied annoyance until one of them simply and firmly responded 'yes'. The boys had not expected this and just packed up and left. It was hilarious to see their faces, they had not expected that haha

In Spain, a ticket inspector addressed me in Spanish, which I don't speak. I tried communicating in English. Unfortunately the ticket inspector thought that I would magically start understanding Spanish if he increased his speaking volume. After a few rounds of this he was practically shouting at me. Luckily at that point another passenger joined in to translate and we managed to sort things out.

On the train from London to Edinburgh, an obligatory drunk randomly shouting Scotsman

Some random novice nun recognized that I am an IT guy so she asked me whether it is really possible that it was God who made her computer crash while she was writing her homework essay about some saint that she was obsessed about.

I have been sitting in a tram that emergency breake'd. It was all seriously fast: Ring of the warning bell (like an overgrown alarm clock) towards the driver of the car, and next thing was that I was leaning over an old lady sitting in the opposite side. They accellerated like a snail on dope, but breaking was applying ACME Insta Stop.

One of the first times I took the path train (it's a light rail in NJ/NYC. Basically another subway line). I sit down, and an older guy in a suit sits down next to me. He's got like a box in a plastic bag in his lap. No big deal.

This was in like 2002. He didn't have a cell phone or earphones. Just sitting quietly, waiting for the train to leave.

He started to giggle. Little chuckles. And then escalated to full laughs. It rises and rises until he's like cackling. And then he calms down, reverses all the way through giggles and back to silence. Never said a word.

I don't know what was in the box. I didn't ask. I assume he just got away with a killer heist.

And people wonder why a lot of folks are uncomfortable on public transportation.

I was excited to ride on public transportation for the first time and immediately people were doing drugs right next to me and babbling incoherently. Yep, no, I'm good.

Drugs is nothing. Vomit is nothing. I watched a dude drop a duce and thought now that's something.

Maybe not the "craziest", but I remember being a kid and on the NYC subway, a bunch of dudes were just like... doing "steet performance" stuff... like on the subway... like they'd while moving from one subway cart to another subway cart (is that what it's called, idk the terminology), like through the train connection thing while the subway was in motion, like a group of 4-5 guys, one went around, begging for money, which I thought at the time was a robbery, like, for context, I was around 8-12 at the time, I literally just came to this country, I was just so "wtf" about the whole situation. Like what the fuck was that. Like... I don't wanna be racist about this... but I'm Asian, and those dudes were not, so you know... me being a kid, I got even more scared about it. I just kinda leaned on my mom sitting right next to me and like hugged cuz I felt so scared.

No it wasn't really a robbery, but like... I was just so fucking confused at the time. What the fuck what that? Then like 10 minutes later, they moved to a different subway cart. It felt like 30 minutes to me lol. And like I don't think we ever were at a stop, since I think this was like those segments where it takes forever between 2 stops, probably the manhattan bridge section of the D train or N train, which takes forever.

Like can you imagine being a kid and a bunch of dudes are causing a scene for some reason you don't understand?

Also I remember this other time where I'm sure it was the D line, and like I went on this subway cart where it was empty. Like you know NYC always crowded af and no seats, and I always hated standing as a kid. So my mom and I picked this subway car that was apparantly empty. So then the doors close behind us and then we noticed a smell, then we notices some homeless looking dude on the other corner of the subway cart. And like the smell was coming from the homeless dude. (No offense to homeless people btw, but I'm describing this memory from a kid-me's perspective so keep that in mind) So it got really uncomfortable in there, but the doors closed and train already got moving. But the next stop was like 10 minutes away (one of the sections where they skip like 3 stops on the express track), so we just had to bear with the dumpster like smell and also the potential danger of dude just waking up and attacking us.

I thought about just hopping between the carts using the doorway thing (if you know what I'm talking about), but there was a sign warning not to move through doors while train is moving and my mom said no, its too dangerous, so we just stayed in that cart for 10 agonizing minutes.

Actually, current-me might've been actually been more freaked out by it since I have germophobia now. That's why I kinda hate public transit nowadays.