The strike is underway, as of 3:00 AM this morning. Sitting in my home/studio on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I am remembering the last New York City transit strike 25 years ago. I was living where I do now. For 11 days in the morning I had to make my way the 7 miles downtown to Wall Street where I worked for a few hours before making my way the 7 miles back home. The downtown trip was easier, hitching a 5 AM ride with a neighbor who dropped me off downtown on her way to work in New Jersey. Coming back was usually at least a 2-hour crawl in a crowded car. At least it was April and the weather was warm.

Back then we had no Internet and no cell phones. Working at home was limited mainly to invalids and wealthy executives (part time in home offices). Distance shopping was done through paper catalogs. The transit strike which begins today will bring chaos — with particular pain for shoppers, tourists, and everyone because of the cold weather. But the halting of the great transportation networks will set the virtual networks into a massive reaction which should do a lot to keep this great city in operation.

The many New Yorkers like me who already work at home will be minimally affected. My guess is huge numbers who commute will stay home and do their work using their cells phones and the Internet. Shopping online may get a boost, as merchants in the city lose sales. Of course the millions who must still physically get to work and school are being greatly inconvenienced. Yet the differences between the strike last time and this time are major. Sitting for all the hours I did in cars moving at a crawl, I could not have imagined the virtual world of today in which the speed of light is the norm.