I like subways. At home in New York, I ride them more days than I don't. When I visit another city, its subway system is one of the first things I check out. But last year, riding the subways in Washington, DC, I found myself feeling dizzy, disoriented, close to vertigo. At first I didn't see why: I enjoyed the DC trains, which were clean, well lit, comfortable, and perfectly designed to show off the district' s splendid multicultural demography. But soon I learned to distinguish between the subway trains and the subway stations. DCs Metro stations were scary, but they were scary in a very different way from the stations in New York. In New York, and in other old systems, the problems were problems of disintegration, of things falling apart. Here, in this system so lavishly built and well maintained, the problem was integration, the way things held together. Platforms were wide (hence rarely overcrowded), benches were abundant, escalators worked or were fixed promptly. The trouble was the crushing landscape created by the primal design.~1
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