Commutation

“ Hardly were they practical means of transportation that could be relied on day in and day out, before commutation tickets were offered for those hardy enough to endure daily trips of a dozen miles or more between home and office. ”

“ It is well known that there have grown up near to all the large cities of this country suburban communities which require this peculiar service, and as to which the railroads have themselves, as in this instance, established commutation rates. ”

“ It is an inconvenient world, this distant, darkened, unmapped country of the Commuter. Only God and the Commuter know how to get there, and they alone know why they stay. But there are reasons, good and sufficient reasons—there are inconveniences, I should say, many and compelling inconveniences, such as wife and children, miles in, miles out, the isolation, the chores, the bundles—loads of bundles—that keep the Commuter commuting. Once a commuter, always a commuter, because there is no place along the road, either way, where he can put his bundles down. ”

“ The Commuter thrusts out his chest. Not for him. His is a different life. He even feels justified in thinking that his is the only life. There is nothing narrow about the Commuter; the open breath of the country has tended to widen him. ”

“ The Commuter knows the dark gray city, knows it darker and grayer than the scholar, for the Commuter works there, shut up in a basement, or in an elevator, maybe, six days a week; he feels and hears the throbbing heart of man all the day long; and when evening comes he hurries away to the open country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, where he can listen a little to the beating of his own. ”

“ Here are the Commuter’s weary miles. Life to everybody is a good deal of a journey; to nobody so little of a journey, however, as to the Commuter, for his traveling is always bringing him home.
And as to his isolation and his chores it is just the same, because they really have no separate existence save in the urban mind, as hydrogen and oxygen have no separate existence save in the corked flasks of the laboratory. These gases are found side by side nowhere in nature. ”

“ Or if a train of cars, loaded with hundreds of passengers, or scores of tons of freight, had been seen passing over the surface of the earth, at the rate of sixty miles per hour, and propelled, seemingly, by its own inherent powers of locomotion, our fathers would have beheld a miracle—an event which would have appeared, to them, to break those very laws of nature with which they were the most familiar. ”

“ He now likes his answers to be in human terms. He takes readily to such conceptions as congestion as the cause for subways and elevated trains; the desire for speed as the cause of change in transportation; the dependence of man on other living things,—all of which I have made the bases of stories. To the children the material in “The Subway Car,” “Speed,” “Silly Will,” is familiar; the relationships in which it appears are new. ”

“ The commuter, no less than the seaman, has fidelities of his own; and faithful, strict obedience to hard necessary formulæ favours the combined humility and self-respect that makes human virtue. The commuter is often a figure both tragic and absurd; but he has a rubric and discipline of his own. And when you see him grotesquely hasting for the 5:27 train, his inner impulse may be no less honourable than that of the ship's officer ascending the bridge for his watch under a dark speckle of open sky. ”

“ NO amount of centripetal force can counteract some energetic tendencies to fly forth tangentially from the customary habitudes of one continually-revolving circle. Its dull monotony and sickening familiar paths are as displeasing to the mind as the sight of some dreary landscape which you have gazed at only too often from your jolting seat in a railway carriage, is to the æsthetic, novelty-craving eye. ”

“ After a certain time the constant coughing of the locomotive, the dazzling of the vision from the rapidity with which objects are passed, the sparks and ashes which fly in your face and on your clothes become very annoying; your only consolation is the speed with which you are passing over the ground. ”

“ Commuters and truck-wagons ain't any sweet haulin', but I tell you they're a heap better 'n cuttin' out refrigerator-cars or oil-tanks. Why, I've hauled—"
"Haul! You?" said the Mogul, contemptuously. "It 's all you can do to bunt a cold-storage car up the yard. Now, I—" he paused a little to let the words sink in—"I handle the Flying Freight—e-leven cars worth just anything you please to mention. On the stroke of eleven I pull out; and I 'm timed for thirty-five an hour. Costly-perishable-fragile-immediate—that 's me! Suburban traffic's only but one degree better than switching. ”

“ In all cases where a horse is used as the means of transit, he must, besides the load which he bears, move the weight of his own body, and a great portion of his strength is thus employed. This portion is found to increase at a rapid rate with the velocity, so that as the speed of his motion increases, the quantity of power which he can spare to his load is as rapidly diminished. ”

“ To vary is to change from time to time, often capriciously. To commute is to put something easier, lighter, milder, or in some way more favorable in place of that which is commuted; as, to commute capital punishment to imprisonment for life ”

“ To be back in the roar of traffic, to feel the terrific pressure of those miles of converging masonry, gave us, after weeks of free air and unbounded landscape, a sense of congestion that made the crowded streets seem lowering and dangerous ”

“ Trapper instinct, before alluded to, made me note heap of broken stones at this particular bifurcation. Here it is; no mistake about that; take other turning, and press on full speed; can't be more than two miles now; straight road, and there you are. Can do it under half-an-hour. Nothing so delightful as walk in country lane in cool of evening. This particular lane rather long; roads and lanes cutting off to right and left; at least no bifurcation. Not a house in sight; every soul in the country apparently turned in. ”

“ MOBILITY AS THE PULSE OF THE COMMUNITY Movement, per se, is not an evidence of change or of growth. In fact, movement may be a fixed and unchanging order of motion, designed to control a constant situation, as in routine movement. Movement that is significant for growth implies a change of movement in response to a new stimulus or situation. Change of movement of this type is called mobility. Movement of the nature of routine finds its typical expression in work. Change of movement, or mobility, is characteristically expressed in adventure. ”

“ We were on a bus whose "route" terminated some five miles from home, which we proposed to reach by a tram, and, the hour being late, it was our chances of catching a car that were worrying Mary.
"Never get flurried," I went on. "If people would only go ahead calmly and steadily.... What causes half our traffic congestion? Flurry. What makes it so difficult to move quickly in the streets? Flurry. What is it clogs the wheels of progress everywhere?" ”

