On Worshiping Foreign Systems
Tucker Carlson has been wowed by Putin’s Russia as of late and is reporting about how great it is; I wouldn’t normally talk about it, except that among the things he crowed about was Kiyevskaya Station on the Moscow Metro. He described it as clean and drug-free, and showed videos that would not have looked out of place in present-day Paris or London, and all I could think about when I watched it was something that I read in Korean media, more than 11 years ago. The newspaper JoongAng criticized the construction of the infill station at Guryong, by comparing its extravagance with the much more spartan stations of the Washington Metro, without noticing how the Washington Metro’s above-ground infill stations cost substantially more than the underground infill at Guryong, the Potomac Yards station reaching four times the cost of Guryong. In both cases, and in some others, the foreign system is not really described as a real place, but as a tourist fantasy. Little learning can come from this.
In fact, there are many positive things one can learn from Russia about how to run rail transportation. Soviet metro planning was quite good, and Eastern Bloc successor states (including satellites, not just former USSR constituents) inherited it and have in some cases expanded on it even while rejecting central planning elsewhere, for example in thoroughly neoliberal Czechia. Good features of this planning tradition include all of the following:
- Clean radial metro network design, with a distinction between city center and outlying areas.
- Very high frequency on each line. Moscow peaks at 39 trains per hour, the highest number I know of on non-driverless metros. When I visited Prague, planned by the same tradition, I saw higher metro frequency than I do in Berlin, with its rigid five-minute headways.
- Central planning of routes, with integration with where housing construction is permitted.
Of note, Carlson’s video doesn’t touch on any of this. He gets the history of the station wrong – he says it was built 70 years ago, when in fact the metro station opened in 1937, and it’s only the two later lines on this three-line transfer that opened in 1953 and 1954. He says he is “just asking questions” and then takes the watcher on a short video trip of the long escalator down to the platform, the ornate details of and art on the station, and the platforms and trains. That’s not Soviet metro design; that’s just metros. The New York City Subway is atypically dirty so that the mosaic art and sculptures there are surrounded by grime, but London and Paris are clean, and some of the stations in Paris have interesting art on the platforms. Stockholm has exposed gneiss rock, which forms a natural arch, and sculptures on some of its platforms. To me, as a regular urban rail rider, all of this looks extremely ordinary, which should not surprise, as good metro planning makes the ordinary last for generations.
Much of it is the excitement of a tourist. To the American visitor, the ornate finishes of Kiyevskaya are new, but the sculptures on the New York City Subway are so familiar that they go unremarkable. I see this in how Americans speak of Europe in general, especially on matters of urbanism; Marco Chitti pointed out that Italian farmers’ markets are for tourists and politicians, while most Italians do their shopping at car-oriented hypermarkets – tourists don’t see how auto-oriented Italy is, and this influences urbanist thinking about the greatness of traditional premodern city centers.
I don’t know what Carlson thinks about urbanism in general. I doubt he’s thought about it much. There are other American right-wing populists who have; their views are common enough among architectural traditionalists that The American Conservative publishes Strong Towns and that at one point the Trump administration passed an executive order requiring all new federal buildings to use traditional architectural styles rather than postwar ones like brutalism or postmodernism.
And Soviet-style metro planning is the exact opposite of that kind of urbanist tradition. It lives off of high-density housing, which are called projects in American parlance and microdistricts in the Soviet tradition, and are ideally placed right next to metro stations so that people can get to work efficiently. In Moscow, the city is large enough to support many radial metro lines, so that districts can be fairly close to metro stations far out of the center; in smaller cities, central planning is required to ensure alternation between high-density housing near the trains and parkland far from them, for which the best examples are Nordic rather than Eastern Bloc.
Traditional architecture critics loathe that kind of housing. In Sweden, one can find right-wingers who view Million Program housing as a socialist conspiracy to depress people into being pliable subjects. Chuck Marohn is not conspiratorial like this, but still opposes spiky density and prefers uniform density, with rules about how new housing on a street should be of similar size to existing buildings (no more than 50% taller) rather than much taller as is typical of either modern redevelopment projects or project-style housing.
