We’ve lost our manners on public transport. Can we get them back?

Each week, Good Weekend’s how-to column shares expert advice on how to navigate some of modern life’s big – and small – challenges. This week: How to ask someone to be quiet on public transport.

What are people thinking? What on earth induces them to turn on their phone’s speaker so that their fellow passengers on a train, bus or tram have the dubious pleasure of hearing not just one side of their incredibly tedious conversation, but both sides? Or worse, their noisy videos?

It’s “hugely rude”, says Zarife Hardy, founder of the Australian School of Etiquette, a company that works – mainly with businesses – to foster what were once known as “good manners”. “People are now treating public spaces like their own lounge rooms,” she says.

Hardy defines etiquette, a quaint word, as “a set of standards and rules that we should follow in society, in life, in business, to make our days nicer and our relationships better”. A code of behaviour, perhaps, that allows us to happily share public spaces. Manners are declining as we live faster lives hooked up to personal devices, she believes: “We’ve turned into a society of, ‘It’s all about me.’ We’ve got to come back to ‘It’s about everybody.’ ”