On the U-bahn this morning, smooshed in a crowd of shifting commuters and getting my toes run over as a woman tried to make room for her baby carriage in the already-packed train car, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that the BVG really does love me.
The official slogan of the Berlin Verkehrsbetreib is "weil wir dich lieben," or "because we love you." Their advertisements are 4-minute long music videos in which people use public transportation to escape ridiculously unfortunate situations. The ads are hilarious, but they also convey an important truth: in Berlin, public transportation is pervasive and accessible.
I remember on my first night out in Berlin, I turned off my phone and later found myself locked out by my new SIM card when I powered it back on, without the code needed to access cellular data. My heart skipped a beat as I realized that I was across the city from home and couldn't remember how to get back.
But the BVG took care of me. In the bright station at Alexanderplatz, I connected my phone to the WIFI with which every single tram, U-bahn, S-Bahn, and bus stop is equipped. A quick search on the BVG app and a few screenshots later, and I had all the information I needed to get home safely.
The BVG works. It is designed to get as many people where they want to go as safely and as expediently as possible, part of the marketing of the city that aims to make public transit attractive. The evidence that it succeeds? Everyone uses it. At 7am businesspeople on their way to work sit next to people who just left the club. A Berlin U-bahn car is a microcosm for the vibrancy of the city's people.
The sketch above illustrates the fact that the BVG vehicles are not just useful, they are iconic. The yellow paint makes them recognizable, which only contributes to how successfully they are marketed to Berliners and visitors.
In addition, using the BVG is intuitive; exit a train and cast your glance in a 180 degree arc around the platform. You will see a sign above the access point for every connection that is possible from where you stand: S-lines are green, U-lines are blue, the tram is red, the buses are purple. The symbolism is systematic, and you will be lead up staircases, around bends, over bridges, across roads, and along tunnels to your connection without having to think at all. Passengers are sorted into streams as easily as water is diverted into pipes. Since the first night when I was lost in Alexanderplatz, the system has grown intuitive to me and I can usually make my way anywhere in the city without even pulling out my phone.
All these accessible and convenient features of the BVG help to limit sprawl (want to go for a hike? Take the S-bahn towards Wannsee, and use the same ticket to get on a bus which will literally drive you into the woods with trails, fishing spots, and an island accessible by ferry inhabited with the descendants of Frederick William III's peafowl), to make the city more walkable, safer for pedestrians and bikers, less noisy, and less cluttered by automobiles, which in turn improve the embodied sustainability of a dense and less car-dependent city.
Meanwhile in suburbia, you have to sit for at least 15 minutes in your car by yourself in order to get anywhere. There is nothing that alienates you more from other members of humanity like sitting in traffic on the way to the dentist channel surfing the radio and glaring at the guy in front of you who's texting when the light turns green.
By contrast, there is something tender about sitting among an ever-refreshing cohort of strangers wherever you go. Sometimes, a train car is bubbling with a blend of voices, and every once in a while, I'll get on a crowded car that is totally, uncannily silent. 50 strangers stand shoulder-to-shoulder, shuffling, swaying; everyone is elsewhere.
To be one passenger on one of hundreds of trains in one of so many cities, crossing thousands of paths every moment, my own bustle tangling with the bustles of innumerable others---it makes me feel small in a wonderful way. I am one of many, connected to my fellow travelers no matter how drastically we may differ in minute and specific ways. We are equal, the way every bird in the flock rises from the field in a single dark mass, the flapping of so many wings sounding as one great rush. Therein lies the power of a good transit system.
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