In Honor of the El

My recent travels have reminded me how much love I can have for the train systems serving major cities. I have an extra special love for the superb delights offered by the train system offered by my own home city. The El. I love you. Because love of this magnitude should be allowed to spill over and warm the hearts of others, I now offer this helpful guide. Following these simple instructions, any city will be able to build a train system of equal efficiency and comfort!

First, know that people ride trains because they are in a hurry. In many cases, walking is a very plausible alternative to taking city-based train systems. People ride the trains because they are much faster a majority of the time. More to the point, people who ride the trains are likely to be on a schedule. That said, late trains can make riders very angry! To keep people happy, it is important to minimize the number of trains which arrive late. The Chicago el is a modern wonder by never having ANY late trains! This is actually quite easy to achieve, using the El's brilliant technique of abolishing train schedules! When you ride the el, you can rest assured that there will never be a late train because there is no conceivable way for a train to be compared to a timetable. Use this system immediately!

Next, be aware that people have a love/hate relationship with the weather. By this I mean that people love being outdoors at all times and hate being separated from the elements! To ensure that people can maximize this primal instinct, minimize the sheltering effects of as many stations as possible. Position as many as you can directly above wide streets, especially those facing towards flat areas, such as large lakes and parking lots. In this way, each gust of wind will not only be felt, it will be amplified! This effect is truly invigorating, especially in the winter months when everyone most needs a pick me up. But of course, it takes all kinds. To this end, provide occasional tiny glass cubicles with heat lamps to isolate and contain the whiners. Size them to be able to comfortably enclose roughly half of one percent of the platform. That will be plenty.

Let’s turn our attention now to the insides of the trains themselves. First, recall that people take the train because they are in a hurry. People rushing to and fro do not want to relax and be comfortable! These are supercharged go-getters. Seating availability should be scaled to accommodate only the weak and infirm riders, or roughly 15% of the expected maximum ridership. This translates to 50%, tops, of your expected typical passenger load. The remaining space should be designed to resemble the sorts of places where people go to have fun – trendy nightclubs! Three words, engineers! Standing. Room. Only. As with nightclubs, expect that people have an inherent desire to cram themselves in to a provided location until it is literally impossible to move without impacting others. Choose train car lengths to enable people to have an excuse to do so. Since liquor is not generally consumed during the day, start people dancing with violent, lurching starts and stops. In this way, people will literally be forced to get frisky with each other! Community bonding at its finest! And remember, trendy night clubs are a physical experience. Even music, typically regarded as auditory, should be first felt, then seen, then heard in a club. Of course, we will not be playing music on the trains. What must be done instead is simply create the same net effect. The train, when running, should generate enough noise that it is nearly impossible to have a conversation inside of it! Nothing is more romantic than a significant glance, and this is the only sort of communication one should reasonably expect to accomplish while riding.

Finally, your train system should have an organic, straight-from-nature element to its overall design. Specifically, you want your train tracks to look like the sort of spider web where the spider got bored and left halfway through. See, everyone knows that downtown is the most important part of all cities. Therefore, everyone will want to go downtown at least once during each and every trip! This is especially true of those people who live far from downtown. They will crave its culture. To help them sate this need, connect all of your train tracks at only one point in the very center of the city. Do not, under any circumstances, connect lines at other places. Doing so would only allow for mixing of the wrong sorts of people. Did you know that the blue line is arguably adjacent to the yellow line more than halfway out of the system? No one living along the yellow line wants to think about that, that’s for sure!

With all of this accomplished, you can know with certainty that your train system is a delight to all those around it. Keeping that in mind, maximize the pleasure and revelry for your citizens! Hoist the train to the sky for all to see, and make sure that the tracks are in a condition to shriek songs of joy to everyone within three blocks every time a train passes by! In this way, even those who do not choose to ride the train can be frequently reminded of its wonders!