London’s public transit is forever ruining LA’s public transit for me. This is largely the fault of LA’s public transit system, which is terrible. I say this as a Great Defender of LA’s public transit. I am forever extolling its virtues to non-transit riders and forever making excuses about how it isn’t that bad, but, alas, now that I am in a city where transit is actually good, the shortcomings of the LA Metro have been thrown into harsh relief.
It’s an interesting difference in culture: here, it seems like just about everyone rides the tube, whereas in LA, well, a colleague who shall remain nameless once said to me “the bus here just seems like it’s for the underprivileged.” This is a very stupid and problematic statement that I shall not begin to unpack here, but I think it really gets at the difference in attitude towards transit that pervades the two cities. Riding transit is a major part of my life, and a big part of the culture shared by myself and many of the people I know. It is also a major part of the lives of anyone in LA who cannot or chooses not to have a car. Lots and lots of people ride the bus, but the bus-riding population in LA is really seen as a marginal group. Here, in London, I think it’s taken for granted that just about everyone will ride transit. There are many things that I think are good about a transit-oriented commuter culture, but one big one is that I think it’s healthy for people to actually just be in public spaces around other people. Around lots of other people. Around lots of different other people. I am tired of rampant individualism, and I think that actually being around other people in the world can give people a sense of perspective and of place in larger social communities and structures. Maybe this is naive and idealistic. Probably it is. Oh well, whatever.
There are more practical, tangible things that I like about a city where transit is part of the culture. I like that I never worry about feeling lost because pretty much anywhere you are you can walk until you hit either an Underground station or a bus stop where you can catch a bus that will take you to an Underground station. I like that once I’m in the Underground, I never feel lost because using it is pretty intuitive (even though the lines all have names that don’t actually make logical sense, because they are all vestigial traces of when the London Underground was a bunch of independently-operating rail companies). I like that on the weekend, when I went to a concert and I was worried about walking back to the tube in the dark afterwards, it turned out that I didn’t have to worry because all of the hundreds of people who were at the concert also took the tube there and so we all walked back to the station together and it felt totally safe. I like that I don’t have to plan at least an hour’s travel time on either side of an event. I am going to so many more things here in London than I do in LA, just because it’s actually easy to get places. I’m always telling people that I love LA, but that it makes me tired. The user-unfriendliness of public transit in the city is a big part of why that is. (Having said all of this, obviously things are not perfect here – tube lines are sometimes frighteningly overcrowded, and everything useful always gets shut down on the weekend for maintenance. Like this weekend, when they shut down the part that was going where I needed to go but I fail at informational-diagram-reading-comprehensions skills, so I didn’t discover this until I tried to switch trains and found my platform barricaded.)
Anyhow, something I have been frequently going to on public transit since I’ve been here are late-night museum openings! They have these in LA, too, but I have NEVER been to one because there is no good way to get, say, from West Hollywood to the Natural History Museum without taking at least two buses, probably three. But ANYHOW. And also, here, most (but not all) museums are free. Because, socialism, right?
I’ve been to the Victoria and Albert late openings twice, because I love it there. It is very unlike, say, the British Museum, which is always very very busy, and always feels kind of…plundery. Something about the informational pamphlet they give you when you go in to see the Parthenon friezes, for instance, just seems a little too defensive in explaining why these priceless Greek treasures are really better off in England. And while I know the V&A has just as much of a plundery, imperialist history (hello, Queen Victoria!), since it’s a museum of design rather than, say, art or history, it is so much wider in scope and so much less intent on selling a particular History of Civilization than the British Museum. AND the current special exhibit is on postmodernism and includes such delights as costumes that belonged to Grace Jones and Klaus Nomi.
And this is where the post that I started writing a week and a half ago and then forgot about and then remembered was abandoned! What was I going to say next? I was probably going to say something about how I also have been to a late night opening at the Churchill War Rooms where I proceeded to get quietly drunk and then wandered around pretending I was a member of Churchill’s stenography pool while listening to an Andrews Sisters cover band. Or maybe I was going to say something about how I went to a late nigh opening at the Tate Britain, where the theme was APOCALYPSE! where I proceeded to get quietly drunk, and watched some apocalyptic performance art until they started passing out haz-mat suits for the audience members to wear, whereupon I decided it was time to go look at some good, old-fashioned John Singer Sargeants, because generally I prefer to be on the “observing” end of performance art involving haz-mat suits, rather than on the “participating” end.
So basically, the takeaway of this post is that good public transit is really handy for the particular subset of people who enjoy going to museums at night for the purpose of getting quietly drunk in presence of art and/or history.
