Commuting

“ Functional integration, like homogeneity, may derive from a single factor or from a group of related factors. Various quantitative measures such as statistics on commuting, traffic flow, trading patterns, and communications, often point to the functional cohesiveness of a particular type of geographic area. Because sources of these data generally involve looking at relationships among smaller entities, statistical entities based on functional integration often are more extensive in size than those based on homogeneity. ”

“ The development of urban transportation from 1960 to 1970 was marked by a 28-percent increase in municipal highway mileage.
Despite the stepped-up population movement to the suburbs that occurred in the postwar period, the cen-tral cities of the larger metropolitan areas were still considered to be the focal points of the local transportation network, and growing commuting and other traffic was expected to pour more and more vehicles into these areas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Scores of cabs and carriages went by, eastward and westward, but no carts or wains or lorries, such as one sees in London or Glasgow—vehicles with bright lamps and well muffled occupants, gentlemen in evening suits, and ladies in ball or dinner dresses, and crowds of pedestrians, under the brilliant gas lights and long boulevard-like lines of trees—the ever-changing human panorama of a great city street before midnight. ”

“ There is no way of travelling like this, in an open carriage; it is so placid; there is no hurrying to catch trains and struggling in crowds, no waiting in dismal salles d’attente. And then compare the entry into the towns by the high road and through the principal streets, perhaps through a city gate, the horse’s hoofs clattering and the whip cracking so merrily and the people standing about in groups watching us pass, to sneaking into a station, one of which is just like the other, which hasn’t the slightest couleur locale about it, and is sure to have unsightly surroundings. ”

“ Start out in the morning, number your every minute’s occupation, watch what your neighbors are doing. The man on the stairs, the wagon on the street, the rumbling subway train in a three million dollar a mile right of way, the elevator in the skyscraper, the office boy at beck and call—it is all transportation. Run over in your mind the work of the office and brain workers in a city business section, how many of them are engaging in planning, directing and accounting the various forms of transportation. ”

“ Getting into a cab, with my very democratic luggage safely rescued from the vans, and forcing an exit through vehicles of all ranks, from the dog-cart up to the lumbering coach, with footman behind, and my lord inside, I emerge at length into London streets from the Euston Square Station, and begin to make my way towards the focus of the world. How mechanically I jog along, just as if I had lived here all my life, and without the least conformity to the fact that my pulse is quickening, and mine eye straining to realize a long ideal, which in a few minutes will be substantial fact! ”

“ Cabs, hackney-coaches, ‘shay’ carts, coal-waggons, stages, omnibuses, sociables, gigs, donkey-chaises—all crammed with people (for the question never is, what the horse can draw, but what the vehicle will hold) , roll along at their utmost speed; the dust flies in clouds, ginger-beer corks go off in volleys, the balcony of every public-house is crowded with people, smoking and drinking, half the private houses are turned into tea-shops, fiddles are in great request, every little fruit-shop displays its stall of gilt gingerbread and penny toys; turnpike men are in despair ”

“ When the Commuter slams his desk shut at the close of a busy day, he is fully aware that he is a superior being. Other mortals condemned to hard labor in the city may squeeze within the ill-ventilated confines of trolley-car, elevated or subway train, may find their way to stuffy apartments, which, if their fronts were to be suddenly removed, would look for all the world like shoe-boxes stuck tier upon tier in a shop. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Around him all is quiet; the few shops are closed; an occasional pedestrian passes, his coat-collar drawn up over his ears, and humming some café-chantant air, or a carriage with coach-lamps sparkles along the middle of the street like a huge firefly. ”

“ All very pleasant except when the cogs in the cable slip, and you become part and parcel of a promiscuous mix-up, all passengers tumbling over and on to each other into the front end of the car, and if you are at the bottom of the struggling heap, with your nose banged against the door, and suffocating fat parties wedged on top of you, this rapid transit slide is not quite so delightful as when you ride on the top of the crowd. ”

“ People traverse it, not with the object of arriving at any particular destination, but for the delight of the road itself, of the joy it gives to the eye and to the imagination. Its only traffic is what the transport agent would call “holiday traffic”; for when the idle season ends the highway is deserted. In earlier days there would rumble along the road the carriage and four of the traveller of great means; then came the humbler vehicle hired from the town; then the sleek motor; and finally, as a sign of democratic progress, the char-à-banc, the omnibus, and the motor-brake. ”

