G, I Really Love You...

Okay, my regular readers in New York, I admit it: that title may be taking things a bit far. But after ten months in Moscow, I can definitely say that the boundless love I once felt for Moscow's transit system has abated, and my perceptions of New York's has improved. More on that in a minute.

For those non-New York readers wondering what the heck that title was about, the G train was my line when I lived in Brooklyn. The G is a crosstown local train running between Brooklyn and Queens (due to service cutbacks, it now only just barely makes it into the latter borough). It is also the only line on the New York subway that never enters Manhattan. And because many of the neighborhoods it traverses are poor, blighted, and predominantly black and Hispanic, the line tends to get treated as the redheaded orphan stepchild of the system. Late at night, service tends to be particularly appalling. I can remember countless nights coming home from Manhattan when I had to wait 40 minutes or more to make a transfer from the A or C train to the G train. Some nights in the summer, when subway platforms become absolutely sweltering, I thought I would do well to bring a beach train with me on my travels through the city, just to prepare for this transfer.

Having written on another occasion about all that makes Moscow's metro glorious, I feel I ought to point out a few drawbacks of Moscow's system:

1) There's no distinction between local and express service. This is not an entirely fair point to bring up, because no city in the world, aside from New York, allows passengers to transfer between local and express trains. But there it is.

2) There flat-out aren't enough stations. New Yorkers like to pride themselves on how much walking they do, in comparison with car-bound denizens of other American cities. If New York had a campaign for an official city emblem, my nomination would be a Wall-Street bound woman wearing a suit and sneakers, with her dress shoes slung over her back. But Muscovites clearly have New Yorkers beat in this category, for the simple reason that they often have to walk 20 minutes or more just to get to the Metro station.

Case in point: I went out to meet a new student today, at her home. I was told her apartment was "not far" from the Metro--"only" 15 minutes. I can't imagine most New Yorkers tolerating a 15-minute walk just to get to the subway station.

3) Line names are confusing and often inaccurate. I recall very dinstinctly the first time I took the F train somewhere very far out in Brooklyn and found myself puzzling over references to a mysterious "Culver Line" on station signage (the Culver Line, it turns out, is the name the F train's line had back in the day when it was still a privately-owned elevated railroad in Brooklyn). But on the whole, New York has done an excellent job of naming its lines with either numbers or letters.

In Moscow, however, line names can be confusing. Moscow maps color code all of the city's lines, and foreigners often refer to the lines as red, orange, green, or what have you. Oddly, however, Metro officialdom and Muscovites alike insist on calling many lines by the names they had when they were first opened (in most cases, the 1950s). The problem with this is that these names is that they were all created using the two end stations on a particular line, and the ends of the lines have since been extended. The line names have not, however, been changed to keep up with these extensions.

4) Wheelchair access is virtually nill. Hard as it is for the handicapped to navigate New York's transit system, I absolutely cannot imagine anyone attempting to go through Moscow's system in a wheelchair. Every transfer in the system requires walking up and down flights of stairs, as do almost all station entrances and exits.

5) Metro entrances and exits feel as if they are in the middle of nowhere. Because so much of Moscow consists of ramshackle, identical housing developments from the Krushchev and Brezhnev eras, and because the designers of Metro entrances and exits seem to have had a need for them to be grandiose, you often have no idea where you really are when you first get out of the Metro. Nearly every Metro station is surrounded by a maze of kiosks, schwarma stands, and tiny retail outlets selling everything from gum to toilet paper. But they all look the same! In New York, I at least instantly knew if I got out at the wrong stop. Not so in Moscow.