Activity #4

Jennifer Rios

Activity #4

For someone who has always lived in Queens, New York, having to travel to the city- also known as Manhattan- has never been an issue for me. It has always been very easy for me to get into the city in forty-five minutes or less. I have a number of trains to choose from that can transport me from my neighborhood to the busy streets of Manhattan. In terms of the typical commuter, it is often more common to see people traveling from suburban areas out to metropolitan areas. This can be shown by simply using Manhattan and the subway lines as an example. While looking at a map, I realized that Manhattan has a majority of the subway lines, which come in from its neighboring boroughs. This may occur because of the fact that a majority of businesses and jobs are located in cities rather than the suburbs, causing there to be a need for more transportation into the city since a larger number of people would be going into this specific area. As a result of trains which, “shattered any previous constraints of time and travel to lure people away from the city in greater numbers and at greater distances” (Kunstler, 46), cities were made more convenient for the working world to be located in. For example, it is common to meet many people from Long Island, which can be considered a suburb, who work in the borough of Manhattan. Despite the fact that this specific flow of commuters is the most witnessed, reverse commuting also takes place.

The term reverse commuting is used to refer to those commuters who travel from the city into the suburban areas to work. Since I have been so used being aware of the fact that people commute from the suburbs into the city, it was difficult for me to grasp the fact that reverse commuting does exist. Therefore, to find some truth behind reverse commuting, I went to Grand Central on a Saturday morning to search for someone who was reverse commuting. Since there was no specific way to approach this task, I decided to just go up to people and ask them where they were coming from and where they planned on going, letting them know that this was for a school assignment. I came across twelve people who mentioned that they were coming into the city to work that Saturday, since they worked six days a week. Finally, as I approached the thirteenth person without any hope of hearing a different commuting flow, after asking this person several questions about where he was going and coming from, he mentioned how he was going from Manhattan to a suburban area in Connecticut. This man mentioned how he was a carpenter in the city but had been laid off for a couple of months. Due to the fact that he needed money to support himself, he began to apply for work wherever it was possible. After applying to a carpentry job in Connecticut, he got called for an interview and got the job.

This one commuter has to travel from Manhattan to Connecticut six days a week in order to get to work and make a living as a result of being laid off from his job in the city. Despite the fact that I believe, “Commuting might not be an economic obstacle for a citizen fortunate enough to be employed” (Kunstler, 103), I believe it can have a larger effect depending on the distance one has to travel. This stirred up the idea that the recession and loss of jobs might be powerful enough to cause the typical commuter flow to change from a regular commuter flow to reverse commuting because of job availability. It can also cause people to move into the suburbs because of the cost of travel in relation to the distance one has to commute.