I read more about the spider - it only exists in this one location in Sweden, Kungsträdgårdens subway station. Curious it did not spread to the next stop on the same line...
the next stop is the central station, and it's possible that there's too much traffice -> more service/cleaning there. The kungsträdgården station isn't at all active since it's just some strange one-station off-shot in the south-ish direction and there are no transfers there. Might as well get off at central station.
That will probably change in the next few years though, as they are planning to extend the blue line from Kungsträdgården out to Nacka. Central will still be Where most people hop off no doubt, but I’d expect traffic at Kungsträdgården to pick up considerable as theres plenty of commuters living south and south east, that work in the offices around there.
Even a google image search reveals photos much like on altas obscura: vast tastefully designed cavernous space dotted with but a few token humans.
It seems suspiciously clean and well maintained compared to NYC metro. Floors polished, no screaming lunatics, no cracked, floors, walls, ceilings. I am willing to bet it doesn't even smell like pee and vomit? Where are the masses?
I was in Stockholm a few weeks ago and among other things, went to visit this subway station. Granted I didn't visit during rush hour, but it was quiet, clean and rather nice.
The station itself may be the deepest, but it isn't the busiest, and if you look at a map it makes sense. It's a single stop away from T-Centralan where all of the lines converge and it is the last station on the line. Leaving the station you emerge in a garden near the centre of the city, but there are other lines that will probably get most closer.
I went there in the middle of summer and honestly, the entire city didn't feel that busy in the same way London feels. I wouldn't be surprised if many locals are holidaying elsewhere, and Stockholm while a capital city, isn't at the top of the list of city destinations.
This is correct - Swedes have an odd habit of leaving Sweden during the best part of the year weather-wise! Granted I'm exaggerating; many don't leave the country entirely but go out to their summerhouses for the month of July. Because most people take the entirety of July off (many businesses shut down completely for the month), that's when they take their longer trips. Stockholm suddenly becomes very quiet (perfect for me as a resident who prefers to stay in the city during this time). I hear that this year fewer people actually chose to go away than usual.
Not surprised fewer went away this year. I was travelling around for nearly four weeks and it rained once, at 8pm. The weather and temperature were beautiful, in the high 20s to low 30s even in Stockholm!
Those problems don't plague most other metros of the same vintage (e.g. Berlin, Paris, Moscow, St Petersburg, Tokyo, Osaka...) even though homeless people and vomit are prevalent there too.
I don't know why NYC and BART have to have those issues.
Because half the American population supports a party that thinks public spending should be banned.
So you end up with the classic 'privatise the profits, socialise the costs' setup.
I don't understand why people can't see that some public spending is an economic force multiplier.
I mean US infrastructure is notoriously bad for a developed economy, you have thousands of bridges that need massive remedial work to make them safe by modern standards.
Issues with US infrastructure are not due to a lack of spending but a HUGE lack of efficiency in that spending. The US actually spends more than most OECD countries on this sort of thing.
The reasons behind this poor efficiency are complex and no one really knows how to fix it.
Here is an interesting article on the NYC Subway System. It's obviously about one small slice of US infrastructure but the general story is the same.
Also, incidentally, since you mentioned "privatise the profits", it's worth noting that the Stockholm subway system is operated by MTR Corporation, a for-profit corporation based on Hong Kong.
>it's worth noting that the Stockholm subway system is operated by MTR Corporation, a for-profit corporation based on Hong Kong
It’s also worth noting that the MTR Corporation is majority owned by the Hong Kong government and, at least in Hong Kong, operates on a strict SLA where they are fined for delays.
>"Because half the American population supports a party that thinks public spending should be banned.
So you end up with the classic 'privatise the profits, socialise the costs' setup."
Except that New York and California - the locations of NYC's MTA and SF's BART are both overwhelmingly Democrat strongholds.
Neither are Republican places. This is true at both the city and state level, which is where the control and funding for these metros comes from not the federal level.
> Neither are Republican places. This is true at both the city and state level, which is where the control and funding for these metros comes from not the federal level.
Wrong about NY. Albany's government might as well be from another planet compared to NYC. They currently have a Republican controlled Senate.
And it is the state-level that usually hamstrings the MTA. 2009 was a particularly bad year in which the MTA budget got raided [1] and the government was in a deadlock [2].