“ Many people living at the present time, who have grown up amidst the exceptional and possibly very transient characteristics of this time, will be disposed to regard the traffic in the streets of our great cities as a part of the natural order of things, and as unavoidable as the throng upon the pavement. But indeed the presence of all the chief constituents of this vehicular torrent—the cabs and hansoms, the vans, the omnibuses—everything indeed except the few private carriages—are as novel, as distinctively things of the nineteenth century, as the railway train and the needle telegraph. ”

“ We, in our day, [183] have been spoilt, by, almost suddenly, having had a road traffic thrown open to us, which renders every village in our Isles, of comparatively easy access, so that we are apt to look with disfavour on the old times. Seated, or lying, in the luxurious ease of a Pullman car—going at sixty miles an hour—it is hard to realize a tedious journey by waggon, or even an outside journey by the swifter, yet slow, mail or stage coach, with its many stoppages, and its not altogether pleasant adventures. ”

“ 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? ”

“ We like his confident air toward life, though he is still a little too jocular to be a typical commuter.
But the commuter, though simple and anxious to be pleased, is shrewdly alert. Every now and then they shuffle the trains at Jamaica just to keep him guessing and sharpen his faculty of judging whether this train goes to Brooklyn or Penn Station. His decisions have to be made rapidly. We are speaking now of Long Island commuters, whom we know best; but commuters are the same wherever you find them. ”

“ Shut carriages, open carriages, motors of different sizes and makes, dog-carts, pony carriages, governess carts—on they came, one after another, stirring up the dust of the road till the air seemed full of a powdery mist, through which unhappy pedestrians ploughed along in the shadow of the hedgerows, their skirts held high in white-gloved hands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have frequently stood on this and other avenues for one half-hour waiting for an omnibus to stop: they pay no attention to the flourishing of an umbrella. Finally, wishing to reach some remote district, you call a carriage to your assistance out of the thousands anxiously waiting the job, when every cab-driver for squares starts after you, and you can imagine yourself added to the long list of unclaimed dead, who, I imagine, receive about as much attention as one of the many horses you see lying dead during a short ride. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Unused to refinements of any kind, my poor driver knew no want beyond what the simplest accommodation might remove, while I had already learned that I was not travelling on a bowling-green, and that I was travelling in a carriage without springs.
As I approached the high-way, I began to feel something like a sense of shame creeping over me while I contemplated the possibility of meeting any one in my own condition of life. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Then there is the crowded traffic of the streets, which renders all locomotion impossible, and keeps you sitting, angry and fuming, in a cab, when it may be you are hurrying off to save a bill from being dishonoured, to keep an appointment with a rich aunt or uncle from whom you have great expectations, to have a last fond look at someone whom you dearly love. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the elevated railroads of New York a passenger can ride in a first-class car eleven miles for 5 cents, or about one-half cent a mile, and on surface-roads the commutation rates given to suburban passengers are in some cases still less. ”

“ As for going downtown on foot, or even over to Cousin Mary's on Ninety-sixth—well, what does a person have a car for anyway?
On Sundays, holidays and election days, instead of ferrying over to the Palisades and walking ten miles or less, as we used to before we could afford not to, we got out the bus and crowded our way into the procession which packed the main road to the most expensive roadhouse, and having eaten thereat we would climb back into the car and take an hour's healthy exercise riding over the bumps of the state highway. ”

“ Under the combined influences of fast trains, corridor carriages, dining, luncheon and sleeping cars and cheap fares, whether for day excursions, short-date or long-date periods, tours at home or abroad, or any other of the various combinations for which facilities are offered, the making of pleasure trips has entered so thoroughly into the habits and customs of all grades of society that the social and domestic conditions of to-day offer a complete contrast from those that prevailed in the pre-railway period. ”

“ There would still remain the difficulty of locomotion in the central districts, but with proper enterprise, organisation, and control, this difficulty is not insuperable. In a few years we shall look back with wonder and pity to the days when the infrequent 'bus, the slow and tedious horse-tram, and the exorbitant cab were the means of locomotion in which a city of six million people put its trust. ”

“ 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?" ”