Public Transportation

Making the Public Transit Beautiful

 

One of the rhetorical strategies of the economic right's cultural politics is to associate the free market with individual pleasure, aesthetic beauty, and technological progress, while associating the public sector with the oppression of the crowd, the spartan ugliness of "civil service issue," and general associations with low-quality, outmoded, cheap machinery. Nowhere is this better seen than in the rhetorical debate over public services.

In the media, the visual and sensory contrast is made very obvious: the car, a luxury commodity associated with wealth and prestige, is an extension of your (now much cooler) person, it's fast and futuristic, and it's well-designed and new (as a matter of fact, it's Audi's concept car for an electric sports car). There's a reason why you never see traffic in car commercials; it would spoil the illusion. By contrast, the dominant media image of mass transit plays up its worst qualities as a social nightmare: it's crowded, claustrophobic, there's no privacy and people and bumping into you, it's noisy and smells terrible, maybe it's dangerous, you're getting delayed again, this is what you take to get where you have to go, not where you want to go.

And part of the cultural work of the left in championing the cause of the public must be to counter-act this kind of imagery. Because the public can and should be beautiful.

This last August, I had the good fortune to travel to Berlin for 10 days. And one of the many things that caught my eye was the fact that, in the land of the autobahn and BMW and Volkswagen, how amazingly abundant and diverse public transit is in Berlin. You can zip across the city in the U-Bahn subway, you can get a wonderful view from the elevated S-Bahn, if you're taking a regular commute you might use one of the bright yellow trams or the plentiful buses, and there are bike paths and cheap rentabikes everywhere. Besides the obvious utility of this redundant network - U-Bahn for speed, trams for a point-to-point commute, S-Bahns from one central spot to another, and bikes and buses for points in between - there's the sheer aesthetic pleasure of it all. ...

And there's no reason why we can't have this kind of public service in the U.S. Granted, you have to have functionality first. The New York City public transit system may be noisy and quite often visually unappealing, but it gets you from point A to point B quickly any time of the day or night. By contrast, the D.C Metro is aesthetically superior to the New York City subway (the cars are newer, the rolling stock runs much quieter, etc.), but its network isn't really as robust as New York City's is. Amtrak, for example, I would argue (again as a lifetime user) has huge deficiencies in both functionality and aesthetic quality. ...

As I've expressed before, I'm a huge believer in mass transit. But beyond that, I'm also someone who is a partisan of the public over the private - I don't like the idea that pleasure and beauty should be commodities, that speed and comfort should be the privilege of the wealthy. Because ultimately what this fight is about is the public square and the common green - whether they should be made beautiful as a source of enjoyment for all but also an expression of a collective aspiration for a better world, or whether they should be chopped up and the pieces sold to the highest bidder.MORE