The Green Line is Boston’s streetcar-subway combo, running above ground on Commonwealth Ave., Beacon St. and Huntington Ave. west of Massachusetts Ave. and below ground in the city centre.
Tokyo is trippy enough, but Chris Jongkind’s videos of its vast rail network takes its surreality to another level entirely. The right adjective here would be “serpentine” as we watch trains slide effortlessly through the urban underbrush of the world’s largest city.
For what it’s worth, Jongkind’s photos are even better.
Asleep—Eastbound On Sheppard
F train, 8:40am. Photo by Travis Ruse
Whenever I try to read on the bus or metro, my eyes invariably slide up and over to the other passengers on board. Considering I will never see most of them again, reading their faces is far more interesting than whatever book or magazine I have in front of me.
It would seem I’m not alone. For more than two years, photoblogger Travis Ruse has been haunting the subway tunnels of New York, documenting the people on his daily commute. What stands out is not his subject matter—subway life has been documented by photographers going all the way back to Walker Evans in 1938—but his unique ability to capture, on a daily basis and with surprising intimacy, the human richness of New York mass transit.
R train, 6:35pm. Photo by Travis Ruse
Lawrence West from David Topping’s 69 Days on the TTC
I’m a transit geek. I’m not a railfan—the mundane details of different train models and rail gauges doesn’t interest me—but I am fascinated by public transport. I pore over subway maps and admire ephemera such as old tickets or the unique, quietly confident typeface used in Toronto’s 1950s-era stations. I love how public transit—in the cities where it is a central part of life and not a marginal service for the poor—is a great social blender, bringing people from every different corner of the city together. In many ways, it is in the subway, not the streets, where the true face of a city is revealed.
That’s why I appreciate David Topping’s 69 Days on the TTC, an ambitious attempt to visit and photograph all sixty-nine of Toronto’s subway stations. Topping documents the subway’s details, captures its atmosphere and studies its users, revealing the breadth and complexity of Toronto’s urban landscape. “I’ve lived in Toronto’s west end since I was born,” he explains on Torontoist. “My Toronto—the part of the city that matters to me—has never extended further west than Kipling, further east than Yonge, or further north than St. Clair. I felt stuck.” By the end of his tour, he felt he had gained “a genuine curiosity for the city that I thought I knew everything about. There will always be more of Toronto to explore, always be more people to find and places to escape to.”