No I am not wrong about New York, Republicans might currently control the senate but the State Assembly in Albany has been controlled by Democrats every year since 1992[1]. And it takes both chambers to pass legislation doesn't it?
Your first link completely supports my point:
>"A plan to shrink the state budget by $2.7 billion to keep New York from going broke was passed by the Legislature on Wednesday."
That would be the same Democrat-controlled since 1992 state legislature that passed that budget plan.
Furthermore the Governor appoints 6 of the 17 seats of the MTA board. And Governor Cuomo is a Democrat from NYC(Queens.) And the the Mayor another Democrat gets to appoint 4 seats. Thats 10 of the 17, for a majority.[1] Let's also point out that New York state has had a Democratic Governor for the last 11 years as well. So those board seat decisions have been by a Democrat for over a decade now.
That certainly seems like a healthy does ofDemocrat influence doesn't it? Maybe do a little more fact checking before telling people they are wrong.
And to be clear the context of my comment was in response to the OP who was insisting that the sad state of mass transit in NYC and SF is because of Republicans and that simply not true as both parties are equally to blame. Failure to fund infrastructure is failure by government period. Reductionist partisan finger pointing is what those have failed us would like us to believe.
This feels like a troll comment, in that it asks a back-handed question, to highlight the shortcomings of a comparable example, more than the question voices honest curiosity regarding the question as it may be superficially posed. Possibly in an effort to lead the loaded question down a negative path, such that responses will lend voice to an opinion one might read between the lines.
But first and foremost, no one from New York calls it “NYC Metro.” It’s The Subway, and it’s operated by the MTA. So, already your comment has the ring of someone who doesn’t live in New York. And to go one deeper, The Subway hasn’t smelled like that since the mid 1990’s. Most of the tourist stations “Disney-fied” by Giuliani get power washed every single night, after midnight, during the gravyard shift, to eliminate the smells of humanity.
It’s still very old, very dirty, very inefficient, slow, crowded, and peppered with tourists, homeless people, pickpockets and weirdos all at once.
New York has more going on than many other cities, and is as dense as it is diverse, and it’s been that way for at least 100 years (or at least the subway has), and that’s a somewhat conservative time frame, but
Other cities aren’t like that, and some of it is due to strict policing. Not always though. Some of it has to do with climate, sunlight and weather, or in social terms, the implicit understanding of the expectation of one’s peers.
In lively cities, when transplanted people lose a sense of expected behavior among strangers, behavior loosens up. Some cities have a specific reputation as being a destination for the specific reason to either lose or find one’s sense of self. New York is one of those places.
That's a weirdly long reply considering you seem to agree with the poster on everything, except that they committed the unforgivable crime of using the wrong word for the subway system, and the part about the smell.
I'm in NYC, and the subways may be powerwashed now and then, but I have to side with the parent here: They do still routinely smell. Not just the stations, either. It's a common sight, even during rush hour, to see cars that are completely empty except for a single scruffy-looking person with plastic bags for shoes; there's a reason nobody else goes into that car.
I'm from Scandinavia, and this summer I traveled back with my American girlfriend. She couldn't get over how clean and tidy everything was. Not just the cities and roads, but also the subway stations and trains: No cracked tiles, rusty beams or random brown water dripping from the ceiling, or puddles of mysterious green matter; modern signage, electronic boards, elevators, escalators; digital ticketing; and so on. The trains zoom in almost silently, and the cars are spacious and comfortable. She said she felt like she'd traveled 20 years into the future.
While you can talk about economic factors — budgets, age of the system, etc. — my thesis is that it also comes down to cultural differences. Scandinavia isn't just clean because of wealth, or a smaller population; it's that cleanliness and tidiness is part of the culture, and it's strived at almost subconsciously at every level, from the individual to the government. That only works thanks to the homogeneity of the population, where everyone share approximately the same values. NYC certainly is not like that.
The subtext of my point is that if you policed the subway beyond a certain threshold, New York might cease to be attractive to the kinds of people that find New York a uniquely livable place.
It’s not so much that the bar should be higher, so much that leaving the bar as low as it is provides a signal that contrasts the range of sky high standards New York also makes possible in other ways.
