Hamburg has an incredible public transit system. The subway and buses run on a frequent schedule throughout the day, and you have to travel for quite a distance out to the suburbs before you come to someplace where there's not a transit stop every block or so.
Another shocking contrast to American public transportation is that Hamburg's Busse und Bahnen are clean: torn seats, scratched windows, and the like are kept to a minimum. In comparison to, say, New York, where subway enthusiasts can geologically date the last time a station was rehabilitated by pointing to various layers -- look at that 1940s IND-style tilework, look at those 1970s earthtones, look at this doorway sign leading to something that hasn't existed for fifty years -- Hamburg's stations are frequently updated for no discernable reason. Near us, the Hauptbahnhof Nord station is receiving completely new tilework that looks exactly like the old tilework; there wasn't anything wrong with the old tile that a simple washing wouldn't have fixed. A herd of maintenance men moves from station to station, cleaning and fixing; any garbage or spills usually only stay around for the remainder of the day that they're dropped.
So, imagine my surprise when I was waiting for the subway on Friday and noticed something moving down among the rails: a little gray mouse, sniffing that day's garbage and darting in and out of sight. As a temporary German, I know that I shouldn't be cheering for vermin and civil disorder, but ... go, little mouse, go!
Even more surprising, in a different way, was the advertising sign for Stern (a German newsmagazine) greeting me as I got off the train at the Gänsemarkt stop. Now they're all over the city:
When a German newsmagazine wants to trash America, it looks a little more like this:
. . . and this was published before Schwarzenegger was elected governor!
(My overseas take on the whole Democratic-primary race: I'm sorry to see Dean go. My feelings about him ran along the lines of this piece: that Dean was the only inspiring and experienced member of the Democratic field, and had he run more as the moderate he actually is, rather than the zany populist that the media and certain of his supporters expected him to be, he would have remained a contender. Now we've got Kerry, whose android-looking-for-a-heart personality, Massachussetts liberalism, and painfully parsed attempts to explain his voting record (when he's not just hiding behind the mantle of "I was in Vietnam") make me long for Al "no controlling legal authority" Gore. I'll be voting for the Democrat, but hopefully the rest of America will turn out to like Kerry as much as the Germans already do ...)
A more useful subway sign: the electronic sign in the Gänsemarkt station, telling you that the next U2 train comes in 5 minutes (and that it's a short train -- Kurzzug -- so that you'll know where to stand on the platform). Note that I took this picture around 11:30 PM, and trains were still running every eight minutes in both directions. Compare this to San Jose, where the loser transit agency decided that it was okay to run light rail every 15 minutes in the middle of the day, and then wonders why ridership has dropped ...
Posted by Kevin at February 22, 2004 10:35 PM