Back to our regularly scheduled programming with more travel spam that the same 10-15 people care about. I’d wanted to lean into the “nonlinear” in my bio by mixing up photos from the two visits to NYC that bookended our trip, but found it harder to find the plot than I expected. So, to get me back into the flow, here’s the quintessential New York experience: the Metro now OMNY.
Twenty years ago, I was such a greenhorn to big cities shaped like grids that I had no concept of stations having many entrances or trains having different directions of travel. I’d carry printed instructions of where to go and find myself heading uptown when I was supposed to go south, and vice versa. I’ve since developed that part my brain (somewhat), and NYC is still emphatically a city that is responsive and attentive to newbies. Every time we voiced any hesitation in or near a platform, someone helpfully intervened. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed in two decades. x
I thought about our time riding the subway while watching a clip of Mamdani on a podcast talking about building a politics that delivers quality for all, as opposed to defining who is more deserving than others. He used the metro system as an illustration of his point: at its best, it embodies a public good that anyone, regardless of income or status, will opt for.
Now there’s much to be said about his ‘deliverism’ and how it, according to his critics on his left flank, dilutes his democratic socialism to make business as usual more palatable, but I’m not interested in that discourse. Having lived in different cities with differing degrees of ‘deliverables,’ I know that liberation can’t be built in the clouds. It needs material conditions.
I don’t live there, but I can safely assume that New York’s subway isn’t always at its best. And yet, even when it underdelivers, it succeeds in the way the best infrastructures do: it creates a public with stakes to negotiate and shared cultures to compose. x
This post is actually mostly from New Jersey, but transport geographies are inherently porous. From the traveler’s perspective, the Newark-Penn Station corridor is an extension of NYC’s megapolis. x