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This is the beginning of my commute to work. It’s
basically the same everyday. Same bike path.
Same clocks. Same tension. No matter how early
I leave home. But this is only the beginning of my
trip. Before I get to work and get home again,
I’ll spend approximately two and a half hours on
the road. I’ll spend just a little more than exactly
that same amount of time with my family today –
between the time I wake up and go to bed again.
So what is a commute?
As a means of investigating this question, the following
text focuses upon commuter trains and
the mobilities occurring in and around them. It is
anchored in empirical observations I have made
over the past six years on my own commute between
Lund and Helsingborg. But it is also a result
of more recent theoretical questions I have been
working on concerning the routines of daily life
and mobility.
“To travel as a commuter”
Commuting by train is not a phenomenon that
many people regard very highly, if you ask them.
They may speak appreciatively of being able to
bike or walk to the train, of getting fresh air, and
perhaps even a little exercise. But press them on
their experiences of commuter trains, and one
88 Commute
enters a realm of frustrating delays, crowded
cars, obnoxious passengers, and uncomfortable
proximities. From this perspective, the commute
is a “necessary evil” of sorts, whose negative reputation
has long been reinforced and further
denigrated by a prevalent flora of popular representations
found in films and books in which
commuting works as the ultimate symbol of drudgery:
a space of flow inhabited by ashen grey and
alienated faces, staring blankly into nothingness.
This is a morally charged genre of popular folklore
in which train lines are all too easily likened
to zones of transit in which machines transport
the empty husks of humanity, so ravaged by the
pressures of work and the intensities of the rat
race that their bodies are hardly capable of registering
the impulses to which they are exposed. 1
The train is here not only a means of transportation,
but also a jungle of micro-mobilities in which
the social order and the sanctity of one’s own
identity are ever threatened and on the brink of
oblivion, as bodies are jammed together, jarred
around, intermixed, and hurled forward along the
trajectory of the tracks. This is the commute as
“life on the go”, mobility as misery.
But to the extent that the commute has been so
readily aligned with the rat race, it has also been
understood as much more than just an arena of