Our theme for the month of March is “cities.”
I always feel uncomfortable walking the streets of a new city. It’s mainly because I don’t know where anything is or how to get anywhere. I can’t stop in the middle of a sidewalk to take in my environment while surrounded by people, all walking faster than me, who know where they’re going. Usually I try to find a space where people spread out and slow down, where I can check a map on my phone to figure out where everything is. Once I’ve figured out where I am and where I’m going, the stress goes away and I begin my journey, hopefully via some form of public transportation.
I don’t mind riding a bus, but I love a subway system. Perhaps it’s the novelty, as my hometown only has buses which run every half hour, with an app that, while useful, looks like it was designed in the mid- to late aughts. Subways are all basically the same. The wind on the platform from the trains moving through tunnels, the stairs down into the stations which are just steep enough to be challenging, the simplistic and stylized maps of the network for whatever city I’m in.
If you can figure out one transit map, you can read them all. The iconography is generally the same from city to city. Clean, simplistic threads of different colors note each line each line, with different sized icons for the different station sizes. Subway maps provide a unique view of a city.
A bus map will depend on the same roads as cars for their routes. Subways can run diagonal in ways streets can’t. Where road maps communicate the paths by which people move from place to place, subway maps show not only how, but where people move from. The tangled web of lines near a city’s center turns into single lonely threads out toward the edge of a city, in the suburbs.
Looking at different transit maps, I’m struck by the similarities they have to constellations. The Moscow transit system looks more like a jellyfish than Ursa Major looks like a bear. Both maps and constellations are navigational tools, one accessed by looking up, the other by looking down at a map or phone, to navigate about a space even farther below. These modern constellations are replacing the older ones as light pollution in cities drowns out all but the brightest stars.
The first time I got on a subway, I was thirteen years old. Though I only had a map of the system, I felt like I could go anywhere, dragging my family behind me. It was freedom I never experienced behind the wheel of the car until I was halfway through Ohio on my way to a friendsgiving this past fall.
Public transportation is one of my favorite liminal spaces. They’re places people only go to get somewhere else. The magic of the subway for me comes from the similarities in the systems. I wouldn’t be surprised to get on a subway in Boston to find myself in London or Paris two stops later, somehow having been transported across the world underground. No matter where I end up, if I can find a station and a map, I feel like I could go anywhere.
Photo credit: Unsplash user José Martín Ramírez Carrasco
