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Monthly Archives: January 2012

Travel Blind

A few years ago, before I had an iPhone, some people stopped me while I was walking to the train and asked me how to get to Skillman Ave. I looked around, uncertain, then shrugged apologetically and told them I couldn’t help them.

On the way home that day, I happened to glance up at the street signs and found Skillman Ave. It was exactly one block from where I’d had this morning encounter. I had crossed it thirty seconds before saying I didn’t know where it was. In fact, I’d crossed it twice a day for two years.

I bring this up because there’s a school of thought that suggests my familiarity with my route should make me sensitive to any change, but in truth, I never get that familiar with any of my routes. In a new route, I usually navigate by address the first time, then by landmark, but within a week, I’m going by muscle memory. The landmarks I no longer need are the only things that still grab my attention, since the repetitive locating I did the first week burned various mantras in my head like “turn at the church” and “bear right at the gas station.” Everything else in those first few walks was categorized as “not the church” and “not the gas station.” Once I know a route, I switch on autopilot and spend the walk thinking about coffee and what to do once I get out of work.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that I don’t notice things like buildings going up or falling down along my route. Unless something actively blocks my path or makes enough noise to annoy me, I’m either checking for traffic or not really there at all.

I’m not even sure if the gas station is Sunoco or Shell. Damned if I know the denomination of the church.

Night and Day

It took me a while to realize it, but there’s no substantive difference between my commutes to and from work. Roughly the same number of people at each station, roughly the same chance of subway catastrophes, and the dour half-awake expressions of pre- and mid-coffee morning travelers are difficult to distinguish from the exhausted and drained slouches of the evening passengers. The evidence of ego seems as crushed by semi-consciousness as it is by a fully realized work day.

The slight, cosmetic differences are seasonal. The end of day subway exodus in the summer is the moment the pace of the day finally slows. In the winter, its cold and dark, so this doesn’t happen until people get to their homes and bars. The environmental oppression is roughly equal between seasons; the exhaustion caused by hurrying through the cold creates the same physical muting as the in-tunnel summer heat that simply robs you of the ability to move.

My exit point in Brooklyn involves crossing a street with a four-minute long light. Most of the time, we all cluster at the corner and peer down the streets, hoping for the rare break in traffic during the endless Don’t Walk light. We look past each other in much the way we walked past each other ten hours earlier, when we weren’t ready to communicate, now not bothering because we have nothing left to say.

The Departure Paradox

When I fly, I try to schedule a departure at the airport as early as possible. Planes leaving at six or seven in the morning tend to be less crowded, and leave on time, because the delays and problems haven’t had time to stack up, and the kind of people who schedule early flights are also the kind of people who get there on time, so on a lucky day you can even leave early.

The L train at rush hour displays similar behavior, which I had forgotten until this morning. For no apparent reason, I was wide awake at 6:30. After making coffee and watching The Daily Show for a bit, I headed to the train with every intention of making it to work by 8:45. I had two things going for me: I was leaving an hour earlier than usual, and I can combine the hat I recently bought with my hoodie and my shades to do a passable impression of popular image of a gang thug, so people get out of my way more quickly.

The Departure Paradox states that if you commute at the particular point on a subway line where the trains can no longer absorb the rush hour traffic, it does not matter what time you leave during the hour of the rush. In my particular case, the rush hour is between 8:15 and 9:15, and if I exit my apartment door during this time, I will arrive at a random time between 9:30 and 9:45 regardless of when I leave.

Once the traffic volume reaches critical density, problems start piling up. A train is no good to you if you can’t get on it, but frustrated commuters will try anyway, thus delaying the trains, thus creating more trains with too many people, etc. As the trains get fuller, probability demands that someone will have a medical emergency as often as not and pass out at a major station. Delays multiply and feedback and a twenty-minute train ride rapidly, so to speak, becomes an hour long. This process is already in full swing by 8:30, and slowly winds down, ending by 9:30, so the later during the rush hour you leave, the shorter your trip is likely to be.

