Subway

Historical Background

At the end of the nineteenth century, the geography of cities was drastically transformed by emergent technologies. While elevators lifted cities upward, increasing density as buildings became taller, public transportation pushed cities outward, increasing the amount of distance that commuters could travel between home and work. Trolleys, trams, and light rail had already replaced horse-drawn carriages and opened up the rural peripheries of cities to the development of satellite towns and suburbs, but subways have become arguably the dominant mode of transportation associated with urban spaces over the past century. Subways, taken as what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would call an assemblage comprising everything from the technical infrastructure of the systems and the governmental policies that regulate the financial and legal operations of trains, even the everyday experiences of passengers, can be understood as a first order medium of integration, an essential and important part of urban polity with a formative impact on the shape and movements of the metropolis.

Seen as monumental public works and symbols of engineering achievement, subways are large-scale structures, the construction of which demands a large amount of capital and a large workforce. Their size and usage varies greatly; while London Underground has more than 400 kilometers (about 250 miles) of track, the recently constructed Metro Del Sol Amado in Maracaibo, Venezuela, is less than four kilometers (almost two and a half miles) long. Similarly, whereas the Moscow Metro, the first in Russia, carries between 6 million and 10 million people per day, newer trains in that country have a much smaller capacity, such as the one in Kazan, which has a maximum systemwide capacity of 6,000 passengers. Most subways were realized in [Page 785]cooperation between various private or public and private organizations, although today, the majority of the subway systems are not profitable and have to be subsidized, and most systems are owned and operated by public institutions. Because of the amount of labor required to construct and then operate subway systems, public transportation authorities are often some of the largest employers in cities and organized worker unions have historically been very influential in city politics.

The use of electrical motors in rail traffic first appeared in London in 1890 and allowed for the development of systems in other European cities like Paris (1900) and Berlin (1902), U.S. cities like Boston (1897) and New York (1904), and later to Buenos Aires (1913), Toyko (1927), and Osaka (1933), the only subways outside of Europe and North America until 1957.

After World War II, with the increasing popularity of automobile traffic, most subway systems stagnated or declined, some even dismantled tram lines to make place for cars. In the succeeding years, new technological developments like rubber tires and a returned interest in public transportation in urban planning have resulted in an exponential increase in subways implemented worldwide, with more than 160 systems in operation in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

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