Silicon States by Lucie Greene

Author:Lucie Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

The Way We Move

Violet light bathes the sidewalks of Eighth Avenue at 6 a.m. as Manhattan stirs awake. Neon coffee shop, BBQ, and diner signs are flickering to life. A hunched army of commuters exit taxis, slamming doors with laptop bags forcefully lop-siding their gaits as they trudge to the illuminated escalator, descending into the heart of Penn Station. Is there anything worse than Penn Station at dawn? A line starts outside Dunkin’ Donuts as workers hustle to assemble chemical-laden carbs and warm caffeine stimulants. Penn Station’s gourmet options, much like its interior, are stuck in a time warp. Climb aboard the Acela express to Washington, DC and customers are delivered at high speed to the grander Union Station, via bridge and swamps, for the immodest fee of around $200. The unfortunates who cannot afford this joy are faced with the bus—lurching along the freeway for several hours longer, pulling into random parking lots along the way. To be dropped at unsavory points often at a time barely resembling the scheduled arrival at their destination.

America doesn’t have the exclusive on awful travel experiences. London’s District Line for a long time delivered some of my most favorite horror stories—an hour of being forcibly Gecko-shaped against condensation-covered windows, rattling from West London to groovy Shoreditch for around ten dollars per day—compare that to New York’s $2.75/ride subway. Trying to get onto the train at Clapham Junction, or the Northern Line in Clapham, the south London commuter belt during rush hour, is like a human game show. People actually jump against walls of human flesh, attempting to fit within crevices between bodies to make it onto coaches. And that seems tame by Tokyo standards where people are willingly shoved onto crowded trains as a matter of custom.

And that’s just the things on rails.

Somewhere along the way transportation got pretty awful. There was some innovation. Trains got faster. Planes got charging cords and individual entertainment stations. And in the Nordics, people luxuriate in clean, fast, efficident train systems. But the modes themselves largely stayed the same. (OK, if you travel on a Middle Eastern airline you can have a private four-poster bed with a hot tub, butler, and personal gym. But the rudimentaries are still there. It will still take fifteen hours to get from Dubai to New York.) Nothing, in other words, is reinventing what transport is.

An elaborately tiered system of domestic air travel has developed in the U.S., commodifying all aspects of comfort, space, or preferable location, and of course this is not unique to America alone. (Oxygen could be a five-dollar offering of the future. Meantime, anything other than the back-row aisle seat, toilet-line central, has an additional price tag.) That’s if you can get to the airport. In many cities you’ll need to pony up for a taxi or a bus ticket.

Cars, then, remain one of the easiest ways to get about, but they can be costly once gas, insurance, parking, and repairs are factored in—not forgetting the expenses and impracticalities of owning a car in urban centers.

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