Word: transiting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis on Sept. 26, 1888. He died in London on Jan. 4, 1965. These dates and places bracket a life but are swamped by its reverberations. For Eliot, in transit, not only wrote The Waste Land, the single most influential poem in English of the 20th century. He also produced a body of work -- poetry, criticism, plays -- that permanently rearranged the cultural landscapes of his native and adopted lands...
Since traffic jams are almost synonymous with urban growth, they have been building for a long time. (The term gridlock apparently came into common use in New York City during a transit workers' strike in 1980, when a surge of commuter autos paralyzed Manhattan's street grid.) Congestion on two-lane highways in the 1950s hastened construction of the 42,797-mile interstate system, which will be officially completed in 1991 (estimated final cost: $108 billion). But the interstates eased overcrowding only temporarily. Says Transportation Secretary James Burnley: "It's not a problem that will be resolved in a final...
...decades. The interstate highway system was originally designed to carry motorists primarily from city to city; its beltways were constructed mainly as bypasses for long-distance travelers. Local commuters, by contrast, generally moved in and out of urban downtown areas in a radial pattern, along the paths of mass transit and major thoroughfares. But the majority of work is no longer downtown: the suburbs contain 60% of current metropolitan jobs and 67% of all new ones, according to the Transportation Department. As a result, many workers commute from one suburb to another, and they crowd onto the beltways because mass...
...road, the number in the shop and the percentage of late arrivals (as high as 50%). Virtually every day some routes got no buses at all. To untangle the mess, Houston voters in 1978 approved a special 1% tax on retail sales to help pay for a modern transit system. Since then the city has spent $790 million to upgrade service, adding 789 new buses, 20 park-and-ride lots, 750 sheltered bus stops and five new maintenance shops. Houston now boasts a highly efficient transit system that the American Public Transit Association ranks as the safest...
...long Angela has lived in a domestic cage with rococo bars and gilded walls. Her husband Frank "the Cucumber" De Marco (Alec Baldwin) boards the morning Long Island commuter train, but he does his work in transit, putting a bullet in the brain of a rival Mafia goon in the seat ahead of him. Angela has a cute son, but the kid runs a three-card monte game in the backyard. Her home must have been decorated by Wheel of Fortune: all the furniture and appliances are studiously ugly, and half of them are still in crates. As she tells...