CityReads│How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities and Lives?

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How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities and Lives?

The experiences of our daily journeys are transforming life in our cities.

David Bissell, 2018. Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sources: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/transit-life

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-commuting-is-transforming-our-cities

We spend much of our lives in transit to and from work. Although we might dismissour daily commute as a wearying slog, we rarely stop to think about the significance of these daily journeys. In Transit Life, David Bissell explores how everyday life in cities is increasingly defined by commuting. Examining the overlooked events and encounters of the commute, Bissell shows that the material experiences of our daily journeys are transforming life in our cities. The commute is a time where some of the most pressing tensions of contemporary life play out, striking at the heart of such issues as our work-life balance; our relationships with others; our sense of place; and our understanding of who we are.

Drawing on in-depth fieldwork with commuters, journalists, transit advocates, policymakers, and others in Sydney, Australia, Transit Life takes a holistic perspective to change how we think about commuting. Rather than arguing that transport infrastructure investment alone can solve our commuting problems, Bissell explores the more subtle but powerful forms of social change that commuting creates. He examines the complex politics of urban mobility through multiple dimensions, including the competencies that commuters develop overtime; commuting dispositions and the social life of the commute; the multiple temporalities of commuting; the experience of commuting spaces, from footpath to on-ramp, both physical and digital; the voices of commuting, from private rants to drive-time radio; and the interplay of materialities, ideas, advocates, and organizations in commuting infrastructures.

The Commuter's Lament

“Overslept. So tired. If late. Get fired. Why bother? Why the pain? Just go home. Do itagain.”

The Commuter's Lament in the passageway between the Port Authority and Times Square subway stations.

Picture: Wikimedia 

Source:https://wilsoncuttler2.wordpress.com/tag/poem/

These sardonic lines adorn eight low ceiling beams in a dingy underground passageway between the Port Authority and Times Square subway stations in the heart of NewYork City. “The Commuter’s Lament” is an art installation by Norman B. Colp, commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1991.

Far from providing diversion, these lines zero in on the life situation that many commuters striding beneath them find themselves in day after day. Simultaneously mocking and commiserating, the lines evoke a pessimistic senseof the overtired and overworked life of the commuter.

Nobody, it would seem, likes to commute. As one study by psychologist Daniel Kahneman and colleagues found, of all daily activities, commuting was ranked by participants as the least satisfying. The study suggests that commuting is anactivity that many would happily give up in exchange for doing something more pleasurable or rewarding.

But commuting is one of the most significant travel practices of our time. This twice-daily ebb and flow of people is one of the major rhythms of contemporary urban life.

Asurvey in London reported that on average British workers will spend one year and thirty-five days commuting 191,760 miles, or 308,607 kilometres, in their lifetimes. One in five workers in Britain now travels in excess of one hundred kilometers each way, and one in ten spends over two hours a day traveling toand from work. All this travel is not cheap, either; the same survey found that commuters spend an average of £42,000 on travel over their working lives.

Although it might feel like commuting has always been part of urban life, it is are latively recent phenomenon. Before the twentieth century, people in many cities tended to live much closer to their places of work. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, studies looking at commuting in Britain reveal that walking was still the main way that people traveled to and from work, especially outside London. Rewind to the early nineteenth century: People only travelled about fifty meters a day on average.

Then, as industry and commerce expanded and became increasingly centralized incities, demand for workers’ accommodation grew and cities developed outwards.The construction of vast suburban railway networks in many cities in the early twentieth century helped to transport large volumes of people efficiently and relatively cheaply into the city from the new outer suburbs, effectively bringing once-distanced locations closer together.

The origin of the word commute itself heralds from the late nineteenth-century United States’commutation ticket, a reduced price railway season ticket bywhich the price of multiple daily tickets was “commuted” into a single payment. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the car became such a dominant way tocommute in many cities.

Although the amount of time that people spend in transit has remained relatively stable, the distances that people travel and the number of people traveling have both increased. Today, people travel an average of fifty kilometers a day. Now, overhalf a million people arrive in central London every day by train.

In Manila, the average length of time spent commuting every day is currently ninetyminutes. In Bangkok, it is three hours. In India, massive population growth and associated urbanization have swelled the number of people commuting into city centers. Yet transport infrastructure development has only grown at a fraction of the rate of demand.

From Mexico City to Milan, and from Shenzhen to Sydney, transport infrastructures in many large cities around the world are at a breaking point. In Mumbai, for instance, 7.5 million riders travel each day on some of the most overloaded trains in the world. Every day, there are twenty to twenty-five serious accidents and between ten and twelve people are killed. Some stations even employ their own undertakers.

In Mumbai, 7.5 million riders travel each day on some of the most overloaded trains in the world. Picture: Getty Images

From a range of professional perspectives there are many reasons to be concerned about the prevalence of commuting.

For transport professionals, the assumption of conventional transport modeling is that the travel time of the commute is wasted time. This is echoed by economists, for whom the commute is economically unproductive time taken away from the ostensibly productive parts of daily life. Such waste is illustratedin statistics that attempt to calculate the economic price of congestion. For instance, the cumulative financial cost of traffic congestion in the United States by 2030 is estimated to reach $2.8 trillion.

For environmentalists, this mass daily mobility is a problem viewed in terms of the carbon emissions contributing to human-induced climate change, as well as the detrimental localized effects of air pollution on the health of city dwellers.

