Whoa.  Our new layout chokes on large post titles.  Doesn’t anyone test this stuff?  The title was originally: “The London Underground and the economics of travel in a big city.”  I guess I’ll have to get more concise.

I really want to go around and take some photographs to give you an idea of the legendary London Underground.  But I haven’t done that yet, and here I am posting about it.

London has a lot of trouble with its subway because it had the audacity of being the first (?) city to attempt one.  Being a pioneer is a great way to teach others A) that something is worth doing, and B) how not to do it.  The tunnels are too narrow by modern standards, so the subway cars are crowded and cozy.  And they were all built by different companies and thus are incompatible with each other — each has special needs, and you can’t shift cars from one to the other to relieve congestion.  It’s clearly incredibly costly and time-consuming to maintain, and the city is just barely keeping up: some of the stations are in an amazing state of decay, and on weekends two or three lines are routinely down for maintenance.  Check the transit webpage before you leave home.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think that to use the Tube is to love the Tube.  If you can get your head out of your daily routine, it feels like wandering through magical goblin tunnels.  It has so much character and sense of history that it makes more modern systems like Madrid’s seem antiseptic.  But I’m probably biased.  I really love trains and subways of all kinds, and I haven’t gotten tired of them yet after five months being completely dependent on them.  (And I’ve lost weight.)  I’m giddy that Albuquerque just opened up light rail service to Santa Fe, so when we get back we can go there without driving.  But I digress…..

But there’s also the cost of a really comprehensive public transit system.  I have no idea what it really costs to build and maintain a subway, but just looking at the scale you can see when you use it makes me wonder how such a thing could ever be cost-effective.  I guess there are some things you can’t put a price on — a city of a certain size and density simply can’t handle more than a certain maximum car traffic.  If you don’t want your entire city economy to come to a halt (or move elsewhere) because people can’t get to work, you have to do something.

But, still, that money has to come from someplace, and there’s the question of how much of it you just take straight out of income/sales taxes and how much you push out to usage charges.  Madrid’s subway was incredibly cheap to use in comparison to London: €1 per ride or a 10-ride pass for about €7.50.  Buses, subway, and light rail charged the same fee.  In some places, you could transfer from subway to bus as part of a single ride (thought not light rail — you had to buy a separate pass for that).  Terran’s transit cost for the week, including commuting to work by subway and light rail and sightseeing inside the city for the weekend, came to something like €10.  If he were using just the subway, which he’s doing here, it would have been more like €7.

The London Underground, OTOH, has a complicated usage system based on what time of day it is and how far you are going.  You put down a £3 deposit for an RFID (?) card called an “oyster card,” and you tap a receiver with it when you enter and exit the subway or when you enter a bus.  All bus rides are £1, so you could probably use the system fairly economically if you only used buses and never needed to transfer, but that gets slow fast (no pun intended).  The cheapest trip on the Tube, going a short distance during the lowest-traffic time, is £1.60.  Going a short distance during peak times, like during commute hour, is £2.20.  Fortunately, we’re close enough in that we don’t usually need the larger fares, but they go up to £3.80 per ride.  (Oh, and if you opt NOT to get an oyster card, all rides are £4.  That’s a no-brainer.)  But even where we live, with the Tube and some bus rides thrown in, Terran’s spending about £20 per week JUST commuting, and he’s not going in to the university every day.  If I had the same commute as opposed to working at home, we would have a tidy car payment just in transit fees.  Our weekend warrior tourist trips are taking us out about another £10/week.

And I’m not even going to get into values of the various currencies.  Now that I’ve been through three of them, I’m learning that value is hard to talk about because the exchange rate is more like a stock market thing.  It doesn’t tell you what you can actually buy with the money when you’re using it or what you’d expect to receive in a salary if you were working there.   But this seems pretty dramatic to me even if we assume that $1=€1=£1, and the pound really does buy more than the US dollar, even in London, so it’s more than that.

London makes the Tube economical to commuters by making it even more expensive to drive.  If you drive into the city during business hours, you are charged an £8-£10 congestion charge, which makes a measly £4.40 commute by subway look pretty sweet.

But all of that doesn’t really mean that Madrid’s system is magically cheaper either.  In fact, you can tell that it isn’t because the city is running an aggressive marketing campaign about it.  There are posters up in the gleaming subway stations with anthropomorphized monuments of international cities (the Statue of Liberty, the Sphinx, etc.) looking excitedly at the Madrid subway signs.  I thought these were so cute that I looked all over the internet to find a picture of one, but this out-of-perspective cell phone shot on someone’s blog was the best I could find: http://saritaymadrid.blogspot.com/2008/10/madrid-metro.html.  I think the actual slogan is approximately “The world wants to travel on the Madrid metro.”

They also run television commercials on screens in the stations (and probably on actual television, too, but we didn’t have one) that show people being excited at the amazing Madrid subway.  All of that said to me, “We had to raise taxes to do this, and we want our citizens to think it was a good investment.”

As for taxes vs. fees, I can see a real tradeoff.  I’m sure a large percentage of travelers, especially on the Tube, are visitors like us who don’t pay local income taxes.  OTOH, with usage fees so high, there’s another whole ball of red tape you have to go through to get low-income deferments, since it seems like a bad idea to keep people from working because they can’t afford to get to work.

Whatever the case, I’ve dealt with the sticker shock, and I still love the subway.  Call me crazy, but there you have it.