This past Tuesday I saw the sad news of 22 year old Malaysia Goodson falling to her death down the New York City subway stairs with her baby in her arms. On Wednesday I read the city’s reactions of sadness and anger and sympathy, as well as many people’s stories describing their own frustrations navigating the subway.
The one thing I haven’t heard anyone expressing is shock. Absolutely no one seems surprised. Big Apple subway users have all experienced varying degrees of discomfort, difficulty, or danger and apparently find this deadly incident tragic but believable, even expectable.
In short, everybody knows New York’s subway sucks.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to!
I myself never used underground public transportation until I was older, a third-year university student studying abroad in Spain. This was because I’m from the West Coast, and there just isn’t that much underground public transportation around. You might think stepping into your first subway station while alone in a strange city and using a new language would have been an intimidating or confusing experience for someone who’d gone so long without ever having used such a service in her own country. But no—it was easy as pie! Not only highly intuitive but safe, clean, and for the most part even bright and colorful. This was because I was now in the Metro de Madrid.
Inaugurated nearly 100 years ago by King Alfonso XIII, Madrid’s metro is today the twelfth longest in the world—over 180 miles of track divided into thirteen different lines servicing 301 stations in the greater Madrid metropolitan area. It’s where the “Spanish solution” of more efficient loading and unloading of cars via two trainside platforms rather than one was first thought up and put into use. It runs from 6:00 in the morning to 1:30 at night most days, longer on some, and has a cheap convenient connection to the airport (with special dedicated areas for suitcases). For these reasons and more, the Metro de Madrid tops many informal lists for best European rapid transit system.
Well over 600 million people a year ride it, residents and tourists alike, an impressively high number considering the city’s population of just over 3.1 million. Because apart from the above statistics, the Metro de Madrid is eminently user friendly.
It is clean, well lit, and safe:
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The Metro occasionally switches up its decor, as well, to promote or participate in different municipal activities. For example, helping the city celebrate World Pride Day weekend in 2017 by keeping trains running 24 hours a day and decorating stations.
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It has signage so easy to understand that illiteracy needn’t pose a barrier to use, as well as color-coding for all stations along each line to help you stay oriented during line changes and in general throughout your journey:
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The Metro also does its part to promote reading, with everything from posters inside cars featuring extracts of all sorts of fiction and nonfiction to free Bibliometro lending libraries in 12 different stations. And the effort is paying off: Madrid has significantly more citizens who read regularly as well as those who read while riding public transportation than any other city in the country.
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Then there are these cute little USB charging stations for those who prefer reading on a portable electronic device or need a battery boost while out and about. There are 2,200 of them spread across nearly every station on the map, and also inside cars at both standing and wheelchair height. And every single one of them is free.
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And because accidents and health crises often happen in public spaces, there are even defibrillators on hand. Approximately 80% of the city’s metro stations—205 in total—are now equipped with one or more of these life-saving devices, whose location and instructions for use are both clearly marked.
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Naturally there is reserved seating for the elderly, pregnant women, those with injuries, and those with infants. And as we saw before, special wheelchair seating is available. One nice thing about the wheelchair areas is that they specifically include standing and leaning space for a caregiver or other individual accompanying the person in the wheelchair.
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Which brings us back around to the topic of underground accessibility. As several recent articles on this sad accident have been mentioning, accessibility is a public good everyone should be concerned with, even if it’s frequently most associated with disability exclusively. Here’s a succinct explanation from the New York Times:
Advocates for the disabled said that accessibility helps everyone. “A more sensitive policy recognizes that at some point in everyone’s life, they’re going to need greater measures of accessibility,” said Danny Pearlstein, the policy and communications director for the Riders Alliance, an advocacy group.
That includes parents with strollers as well as people carrying packages or suitcases or people with injuries that temporarily limit their mobility.
--From “’We all need to help’: Outrage and Empathy After a Mother’s Death on Subway Stairs”
In Madrid, Metro accessibility is quite good. There are 1699 escalators, which is either the most of any underground transit system in the entire world or second only to Shanghai. (Unfortunately, the Shanghai metro doesn’t appear to be nearly as forthcoming as Madrid with their statistics, and I wasn’t able to find any exact numbers for them.) As for elevators, there are currently 522, but by the end of this year that number will have risen to 530, covering nearly ¾ of entire metro system, with plans for further elevator construction in the future. All told, Madrid has more metro elevators than London, Paris, and NYC combined. Additionally, all ticket dispensing machines include an option for spoken instructions for the visually impaired. Some stations have begun including signage in braille. Entrance gates are generally larger than New York turnstiles (if a few narrower NY-style turnstiles still do persist at some stations), and most if not all stations have extra large gates for passengers with wheelchairs, strollers, luggage, or even just an armful of shopping bags. All this is on top of the accessibility features mentioned previously: floor architecture for the blind, wheelchair seating, and USB charging stations at wheelchair height.
In New York City, subway accessibility is famously bad. Not only that, stations are darker, dirtier, and just feel overall older and more run down:
There is no good reason for it to be so bad!
Sure, it’s old. But so’s Madrid’s.
Sure, it’s got a lot of users, which makes for a lot of wear and tear. But so does Madrid’s.
Sure, refurbishing takes money and time. But Madrid’s chosen to take them, and the entire city—as well as those visiting it—is better off for it. Madrid is proof that well-functioning, value-adding public transportation can actually exist.
So what’s stopping us?
Money?
Well, yes, there is that. Madrid spent a lot on their Metro and even incurred debt to build it. In fact, the European Union was less than thrilled with Spain for surpassing debt and deficit limits set out in the EU Stability and Growth Pact. But countries—including America—regularly borrow for all sorts of spending they deem worth the debt. Money can always be found if it’s wanted enough.
Political will?
The inertia of inaction can be hard to overcome, it’s true. Politicians and institutions can be just as lazy as everyday individuals. But better public transportation is a pretty easy sell to a pretty wide swath of city dwellers. It’s hard to imagine much of a pushback to any reasonable proposal for serious improvement. After all, you know what they say about keeping the trains running on time. There’s a reason that’s a winning strategy.
But more importantly than money or political will, I’d argue, more basic and fundamental, is the simple ability to realize that this is not as good as it gets.
America likes to think of itself as the greatest country in the world—and in several senses, I’d agree wholeheartedly. But pledging blind allegiance to the notion that we are already the best at everything prevents us from recognizing those areas where we can and should improve, where we can live better than we currently do. It is time for America to admit to itself that in the realm of public transportation, particularly as relates to accessibility (and in a few other realms, as well, but I’ll leave those for another day), we are actually in pretty sorry shape.
Once we all acknowledge that, we can—and with relative ease—get on with the task of developing a public transportation system that is truly great, rather than mediocre. Something worthy of our high-minded self-regard as a great nation.
Malaysia Goodson needn’t have died. She deserved better. New York deserves better. The entire country deserves better. But to get something better, we have to choose to do better.
We owe it to ourselves and to one another to do better.
Hopefully this preventable tragedy will serve as a wakeup call to New York and America—we don’t have to live like this! We can have it better! It may cost money and it may require sacrifices or tradeoffs—there are legitimate, important public debates to be had whenever we start to talk about expanding priorities and finite resources.
But do we really want to live—and die—like this?