Exit Shinjuku

Outside exit A9, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo

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Transit by Design

Lai King Station, next to Hong Kong’s sprawling container port, has special significance for Wilfred Yeung. “This was my first assignment when I joined the MTR,” he says as we ride down the escalator from the busy platform upstairs. In the mid-1990s, as a young architect, Yeung was given the task of expanding the station to accommodate a new metro line. Rather than expand the station into an unwieldy maze of corridors, tracks were rerouted so that passengers could transfer between lines simply by walking across the platform.

It’s this kind of efficiency that passengers have come to expect from the MTR, the world’s ninth-busiest metro system, with 1.41 billion passenger rides last year. Not only efficiency, but seemingly endless expansion. Over the next five years, the MTR will open seven new metro stations and a high-speed rail line; several more lines and an overhaul of existing stations are in the works. But attitudes in Hong Kong are changing, and growth for growth’s sake is not longer held in high esteem. Nor is a purely functional metro system, no matter how fast and reliable it might be. The MTR’s new challenge is to move millions of people a day through a system that is at once convenient, comfortable and aesthetically interesting.

Aesthetics weren’t the top priority when the MTR was first planned in the 1970s, but under the guidance of British architect Roland Paoletti — who later oversaw the design of London’s renowned Jubilee Line extension in the late 1990s — it managed to create a visually distinctive system with limited resources. Paoletti made extensive use of commonly-available, brightly-coloured mosaic tiles to create a distinct identity for each station. “It’s still so significant that it’s hard to depart from when we plan new stations,” says Yeung, who is now the MTR’s chief architect. “People associate the MTR with bright colours.”

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Saturday Night at Shin-Okubo Station

Saturday, March 26th at Shin-Okubo Station

Last Saturday, two weeks after the Japanese earthquake, I found myself in Tokyo. I was on assignment for a Canadian magazine — more about that on a later date — and I spent much of my time wandering the city and speaking to people, trying to get a feel on how the city was coping with the disaster and the disruption it had caused to daily life, not to mention the persistent threat of a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant.

By the time I arrived, the mood in the city was not one of panic, or even overt tension, but rather a quiet, constant stress that seemed to pervade every aspect of life. Tokyo was barely damaged by the earthquake and for the average person, the question of radiation was still hypothetical, despite the news of contaminated vegetables and (slightly) radioactive tap water. Compared to the devastation up north, where tens of thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands more left homeless, Tokyo got off easy.

But a conversation never lasted long before turning to everyday uncertainties — whether there would be fresh produce in the grocery store, whether the power would be on — and long-term anxieties: will the economy recover? Just how bad is the radiation, anyway? And it was hard to escape the reminders that this was not a normal time. The streets in Shinjuku’s normally-buzzing Kabuki-cho were quiet. Billboards and video screens were dark. TV screens on the JR rail lines flashed constant announcements of train services cancelled by blackouts.

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Rush Hour in London, 1970 and Today

Bulbous black taxis and double-decker buses might supply London’s most recognizable transport iconography, but Britain, where the railroad was born, has long been a nation defined by trains. A look at two videos of London’s rail station at rush hour confirms the country’s undying regard for rail. The crowds pulsating through Waterloo Station in 1970 were at the mercy of the antiquated, almost Steampunk-styled signal equipment featured in the first video, a British Transport Film fished up from the archives of the British Film Institute last year, but if they were at all aware of this, it didn’t stop them from swarming the station in droves (though, being British, they also manage to organize the chaos into an occasional orderly queue).

Not even the materialism of the Thatcher years, their emphasis on homeownership, nor subsequent real estate booms, all of which promoted car ownership and the expansion of the London’s suburban commuter belt along the motorways radiating from the city, could seriously challenge British railways’ importance. Still less hemorrhage resulted from the 1993-7 privatization of the UK rail system, achieved, in the eyes of many, for no practical purpose and with disastrous results; in fact, traffic since privatization has actually increased, even as public impressions of the railways’ reliability and safety have declined. More passengers were carried in 2006 than in any year since 1957.

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Railway Stations in Quebec and Montreal

Gare du Palais, Quebec

In the 19th century, Montreal boomed as an industrial railway hub while Quebec City fell into obscurity. Quebec remained poorly connected by rail to the rest of the continent until the 20th century. A grand chateau-style railway station, called Gare du Palais, was built in 1915 to inaugurate the new railway line crossing the recently-completed Quebec Bridge. A small park with a brutalist fountain by Charles Daudelin was added to the front in 1999, and for some strange reason the contrast works. There’s something grand to this area, leaving you with the misleading impression that Quebec is an important railway hub. But the cavernous emptiness of the halls reveal the truth – only four trains come into the station per day.

Gare du Palais, Quebec

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Three Visions of Montreal

Today, the corner of University and La Gauchetière is as cold and forboding an intersection as you are likely to find in Montreal, bordered on all sides by charmless office towers. In 1945, however, as this photo shows, the corner provided a spectacular cutaway view of three remarkable buildings. Each represents a different facet of Montreal’s history.

On the far left, the St. James Cathedral (now dedicated to Mary, Queen of the World) was commissioned by Monseigneur Ignace Bourget, the Bishop of Montreal, shortly after the city’s previous cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1852. Bourget was an ambitious man, an ultramontanist who believed firmly in the supremacy of the Catholic Church over life in Quebec. It made sense, then, that he decreed that the new cathedral would be built in the Golden Square Mile, Montreal’s bastion of Anglo-Protestant privilege, where more than three-quarters of Canada’s wealth was concentrated. Bourget was making a political statement, using geography to assert the power of the church.

By the time it was completed, in 1894, its copper dome could seen from throughout Montreal. It remained unchallenged until 1931, when an even more impressive temple to another religion—commerce—was erected across the street.

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