Instead of screaming into the void of Twitter, I bring you a weekly highlight reel of what it’s like going places in Greater Hartford when one is gloriously car-free. These posts are on a slight time delay because nobody needs to know exactly where I am when I am there.
One of the things that bothers me about books, shows, movies, is when they are set in a place that does not remotely resemble where they say they are. I can suspend disbelief about many things, but I will believe nothing if the way a character moves from place-to-place is unrealistic. I shouldn’t be sitting there thinking “a character from this neighborhood would never choose that route if rushing” or “that character can’t afford that neighborhood or mode of transportation, not without a good explanation of who is paying his bills.” Another thing that will ruin a story for me is if there is no understanding of a particular job. I’m thinking specifically of this romantic-comedy trope in which the love interest – who is neither employed at the school nor a parent – makes visits to the classroom as part of the wooing of the quirky-and-clumsy-yet-basically-vanilla elementary school teacher lead. Maybe that was allowed at some point in history; growing up in a somewhat free range environment of the 1980s, there were never random adults in the classrooms. If you want the love interest to do a light stalking, then the protagonist needs to work somewhere that isn’t closed off – a coffee shop, a library, The Gap.
This is why I found myself on a train to New Haven recently. I’m working on a piece of long fiction, and there are various cities (New York, Providence, Boston) and places (workplaces) that I need to know better if I am to write convincingly. Okay, I know New York – or at least the part featured in it – well, but I’m looking for any excuse to return. The problem is the problem we all know about: the Covids make everything tricky right now. A trip to New Haven was the only that felt doable: less than an hour on the train in each direction, so not long enough that I’d get hungry and want to take my mask off to eat. I managed to get some of that research done, and still have time to observe/think/obsess about getting around there.
THE TRAIN
Outbound: The train arrives exactly on time. Not a minute late. Boarding is quick. Passengers are quiet, as in, no one is talking except for a child and who I presume is his father. The kid excitedly plays Say What You See the whole way to New Haven. He comments if the train is going too slow or too fast, the age of other tracks he sees out the window, how a noise scares him. The difference between me and him is that he is loudly narrating his observations for everyone to hear, and I’m thinking the same things but keeping them to myself because it would raise too many eyebrows if an adult randomly began yelling things like “look at that tractor!” and “those rocks were too close.”
Inbound: The platform says my train is boarding. It’s not. There is no train. Why don’t they fix this to reflect what is actually happening? Based on previous patterns, I expect the train will be pulling up in about 5-10 minutes. But that does not happen. Other trains roll by, cruelly getting the hopes up. There is no announcement. No change to message board. Ten minutes after scheduled boarding time, a message finally appears on the Hartford Line Alerts twitter account and then to the screen. 35-40 minute delay. It is cold. Cold. The “inside” part of the station is not much warmer. While you can wait for a bus beneath a giant space heater at the Westfarms mall – or just linger in the mall itself – there is nothing at the train station to keep customers from frostbite when their trains are delayed again and again. And yes, I was wearing a hat, coat, scarf, gloves, long underwear, wool socks, and generally appropriate clothing for the weather.
The other delayed passengers looked stressed – except for one woman who was unbothered by all of this, even though she did not seem dressed any warmer than the rest of us. I was beginning to wonder/worry about having to huddle with strangers to keep warm. I was looking for a tauntaun to climb inside of.
By the way, that 40 minute delay turned into a 60-65 minute delay, which basically meant that the scheduled train was canceled. Again, it was fucking cold.
Then there are the other human needs, like bathrooms. There is no bathroom at this station. Not so much as a portapotty. You don’t want to wander too far in a situation like this because you have no way of knowing the reason for the delay, and if it by chance gets dealt with sooner and suddenly you’re missing the train because you had to walk five minutes to a grocery store, wait for a clerk to open the bathroom, use it, then walk back. Had I known that this delay meant I would have to catch the next train in an hour, I would’ve made that trip. Instead, there was a lot of pacing and being irritable because who’s to say that hour wasn’t going to be longer? The only positive about this is that the bathroom aboard the train was clean, and oh, that they have the bathrooms opened. Because remember when someone decided that since bathrooms were not accessible, that meant nobody could use them? What kind of logic was that? Making everything accessible should be a goal and priority, but making everything inaccessible to everyone defeats the spirit of it.
