A good public transport system is the most utopic technology you can have

i like trains

One of the most noteworthy events in Sydney over the last year was the construction of the metro. Our public transport has been notoriously average, and when it was built, it was like someone had built one of those ridiculous sci-fi hydraulic tubes through the city, one of those ones they had in Futurama — like, ah, yes, the future is now.

Passing through the metro station and all of its related refurbishments feels exactly like a sci-fi movie feels: shining steel rises up in diagonal lines for what feels like miles, criss-crossing against vast shining vacuums of empty space; commuters arranging themselves in an orderly manner, aligning themselves exactly with the carriage doors with little fuss; everything is lit up by a gentle halo of recessed lights meticulously installed across every perimeter.

When you descend the metro escalators you notice that the birch-coloured walls to either side of you are designed like a sort of slanted brickwork, creating diagonal lines that converge into an invisible vanishing point in the distance. That’s because these are the longest escalators in the Southern Hemisphere (I have always loved vanity metrics, no matter how stupid and arbitrary), and the walls are apparently designed to combat vertigo.

When I first noticed this effect, it wasn’t from the escalators, but looking up as a commuter waiting for the metro: I felt that the unusual slanting pattern gave me a subtle sense of thrill and anticipation for the metro (lol), as in, it felt fast, it felt like I was going somewhere, it felt like being inside of an accelerating vehicle before I was even inside of it.

For some reason, really good public transport feels more futuristic than say, having access to all of the world’s information in the form of an always-available, nearly-sentient humanoid. It feels fundamentally utopic rather than dystopic. I think it’s because you can see so many people using it so easily, and its benefits seem so unambiguous. Utopia is this sense of collective hope and harmony; it is a sense that humanity as a whole has figured out something to progress into the shining blue sky of the future, and what is implied is that we have also learned to overcome our collective differences in order to do so successfully.

Dystopia is the sense of panic that I will be one of the ones left behind. Dystopia is realising that if I want to stop getting stomped on, I need to buy a bigger boot; I need to use bigger and better weapons to defeat those who would squash my own right to exist, I need to buy the bigger SUV, invest in the property market.