A tale of two capitals. Part 1. Travel. Washington DC and Stockholm.

A tale of living in two capitals - Stockholm vs. Washington, Part 1, travel. 

December 26, 2017

As promised, I am still writing up my thoughts about living and working in Washington, DC.  While living there, I was often thinking about comparisons to another capital city that I lived in - Stockholm, Sweden (fall 1994-spring 1995).  These are of course two very different capital cities.  First, Stockholm has roughly 1 million residents or so in the surrounding area.  Washington, DC has roughly 6 million.  However, they are also somewhat similar with traffic problems.  I remember that while living in Stockholm they wanted to severely tax people when they drove into the city.  Meanwhile, in DC, we just heard a few days ago that the toll on I believe, I-66, went up to $40 per car for a few miles stretch.  DC is the only place that I have ever lived where there is always a traffic report on each day of the weekend.  

When I lived in Stockholm, the cars/wagons on the Tunnelbanna (the subway) were getting very old and worn out.  They needed to be replaced.  It took a long time, but when I was in Stockholm in the late spring of 2016, the new wagons were very nice and clean.  Washington has similar problems.  The METRO is really out of date in many ways and from what I understand from my FDA colleagues, there was serious fraud that occurred with respect to maintenance of the system.  The DC Metro is also getting new cars and many of the lines have the new cars.  I like them because they have a place underneath them to toss bigger bags.  As someone who often goes to DC for meetings for either NIH or NSF proposal reviews, this is a welcome idea to have a place to put my small bag.  They also removed the carpets from the cars and so they will be much easier to clean. 

I try to do my best to use public transport when I am able to do so.  I know it can be slower, but I think it is the right thing to do.  DC public transport is getting harder to use.  I don’t know the hours anymore in Stockholm, but the tunnelbanna ran 24/7 when I was there.  I know they had a series of rapes on the subway and other problems late at night and then changed to something like 5 am to 1 am, I believe.  Nevertheless, the subway started early.  DC public transport has shortened its hours on the weekends and weekdays.  The Metro does not even start to run till 7 am on Saturday and 8 am now on Sunday.  I think they reduced the evening hours on the Metro as well to 11 or 11:30.  This is our nation’s capital we are talking about.

On that note, Washington DC is really, in my opinion, a commuter town.  People drive in from faraway places to work there and drive home.  One of the secretaries in the FDA division came in from Baltimore every day.  This is a greater than 30 mile drive.  She would come in early before 8 am and leave around 4 pm.  She claimed the traffic was not that bad if you left at these times.  While I know there are trains that go back and forth between Baltimore and DC, they are also few and far between.  Meanwhile, many people took the train in Sweden between Stockholm and Södertälje (to the south) which is listed as 30 km between the two cities (18 miles).  There are lines that go about the same distance to the north.  These lines run (or they did run) every 15 minutes when I lived in Sweden.  I am pretty sure it is about the same now during the work week.  I believe it is every 30 minutes on the weekend.  There is a high speed train (200 km/hr) now that goes between Uppsala and Stockholm which might be roughly 50 km apart or so. 

The parking lots are fixed and free at FDA.  This means they do not plan to add a single new parking space because people are supposed to or encouraged to take public transport.  However, so many people drive and their main reason for doing so is that with public transport they spend too much time making connections.  I completely agree with this response.  And, it is unfortunate. 

My hotel was in the Shady Grove area.  I would take a bus to the station each morning and then there was a shuttle bus to the FDA.  This only left about 3 times in the morning at 5:45, 7:10 and 8:45 am.  Occasionally, I would take the 7:40 am shuttle from White Oak which required jumping on Metro and going a few stations to White Oak.  The bus schedule was such that I normally had to wait 10-15 minutes at the station for the shuttle bus.  Then it was a 30 minute ride to the FDA.  Different shuttle buses use different routes (the NIH has buses that run back and forth as well.  The National Cancer Institute was across the street from my hotel.  They ran buses back and forth between Shady Grove and Rockville, where the big trains from Baltimore come in.).   Getting to the FDA completely on public transport without these shuttles is highly challenging.  I had to take a bus from another place to get across town.  That took more than 90 minutes or so the day I stayed at the hotel in the morning to finish up a proposal submission (I think) one day.  The shuttle bus drivers try to be nice, but the bus is a bit bumpy and it was hard to read things even though I tried to do so.  I get newspapers on my iPad so I would read through the Wall Street Journal and Arkansas Democrat Gazette to/from FDA and the Shady Grove Station. 

Conversely, I think I had over a 30 km route from where I lived on Lidingö to the Huddinge Hospital (a main and huge 800-900 person bed hospital south of Stockholm), where the Clinical Pharmacology department was where I worked.  I remember this travel being completely fluid when I lived there.  I had a choice of two different buses, the 204 or the 212 which had very different stops before heading into the Ropsten station.  Most mornings everyone got up their heartrate by charging up the escalator steps and then taking a side jump into the train before it would leave.  It was rare to wait more than 5 minutes for a subway train to leave.  Then it was the long walk through the Stockholm central station (which is very big and I forgot how big it was until I was back there in 2016) to where the regional trains pick up.  It was then about 15 minutes from the central station to the stop at Huddinge. 

Just like Stockholm, most of the major living areas around DC are really north and south of the city.  I drove out into the “country” a couple times and was surprised how close it was to the main parts of the city. 

That is probably enough for one sitting.  There will be much more and maybe I should have started this blog a long time ago when I was in DC.