The lunatic express Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work. By Iain Gately. Head of Zeus; 378 pages; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.co.ukTO THOSE who don’t do it and to many who do, commuting is joyless: dead time, a limbo between home and work. Not for Iain Gately. In “Rush Hour” he argues, vividly and largely convincingly, that commuting is to be celebrated, not lamented. “For the last century and a half”, he writes, “it has given countless people the opportunity to improve their lives.”The book is in three parts, covering commuting past, present and future, from Britain’s Victorian railway boom to Elon Musk’s vision of a “Hyperloop” whisking Californians the 380 miles (610km) from San Francisco to Los Angeles in merely half an hour. Mr Gately points out the changes in landscapes, manners and entertainment (from drive-time radio to “The Jetsons”) that commuting has brought about.People were eager to commute as soon as they had the chance. Early railway entrepreneurs...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21637353-joys-journey-work-travelling-hopefully?fsrc=rss%7Cbar
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