Public Transit Perspectives: London, Boston, New York

AKIE BERMISS: I have a simple perspective when it comes to public transportation: New York City does it best.  Hands-down, no quibbling, end of story.  To a certain extent, we invented functional mass transit.  We made it work on a municipal level in a way that no other city has been able to even come close to replicating.  There is no competition.  We own it.

I’ll be the first to admit: it ain’t perfect.  But up against whatever the rest of the world has going on its a damn sight better than the rest of the best.  It really boils down to four simple criteria.

1. Functionality:  Does it get you where you need to go?  Work, hospital, police station, jury duty, supermarket, ikea?  Does it get you where you want to go? The movies, the beach, clubbing, your friend’s house, etc.  Is it easily accessible?  Can you walk to the train in under 10 minutes?  Can you walk to multiple trains in under ten minutes?  There are some cities where you need a friggin’ car just to get to the train station (DC — I’m talking about you!).  What is the point of that?  Its practically useless.  That is, it may be public transportation, technically.  But it ain’t what we here in NY call: Mass transit.

2. Clarity/Simplicity:  Ok — so if you’re not from a city, there’s always going to be a trial period where you are trying to figure things out.  Where you take the wrong train, in the wrong direction, at the wrong time.  Sure.  I’ll warrant you that.  But surely you must agree, its shouldn’t take you too long to get the basics down.  Work, home, and store.  That should come pretty quickly, especially if you’ve moved to a place to work and live.  After, say, a week or so, you should at least know that at 9am you can get to work by a particular route, and home by a particular route without having to do any quick math or orienteering in your head.  I think most people give NYC a bad wrap for this one, of course they are ignoring the fact that so comprehensive a subway system is going to have to be at least moderately complex.  Different trains SHOULD go to different place or, if the same places, by different routes.  Some cities (and I’m talking about you, Beantown!) ignore this simple principle and their trains are sadly redundant and illogically arranged.

3. Comprehensive System: A city is not a suburb.  I’ve lived in the suburbs.  There’s one train station and one bus depot per town.  Sometimes the bus depot doubles as the elementary school or the apothecary.  Point is, eveyone’s got a car, they’re used to suburban sprawl and the know that, if they don’t want to drive, they can go the a central location and train on out of there.  A city’s public transit system cannot be set up this way!  Cities are cities because they don’t buy in to all that obvious centrality.  Every piece and part of the city is its own centrality, with its own local hubs and its own outlying boundary areas.  A city needs to be set up with multiple train stations and bus depots.  In NYC we have Atlantic Center, Times Square, Grand Central, Union Square, Jamaica Center, City Hall, Brighton Beach/Coney Island.  Each one is arguably a hub of some sort where you can catch three of four different trains that travel through one or two of the other hubs before going off into very different destination hubs.  Its comprehensive.  And yet, also, the non-hub stops also offer the chance to transfer between trains, providing the kind of flexibility that denizens of a thriving metropolis need.  What’s with all these primary color-based train systems.  Five lines that meet up, basically never… or just once.  Its silly.  Its poor urban planning.  Its embarrassing.

You can do better!

And, finally: Bad-Assed-ness.

How bad-ass is your train system?  How fast do the trains go?  How jam-packed do the cars get during rush hour?  How hip do you have to be to know how to avoid the press?  How many cool little cross-overs and hidden underground connections does it possess?  Do you have break-dancers, musicians, visual artists, and startlingly creative panhandlers?  And how late does it run?  (How many cities have I been in where I get out of the bar at 2a — and have no option but to call a cab because the trains aren’t running any more?  ME: “Wait the WHAT ain’t running anymore?  How the hell do you shut it off?!”)  Do you have over-passes AND tunnels?  Do your trains arrive right under certain places you want to go (museums, malls, parks, etc)?  Do you have wild and zany conductors who like to affect their voices during announcements?

This is what I’m saying, people!  You can only get all of these thing in the New York City Subway System.  We got it all.  No — we’re not super clean.  Nor do we have digital displays showing when the next train is coming.  The trains aren’t really cute inside like a really nice apartment.  We don’t even have cushions on the seats.  You get on a train here and you can either stand, lean, or sit on a slab of insanely hard plastic.

