A 39-year old woman, Lakeysha Beard, talked for more than half a day while on an Amtrak train going from Oakland, California, to Salem, Oregon. The loud cellphone conversation lasted sixteen hours last Monday, after which police stopped the train for twenty minutes to arrest the woman.
According to the British newspaper Daily Mail, Amtrak has no policy forbidding passengers from talking on the phone on a moving train.
In the train’s car, a few passengers asked the woman to put the phone away or to stop a few times during the conversation prior to notifying the train staff. Staff members were unable to convince the woman to end the conversation and stopped the train to arrest the woman and halt the disruption.
As British newspaper Metro mentioned, this cellphone conversation doesn’t beat the record 51-hour phone call by Sunil Prabhakar of New Delhi in 2009.
Sydney, Australia etiquette expert Alex Travers, remarking on a train incident in March, said part of the problem is a lack of respect for public transportation from younger generations. The U.S. woman in the current incident, Lakeysha Beard, is 39 years old. Travers said, “I’m afraid we are all in a very bad place as far as we feel about our public transport. People think poorly of it, so therefore they are getting on it with a poor attitude.” He called youths “me-oriented” and said that they “do what they want to do” without thinking about others on the vehicle.
