Picture the scene, if you will.

You're on a Luas, and you're getting on at the stop at Jervis. Your final destination is The Point. You get on and it's reasonably full and there's a seat open next to someone. The gender, disposition, smell whatever of the person you'll be sitting next to is irrelevant.

Luas travels along, other seats are occupied, people are standing, typical scene as you can imagine. The Luas gets to Abbey Street, and empties a significant portion of its passengers and frees up a number of seats. Crucially, two seats opened next to you across the walkway.

Now, here's the quandary - in that moment, do you get up and move to those free seats or do you stay put? Remember now, in this instance, there is absolutely zero going on here about the person you're currently sitting next to. They don't smell, they're not eating egg salad (saw it happen once), they're not blasting Sean Paul on their phone (also saw it happen once) and they are being quiet and unobtrusive.

This is a question that plagues people on a daily basis, because there's so much to consider. If you get up and walk over to another seat, that person you're sitting next to will likely realise what's happened and begin to question themselves. But if you stay put when there are free seats open, what happens then? Is this a declaration or something, by remaining seated next to them?

What's gas is that if there's a division of some kind, it's less of an issue. Take, for example, a train. You're seated across a table from someone random and you wouldn't get up and move seats unless they were doing something particularly off-putting if there was a free seat. Now, if there's a window seat available, then yeah, maybe.

A bus, however, it's a different scenario.

If it's a long-haul bus journey, moving seats is fine because you're packed in and you've got to take any kind of mitigation in that kind of close space. If it's shorter, say, Dublin Bus, you've just got to get on with it because it's a shorter journey.

In our hypothetical situation, that's a relatively short journey. You're not going out to, say, Tallaght or Sandyford if you're on the Green Line.

So, over to you, what do YOU do in this situation?