Subway stations and train cars provide an intimate view into how citizens shop, interact and move about.
Guest column by Liza Weisstuch
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The revelation began, like so many do, in the bathroom — the women’s room at the Tokyo Metro’s Shibuya Station, to be specific. A whimsical mural of birds covers the walls, and a loop of birdsongs serves as quiet ambient music. My fascination with subway stations took root.
The futuristic, perpetually teeming transit hub is described on its website as having “a magnetism that few can resist.” I cannot be the only person who credits that allure largely to the restrooms, which are as sparkling as the lobby facilities at any Four Seasons hotel.
The station itself was equally immaculate. And when a train pulled in, people waited for riders to exit before they filed in, no matter how crowded it was. The systematic flow of people on the escalators — standing on the right, walking on the left, no exceptions — made me think that children receive subway etiquette training in public schools. The orderliness, the cleanliness and the respect for fellow urbanites add up to a portrait of Tokyo, condensed.
I will always opt for public transportation when I travel. The true local experience is unavoidable when you’re side by side with others, observing what they’re buying, what they’re reading and how they treat one another. A city’s heartbeat pulses along its tracks.
Yes, it can be a hassle to decode the fare machines for a foreign transit system or to navigate the labyrinthine tunnels, which never fail to call to mind a litany of disaster movies. But who doesn’t appreciate a little mystery on their journey?
When everything runs smoothly, the subway gets you to your destination more quickly than a car inching through traffic. Plus, it offers bite-size doses of the city’s attractions and idiosyncrasies. In New York City, for instance, you get public art; art deco accents, a flicker of an extinct opulence; talented buskers; newsstands hawking overpriced soft drinks and snacks; and critters that constitute the urban ecosystem’s wildlife. If a full-immersion local experience is what you’re going for, you need to take in the lows as well as the highs.
The Moscow Metro is a series of concentric circles of tracks with routes that radiate out from the center like spokes. The map is chaotic and perplexing and tough to navigate if you don’t know Cyrillic, but the stations make you forget all that. The glorious underground art and architecture are museum-worthy. The underground retailers sell an assortment of necessities: home goods, clothing, beauty items, hardware and electronic gizmos, evoking the simplicity, efficiency and forced minimalism of 20th-century life there.
The London Underground, which opened in 1863, maintains its Victorian charm. It manifests not only in the brick archways and tiled surfaces, but also in the aggressive civility, like the famous “mind the gap” safety announcement and the billboards emblazoned with a colorful cartoon heart encouraging straphangers to “be kind.”
For Belgrade, Serbia, an official visitors website deems the system “easy to use, but hard to love, yet it has a certain charm.” The message nails the city’s no-nonsense exterior and huge heart, a dynamic I love about it.
The streetcars that click-clack down busy thoroughfares are just another performer in the vintage production that is New Orleans.
As a New Yorker without a driver’s license who’s dependent on the subway for everything, I cannot endorse the Metropolitan Transportation Authority enough. Yes, there are breakdowns and delays along its 850 miles of track, shutdowns for construction, litter and the sheer humanity, which gets increasingly — let’s call it multisensory — as the weather heats up. And the public kvetch fest sometimes feels like an Olympic sport. (“My commute was worse than yours,” people will say, ad infinitum.)
Yet, despite all those demerits, I remind tourists in New York that you get what you pay for, which is $2.90 per ride. Personally, whenever I travel, I’d rather spend cash on memorable meals, museum books and purchases from stores that don’t exist elsewhere than drop upward of $20 on a car ride to get somewhere.
Liza Weisstuch is a New York City-based writer. You can follow her on X @livingtheproof.
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