Minding the Gap

March 2005

After eight days the London Underground seemed easy. We knew when to let the District line train pass and wait for the Circle line. Although we were on vacation, the rest of London was in the midst of a normal work week, and late in the afternoon trains were thronged with people going home, and it would strike me: in Atlanta all these people—young, old, trendy, business-like—would be getting to work in their own private car.

London provided the kind of experience possible in only a handful of American cities: the common way to get around was public transportation. When we thumbed through the local magazine Time Out looking at the theater and museum listings, each entry prominently listed the closest London Underground stop. Someone living in New York or San Francisco might wonder what is so strange about that, but if you live in Atlanta or Los Angeles you will find it a novel experience. I remember how well acquainted I got with my Thomas Guide book of street maps when I lived near Los Angeles—there was one way to get somewhere: my car.

Arriving back to Atlanta at the crowded Hartzfield-Jackson International Airport, we had occasion to use the MARTA rail system, which conveniently connects to the airport. Some differences from our experience of the previous week in London immediately stood out.

Instead of the stylized weave of different colored lines that marks the London Underground map (we even saw large color posters carrying the design), in Atlanta we were faced with a simple intersection of a north-south line with the east-west line (it would make a boring poster). Had we been tourists new to Atlanta, we could have found our way to a central hotel, but other major sites would have been tricky at best. Certainly the newspapers do not provide listings about the closest MARTA stops or the best combination of MARTA rail and bus routes. That is all information that a needy, car-less person must figure out.

We chose to live in a house that is located reasonably close to a stop on the east-west line, and so we count ourselves lucky to be able to return from the airport by a MARTA train and a short walk. On this particular return a rather obvious fact stood out for us: public transportation in Atlanta is overwhelmingly a black experience. This is not so obvious when one boards the train at the airport, since Atlantans of all colors and types take the train north to several convenient free parking structures, but when we got out at Five Points and made our way up to the platform for the west bound train, the division was clear. A large majority of regular MARTA users are black.

There is of course nothing inherently black about the experience of public transportation, as millions in London or New York could testify. Yet public transportation is nevertheless a remarkably segregated experience in Atlanta, and perhaps the rest of the South as well. It is interesting to remember that a signal event of the Civil Rights movement was Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The story is well known, but it also gives us an interesting snap-shot of public transportation on that December 1, 1955: the implication is that there were many whites taking the bus that day, which is the reason she was asked to vacate her seat. If segregation were still in force today there would be no reason for a Rosa Parks to move. There would be no conflict since many whites no longer seem to have an interest in public transportation.

It is tempting to speculate about the reasons for the retreat of white Americans from public transportation in many parts of the country. It suspiciously coincides with the legally mandated mixing of races in public places that was a result of Civil Rights. Seen in this light private vehicles and the expansive world tax-payers have constructed to support them become a strategy to avoid mixing with different people, to avoid sitting next to a Rosa Parks. I am not sure how else one can interpret the steady refusal of predominately white Atlanta suburban counties such as Gwinnett and Clayton to support public transportation.

These are occasional essays on the imagination and life, not on social change, yet my point throughout these essays will be that social change is often not a matter of convincing people to do what is right—what is environmentally sustainable—, but rather a matter of getting people to imagine their world differently. For now, from many different angles, the private space of a car is the preferred way to imagine getting around. The challenge is to make a different system appear desirable and optimal, and big cars ugly and cumbersome, with their hassles and tax-payer supported infrastructure—their lakes of concrete.

A trip to London is one way to get a new view of the transportation question. Tourist shops are comically full of Underground paraphernalia. The instantly recognizable underground logo is sold on T-shirts, mugs, and anything else a tourist might buy. I wondered about who buys all this stuff, and why. I would guess that it is not bought by visitors who are used to an extended public transportation system where they live, but rather by people for whom this kind of reliance on public transportation is a novelty. The fact that people enjoy their experience is evident by the popularity of these products.

Anyone from America will certainly be struck by the quaint warning “Mind the Gap”—meaning to stay behind the yellow safety line as the train approaches or departs. More importantly an American will be struck by the convenience of getting nearly anywhere, movies, restaurants, or work. The buses and trains are not on a once-every-forty-five-minutes schedule, so it is just a matter of showing up at the correct stop and waiting for a few minutes. Even at bus stops a digital readout lists the times for the approaching buses. It is enough to make one not just buy a T-shirt, but wonder about the gap between this and the normal American experience. Why do we not live so richly?