The Sound of the Underground

The London underground and the New York Subway: Which is better?

Few things probably symbolise the greatness of a great city better than its subway/underground system: lots of people with a look of purpose, travelling at speed. Every city movie’s got to have a glimpse of a crowded underground railway system. A huge logistical infrastructure that only a big place could support.

So it is with London and New York: both cities produce thousands tourist-friendly mugs and tea towels with Underground / Subway signs. Designs illustrating the Beck Underground Map or showing the 4 Train to The Bronx, compulsory for any tourist who has been there and bought the T-shirt.

So how to compare?

First thing to remember is what London is built on: clay. New York is on Granite (much harder). This means London can dig tube lines 60 metres underground, whilst New York railway designers are forced to exclusively dig lines just below street level. London has plenty of these “cut and cover” lines, but they are generally the older, slower, more rubbish lines, like the District, Circle and Hammersmith & Sh*tty.

New York Subway Trains are bigger and faster. Their huge silver carriages, with the Stars and Stripes painted on the side, evoke movie memories and somehow look inately cool. They also have air conditioning. London’s deep-level tube level lines are too far underground and too narrow, so retrospective installation would be unaffordable. London summers are usually relatively more tame, but not if you’re deep down on the Underground, where train temperatures sometimes end up topping levels legally permissible for livestock.

Because it's dug only a shallow depth in to the granite, the New York subway is much easier to get to: exiting from a train, you’re only ever about 45 seconds from street level. A break toward surface-level is not SUCH a big hassle in London, but 2 sets of LU escalators loaded with tourists and City bankers, chip away at anyone’s time, not to mention decorum.

So, IMO, the NY Subway is much easier than London’s. if you’re going in the right direction that is. The problem is that unless you know it with a reasonable degree of familiarity, you’re often NOT going in the right direction. London treats its Underground users as if they’re idiots and therefore, so it’s pretty damn hard to get lost on it. New York MTA takes a slightly different approach to customer service. Train lines are defined with numbers rather than names. Signs on street level are barely existent and because of toughness of granite, don’t bother connecting station underground, so you need to ensure you are going in at the right entrance. Maps are harder to find and general signs to subway lines are seemingly contradictory and imprecise.

The classic New York rookie subway error is to mistake an “Express” Train for a “Local” Service. Both run from the same platform but only the latter stop at every station. If you’re not careful, the express train can take you 30 blocks from where you want to go, or take you in to deepest Brooklyn far from Downtown Manhattan.

The other thing about NY Subway is that there’s only one ticket zone, so once you’ve swiped into a station, you don’t have to dig your ticket out of your pocket’s nether regions to escape at the other end. Not a big deal difference, but something that leaves me relaxed.

I also think this makes the art of fare dodging / barrier jumping more common here. Occasionally you see people grasping the two sides of the barriers, pushing themselves up, pulling in their thighs and rocking over the turnstile (as per Doherty/Barat style in that Libertines video, though that was maybe the Paris Metro). Not seen anyone caught for doing this, but I have heard the NYPD don’t look on it too kindly.

Another thing I love about the NY subway is the live entertainment. New York subway has more communal areas underground and a huge range of entertainers use it to perform. This is in part a product of the City's tipping culture. I've seen a 12-year old pianist doing Beethoven, a Bag piper, Beat Box, as well as a host of different guitarists and break dancers in London. You get this in London too, though it is all more licensed and regulated and the range isn't so good.

Last but most worthy of mention, is their differing running times. The “City that Never Sleeps” is as restless and nocturnal as it is because of its 24-hour subway. Bars, late night entertainment, masochistic office marathons, can be extended deep in to the night in New York thanks to reliable late night transport. Hapless Londoners meanwhile, are forced to cram in to a midnight tube or wait for a Night Buses. Now London Night buses are an institution and facilitator of great banter, but when you're traveling late at night between Elephant and Brockley, in Peckham Traffic lights, there are fewer places you would less like to be.

The NYC MTA has its problems, primarily due to budget cuts arising from the recession. An Albany bail-out notwithstanding, fares have gone up and services have become less frequent, with a new East Side subway line construction delayed. LU doesn't have such bad problems. However, New York - thankfully - does not have to cower in the specter of one individual who was born to bugger up the lives of Londoners: Bob Crow.

Neti Pot - and maximising your lot.

I saw this article in the NYT the other day.

I'm not sure who came up with the idea of the Neti Pot, or if it was was taken from a Dick Cheney Water Boarding torture manual, but - the truly surprising thing is - it's actually quite reasonably widely practiced around here. Euphemistically, it's also called "Nasal Irrigation".

It freaked me out a little bit. The picture accompanying the article was not produced by a surrealist disciple of Salvador Dali, the videos on youtube prove that it is physically possible though the following might give you nightmares for a few weeks.

The videos on youtube make it appear suprisingly simple to recline your head a fraction a tiny bit and pour a mini teapot full of water up one nostril and down the other nostril. The translucent liquid swishing back out of the exit nasal passage looks implausibly bogey-free to me. Unlikely also seems to be the absence of choking induced by the manouvere.