Other cities have trains that are really fun to ride.  Or really deep in the ground.  Or just really add to the flavor of the place.  Not that the MTA doesn’t give NY a good deal of flavoring.  But that ain’t what its there for.  Its there to make sure people get where they got to go.  No muss, no fuss.

Just get there, baby.

EMILY SAIDEL: I’ve experienced a number of public transit systems: Philadelphia for four years, Chicago for four years, New York for almost four, not to mention travel forays in Boston, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. The system I’ve been most impressed with? London.

I was only in London for a few days, but most of those involved traveling on my own. At the time the exchange rate was about 2 dollars to every pound so paying for taxis was a splurge I wasn’t willing to make. The London Underground made it unnecessary.

I am regularly thankful for New York’s 24/7, 365 day/year policies, but I am less thankful for the rats, dirt, and smell of urine. The Underground, with its clean white tiling and friendly, attentive workers, had two features that particularly impressed. The first was the deliberate closing of doors. I twice saw parties separated when the doors closed, because they were not quick enough to board or depart. As frustrating as that is for those individuals, as a rider I have to say great. The good of the many overrides the good of the few. And the many want to keep moving.

Second, and most importantly, the signage of the Underground is commendable. Training on New York’s system has ensured that I can follow a subway map of colors, lines, numbers, and letters without too much difficulty. But one of the flaws in the NY system is that to orient oneself, one must already know a little about the city. Is West 4th uptown or downtown from 34th? Toward Brooklyn or toward Queens? Toward Jamaica-179th or Stillwell? A New Yorker can answer easily, a visitor, less so. London compensates for the visitor by having large, bold signage at the stairs before descending to the platform. Is Notting Hill Gate clockwise or counter-clockwise to Westminster? And what is the end of the line in appropriate direction? Even if I were unsure of the answers, I can look at these signs, see which platform has Westminster listed, and move in that direction. No messing with maps, no standing looking lost.

The excellent signage continues on the platform level with electronic signs indicating when to expect the next train on which route. Clearly, the train will arrive when it will arrive, whether the passenger knows it is coming or not. But there is considerable comfort to knowing the wait is terminable.

I could wish the system ran all night. The Night Buses fill in the time gap suitably if not optimally. But I would easily trade 24 hour service for the clean, clarity of the London Underground.

MOLLY SCHOEMANN: Don’t get me wrong, I love Boston. It’s like my second, not-as-good home away from home. There’s great history there, and lots of character, and the letter “R” is pronounced “AH” by natives, who like nothing more than to glare at you from under their Red Sox caps. What’s not to like? Oh, right. The cold. And the high cost of living. And all those college students. And the godforsaken T.

Having lived in Boston for 5 years without a car, I think I can say with authority that in when it comes to public transportation, Boston is like Toon Town. First of all, the subway lines don’t have names, or even letters or numbers—they have COLORS. Could they possibly simplify that any further? Except then, to complicate it, some of the trains of one color line (the green line) branch off and go into vastly different directions. So, on the green line, you have the B line, the C line, the D line, and the E line. Could they have possibly picked four letters that didn’t sound exactly the same when announced in a noisy T station during rush hour? There are other letters in the alphabet that have different tones—like H! Or M! There are also other letters that don’t look very similar when they’re displayed on what looks like a defunct Lite-Brite on the front of a rapidly moving train. (And don’t get me started on Lite-Brites and Boston for that matter, thanks to a little show called Aqua Teen Hunger Force.) In any event, so you’re standing at Park Street (or PAHK Street) waiting for the E line, and here it comes along—but wait, is that an E or a B? And it’s on the C tracks?! And the doors on the side where you’re standing don’t seem to be opening! AND you paid $2 for this lousy T ride! What the hell!?

Still, you are given something of a sporting chance, particularly at Park Street, because the trains don’t move ALL that quickly. In fact, there was a recent incident in which a drunk girl fell onto the T tracks in Boston, right in the path of an oncoming train, and she was saved by heroic bystanders who waved at the oncoming train to get it to slow down and stop in time. And it did stop in time. So, we’re not talking about super fast transport here either.

