The only city other than D.C. in which I have ridden on a subway system is Boston. Shocking I know, but I'm a suburban boy at heart; strip malls and large corporate box stores filled my childhood with hours and hours of joy, and public transportation was non-existent.
But even while at Tufts, I only ever used the Red Line. A quick (and by quick I mean at least 30-minute) wait for the Joey, then a leisurely (and by leisurely I mean "Excuse me, do you have any idea when the next train will come? What? No?") wait for the train at the Davis Square station, and before I knew it I would find myself robbed of $1.70 and standing at Park Street.
Yet for some reason, when I started riding the Metro multiple times a day in D.C., certain nostalgia for the good ol' Boston-baked T kept creeping its way into my conversations. I complained that the incredibly long escalators took forever in D.C., and that in Boston the stations aren't 20,000 leagues under the city. I shared with my friends from Oregon and Iowa and Missouri that in Boston, each T station is unique, featuring artwork, exciting color schemes, live music and even urine.
Maybe it is the industrial feel of each of D.C.'s stations. Every station is exactly the same; think cement. Now add a Kellogg's Eggo muffin thing. Now picture yourself standing on a cement platform looking up at a giant, folded-over, concrete Eggo. Multiply that by a lot, and you have every single underground metro station in the District.
Sure, some of the stations give you the option of exiting on the right or on the left, but otherwise uniqueness was not something the Soviet Union architects (I highly doubt they hired Soviets to design the system, but it sure looks like something Stalin would have loved) considered.
Aside from aesthetic value, which we know is highly regarded in our culture (surge and purge, surge and purge), the Metro is actually very efficient and reliable, except for the minor occurrences like fires and the occasional derailment.
At each station there are little red signs that alert you to the next arrival time of a train. I thought this was kind of cute initially, but now I've come to rely on that comfort, knowing that my train will be right in front of me in precisely 17 minutes (oh joy, nap time on a bench!).
And the efficiency doesn't end there; with a little Metro SmarTrip card you can easily and quickly store cash for the entrance and exit fares.
When entering the turnstiles, I do the butt rub method. It is simple; I shift my cheek so my wallet (through my pants) is close enough to the receptor device that the gate opens and I can pass through. And it makes people laugh. I might as well offer up some free entertainment.
The doors on each train make a pleasantly nauseating "ding-ding ding-ding" sound while opening and closing.
And then there's the voice of the Metro. Have you ever heard the Verizon wireless woman?
You know the one I'm talking about. You are trying to leave an important message at 3:30 a.m. before passing out, and she's the lady holding you up with "after the tone, press 7 to have your head explode." Now imagine her voice, only twice as high and more annoying.
"Step back!" she shouts with vigor each and every time the doors open. Then, depending on whether the doors are opening or closing, she states the obvious and tells us a play-by-play as to what the doors are doing.
Heaven forbid someone is standing in the way when the doors start their closure ritual, because then she really gets angry and repeats her message three times in a much harsher tone than before.
And that's just what you hear on the Metro. As part of the Metrorail re-education system, there are these little ads on the trains about a whole slew of things.
They are produced by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority as a way to get each and every Metro rider to follow the rules.
As a general rule, like good sheep-people, the left side of a Metro escalator is reserved for walkers. If you are interested in a 45-minute ride up the escalator, then you stand to the right and enjoy the concrete walls.
Of course, if you are an eighth-grader down in the city with your FBI T-shirt on, you don't know this. How does the Metro solve this problem? With re-education ads, of course.
Besides the normal posters you see on a Metro train for things like "Norbit" (2007), military transport planes, and C-SPAN, there are also the "re-education" ones containing little made-up words and their definitions. Two that I've seen recently are "escalefter" and "escalump." What on earth? Yeah.
An escalefter is someone, probably a foreign tourist and their entire family, that stands on the left of an escalator making everyone else behind then angry and late for committee meetings.
An escalump is someone, probably the same tourist but now with a few days experience in the city, who stops walking at the top of the escalator, becoming a human speed bump.
Can you imagine the posters the MBTA would put up? "Confusuter: Confused commuter that doesn't understand which Green Line train to board ... B, C, D, E or Z."
