Well, OK, maybe not quite as old as the hills.
But "commuting" has a very American history, all the way back
to the 1830s in Boston.
Throughout modern human history (last 1,500 years or so), folks who
weren't doing farming or "cottage industry" work purposefully tended
to live within an hour's walk (or hour's travel time) from the place where they
worked. That makes sense, especially centuries ago, when there was no public
lighting and darkness tended to shut down a lot of activity, and so spending no
more than a couple hours a day getting to and from work seemed like a really
smart thing to do….and, of course, a lot of folks lived a lot closer than that
to their workplace.
In the 1830s, Boston investors and entrepreneurs started building the
railroad infrastructure that would create "spokes" of rail lines
leading from the central city "hub" to sparsely populated places
that would become Newton, Providence, Worcester, Lowell, Salem, Newburyport,
Plymouth, Fitchburg….
Now, here's the thing: these railroad pioneers built their lines to
handle freight. Gradually it dawned on them that they could profitably carry
people. Add in a little real estate speculation, and some homebuilding, and upper
class folks who wanted to get out of the city, and Voila! The first
approximation of suburbs appeared along the tracks extending outward from
Boston.
The owners of the Eastern Railroad running to Newburyport, and the
folks at Boston & Worcester R.R. serving Newton, started offering reduced
price "season tickets" to regular users of their lines, that is, the
folks who lived outside Boston and went in to the city to work or do business
regularly. These tickets were said to have "commuted" prices—an
old-fashioned meaning of "commute" is "to change or
reduce."
So these early suburban travelers taking advantage of the
"commuted" tickets came to be called "commuters." They could
live outside Boston and still have an hour or less travel time to their work.
By 1849, there were 105 commuter trains arriving in Boston every
weekday….and, y'know, they didn't have any traffic jams on the rail lines. We
could use more rail lines today.
My sources for this historical tidbit:
Henry C. Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 95.
James C. O'Connell, The Hub's Development: Greater Boston's Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 42.
Henry C. Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 95.
James C. O'Connell, The Hub's Development: Greater Boston's Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 42.
