ereH sgnihT oD eW woH

Item #1 is the proposed Rochester Intermodal Transit Facility. It will house a new station for Amtrak, inter-city buses in Phase 2, and eventually high-speed rail. This project was recently funded by a $15,000,000 grant from the federal government. Total budget is in the range of $24,000,000.

Item #2 is our regional transit authority’s (Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority, RGRTA) new Mortimer Street Bus Barn. Construction is slated to begin this year. Budget is $52,000,000.

This is the measure of our far thinking leaders, as they plan for a sustainable and useable future for our city. Great work, team.

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Moving Rochester

Rochester, Baseball Park, 1910.

We’ve been moved by automobiles here in Rochester for a very long time. But wait! Now we Rochesterians have a great chance to try something both old, and new again.

On June 21st Reconnect Rochester is mounting the 2nd annual ROC Transit Day, and we Reconnectors are inviting the entire region – dazzling urbanites and sophisticated suburbanites – to set themselves free and join us on – wait for it – the bus. Here’s the particulars:

June 21st, 2012 is ROC Transit Day! What is ROC Transit Day you ask?

Reconnect Rochester is working to improve the quality of life in our community by promoting transportation alternatives. On ROC Transit Day, Reconnect Rochester wants as many Rochesterians as possible to leave their cars at home and go for a bus ride instead. I know what you’re thinking… the bus? Seriously? This is going to be a blast! Here’s what we’re up to…

Reconnect Rochester will be giving away 1,000 specially designed all-day bus passes good for FREE rides all day on June 21. FREE PRIZES will be given to random bus riders all day. Prizes will include gift certificates to local businesses and tickets to area events and other fun stuff. There will also be “pub crawls” to various shops, restaurants, and bars along a few main bus routes.

Participants can leave their cars at home and not have to worry about how to get home if they’ve indulged a bit too much. The day will wrap up with happy hour at Legend’s Sports Bar & Grille (120 E Main St, Radisson Hotel) from 5:00-6:30pm. A FREE ROUND OF BEER & APPETIZERS will be served to those with a cancelled bus pass!

THE GOAL IS SIMPLE: Increase awareness of the great resource that lies in our public transit system and convince enough people to use the system so that we may start to expand upon it in the future.

THE CHALLENGE WILL BE ENORMOUS: to get drivers to try something new, not an easy task! For more information, please visit: http://ROCtransitday.com.

And while you’re there, check out the sensational video crafted by our ever-fearless and ever-tireless leader, Mike Governale.

See you on the bus!

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Buffalo’s Billion

Our Governor here, Andrew Cuomo, has just announced that the State of New York will be forking over $1 billion to the city of  Buffalo, to aid a city in crisis.

Yup – a cool billion.

As you can imagine, the howls of disbelief and anger in Rochester and Syracuse are deafening. These three cities, the Moe, Larry and Curly of upstate New York urbanism, are nearly identical in rates of poverty, crime, joblessness, screwed up downtowns, massive sprawl, infrastructure no one can pay for, municipal budget deficits, crummy schools, and any other metric you might imagine to measure cities in crisis.

All three cities are a mess, with huge challenges ahead. All three cities have a rich and deep store of narratives, and all three were once gorgeous, vital, robust, bustling, and unique. All three cities have systematically choked themselves with inner loops and outer loops and loop-de-loops, sending  jobs and institutions and families out of town, and fast. All of which got me to thinking.

Maybe the fact that our city didn’t get the dough is actually a blessing. Maybe we can put our heads together and figure out just exactly what we would do with that kind of money, so next year, or the year after, when we here might win the Governor’s massive lotto game, we can get started right away. Let’s think about this for a minute.

(Of course it could take years to get an agreement in any of the Stooge Cities as to how to spend a $1 million windfall, much less $1 billion – but onward).

Here’s what we should do (with thanks to Edward Glaeser and his wonderful, problematic book, “Triumph of the City”): City, County, and area leaders and institutions should come together to harness the extraordinary energy and innovative talents of our region – our people – and especially our young people. Doing all that they can to foster a spirit of invention and entrepreneurship, our leaders should commit to a central locale for a potent, new, and powerful economic engine: our central city. By bringing the energy of our most gifted citizens together in a dense urban setting, collaboration and the free sharing and transfer of ideas and invention will yield new jobs, real growth, and a new vitality for Rochester and its surrounds. History teaches us that innovation and invention benefit most from close quarters – cities.

