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Nick Paumgarten's piece in this week's New Yorker, "There and Back Again," is about commuting. A few pages in, we're told just where the term "commute" comes from.
The term “commute” derives from its original meaning of “to change to another less severe.” In the eighteen-forties, the men who rode the railways each day from newly established suburbs to work in the cities did so at a reduced rate. The railroad, in other words, commuted their fares, in exchange for reliable ridership (as it still does, if you consider the monthly pass). In time, the commuted became commuters.
Mr Paumgarten then asks if there exists the "perfect commute." As it turns out, I grew up in his answer:
Is there a perfect commute? Many citizens of Bronxville, a small, exclusive, affluent, mostly white enclave that is as close as a town can be to New York City without being part of it, would nominate theirs. A place like this could not exist, of course, without a daily influx of labor from neighboring towns. (“Every Bronxville needs its Yonkers,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson told me.) The Bronxville commute—twenty-eight minutes from Grand Central Terminal—is a well-oiled one, and it has its proud and cagey veterans, some of them whose fathers made the same commute, back when men wore hats. Many people still walk to the train station, timing their arrival on the platform to coincide with the opening of the train’s doors. And many walk through tunnels from Grand Central to their office buildings; they hardly ever see the street.
As soon as he could afford to do so - I was still a little boy - my father abandoned the train and drove down to lower Manhattan every day, parking somewhere near (or perhaps upon) what would later be the World Trade Center site. Every so often, I'd catch a ride with him, because my summer jobs (which he had arranged) were all near his office at Chase Manhattan Plaza. The drive usually took ninety minutes. Bronxville, for the record, is situated sixteen miles north of Times Square, and therefore about twenty miles from Wall Street. Ninety minutes, rain or shine. In the Sixties.
By then, Dad was driving a Lincoln Continental. WNEW came up on the AM radio the moment the engine turned over, and likely as not there would be the mellifluous voice of William B Williams announcing the sequence of grown-up popular songs that were not yet widely known as comprising the American Song Book. Dad heard the music but he didn't really listen to it. It served as a kind of lullaby, wafting him into a narcotic state of semi-conscious contentment in which all that was required was a certain attentiveness to brake lights. He didn't mind the stop-and-start traffic at all. Sometimes, his mood was disturbed by a situation at the office, but this was uncommon.
Although I know a number of people who claim to put their commutes to good use by listening to audiobooks, I don't think that many people share my father's mild commuting pleasure. Mr Paumgarten's article suggests that most commuting workers live in a state of peonage. They don't really have a choice - or they don't think they do. Living close to work is difficult in recently built-up cities such as Houston, where the sprawl begins at the edge of a compact downtown area and stretches for miles in every direction. (Harris County, which is not the whole story, is a hair less than a third the size of the State of Connecticut.) The closer to downtown and other centers you get, the more expensive decent housing generally becomes. People in the lower rungs of the middle class get stuck with relative expensive commutes, which is pretty tough, given that these are the same people who are most likely to drive less-than-reliable automobiles.
To my mind, lengthy commuting is an inevitable byproduct of poorly thought-out (and underfinanced) expressions of the American dream. There is the house on a plot of hopefully verdant land. That's one. Then there's the solitary commuter, driving alone in his car. That's two, but it's really the same thing as the house on the plot of land. Americans like, or think they like, to keep their distance. They give each other much more space when standing, say, in a group, than do people elsewhere, and their homes are as remote as possible from other homes. Living in apartments is something that you do before you get married or have children. Then you take your family off to your castle. Here comes the crazy part. The castle is perforated by doors and windows on all sides, and exposed to view from at least one direction (the front). Trying to reconcile ostentation with privacy, Americans wind up living in the backs of their houses, from which they can't see what's going on in the neighborhood.
Some day, if nothing else does it first, the price of oil is going to put an end to all of this. From a green perspective, American arrangements are wrongheaded, and perhaps even immoral, from the ground up. There are no good reasons for lengthy commutes, only the servicing of various fetishes to explain them.
One of these spring or summer nights - assuming that she can leave the office at a reasonable hour - Kathleen will walk home from work. Her commute stretches for about forty city blocks. She's looking forward to some warmer weather. But then so are wel all.
Copyright (c) 2007 Pourover Press