Carlson himself is not that influential in urbanism, in the grand scheme of things. But urbanists who go on tourist trips abroad and conflate their travelogues for intellectual insights abound. Their views are often idiosyncratic, based on whatever they liked on a trip, which could be a high-speed rail trip, a neighborhood in a tourist trap, a kind of shopping that locals rarely do, or something similar. In all cases, this is fundamentally about leisure: the (usually New Left) tourist is in the city for purposes of leisure and experiences it as such, but the local rarely is. A glimpse of this can even be seen in the video from Kiyevskaya: the Moscow Metro is very crowded at rush hour, but the video does not depict overcrowding.
It’s possible to learn from abroad, but it does not involve travelogues. It involves interacting with locals in a position of equality rather than in that of a heavyweight who uses taxi drivers as sources. It involves reading what locals say; two years ago, around when Russia invaded Ukraine, I found a list of Russian dissidents and looked at the LiveJournal of an urbanist activist, who was talking about how Russian cities undermaintain public spaces. I think highly of Seung Y. Lee precisely because he demystifies Korean and Japanese urban rail for the Western reader; one can read his complaints about the Seoul subway’s accessibility and still recognize that its 92% wheelchair accessibility is by most global standards very good. It’s possible to, from a position of learning, inform oneself and conclude that a foreign system is superior in most aspects to the domestic one. But that’s not what so many urbanists who speak of their own tourists experience do, and Carlson happens to have provided one political example of this.
Pedestrian Observations 
Carlson at least enjoys city life (he’s on the record of going weeks without entering a car), but the critique feels so fundamentally aesthetic as to be vapid. If you like brutalism it’s difficult find a flaw with metro center’s design and aesthetics. (There is one, when arriving on the southern red line track one must turn instead of continuously walking forward to transfer to the below island platform.) The stations are clean and orderly downtown. The problem is they’re low ridership because DC is so low density!
I don’t even think it’s aesthetic in this case. He must have been a tourist in Paris and London before. It’s either about racism – Paris and London have nice subways but they also have black people and American racists, who are not used to seeing racial minorities in Europe, flip – or about his general hate for the American regime to the point of worshiping anything that looks like an alternative.
He’s not a man of principal that is out to give honest and consistent analysis. He will say whatever he can think of to praise who he wants or criticize who he wants even if what he says today conflicts with what he said yesterday.
He wanted to praise Russia so he did.
His praise of the art in Moscow’s metro system will not stop him from in future criticizing any art installed in systems in the US or western Europe as a waste of money. Even if the art in the western systems cost the same install and maintain he would not care and criticize it anyway because he felt he had a line of attack that could resonate with his audience.
He has no shame, it is pure propaganda for Putin war machine. Compared to all those lies about how Russia needs to conquer other nations because of some 8. century “history” bulshit, this was minor thing. But if talking about public transport, one could ask, what happened to Moscow trolleybuses?
I once visited Moscow (I think around 2012) and I was surprised how many “non-white” people were on the metro. Particularly a lot of what Americans would call (East) Asians. I guess Moscow had and has a big colonial empire to the east, and a good number of them have made their way to Moscow over the years.
These (Central) Asian immigrants are similar to Latin American immigrants in the US, providing manual labor that the locals are unwilling to perform for the wages most companies offer. Construction, cooking, cleaning, delivery, nail care, etc. are the usual employers of first-generation immigrants.
I wasn’t sure this thread would still be alive, but since others are still commenting:
I think it is a bit disingenuous to compare Kiyevskaya Station to anything on the Paris Metro or London Underground, or the NY Subway even if it were clean. None of those systems have anything like the chandeliers, marble (other stone?) wainscoting on the walls, or gilt (just gold paint?) trim and picture frames at Kiyevskaya. I did see a picture of a Paris station once that appeared to have art deco chandeliers/sconces, but in my travels on all three systems (by no means extensive) I have never seen anything like Kiyevskaya. The generally plain white tile that tends to characterize all three systems (plus exposed iron columns/beams as appropriate in Paris and NY) is just not the same (even in the really nice stations like Gants Hill).
