Back in the early 1990s, I wrote a profile of a Rhode Island-based venture capitalist named Arthur D. Little for the now-defunct magazine, New England Business. I knew something about Little before my editor assigned the piece: a long-distance runner, he was a popular figure in the Boston running community, known for his ability to balance the demands of his successful career in the financial world with a healthy, active lifestyle.
After interviewing him, I became fascinated with one particular aspect of his biography. Though his company, Narragansett Capital Corp., was headquartered in Providence, Little, a devoted Bostonian, chose to live in Boston and commute to work.
Unlike other captains of industry of his day, however, Little wasn't the type to make his daily commute in a car—though, no doubt, he could have afforded both a luxury automobile and a chauffeur to drive it. No, Little was a dedicated train man. Early each morning, he set off for work from old North Station, where he returned when the day was done.
Little viewed his daily commute not as a chore, but as a respite from an otherwise busy, often hectic professional and personal life. It gave him a chance to prepare for the day ahead—a voracious reader, he spent much of the time poring over newspapers, magazines and books—and to unwind on the way home. Most of all, the availability of a dependable commuter train allowed him to live in the city he loved, an hour or more from the office, without wasting time or contributing to the pollution of the air that, as a runner, he breathed deeply.
Little wasn't the only person of privilege and position in that era to choose mass transit over the privacy of his own car. Before his failed bid for the presidency, former Gov. Michael Dukakis had endeared himself to many Bay Staters by schlepping to and from work each day on the MBTA's Green Line, which picked him up in Brookline and dropped him a short walk from the Statehouse.
Dukakis didn't earn political points for trying to save the planet from greenhouse gasses—global warming wasn't yet on most people's radar screens—but rather for being unusually down-to-earth, commuting with the proletariat rather than relying on a State Police driver to cart him around in a Crown Victoria with tinted windows. There was something reassuring about a governor who voluntarily experienced some of what some of the rest of us deal with on a daily basis.
If people like Little and Dukakis seemed quaint 20 years ago, they embraced an ethic that thankfully becomes more fashionable with each passing day. Their personal choices in transportation run counter to the impulse—of those days and, arguably, these days—to avoid the company of strangers in favor of privacy, at least the privacy offered within the steel and glass of one's own car. That they chose mass transit not in the spirit of sacrifice but as a desirable alternative to driving hardly diminishes the prescience of that choice.
As a devoted New Englander, I'm increasingly at war with myself as I point my vehicle to wonderful destinations throughout the region, wanting to take advantage of all that's available—Cape Cod, the woods of Maine, the mountains of Vermont, and on and on—while knowing that I'm adding to the pollution of the skies as well as to the congestion choking the region's roadways. How wonderful would it be to be able to get across the state and up into Maine by rail? To be able to leave the car at home and let someone else do the driving?
If our new president is successful in turning on the faucet of government spending to rebuild our nation's infrastructure, I hope New England's share of the money will be spent less on updating highway systems that represent an old and dying approach to transportation and more on systems that can move large numbers of people quickly, safely and energy-efficiently. The car may always have a place among our transportation options, but it shouldn't be our only option.
