The Human Age: Part Two

In the first part of this series, we talked about how things in daily life have changed in the past few decades, focusing primarily on how people stay informed, apply for jobs, and find a place to live, and what that means in terms of jobs. This time we'll look at the rapid changes in transportation that have taken place in the past 50 years, particularly the last 25.

Some things are largely the same. If you travel by bus locally or long-distance, that's largely the same, as is travelling by subway or commuter rail in a large city. But if you're driving, that world has changed. Lets start with the most obvious thing: apps.

I particularly like the app on my phone that synchs with the sound system on my car. I can dial up any address, select whether I want to avoid tolls or expressways or just choose the fastest route, hit GO, and I'm told how to get there, turn by turn. If there's an accident or a speed trap, I'm told, and I'm offered an adjusted route as I drive, in real time. That's great. And for the most part it's better than looking up and printing out directions, which is what we did 20 years ago, or looking at maps, which is what we did before that. But it's not 100% accurate, not does it replace human judgment. I was just stuck in a traffic jam that would have kept me on the interstate for over an hour without moving. All I had to do was drive on the shoulder for a few feet and get off at the next exit.

Worse, if your destination is a new store, or a new address, it may not be listed. When I went to visit a friend in Florida two years ago, the app kept trying to get me to drive into a water treatment pond, and his house had been there for over a decade. The same happened when I went to visit my parents. Until recently, any time I entered their address for their new house in my app, it would steer me to the other side of their town. They would laugh and say they could almost never get packages or food delivered either, unless things were sent by U.S. Mail. They were always told their address didn't exist.

For local travel, we now use Uber or Lyft or an e-scooter or e-bike if you're not walking or taking public transportation. But let's say you're driving. How has that changed?

Well, now you have your car or SUV with climate control, programmable seats, powered locks and windows, and possibly entertainment options for passengers and kids. You're unlikely to be able to play physical media like CDs in the car. Instead you'll have a radio, probably the ability to do satellite radio if you have a subscription, and your car can probably synch up with your phone or device to play music from there.

In more recent decades, you could of course play music from CDs and/or cassettes in the car. Some prefer that, others don't, and there are pros and cons on each side. The real discussion isn't about media in cars, it's about the bigger difference. While cars are safer now, and more fuel efficient, and you have more options, older cars gave you two things you can't really get now: Size and simplicity.

Not counting SUVs and luxury vehicles, if you drive a car now, say a Honda Accord, you can fit two people in the front, because it has "bucket seats" and at most three in the back. Three kids for sure, but only two adults comfortably, three if they're short.

In older cars, such as the 1972 Pontiac my mom drove for about 15 years, you could fit 3 people in the front, 3 in the back, no problem. And the trunk was huge. It only had an AM radio and an 8-track cassette player, heat but no air conditioner, manual windows and locks, and rear wheel drive. But it had space and power.

Plus, no computerized anything . It's well-known that in modern cars, the car is as much computer as car. A computer controls all your gauges, it assists with your breaking, your steering, your everything. In old cars, it was all mechanical. Guys like my dad and uncle would either take auto shop in high school or just hang out with guys who knew about cars, and they'd learn how to do basic maintenance on their own vehicles, saving them lots of money on repairs. They only brought their cars to a mechanic or body shop if something was seriously wrong or if it was in an accident.

Fueling your car has also changed. While in some states, such as New Jersey, it's still the law that only gas station workers are allowed to pump gas, in most places now, when you gas up your vehicle, you're doing it yourself. That's called self-service. But up until about the 1980s, full-service was still an option at some gas stations, and it used to be the norm. You've seen it in old movies and TV shows like "The Andy Griffith Show." You pull your car up to the pump and the gas station and you either say "Fill her up" or say that you only want a certain amount of gas. This "service station worker" would or could then also check your oil, check the air in your tires, clean your windows, check or replace your wiper blades, and maybe give you directions to somewhere you were going. Those services were free. You just paid for the gas, and probably gave the service attendant a tip. That's why it was called a service station, not a gas station. They provided service on your car. Now you just go up to the pump and pay there or pay inside. No one does anything for you except taking your cash. More jobs and human connection lost.

Air travel

Aside from local travel, let's say you're traveling out of state, and you're not going to drive. If you did, that also would be vastly different, as speed limits and rest stops have changed drastically since the advent of the interstate system in the second half of the 20th century. But what about flying?

After 9/11, flying changed forever due to increased security measures to prevent further attacks. But fliying was already changing due to environmental regulations and efforts to reduce costs. Now you're likely to have less space on a plane, and, unless you're flying first class, nothing like the experience even coach class flyers had 30 years ago.

One good thing, from most people's perspective, is you can't smoke on airplanes anymore. You can't smoke in most places, and unless you're amon5 the roughly 1 in 5 adults still smoking with any degree of regularity, you're probably happy about it. It was gross to sit in or near the smoking section of a restaurant, and far worse to be in the middle or back of a plane, because the back is where the smokers were. The air was recirculated throughout the plane, so there was always some smell, but if you were toward the front, it was overall pretty pleasant. The further back you were, the worse it was, though you never really smelled as bad getting off a plane as you would being on a road trip with smokers, or, worse yet, in a bar or club. Coming back from nights like that, even as a nonsmoker, the best thing to do would be to get home, strip, put your clothes in the wash, and get in the shower. Your clothes would reek so bad the next day, you could smell them from a distance.

