The metro

Passengers waiting for the train in a metro stattion in Rotterdam

You find it in many big cities: the metro, underground, subway, tube, or how you want to call it. It brings you easily where you want to go. A metro train will pass you on to your destination. Therefore, we can call a metro – and other public means of transport – a passage. There are also other reasons to do so, for the metro tube is a kind of space you must pass through to your destination, for instance. Metaphorically, we could call the metro train, where you stay during your transport, a passage as well. You simply must wait there, while being moved, and that’s all. You wait while being passed.
However, the latter observation raises an intriguing question: Is a metro train really a passage, in the sense of an instrument that passes you on? Isn’t it a waiting room? The question is intriguing, since passing and waiting seem to be contradictory “activities”: either you pass, so move (from one place to another), or you wait, but when you wait you cannot go to another place. Nonetheless, in a metro train both happen simultaneously. Therefore, we can say that using the metro is a hybrid activity: passing and waiting. Passing while you are waiting or waiting while you are passing. The passenger is active and passive at the same time: Active when choosing where to go; entering a metro station; walking to a train; taking a seat; and leaving the train at the destination. It’s just like walking through the city or driving a car. However, the passenger is passive, because it is the train that moves him or her and passes the passenger on. It’s like in the waiting room of a hospital: You go to the consulting room, when the doctor calls your name, just as that you leave the train, when you see a sign with the name of your chosen station.
There is more that makes the metro system a special kind of passage: Using a metro train is collectively passing. Usually, passing, like walking or driving a car, is an individual affair. You do it alone or otherwise with people you know, but not with complete strangers. Walking together or driving a car together are things you normally do only with people you know. Using public transport is always collective and with strangers. On the other hand, also waiting is often a single, individual matter, but waiting with others is not unusual. It happens often together with people you don’t know; by far more than passing: At a bus stop, in a railway station, in the doctor’s waiting room, etc. Actually, waiting in a public space is a collective affair most of the time, unless it happens, for example, that you are waiting alone at a street corner (or wherever) for a friend, and the like. Waiting alone at a bus stop is in fact not more than a limited case of collectively waiting, for it can always happen that someone will join you. Of course, this usually collective character of public waiting doesn’t make that you’ll need to connect with those who are waiting with you. Usually, you don’t. It is the same for passing: people passing collectively like in the metro seldom connect and interact with each other.
Using a metro train is not only a collective affair, but this being together there is something special. As Sally Raskoff notes: “The subway is a unique social space where people of different backgrounds and social classes find themselves – perhaps for the only time that day – in the same, small space.” The metro is one of the few means of public transport used by nearly everyone, no matter their social background, class, ethnicity, etc. Maybe, it is the only place where people of all kinds of backgrounds ever meet, even more than in a bus, tram or train. The whole world comes together in the metro, so to speak; it is the human world on wheels, more than any other means of public transport.
There is yet another characteristic of the metro worth mentioning. You pay for using the metro and you may think “that’s it”. However, as Marc Augé has made clear (p. 77), it’s more complicated. Using the metro is concluding a contract with the metro company: You pay and the metro company has the obligation to transport you. Buying a ticket makes you a passenger. You need a ticket to be allowed to go on the metro (or even to enter the metro station), but once you have it, you are entitled to use the metro and the metro company has the duty to transport you and to take care of a good service. Without a ticket you are a fare dodger, or, literally, a “free rider”. It makes that using the metro – and using public transport in general – is based on a contractual relationship. Using the metro is contractually passing, so to speak, and the metro is a contractual passage. And of course, this makes using the metro also contractually waiting and a metro train a contractual waiting room. The latter is only implicitly so. For, in the end you don’t buy a metro ticket for waiting but for being passed on and that’s what the metro company is paid for. However, without providing metro carriages that are also waiting rooms a metro company cannot transport you; without them a metro company cannot pass you on. Moreover, you expect that the carriages are clean and well maintained, and that’s what you also pay for.
Taking the metro always seemed to be such a simple thing, but as you see it isn’t. But when you want to take it, don’t think too much about all this, for otherwise you’ll not arrive at your destination. But that’s true for many things in life.