London was the city for me. I remember stepping out of the underground for the first time at Edgware Road and feeling a switch turn on — I had places to be, problems to solve, embarrassing tourist ineptitudes to disguise, but for the first time in years the pure act of awareness suddenly mattered. This was new. I’d long since ceased to feel any connection to my American surroundings. I was 25 and at least three years into a torturous spiral down into artistic, professional and spiritual frustration. People, places and events flowed around me and through me without touching — I was a ghost, hollowed out by roiling inner strife that rendered engagement with the outside world dull and tiring.
All of that resided within me at Edgware Road. I was unhappy and depressed. But I was also now suddenly aware, my senses reaching and grasping without effort, and it felt good.
And the switch never turned off. From that moment to the very last day of my 20 month stay in the city as a Master’s student, even after all the frustrations had been addressed and conquered, London never felt any less special and desirous than it did at first glance. 30 April, 2014, driving to Heathrow airport in the process of deporting myself to the US (after a failed post-Master’s internship visa debacle): in the midst of one of the saddest and most stressful days of my life, what stands out most vividly in my recollection is the image of The Angel sweeping into view as I crested the gentle left sweep up Goswell Road. It was an imminently familiar landmark I’d passed on foot and cycle countless times, but this day, from this angle, at this speed, in this car, my perception of it was ever so subtly different. Even gripped by bleak melancholy, in that moment I felt a swell in my soul.
That was London. Now I am in New York, and it is very different. Insidiously similar enough to keep my mind’s compare/contrast machinery running in constant overdrive, but different enough that almost no aspect can be described as fundamentally “the same”. So here, after two weeks and past the acute culture shock phase (brief — I am American after all), are my initial impressions.
I was eager to explore the subway, having read a number of intriguing articles comparing New York’s system with that of the London Underground. 24-hour service meant there would be no more scrambling for the last train, but would there be other obvious advantages? Disadvantages? Convenience, comfort, crowdedness? Would my naïve love for London’s system be smartly corrected by exposure to a very different but equally admirable method of providing public transport?
There are two inarguable disadvantages to the tube: cost and rush hour crowdedness. Aside from that, it is a superior experience.
New York subway stations are generally dingy, exuding an aura of mustiness and uncleansable dirtiness (and boy will they be sweltering in the summer*). They feel functional and unfinished-basement-like, and do not tend to have much individual charm — usually subtle tiling differences on the walls are the primary aesthetic differentiator. London’s tube stations are far more welcoming — they have a finished gleam and often retain singular character: compare the lithic steel-and-concrete gravitas of Westminster with the beleaguered mosaics of construction-plagued Tottenham Court Road, and observe how differently the two settings play upon your emotional milieu. I have used probably 25 stations so far in New York, and though there are many quirky visual delights I have yet to feel something particular on any one platform.
It’s not that I can’t dig the utilitarian grunginess — it fits into a narrative of cheaper, more universal mass transit, a narrative that also includes big high-capacity train cars, immense platforms and extremely quick access from street to platform. In tube parlance, subway lines are all cut-and-cover, meaning they run no more than one or two staircases below street level. In contrast, most of London’s platforms are deep below the surface and require quite a hike, often involving multiple escalators, to reach.
But the narrative is sabotaged by one thing: waiting. When the tube runs, it runs. After you’ve made it to the platform, you can expect a train any time. In addition, all platforms have a digital display announcing the time of the next arrival. In New York, not only will you often have to wait ten or more minutes for the next train, you won’t have any idea when it is coming.**
In London, the experience of using the tube is of expending energy to navigate a sometimes frustratingly extended station layout, and then being rewarded with prompt service. Feelings of predictability and personal agency in one’s travel efforts are thus preserved: “If I give myself X minutes to walk to the platform, and at most a 5-minute uncertainty window to account for train arrival time, I can expect to be at my destination on the dot — unless unforeseen delays occur”. That stress of uncertainty, which the tube allows one to compartmentalise within “the unforeseen”, plagues the typical New York subway experience. The train could arrive right away or in 15 minutes. And you won’t know until you see the lights coming down the tunnel. If you transfer, additional uncertainty must be accounted for. Instead of diving into and out of a rapidly moving circulatory system at will, passing the subway turnstile feels like consigning oneself to the whims of a lumbering transit prison. My two weeks of using the subway have developed a single summary image: standing on a dirty concrete platform, waiting.
The trains are bigger; the cars are bigger. I had to squeeze myself onto a cosy Central Line carriage during morning rush hour at Leyton Station, and it was a fairly horrific endeavour. I haven’t started commuting yet in New York, but things are surely a lot less claustrophobic at rush hour (though personally, I can imagining preferring London’s slightly uncomfortable and degrading on-train body heat squish to whatever hellish insta-sweat environment I’m told to expect on the platforms here in August).
