Transit Trouble

If yesterday's City Council order driving the buses out of Harvard Square is any barometer, this season is a bad one for machines. For years, people have been looking on with smug approval as their mechanical creations grew bigger and, if not better, at least more complicated. Now, however, the machines have been getting smug themselves, and quite a few people have been growing just a little alarmed. William Faulkner, for instance, last week published a letter in the Times decrying the way airplanes now fly, and fall, themselves. The Council order shows the tide of reaction has reached even to Cambridge. For buses have been loitering in the Square.

The City authorities think it's alright for less conspicuous creatures to loiter. Relaxation gives a town a cosmopolitan air, and even a few of Cambridge's Finest can be seen leaning against the Three Feathers displays in a particular Square establishment. But the old ladies of DcWolf Street have been writing the mayor that the buses lying in the middle of the Square are blocking their view of the subway kiosk, and 1955 is an election year.

A bus is quite a bigger proposition than an ordinary bum, however. You can't just walk up to a loitering bus and tell it to move along, bud. You have to have a decree, which often means a great deal more work for the city clerks, and everyone knows they have all they can do. Besides, they and their friends vote too.

We don't really mind their moving the buses. There weren't always buses in the Square. There weren't always subway kiosks, and seven minutes to Park Street was once as great a thing as a four-minute mile. But it seems to us that if you're going to move the buses, you have to have something to put in their place, and the city probably hasn't even thought of what it will do with the bare asphalt triangle. There are some things it could be filled with, however. It would be a fine location for the University's theatre, if and when it builds one. Right there in the center of the Square, with a flashing triangular marquee, Harvard drama could compete with the movies. More important, it would be convenient to all sorts of transportation, except, of course, the buses would have to let their passengers off on the run.

The space could be used for beauty, instead of for a specific function. A lot of Cambridge people haven't seen the World Tree, tucked away where it is in the Graduate Center, and we can't think of a better place for it than in the Square. But the ideal solution would be to make a giant rotary out of the whole area. With a challenge like that--Mystic River Bridge signs at three of the six or so exits--even the police wouldn't have time to loiter, and the present city government would almost certainly be re-elected.