One could take the artistic relativism position (all art is in the eye of the beholder, a toilet seat hung on the wall is every bit as meaningful as the Mona Lisa, etc.) but even then you have to acknowledge that Kiyevskaya is a fundamentally different type of art/architecture, even if you don’t consider it qualitatively different. It’s the same as recognizing that brutalism is a fundamentally different kind of architecture than neoclassical (in terms of shapes, level of detail, materials used, architectural language, etc.) even if you don’t think that brutalism is trash and neoclassical is refined.
In that case I think it might very well be aesthetic. There are a great many people who prefer traditional architectural forms and detailed art. People do tend to vote with their feet in choosing to live in more traditionally styled buildings/neighborhoods, which might be why very modernist structures tend to end up as slums/subsidized housing world wide (Ballymun in Dublin, Biljmermeer in Amsterdam, etc.)
The better argument is that all supposed connections between art/architecture and politics are generally worthless. This is especially so given how the two political sides seem to switch their position every few decades/generations. Currently the right seems to view traditional architecture as embodying traditional values while the left is either more neutral or promotes post-modernist works in simple opposition to the right. In the 40s-60s it was the right, particularly business interests, that was championing the International Style as forward thinking a la Ayn Rand and conducting “slum clearance” of finely detailed row houses while it was the left that invented historical preservation. But in the 20’s the birth of modernist architecture was seen by the left as a tool to remake society following the horror of WWI, while the right was ambivalent or would promote more traditional styles out of simple nostalgia.
What of that are things that are fundamental to the design of the station and what are superficial things that are easy to change? An electrician can change out a chandelier for a different style in a night. If you don’t currently have a chandelier in that place you need to verify the structure can hold the weight before running the wires. If you have low ceilings you will never put a chandelier in at all as they take up too much space.
The louvre could take the Mona Lisa down anytime they want to replace it with something else. (of course since most visitors only go for the Mona Lisa they won’t – but if they are like most museums they change what art is on display all the time). If avocado green tiles come back into style a station can replace all the tiles in the station in a couple weeks of overnight work, and in a few years when style changes they can put up new white tiles.
I’ve long said a stations should have hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, 10 year, and 30 year maintenance plans. You empty the trash hourly. You inspect the whole building daily for cosmetic issues to touch up. You remove graffiti weekly (this requires some specials and chemicals) You replace the air filters and update the art monthly. You repaint as needed yearly (anywhere you touch up pain – the whole wall gets replaced). The whole building gets a minor remodel every 10 years (this is always repaint everything, but it some significant work it done). You do a major remodel every 30 years – all new plumbing to your new restroom fixtures, add elevators and other major things. Of course exactly what you do should be done with consultation with maintenance, the above is a guide not a law.
Many of NYC’s subway issues are just a result of not budgeting for standard basic on going maintenance. Elevators are expensive, but if you remodel 16 stations a year in 30 years you be finishing the last stations this year (giving you 4 years after the ADA passed in 1990 to update plans). And since good paint lasts 10 years people would not have a sense of pride of how dirty their stations are.
The other problem with DC besides low ridership is that it’s such a unique example in the US – a multi-line heavy rail system with good land use, consistent architecture, and good transfer design. The US seems determined that all future transit investments should never have this combination of planning, land use, and performance.
So the average American sees the showpiece of DC Metro, the inherited goliath of NYC Subway, and the uncompetitive and apparently declining systems everywhere else. Maybe they tolerate a system like Philadelphia’s where there is constant anti-social behavior and riders need to have much thicker skin than most first-world transit systems.
Tucker and his viewers don’t have Paris M1 or the Jubilee line as their comparators here so the quality on display there isn’t relevant. If France had a nationalistic or Gaullist strongman type as President Tucker would happily gush about M14 and the rest.
Part of the ridership issue in Washington DC is that pre-Covid there were 400m train journeys a year into London from outside. If you assume 80% of those journeys have a tube journey as well – that’s still a sizeable amount of traffic.
The leisure trips among those also undoubtedly help spread the demand out across the evening, as someone living further from London will probably leave London earlier to avoid getting home too late.
