Originally Posted by DoubleJ

While I agree that there is still room for improvement, I feel the railway companies have come a long way in the past ten years or so. Remember when the platforms were one big smoking area?

The situation you describe is not unlike what can be found in restaurants in Japan. How many times have we entered a "family" restaurant and dutifully filled out our names on the waiting list, only to be informed that the non-smoking area is full, but that if we didn't mind the smoking section (which appears to be just as large if not larger than the non-smoking area), we could be seated immediately.

Do we wait 30 minutes for a table, allowing others to bypass us in line and take seats in the smoking section, or do we take what seats we can immediately get and "gaman" during the meal? Evidently many families take the second choice, seeing all the non-smoking families with children sitting in smoking areas. But sometimes it's just all moot, as you can be in the "non-smoking area" but still find yourself seated next to a group of smokers (the invisible boundary between smoking and non-smoking areas evidently running between your table and their table).