Complain about the trains all you like, but appreciate them too.
New Yorkers tend to talk about the subways roughly the way Canadians talk about the cold: We don’t love it, but we have no choice but to bear it. We gripe amongst ourselves about how track work delayed a trip to work, or how a person with a certain smell overtook a car, or how an obnoxious fellow rider was playing his music at top volume. The undercurrent is that the system is old, creaky and dingy. The tracks and trains and switches frequently seem exhausted, which is why getting from place to place can be exhausting.
Let’s dispense with the obvious: The subway system is indeed old and creaky and replete with little indignities. It floods like a bad joke during a big storm. Air conditioning units give out. The announcements can be incomprehensible. Tracks catch on fire. Too often, trips can be a little scary or even scarring. Stations are depressing. Service is far too often snarled.
But how we talk about the trains to one another isn’t how we should think about them. Even the most jaded among us should acknowledge that the subways, when they work well — and they do work well most of the time — are a great gift to a great city, one without which it simply couldn’t be what it has become.
As a New Yorker for almost 30 years, I can attest that the majority of times we ride, we get from point A to B uneventfully and more efficiently than the equivalent journey would be via any other mode of travel. A small fraction of journeys are unpleasant (and a very small fraction might be worse than that), but a larger fraction serve as affirmations of shoulder-to-shoulder city living and even, I daresay, of humanity.
Even the most jaded among us should acknowledge that the subways, when they work well — and they do work well most of the time — are a great gift to a great city, one without which it simply couldn’t be what it has become.
Many a subway ride includes some small, positive interaction with a stranger, the kind that, whether we admit it or not, makes our day — and that research suggests can be very good for our well-being. It might take the shape of an offer to slide a seat over so that you can sit alongside your kid. It might be a game of peekaboo with a baby across the way. It might be a quick exchange between a relative newbie and a seasoned rider about how to get to Queens Plaza. It might be a passerby catching notice of your University of Miami hat, followed by the sharing that you both grew up in Miami and a brief conversation of how damn much that city has changed. These kinds of things don’t happen as much on sidewalks or in parks, and we don’t think enough about why.
New York’s neighborhoods are de facto quite segregated by race, and so are its schools. On the subways, we stand and sit next to people going from and to every point along the line, which in New York City means people from all over the world (including tourists from all over the world). Squirming toddlers sit next to the elderly. People on their way to Free Palestine rallies share cars with orthodox Jews, and it’s almost always a nonissue. When there’s a person behaving strangely and the rest of the car has to make a snap judgment about whether or not they are a threat, eyes quickly meet eyes and take the measure of the moment, with everyone (save that odd man out) generally acknowledging that for at least the next few minutes, they’re all trapped in this metal tube together.
Some people are unstable and some are jerks and some are downright terrible. They disproportionately make things bad for the rest of us. But most — and by that I mean the vast, vast, vast majority — are good people more or less like you, creating the culture and setting the tone.
It is no small thing that among the many mixings that happen underground, the wealthy often sit next to the unemployed on their way to job interviews. That’s unlike transit in almost any other American city. The norm is that public transit is the slim pickings of the poor and working class, with crummy service that often reflects that stratification.
The democracy of the New York City subway may not be the type of socioeconomic integration that shrinks racial wealth gaps and combats entrenched inequalities, but it is meaningful nonetheless: It teaches the eternally essential lesson that, despite all flattening cultural and political caricatures to the contrary, the typical fill-in-the-blank person is more or less the same as you.
It is no small thing that among the many mixings, the wealthy often sit next to the unemployed on their way to job interviews.
A subway car packed to the gills can hold about 240 people. When I’m in a moderately full car, it often occurs to me: The odds are good that someone here is on their way to an outpatient clinic to get a fateful heart test. Someone else probably just got a pink slip, or terrible news about a loved one. I’m pretty sure this thought has crossed the minds of others because, contra the stereotype that New Yorkers can’t stand one another, our default mode is accommodation, even basic kindness.
Over the last 20 years or so, the way people behave in public space has changed a lot. The vast majority of us are these days in our own personal attention zones — head down, on our phones. (I’m writing this sentence on my phone on a train.) Plenty of New Yorkers walk through the sliding doors and don’t exchange a meaningful glance with anyone else for the entirety of the ride. In this way, subways are increasingly antisocial, as is almost everywhere else. But on the trains, despite our different origins and destinations, there’s still a shared awareness that being in the same space for a brief period, going places together, means something. There’s no better expression of why cities matter.