Korea, with less time to develop than Japan and more development to do, has given rise in Seoul to a city that appears to have only just been torn out of its packaging. Even in Osaka, Japan's comparatively Falstaffian second city, reputedly characterised by rustic straightforwardness and saturated with vulgar capitalist energy, the trains (on which I never saw anyone drink, eat, or speak into a mobile phone) adhere to a standard of regularity no less rigorous than Tokyo's. If the schedule says the bus will show up at 8:31, a Kyoto-based English friend told me, people start looking at their watches at 8:32. Japanese major cities, more than any others of my acquaintance, run on expectations – a constant stream of them, routinely fulfilled to the slightest detail. In the event, though I never felt the touch of the oshiya, I was impressed not just at the perfectly punctual, all-reaching trains, but the way riders regard them not as objects of great municipal and national pride, but as expected necessities. I also prepared myself for the white-gloved hands of the oshiya, or "pushers" – station workers employed to cram as many rush-hour commuters as possible behind a subway car's closing doors. Before making my first trip to Japan, I prepared myself for astonishment at the functionality of its trains.
Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reutersįew outside Chile know the high quality of Santiago's transport, but everyone knows the high quality of Tokyo's. "Make sure you ride the metro," Santiaguinos abroad would insist to me upon hearing of my plans to visit their city.ĭespite the grumbles from its passengers, the tube functions as London's main arteries. With improvements that have turned it over the past 25 years into South America's most extensive subway, it also announces the country's escape from dictatorship. The still-gleaming Santiago metro opened in 1975 as a declaration of Chile's emergence, real or desired, from provincial isolation. Often the style of a city's transport reflects how that city sees itself, or would like to.
Amazon's recent relocation of its offices to downtown Seattle bodes well for the life of the city proper, but it still has no end of catching up to do with the metropolises of Europe, Asia and Latin America, where high densities of transit not only exist, but make statements about the cities that built them. The surprisingly backward state of Seattle transport tells a story familiar to many American cities: an aesthetically bold, forward-looking optimism in the years after the second world war, followed by decades of bitter struggle with its own demanding suburbs, home in this case to the mighty or once-mighty likes of Boeing and Microsoft. Proposals for a useful monorail network have risen and fallen over the years the first light rail line there opened only in 2009. While neither offer much of everyday value to the locals, the monorail – which takes the form but, in running back and forth on only a mile of track, not the function of a dedicated public transit system – stands as a reminder of the city's many frustrated attempts at complete urbanisation. Seattle's "retro-futuristic" image has, for the past half century, rested in large part on a pair of structures built for its 1962 World's Fair: the globally recognisable Space Needle, and the lesser-known but still sadly evocative monorail. This line of thinking never occurred to me in my years growing up just outside Seattle, a city which I frequented but never gave much thought. You can learn a great deal from robust transport systems, and even more from underdeveloped ones. This goes not just for subways, but overground trains, buses, cycleways, rickshaws, and every mobility solution in between. If you wish to understand London or any place else, look no further than how people move through it. Beyond that, and like every other means of urban transport system around the world, it tells you nearly everything you need to know about the city it serves. M y recent, first trip to London presented me with two surprises: the reach, convenience, and frequency of the tube, and the volume of Londoners' complaints about the reach, convenience, and frequency of the tube.Įnglish friends had explained to me, not without pride, the importance of grumbling to the national character, but I still want to stress to every Londoner I meet that - take it from a visiting Los Angeleno - the tube exists, and that counts as no trifling achievement.