Also, way the T system is set up, is like spokes radiating from a hub in the center (more or less) of the city. As a result, there are many situations in which you need to take the T all the way into that center hub in order to take it all the way out in another direction, to get not that far away from where you started. So there are places that take 15 minutes to drive between, but they take an hour to take the T between. I lived in Somerville at one point, and my younger sister lived in Jamaica Plain, and it took us about an hour and a half to get to one another’s houses on the T. And Boston, don’t flatter yourself; you’re not that big.

There are also situations in which you could conceivably transfer between different 3 trains in order to go exactly two aboveground city blocks. Ridiculous!

And don’t forget the bus! Boston is also home to a fabulous bus network that has become more easily navigable in recent years, but at one point there was practically no way to find out where buses stopped without taking them. Bus schedules consisted of random-looking online .pdfs which were never shown in relation to actual streets. Since those early days, Boston wised up and began printing up actual bus schedules, and sometimes if you are lucky, you will actually find the schedule you are looking for in the display tree at your local T station. I don’t think they have ever managed to print them in a way that corresponds with demand—there were always nine thousand schedules available for the ubiquitous #1 bus, and I have NEVER seen a living schedule for the elusive #94.

So, the bus system in Boston has improved—but so has the price increased. When last I lived there a year ago, I regularly took an express bus that took me from outer Medford to Downtown Boston in about 20 minutes, and cost $3.50. That’s right, per ride. And no, this bus did not offer door-to-door service, free coffee, a complimentary newspaper or a lapdance. Sometimes it didn’t even offer a seat. And yet, $3.50?! I ask you. For three times that price, I could take a bus to NYC.

Lastly, let’s talk about hours of operation. Boston is a well-known college town with a fairly young demographic and a pretty active nightlife—and yet it’s stuck with a transportation system that keeps cranky old people hours. Trying to catch a T or a bus any time after midnight, you have about a 50% chance of being SOL and having to take a cab or walk. And in a city known for a negative wind chill factor in winter, walking is kind of risky sometimes. You could end up dead in a snowdrift between two parked cars.

Also, it is almost impossible to get a cab in many areas, because either a) there are NO cabs, b) no cabs will stop, or c) a drunken frat boy elbows you out of the way and takes your cab. And few things are more frustrating than stumbling out of the club after a night (well, half a night, since it’s only 1am) of dancing, wearing a miniskirt in fifteen degree weather, and stumbling to the curb to catch a quick taxi—only to be passed by dozens of empty cabs who refuse to even look at you because presumably they are off-duty. Why cabs choose to go off-duty late at night when they have become the only game in town, I will never know. In fact, I once hailed a cab and watched the cabbie stop his cab, light a cigarette, glance up at me, and then speed away. It was enough to make me weep and gnash my teeth with rage. And I’m no shrinking violet.

Boston, you’re a tough town. But I’ll always have a soft, angry place in my heart for you.

TED BERG: I have very little to add to what my colleagues said above. I’ve spent time on various sorts of light rails in numerous cities, and I, like Akie, would take New York’s over all of them.

But if we’re talking pure aesthetics — not convenience, not charm, and certainly not well-planned seating alignments — my favorite public transit system is Washington, D.C.’s in a landslide.

I should mention, I suppose, that during my time living in D.C. the two stations I most frequented were Dupont Circle and Rosslyn, two of the very deepest and thus most impressive.

How deep, you might ask? It’s impossible to describe. The escalator just keeps going and going, and then you get off and turn a corner, and there’s another huge escalator taking you even further down into the center of the earth. It’s almost as if the District of Columbia hoped to save energy on intercity travel by burrowing so far into the earth’s crust that the distances between stops was actually significantly closer than it would be on the surface.

And that’s pretty badass.

Also, D.C.’s Metro stations are not lined with cracked and aging ceramic tile, like in New York or Philadelphia, or with piss-drunk douchebags, like in Boston. The walls of the D.C. Metro are formed of giant tiles of unmarked gray concrete with a rectangular indent on each.

Oh, and it’s really dark down there. Spooky dark.

It all adds up to the feeling that you’re riding the subway in the future, only it’s some bizarre and deeply faulted version of the future, something out of a Kubrick film.

The trains get way, way too crowded at rush hour, and they don’t come enough, and a lot of the routes aren’t all that convenient. But it’s something to look at.

Tags: Boston, public transit, the T

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