Honestly, I care less about how a subway station looks than how the system itself works and its coverage. Unfortunately the US has neither. If we want to fix one thing, its function and coverage, not aesthetic.
I’m with OP on the being had in the first half. Though I’d add, with a little bit of added effort, you can fix both. The fact that the US can do neither is, in my book, a failure of policy.
St. Petersburg’s and Moscow’s old stations were built to show off superiority of communist state. That’s where you can see lots of polished stone, sculptures, giant golden light fixtures, stained glass, etc. Focus was not on the people. Then starting around 1970s the stations were built with much more utilitarian design. Modern stations built in Moscow in last decade or so look very nice though.
NYC subway is just gross. I guess they are seriously underfunded to afford proper cleaning and renovation
Having worked for the MTA on the subway system years back, I invite you all to remember that we built one of the very first subway systems in the world, definitely first in scale, knowing we’d make mistakes in implementation, along with a lot of successful ideas.
Everyone else learns from our mistakes, we gladly hosted the engineering team from Los Angeles and Bangkok when they wanted to share notes with us.
With almost 200miles/320km of public tracks, this is easily the most successful mass transit system internationally. "BuT gWaFiTi BaD :( "
One could make a similar post of a clean American city and European cities with graffiti everywhere.
Most all major cities have graffiti. I will say that I’m pretty surprised at the number of EU cities that have massive graffiti everywhere. The US has issues, but a lot of larger graffiti is limited to poorer, less-traveled or more inaccessible areas. EU? Huge graffiti right across shop fronts roll-down shutters on the Main Street. Surprising.
France is a shit hole compared to most US cities, and I’m VERY well traveled. Spain? Absolutely the opposite. Cleanest cities I’ve ever seen and some of the nicest architecture too.
This crap isn’t a monolith, and the US has plenty of good mass transportation systems.
Hi friend, please reread and note the caveat, “one of the very first”, which position number 5 certainly includes.
Also, a bit childish to want to rank systems based on creation date. If you feel like “losing”, please read on:
NYC total system length is about 800 miles (1.1km)
yearly ridership: 1.8bn rides
If we count the el’s (elevated rapid transit, which is still running), first ride was in iirc 1868.
But look, the important thing is that both our countries (presuming you live in the UK) have nice mass transit systems to keep cars off the roads. I look forward to visiting your country and riding its underground system at some point.
When somebody says one of the first it implies by time (and US was 30 years later. ) Thus why that link I posted rates them by creation date. If you had claimed by best subway by milage I would link to which one ranks them by order of mileage. If I feel like losing. LOL It isn’t a zero sum game we are playing, Just facts I linked. Sorry you feel so offended. Hope you have a good new year.
Yeah, by saying first it would mislead people into thinking USA were pioneers, but they were actually fifth because it took USA longer to institute. Not judging, just saying…and it makes sense because UK has been a country with cities for thousands of years, while USA is relatively new…with a slower need to get people moved
Car infrastructure is just, and I do mean this seriously, unimaginably expensive. If you do not priotize the car you have such a shitton of money left over you can just put like, chandeliers in your metro stations.
There’s the Oculus stattion in NYC which is ok, but I hate the building it’s connected to. It’s one of only a handful of nice stations though. Half of the NYC metro looks like Silent Hill.
I may be biased since I live in the city, but being able to get damn near anywhere (that’s not Staten Island, but fuck Staten Island) for the price of a bag of chips is pretty cool.
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