Modern man has developed innumerable devices for blowing himself up, giving himself bad eyesight, high blood pressure, flat feet, nervous indigestion, and ossification of the brain. He has produced an atom bomb and a panty girdle, the vitamin pill, the comic book, the subway gum machine, the soap opera and the revolving door. But in the minds of thousands of New Yorkers all of these achievements pale when compared to the Fifth Avenue bus.
Despite its elephantine proportions, the double-decked bus was designed for a purely hypothetical race of men with an average weight of 98 pounds and an average height of 5 ft. ½ in. A normal man cannot stand in one without getting his hat knocked off, or assuming a stooped posture, not unlike that of an Oriental criminal awaiting the headsman’s ax.
Oops! When—by virtue of guile, luck or the dexterity of an acrobat—he gets a seat, he immediately becomes conscious of another startling fact. The seats are too small, and his posterior is subject to the same grip which clamps once exerted on the necks of photographers’ victims.
The buses have other peculiarities. Above stairs, smoking is not only permitted, but virtually mandatory. On humid summer days the atmosphere is often as rich as that of an opium hell. The entrance doors are miracles of cunning engineering—folding contraptions capable of snapping like bear traps, and edged with rubber to convey the impression that they are incapable of decapitating the unwary.
Irascible as Manhattan’s bent and pleated bus-riders often are, they can never hope to match the irascibility of Fifth Avenue’s ancient, turtle-blooded drivers and conductors.
Years of jamming buses through Manhattan traffic have given many a driver ulcers, a sulphurous vocabulary, the voice of a mule skinner and a wild ambition—to drive the whole route without stopping. None ever make it, but all pass up wind-chilled passengers with maniacal glee. On a slushy winter morning a good driver, as he speeds past, can hit as many as a dozen fist-flourishing bystanders with the spray from his wheels. Years of diving through elbowing passengers to collect the 10¢ fares has given many a conductor the temperament of a yegg; most ram their nickel-plated, jingling coin-collectors at the entering passenger’s belly like a gunman wielding a .45.
To many a bruised New Yorker, the Fifth Avenue bus has represented the apogee of progress, the point beyond which even Western Civilization could not go. But last week they knew better. Open-topped buses (from which it was sometimes possible to catch a few breaths of air only mildly tinctured with exhaust fumes) were being removed from service. Other double-deckers were being made into one-man conveyances—drivers would have to make change as well as buck traffic, and could be expected to get more apoplectic. And new, elongated single-decked buses were being introduced, thus forcing passengers to elbow harder and longer than ever to be digested and, finally, expelled.
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