I arrive by train in a major European city. As usual, the main rail station contains a rapid transit or ‘metro’ station. For the transit system, such a station obviously requires a high level of fare sales equipment or staffing, as most of the customers are newly arrived in the city and therefore won’t be holding its transit system’s tickets or passes. It’s also an opportunity for an act of welcoming.
The current generation of urban designers may like to complain about NIMBYs, but urban designers and NIMBYs can be counted on to agree on one thing: Elevated transportation infrastructure is a bad thing in an urban setting. Urban design today focuses on activating the ground plane and maintaining its visual connection to the sky. Even pedestrian bridges are out of fashion, while a new continuous elevated structure would be hard sell in the urban core of almost any major city. The Seattle Monorail Project (1996-2005) proposed a very thin elevated structure, but even this was a flashpoint of controversy when it got close to existing buildings.
It may be true that we don’t know how to build viaducts anymore and that the freeway era has traumatized a whole generation into reacting badly to absolutely anything new up in the air. And I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, but …
But before we decide for sure, take a walk with me along Berlin’s Stadtbahn.
Given the passions that surround the streetcar in North America, it’s interesting to travel in Germany, where there are lots of streetcars, and lots of buses, and not as much focus on the difference between them.
You’ve seen pictures of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. It’s Germany’s equivalent of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but in a Neoclassical style.
Sometimes, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, the medium is the message.
I thought it worth a post to say only that I’m now on a Deutsche Bahn ICE train sliding across the German countryside at around 200 km/hr while enjoying seamless internet service. (Those trees are further away than they look, a common high-speed rail illusion.)
At EUR 8.00/hour it’s a little expensive, but most things are in version 1.0. Like many German services, they clearly put quality before price.
Earlier this year, Berlin’s U-Bahn opened its newest segment of subway, a 1.1 mile three-station line connecting the main rail station to the Brandenburg Gate. It’s temporarily called the U55, but it will ultimately become part of the expanded U5 (see network map here). From the Gate, the line will continue east under Unter den Linden, Berlin’s main processional boulevard, to Alexanderplatz, the former East Berlin downtown and one of Berlin’s most important hubs. (From there it will continue to the eastern suburbs as the U5 that already exists.) This is such an important segment for Berlin, both practically and symbolically, that it´s remarkable it´s only now being built. (The Transport Politic reviewed the political history here.)
Lately there’s been a groundswell of talk among transit advocates about the need to stop building rapid transit along freeways. To honor the imminent opening of Portland’s Green Line, which runs mostly along the east side of that city’s I-205 freeway, I thought I’d weigh in on this a little, with some relevant pictures fresh from Berlin.
When you’re trying to run quality transit in a mixed-traffic situation, and you have a street with two lanes of traffic in each direction, the best practice is for transit to run in the faster lane, the one further from the sidewalk. We see this most commonly with streetcars, but it’s true of any mode of street-running transit. That’s because the lane closer to the curb is often delayed by random car movements, including cars turning, or trying to parallel-park, or doing pickup and dropoff. So long as the fast lane is separate from any turning lanes, it’s the lane where you’ll get the best travel time in mixed traffic.
Hello from Berlin, where I chanced to be in town for one of the larger transit meltdowns I’ve seen. And I’ve seen a few!