Looking at the alerts on Twitter later (not at the time, because I was interested in keeping my hands warm) I saw so many of these same cancellations. If y’all know you have a problem with equipment or staffing or whatever, could you cancel certain trips well in advance so people aren’t freezing our tits off at your no frills stations?
More to the point, I’m thinking about those ridiculous surveys asking how they can improve rail service and they keep coming back to “we need better WiFi on board.”
No, no you do not.
You need to provide basic services like speedy and honest communication about delays. You need to provide warm places for people to wait when it’s in the low 20s and windy. You need to provide restrooms at your stations. Or, you need to have trains run when you say they will.
BIKES OUTSIDE
If you’re cold, they’re cold. Bring them inside.
SIDEWALK BIKING
If there is no barrier-protect bike lane. . . then you are welcoming cyclists to use the sidewalk. Change behavior with infrastructure, not signs.
And back home. . .
OMG YOU RODE THE BUS!
It finally happened.
Someone audibly gasped when I said I arrived by bus.
Not a series of connecting buses across the country, or a bus that caught fire on the highway.
Just a non-dramatic bus ride that took about 15 minutes to get me from here to there.
Next up in my line of shocking activities: preparing my own dinner and washing the dishes.
THEN AGAIN. . .
Is this photo disorienting? It should be. That ad is on the ceiling of a city bus. Or, I should say, ads. When I boarded I could see something up there, but leaning back to look hurt my head.
So many questions. Were they like, “hmm…there is one surface we haven’t obnoxiously plastered with advertisements, yet the only way it’ll get attention is if the bus rolls over. Hell, let’s go for it!” or are there this many passengers riding on their backs at the back of the bus? Maybe I should be more concerned about taking the big blue limo for errands.
WHAT NEXT
Consider submitting testimony in favor of adding e-bikes to the Cheapr program. How? Kate guides you through this.
Car-Free Diaries: Week Twelve
Instead of screaming into the void of Twitter, I bring you a weekly highlight reel of what it’s like going places in Greater Hartford when one is gloriously car-free. These posts are on a slight time delay because nobody needs to know exactly where I am when I am there.
One of the things that bothers me about books, shows, movies, is when they are set in a place that does not remotely resemble where they say they are. I can suspend disbelief about many things, but I will believe nothing if the way a character moves from place-to-place is unrealistic. I shouldn’t be sitting there thinking “a character from this neighborhood would never choose that route if rushing” or “that character can’t afford that neighborhood or mode of transportation, not without a good explanation of who is paying his bills.” Another thing that will ruin a story for me is if there is no understanding of a particular job. I’m thinking specifically of this romantic-comedy trope in which the love interest – who is neither employed at the school nor a parent – makes visits to the classroom as part of the wooing of the quirky-and-clumsy-yet-basically-vanilla elementary school teacher lead. Maybe that was allowed at some point in history; growing up in a somewhat free range environment of the 1980s, there were never random adults in the classrooms. If you want the love interest to do a light stalking, then the protagonist needs to work somewhere that isn’t closed off – a coffee shop, a library, The Gap.
This is why I found myself on a train to New Haven recently. I’m working on a piece of long fiction, and there are various cities (New York, Providence, Boston) and places (workplaces) that I need to know better if I am to write convincingly. Okay, I know New York – or at least the part featured in it – well, but I’m looking for any excuse to return. The problem is the problem we all know about: the Covids make everything tricky right now. A trip to New Haven was the only that felt doable: less than an hour on the train in each direction, so not long enough that I’d get hungry and want to take my mask off to eat. I managed to get some of that research done, and still have time to observe/think/obsess about getting around there.
THE TRAIN
Outbound: The train arrives exactly on time. Not a minute late. Boarding is quick. Passengers are quiet, as in, no one is talking except for a child and who I presume is his father. The kid excitedly plays Say What You See the whole way to New Haven. He comments if the train is going too slow or too fast, the age of other tracks he sees out the window, how a noise scares him. The difference between me and him is that he is loudly narrating his observations for everyone to hear, and I’m thinking the same things but keeping them to myself because it would raise too many eyebrows if an adult randomly began yelling things like “look at that tractor!” and “those rocks were too close.”