“ In considering the power of traction or impulsion necessary to move a body, whether on a canal or on a road. I must carefully distinguish that force which is requisite to put the body from a state of rest into a state of motion, from that which is requisite to sustain the motion when once imparted to it. ”

“ Conversely, nothing is more dismal than to see set in permanent rigidness a thing whose aspect is linked for us with the idea of great mobility. Even the blithest of us and least easily depressed would make a long detour to avoid a stuffed squirrel or a case of pinned butterflies. And you can well imagine with what a sinking of the heart I beheld, this morning, on a road near the coast of Norfolk, a railway-car without wheels. ”

“ The Main Line commuters, it is true, seem to stroll trainward like a breed apart, with an air of leisurely conquest and assurance. They have the bearing of veterans who have conquered the devils of transportation and hold them in leash. ”

“ To do this, let us imagine a railway carriage, full of passengers, to be whirling along at a great speed, its occupants quietly at ease, because, although they are in rapid motion, they are all moving at the same rate and in the same direction. ”

“ Were other means lacking, the progress of the human race might be pretty accurately gauged by its modes of locomotion. On such a basis of classification there might be a pedestrian period, a pilgrim period, a saddle period, a road-wain period, a stage-coach period, and a railway period. ”

“ But when a carriage is drawn or impelled along a hard and level road, the motion which it receives from the first impulse would continue undiminished for a short time, if the road and the faces of the wheels were perfectly smooth, and no resistance of the air. ”

“ This style of locomotion rather startles you at first, not only on account of its novelty, but also by reason of the indifferent equilibrium you are able to maintain. Jostled over the pavement, threatened every moment to see yourself projected into space, at a tangent, you involuntarily grasp the nickel handle which is there for that purpose, just as a tyro horseman instinctively clutches the mane of his steed. ”

“ The road may be rough, roundabout, and steep, without precluding wholesome and hearty happiness; but if one wheel drags while the other turns, if one goes back while the other goes forward, if for any reason the two do not move by parallel lines in the same direction, the whole carriage is bewitched, the whole journey is embittered, the whole object is baffled. ”

“ So often, in modern life, the climacteric seconds came between the momentary stopping and the starting of a locomotive—the meetings and partings, the joys and heart-aches, the hopes and tears, the awakenings and regrets! ”

“ The seasoned commuter, by long and arduous practice, eliminates these errors; but we, who go to New York but once in a week or so, are unskilled in early morning hustles, and generally see the tail-end of the express disappearing in the cutting. ”

“ If we observe two men endeavouring to move a railway carriage upon the line, we shall notice that they do not at the first exert all their strength in one powerful, and what would probably prove exhaustive and futile, effort, but placing their backs against the carriage, they will push with a continuous and gradually increasing effort for several seconds, or even longer, when a slight movement will be perceived in the carriage, [149] and a slight additional exercise of force will set it in motion. ”

“ As an able chauffeur, the master of a good machine, and the ex-leader of the Lincoln Highway procession for a certain distance, how was a man like Speed to take a rebuff like this? Why, as all good and true chauffeurs should, by increasing his own speed and trailing them so close and making such a row that they would have to give way. ”

“ The fatal spell of lethargy and exclusiveness seems to be laid upon everything and everybody:—the very carriages and public conveyances (at least a large portion) are redolent of the past century, and all idea of locomotion is put to flight at the sight of them ”

“ But the formation of a perfectly smooth road, and of perfectly smooth wheels to move on that road, is impracticable in this country. The surface of the road and the surface of the wheels, whatever is their materials, or with whatever care they may be constructed, will be covered with asperities; which will obstruct the motion of the carriage in proportion to their number and magnitude, and in proportion to the weight with which the carriage presses upon them. ”

“ By contrast, have you ever seen an ad for public transit showing people zooming to work in a modern transit train, while they were snoozing, chatting or reading the newspaper, and racing ahead of a parallel highway clogged with trucks, vans and cars moving in slow motion? ”

“ As we slowed instantly, to avoid a collision that would annihilate us and all our mass, they swept the end of their longer line around the rear of our own, and thus in the next instant were forming a complete circle around our cities. ”

“ If at a less distance still, no inconvenience will result; for when either of them takes over an obstacle in the road, it instantly, and during the need, discharges its respective active wheel from the ground, and works in its stead. ”

“ This is the daily glory of this conductor, as he stands, watch in one hand, the other hand on the signal cord, waiting for Time to catch up with him. "Some train," we cry up at him; he tries not to look pleased, but he is a happy man. Then he pulls the cord and glides away.
Among other articulations in the anatomy of commuting, we mention the fact that no good trainman ever speaks of a train going or stopping anywhere. He says, "This train makes Sea Cliff and Glen Cove; it don't make Salamis." ”

“ If we ride in a well-appointed carriage with good springs, upon a railway which is in excellent order, the movement is almost imperceptible to us; and the rate - 286 - of speed may be increased indefinitely, without making itself apparent to our senses. ”

“ No pretext of convenience in locomotion, whether by horseback, rail, steamer, velocipede, or mangle, can rub out of our preference the lines which trace the reserve that protects our youthful dream. And how can this being, only half suggested yet clearly not ourselves, put a scrawl of crudity in place of those fluent curves that describe something less angular than we are? ”

“ You see the conductor glance at his watch as he gives the engineer the starting-signal. You realize that the whole transportation system is merely an enormous piece of clockwork and that it, in turn, is a part of the vaster clockwork of modern civilization. ”

“ All nations are being chained together by iron roads or lines of swift steamers, and everybody travels. Locomotion is the order of the day, a sign of the times, and electricity is the great factor that has brought it about. ”