I think the tourist perception of places as more transit oriented than they are is a more general phenomenon than Europe (it’s certainly the case in Japan, possibly to an even larger degree). I wonder if there’s anywhere where this isn’t the case – perhaps somewhere with unusually good commute share relative to overall transit quality due to extreme geographic bottlenecks, like the Bay Area pre-2020
Yeah, I was going to say that Taiwan has something similar, in that most Taiwanese people get food from 7/11 and supermarkets rather than from night markets. But that requires a lot of layers of nuance – for example, most people at the night markets when I visited were East Asian and not white, and the sellers didn’t generally speak English; and it was a Taiwanese acquaintance here who recommended the night markets to me when I was making plans to visit. So it’s more like how I recommend Holocaust museums to people visiting Berlin, an activity I do less than once a year here, than a true tourist trap that locals recommend against.
Also, Taiwan is unusually motor vehicle centric among East Asia countries. Even in Taipei, a very dense and transit-rich city, the modal splits of transit and private motor vehicle are close to each other. Elsewhere, transit is under utilized to the extents of typical American cities. (https://www.motc.gov.tw/uploaddowndoc?file=survey/202104261427470.pdf&filedisplay=202104261427470.pdf&flag=doc)
Wait, the year 109 survey was taken in 2020, during corona, so transit numbers were somewhat lower. As of 105 (=2016), Taipei’s modal split is 42.8%, the Taipei region’s is 31.8%, Kaohsiung’s is 9.3%, Taichung’s is 12.2%. These are not American numbers, unless Chicago and Seattle are taken as the representatives of the US; the national number, 18.1%, is better than Germany and France’s 16%.
Possibly Singapore is more transit oriented than tourists appreciate?
Singapore’s modal split is high by the standards of cities of its density/size (i.e. 5million with above 10,000 people per square kilometre). Meh by the standards of Hong Kong (42% mass transit versus 88%). If Vienna and Prague are eating your lunch on mass transit then you’ve done something wrong as a city state.
Singapore is deeply overrated, its insanely good geography and state appropriation of land rents hides a lot of dysfunctions. 2.5% of the island is golf courses, they have a industrial policy fetish on island with a land shortage and imports water. They also are trying to have 30% self-sufficiency in food*….that’s insane, buying more frigates or building giant food storage warehouses would be cheaper. They also think have lots of grass randomly about is good thing like its Surrey not the tropical East Indies (its trash land use in Surrey too ). In a tropical climate keeping it trim is expensive even if the labour is an abused transient underclass.
Alon has of course talked about them sharing in Anglo-cost disease, but HK MTR at least builds better rail depots and more underground**.
*This isn’t just multi-story hydroponics which have their own problems they also have dairy and eggs.
** If you are so committed to Porcupine-Total Defense National Defense state you should build all your rail underground.
Alternatively any poor country where tourists would go everywhere by taxi but locals might use buses?
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LOL… Imagine if the “Trump Era” was defined by Neo-Classical “Wedding Cake Architecture” of federal buildings (courthouses, etc…) as the Stalin Era of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was, for example Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science with its Stalinist architecture and Social Realism artwork. Of course, Trump the Great Builder built nothing… SAD!
Yes! When I was in Moscow as a tourist, but one with a background in urban design, what most impressed me about the Metro and what I always talk about was not the architectural program as grand as it is, but the frequency. Above the tunnel where train enter the station there are count UP clocks: as 1 train leaves the station the clock starts, and at the moment the clock reaches 2:00 minutes the next train enters the station (1:30 during peak hours). Much more than the architecture and sculpture this frequency is what makes the Metro a great system. Also, St. Petersburg has a similar frequency – I don’t remember if it was the same 1.5/2 minutes.
Yeah, Prague has the same count-up clocks. It wasn’t as frequent – the clock was reaching 3-5 minutes, not 2 – but it was the same system.
American rightists are anti-urban have been so long before trains even existed and everybody had to walk or ride a horse everywhere. Anti-city feelings in the United States can go back before the Declaration of Independence. The worship of the Moscow Metro that Tucker demonstrated was basically just a way to rub sand into the faces of Democratic cities and our not so great by international standards transit. That America’s bad transit was a deliberate policy choice made at local, state, and federal levels for decades along with very subsidized suburban sprawl doesn’t seem to come up.