Where should we create this new regional economic engine room? Well, there are a bunch of recently cleared blocks in downtown Rochester where an old enclosed shopping mall used to be. It was called Midtown Plaza, and it was at Main and Clinton – our city’s historic crossroad intersection. Now it’s big and empty, and will be for the most part for the foreseeable future. A great spot for our power center.

From the Democrat & Chronicle.

At the moment, RIT is building the Golisano Institute of Sustainability out in the suburbs on their windblown campus. Of course this kind of Center should be downtown, since no human settlement is more sustainable than a dense, walkable city. Maybe we could allocate a few dollars to move the building to Main and Clinton.

Our local Community College, Monroe Community College, is about to enlarge their downtown presence substantially – probably in former Kodak buildings over by our ball yard. So they will be downtown.

University of Rochester is spread out all over the place here. They began downtown – maybe we could lure them back with a portion of their facilities.

So we gather the best and the brightest – well at least some of them – and we get them to go to work inventing a useable future for our region. Meanwhile, we take whatever is left over in the $1b grand prize and we give it all to our urban infrastructure, social and physical. Many of my fellow Rochesterians may not agree with me, but it seems clear that the health and viability of our region is inextricably tied to the health and viability of our city.

And in late-breaking news, we learned Friday that Rochester has won a kind of booby prize in the state’s urban lotto. The Governor has awarded us $100 million so that we can improve an interchange on one of our loop-de-loop expressways. Everyone here seems to think this is a fabulous development. At the risk of being lynched, I say: NUTS!

The intersection in question, I 390 at Kendrick Road, is a southern point of access to U of R and their medical campus. Sandy Parker, of the Rochester Business Alliance says: “All of that area is extremely congested, so without this project coming into being, it would restrict further expansion of the U of R and RIT.” Take a look at this extreme congestion.

Joel Seligman, President of the U of R, declares that the project will be “transformational to the region’s economic future….” State Assemblyman  Joe Morelle says that this project will “help take us to the next level.” All of them should be ashamed. This project is a massive make-work that is a total and absolute dead end. Basta.

As it happens, I know this intersection very well. In the spring, summer, and fall, I am here multiple times a week, at many different hours of the day. This place is many things, but “extremely congested” is certainly not one of those things. This is just the kind of defective thinking that is leading us further and further from a useful urban future.

A truly ridiculous project, whose time has come and long gone, and yet cheered on by our regional and institutional leaders. Do we really still believe that road building is what we should do to preserve and protect our community? I wish I could laugh – it is laughable – but I can’t. There are 100 million better things we need to be doing here. Expressway interchanges are nowhere on that list.

Sigh.

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The Streetcar City – II

Staib’s Saloon, Blossom and Winton, 1913.

Of course it was an imperfect arrangement. Streetcars in cities were an important, even critical, part of early 20th century urban life, but like any human conception, not without the occasional flaw.

Like the one above, when a streetcar crashed through the front door of Staib’s Saloon. Perhaps the motorman was thirsty….

One of the biggest challenges was keeping autos and streetcars separated. As on Main Street, below in 1919, officials experimented with a variety of controls to assure that the transit modes stayed clear of each other.

Which of course they didn’t.

Parsells Avenue, 1915.

Monroe and Crosman, 1923.

And often the sudden presence of a car or truck on the tracks would induce various kinds of mayhem.

On St. Paul in 1922, a truck bumped a streetcar off the tracks, and it promptly hit a fire hydrant, causing a small tidal wave.

Not sure how this next one  happened right downtown, but it sure drew a crowd.

 

Methinks somehow a rubber-tired vehicle was involved….

Streetcar workers occasionally went on strike (as railway companies found ways to operate the trolleys with fewer employees, for example), but the show had to go on. And it did.

I can hear OSHA inspectors nationwide groaning at this image. But hey – it worked.

Judging by all the smiles, everyone was having a pretty good time in spite of the work stoppage.

Main and Fitzhugh, 1910.

So mishaps and hiccups notwithstanding, the streetcar city worked pretty well.

Moral of the tale: cities are for feet, then rails, then cars.

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The Streetcar City

I have been spending a fair amount of time recently trying to understand the streetcar city we once had. Say in 1929 or so.

