Having just come back from New York, I highly disagree on the issue of plastic seats and especially on this post in particular.
Having been in New York last summer, those plastic seats are god awful.
While you might not be wrong about the benefits of plastic seating from a cleanliness perspective, riding the thing has to be one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. I think in total I spent more time either standing up, or surfing between the cars because my butt would get sore after sitting on those things for more than 5 minutes.
Perhaps there's a reason for that? If someone suggests ideas that we could borrow from Europe the correct response is not to immediately reply with "why do we care what Europe does?"
But this is a fallacy. I agree that Europe is absolutely a world leader in many elements such as urban planning and transit design, however they aren't gods amongst men. Just because Europe does something doesn't mean it's by default the right way to do something. Even European cities are prone to making mistakes, making decisions only due to them wanting to save money, or some of their decision making could done based on the context of it's city, and by no means something that could or should be replicated by other cities. To list some obvious examples, let's look at all of the French towns that built weird priority rubber tired trams simply because of lobbying from tarmac/tire companies. Or how about all of the rack-railways and rubber tire metros that were built in cities like Lausanne that replaced existing funiculars and thus needed that technology for the grades? In fact we can see the outcome with this in Montreal which ended up building a Rubber Tyre metro solely because Jean Drapeau liked them, and now Montreal is stuck with a legacy rubber-tyre Metro network that isn't suited to the climate and is thus expensive to expand, and has nothing to show for the technology other than maybe the Yellow Line making use of the steeper curves to go under the river. I can bring up a ton of examples of things Europeans do like tram-trains that are very context sensitive yet we in the west like the exploit because "that's what Europe does so it must be right".
Finally, I want to bring up east-asian cities like Tokyo for a moment. Many would argue that East and South-East Asia are as good, if not better than Europe in regards to urban and transit planning, yet a lot of Asian customs and norms heavily conflict with what you see in Europe. For starters, let's look at the context of this conversation - seat types, and see how it's done in Tokyo... oh my god, they're all padded!
In many cases, an example of something taken from Europe that one might claim as doing 'x' correctly, you can find a counterexample in some Asian city with them doing something completely different. European Urban Planning loves putting trams as a common form of mass transit, meanwhile in Asia you'll find elevated Metros and Light Metros in dense areas where you'd find trams in europe.
The point is, just because Europe does something one way, doesn't make it the "right way", and it's absolutely fair to criticize statements that just bring up some european city as proof that this is the way to do things.