For public health professionals, commuting means that many people are leading more sedentary lives than before, hemmed into cars or wedged into seats on public transport and thus increasing problems such as back pain and cardiovascular disease.

Thinking commuting differently

But journeys between work and home are a strange, liminal part of our lives. They are curiously suspended between the other activities we undertake at home and work - activities that, for better or worse, give our lives meaning and shape who we are.

However, these journeys are often so deeply routinised that we rarely stop to thinka bout them. The blindingly familiar world of traffic and travel has become sodeeply grooved into the everyday life of cities that it often goes unremarked upon.

The significance of commuting is only likely to increase as processes of urbanization intensify around the world. The urgency of understanding how commuting impactscity life is heightened by the multiple infrastructure, public health, and environmental crises that presently haunt our cities.

Very little, however, is known about how commuting is transforming urban life. How is commuting affecting the social fabric of urban life, striking to the core ofwho we are? Would our lives really be better without commuting? Is commuting just a means to an end? The question of how our everyday journeys are changing our lives over months, years, and lifetimes is one that has yet to be adequately addressed.

All the events that we experience, all the environments that we move through, impress on us and leave their mark. They might increase some capacities while depleting others. Even if we are not conscious of how an event has affected usat the time, we might come to realize, sometimes much later, how forceful that event was.

Think of how being in a specific place can catch us off guard by sparking a memory that might be felt with overwhelming intensity. Our capacities to be affected by things and our capacities for action change through the experiences that wehave.

However, in parallel, our own presence changes the world as well.

Think about how we might have left traces on the people that we travel with and on the environments that we travel through. What we experience becomes part of whowe are — and who we are comes to be part of the environments that we move through.

This has some profound implications for reimagining the significance of our everyday commutes. For many writers, it is the exceptional experiences of travel associated with touring and vacations that are imagined as being transformative. Recall here the life-changing impet us for the Odyssean classical-era Grand Tour around Europe undertaken by the elite youth of theday. Or, when planning a holiday, think of how we might hope that it will transform our being in some way.

The everyday journeys that we make to and from work can be transformative in ways that are different, but no less profound. Rather than passively transporting us, commuting journeys actively change us.

Commutingcan tire, deplete, and cost—but commuting can enliven, excite, and energize. Commutingis differently enabling and constraining—both poison and cure.  For good or for ill, commuting is one of the most significant collective daily movements in the city. It contributes to the distinctive rhythms of urban life.

Organization of  this book

This book is organized as 6 chapters. Chapter 1 explores the skills that might be involved in different ways of commuting. For many people commuting is something that happens on autopilot. Yet beneath the threshold of conscious attention lies a whole series of fine-grained experiential knowledges that commuters develop over time, enabling them to traverse urban transport systems with ease. Skill is therefore a vital but often overlooked dimension of commuting that enables us to appreciate its changeability. The understanding of skill developed in this chapter draws on social theories of habit that can assist us in thinking about how habit is an enabling rather than repressive force, in which skills are transitional and open to change. the concept of skill helps us trace a more transitional politics of commuting in which relations of enablement and constraint change in response to ongoing practices of mobility.

Chapter2 explores the dispositions that emerge through commuting. Commuting creates acomplex social setting, raising a set of important questions about how people relate to and are affected by others in commuting spaces. In exploring the social life of the commute, this chapter spotlights the diversity of social formations that commuting can give rise to and the sorts of dispositions towardothers that these social formations might create. this chapter explores how different intensities of light-touch and forceful events and encounters can change the nature of collectives.

Chapter3 explores the temporalities of commuting. The activity of traveling to and from work involves significant amounts of time, which, when measured by the clock, traditionally has been viewed as wasted and unproductive from an economic perspective. However, this chapter highlights a series of other temporal dynamics in the commute that are often masked by clock time. Drawingon different social theories of temporality, this chapter explores the semultiple temporalities to evaluate how commuting time becomes differently valued.

Chapter4 explores the spaces of commuting. From platforms and footpaths to car parks and bus stops, every commuting journey involves moving through a diverse combination of spaces. However, in contrast with a static understanding of space that would imagine space as an inert playing field that social life unfolds across, this chapter draws on social theories that can help explain how spaces are differently produced and differently affecting. This chapter explores how new digital technologies are potentially transforming the experience of space for some commuters.

Chapter5 explores different ways of voicing the commute. This chapter surveys how various practices of speaking and writing about commuting have different capacities to change the commuting experience. They are an important but overlooked part of how everyday urban mobilities take shape and gain definition. Drawing on social theories of performance and expression, this chapter travels beyond the spaces of the journey itself to explore some of the dispersed sites through which practices of voicing the commute takeplace.

Chapter6 explores how commuter infrastructures emerge. The development of new transport infrastructure is often sorely needed to respond to the growing populations of cities. However, the way that infrastructure comes about is byno means straightforward and is often contingent on a delicate interplay of practices undertaken by different institutions and organizations. This chapter explains that we need to expand our understanding of infrastructure to account for the various materials, ideas, practices, and performances of advocacy that unfold in different ways across the city and that aim to transform commuting experiences. In doing so, and developing social theories of infrastructure, this chapter explains that we need to understand infrastructures as transitional and always in formation.

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