metro de madrid: best transit ads… ever.

I live in Toronto, a city where the only thing worse than the pathetic joke that is the Toronto Transit Commission is the hideous mockery that is it’s own lame advertising (“Ride the Rocket” anyone? Perhaps, if I had to wait 25 minutes for a rocket that would then short-turn with no explanation and only get me half-way to where I need to go – then, I guess, I’d be riding a rocket. The TTC is more like “Ride the Dinghy”? “Ride the Turtle”? “Ride your tax dollars down the drain”?) I hate the TTC and will go on about this all day; so don’t get me started, don’t even get me started.

My hate is not alleviated when you see the stunning work being done by another major transit company – Metro de Madrid. These are two of the best commercials I’ve ever seen – in my entire life. I want to fly to Spain tonight and ride the subway until I fall asleep or fall in love or get hit on or simply transcend into a higher state of spiritual conciousness – because these ads have proven to me that’s how completely fucking awesome the Madrid subway is.

They’re both so good I’m not sure which one to lead with. The first, “Transparante”, is simply one of the most well-filmed, visually-arresting ads I’ve ever seen. And, listen up TTC, it’s for a subway. This would never make it here, it’s far too ethereal and cool for the majority of North Americans to accept as advertising…

(Agency: Contrapunto Madrid. Director: Gabe Ibanez. Production: Peliculas Ponder.)

That’s not all. Why only have one mind-bendingly good ad when you can have two? Before this, I would never have thought I’d get misty-eyed at a subway commerical. This spot, “A Little History”, changed that:

(Agency: McCann Erickson Group Spain)

oslo subway: tunnel of light project.

It pains me to look at this. Living in a city (Toronto) whose transit system (the TTC) lies somewhere on the public opinion scale between being an abomination or a total joke, I can’t even fathom experiencing anything this ethereally beautiful during my daily transit excursions. An “art installation” on the TTC is anytime they manage to put cardboard over the gaping holes in the tiled walls – unless you can consider ceiling drips an aquatic sculpture of some kind.

Not in Oslo, Norway. Leave it to those damned Nordic geniuses to not only have a public transit system that works, but to actually put effort into making it an experience. It doesn’t take a massive amount of effort to create a difference between dragging your ass to work in some dirty grey afterthought and being subtly motivated to go to work and turn your country into a design superpower. They’ve obviously gone for the latter.

Built around an escalator in Oslo’s Nydalen subway station, this 27 metre translucent glass tunnel houses a brilliant shifting light installation created by a team of artists let by the station’s architect Kristin Jarmund.

mark ovenden: on the map.

At the risk of seeming totally odd, I love transit maps. It’s all those (normally bright primary coloured) lines intersecting over and over again. The fact that they actually represent something is purely secondary.

This endlessly fascinating (for me) e-card was used to promote Mark Ovenden’s 2007 “Transit Maps of the World”. It’s also the cover of this 133-page coffee-table transit tome. It illustrates, in classic Harry Beck transit map style, all the cities in the world that have their own public transit as if they were one global system unto themselves. In my mind it’s called the Terra Train.

The thing I love about the Terra Train layout is that, just like real transit maps, it’s actually pretty messed up. It totally distorts all accurate sense of distance and in some instances completely fails to connect two locations that are really quite close to each other:

• Notice how apparently Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montréal have become equidistant.

• It’s a long ass ride from Eshafan to Sydney. Bring a book.

• Oslo and Helsinki are only 787 km apart. On the Terra Train all you’d need to do is hop south on the Oslo-Pyongyang Line until you get to Berlin. Then transfer and head east on the Lyon-Shanghai line until you get off at Ufa Station. This sucks because Ufa is always rammed, especially at rush hour. Brave the transfer there onto the Mumbai-Helsinki line (watch out, ’cause crazy drunk Poles always stumble on at Gdansk Station) until you finally cruise into good ol’ Helsinki a mere 15 stops and 3111 kilometres later. Easy as that.

Yes, I actually figured the distances out. Don’t judge me…

Via Strange Maps