Transit: The Soul of The City
By Mathew Wagman
Chances are, a post recently popped into your feed documenting the glitzy exploits of a friend in NYC. Along with the indispensable pizza tastings, taxi sightings and ludicrous lines for novelty pastries, a descent must be made into the dingy depths of the world’s most iconic subway. Nowhere else is so instantly recognizable yet so filthy, so accessible, yet so glamorous. How else would you get to Times Square, “The Crossroads of the World?” Are you really going to pay plane ticket prices for an Uber after a night out in SoHo, or an even larger parking fee at the stadium when it’s called the “Subway Series” for a reason?
Though certainly more distinguished than its equivalents, New York isn’t the only city whose identity is inextricably linked to the look and feel of its public transportation, not by a long shot. Chicago would fade into middle-american metropolitan blandness if not for the elevated trains criss-crossing its otherwise generic north american cityscape. The Tube, the first thing most visitors to the UK see after stepping out of a plane or a Eurostar, and what shuttles them between all of London’s most famous sites, is appropriately dressed in the bold hues of the Union Jack. Germany’s top three largest cities divided the primary colors to create distinct paint jobs they carry throughout their systems. No city of any size or notability is replete without a transport system tying it all together, a singular symbol which encapsulates all the destinations which warranted its creation. The very act of connecting all these parts of a city creates a new visual shorthand for what makes the city unique.
As a city evolves, so does its public transportation network. New York’s post-war decline was epitomized by the graffiti that coated its subway system, inside and out, described as reflecting “a prevailing sense of the incapacity of government” by 1979. Yet just ten years later, the subway system was deemed “free of graffiti”, and the new trains were eventually cleared of paint altogether, their sleek silver cars welcoming the city’s resurgence and inspiring a trend of metallic baldness throughout the continent. By the early 2000s, Montreal began to emerge from the three decades of debt it was saddled with from extensive urban renewal and state-funded megaprojects in the Sixties and Seventies, and move beyond the turmoil of the Quebec independence movement which subsequently gripped it. To mark this new era, slick new “Azur” trains replaced the fifty year-old models dating back to the system’s founding, some of the oldest in the world. They too featured the gleaming silver coat popularized in New York, relegating the classic Cerulean color of the trains they replaced to accents and interior detailing. These cars signified a new Montreal, a city seeking to put forward a vision of itself as a cosmopolitan hub for high tech industry after losing its primate status to Toronto in its late 20th-century turmoil. San Francisco is a perfect example of a city which refused to cave to the pressure of reinvention through replacement of its transit network. Instead, they chose to keep their famous cable cars in a protracted postwar fight to preserve the city’s heritage against the seemingly inevitable march of the combustion engine. Later on, grandiose plans to supplant the similarly iconic streetcar system with the futuristic automated BART network were modified to preserve the trolleys in the upper level of the new downtown tunnel, with BART running beneath them. Saving the trolleys and cable cars preserved San Francisco's classic streetscape, yet their integration with the innovative and swift new BART provided a veneer of regional heritage over what was quickly becoming the center of global information technology.
Sometimes, transit isn’t meant to differentiate a city or reflect its unique identity, but instead to bring it in line with a uniform vision of what a city should be. Part of the Chinese government’s project to spur massive economic growth and modernize the country has manifested as a policy providing standardized Metro systems to all major cities. Having launched an initiative to provide all cities with at least 1.5 million inhabitants with a Metro, the state-owned train manufacturer CRRC recently released a set of standard, modular designs to simplify construction and increase intercompatibility on the rapidly ballooning number of rail systems in the country. In China, new transit is not meant to be the same sort of local differentiator or mark of civic pride that most other systems (including its older ones) are, but instead a strong physical reminder of the power of the ruling party to transform the lives of its citizenry.
Whether it be the Underground or the Subway, a “T” or an “L”, or any of the countless Metros or U-Bahns that traverse urban areas the world over, a strong sense of identity can be cultivated through the shared experience of traveling on our local buses, trains, or ferries. Car-centric infrastructure does quite the opposite, destroying local character with monotonous wastes of concrete. It isolates people into individual compartments, and turns transportation into an adversarial process in which we are incentivized to avoid others. Unlike most forms of public transit, making a city more hospitable to cars means making it less hospitable to any other mode of travel which people might want to try, turning what in some places is a great unifier into a form of charity only for those with no other options. As we work to increase public awareness about the necessity of a sustainable urban future, we must remember that the purpose of a transit network isn’t just to tick a box or give alms to the poor, but to foster a sense of community by connecting people to their neighbors.
Written by Mathew Wagman, Co-founder of the McGuill open mapping group and member of McGill Urbanism Club. He is a second year Urban Studies major at McGill University
Cover Photo by Luca Bravo
Urbanism Club August 30th, 2023