Imagine having to catch a Red Line train home at rush hour on a weekday. Now imagine that Metro was only running four-car trains. At 12-minute intervals. If you can fathom the sheer human crush that would result, you may feel the pain I felt today.

I´m in Caracas, Venezuela, a city I know well, on business. One of the perks of visiting and working in downtown Caracas, a city of roughly 5 million people, is its Metro system. Planned and built around the same time as its counterpart in Washington (though it opened some 10 years later, in 1983), the Caracas Metro is a shining mix of ambitious engineering and the boom-and-bust cycle of oil prices that periodically leaves the Venezuelan government flush with dollars. Though smaller -- it currently only has three lines, the longest of which has 22 stations running from east to west along the valley in which Caracas sits -- it handles some 1.2 million riders a day, and has become one of the best ways to efficiently move in a city whose roads and drivers put Washington gridlock to shame. Best yet, the Caracas Metro could well be Washington´s younger transit sibling -- the stations are similarly spartan and cavernous in places, while the trains differ only in that they lack the carpets and the cushioned seats.

But back to the crowding. The Red Line analogy still stands. A certain stretch of the Caracas Metro in the downtown area is notoriously crowded, so much so that the current government has undertaken the building an additional line to lessen traffic on the system´s busiest corridor. And not a minute too late, I might add. Upon emerging from an afternoon meeting and descending into the Chacaito station, I spied a crowd three deep on the station platform. I guessed a train or two would lighten the human load. It took five. And by the time I made it on a train, it wasn´t because there were any fewer people waiting -- it´s because I pushed, and pushed hard. Each train came tightly packed, with only a few people coming off at a time. So desperate was the desire to board a train that riders rushed the doors as they opened, surging into the trains as others fitfully tried to squeeze out. Getting in was more a matter of brute force than it was finesse, luck, or good manners. And once on the train, holding on wasn´t much more than an afterthought. In trains packed that tightly, you go with the crowd -- essentially, nowhere. Sandwiched between a horde of other riders, I felt more like I was in a mosh pit than on public transportation.

Like many of my other travels, I will come away from Caracas with a renewed appreciation of what I deal with on a daily basis. After all, I´ve never pushed that hard to get into a Red Line train.

Picture taken by Alejandro Sosa.