Today, the L train made it to the river, then turned back due to a sick passenger three stations into Manhattan. I gave up and worked from home, on the grounds that if a 400 ton train couldn’t make it across the river, I wasn’t going to either.

Obits

If I died this morning in the manner I suspected I might, this is what my obituary would say:

Peter Welch was killed by a bacon delivery truck while crossing Hester street in Chinatown. He died as he lived.

Groundhog Commuting

Wherever a new job lies, the habitual commute emerges quickly and is fairly immutable. There is nearly always a fastest route, and barring construction, dead trains, or desperation for variety, there’s no reason to change it. Given two or more paths nearly equal in length, I switch between them, but even that switching will start to take on a predictable pattern.

When walking through Manhattan, the regularity of the experience can be shocking. Previously, when leaving from my girlfriend’s apartment, I would get my coffee, smoke my cigarette, walk down to Grand, turn right, cross Forsyth, turn left at Chrystie and walk next to the park, then right at Hester, after which it was a straight shot to Baxter.

Unfortunately, I always ended up having to wait for a light when crossing Chrystie at Hester, which meant always having to wait for a light at Bowery, and those are both long, cold lights this time of year. The Keep Moving Principle is important to optimizing a commute, so this bothered me. I eventually noticed that every time I got to Chrystie, the light was about to change in my favor decided to risk the nasty stretch of Grand between Chrystie and Bowery in the hopes that it would get me to Bowery in time. Unfortunately, the stretch is bad enough that it’s always about five seconds too slow to make the very short light on the other side.

Still, that put me in the game on the long block between Grand and Hester. This block is pretty clear, except for one guy handing out restaurant flyers approximately 30 feet south of the Grand and Bowery corner, and I walk pretty fast, but there isn’t quite enough time to make it the whole length of the block before the lights cycle back to the long wait. However, since traffic is pretty clear, when the light turns in my favor, I can cross about 35 feet before the actual crosswalk and weave through the stopped cars on the far side, thus traversing the Chrystie/Bowery portion without stopping.

To summarize: wait 5 to 10 seconds at Grand and Chrystie. 40 seconds down Grand, turn left, pass the flyer guy at 30 feet on the right, cross 35 feet before the crosswalk.

Every. Single. Time.

And it will be exactly like that until someone changes the timing on the lights or the weather warms up and slows everybody down. Though today a guy crossed the sidewalk in front of me with a freshly butchered pig over his shoulder, so that was new.

Waiting

There’s no better example of existential futility than waiting for public transportation. There’s little anger on the subway platform during a long wait, because there’s nothing to be angry at. Even a bus has a visible driver who can receive an angry glance; a train might have a head sticking out of a window, but probably not the head responsible for navigation. There’s just an anonymous tube that may or may not show up at any minute. Until it does show up, there’s nothing you can do.

At one point during my first regular commute requiring public transport, at UMass, I caught myself and my fellow commuters craning our necks to see another two feet into the distance, looking for the bus, and I suddenly wondered why we bothered. It was never going to make the bus come faster. At first I thought it was like sports fans believing they were contributing to the game through a TV, but the truth is people just want to see the headlights at the soonest possible moment, because the thought that this time it will never come is the creeping dread the ego must disprove.

Once I realized this, I tried to be Zen about it. I stopped looking, turned up my headphones, and read a book, not noticing the approach of the bus until it was there. Now, craning to look down the subway tunnels is pointless anyway, because in the train stations I frequent, you feel the breeze from the oncoming train before any other sensory evidence.

But something about being underground makes it worse. The idea that a train may never come is sister to the fear that everything you can’t see might not be there, and there’s not much to see in a subway station. After half an hour, the thought begins to tug in the basement of the brain: maybe this is all there is. A walkway filled with strangers, next to a tunnel leading into darkness in both directions. Darkness that may or may not contain trains.

» Similar story

Dodgy Tactics

A couple of near misses this morning made me think about how we navigate oncoming foot traffic.

