There should be a word for when you rediscover something that reminds you of the depths of the pandemic: your COVID-19 vaccine certificate in your Apple wallet, a faded QR check-in sign, Tiger King on a Netflix menu.

I was rifling through a drawer recently when I rediscovered one of those Transport for NSW “green dots”, the ones they stuck to train, bus and ferry seats to keep commuters socially distanced. I had souvenired it when it came off on my coat some time back in 2021. Remember when Sydney’s trains were decorated with more stickers than a kindergarten exercise book?

Train patronage is returning to pre-pandemic levels. Credit: Dean Sewell

Sixty-five thousand green dots were placed on every second train seat in May 2020. Transport for NSW’s annual report for that year says they replaced 1000 “sit here” stickers across the network each night and, while an optimist might like to think they were all lost on coats, defacement with a Sharpie definitely also played a role.

Two years after the stickers were stuck, they were gone. Social distancing rules on public transport ended, and Sydneysiders – many of them reluctantly – returned to commuting. Yet, the legacy of the green dot lives on.

There are 880 seats on a Sydney Waratah train. But, on the city’s increasingly crowded peak-hour services, you’d be lucky to find bums on 700 of them. Commuters have become used to not sitting next to someone, and are willing to turn a blind eye to whatever chaos their desire for a bit of space causes.

The third seat – the middle chair of the three-seater – on a Sydney train has become a fiction. Or, at least, a space able to be accessed only by those with fantastical powers: a woman on the train last week commanded a seated man to move over with an authority that could have only come from years of tutelage from Dune’s Bene Gesserit. I have also witnessed someone successfully make a run at the centre seat, like a Hogwarts student entering Platform 9¾.

The rest of us are not so bold. Instead, we crane our heads to peer up and down the stairs, hoping one of the separated sitters might be unseating themselves at the next stop.

There was a time last year when even the two-seaters were a solo commuter affair, but that appears to have passed and those seats are, thankfully, now filled. Yet across the aisle, returning to sitting three abreast is still proving to be a challenge.