Commuting

In the urban context, commuting is characterized by the use of a transportation mode to go back and forth from work to home every day (as between a suburb and a city). The phenomenon of commuting is closely linked with the growth of suburbs in the United States. The word suburb refers to an unincorporated area outside of a central city. The growth of suburbs or suburbanization was initially facilitated by the development of zoning laws that allocated business or commercial land use at the center of the city and residential land use along the periphery. In the older cities of the United States, suburbs developed along streetcar lines that could shuttle workers into and out of city centers, where the jobs were located. The development of transportation modes such as streetcars and, later, automobiles and highways allowed middle-class workers to commute to the city from the suburbs.

It is true that suburbanization after World War II was unprecedented in its scale and its use of the personal vehicle as a mode of transportation. However, the postwar period was not the first major suburban movement in the United States. Very early on, railroads built stations in rural villages on the outskirts of large cities. In New York City, commuter travel by rail began as early as 1832. The railroad along Long Island Sound reached New Haven by 1882. Population growth along the railroad tracks was rapid, and by 1898 the ridership on the passenger lines to the north of the city was more than 100,000 daily commuters. Growth in ridership in railroads happened in other cities as well. By 1900, railroad commuting was well established in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. Compared to other forms of public transportation, steambased railroad travel was expensive, unlike the horsecar or the electric streetcar.

Sam Bass Warner's Streetcar Suburbs in 1978 looked back at the process of suburbanization in Boston between 1870 and 1900. He suggested that suburban growth was made possible by the streetcar. Warner argued that 19th-century suburbanization was spurred on by socioeconomic considerations. The middle class had lived with the lower classes in downtown Boston for centuries. According to Warner, the middle class had three major reasons for fleeing the city by the 1850s. The first reason was the growing immigrant population in Boston, especially of Irish Catholics, which led to representational conflicts with the Protestant majority. The second reason was that [Page 180]these immigrants tended to work in heavy industries that were also usually located in central Boston. The third reason was the rural ideal that was influenced by the urban parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The middle class moved away from the city toward this rural ideal. By 1900, the center of every American city had become an area of office and commercial uses. Close to them were the industrial land uses, and within walking distance were the poor, the unskilled workers, and the recent immigrants. Beyond the walking city were the streetcar suburbs. The relatively wealthy railroad commuters lived in houses that represented the American rural ideal.

...