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Category Archives: Principles

The Art of Commute

The principles of commuting comprise an art form like any other. They are general guides to an ongoing process, applicable to the immediate situation as well as the practice as a whole, and to the shaping of a life’s work in the form.

The principle of least effort is the primary primary principle, guiding the commuter to be like water, to be still when possible, and flow quickly and easily around all obstacles when necessary.

The secondary principles are derived from the primary: the principle of shortest path and the principle of minimal friction. Shortest path merely merely directs the commuter to cut all corners and seek the straightest road. Minimal friction dictates avoiding confrontation and collision, and strive to appear as though nothing is in one’s way.

In practicing these principles, the commute shortens and eases. Those of the higher ranks will barely seem to travel. He who truly masters of the art of commuting will not commute at all. Or perhaps, he shall own a helicopter.

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.

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.

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.

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

Contrarians at the Gate

Every day I’ve come home at rush hour for the last seven years, someone has pushed open the emergency exit gate. At first I thought these people were just trying to be cool and contrary, as in, “Yo, cat, I’m a New Yorker, these rules don’t apply to me,” but once my blood turned to coffee and the last of my nerves were shredded and I actually became a New Yorker, I realized it’s for the best. Several hundred people get out at my stop, and stuffing them all through three turnstiles is like getting wet salt through the crusted holes in a Applebee’s shaker. Another hole can’t hurt.

Though I often go through the opened gate, I never open it, as that would violate the principle of least effort I apply to all my commuting. It takes slightly more effort to open the gate than to push a turnstile, and no effort at all to walk through an open gate, so strict application of this principle dictates always walking through an open gate, and always opting for the turnstile if nobody else has opened it. It also sets off a really fucking annoying alarm that I could live without.

Recently, however, I’ve been going for the turnstile even if the gate is open. Most people shoot for the gate, because the gate tends to be a faster exit, and this is in line with the equally important principle of fastest commute. But at a critical mass of commuters, this stops being true, precisely because enough people think it is true, so you have a trickle of commuters flying through the turnstiles, and a thick line shuffling through the gate. Furthermore, people are coming at the gate from two angles, and though it appears the gate can handle two people going through at once, this never happens due to the alarming space-consumption-to-body-size ratio most New York commuters display, so you get microsecond delays whenever two people make for the gate and discover this. This double bottleneck slows the gate exit to a degree at which even if the gate is strictly closer to the point where I exit the train, I can skip a line of thirty people to go through a comparatively untouched turnstile.

Even with a firm grasp of the principles of commuting, context and commuter density must always be factored into calculating the net benefit of your tactics.