TRAX -- Group Post

We are venturing out on our first walkabout, the TRAX lines. It is a pleasant evening, 70-80 degrees out and around 5:00 pm, rush hour. We start at the Fort Douglas TRAX stop by the dorms, and since this is only the second stop on the train’s route, there are few people on board. The first few stops are consistent with the first; the trains are not extremely packed with people, and most passengers appear to have some business with the University. We see mostly students, professors, doctors – no one under the age of 17 or 18. As we move down campus, my group is comfortable with our surroundings because with are with the people we associate with every day. Outside the atmosphere is casual as people make their way down South Campus Drive, windows down, listening to music, happy that the work (or school) day is over. We find that there is not much to observe that we don’t see on a daily basis, so our group sits in seats close to one another, chatting about our days and focusing mostly on the various forms of art displayed at each stop.

Once the train turns onto 400 south, we notice a big change in our surroundings. We are suddenly in the middle of rush-hour traffic, and people are not driving so casually anymore. The stops get exponentially busier as we make our way downtown. At the library we make our second departure from the train (we got off at the South Campus stop as well) to admire some more of the art, but find the people there just as entertaining. We now see people that appear to be from every imaginable background. There is a wide rand of age, race, social standing, etc. We no longer feel like chatting and instead are constantly turning in circles to get a full view. There is a man with dread-locks playing the guitar. There is an elderly couple reading the map. More students come to the stop as SLCC is across the street from the library (something we didn’t know). When we board the train once again, we no longer have seats and end up holding on for dear life along with half of the other passengers.

There are a few observations we had of the passengers that were consistent for the entire trip. A major one was that we seemed to be the only people travelling in a group. Other than the sound of the train moving on the track and car horns outside, the train was surprisingly quiet. Most people had head phones on or were reading a book. This made the people-watching a bit difficult, because we couldn’t get a good sense of who each person was. There were no conversations going on, so we was left wondering where everyone was coming from, where they were going, what kind of life they had, etc. Usually, it is easy to know at least a little about a person by the way they talk, interact with others, move through crowds and such, but for most of the ride we were left wondering. This reminded of us of a passage in the reading referring to form versus meaning, “so various are the individual meanings of a city, even while it form may be easily communicable” (p. 9). We witness what this quote was saying on TRAX; we knew everyone was on TRAX because they were trying to get somewhere, which was obvious. What we were unsure of is where people were going, why they were on the train, where they were coming from, etc. We weren’t able to determine the meaning of everything we were seeing.