Learning to love mass transit and 'Outliers'

Published April, 2009

It started out as a day to learn to love mass transit. I was going to leave my humble abode in Smithfield and make my way to the University of Utah in a couple of hours and live to write about it.

Well, it ain't happening. It doesn't work. Unless you want to take a cab from my house to Pleasant View and arrive at one of the three times each day -- before the sun comes up, I might add -- to make that leg of the journey work, it doesn't work. So we improvised.

Spouse dropped me off in Ogden, at the Wall Street Station. So, how is that saving gas and going green? Well, with my weight in the front seat no longer bearing down on the Buick, we used less gas and put out fewer pollutants, see. OK, maybe a half-cup of gas was saved on the day.

I thought the Ogden transit center is well-maintained and designed. It could stand to have a few more directional signs for first-timers to get them to the Frontrunner dock. Workers were helpful and pleasant.

I brought along a book, not knowing how many dead spots there would be in my day, "The Outliers," by Malcom Gladwell. It is a fascinating look at "what makes people successful." While waiting, I noted this:

"Most parents think that whatever advantage a younger child faces in kindergarten eventually goes away. But it doesn't ... the small advantage that the child born in the early part of the school year has over the child born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement ... that stretch on for years."

Moving on to Roy, the next stop south, I began to wonder what my backyard looked like. I wondered how it would be rated or viewed by passersby, if I had as many passersby as several streets of homes near the Roy station had. Tramps are popular, and I mean the kids-jumping-on-them kind. Spotted plenty of those, along with lots of used-up vehicles and some used-to-be Tuff sheds. It's an interesting mix of backyards, I have to say.

When the Roy station is filled in with grass and landscaping, it is going to be very nice. Even now, the "statuary" in place there is interesting and appealing. But, time for more reading:

"...what truly distinguishes the histories of the successful is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities. Outliers ... are the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity .. we pretend that success is a matter of individual merit ... their success is not just of their own making but a product of the world in which they grew up."

On to Clearfield and Layton and Farmington. Looking out the east window, second level, of course, the question arises, "What should be done with house trailers when they've filled their usefulness?" There doesn't seem to be a good method of recycling or eliminating them, or am I missing something? Come up with a plan, someone, please.

"... at Microsoft, job applicants are asked a battery of questions designed to test their smarts, including the classic: "Why are manhole covers round?"

There were a lot of first-timers on the train the day I went. You could tell by the fascination from the children, the checking of route maps, questions about where the rest rooms were. It was a spring break day from elementary schools and as it turned out, several in the same car in which I was riding were also going to the Gateway Discovery Museum with their munchkins.

Education reformers in Western cultures "followed the rhythms of the agriculture seasons. A mind must be cultivated, but not too much, lest it be exhausted. And what was the remedy for the dangers of exhaustion? The long summer vacation, a peculiar and distinctive American legacy that has had profound consequences for the learning process ... to the present day."

Along about Layton, my munchkin got parched. And explanation after explanation of how long a garden hose it would take to give him a drink on this train just seemed to miss the mark. His logic was if they have a bathroom, they should have a drinking fountain. Hint: take some water if you have a young one in tow. Besides battling with an 8-year-old over water problems, however, I have rarely taken a more relaxing, anxiety-free trip to the big city. And, obviously, I always felt perfect safe.

"(Airline crashes) are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skills ... the kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication."

We arrived, made our way around the capital city with Traxx and spent way too much money at the children's museum. When Spouse picked us up, I tried to stump her with the Microsoft question that I had read earlier. Even though the "answer" is that round lids cannot fall into the hole, while other shapes could be knocked into the manhole, causing injury, she had an intuitive answer that worked for me.

We should appreciate planners and administrators for seeing far enough into the future to have provided mass transit, which is handy, inexpensive and will become handier, I'm sure. And I appreciate a partner that, quick as a flash, told me, "because manholes are round."