A Few Moments in the Seoul Metro

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Un Métro à déstination de nulle part

On dirait que le prochain Big Owe au Québec sera, en effet, un deuxième Big O. Un gros O en orange, pour préciser, qui amènera ses usagers en comfort et luxe sous la plaine banlieusarde de Laval, coupant dramatiquement le temps de parcours entre les deux bouts de la ligne. Gilles Vaillancourt, vous avez de quoi être fier : vous avez donné un beau nouveau jouet à vos électeurs.

Quand on était à l’école primaire, on nous a toujours dit qu’il est plus facile d’obtenir ce qu’on veut si on travaille avec ses camarades. C’est donc encourageant de constater que les maires des trois plus grandes municipalités dans notre région ont chacun fait leur tour en école primaire. Avec rien de plus qu’un coup de crayon – sauf peut-être des ‘consultations’ en huis clos – nous avons collectivement décidé de faire prolonger notre métro. Déjà reconnu autour du monde, il sera bientôt étendu au reste du monde.
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Subway People

New York City is filled with all kinds of different people from all over the world. Everybody knows that, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting in the eyes of a visitor. What better way to get a look at people than on the subway?

Riding the NYC subway lines 4, 5 or 6 up and down Manhattan, from Wall Street up to Union Square then on to Grand Central, or taking the ‘L’ over to Brooklyn is as pleasurable to me as being above ground visiting the sites we are all supposed to see when you go to New York. The Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty are all great places, but frankly, I’m over them. It’s the people of New York I want to see.

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J’vous emmene?

It’s got nothing on Il fait beau dans l’métro, but this 1985 TV spot certainly ranks up there in the pantheon of kitschy transit ads. What kind of bugs me about it is that the metro is taking this very fashionable couple from their living room to a restaurant and a swimming pool, yet they choose to get off and hop on a bus driven by some creepy moustachioed uncle with a twangy accent. What gives?

Montreal in a Minute

When it first launched, Urbania magazine had a pretty useless Flash-based website that replicated selected content from its print magazine. I’m glad to see it has embraced the full potential of the web. 14 “channels” of video, images and text add a new, more dynamic aspect to the quarterly magazine. One of my favourite features is the Urbania Minutes series of videos: one-minute vignettes of Montreal life.

Above is L’exil, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, a brief portrait of a Chinese dépanneur deliveryman in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Despite the annoying synopsis, which exoticizes Chinese immigrants (“En quête d’une vie meilleure, désireux d’offrir un avenir à leurs enfants, les ressortissants de l’Empire du milieu sont prêts à trimer dur pour réaliser leur rêve. Travailler 18 heures par jour dans une buanderie ou un dépanneur, ce n’est qu’une manière d’acheter sa liberté”), it’s a worthwhile glimpse into both immigrant life and the peculiar tradition of dep delivery, which has disappeared from other parts of the city.

Le métro de Montréal s’éveille, below, is one of those always-interesting behind-the-scenes looks at something we take for granted. We see the metro come to life in all of its antiquated glory, a 1960s flashback that begs to be seen as an old episode of Batman or something.

Three Stops on the Cairo Metro

Pending the completion of Johannesburg’s subway, the Cairo Metro is the only rapid transit system in Africa. And for all the rot and deterioration that characterizes much of Cairo’s city center, it’s surprisingly clean and efficient, with stations that possess a maintenance level and design savvy that would be the envy of New York.

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Songs and Dances of the Underground

It often seems like the subway is treated as a metaphor for urban life in general. When we’re immersed in the optimism of economic expansion, it represents progress and vitality. In more troubled times, it becomes a symbol of crime, danger, aggression and alienation.

Last winter, while browsing the shelves in Stephen Welch’s bookstore on St. Viateur Street, I came across Michael Brooks’ book, Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York, in which he weaves the history of the New York subway’s development with the history of public attitude towards it. His point is that how people feel about the subway has always been as important as the actual operation of the subway itself.