On a plane, it wasn't so bad. It was still gross, but tolerable And, if your flight was more than two hours, chances were they'd feed you. No, not just pretzels or peanuts. They fed you. Food. People complained about it. It was a frequent punchline for comedians. But you were fed. Toward the end, in the early 2000s, it might just be a sandwich, typically your choice of chicken or roast beef, or maybe tuna salad or egg salad, plus chips and a pickle and your choice of mustard or mayo, but it was an acceptable sandwich. If you were on a longer flight, you got an actual meal, on a tray. Breakfast in the morning, with eggs, juice, toast, jelly. Maybe a sandwich or salad for lunch, and dinner was dinner. Meatloaf or chicken or something like that, with a little brownie, some vegetables. It was okay. And there was actual metal cutlery.

On one airline, based out of Milwaukee, Midwest Express, they addressed all of the most common complaints travelers had about airlines, and invested in quality, making ALL of each plane effectively first class, at a regular airfare cost. Leather seats, 2 on each side, wider than regular airline seats, and they fed you on every flight, actual quality food reflective of the area you were flying into or out of. Steak, chili, seafood salad, soup. And if a flight was too short for a meal, there was always the fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. And warm towels to clean your hands, not wet wipes. And free wine. Not just soda or juice. Free red or white wine. All flights non-smoking. It was glorious.

The great age of trains

But flying is a relatively recent luxury. Let's go further back. Let's take a train. There are plenty of films depicting train travel, from "The Godfather II" to "Murder on the Orient Express" and multiple Alfred Hitchcock films, you can see the comfort of travelling by train. Of course comfort varied by how much you paid for your ticket - you might have a sleeping compartment, or share a bunk on a sleeping car, or just have a seat where you stayed for the whole trip, getting up to use the common bathroom while going for meals in the dining car or for a drink in the bar car. Those are all interesting variables, which you can still elect to have today if you ride by rail. But now it's more of a novelty, at least in the U.S. In the first half of the 20th century, it was more like the norm

Now let's take a look at how things would change at the end of your journey.

Let's say you've travelled from Chicago to New Orleans, or San Francisco, or Seattle, for whatever reason. Business, or you have a sick relative and you'll be in the area for a while. You've never been there before.

You get off the train and there you are with your bag(s). Where do you go? You hail a cab and ask the cabbie about good hotels. Cabbies go everywhere, so they probably know. Your Uber driver today might, but cabbies typically knew, and sometimes they were contracted with certain hotels. Cabbies also knew about good restaurants, bars, night clubs, and, if you were interested in illegal activity such as speakeasies (during Prohibition) or prostitution, they could help you out there, too. For a bigger tip, naturally. Unlike using the Uber app today, transactions were always in cash, and a big tip for that kind of information would be between you and the cabbie.

Of course the flip side was, sometimes a cabbie would take you the wrong way, to run up your fare. Harder to do that with Uber, since you would hurt their customer rating.

You get to the hotel of your choice. If you picked a gross hotel, that's on you. Gross hotels are always gross hotels. But if you have a nice hotel, even a mid-range nice hotel, you now have a massive support system. This is still the case at nice hotels. But it's harder and harder to find regular hotels that will do the essentials that were commonplace as recently as a decade ago. Most of these things were teetering for a bit, and wiped out largely by the COVID pandemic. Things like room service. If you just want to get a hamburger or salad sent up to your room now, good luck. You'll most likely have to go down to the bar or restaurant and order food there, and what you get isn't going to be the level of quality that used to be common at hotels, when there were actual chefs and kitchen staff there for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And that's just one of the elements now mostly lost.

When I first started travelling for work, roughly 30 years ago, most of the elements of classic hotel service were still there, even if I was staying at a Radisson, Hyatt, Doubletree. On my first trip to New Orleans, for a conference, I asked the concierge where I should go. The concierge is basically the go-to person at any hotel for services and information. He gave me a map and highlighted where to go, and crossed out where to absolutely not go in order to stay safe.

While there, I needed my shoes polished before I was going to the conference. Each room had a bag for this purpose. You put your shoes in the bag, put them outside your door when you go to bed. When you wake up, the shoes are there, in the bag, polished overnight. Often for free, but sometimes for a small fee, like $2.

Hotels often had gift shops that sold not only touristy trinkets, but things like postcards to send to family and friends, which you could mail from there, as well as film, disposable cameras, and clothing items. Forget your sunglasses? Need socks or a belt? No problem. Buy them right there.

You could get mail at the hotel (you still can, it's just less common as people don't stay as long). The front desk would take messages for you in case someone was looking for you (they'll still do that too, and you can put in a wake-up call if you need it). And, lots of hotels had barbers. Whatever you were doing, the hotel was your place to eat, get messages, get your news, get your shirts cleaned, maybe buy new clothing, get directions, whatever you needed to do. And they were safe. "Hotel detectives" (aka security) kept an eye out for pickpockets, thieves, and other problem people, usually coordinating with local police to keep an eye out for trouble.

Hotels were, and still sometimes are, a small city unto themselves. Desk staff, bellhops (otherwise known as bell boys or bag boys), concierges, cooks, cleaners, security staff, parking attendants, maids, bartenders, even musicians all worked there regularly, some of them for decades. Now, at an average hotel, you're likely to have the clerk and cleaning staff and maybe a bartender. On a few of my recent trips, staffing was so minimal that even around dinner time, there were only two people working at the hotel, the front desk clerk, and another staffer who floated between the front desk and the kitchen. Both of them covered the bar area, though neither of them really knew how to make drinks, they just opened bottles and poured glasses of wine. It was sad to see.

Next: Shopping and entertainment.