Old Post: A Tale Of Two Transit Systems

Nov 6, 2006

This is an old post I made a bit over a year ago.

I just got back from a two week vacation, one week in New York City (sorry Ratty and crew, was with the family) and one week in London, and being the guy that I am, I spent a lot of time paying attention to the two transit systems we used to get everywhere: the New York City Subway and the London Underground (“the Tube”). I figured I’d throw my thoughts up here in case anyone is interested. I should note that, as we were playing tourist, I only saw a subset of each system, so it’s quite possible that my experience isn’t representative of each system as a whole. Specifically, I mostly saw Manhattan (most of my time was spent on the A-C-E, 4-5-6, 1-9, and B-D-F-V lines) and Central London (most of my time was spent on the District, Circle, Picadilly, and Central lines). I also am not currently a resident of either city, so I view them as a visitor rather than a local.

History:

• The Underground began in 1863, the first underground railway system in the world. It used steam locomotives when it began, but switched to electric at the start of the 1900s.
• The Subway began in 1904, using electric trains for its entire history.

Scope and Size:

• The Underground has 275 stations and runs from 5:30 to 00:30 Monday to Saturday, 7:30 to 23:30 Sundays.
• The Subway has 468 stations (35 less than the number of subway stations in the rest of the US combined) and runs 24 hours a day.

Names:

• The lines on the Underground are named actual names (eg, the Picadilly, Jubilee, District, or Metropolitan lines), and the stations are (mostly) named after where they’re at. Some are misnomers (eg, Mansion House station is actually further away from Mansion House than Bank station) and some aren’t actually meaningful unless you know the station’s or area’s history (eg, Arsenal station is named after the football team that plays there). This definitely gives them a lot of character, but without looking at a map you can’t tell if, for instance, Marble Arch is before, after, or even anywhere near Queensway*.
• The lines on the Subway are named by letters or numbers (eg, the A, D, 1, or 6 line), along with having a color, and the stations are named after the street they’re located on (if the line runs north-south, it’s usually the east-west street, and vice-versa, from what I could tell), with an addition of a notable landmark they’re located at (eg, 42nd St/Times Square station). This makes things pretty easy to figure out, as even without a map you know that if you want to go to 8th Avenue and 123th Street then you need to take an A-C train (which runs along 8th Avenue) to 125th Street station and walk 2 blocks south. When lines of the same color run along the same section of track, they’re commonly referred to in combination, as in the A-C-E line. As far as I know, lines never branch*.

Stations:

• Underground stations are largely well-built and architecturally interesting, the southern Jubilee line stations especially are quite nice (being very new). Some of them are also ridiculously cavernous. In a couple cases, it takes three giant escalators and a network of winding passages to get down to the lowest platform.
• Subway stations are pretty much just concrete. They all have a tile facade on the platforms that shows which station it is and is pretty nice, though.

Lines and Service:

• Underground lines are quite annoying the way they’re set up, if you’re not a local. Many lines split into several forks, though each branch shares the line’s name, with the train announcing where its final destination is. As well, you’ll often find trains that only travel partway down a line, stopping a few stations before the actual last station on the line. Combined with the fact that the station names don’t follow a logical pattern, you really need to look at the map a whole lot when you’re traveling.
• Subway lines always go all the way to the end, as far as I know, and none of them have branches. Lines are also classified as express or local, where express lines skip a number of less-important stations. Late nights, some express lines run local (meaning they stop at the stations they’d usually skip), but in practice that’s not confusing at all, you just may end up taking longer to get to your destination than you thought.

Schedules:

• The Underground appears to have a schedule that they follow. Each station also has an electronic display that scrolls through the next 3 or 4 trains and their ETA (amazingly, some London bus stops have the same thing), and it appears to be based on the train locators rather than the schedule, as it’s quite accurate in my experience. Our average wait time for a midday train was probably 2-3 minutes.
• The Subway doesn’t appear to really have a schedule in the strictest sense of the word. It just basically runs under the situation that trains arrive when they arrive, and you’ll darn well wait until they do, and that trains should arrive once every so many minutes at certain times of the day (eg, midday in Midtown, you should see a train every 10 minutes). Our average wait time for a midday train was probably 5-8 minutes, depending on the line. My sister and I once waited half an hour for an uptown C, but then again, it was 2:00 am at the time.

Trains:

• The trains on the Underground are rather nice, with very little graffiti or grime. They don’t always line up with the platforms properly, though, for whatever reason, leaving a gap.
• The trains on the Subway vary from fairly nice to fairly grungy.

Street Musicians: Underground street musicians are a lot higher class than those on the Subway. Over the course of a week, on the Underground, I saw one guitarist, one flutist, two violinists, and one lady playing a french horn. You don’t get french horns on the Subway that I saw.

In general, my impression of the Underground was that it was a nice, usable system that was fairly complicated for a non-local to use. My impression of the Subway was that it was a system that sacrificed character for efficiency.

* As an example, the stations on the District line between Earl’s Court, where our hotel was, and Tower Hill, where you get off to see the Tower of London, are Gloucester Road, South Kensington, Sloane Square, Victoria, St. James’s Park, Westminster, Embankment, Temple, Blackfriars, Mansion House, Cannon Street, and Monument. ** As an example, the stations in between 42 St/Port Authority, where we caught the C to my sister’s place, and 168 St/Washington Heights, the station to get to my sister’s place, are 50 St, 59 St/Columbus Circle, 72 St, 81 St/Museum of Natural History, 86 St, 96 St, 103 St, 110 St/Cathedral Parkway, 116 St, 125 St, 135 St, 145 St, 155 St, and 163 St/Amsterdam Ave. *** Technically, lines are actually sections of track, and routes are designations of pathways that trains take (and thus, a single line may service several routes and a single route may pass over several lines). In the local lingo, though, routes are usually called lines.