ridership

I have fond memories of riding the El in Chicago, heading downtown or north from Uptown to Rodger’s Park to get away from the craziness of my neighborhood for a while. The trains always seemed full, even if they weren’t packed. There was always one crazy person ranting to themselves and a handful of others avoiding eye contact. Most people had on earphones, some read books or newspapers. Every race and color and size and age was represented, no matter what time of day or night. It was a little taste of humanity, packed together in a loud rail car, trundling along three stories above the street, heading somewhere, together.

My experience with the Metro rail of Saint Paul has not not left me in quite as expansive a mood. Today, I walked through a gloriously cool and blustery morning, and missing the train by three minutes (I was still blocks away, but could see it fly past the intersection far ahead without me) I found myself on the platform alone. I waited around for the next train, killing time on my phone. I had paid a rush-hour fare with my new “GO” card, struggling to figure out how to activate a ride, not yet having figured out (as I did this afternoon) that if I am paying full fare anyway, there is no need for button pushing and fumbling around the fare kiosk. When the automated announcement alerted me to a pending arrival, I looked up and realized that, rush hour or no, I was still on the train platform alone. I hopped onto the train, headed downtown (granted this was at seven thirty in the morning) on a nearly empty train. I was one of three people in the large light-rail car. When I got off the train at the hospital, a few stops from downtown, I did so alone and the car was no more full than when I’d hopped on. I was left feeling rather alone and isolated, rather than a part of something bigger, as I always did when riding the El trains around Uptown.

I wonder if it is just that early morning ride that is so empty. I know that the trains must be packed as they head to Twins games in downtown Minneapolis on the weekends? Or are they? I remember choosing to walk back to Uptown rather than attempt to board among the writhing mass after a Cubs came in Wrigleyville. Is it just that this city is more commuter friendly, as my family’s native Houston? Built for cars and not for pedestrians and public transportation? Yet the city has fantastic, fast and clean public available. Do enough people even use it?

A quick google search establishes that the Metro green line transports over thirty two thousand individuals per week, and that the Metro Transit system gave over 81 million (!!) rides in the last year alone. Even if you account for commuters using the train every day, that is still nearly sixty five hundred riders a week as a low-ball, just through our neighborhood. That’s not a small amount of people, especially considering that the cities themselves where the trains sit don’t hold the mass of humanity that is the city of Chicago. Saint Paul herself doesn’t even have three hundred thousand people. But then look at Chicago. The annual rides given by the redline alone in 2012 was eight million. Ridership on all of Chicago’s trains were 229 million that year.

In the end what this comes down to is perspective, I suppose. After leaving Chicago for rural Alaska and then relatively rural Iowa and spending the last eleven years plying that lesser traffic, I have shifted somewhat in my ideas of what an urban landscape is. The twin cities are cities, no doubt. But they are small cities, in the scheme of things. Yet after my years in the woods and cornfields, I was was wowed by her big skyscrapers and fancy eateries and clean trains that I forget what being in a place like Chicago (or Jakarta) with millions on millions of people crammed, living and breathing and eating and sleeping, in such a small space feels like.

It does not feel like that here, this close to cornfields and lakes and woods. But it feels good to be among streets and people and urban life again, even if the light rail isn’t packed full at rush hour every day.