Inbound: The platform says my train is boarding. It’s not. There is no train. Why don’t they fix this to reflect what is actually happening? Based on previous patterns, I expect the train will be pulling up in about 5-10 minutes. But that does not happen. Other trains roll by, cruelly getting the hopes up. There is no announcement. No change to message board. Ten minutes after scheduled boarding time, a message finally appears on the Hartford Line Alerts twitter account and then to the screen. 35-40 minute delay. It is cold. Cold. The “inside” part of the station is not much warmer. While you can wait for a bus beneath a giant space heater at the Westfarms mall – or just linger in the mall itself – there is nothing at the train station to keep customers from frostbite when their trains are delayed again and again. And yes, I was wearing a hat, coat, scarf, gloves, long underwear, wool socks, and generally appropriate clothing for the weather.
The other delayed passengers looked stressed – except for one woman who was unbothered by all of this, even though she did not seem dressed any warmer than the rest of us. I was beginning to wonder/worry about having to huddle with strangers to keep warm. I was looking for a tauntaun to climb inside of.
By the way, that 40 minute delay turned into a 60-65 minute delay, which basically meant that the scheduled train was canceled. Again, it was fucking cold.
Then there are the other human needs, like bathrooms. There is no bathroom at this station. Not so much as a portapotty. You don’t want to wander too far in a situation like this because you have no way of knowing the reason for the delay, and if it by chance gets dealt with sooner and suddenly you’re missing the train because you had to walk five minutes to a grocery store, wait for a clerk to open the bathroom, use it, then walk back. Had I known that this delay meant I would have to catch the next train in an hour, I would’ve made that trip. Instead, there was a lot of pacing and being irritable because who’s to say that hour wasn’t going to be longer? The only positive about this is that the bathroom aboard the train was clean, and oh, that they have the bathrooms opened. Because remember when someone decided that since bathrooms were not accessible, that meant nobody could use them? What kind of logic was that? Making everything accessible should be a goal and priority, but making everything inaccessible to everyone defeats the spirit of it.
Looking at the alerts on Twitter later (not at the time, because I was interested in keeping my hands warm) I saw so many of these same cancellations. If y’all know you have a problem with equipment or staffing or whatever, could you cancel certain trips well in advance so people aren’t freezing our tits off at your no frills stations?
More to the point, I’m thinking about those ridiculous surveys asking how they can improve rail service and they keep coming back to “we need better WiFi on board.”
No, no you do not.
You need to provide basic services like speedy and honest communication about delays. You need to provide warm places for people to wait when it’s in the low 20s and windy. You need to provide restrooms at your stations. Or, you need to have trains run when you say they will.
BIKES OUTSIDE
If you’re cold, they’re cold. Bring them inside.
SIDEWALK BIKING
If there is no barrier-protect bike lane. . . then you are welcoming cyclists to use the sidewalk. Change behavior with infrastructure, not signs.
And back home. . .
OMG YOU RODE THE BUS!
It finally happened.
Someone audibly gasped when I said I arrived by bus.
Not a series of connecting buses across the country, or a bus that caught fire on the highway.
Just a non-dramatic bus ride that took about 15 minutes to get me from here to there.
Next up in my line of shocking activities: preparing my own dinner and washing the dishes.
THEN AGAIN. . .
Is this photo disorienting? It should be. That ad is on the ceiling of a city bus. Or, I should say, ads. When I boarded I could see something up there, but leaning back to look hurt my head.
So many questions. Were they like, “hmm…there is one surface we haven’t obnoxiously plastered with advertisements, yet the only way it’ll get attention is if the bus rolls over. Hell, let’s go for it!” or are there this many passengers riding on their backs at the back of the bus? Maybe I should be more concerned about taking the big blue limo for errands.
WHAT NEXT
Consider submitting testimony in favor of adding e-bikes to the Cheapr program. How? Kate guides you through this.
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