Slip N' Slide

A canopy of umbrellas shields the concrete jungle from a rainy day.  Each falling drop joins the groundwater army collectively turning the walking commute into an escape from the temple of doom.  Puddles can be an inch or a foot deep but only hindsight can make that destinction.  Tidal waves rush over curbs and into your shoes leaving you yearning for fresh socks.  You curse the wind as it furiously blows the flying water under your umbrella and straight onto your once dry pants. 

Game Over

Grasshoppers have the incredible ability to fly in swarms of thousands separated by mere micrometers without ever colliding.  This ability is so evolved that companies are studying grasshoppers in an effort to develop the next generation driverless car.  Humans do not posses this talent.  We walk around bumping into things all day, especially in the freewheeling flurry of the morning commute. 

Riding Backwards

In the battle between quality and quantity public transportation has always leaned much closer to quantity.  That isn’t to say that the new trains, buses, or subways that get rolled out every so often aren’t an improvement but in their attempts to accommodate the ever-increasing commuter crowd certain sacrifices must be made.  As a result, seats are sometimes installed in slightly inelegant positions.

Commuting in the Dark

It’s been a long day and you’re catching a ride home way later than usual.  You know what lies ahead.  You are about to cross into the illusory world of the night commute.

The Working Commute

Sometimes work just isn’t done at work.  There can be any number of reasons why but they all lead to the same result, a commute spent huddled over your laptop racing to complete that all-important PowerPoint presentation before your 9:30 meeting with the team from Hu & Kares.  The working commute is the Australia of the office drone's world, everything around can and will kill you(‘re presentation) if you don't tread lightly.

Standing Room Only: The Plight of the Aisle Dweller

Like a dog circling a couch to find the right position commuters will often traverse the length of an entire train to find the right seat.  Often a group of unlucky riders, the aisle dwellers, are forced to come to the conclusion that they won’t be finding one.  Sometimes, though, one lone aisle dweller refuses his destitute fate and rises up, a champion. 

The Sermon on the Train

It was 8:45 p.m. on a hot summer Friday; no one was going to fault the man for indulging in a nice cold adult beverage on the ride home from a long day at the office.  It was the unrelenting sermon, that seemed to grow louder and more audacious with each gulp, which drew the unified ire of the night commute crowd. 

The Connection

For many of us the commute is never as simple as go to station, get on train/bus, sit down, arrive at destination.  No, for many of us the commute involves a walk, a bus, a train, another train, and another walk, or some variation of the like.  The commuting veteran knows that the key to any multi-stage commute is timing those connections.  Most of this is done beforehand but of course there are times when some last second adjustments have to be made.

The Time Traveller's Purgatory

There is no time on the commute.  The entire concept vanishes for the hour or two that you’re stuck in that big metal box on wheels or rails or whatever; you begin to think in terms of the schedules.  The second I hop onto a 6:17 train it is already 7:41 in my mind.  That hour and twenty-four minutes vanish instantly into the abyss of the commute. The promise of reaching your destination, though, is sometimes shattered by an unexpected squeal from the breaks, a light flickering above, or the ominous beep of the PA turning on and this box quickly becomes purgatory on Earth.  Then there are the times when all three happen at once and this purgatory becomes your inescapable reality. 

Switch Problems

There is only one thing that crosses my mind when I finally get to the train station on my merry way home only to be met by an unusually dense sea of stoic heads pointed unwaveringly towards the track announcements… switch problems.  Days like these are bad enough but sometimes the issue isn’t revealed until it’s too late.

The Silenced Cellphone

Solidarity is fairly unique in that it can establish a bond within a group of seemingly unrelated people.  The commuter experience offers a taste of solidarity just like a movie trailer offers you a taste of a good movie. It groups a bunch of people together, under the same circumstances, with essentially the same goal; to get to where they need to be when they need to be there in the least unpleasant way possible.