Modern transit created sustained mutual visual attention without speech.

Evidence

Social life in the large city as compared to the towns shows a great preponderance of occasions to see rather than hear people. Before the appearance of omnibuses, railroads, and street cars in the nineteenth century, men were not in a situation where for periods of minutes or hours they could or must look at each other without talking to one another. Modern social life increases in ever growing degree the role of mere visual impression which always characterizes the preponderant part of all sense relationships between man and man and must place social attitudes and feelings upon an entirely changed basis. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 1083

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s cross-reading with Simmel’s blasé attitude and Lofland’s civil inattention: transit vehicles are the physical conditions that made stranger-watching the default urban posture.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the Grafting & Growth-adjacent theme of infrastructure reshaping perception — here the transportation infrastructure that manufactures the observing self.