When it comes to looks, a New York subway car is boring, plastic and functional. It feels as charming as an underground school bus, except less comfortable. It is indeed air conditioned, though that is more necessity than luxury (London tube trains get a little stuffy, but given the mild climate installing air conditioning would represent marginal comfort gains). I haven’t noticed any major compelling features distinguishing the stock on different lines. Older and newer trains do commingle on the same lines; they all contain plastic bench or slightly scooped bucket seats, and the basic colour schemes are either grey and blue or grey and orange/brown/dirt.*** At first I felt uncomfortable emanations of the pukey linoleum-and-laminate cheapness of my 1990s grade school career (“This is why we can’t have nice things”). Such associations are receding as the subway becomes routine, but…still.
Each London tube line, of course, has a lot of character. The interiors feature colour and carpeted seats. The designs feel confident and good-natured. The bars seem to reside exactly where your hands want to be, especially in the doorway areas. The new Metropolitan stock greets you at the station with that oddly fetching bug-eyed driver cockpit. The Bakerloo line has those weird springy cushions you can plop down on to bounce the person sitting next to you. Some things are cool. Some things are humorous. Everything is in its right place. On the subway I catch myself thinking “ugh” as I stand in the aisle and feel that in reaching to hold on I am forced to invasively lean over the seated passengers. Pointed reactions to design deficiency like that never came to me beneath London. The tube surely isn’t perfect, but design flaws are well hidden behind the thoughtful cohesiveness to each train stock’s design.
But what about the 24 hour service? Isn’t it a sweet relief to banish the terror and angst of “LAST TRAIN, RUN!!”?
Not really. Subway trains are fairly infrequent at night (often twenty minutes apart) and if you have to transfer you are looking at exorbitant fluctuations in total journey time. Standing on a dirty concrete platform, waiting. London has a much more pleasant alternative, and it is called the night bus.
New York’s bus system is fairly shit. Like the buses of other American cities, these austerely appointed, garishly lit, irregularly arriving dirty metal caterpillars just reek of social underclass. My first few bus rides here were marked by an odd feeling of embarrassment. I had to think about this to figure it out: sitting there with my obvious privilege badges of whiteness and economic advantage (i.e. iPhone), I was aware that I was somehow rubbing it in: “Hey, I could take a taxi and pay for it with Daddy’s dime, but I’m saving money like a good boy by riding here on this service meant for you humble working poor”. I highly doubt anyone on the bus felt the reverse of that feeling toward me, but it was a telling thing to play upon my conscience. It is also telling that the tools for navigating the bus system — signage, maps, on-bus announcements for upcoming stops — tend toward the inconspicuous and/or non-existent. This city takes no pride in its buses: to use them requires local familiarity or a lot of DIY navigating. If not for Citymapper I’d be completely lost.
The bright red double decker buses of London are bold, typically frequent, and always easy to navigate. As on the tube, the seats are carpeted. The interiors are attractive. Visual and audio announcements mark each upcoming stop. Social inequity is muted by the bus’s flamboyance: whether a mass of tired first generation immigrants or an insufferable crowd of rich young revellers, everyone is at least partially subsumed into the common dignity of being on a London Bus: an undeniably proud and civilised vehicle. And paying £1.45 ($2.45) for it, essentially the same as New York’s $2.50 bus fare.
Here is where I wish I could praise a highly utilitarian subway system whose equivalent $2.50 fare (against standard London tube fares running from $3.75 — $5.50 depending on journey distance) makes it the Transport of the People, with ancillary buses picking up the slack for certain journeys that would be awkward by train. And well, it is significantly cheaper. But as already discussed, there are trade-offs. And no matter where that lowest common transport denominator lies in New York, its standard of collective dignity rests well below London’s.
In sum, using London’s public transport is by no means a utopian experience — it is sometimes extremely crowded — but it feels civilised and often intangibly uplifting. New York’s system is grittier and cheaper and comparatively faceless. If trains ran half as frequently as they do in London, the contest would be much more competitive. But they don’t. So it isn’t.
Footnotes (identical as those given in-line above)
*editorial update at 4 weeks: change that “will be” to an “are”.
**editorial update at 4 weeks: sometime in the last week I discovered countdown clocks DO exist on a significant minority of routes, namely the 1/2/3, 4/5/6 and L lines. It is amazing what a psychological difference these clocks make. Most of my travel has been on lines A/C/E, B/D/F/M and G, which apparently are years away from such clocks.
***editorial update at 4 weeks: I have since decided that the old 1960s stock one sometimes encounters on the A/C/E line, with its corrugated aluminium exterior and dark blue bench seats (vs the gross earth tone buckets of 70s stock and almost periwinkle benches of newer stock), gives me the best aesthetic vibes.
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