The Transit of Two Titans

Hello Interactors,

We like to think we choose our own paths, but our cities have already decided for us. New York and Los Angeles function as the extended phenotype of our species — a living circulatory system that subtly channels our collective behavior. This week, we explore the multi-generational biology of transit to see how modern infrastructure effectively dissolves what we perceive as individual autonomy.

MANHATTAN MOBILITY AND THE MASSED MILIEU

I recently flew from New York visiting my daughter, where large vessels moved massive numbers of people around, to Los Angeles visiting my son, where small vessels moved small numbers of people around. The transition was jarring. I went from being physically enmeshed in a dense social milieu to being systematically protected from it — from walking over 10,000 steps a day to barely 1,000. My daily cadence shifted from bobbing and weaving around persons I could see, hear, and smell, to maneuvering around what sociologist Mike Michael termed ‘carsons’ — persons fused with a car.

This deep-seated desire for individual control over our own mobility is not unique to the modern driver. The instinct to leverage an external entity to conquer long distances is as old as the domestication of the horse in the third millennium BCE. Every stage of human life presents a shifting horizon of mobile autonomy: from crawling to walking, to the childhood triumph of mastering a bicycle or a local bus network, to the initial rush of freedom that comes with a first car. All before the natural declines of aging ultimately diminish our autonomy once more.

Yet, suggesting mass transit to many Americans accustomed to the perceived agency of the car feels like a threat to their very freedom. Because transit routes are fixed and schedules are unyielding, collective travel is often mischaracterized as an artificial restriction on liberty. History shows that long before the locomotive, scheduled, multi-passenger transit enabled human freedom and societal cohesion where individual movement was risky or impossible. Across Eastern Polynesia, the Caribbean, and northern Eurasia, multi-passenger canoes were the lifeblood of trade and travel. In southern California, the Chumash and Tongva communities developed advanced sewn-plank canoes called tomols and ti’ats, which facilitated complex political economies between the Channel Islands and the mainland. This reliance on collective vehicles extended beyond coastal waterways. Human networks also depended on highly organized, shared transport to conquer distance across vast terrestrial and inland landscapes.

Centuries before Western cities built public transit, imperial China constructed the Grand Canal, a two-thousand-kilometer artificial waterway that operated as a continental transit artery during the Sui Dynasty. This facilitated the regular movement of millions of passengers and state resources between agricultural basins and northern metropolises. On land, Tokugawa-era Japan structured its empire around the Tōkaidō, a highly regulated highway system where travelers moved rhythmically between post stations using a coordinated network of horse relays and official permits.

Eastern aquatic and terrestrial networks achieved continental scale, replicated on Europe’s rugged overland trails. Public multi-passenger carriage service began in Paris in 1662 with the world's first urban transit system. In colonial America, occasional stagecoaches linked Boston and New York starting around 1735, with regular schedules emerging in the 1740s. By the late 1820s, fixed-route horse-buses (omnibuses) appeared in Paris (1828) and New York City (1827).

When urban populations exploded in mid 1800s, these street-level collective networks buckled under their own weight. It triggered unprecedented structural crises. By the late 19th century, New York City was drowning in a public health emergency born of its own transit power. Imagine over 150,000 working horses blanketing the streets. N