The first way they relate is obvious: The subway system, like the mythical Atlas, supports our world. It created the New York we know and usually love, of skyscrapers leaping out of the ground, filled with people. The built environment we think of as New York City grew out of the subway and its capacity to bring millions of people more or less at the same time to the same place. While Manhattan's grid existed before the subway system, its skyscrapers did not–nor did its amazing employment density, which was based on moving millions into the city daily.

The late, great World Trade Center provides a good example. What if the Port Authority had built the towers without the No. 1 line and the PATH train beneath it and the ferry nearby? How much parking would you have needed so all those people could drive into Manhattan?

Well, using the standard suburban-developer's formula of one parking space for every 250 square feet of office space, you would need 56,000 parking spaces for the World Trade Center's 14 million square feet. Which means you would need 560 acres of parking, or basically all of lower Manhattan, because you can only fit 100 parking spaces per acre. So basically, you would've had to convert everything below Canal Street, from Tribeca to the Staten Island ferry, into a parking lot for one building complex.

Or you could build parking garages. If you built the garages with the same expansive 50,000-square-foot plates as the twin towers, you'd need two 190-story parking garages to sit beside the 110-story World Trade Center towers. You would also need a 50-lane freeway to get the people there and back.

Most people don't understand transportation. They think we have these places–like Times Square or, say, a shopping mall outside Atlanta–and we figure out how to move around within and between them. Actually, it works just the opposite: We create ways to move around, and that creates places. The subway and train lines created the New York we love, the same way the interstate highways created the Atlanta suburban sprawl we hate.

New York is so different in its physical form because a subway, unlike a highway, can move many people quickly to more or less the same place. A highway moves 1,800 vehicles per lane per hour. A good subway can move 60,000 to 80,000 people per track per hour!

So we are creations, in a sense, of New York's transit system. But, like the hard-working capitalists in Rand's novel, the subway gets no respect and little attention. The casual rider doesn't appreciate it; the feds feed it last, after lavishing money on Georgia interstates and mining subsidies to Utah.

So that's one way the subway relates to Atlas Shrugged . The second way the subway relates is less obvious, but more crucial. It's that Ayn Rand was wrong! In Atlas Shrugged , she details her theory that capitalists, like her hero, John Galt–those out to make a buck–create all the value in the world, and the rest of us are just freeloaders. To Ayn Rand and all her libertarian, neoconservative soul brothers at the Cato and Manhattan institutes, the people who create value and prosperity in this world are the Mike Bloombergs and the Bill Gateses. Government is at best a necessary evil, there just to tidy up the manly work done by the capitalists.

Now this makes sense to sophomores in college and John Tierney on the Metro page of The Times , but it's just flat wrong. The world we live in rests on a vast system of publicly funded (and usually publicly built) infrastructure. Sure, people start companies and do neat stuff. But they use workers who receive public education, and they get places on highways, planes and subways that government has either built or massively subsidized. The free market doesn't create infrastructure, at least not very well. John Galt and the other capitalists in Atlas Shrugged depend on government to build a transportation infrastructure for them,

educate their workers, and create a legal system that allows them to buy and sell. Government creates the infrastructure of capitalism: physical, intellectual and legal.

This is true in New York most of all. It's no accident that New York, symbol of free-wheeling capitalism, has the most extensive and elaborate mass-transit system and social-welfare state. Compared to the rest of the country, New York is Sweden.

So who is this Atlas that's carrying the world? It's us, the taxpayers. And where does that leave us? In the hands of the politicians. The good news is that there are signs that Mayor Bloomberg gets it: He's talked respectfully not only of the transit system, but of the parks, water mains and other systems that make our city work.

If we wanted to make this city even better, then the easiest way would be to pour money into the subway system first, and then the commuter rail, ferries and Amtrak. They are like blood lines to vital organs. A wish list would include the Second Avenue subway and bureaucratic changes like making the MetroCard common currency on all trains, ferries and buses, no matter what state they originate from.

But we shouldn't just make the transit system more efficient; we should make it beautiful. It's a sign of the hostility with which we regard public infrastructure that most of it looks like the underside of a kitchen sink.

A few years back, I rode the new No. 14 subway line in Paris to the Bibliothèque Nationale, those giant glass bookends that sit over a cool subterranean complex. The subway fit right into this Schrager-like aesthetic. The platforms were separated from the open tracks by a wall of glass. When the train pulled in, its doors lined up with these glass walls, and the two opened together. It had other nice touches. The stations were actually works of architecture, both inside and out.

Our subways could be like that: marvels of both engineering and aesthetics. The Second Avenue subway line, which would take people from the Bronx all the way to lower Manhattan, could be a showcase of the best in design and architecture.