The standard deal I thought city-dwellers (at least in MEDCs) make, before they retreat to the suburbs middle-aged, is that they trade off a few years of life by moving to an unhealthy polluted city, where they can play sport or go hiking so that they can pack more life in to the years that they have. Not so in New York: they are constantly trying to appear younger and healthier, fighting the inevitability of urbania with quackery, Gym Membership, vitamin supplements, soya milk and plastic surgery. Macrobioticism (something I initially assumed has a specific scientific name, really is the far more pretentious "long life")though has much to be commended for it. The fact is, it shows the kind of zest that New Yorkers have to fit more in to life, by extending it. Despite the Dorian Gray-esque aspirations, the aim is - essentially - a good one!

Doggy Bagging (Difference 5)

Went in to a New York Diner the other day with my visiting parents. After finishing my own food, and despite having zero appetite, I had no hesitation in taking my Mum's offer of taking her meal, because I knew I would be able to ask the Waiter for a "doggy bag".

In Britain, for some reason, there is a bit of a stigma associated with taking home your left overs. I think it suggests that you are a little stingy. When I worked in a waiter a few years ago, only one person ever ever asked to take the remained of their meal back home and I must admit, I gave them a bit of an odd look.

But fair play, it means good food does not get wasted, when too much of the food I cleared from the tables at The Three Moorhens during my Waiting days, went to landfill. Maybe it's because Americans have bigger plate fulls to start with, but hey. American utilization of resources 1, mutually destructive British snobbery 0.

Difference 4: Optimism

The biggest Trans-Atlantic dividing point? The Audacity of Hope. It is something that is pretty hard to quantify or prove, but to a first-time non-native visitor to New York, it is visceral.

Americans are optimistic, much more so, than their curmudgeonly British cousins, who in comparison, are the masters of cynicism. I am generalising of course, but like most stereotypes, it comes from somewhere.

Americans respectively "can do", "will do", "pumped", "psyched", or "feel good" at the most trivial of happenings, and at the most inauspicious of occasions.

Each morning, the curb side fruit-seller, the lobby security guard, the train conductor all wish me "a GREAT day" - in Britain, such a phrase would be considered an ironic sleight.
Speaking on the phone, with cold-calling salespeople, inquire positively about how we're feeling (reserved Britons, typically having a crap day, would never intrude in to the bitter truth).
The Mail man on my desk declares each morning, as he deposits post in our empty reception "mail, ON THE DESK" in a cheery way only Santa UK might be allowed, on December 25th. I could give more anecdotes.

The press is more positive, whilst the economy has been pretty messy of late, the US Media - without being panglossian - hasn't resorted to doomesday type reportage evinced in British papers like the Jeremiah "Daily Mail" and "Daily Express" (admittedly these are the two extremes). Even if the US was totally wrecked, or it worked in alliteration, it would not get away with the terrible glib headline "broken Britain" that so many talk about the UK.
Talk to Americans about the economy, the view is dim, but there is great faith in the ability of the market to eventually sort itself out. I saw an interview recently (on BBC) with a recently laid-off New Yorker and the remarkable thing was his cheeriness.

Talk to Americans about their future plans, they are positive and upbeat. The weather may be wet, but tomorrow promises to be better. Adverts from Alzheimers to Home Insurance to Obama hail "HOPE". The average American is therefore, from what relatively little I have seen, closer to Ned Flanders than Homer Simpson.

An interesting dividing point is American regard for their home town. It is a truth universally acknowledged that someone from Britain must come from a self-described "Sh*t hole": be it Swindon, Luton, Bradford, Cumbernauld, Buxton or Tunbridge-Wells. Books on GB's "50 Most Crap Towns" fly-off the shelves in to Christmas stockings and get re-printed every Yuletide. Americans, meanwhile, from Mississippi to Minnesota, Springfield Ill to Springfield Mass, beam positively about their cute home town. Some are more honest, but there are fewer complaints.

Okay, out of 300 Million people, there are a few people drinking out of half-empty glasses. Not all live the easy-wealthy lives that promote a belief a feeling of optimism. People who live in New York and are able to wake each morning to the sight of the Empire State are understandably more inclined to be upbeat. The difference is there.

The reason for hope? Americans are a nation of immigrants. Their population have inherited a culture from the self-selective adventurous people from whom they are descended. For many of these new generations seeking the American Dream, it is already half realised and spurred on by the knowledge that the present is better than the recent past and that improvements in life quality can continue.

Optimism and hope are not always a good thing however: misanthropy sometimes goes a long way. Americans often seem naive to European eyes, because optimism provokes people ot ask fewer questions about people's motivations. To British people, American positive-thinking and hope sometimes seem superficial and in-sincere. Why do Britons hate Americans? Well, when they sometimes do, largely because they are a different culture. Worse, because they speak the same language, they assume that they ARE the same culture, when they're not: as Oscar Wilde said I think "two peoples separated by a common language". Faced with American brashness, Britons are repelled and take Schadenfreude at their failures.

So, neither is perfect.

Obama's election campaign evocation of "Hope" and "Change We Can Believe In" would generally not work so well in more cynical Britain. (Well, emptyish words worked for Tony Blair in Britain, but maybe I can call that an exception to the rule.) In 2009, that would never happen.

Good or bad, optimism is something that I will miss when I leave America but I will try and ship some of it back to the Sceptered Isle!