The Hell That Lurks Below

If you want to get a sense of a city's core character, step deep inside the beast and take a ride on the subway.

In New York, the trains never sleep, screeching their bad-assed way through rat-scuttling tunnels carrying buttoned-down traders, droopy-panted gangbangers, kerchiefed babushkas, slouching hipsters in their dumb glasses, Marge and Harvey from Iowa nervously patting the bulges of their hidden moneybelts, plus your standard-issue crazies and flashers … the seething melting pot of a big, hairy metropolis, constantly on the move. The only thing that stops these pushy bastards is the occasional flood or 9/11-scale cataclysm.

Moscow stations have an old-world veneer of opulent civility:
But in the cars, its an offkilter mix of cabbage-grade mundanity and vodka feuled wonkiness, where feral dogs riding the trains on their daily commutes passes for normal.

Not to vorry, nice laydee readink zee books of vampires... just makink sure Kalashnikov ees clean and verkink like borscht-schloppink proletariat.

The Paris metro is all Catherine Deneuve meets Audrey Tautou – there's sleek sang-froid in how its chic urbanites expertly disdain panhandlers who work the cars with their sob-stories and gypsy music; while the perkily clipped platform warnings about “les peek-po-KET” add a dash of pixie-ish je ne sais quoi.

It's also very sexy.

In Montreal… well, it appears we’re at the mercy of a shabby pot-smokin’ bohemian who’s too wiped out from last night’s open mic poetry slam to give a damn that the rent is overdue, the garbage is overflowing, and that, on any given weekday, there’s about a million people who actually need to get somewhere with a reasonable degree of efficiency.

The “where the fuck is my train?” platform crush guessing game is as old as the metro itself.

The metro system opened 45 years ago, and has pretty much been allowed to crumble into carnal decay ever since. Aside from the embarrassingly dated décor that evokes the worst design impulses of the late 60s (there’s a lot of concrete Brutalism and orange goin’ on), cracks in the walls and ceilings ooze like weeping sores; petty vandals and hooligans run amok; the platforms are shabbily soiled at best; everything is falling to bits, and the Outremont station smells like satan’s outhouse.

The description of Namur station on the Societe Transport de Montreal's website reads: "The decoration is quite plain, except for the astonishing, enormous illuminated molecular structure suspended in mid-air.” In reality, it’s oppressively dreary in spite of being harshly overlit; the depanneur is a shambolic closet of grossness inhabited by a mad old troll with disturbing stains on his paints; the downstairs hosts a mini crapmarket of some of the most hideously tacky accessories in the known universe; the middle landing is the site of an epic land claim battle between two hugely annoying buskers… the old guy in shorts and white knee socks who sculpts a path of pain through your head with his grating piccolo stylings; and the storkish old dame who huffs pathetically into a melodica (in spite of having publicly laboured at it for at least 10 years, still can’t play two consecutive notes even marginally smoothly or cleanly); and getting out the doors entails running a gauntlet of silently accusing Jehovah’s Witnesses and assorted hustlers.

Our trains, by far the oldest on the continent, seem to be held together with little more than rubber bands, chewing gum, and abject faith. When I get on and see the same distinctive jester-on-a-unicycle-shaped splotch that I straddled two days ago, it belies an absence of any sort of focused cleaning regimen; there's stupid teenage-grade graffitti Sharpied onto the walls and seats and scratched into the windows; grip poles are greasy with a thick residue of hand germs; I’m not sure WHAT that brownish scum is on the only available seat, but I’m sure as hell not going to put my ass on it; while underfoot, empty bottles drift back and forth through an undergrowth of discarded papers and whatever quasi-biohazards people care to drop, spit, or spew onto the floor.

Yep. 10:00 am Tuesday and we've got vomit on the platform.

In the summer, the un-airconditioned trains are, at best, dank capsules wafting with dodgy odours. If you unwittingly stumble into a car where the fans aren’t working, once the doors close its like taking a shower in your own trickling sweat while breathing in the fetid body steam of strangers.

Its rare that I’m able to get to and from work without at least one instance of the service being held up repeatedly or flat-out stopped for an indeterminate period. Common causes include doors that won’t close, 2- or 4-legged creatures wandering the tunnels, intermittent electrical failures, and driver caprice.

Don't look up!

And then there are seasonal factors that beget random chaos. The advent of Christmas always gives rise to a cluster of jumpers, heart attacks and stress-induced collapses, which put me in the uncomfortable position of feeling super annoyed at having to blearily figure out what configuration of overstuffed buses to haul my hungry, parched and bladderbursting carcass onto, to arrive mega-late for work AGAIN, because another poor schmuck of lesser fortitude reached their breaking point. And whenever the metro worker’s union contract is overdue for renewal (as it is now) there’s a conspicuous uptick in mysterious slowdowns that magically occur only during rush hours.

A little niche of nastiness at Guy-Concordia station.

In 2006, the city finally acknowledged that it was time to replace its ailing fleet. In keeping with a long history of extended bureaucratic dithering and corporate jousting surrounding multi-billion-dollar contracts, it took 2 years before bidding started and another 2 years of decision-making and legal challenges before a supplier was named. New cars are supposed to be ready by early 2014, but I’m not holding my breath (well, other than when I’m trapped in a car with a homeless person who reeks of poo).

