Navigating underground

I've always loved subways/undergrounds.  Even packed cheek-to-jowl into an un-air-conditioned Circle or District line car in the middle of the (then) hottest summer on record, in a suit, I still loved the posters and ads, the station architecture and decor, the endless parade of passengers, the nearly endless escalators, the tabloid news stands, the surprising variety of little shops tucked away ... even the names of the stations, the sound of the wheels and the brakes, the generally indecipherable announcements and the sheer urban gothiness of the tunnels themselves.  Sort of like an old-fashioned carnival funhouse ride but way, way cooler.

But there is another, more practical reason that I love subway systems: They make navigating a strange city nearly foolproof.  You only need to know two things: What stop your destination is at, and how to get to and from the system.  If you're just seeing the major sites, both of those are generally dead easy: the names of the stops are invariably listed in the guide book, and guess what -- stations tend to be built right by major landmarks.  Even if you're not visiting a major landmark, chances are whomever you're visiting will tell you the name of their station and the same technique will work.

All you really have to do is follow the greatly-simplified system map, make the right transfers and avoid Baker Street.  Unless you're on a tight schedule, you can essentially treat the whole system as a single point.  Your route is Point A -- subway -- Point B.

Such conceptual simplicity is so handy that one can spend months in many cities without learning more than the bare rudiments of the above-ground layout.  This is not entirely a good thing.  Apart from missing the richness of sights to be encountered by straying into this side-street or that arcade (but not that one; the less said about it the better), there are surprisingly many cases where it would be faster just to walk.

An underground transit system has a cognitive character all of its own.  Traveling above ground, you can generally see where you're going and gauge turns and distances reasonably well.  Underground, after several twists and turns of stairways and corridors, lurching starts and stops, and a few subtle or not-so-subtle bends, I personally find I might as well be playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.

And yet the human brain, adapted to navigating outdoors and on foot, seems to cope reasonably well with the time-passes-and-then-you're-elsewhere nature of subway riding, even when the mental map of the territory above is largely blank.  A mental map developed solely from underground transit will have significant distortions, of course, but these don't seem to hurt much.  Once the real landscape becomes familiar, this more accurate view tends to supplant the earlier one (at least in my experience) and the below-ground journey starts to make a bit more sense.

The brain is used to meshing different sets of information, so perhaps this isn't surprising, but I get the definite feeling that more is going on here beneath the surface (so to speak) than one might think.