straphanger

plural straphangers

1. A person who travels using public transportation (often standing up and holding on to a strap).

   For several days, Mr. Sammler returning on the customary bus late afternoons from the Forty-second Street Library had been watching a pickpocket at work […] Mr. Sammler if he had not been a tall straphanger would not with his one good eye have seen these things happening.

   1970, Saul Bellow, chapter 1, in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, published 1971, page 8

   1 more example

   The number of elevators has grown significantly since 1990, when the Americans With Disabilities Act set off a transformation of the aging transit system. For the disabled, the changes promised to open doors, while thousands of other straphangers—parents with strollers, older travelers—expected a small dose of convenience in a wearying city.

   2008 May 19, William Neuman, “$1 Billion Later, Subway Elevators Still Fail”, in New York Times, retrieved 16 Nov 2009