Touted “improvements” include high-definition tvs (so commuters can have more advertising shoved in their faces) and fewer seats. All I dare hope for is that when the trains finally come into service some time around the middle of this century, that the effing doors and ventilation systems work, and that announcements over the PA system sound less like somebody with a mouth shot full of dental anaesthetic mumbling incomprehensibly through a paper bag full of crinkling tinfoil and static.

Perversely, the only surfaces that I see being cleaned routinely are those that nobody touches.

To usher in the rechargeable passcard system, stations were plastered with posters chirply extolling how fun and groovy it was going to be. But since it never occurred to anyone that the promotional budget might have been more usefully spent on signage that actually explained how the new passes and turnstiles worked, stations were jammed with seething scrums of exasperated people unable to figure out why the fares they’d just surrendered into the bowels of the machines didn’t seem to work. After several weeks of fuming chaos, with the ticket-booth staff becoming less helpful and more belligerent the more they got yelled at, the geniuses at head office got around to hiring people to stand at the turnstiles to guide people through. Of course by then, pretty much everyone had it figured out, so all the enablers did was annoy people by being obsequiously useless and constantly in the way.

A deep sea photo from the Marianas trench? Nope: just part of the wall at Snowdon.

Astounding levels of ineffectuality have also been attained in the installation of new escalators. They’ll rip out an old escalator (which at least you could count on working 5% of the time) then let two to three years go by during which the hole sits gapingly idle, leaving old ladies, people on crutches, and moms with strollers to face the monumental challenge of tottering down a bajillion stairs without toppling into the void. And God help them in the fairly likely event that the up escalator also goes on the fritz.

In over 3 years of passing through the Place des Arts station every weekday morning, I have not ONCE seen anybody working on the escalator. Guess they're planning on starting around 4 pm on Feb 27.

Another amusing maintenance in-joke involves randomly disabling station entry doors. Since getting the swivelling doors to budge typically requires a linebacker-strength shoulder check, it isn’t until after you’ve done a running slam into the glass that you notice the highly innocuous wee sticker that vaguely states “Desole” as a post-concussion hint that you need to use the other door.

Can YOU tell which door is locked?

And then, once you’re able find a functioning door and muscle through it, you’re swept off your feet, skirts (if applicable) whipping around your ears, by the incredible suctioning wind caused by the weird pressure differential. Frail grannies are swept away like tumbleweeds; toddlers are wrenched from their mothers’ hands to fly away like leaves in a windstorm. Its super fun.

This is part of a magnificent installation, now running into its 4th month, that takes up a good portion of the southbound Sherbrooke station platform:

Here's a typical workday commute experience:

Approaching the subway entrance, I must apply laser eyes of fury and an edge of hostility to beat a path through the horde of aggressive flyer distributors who come at me like a flock of seagulls moving in on a scattering of french fries.

As I muscle my way through the 500-lb doors, I'm grabbed by a typhoon that sends me hydroplaning across a wet patch for about 4 feet, doing that cartoonish flailing arms thing with my life flashing before my eyes.

Grit my teeth past the busker who's playing off key and screechy easy-listening schmaltz on a violin plugged into a shitty amp that cranks up the awful.

Stand in a jostling mass breathing strangers' coffee breath and getting increasingly desperate to remove a few layers of smothering outerwear, until the train passes old Montreal and a seat frees up.

Enjoyment of newspaper precluded by being rhythmically whacked in the side of the head by somebody's megapurse.

After a few stops, my pissyness shifts to the fact that we’ve been sitting immobile at a station 3 stops from my exit for the past 15 minutes. Finally, there's a garbled announcement saying the whole orange line is stopped because there’s somebody on the tracks. Exasperated sighs and copious eye-rolling all around. More time ticks by, then we’re kicked off the train and told the delay will be “indefinite”.

This grotty little number at Namur is accompanied by the disturbing gurgle of trickling water hiding in the ceiling crack.

People’s faces show a blend of annoyance and anxiety about how they will surely be late for their jobs, their MRI, their thesis defense, their court appearance, their date with destiny. Everyone resents being roused from their morning commuter trance by the dilemma of trying to figure out what hand to play based on zero reliable information… do we stick around to see if the situation is resolved in the next 15 minutes, or join the desperate scramble up to the streets to fight like starving jackals over the scraps of alternate transportation? For once, I make the right call and wait it out. Mere minutes after sending thousands of people away into frustration and chaos, the train starts running again.

Later, during after-work rush hour, people are packed on in a solid, steaming mass ... and it happens again. Really? What is this, Be an Idiot on the Tracks Day?

Caution! Extreme skankiness abounds!

Yet, remarkably, the STM just beat out every other system in North America for an Outstanding Public Transportation System Achievement award. Although we won mostly based on increased ridership, supposedly 86% of users are satisfied with the system’s efficiency and reliability.

You’ve got to wonder who they polled though. Certainly not me, or any of the scores of fed-up commuter schmucks that I rub elbows and other unwitting body parts with every day.

And the buses? Designed by a particularly malicious descendant of the Marquis de Sade, I'll wager.

And they wonder why people want to own cars.