I
want to like the subway. Subways are vital routes of blood flow in New
York. In Tokyo the breadth and
convenience are simply inspiring.
When I take the train or the plane to Shanghai’s Hongqiao terminus-cum-airport,
I can walk over to the subway, get a seat and ride straight out to my likely
destination on one line. But
in Beijing, it’s different.
I should be a big fan of this Line Fifteen, which I watched
being built and which carried so much promise for convenience. It comes in from Shunyi city and there
is an enormous, above ground station next to the enormous, above ground
“Chinese International Convention Center,” which is not much older than then
the subway line, but already looks tarnished, with rust stained walls and vast
emptiness most of the time, save when there is an auto show and residents
hunker down and drive back roads, to avoid the throngs.
If Line Fifteen were designed for, say, commuters, as this
is, in part, a commuting community, the line would whisk you in to the city and
get you to a relevant transfer station like San Yuan Qiao or Shao Yao Ju,
quickly. Rather, this line
take a hard turn and drops you off at the satellite city of Wang Jing. Wang Jing is where my children like to
go to buy “cool” pens and erasers.
Wang Jing happens to be where you can find authentic Korean food in
Beijing. Wang Jing has, like every
where else, gone through an extreme makeover and now has a slew of high rises
and office towers and I suppose if I worked for say Sony or Siemens who have
offices there, (at least they once did) it would presumably be convenient. But for me, trying to get down town
quickly, to meetings, it is a pointless detour.
When you change at Wang Jing West station, you need to
change for Line Thirteen. Alas,
this is another pointless appendage line that was built to round-out reach
across the northern part of the city, and drop you at other terminus closer to
the city’s gate. But Line Thirteen
doesn’t take you in or more importantly, through the city. In my case I must take it one more
stop, to change for Line Ten, which, finally, does have a progression, around
the town. Line Ten is the one I can
remember bitching about there not being, back in the late nineties. “ahh, if only there was a subway that
traced the third ring road, wouldn’t that be grand.” But I get ahead of myself.
First you have to navigate the way from the Line Fifteen to
Line Thirteen at Wang Jing West station, which looks like an obstacle course
from Battle of the Network Stars.
It makes the annoyance of the walking the Bleecker Street Station on the
Lexington Avenue Line over through to the Broadway Lafayette on the F Train,
seem simple and well thought out.
It’s a long trek, involving many people, many stairs, outdoor walkways
over highways till finally you’ve got your connection.
One stop and a few hundred yards more of walking and you can
board Line Ten. Now, I can access
most of what I need, save, of course, a seat. There are other things one could complain about. The silly bag check that presumably
could find a Simon-Bar-Sinister ticking bomb but not much else wastes time
needlessly, as the inspection gals chat with their friends while your bag sails
through. The rough, - we’re piling
in, before you can get out- aesthetic at every stop. Smells are strong, signs are confusing, oh dear. It’s like Graham Chapman as Brian says
to Michael Pailin the ex-leper beggar after the latter complains upon receiving
only half a denari: “there’s no
pleasing some people.”
As a New Yorker you can’t really complain about the
cleanliness, comfort or clarity of anyone else’s subway system. Just look at the ceiling when you
change trains on the Lexington Avenue Line for the local at 14th
Street. Strata upon strata of
never-cleaned filth coat the ceilings like turf and every shadowed space is 乌七八糟[1]. God
help anyone trying to understand the conductor with his ratty mic and
mono-syllabic “standclearoftheclosingdoors.” I was reading yesterday with a book in one hand, fishing for
my headphones in my bag with the other, when the train took off, smoothly. Try doing that without a third hand
strap-hanging on the IRT.
I think part of
the issue is New York, of course, built out the subway in another era and now
maintains a legacy network.
Beijing had the chance to learn from New York and fifty other cities’ compromises. Budgets were effectively limitless,
ambitions effectively celestial, and somehow, in spite of all this it feels
patched together with a sense of obligatory coverage of Beijing’s breadth,
rather than something designed with convenience in mind.
Final gripe, I promise. The official website is hopeless. Assumption: many, many people who visit the Beijing
Government’s subway web site, want to see a map. But when you go there is only a section of the map offered,
scroll though you might for other views.
http://www.ebeijing.gov.cn/feature_2/BeijingSubway/
You can invistigate this line or that line, but no where can
you get an overall picture of how the interact, or what their near. To do that, you have to go to a third
party web site and expand the view out.
The official web site for New York’s subway section, by
comparison, has something I can use, immediately. http://web.mta.info/nyct/maps/subwaymap.pdf
Wiki tells me that Beijing has the world’s second largest
subway network, second only behind Shanghai, in terms of track length. So they’ve covered a lot of ground very
quickly and accordingly and more importantly, I’m not used to it the way I am
in New York or even Tokyo, which is what’s really going on here. I’ll take it again this afternoon, over
to the west side. I won’t be able to avoid the three-station-migration, at the
outset, but maybe I’ll find a seat, as we head west.
I must tell you, before parting, that my stepson is back in
town on business and this has my daughters over the moon. They couldn’t be happier to curl up in
his arms, laugh, be teased and eat the delicious Japanese deserts he brought
with him. They were all up early
eating breakfast this morning and it was like a holiday, to suddenly have
everyone here. My wife was in the
kitchen when I returned from the gym, listening to her French language
tape. I thought I’d be helpful and
introduce some proper French music, proper French lyrics. Half way through Serge Gainsbourg and
Jane Birkin’s “Je t'aime Moi Non Plus” from the année erotic 1969, where the latter sounds like a lamb having an
orgasm under a waterfall, my computer was closed and we returned to disciplined
vocabulary lists. Next time we’ll
try “Le Poinçonneur des Lilas” about
the frustrated metro-ticket-puncher, which would have been a much more
appropriate addition to today’s theme.
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