Why, you might ask? Well, for a couple of reasons. First, the routing of the streetcars of so long ago is nearly identical to the routing of today’s bus system. This may seem counterintuitive to some who realize how much this place has changed in the last 80 years or so – sprawl has emptied the city, changed where we live and work, vaporized downtown retail and entirely changed our patterns of urban life. But the routes, right down to the route numbers for many routes, are intact. More about this later.

And then I got to wondering about how it was to move around the city in those days. In 1929 we had subway, streetcar, bus, and trackless trolley (electric buses running on power from overhead lines) in addition to interurbans and long distance passenger rail. Today we have bus. And our cars, endlessly our cars.

Anyway, I found a map of the streetcar, bus, and subway routes from about that date, and I have been puzzling over it for some time. Here’s the map:

The solid lines are streetcars, the dashed lines are buses, and the subway is a doubled line with dashes inside. There were something like 10 bus lines and about 15 or more trolley lines.

Remember this: in those days the city was nearly twice as populous in nearly half the land. There was not yet a large non-city population (regional population). Downtown was, well, downtown: bustling, filled with jobs and retail and entertainment - the destination. The map shows so many routes going there because that’s where everyone wanted, and needed, to go.

The fare was a dime – about $1.25 today – and there were transfers so that you could change streetcars, or change modes, from streetcar to bus to trackless trolley. (Today there are no transfers – it’s a buck a ride, and another buck on the bus you have to transfer to).

In fact the streetcar transfer was invented here, by a man named John H. Stedman, 1843 – 1922, in 1892. Notably, Stedman also invented the fuzzy pipe cleaner. He’s buried here in Mt. Hope Cemetery.

I digress. There were also weekly passes. For a buck, you could ride anywhere anytime, all week.

The streetcars were pretty comfy, actually. We know this because Mr. Stone photographed their interiors in 1918, as they were disinfected during the influenza epidemic. Take a look.

In the winter, the cars were heated by coal-fired stoves. During WWI coal was rationed, so the railway system positioned coal stations across the city where a conductor could get a handful of coal lumps to keep the home fires burning.
This guy looks like he is having a real ball.

Perhaps I have digressed again.

In the 20s, the streetcars ran from 6:00am to 12:00pm – 18 hours a day. But here’s where the comparison to today starts to get a bit, well, revealing.

At peak, the headway – the distance between trains – was about 5 minutes. The longest headways were in the evenings, and were about 15 minutes.

Today, the bus system runs about 20 minute headways at peak, and off-peak headways sag to about an hour or more.

And if you were inclined, there was an interurban between Rochester and Syracuse that ran every 30 minutes.

So over 80 years ago, you could move around our city almost as quickly on the streetcar/subway/trolley/bus system as in your car today. Maybe we’re not as smart as we think we are.

And you could get to Syracuse, downtown to downtown, from here as fast or faster than you can get there today, in your car. Hmmm.

Now, a short glimpse at today’s bus system. Here are a couple of images of the bus routes today. I have taken these from the RGRTA website. They offer a 14mb image of the system map that is pretty nearly impossible to use – slow to download, gigantic, and cumbersome, at best. Come on guys – the 1929 map is a snap to use.

First, the overall system:

Looks kind of familiar, yes?

And now a snapshot of the system in downtown:

So in 1929, you could get downtown (you wanted to go downtown) quickly, and transfer easily to other parts of the city.

Today you have to go downtown (you may want to go there, or you may want to go elsewhere, but you have no choice), usually pay a second fare to transfer to another bus, and go out of downtown to your destination.

Lots has changed in our region in the last 80 years. As I said at the outset, we no longer live, work, shop, or loiter in the same places we did then. But here’s the thing: it was a 20 minute city then, and it’s a 20 minute city today. Except that in those times, it was 20 minutes using transit. Today, you are in your car.

Is this progress? Maybe. Maybe not.

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Compare and Contrast

Four Corners, downtown Rochester, 2011:

Four Corners, downtown Rochester, 1922:

Talk amongst yourselves.

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Unfolding the City – Memory’s Maps

1923, Edgerton Park.

Max Frisch, Swiss novelist (and architect) once said, “Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.”

True, I think. Like maps, our lives unfold until all is revealed. And so it is with cities, as we unfold the stories of their places time after time.

I have been unfolding the stories of a particular portion of our city for quite a while. It has taken me months to put the pieces together to create an unfolded map of  just this one particular spot. The stories crisscross back and forth over a very long time in our city – 165 years to be exact. Get comfortable – this one is going to take a while.

