The Big Day?

by Karl

This is it!  The day of the strike!  Prague will be shut down!  Or it will be chaos!  The strikers will block highways!  Oh, wait, they changed their minds, they'll just process through town to the Castle, which will still block up traffic a little, but not nearly as much.  No, wait, they won't go as far as the Castle.

"LIVE: Only hundreds of union members came for the march through Prague."

"'Traffic jams' on the bike paths: Praguers broke the strike on their bikes"

"First hours of the strike turn into a smiling cyclistic 'happening'" (and they actually use the word "happening" in Czech)

It was supposed to be a day when anger would erupt. A day when life in the country would come to a stop and the 90% of Czechs who, according to the unions' statements, don't agree with the policy of the Nečas government, would move the country closer to early elections.

Thursday morning's reality could hardly be farther from the unions' vision.  In most regional capitals, nothing happened at all.  On Prague's embankments hundreds of cyclists rode past each other in the morning sun.  Some of them took pictures of each other and with smiles fell into conversation. 

Neighbors worked out carpooling and at least for one day there was relief from the nuisance of morning traffic, 1 car = 1 person.  In the morning traffic reports, drivers didn't hide their delight.

In those trolleys that did head out in spite of the strike and quickly became overfull, travelers describe an unusual atmosphere of unity and solidarity.  "Scooch in a little more so more of us can fit in here," sounded one example.  Incredible, compared to other days.

The counter-strike that I mentioned earlier turned out not to be much of anything. Tuesday's paper said that 300 people had already said they were going to do it, and it gave the impression that the numbers were growing.  In the end, only about 150 people got on Wednesday's last subway to Dejvická and didn't get off at the end of the line. Or rather, judging from the pictures, they got off the train, but didn't leave the station. They played guitars and sang songs. They chatted. They drank. (A picture with an earlier version of the story clearly showed a keg, which probably didn't contain mineral water. "What part of 'I'm not joining your worthy socio-political cause unless there's a keg!' don't you understand?") As the newspaper put it, it was more of a 'happening' than anything else (there's that word again).


So a bit of dud on the counter-strike, but who can blame them? You'll have get up earlier than usual the next morning--because there's a transit strike, so you have to expect your commute to take extra time. Also, you'll have to take a cab home when the "happening" finally wraps up, maybe at 1:00am. Normally you could take public transit--the subways shut down overnight, as do the regular trolley and bus routes, but they run a skeleton network of trolleys and buses on a half-hour interval, covering pretty much the whole city. But--there's a strike, so a cab it is.

(Note that what Prague considers a skeleton suitable for 3:00am would count as pretty good service at rush hour on a lot of bus routes in the U.S. It's the difference between transit as some sort of weird thing used by poor people, environmental terrorists, and normal folks who happen to live near a line, and transit that makes it unremarkable to live without a car.)

Our own observations matched up pretty well with that newspaper account I quoted above. A fair number of bikes--maybe there were more in other parts of the city, but I certainly didn't see any bicycle traffic jams.

And much to my surprise, there was nothing remotely like an automobile traffic jam. Usually on a weekday morning, the southbound lanes of the road below (the lanes heading toward me) are backed up, sometimes for miles toward the town of Roztoky. A little further south, the road is constricted to one lane for a major trolley expansion project, and the reduced road just can't handle the morning commute. But today it was fine.

More puzzlingly, there were buses. This is the route that runs from my university, and it seemed to be running at maybe half its usual frequency. A bit of an inconvenience, but you can still get a seat if most people are staying home.

If this is what the streets look like during a strike, one could draw the conclusion that public transit actually makes traffic worse, but that would likely be unfounded, just as with the famous story about how medicine is bad for you because funeral homes in Israel lost business during a doctors' strike. I suspected that a lot of people had looked at the predictions of what the day would be like and just stayed home--I certainly did. And the mother of one of Garrett's classmates mentioned that her husband was working from home--it's office work, and with telephones and computers it's no big deal if everybody's out for just one day. The newspaper article cited above confirmed my guess:

To be sure, a significant reason for the relatively calm atmosphere is the fact that many people didn't go to work at all.

And here's the bus terminus at Dejvická--half the usual buses, one tenth the usual passengers.

In the afternoon Kate and I saw a trolley, jam-packed, just like the newspaper website described, and very different from the buses I was seeing in the morning.

It's over now. The unions are claiming victory. The government says it won't give in to the union's demands. The trains are running. Trolleys, buses, and subways will be back to normal in the morning. My sense is that it didn't do much for the workers' position, but I'll see if I can figure out more along those lines in the future.

Here's an on-line picture gallery from the strike.