Even when factoring in the better economy and increasing population of New York, more people than expected have ridden the subways and buses in the last 15 years. Why? Probably because the subway cars are no longer covered with graffiti, the stations rarely smell of urine and the M.T.A. has spruced up the stations with new flooring, tiles and railings. That's been wonderful, but it's just a first step.

As we contemplate our post-9/11 future, we can choose to make our city a better place in ways that are both sensible and efficient. We don't have to be like the late Ms. Rand; we can take the subway.

time to prompt some discussion about not only crime, schools and jobs, but

something both more conceptual and more concrete, such as what kind of city we

want to be.

The words "urban" and

"suburban" are irritatingly vague, and used as both pejorative and praise. To

some, "urban" is still a code word for minorities and crime. To others, it

means sophistication and a willingness to embrace rather than avoid, public

rather than private, a street-based life. "Suburban" can mean narrow, isolating

and sexless, or it can mean families, space and nature.

Some New Yorkers feel that the lines during the Rudy

Giuliani years have been blurred: that the city is becoming too suburban (no

sex shops, no noise, no nightclubs, no crime), and that the funkier streets of

the 70's, 80's and early 90's-when the city was a rougher but arguably more

interesting place-are making way for blocks that more closely resemble Garden

City, Long Island (where Rudy grew up). It might be good to clarify the

terminology, because it's not always clear what people mean, or if they know

themselves.

New Yorkers aren't the only ones confused, however. Last

month, 1,000 "New Urbanists" visited the city for their annual convention. New

Urbanism is a movement, probably the leading popular-design philosophy in the

country dedicated to making places more citylike. But those who call themselves

"New Urbanists" are also not sure what that means.

New Urbanists have produced mostly fake urban places, like

Disney's Celebration in Florida. These places are essentially suburban

subdivisions, built in cornfields and dressed up like small towns. Yet some New

Urbanists, mostly on the West Coast, have helped accomplish more urban goals,

such as building train lines and stopping highways.

Steven Bodzin, the

spokesman for the Congress for New Urbanism, said the group chose New York for

its convention this year because it was alien territory. The Northeast has few

of those cutesy New Urban subdivisions, and the New York architectural

establishment derides New Urbanists for liking the traditional architecture of

columns, cornices and front porches.

"In the New York architectural world, there is a deep

suspicion of New Urbanism," Mr. Bodzin said. "Our single biggest source of

criticism comes out of New York. So we decided to come here."

Jonathan Rose, member of the prominent Rose development

family and a developer himself, was the New York host for the convention. An

avuncular man with a bushy beard, Mr. Rose said that New Urbanists can learn

from New York, and vice versa.

"What New Urbanism has is a rap," he said. "It has been

extremely good at communicating its vision."

The group's travel schedule illustrated either its diversity

or its confusion. The conventioneers toured the subway system and Greenwich

Village, but also the placid, quasi-suburban Queens neighborhood of Forest

Hills Gardens, with its privately owned streets. At the conference itself, held

at the Altman building and the adjacent Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th

Street, the group tried to work out its own definitions.

Key indicators popped up. For example, congestion-something

New Yorkers struggle with-may be a sign of success rather than failure.

"We're in New York because it's a congested city," G.B.

Arrington, a transportation planner from Portland, Ore., told a small group.

"Congestion is a sign of vitality. Maybe if your streets aren't congested,

you're doing something wrong."

And how about infrastructure? The average person, I suspect,

does not realize how directly a city's infrastructure determines its character.

Build more subway lines and you get more city. Build more highways and parking

garages, and you get more traffic and quasi-suburban settings.

Jaquelin Robertson, the elder-statesman architect from

Cooper & Robertson, did a masterful job taking listeners through the city's

key infrastructure decisions, from the Erie Canal of the 1800's to Robert Moses

in the 1920's and 30's, stringing parkways across the region as "a kind of

infrastructure emperor."

"If the Roman Empire was about roads, bridges, aqueducts,

Roman laws and Roman legions, then my adopted New York, the Empire City, was

about parkways, bridges, aqueducts, New York real estate, Penn Station, Yankee

Stadium …, " Mr. Robertson said.

As a journalist who has

written a book about cities, I have my own views about what constitutes

urban-and what I'd like New York to become. To my mind, urban means building

the Second Avenue subway line and making fewer accommodations for S.U.V.'s and

more for social activities, such as drinking at street fairs or dancing all

night. What urban does not mean, to me, is tolerating crime, incivility or

trash. I would like a safe, diverse, dynamic and clean city with more trains

and fewer cars, with funkier streets and more stoops instead of porches.

Maybe one of the Mayoral candidates will offer his own

answer to the question: How urban do you want New York City to be?

Terry Golway will

return to this spot in several weeks.