Cities & Subways

In the past week, I was in SF, LA, NYC and Boston, and took the subways in 3 of the 4 cities:

SF: BART is a good way to get around the Bay (provided that there's a station that's near where you're going).  It can be expensive, but is a great way of getting into downtown SF from SFO, especially during rush hour when it'll be quicker than taking a cab or renting a car.  The train can get pretty noisy from the speed it travels.

Amazingly, the people will line up behind the markings on the platform where the train stops and everyone boards in an orderly way.

NYC: The MTA's subway is a workhorse.  My complaint is that it can get pretty disgusting, especially in the summer when it's muggy outside.  Also, the old trains screech down the tracks -- sometimes the sound is unbearable. 

If they'd have a system to display when the next train was coming, you wouldn't have so many on-the-go New Yorkers, myself included, craning their necks to see if the train is coming. 

Boston:  I love the T.  It's pretty clean and efficient.  It's also the only subway in the world where seeing someone deeply engrossed in their Thermodynamics textbook is not an uncommon sight (especially the red line that serves MIT & Harvard).

LA:  Subway?  Public Transportation?  You must be joking!  What fascinates me about LA is how the freeways and other roads take on lives of their own.  On the east coast, people will refer to a freeway by its route number ("Take 95 South").  On the west coast, especially LA, they append "the" to the route number ("How do I get to the 405?"), and seem to refer to them as living entities.  Not only that but it's practically a parlor game in LA to talk freeway & route selection with people sharing insider tips on shortcuts, or not as the case may be.

Comments

[kitty]

what I thought was cool about the Boston subway was that you can walk on the trax... at least on one of the lines, maybe it was light rail, it was wierd.

[Luke Stiles]

I once took the bus in LA as an experiment. It went OK, but took quite a while to get to Hollywood from Venice in the middle of the day. I still haven't made it to the LA subway, which I learned about from the cover of the Dilated Peoples album, The Platform.