Yes, the subway sucks, but New York’s tendency is to let the full scope of humanity simply exist out in the open, as is, warts and all. This is the philosophy I take away from it.
Should the world standardize a mandatory minimum quality upon public civic spaces? If we did, wouldn’t that require cracking down on deviations from the prescribed norm? Wouldn’t that drive people out, possibly sending some to a place much worse that a dirty smelly subway tunnel? The answers to these questions aren’t cut and dry.
That's a weird metric to measure a city by. NYC is a vibrant city whose interestingness is intrinsically tied to the unique, sometimes weird blend of people inhabiting it. But tying this colourfulness to the amount of grime in the subway seems like a strawman to me. NYC isn't what it is because of smelly bums in subway cars, leaking ceilings, "showtime" kids or schizophrenic maniacs wielding knives, all of which feature heavily in the subway.
Secondly, there are plenty of cities with clean, "quality" civic spaces that are also have plenty of weirdness and colourful culture, including Berlin, Paris, Barcelona and Moscow.
Not my intent to make a troll comment. But, yes, "the subway" in NYC does STILL smell like pee and vomit in many places and, yes, it is chaotic. That's been my impression of subways in many but not all cities.
I think that it's possible to do better. I question why so many cities allow their public spaces to decay to such a low level while others seem to cherish their spaces.
I will say that the subway in NYC is not really typical of its public spaces in general these days. (Go back a few decades and both the subway and many of its public spaces like parks were much worse.) There is a fairly large homeless population and Manhattan generally is a rather dense, fast moving, and chaotic place. But parks like Central Park and Bryant Park are pretty pleasant for the most part.
I think aspects of the operational technology should improve, but should the subway be a brighter, more cheerful space? Of that I am uncertain...
I’d advocate for more reliable trains, in the same way I want the elevator to show up as soon as I press the button. Of course I want that instant gratification, but the atmosphere of the subway, on the other hand, I find to be a less urgent concern.
Mostly I think people are generally accepting of the fact that New York City’s subways are like an unfinished basement. It’s a moldy, musty cellar, and it’s not a destination. It’s a liminal zone.
If you want to talk about smell, consider this curiosity. One of the most irritating parts of the subway for me right now is the new cars. The bright, automated cars with the electronic conductor voice, and the light blue bench seating. [0]
These new cars have an air conditioned ventilation system miles ahead of the old cars, where you could just crack a window, and I swear to god these cars utilize an engineered odor as a crowd control mechanism. I harbor a suspicion that they radiate a strange odor on purpose so as to repel most normal people, so that no one lingers in these cars casually. It’s a unique smell. It only affects the new cars. And I only smell it inside those cars, even when they’re freshly cleaned. I suspect it’s the same tactic restaurants use [1], with artificially manufactured food aromas, but with a scent chosen to disgust.
None of the old cars smell like that. The plaform doesn’t smell like that. When the ventilation is off, and the doors are open, and the train sits in the station for 15 minutes, the new cars lose the smell. But for years, that smell has only affected the new cars. It smells like bad breath, if I were to try and describe it. Not vomit. Not urine. But more like if you lick the back of your hand first thing in the morning and smell it before it dries. That’s the closest smell. And I think it’s no accident the new cars smell like that.
As a parent, I would not enjoy having my child commuting to school in a "mouldy, musty cellar".
Stockholm doesn't have less homeless people roaming around than New York because they've been driven out by how clean everything is, it's because Sweden has a working welfare and health care system.
I live in Stockholm, the stations are almost always clean and tidy, rush hour doesn't look anything close to NYC metro (or any other major metro areas you might think of).
The metro is quiet, even during rush hours, people keep to themselves in their own seats, there are no cracked floors, walls or ceilings (at least on most of the stations I've been to and I think I have been to a good 70+% of them).
It doesn't smell like pee nor vomit and there isn't people shitting on the escalators (like I saw at Jamaica Station when I went to NYC for the first time, it was one of the first sights I had after leaving JFK).
Even a google image search reveals photos much like on altas obscura: vast tastefully designed cavernous space dotted with but a few token humans.
It seems suspiciously clean and well maintained compared to NYC metro. Floors polished, no screaming lunatics, no cracked, floors, walls, ceilings. I am willing to bet it doesn't even smell like pee and vomit? Where are the masses?
