On public transit and urban community

Rebecca Tirrell Talbot wrote an article titled Of Public Transit and Human Nature for today’s issue of The Curator Magazine. Fascinated as I am by transit (and in some ways the city of Chicago) I read the whole article, not too long and not too short for an internet publication.

Talbot makes some interesting observations concerning the trains in Chicago and their riders, how different lines possess different personalities, how riders in general react (or don’t react) to certain behaviors. I’ll let you read the article (linked to in the first paragraph) for the details after saying one thing: People in the city really wear iPod earbuds like they’re implants. I noticed this on the trains in New York back in February. It’s something we — and by we I mean American culture — made fun of a few years back. Here in our tiny midwestern town you don’t see it very often, hardly at all actually.

Photo from Wikipedia by Daniel Schwen.