I had this in mind when I saw Songs and Dances of the Inanimate World, a 1985 National Film Board piece by Pierre Hébert, Robert Lepage and René Lussier. Through animation, still photography and drawings, the film serves as a portrait of the Montreal metro, but it’s not a very flattering one, dwelling on the alienation and inhumanity of the underground. It’s fascinating to watch but I find the message a bit tiresome.

By virtue of where I lived, I only rode the metro occasionally in Montreal, getting around mainly by bus, foot or bike. Here in Hong Kong, though, I’m a regular subway commuter. On most days it’s monotonous, and on particularly bad days it’s insufferably hostile, but it always affords me a chance to consider the people I normally pass by on the street without thinking twice about. Last week, as I rode the MTR in the late afternoon, I considered how the teenage schoolkids heading home infused the train with a nervous hormonal energy. Another day, I watched, bemused, as a little white girl climbed up one of the support poles as if she was on the monkey bars. Her dad smiled but the middle-aged Chinese ladies across the aisle shot dagger looks, as if to ask, “How could he possibly allow that?”

Songs and Dances’s French synopsis describes it as a “metaphorical and expressive representation” of the “rapports d’agressivité” — aggressive relations — in the metro. But are they really aggressive relations — or just the superficial indifference of urban life?

Meet Opus

When Montreal’s new public transit smart card was officially launched in late April, most of its details had already been known for months. There was, however, one surprise: its name, Opus, which was chosen from more than 1,000 proposals and then kept secret for nearly four years.

Many transit users like smart cards because they allow them to store cash value and multiple passes or tickets on a single card. Transit agencies like them because they reduce fraud and make it easier to adjust fares and analyze passenger flow. More than that, though, they are valuable marketing tools. That’s why, in cities around the world, so much emphasis has been placed on coming up with a catchy name to anchor a strong brand identity.

For the Société de transport de Montréal, which led Montreal-area transit agencies in the creation of the new smart card, creating a memorable name was essential.

“Three hundred fifty thousand people buy a métro pass each month and they use it every day. With a smart card, they need to keep the card permanently, so we need to build a relationship between it and the consumer,” STM spokesperson Odile Paradis said in a phone interview. “They need to keep it, take care of it, make it part of their lives. If it didn’t have a name, it would just be an anonymous access card that nobody would care about.”

Opus is being phased in, starting with a small test group now, and expanding to students this summer and the general public in September. The old turnstiles are to be removed next June.

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Underground Art

Axel Morgenthaler’s “.98.” Video by Matt McLaughlin

It becomes obvious as soon as you enter the métro car: this will be no ordinary ride. The usual advertisements and bright orange colour have been replaced by a dark blue, wood-textured film covering the car’s interior walls. Distorted, semi-transparent photos are pasted on the windows. As the métro doors close, eerie music starts playing, followed by the mournful wail of a fog horn.

Nowhere are the odd sounds and visuals explained, which is exactly what artist Rose-Marie Goulet wanted when she created Point de fuite, an unprecedented art project that has been riding the rails of the métro’s Orange Line since last September. When she first teamed up with the Montreal Transit Corp. to create the installation, in 2006, she insisted that it not be labelled explicitly as an art project.

“It’s by chance that you come across this car,” Goulet explained. “People aren’t expecting it, that’s what’s important.”

At Henri Bourassa station, meanwhile, métro riders have even more unusual art to consider: .98, a new light mural that was inaugurated last April. Located in one of Henri Bourassa’s long corridors, the mural consists of several dozen LED lights programmed to change colours and blink in different patterns.

Art has been part of Montreal’s métro since the system first opened in 1966. In some ways, with its abundance of sculptures, murals and unique architectural details, it is a vast underground gallery through which hundreds of thousands of commuters just happen to pass every day. What makes .98 and Point de fuite stand out is the way they engage métro riders in unorthodox ways.

When lighting designer Axel Morgenthaler was commissioned to create a new work of art in the Henri-Bourassa station, he wanted to make something unusual that would grab the attention of harried commuters.

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