This particular place in our city has had many names in many eras: Western House of Refuge, State Industrial School, Exposition Park, and finally Edgerton Park (named in memory of former mayor Hiram Haskell Edgerton, who has appeared in our pages previously).

Just under 40 acres, this place has been home to juvenile delinquents, trade school students after the children’s prison was reformed in the late 1880s, hundreds of thousands of Rochesterians from across the entire city and region attending the annual Exposition from 1911 until the late 1940s, Glenn Miller and his orchestra, the 1950-51 NBA Champion Rochester Royals, high schoolers (Jefferson High School is a part of this site), model train buffs, and today neighbors and all kinds of recreators. It’s an amazing, complicated place. The map across time of Edgerton Park is really a guide to the changing life of our city.

For me, it all started with this:

A parade. It’s 1908, and Mr. Stone is showing us what was called the Industrial Exposition Parade. Moving up and down Main Street are floats exhibiting all manner of Rochester businesses: milliners and tailors, shoemakers, photographic supply houses – a long list of local enterprises. The notes accompanying the photograph explain that this parade was a precursor to the annual Industrial Exposition at Edgerton Park. Hmm, I thought – what the heck was that? I was puzzled – because today, Edgerton Park looks like this:

In the distance at the right is Jefferson High, and a bit to the left is the Edgerton Park Rec Center. And then: a running track, a children’s water park, tennis and basketball courts, and a whole bunch of ball fields. Sensing a rather large gap between what I could see and what I was beginning to sense were the other lives of this place, it was clearly time to investigate. Here we go.

In 1846, the State of New York created the Western House of Refuge. When complete, it was the first reform school in the United States – home to young delinquent boys. The place opened in 1849, with 50 children. By 1875, the legislature agreed that girls could be housed here as well, and the place kept growing, with more and more buildings added to house the swelling roll of inmates.

In 1870, the place looked like this:

And in 1872, like this:

A walled prison in a bucolic, ex-urban setting.

As the 19th century came to a close, reforming the reform school became an increasingly pressing matter. Corporal punishment was banned, hard labor reduced, bars on windows removed, real schooling instituted. In fact, by the late 1880s, the Western House of Refuge was renamed. It became the State Industrial School, and inmates were now taught trades in addition to their regular classes.

In 1900, the place looked like this:

That’s the Erie Canal running diagonally at the far left. The School had a tiny railroad that carried supplies (mostly coal) from the Canal to the building that housed the boilers, the dining hall and the power house.

And as you can begin to see, the city had moved out to and now surrounded the School. Time for change. In 1902 the State purchased 1,000 acres of land in what was then the nearby but very rural Rush, New York, and the move began. By 1907, the site was abandoned. Now what?

The City of Rochester bought the place, and transformed it into Exposition Park, home to what had begun as the Industrial Exposition Parade. Voila – now I was getting somewhere.

But before Exposition Park would open, a certain canny photographer visited the place to show us what it looked like as a reform school. Here are a few of the images Mr. Stone shared with us.

This is the Main Building and the main entrance to the School, facing east and Backus Street (Backus was an early Director of the Western House of Refuge). Mr. Stone took this image from the middle of Phelps Avenue.

The portion on the left, with the arched openings, is the chapel. Remember that part of this huge rambling building – you’ll need it later.

Demolition is underway – the boiler room/power house/dining hall is biting the dust in the middle ground. In the distance is the Main Building, and again the chapel is seen on the right. You’re looking east.

And finally, this, from 1910:

Looking north, towards the School. Streetcar tracks. In both directions. Remember this – it will become very important later. Very important.

So, with demolition complete, Exposition Park could open. From the looks of the parade in 1908, I expected to find that this annual event would prove to be some kind of glorified trade show. Boy, was I wrong.

Concerts:

1911.

I think the bandstand is one of the odder structures I have seen. Here’s another view, from 1922. To the left of the bandstand is the zoo, complete with apes and bears and ostriches.

The ostriches, in 1917.

Exhibitions by the Historical Society:

1913.

Art Exhibitions:

1912.

Every manner of sports competition imaginable, but lots and lots of horse contests of various kinds:

1919.

In 1918, the place looked like this:

Here’s Mayor Edgerton opening the Expo sometime in the 19 teens:

Oh sure, the latest technologies were showcased:

Yes, that’s a lawnmower – 1920.

And as time passed, lots and lots of car exhibitions:

1924.

A couple of favorite exhibitions from this period include:

This is an exhibition of stolen autos, held in 1920.