My ten-cent theory for the last couple of years has been that people take cues from other people’s eyes to determine which way they’re going to veer to circumvent a given human obstacle. This led me to believe there would be more awkward shuffling as people double-guessed each other’s path in the summer, because everyone’s wearing shades and you can’t tell where people are looking. Observational data collection for this aspect of the theory will have to wait for a few months.

The mechanics are a bit more complex: two people are looking where they are going. They are primarily scanning for openings, and calculating the velocities of people converging on the openings. When a collision is imminent, person A scans the head of person B to see where its scanning. B is generally scanning over one shoulder or the other of A, so A goes in the opposite direction to the best of their ability. This process short circuits if A and B scan each other at the same time, because they’ll both be waiting for a cue. As they get closer, a sharp turn of the head will signal the other, and they’ll diverge. Sometimes this need to be a full body gesture, and sometimes a Hail Mary dodge is necessary. If all this fails, or competing Hail Marys collide, you’re reduced to the stop and shuffle.

This morning, my subject B went with a full body gesture and brought this all to mind, so I watched the rest of the pedestrians on my commute, trying to see how often this theory held up.

A keen reader will note the basic fallacy of my first assumption. Most people just aren’t watching where they are going. Much of my commuting experience comes from midtown, a virtual wasteland of any human-oriented community structure. It’s business, food, and terrible bars, with wide and crowded sidewalks, the only purpose of which is to serve people in a hurry. Tactical navigation is the only thing to think about. Chinatown paths are narrow and full of residents and things to buy, so a high percentage of people are street and window shopping.

However, at the points before and after the worst of the market areas, the theory seemed sound: there were subtle but noticeable tilts of the head indicating on which side of me the oncoming traffic intended to pass, and even after checking for traffic at crossings, the head would come back to indicate its intended path.

Still, further research is necessary.

» Future research accessory

Forget it, Jake

Certain rules get dropped in favor of getting around or making a buck in Manhattan. If jaywalkers were vigorously prosecuted, the NYPD would be rich in a day. Reddish-orange light-running is usually kosher as long as you weren’t explicitly trying to kill a Jew. Peddling questionable goods wherever and whenever is usually a safe bet, though directly at odds with the commuting effort.

Chinatown turns this casual lawlessness up to eleven. Walking along the blurry and blurring borders of Little Italy and Chinatown is walking through a narrow bazaar of stacked clothing, buckets of trinkets, and crates of food. It’s hard to tell what’s being loaded into the stores and what’s being sold on the spot. Sometimes it’s being distributed to the street dealers: one crowd of peddlers gathered around a trash bag full of purses had a member whose job it was to fend off interested tourists with shouts of, “No sale! No sale!”

I recognized the shouter from the Starbucks team. She doesn’t work at Starbucks, she works the sidewalk just outside. I assume she and the rest of her team recognize me by now, which is why I don’t hear “watches, rings, watches, rings” muttered quietly in my ear as often as I did when I first started getting coffee there. As far as I can tell, they’re selling approximately the same thing as the blocks of nearly identical stores selling knockoffs or otherwise acquired items, some in the window, some in the rooms you have to ask six or seven times to see.

The confusion caused by the masses of people trying to sell you things on and off the street is roughly doubled by the hosts at the Italian restaurants trying to assure each passing tourist that the restaurant just to the left is the very best Italian restaurant out of the thirty or so that are holding up against the Chinatown onslaught. The only way to navigate or hold a conversation among the turmoil is to create a sensory blind spot and not give any indication that you can see or hear anything that isn’t in the dead center of your vision. It’s also important to do this, since the rules of right-of-way seem to be whoever got there first by not backing down. The roads tend to be 50% sidewalk, and there’s often no way of knowing if that’s because it’s currently safe or if it just happens to be that way because some delivery guys took over a section street, and will at any moment release a stack of angry traffic, or just run you down themselves with an overloaded hand trolley.

It’s Chinatown.

