It got me thinking a little about hearts. In my daily sampling of tweets about Philadelphians' public transit woes, I often wonder about the parallel 'private' transit happening on the regions roads and highways. I suppose one of the hidden PR disadvantages of running public transit is that your clients have nothing but time to complain while waiting for and actually using your service. Drivers, on the other hand, we hope, are keeping a white knuckle grip on their steering wheels while commuting to work and have not time to thumb out their disgust with traffic. In other words, thanks to a mechanical bias built into the ways we commute, the twitstreams simply aren't sufficiently similar to compare the stress and irritation of driving vs. riding SEPTA.
So here's an idea. Let's take 100 daily public transit riders and 100 daily car commuters and strap heart rate monitors to them. Let's recruit them from the same communities and the same industries. And then let's look at their commute times and heart rates for one month. Let's make the data public and compare just how long and how stressful our commutes are. And hell, let's do a little oral history while we're at it!
Hypothesis: Driving sucks WAY more than riding SEPTA. And you'll feel much better about that bus that just drove by without stopping or the train conductor who shut the doors in your face if you know there's a sad sack somewhere on 95 North choking down a Croissanwich and spitting with rage at the Jetta driver who just cut him off to reach the Aramingo exit.