Back then, I think the American “right wing” was urban merchants and bankers, while the “left wing” was rural farmers, although someone who remembers more than me can add more nuance.
When I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, what struck me was the subway escalators. Looong, deeeeep escalators (at the Admirality, for example). I remember a babushka (old lady in a cloth coat) sitting on a chair at the bottom with her hand on the red/stop button. If someone stumbled on one of the down escalators during the busy commute hours, the chain of human domino’s that would result could be very, very bad.
St. Petersburg straddles the Neva, a very short but powerful river (its discharge is a bit smaller than the Nile’s, but larger than that of the Missouri or the Yellow river) that, unlike the similar rivers connecting the Great Lakes, flows through terrain formed by deep layers of sediment. You have to dig deep to find a dry spot in St. Petersburg, and even then accidents can happen.
The 90m deep tunnels between Lesnaya and Ploschad Muzhestva were flooded during construction in 1974 and had to be frozen with liquid nitrogen instead of the usual brine to stop the incoming water long enough for the repairs to be carried out. In 1995 the tunnels flooded again, and the new tunnel was opened only in 2004.
I think framing is the key. What stuck me was Carlson’s enthusiasm for the shopping cart where you need to put a coin to unlock it. I don’t know where this system originates from, but this is certainly not a Russian exclusive (you have those all over Europe) it certainly does not prevent homeless people, or homeless people using shopping carts (most people don’t put a real coin anyway).
This romanticism is pretty normal. Anglophone Urban Planning academia has very poor skills in international comparisons. Its actually hard to figure out what is a “good system” given that pretty much every culture underbuilds in their major cities*. That’s how you can books on “affordable housing” which praise England as an exemplar because it got the most “affordable housing” units from developers in the OECD. Or see the Netherlands as the great hero of social housing because they have the highest rate of social housing in Europe while not noticing how much income inequality/housing inequality/wage suppression/segregation/NIMBYism NDL has. Looking at you Fainstein fans.
That’s how you get books like Fujita et al (2012) saying “well our data tells us that Japan and Taiwan have the lowest residential segregation in the world, but we’ll ignore that and praise France and Denmark because it means we don’t have to re-think our priors, Neoliberalism blah blah blah, financialization blah blah blah”**.
*Housing bubbles of the last 20 years such as China, Spain, US often have overbuilding in peripheral regions and underbuilding in their richest areas.
** My suburban Tokyo rent wasn’t that much higher than the average London social housing tenant. And I got better service than the abusive incompetent who tend to run London council housing.
Could you expand a little on the low housing segregation rates in Taiwan and Japan, what it means and how they got there? I’m not interested specifically in the articape you criticized but in your larger outlook on it.
The basic reason is that Japan has a market oriented land allocation system backed by a powerful rail system that naturally creates TOD landscapes where there are lots of basic services in easy walking distance, and there are lots of building types for all manner of lifestyles. Small city centre apartments for working class singles, large exurban houses for the middle classes, large flats in city centre tower blocks etc etc.
And they just keep building. Except in the Ultra-Nimby Commie suburbs like Higashiyama in Kyoto or Kamakura in Kanagawa (Japanese Communists are basically like the Greens in the UK i.e. elitist nimbies).
Japanese has plenty of poverty and inequality, expansion of the housing stock has mitigated this, but it can:t stop it.
Taiwan has a lesser version of this because its cities (esp Taipei) much more geographically constrained, it has more hidden parking subsidies, its rail system is somewhat weaker, it has greater unnecessary “urban containment” and too few skyscapers (about the same the UK has). But the basic Taiwanese city is mostly multi-story apartments with commercialised lower floors connected by bikes, buses and mopeds. People trade prices and space.
Very interesting , thanks.
Isn’t the main reason why Tucker Carlson was wowed by coin-unlocked shopping carts in Russia, that an oddity of the United States currency (no coins in common usage of higher denomination than a quarter) makes the concept unviable there?