Drizzle

When commuting to work from my girlfriend’s apartment, my morning ritual involves a small cup of extremely expensive coffee from a small coffee place three blocks north of her building. It takes two or three minutes to make, because it’s brewed a cup at a time and because it wouldn’t be a luxury item if it was expedient. Once I have my coffee, I sit on the step of a store a couple of doors down. This store has been under construction or deconstruction for a year or more, so I don’t think anybody minds. This whole process takes about ten minutes, after which I do the ten minute walk from the shop step to my office.

Today, the first ten minutes happened to be the ten minutes the sky took to turn from sunny and clear to gray and beginning to rain.

Actual rain changes the walking dynamic into a scurrying maze of death and hate, but pre-rain drizzle has the less dramatic effect of magnifying preexisting commuter habits. Fast walkers lengthen their strides, opportunists break into dashes more frequently, the lost sheep look a little more lost as they eye the sky. A few people already have umbrellas up. The curb creepers edge closer to death, looking for openings. The people who have to work outside and don’t care about anything continue not to care, but except for them, the pace of the street ratchets up a couple of cranks as everyone tries to shave thirty seconds of the minutes between them and their target door.

Overall, it worked out well for me. The drizzle dispersed the mini-clusters of people looking over stolen or knockoff goods along Hester street, and brought the amblers up to speed walker status. For some reason the lost sheep seemed to have wandered their way into another time frame: one woman took a full thirty seconds to traverse the S-curve she was following in front of a delivery truck trying to make a right turn, and a man who couldn’t have been over five feet tall managed to block an otherwise unobstructed sidewalk with a cane and a single plastic bag. I wondered if this was some kind of obscure martial art.

The only things that become more dangerous in pre-rain conditions are the bicycles. Cyclists already eschew law and order in favor of speed, and when the rain is coming, the space reserved for their sense of superiority is annexed by their already amply housed sense of entitlement. Fortunately, they remain a bigger danger to themselves than anyone else, but it’s important to stay out of the bike lanes.

I got to work with only a light moistening, which I dried off with the my edition of the company shirt somebody ordered without asking anybody what size they wore. The rain stopped two minutes later.

» How I made myself feel better today

456

I’ve ridden a lot of trains at rush hour in NYC. The least crowded was the PATH to Jersey, because I was taking it in reverse, since nobody actually lives in Brooklyn and works in Jersey. I regularly had an entire car to myself. The ads were the best part: one advertised condos in Hoboken by pointing out that if you live on the Jersey waterfront, you get to look at the Manhattan skyline, whereas is you live in Manhattan, you have to look at Jersey. They had a point. Another ad proclaimed, “Have you talked to your kids about drugs? Because their friends are.” The grammatical problems with these two sentences made me grind my teeth for a year.

The exact opposite of this advertising meditation commute was taking the 456 uptown from 14th Street at nine in the morning. I’ve never seen anything like it outside of dystopian-future cinema. A lucky day involved getting down the stairs and making the third train. Often, there was a line just to get to the head of the stairs, and you could spend five minutes on them before you got to the platform below. When there was room for them, MTA officials would move people around and clear entrances with flashlights and shouting. I mentioned the tipping point previously; that was every second on the 456 line once you got close to it.

People snapped on a regular basis. I witnessed the most impotent fight of all time, as two men yelled at each other over the impenetrable press of people between them, unable even to make a threatening gesture because their hands were pinned to their sides. Once when I was working my way to an acceptable spot on the train, I briefly got caught on a woman’s purse. She yanked it away angrily and shouted, “Excuse me is a word!” This is false, but I wasn’t going to correct her in such an unstable environment.

The 456 at 14th is also the loudest of all train stops, reaching 106 decibals, which starts causing hearing damage after 30 seconds. The screeching achieved by every single train is equivalent to having headphones made out of two hungry babies. People who just say, “gimme a second” into their cell phones and don’t blink when multiple ambulances go by still flinch when a slow 6 train pulls into 14th Street.

If you’re not from the city, the 456 is the green line on the subway map. Avoid.