John McCloskey of the blog More, Better Lies took a bus trip from New York City to Springfield recently. In a post describing the experience, he says that he’s getting good at traveling by bus, which he describes as successfully projecting "enough bad vibes that no one chooses to sit next to me, but not so much that my aura of hostility provokes an open conflict." On this journey, however, the empty seat next to him ended up getting taken. From the post:
He came lumbering down the aisle, an Ignatius Reilly type, replete with the hunter’s cap and lunch crumbs on his coat. He clutched a plastic Hudson News bag full of papers, magazines and paperback books.
I looked up and saw him coming, then put my head down into my book. I tried to push out as much ill will as I could. My temples throbbed with anti-social energy.
There were other empty seats on the bus, both ahead of me and behind me. When he stood in the aisle alongside my seat and asked me to move my bag I did what everyone would do. I pretended not to hear him.
In their ensuing conversation, the unwelcome man tried to capture what it can be like hunting for a seat on the bus:
"Getting on the bus is like looking for a place to sit at lunch in junior high. You know, you look around the cafeteria and none of your friends are there. So you wander with your tray and your little plastic cup of apple crisp and all you really want to do is find a place to sit so you can eat it first. After all, your mom isn’t there but no one really wants you to sit with them, and you get kinda sad and mad at the same time, until finally you just sit down. That’s what riding the bus is like."
"I guess that’s why most people drive their own cars these days."
Speaking of people driving their own cars more these days, the Hudson Valley‘s Times Herald-Record published an article yesterday briefly chronicling the toll commuting takes on "families, communities and happiness." So why commute long distances? Anecdotes point to affordability. From the article:
Talk to any of the thousands of local commuters, and the answers are always the same.
"There’s really no place to work here," says Warwick‘s Kathy Granger, who rides the train four hours to and from her job at the New York School of Medicine in Manhattan. In New York City, the average salary of $52,190 is nearly $8,000 more than in our region.
Jay Anthony of Scotchtown, who drives 62 miles to his job in Whippany, NJ, says that when he moved here in 1983, a condo in New Jersey cost $175,000. His Orange County home cost $120,000.
"And every mile you drive north of the city, a home costs $3,000 less," says DiTullo.
