Vectures: Monetizing Urban Transportation

Vectures are the formal name for transportation tokens including coin-like payment for trolleys, buses, trams, and trains, as well as coin-like forms for parking, bridges, and ferries, as well as cards, tickets, and chits, including electronic formats.  In short, vectures are the numismatics of traffic and transportation. 

Courtesy card from the hotel for the tram

You can monetize anything.  Transportation tokens in all their expressions serve both sides of the transaction: they let riders pay for carriage, often at a discount if purchased in advance and in bulk, i.e., a weekly or monthly pass.  At the same time, they allow the transport authority or business to borrow money from patrons interest-free.  More subtly, they allow the monetization of a service.  

Cleveland, Ohio, 1950

Furthermore intra-urban transport represents a significant service to the commuter.  I do a lot of reading waiting for the bus and riding. Now, the express buses here in Austin have wi-fi, allowing me to work while I ride.  After January 1, 2015, it will be illegal to text and drive.  (The enforcement is more problematic than the authorities expect, but that is their problem, not mine.  I mean, I could be using my GPS, not texting...)  Be that as it may, the bus or the train allows you to do something else while you are being transported more or less safely and more or less conveniently.

Chicago 1976.
I jumped the turnstile to keep the ticket;
but I was on camera.
They let me go with a warning.

If you were sent back in time, how would you explain parking tokens to Leonardo da Vinci? Herbert Spencer might have understood.  He knew that social organisms evolve mechanisms and appendages.  The city of the modern era is not the city of the Middle Ages.

  

Roma, Italia. Face and Back of Metropole pass.

Consider the  Carrier's Case of 1473 (Wikipedia here).   We might imagine a science fiction story set in intra-galactic interstellar space in which the common carrier's point is carried forcefully.  However, here and now, it is hard to imagine that the bus driver could sell the contents of your cellphone while you ride.  

Coin-like tokens, attributed against the Atwood-Coffee catalog.
Prices have not changed in decades.

In the fantasy Lost in Austen, the 21st century viewpoint heroine caught in the Regency period comes from "Hammersmith" which to them is "outside" London.  "Well, yes," she says, "in your time..."  In the David McCullough biography of John Adams, villages outside of Boston are today neighborhoods within Boston.  "BosWash" has been the East Coast metroplex of science fiction for over seventy years.  Someday, some biometric will let you travel anywhere on Earth for a flat rate.

PREVIOUS ON NECESSARY FACTS

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The First Dagny

We met in the student lounge through a friend of hers.  Another friend of mine from Young Americans for Freedom had handed me Anthem as we passed between algebra classes. After I read it, I gave it to Jan. 

  

Prom Night 1967

 In 1966, Janet M. Matyas was my high school sweetheart.  She was a year younger than I, and in the “major work” program of Cleveland Public Schools for gifted and talented students.  (I was not. I went to summer school to catch up.)  She played the violin.  After Anthem, we went on to read all of the existing books. I subscribed to the Objectivist Newsletter and took the “Basic Principles” class.  Several of our friends also had read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.  High school romances are transient; and I changed schools the following year.

Cleveland as seen from Lakewood

For that year, we had the steel mills and trains, a high rise apartment for viewing the city from the lake and some penthouse parties (though no Penthouse Legends) with our friends.  At a spring dance that year, we were there with everyone else and happy to be on a date, but oddly enough, the band played "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" which is in 6/8, and we danced it as a waltz -- not a big deal, but, when we were done, we looked around to find the floor empty, except for us.

Winton Place is the tallest. At the left in front is
Edgewater Towers where we lived
(but not where I grew up).

Janet and I cringed at the classical architecture of the banks.  We had great universities, corporations dedicated to electrical research, and John D. Rockefeller as the model of the hometown boy who made good.  Riding into downtown on the Rapid, we entered beneath the Terminal Tower, staring hard and deep into the many tunnels into which other train tracks disappeared.  The Terminal had a concourse with a tobacco shop.

 

It does not get more romantic than this.

About 1989, we found each other through FidoNet.  We exchanged a few letters. The last I heard from her was in 1996. 

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