The Métro pulls out of the Corvisart Station in the 13th.

Starts & Stops - the Subway or Métro?

By Abbott Katz

Paris Kiosque - April 1996 - Volume 3, Number 4
Copyright (c) 1996 Abbott Katz - Used with permission

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For this New Yorker, the Paris Métro must be accounted among that city's abiding pleasures and wonders. Fabulously punctual and almost startlingly negotiable - even to this visitor, whose debilitated French throws a conversational damper on all he meets here - the Métro roams its city with a lumbering elan, posing contrasts to my native subway at every arrête.

The New York subway is an anarchic roar, or so it may seem to the novice yet to be initiated into its secrets. A slapdash melange of what was once three separate systems, its lines are rife with idiosyncrasy, known merely by mysterious numbers or letters; they sport redundantly-named stops (the D line contains two called 7th Avenue, one in Brooklyn, the other, in Manhattan) often splayed at wildly variable intervals, and I know of at least one junction at which transfers may be completed toward one direction, but not the other. True -the system tends to work; but its enormous rusting motor suffers from an uncontrollable uncertainty that daily seeps into its parts.

But ah, the Métro and its lucid maps (including some attached to a console that draws for the traveler, at the tap of a button, a swiftest-route scenario) and limpid

The Arts Et Metiers Métro stop in the 3rd.

signage (and prurient ads), with its arrêtes homogeneously spaced, its trains stunningly timely; and while it is true that in many comparative ways the subway is the apple to the Métro's orange - the former never closes, for example, and pulls across a vaster terrain - I cannot look past the idea that the Métro seems to simply work better.

But apart from their relative efficiencies, the Métro and subway support different atmospheres as well. In the subways, riders are apprised about those seats reserved for the handicapped; the Métro assigns priority instead to the mutilites of past wars. New York's underground serves as a kind of movable enterprise zone for a cadre of beggars of various probity, with a subculture textured enough to command an article all its own, if not an ethnography. But on the Métro such entrepreneurs are remarkably scarce. I can remember but one such free marketeer, the reed of his saxophone plunged into his embouchure, his recital set to commence; but as his overture beckoned, a gendarme split open the car doors and reeled our performance artist off the train. "End of concert", he declaimed, without so much as bothering to issue a rain check.

But what is still missing from my Métro experience is the play of peoples and territory that winds around my New York ride, the way in which the stops beneath correlate with and resonate to the city life above. My F train is unfathomably polyglot, encasing black and Orthodox Jewish women completing their prayers, Polish nationals, the yuppies who embark at 7th Avenue (yes, the F has one too), Catholic school kids convening for the morning runs to class, and the assorted ethnic time-releases that are tripped at transfer points with other lines. I do not yet know who boards at Stalingrad, or Franklin D. Roosevelt, or 8 Mai 1945, or what urban clamor roils atop these stations; that sense needs yet to be refined. I await the next ride.

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Abbott Katz is a PC support analyst who lives in Brooklyn and has written for New York Newsday and other publications. He will be sure to let you all know when he plans to be in Paris next, and can be reached in the meantime at akatz@juno.com.