The station itself may be the deepest, but it isn't the busiest, and if you look at a map it makes sense. It's a single stop away from T-Centralan where all of the lines converge and it is the last station on the line. Leaving the station you emerge in a garden near the centre of the city, but there are other lines that will probably get most closer.
I went there in the middle of summer and honestly, the entire city didn't feel that busy in the same way London feels. I wouldn't be surprised if many locals are holidaying elsewhere, and Stockholm while a capital city, isn't at the top of the list of city destinations.
Also, shameless self-promotion and photos, but a friend challenged me to blog my trip and post online, click here for photos: https://consto.uk/2018/07/16/interrailing-into-stockholm-day...
In my admittedly limited experience the Swedes are really good at shared public spaces.
I don't know why NYC and BART have to have those issues.
So you end up with the classic 'privatise the profits, socialise the costs' setup.
I don't understand why people can't see that some public spending is an economic force multiplier.
I mean US infrastructure is notoriously bad for a developed economy, you have thousands of bridges that need massive remedial work to make them safe by modern standards.
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/15/us/structural-deficient-b...
The reasons behind this poor efficiency are complex and no one really knows how to fix it.
Here is an interesting article on the NYC Subway System. It's obviously about one small slice of US infrastructure but the general story is the same.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
A lack of spending is not the problem.
Also, incidentally, since you mentioned "privatise the profits", it's worth noting that the Stockholm subway system is operated by MTR Corporation, a for-profit corporation based on Hong Kong.
It’s also worth noting that the MTR Corporation is majority owned by the Hong Kong government and, at least in Hong Kong, operates on a strict SLA where they are fined for delays.
Except that New York and California - the locations of NYC's MTA and SF's BART are both overwhelmingly Democrat strongholds.
Neither are Republican places. This is true at both the city and state level, which is where the control and funding for these metros comes from not the federal level.
Wrong about NY. Albany's government might as well be from another planet compared to NYC. They currently have a Republican controlled Senate.
And it is the state-level that usually hamstrings the MTA. 2009 was a particularly bad year in which the MTA budget got raided [1] and the government was in a deadlock [2].
[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2010/03/09/albany-didnt-cut-the-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_New_York_State_Senate_lea...
Your first link completely supports my point:
>"A plan to shrink the state budget by $2.7 billion to keep New York from going broke was passed by the Legislature on Wednesday."
That would be the same Democrat-controlled since 1992 state legislature that passed that budget plan.
Furthermore the Governor appoints 6 of the 17 seats of the MTA board. And Governor Cuomo is a Democrat from NYC(Queens.) And the the Mayor another Democrat gets to appoint 4 seats. Thats 10 of the 17, for a majority.[1] Let's also point out that New York state has had a Democratic Governor for the last 11 years as well. So those board seat decisions have been by a Democrat for over a decade now.
That certainly seems like a healthy does ofDemocrat influence doesn't it? Maybe do a little more fact checking before telling people they are wrong.
And to be clear the context of my comment was in response to the OP who was insisting that the sad state of mass transit in NYC and SF is because of Republicans and that simply not true as both parties are equally to blame. Failure to fund infrastructure is failure by government period. Reductionist partisan finger pointing is what those have failed us would like us to believe.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/New_York_State_Legislature
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/nyregion/who-runs-new-yor...
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-pr...
But first and foremost, no one from New York calls it “NYC Metro.” It’s The Subway, and it’s operated by the MTA. So, already your comment has the ring of someone who doesn’t live in New York. And to go one deeper, The Subway hasn’t smelled like that since the mid 1990’s. Most of the tourist stations “Disney-fied” by Giuliani get power washed every single night, after midnight, during the gravyard shift, to eliminate the smells of humanity.
It’s still very old, very dirty, very inefficient, slow, crowded, and peppered with tourists, homeless people, pickpockets and weirdos all at once.
New York has more going on than many other cities, and is as dense as it is diverse, and it’s been that way for at least 100 years (or at least the subway has), and that’s a somewhat conservative time frame, but
Other cities aren’t like that, and some of it is due to strict policing. Not always though. Some of it has to do with climate, sunlight and weather, or in social terms, the implicit understanding of the expectation of one’s peers.
