PDC (EN) : The Tube
Internship London > Culture > Tube
Most of my readers had almost once taken the French Tube in Paris. Sometimes beautiful and open, sometimes old and scary, different populations of different ethnics origins are mixed within the customers. The difference between the « RER » and the « Metro » is that the first one is intended for long distances, coming every ten or twenty minutes (or more, depending on your destination) whereas the second one is for short distances, coming every three to five minutes.
In London, the concept of Zones exists just like Paris, but here « RER » and « Metro » are gathered together under the sign « Tube ». This city, with 9.3M inhabitants (vs. 2M for Paris intra-muros), has only one kind of transport on railways, now subterranean, now emerged. And if the emerged stations are just like the countryside-RERs in Paris (like Juvisy), the subterranean stations have nothing to do with the ones from Paris.
In fact, walking a long time between to railways is exceptional in Paris, and most of the time reserved to the correspondences between a RER and a metro (stations like Châtelet). Here, the exception is more to have a direct correspondence ! Just like in France, they have escalators to help disabled, tired, or lazy persons, but these ones follow each other to the pace of four per correspondence tube/tube : one of the tube is deep inside the ground, the other one is just below the floor. So, your 2-minutes correspondence in Paris takes five, six, or ten minutes of walk in London (depending on your luggage).
The confusion between metro and RER makes the time between two tubes very variable : if a metro *can* get *somewhere* out of the Zone 1 (center), it will only arrive in a station every seven to ten minutes, *even if* there are already other stations in Zone 1 to get through. From one station to another one, you have to count more than two minutes (vs. one in Paris) : are there the reasons why the taxis are so developed here ?
But there are also arguments in favor of the Tube : the Oyster Card, a magnetic card which is just like a purse, and can contain the equivalent of our Orange cards (« travelcards »), per example.
Here, all the populations are mixed, but this mix is not reserved to the customers : finding Indian Tube agents is not rare ! It’s a good way to integrate people from different origins, with a useful job in contact of public, but which can (for some jobs) be done without a high qualification.
We’ll finish this (long!) article by underlining that the Tube helps up to memorize our geography of London, by using the terms « East » / « West » to designate the east and west part of a tube railway (instead of just giving the name of the last station like in Paris)… Pourquoi pas ;-)
[ Article traduit du français ]
