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June 4, 2007
Demography of the M31
When I get on the CTA's route 143 at 8:45 a.m., I know that I'll be riding with "consultants" in their early 20s, attractive department store sales girls and the odd law student. The 151 at 9:30 takes on waiters in Lakeview, the mom-with-stroller crowd in Lincoln Park and the excruciatingly slow elderly in Gold Coast, many of whom you'll see on the 3 p.m. 151 going in the other direction, shopping bags in hand.
My new bus is the M31. It goes from the expensive 1980s-era apartment buildings on York Avenue, down the quiet end of the Upper East Side, past the Cornell Medical Center and then across Midtown on 57th Street. When I get on, the crowd is roughly as follows:
10% elementary school kids and their parents or Caribbean nannies
30% professionals, mostly in their mid-thirties and mostly staring at BlackBerries.
60% Seniors
Needless to say, this bus is painfully slow. There isn't that much traffic on York, but a combination of double-parked delivery vans, slow walkers and errant children makes it only slightly faster than a brisk walker. I've seen it a few times: I pass someone walking down the street at a medium-to-quick clip, we pass him, then I see him again while a 65-year-old woman with tightly tied up dyed-blonde hair argues with the driver about whether she could fit in wedged against the windshield instead of having to wait for the three other buses bunched up two blocks behind our bus.
Another interesting note about the people I ride to work with every day: some of them read the New York Sun. I've never seen anyone read that five-day-a-week neocon fantasy rag since outside the M31. That's not much of a surprise, since it sells about 13,000 copies a day, dumping an additional 85,000 copies on the doorsteps of unsuspecting rich white people (much like the Washington Examiner). This means that I've found a very elusive creature: the New York republican. Once thought only to exist only as grumpy outer borough racists, former trotskyites and their nepotistic aftermath, there is another breed along the route of my bus. Noblesse without the oblige, you might say.
Posted by rj3 at June 4, 2007 9:22 PM
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Comments
This is a really random comment, but I just thought this post was really well written.
Posted by: cella at June 5, 2007 9:03 AM
Thanks!
Posted by: rj3 at June 5, 2007 9:20 AM
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Posted by: xnspi mabzhy at February 25, 2008 10:44 AM