In lively cities, when transplanted people lose a sense of expected behavior among strangers, behavior loosens up. Some cities have a specific reputation as being a destination for the specific reason to either lose or find one’s sense of self. New York is one of those places.
I'm in NYC, and the subways may be powerwashed now and then, but I have to side with the parent here: They do still routinely smell. Not just the stations, either. It's a common sight, even during rush hour, to see cars that are completely empty except for a single scruffy-looking person with plastic bags for shoes; there's a reason nobody else goes into that car.
I'm from Scandinavia, and this summer I traveled back with my American girlfriend. She couldn't get over how clean and tidy everything was. Not just the cities and roads, but also the subway stations and trains: No cracked tiles, rusty beams or random brown water dripping from the ceiling, or puddles of mysterious green matter; modern signage, electronic boards, elevators, escalators; digital ticketing; and so on. The trains zoom in almost silently, and the cars are spacious and comfortable. She said she felt like she'd traveled 20 years into the future.
While you can talk about economic factors — budgets, age of the system, etc. — my thesis is that it also comes down to cultural differences. Scandinavia isn't just clean because of wealth, or a smaller population; it's that cleanliness and tidiness is part of the culture, and it's strived at almost subconsciously at every level, from the individual to the government. That only works thanks to the homogeneity of the population, where everyone share approximately the same values. NYC certainly is not like that.
It’s not so much that the bar should be higher, so much that leaving the bar as low as it is provides a signal that contrasts the range of sky high standards New York also makes possible in other ways.
Yes, the subway sucks, but New York’s tendency is to let the full scope of humanity simply exist out in the open, as is, warts and all. This is the philosophy I take away from it.
Should the world standardize a mandatory minimum quality upon public civic spaces? If we did, wouldn’t that require cracking down on deviations from the prescribed norm? Wouldn’t that drive people out, possibly sending some to a place much worse that a dirty smelly subway tunnel? The answers to these questions aren’t cut and dry.
Secondly, there are plenty of cities with clean, "quality" civic spaces that are also have plenty of weirdness and colourful culture, including Berlin, Paris, Barcelona and Moscow.
I think that it's possible to do better. I question why so many cities allow their public spaces to decay to such a low level while others seem to cherish their spaces.
I’d advocate for more reliable trains, in the same way I want the elevator to show up as soon as I press the button. Of course I want that instant gratification, but the atmosphere of the subway, on the other hand, I find to be a less urgent concern.
Mostly I think people are generally accepting of the fact that New York City’s subways are like an unfinished basement. It’s a moldy, musty cellar, and it’s not a destination. It’s a liminal zone.
If you want to talk about smell, consider this curiosity. One of the most irritating parts of the subway for me right now is the new cars. The bright, automated cars with the electronic conductor voice, and the light blue bench seating. [0]
These new cars have an air conditioned ventilation system miles ahead of the old cars, where you could just crack a window, and I swear to god these cars utilize an engineered odor as a crowd control mechanism. I harbor a suspicion that they radiate a strange odor on purpose so as to repel most normal people, so that no one lingers in these cars casually. It’s a unique smell. It only affects the new cars. And I only smell it inside those cars, even when they’re freshly cleaned. I suspect it’s the same tactic restaurants use [1], with artificially manufactured food aromas, but with a scent chosen to disgust.
None of the old cars smell like that. The plaform doesn’t smell like that. When the ventilation is off, and the doors are open, and the train sits in the station for 15 minutes, the new cars lose the smell. But for years, that smell has only affected the new cars. It smells like bad breath, if I were to try and describe it. Not vomit. Not urine. But more like if you lick the back of your hand first thing in the morning and smell it before it dries. That’s the closest smell. And I think it’s no accident the new cars smell like that.
[0] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/01/26/04/3093161B000005...
[1] https://www.scentair.com
Stockholm doesn't have less homeless people roaming around than New York because they've been driven out by how clean everything is, it's because Sweden has a working welfare and health care system.
The metro is quiet, even during rush hours, people keep to themselves in their own seats, there are no cracked floors, walls or ceilings (at least on most of the stations I've been to and I think I have been to a good 70+% of them).
It doesn't smell like pee nor vomit and there isn't people shitting on the escalators (like I saw at Jamaica Station when I went to NYC for the first time, it was one of the first sights I had after leaving JFK).