Armed with iPhone, man on crutches documents those who take subway seating away from disabled people

From The New York Times:

There was a time, not long ago, when Matt Muro did not deal with his frustrations quite so constructively.

Mr. Muro, a 37-year-old Web producer from East Williamsburg, had been feeling mysterious pain in his right foot for months after a mishap with a metal garbage can. His doctors had tentatively diagnosed a stress fracture and fitted him with a stabilizing boot and crutches.

This was in December. By February, Mr. Muro was quietly seething through his morning commute into Manhattan on a typically crowded train. Despite his best efforts to board the train near the “Priority Seating for Persons With Disabilities” section, and despite his obvious hardware and his limp, he was as often as not left to stand.

One day, he found himself looking down at the people in the priority seats and grousing silently about their relative fitness.

“This one guy was in a track suit, really athletic, perfectly healthy, and I was just staring at him, because I wanted the seat,” Mr. Muro recalled the other day. “I just broke. And I said, ‘Excuse me, are you disabled? Well, next time someone’s standing on crutches in front of you, you should think about getting up.’ ”

It was about this moment that an Internet sensation was born. What if, Mr. Muro thought, standing nose to nose with the seat’s angry occupant, there was a venue to publicly spotlight such transgressions? Within weeks, he had created that venue: a Web site called People Who Sit in the Disability Seats When I’m Standing on My
Crutches.

Armed with his iPhone camera, Mr. Muro began photographing those he viewed as the worst offenders and posting their pictures online under headlines like “Crutches? What Crutches?” and “I Can’t See You, I’m Reading a Book.”

Through February and most of March, most visitors to the site were Mr. Muro’s friends and relatives — about two dozen total.

But numbers were beside the point. The site was good for his sanity, and it made his friends laugh.

“People don’t annoy me as much,” he said, “because I just think, ‘This is just material for the blog.’ ”

Then, on Monday, the Web site for the pop culture television show “Best Week Ever” — on VH1, where Mr. Muro works — linked to the site. About 18,000 people visited. The next day, there were 38,000 more. The day after that, 82,000. Then came the abuse.

If you believe that subway riders should refrain from blocking the doors, or should move to let fellow passengers on and off the train in an orderly fashion, or should keep an eye out, while sitting, for people in need, you might not find the public comment section on Mr. Muro’s site very heartening.

The recent responses — the printable ones, at least — include the admonitions “Get over yourself,” “I’ll sit wherever I want” and “This guy is clearly a chump.” Another begins, “Listen, you ignoramus.”

The longer critiques tend to break down into two arguments: 1) What if someone has a disability you can’t see? and 2) Why don’t you just ask the people to move?

To the first, Mr. Muro concedes the point. The site includes a disclaimer noting that some people, like a woman with multiple sclerosis who e-mailed him taking exception, may not be visibly disabled. The answer to the second question is tougher. The official priority seating rules, for whatever they are worth, say the seats must be given up — upon request.

True enough. But asking makes him uncomfortable. “It’s just not in my nature to ask,” said Mr. Muro, a soft-spoken man. Besides, he wonders, should it be necessary?
Descending the stairs into the subway on Wednesday morning, Mr. Muro was surprisingly nimble. His foot has been improving and the boot is off, though he still limps, still uses crutches and still can’t walk very far.

Initially, on a rare uncrowded rush-hour train, he found an empty seat. But when he transferred to an uptown line, things got interesting. Occupying the priority seats were a sleepy girl of high school age and, sitting next to her, a woman who looked old enough to be her grandmother. Also old enough, it appeared, to occupy the seat without anyone giving her an argument.

For a few minutes, nobody moved. Then the woman looked up and glanced at Mr. Muro. “Excuse me,” she said, “do you want to sit down?”

“Uh,” he replied, weighing the sudden complexity of the situation, “sure.”

Seated, he traveled the one stop to his destination. Someone else stood, offering the woman a seat. Someone who bumped into Mr. Muro’s crutch apologized.

The girl next to him, still gazing into the middle distance, yawned.