The cars were stolen in the midwest, but shown here. Hmm.

And this one:

An exhibition of “Fruit Diseases and Injurious Insects,” 1921.

Huge crowds were the norm. Here are two views. Often these events were at the 4th of July, or revolved around patriotic events linked to World War I.

4th of July, 1917.

4th of July, 1918.

I could go on, and on, and on. Clearly this place was at the heart of city life in those days. Folks could hop on a streetcar, or later the subway, and then walk a block and join the throngs. It must have been an amazing place – a kind of annual mini-World’s Fair. The more I looked, the more astonished I became at the heady life of this place.

Here’s Edgerton Park in 1926. By then, Mayor Edgerton was gone, and the place had taken his name.

Notice that the Erie Canal is gone now, and in its place, at the far left, is the word “Transit.” This was our beloved subway.

You could get to Expo Park by subway, or by streetcar on one of at least two car lines. Kodak Park was only a few blocks south, and this part of the city was dense and bustling.

But more. After his death, a monument to Mayor Edgerton was erected, and it looked like this:

1929.

It’s on the left, in front of the peristyle where visitors bought their tickets. I have not been able to figure out what happened to the monument – it’s gone, but I don’t know where. Maybe you know.

Back to the Expo. Every year one of the most wonderful features was the baby contest.

That’s Richard Eyer and Doris Sedgwick, in 1926.

There are many images of this particular event – apparently a favorite of Mr. Stone’s. Here’s another:

Virginia Grace Coxon, in 1923.

The Expo survived the Depression, and went strong until the 1940s. But it faded after World War II, and I couldn’t figure out what happened, or why.

I knew that hockey was played in the old arena in the late 40s and 50s. I knew that the Royals (now the Sacramento Kings) won the NBA championship here in game seven of the 1950-51 season. I knew that the PAL (Police athletic League) started a fabulous model train layout in the 50s, aimed at giving children something creative to do, and which thankfully survives. But I could not figure out how the place went from being at the heart of the city to being a big neighborhood park.

Today, a few more views.

First, a view of the park in almost the same place as Mr. Stone’s image of 1910 – the middle of Phelps Avenue looking west at the chapel. Remember the chapel? Good. There it is – the Edgerton Park Rec Center.

And here, a view looking toward what was once the Erie Canal, then the
Rochester Subway, and today a berm.

And here, another view of the park today.

Today, the park is an important part of the neighborhood. A few events at the park draw folks from across the city – dances, the model trains, athletic contests, the water park, and others. And the city is conducting a few special events in this, Expo/Edgerton Park’s centennial year.

But as the city dispersed after World War II, and Kodak dwindled, and the car took over the streets, the park went from central to the life of the city to peripheral, at best.

It’s this last part that I could not figure out. What was it that pulled the plug on this place? Dances and concerts continued into the 50s. Glenn Miller – yikes. Basketball – big time. Hmm.

And then last week, the last piece of the puzzle emerged. We had lunch with some of Amy’s long time family friends, from her old neighborhood. She baby-sat for the family, and the matriarch of the family, an M.D., grew up in the Edgerton neighborhood. She remembered the Expo, and the concerts and the music. She remembered the dances especially, jitterbugging into the night.

She said: “Things were different after the War (World War II).” And then the light went on, at last.

The city pulled out the streetcars in 1941. Symptomatically, Expo Park ceased in 1947.

And the subway ceased in 1956. In 1957 the former World Champion NBA Rochester Royals moved to Cincinnati, and thence to Sacramento.

Our lives changed radically here in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, like lives in cities across the nation. Edgerton Park, so long a central part of the life of the city, was now abandoned, and marooned. The river of city life had shifted, and today the map shows only a small creek where once had been a mighty stream. Chapter closed.

Today Edgerton Park remains an important place in our city. While the neighborhood is poorer than the old days, and abandoned buildings are visible, it would be wrong to underestimate the role the place continues to play in the life of the city. But there are no more throngs, no monuments to beloved mayors, no baby contests, no exhibitions. The city does not teem to the park on the 4th of July. It’s pretty quiet now.

165 years in the life of any city is a long time. Edgerton Park has unfolded before my eyes, from prison to school to gathering place to home for great city moments, and now, simply, a park.

Perhaps we made some mistakes along the way. The future’s map is unclear. But certainly we will not go back to where we have been.

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Understanding Cities – Baseball: Addendum I

Question: how did most Rochesterians get to the ballyard in 1910? Answer: simply ask Mr. Stone (somehow, I missed this one). Opening day, 1910.

Until Bay and Webster no longer hosted Rochester’s baseball (the last year there was 1928), the streetcar was your best transportation choice.

Now take a look at this map (I feel like I have finally found the mother lode with the discovery of this extraordinary document) to see that you simply hop on the No. 6 car and you’re at the park.

Discovering this map has helped me to solve some really knotty urban problems. Stay tuned – much more to come very soon.

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The Main Street Bridge

Reader David Steele has asked what the street side of the Main Street bridge was like. Reader Jason Haremza told him: just like any other street, really. You’d never know the river was there. Herewith, proof.

Here’s the bridge from the south, looking downriver, in 1919, on a day when the river was very high. (This was after the city deepened the river under the bridge in 1916, because of a flood in 1915).

Here’s a similar view, a bit closer, from around 1920.

And here’s a similar view but closer still, from 1922.

Can you make out the name on the upper right of the right hand building? Ocumpaugh’s. Remember that – here’s the front on Main.

51 to 55 South Main, 1922. These shops and offices comprise the Ocumpaugh property. The pedestrians are all on the bridge.

Okay, so what did the street side of the bridge really look like? One more image tells the tale.

Main Street, looking east across the river, in about 1912. The streetcar in the middle of the image is almost exactly in the middle of the river.

In truth, it would have been a nicer bit of the city if there was a little porchlet or terrace out on each side of the river, providing passers-by with a little vista up and down the river. The Ponte Vecchio does have that lovely colonnade on each side.

But it was pretty nice, anyway.

Streetcar buffs – note the headways on the westbound side of the street. What do you figure? 20 seconds, maybe?

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A Busman’s Holiday

Despite the bad news about cars and the cities they have ruined, we can report that we saw some amazing transit systems during our recent walkabout. Okay fellow transit nerds, herewith, three examples.

In Hong Kong, we delighted in riding the double-decker streetcars. The system, now over 100 years old, is wholly owned by a private entity: Veolia Transport. Fare is HK$1 for us gray hairs, HK$2 for others. The system has 161 cars, 30km of track and 118 stops in its entirety. Heavily used (80,000,000 riders annually), the system runs on 1.5 minute headways at peak operating hours (no, that’s not a typo – 1.5 minute headways. Practically a moving sidewalk of trams !!).

The tram looked like this not too long ago:

And today, with its new cars and wrap-around advertising, it looks like this:

This is true no-frills transport. Enter at the rear of the car, sit if you can find a seat, plug a $1 coin in the box as you leave up front. Oh, and pick up your feet – they ain’t kiddin’ about the tight schedules. Downtown stops have shelters – it rained and rained on us – but elsewhere not. There is absolutely nothing fancy about this system, but it really works.

In Singapore, we rode the subway, and we can report that while we have not ridden every subway system on the planet, this is the best we have ever seen by some distance.

During planning for this system in the 70s, a bus-only system was considered, but planners concluded that the requisite flood of additional buses would fill roadways already groaning with traffic. So in the 80s Parliament opted for a subway. Good choice, Parliament. Even as the basic system opened, Parliament understood the need to continue the expansion of the system, and this expansion continues today.

Today, the system comprises 130 kilometers of track, and carries about 2 million people a day, or 744.8 million people a year, making it the 15th busiest subway in the world (Singapore is the world’s 33rd largest city – folks there like their transit).

We can report that, as any good system must be, the MRT in Singapore is completely intuitive to use. Really clear, really simple. We found ourselves easily upgrading and exchanging our credit card-like tickets –  piece of cake.

And the system is gorgeous, spotless, quiet, and comfortable. Anybody know of a better system?

In Dubai, we rode the subway all over the place, on its runs both above and below grade.

And guess what? It is a direct and complete knock-off of one of the best systems that exists: Singapore’s.

But for the station tile patterns and a few other quite minor variations, they are interchangeable.

We rode the Dubai system one afternoon when it was absolutely packed – jammed to the limits – and it was still remarkable in every way.

How could you go and see this, without a terrific subway system?

Skiing, Mall of the Emirates. Completely goofy, but then so is Dubai.

And then we came home to our humble, mostly unusable bus system. Maybe if we built a giant indoor Hawaiian surfing park at Eastview Mall, we could get better transit….

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