Do Cities Still Need Metros?

It's sad when cities ruin their tight tram network to make room for cars

if you have to check a schedule, it's a train. if you just rock up to the station whenever, it's a subway.

This reminds me of a debate we had in Warsaw after the first Metro line opened. The M1 runs along one of the city's main N-S street routes, which also happens to host one of primary tram routes. After the metro was opened, a lot of people argued the tram was now redundant in this area and should be scrapped (presumably to make more room for cars). The city decided against it, based on the premise that a tram serves a different kind of journey from a metro. Should be obvious enough when you take into account that the tram stops about twice as often as the metro on the same route. There's a similar ratio between metro and suburban rail stations.

It's also sad that the United States had over 100 different suburban and intercity rail options and just left it into disrepair or all together removed it to make way for their interstate system.

I live in Moscow, Moscow without the metro system would be mayhem, the ongoing expansion of the metro system here is not just a luxury but it is absolutely essential!

In San Francisco, we don’t have a particularly strong subway as we essentially have 1 tunnel that functions as suburban rail outside the city core (BART). But the city built a semi-metro (or a streetcar tunnel) which can handle multiple tram lines feeding into it. More recently the Central Subway was built and is designed for 2-3 car trains only. Right now it’s only 1 line feeding it and there’s no plans for more lines, although a shuttle service exists but only for events. San Francisco struggles to think big and continually is discouraged by cost of construction for which I can’t blame them… this is a massive national problem the US faces. Unable to think big because our economics does not match the desire of the people.

The example you showed of Wood Lane on the Hammersmith & City / Circle Line started out life as a branch of the Great Western Line, much like the Greenford Branch still is. In London, the disdiction between train and tube is mostly about which budget it is funded from. The Waterloo and City Line for example, was considered a train line until very recently. The East London Line, now part of the Overground, used to be part of the Underground, even though, at Whitechapel, the Overground is in a tunnel and the Underground crosses over it just below street level, with an open view of the sky. Basically, when the first Metropolitan Railway tunnel was dug (between Paddington and Faringdon, later extending further east, they envisaged something more like what the Elizabeth line Line does now.

I was hoping Japan would be mentioned; their regional railways are their metros

Ideally, metros should only be used on the highest density urban corridors, while suburban rail should be used to connect the suburbs to the core, and LRT/BRT should be used as a stopgap either in the form of branch lines or to help connect the two systems.

I think a video on Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden's tram and suburban rail network could be really interesting. It's the 2nd biggest city in Sweden, but relatively small compared to most cities featured on the channel (600,000 urban, 1,000,000 metro) and yet it has a lot of transit. Your Rennes video made me think of it.

Subways are incredible, I always feel in the future

Subways would never be obsolete, because 1. They isolate the noise to the passengers (Elevated). 2. They don't compete with other traffic modes (like Light Rail). 3. They are generally faster because of the above. 4. The chances are you will be in a climate control environment. This is important for limiting delays (waiting or incremental weather like snow or flooding). There advantages out weigh there disadvantages, so certain cities makes the investment.

Subways don't disrupt the surface roads and buildings. You would not build an above ground train downtown.

Yes, cities still need metros. But not every city needs a full scale metro, and many can use a intermediate solution. That said, do not forget to look at other pre existing modes like commuter rail (S Bahn)

Another consideration to make is the age of the infrastructure. Commuter rail tends to follow legacy rights of way that were originally built through greenfield, whereas subways are generally built from scratch, with few cases in which legacy track was converted to subway. Center-City commuter rail tunnels are almost always built to knit together an existing legacy system, so branching is somewhat endemic to the concept. But so much branching forces padding of the timetable, so, even with larger trains, CR through a central tunnel can still struggle sometimes to match capacity with a subway line that has a single dedicated service and tighter headways. Like you said, every technology has its niche!

Thank you for your work! I live in the Tampa Metro area which has no rapid transit and we have a list of struggles for adding one. 1) poor soil quality for tunnels. 2) a giant body of water dividing the metro area. 3) infrastructure needs to meet hurricane codes. 4) urban sprawl with few walkable neighborhoods and no transit oriented development. 5) weird/bad zoning and city codes. 6) NIMBYs. And I’m sure others. I know all of these can be resolved, but it’s hard to convince anyone of that locally. So a humble request, that if you are looking for video ideas to possibly make one about how to add a metro system in a city where EVERYTHING is working against it. Maybe in particular to use Tampa as a case study of how we could get started and build up slowly over time to help local’s understand what our city could be.

And here is MFG using Frankfurt as his personal example again: - A full sized S-Bahn train is around 200 metres long, a full sized U-Bahn train around 100 metres, though it's more common to see 75m trains (the U3 and U5 even are limited to 75m thanks to their legal loading gauge). On top of that, the S-Bahn trains have standard train width (around 3m), the U-Bahn more that of a tramway (2.65m). - The S-Bahn has nine separate services of which eight go into the tunnel (though that too can be split into two separate metalines, the north-south S3-S6 lines and the east-west S1, S2, S8 and S9 lines) while the U-Bahn has three metalines (named A, B and C) of which the A has four branches while the other two have only two each. - You can see the difference in accelleration on the shared C-line-S-Bahn tunnel below Zeil yourself. - The U-Bahn has some pretty tight curves at Marbachweg though ideally, they would have been softened out if it were properly grade separated, and the remaining curves are still tighter than that you will see on the S-Bahn. - Though the S-Bahn has some stops only 500 metres apart in the trunks (most notably Lokalbahnhof), once the trains are outside, the distances are closer to that of your average (German) regional line even within the city border while the U-Bahn only has higher stop distances if geometry (e.g. there are buildings or a river above the line) and population (very prominent in the north) makes a stop impractical. - Thanks to taking over existing rail corridors, the S-Bahn tends to serve more places outside the city than inside so outside the centre, only Nied, Griesheim and Höchst have tracks right through their centre while neighbourhoods like Eschersheim, Dornbusch and Bornheim are better served by the U-Bahn. It also makes the S-Bahn network heavily skewed towards the west so the U-Bahn also is more prominent in the east than the west. - Related to the above, A-Line and the north-south S-Bahn lines intersect quite often (Südbahnhof, Hauptwache, A-S6 in Eschersheim, U3-S5 in Oberursel, nearly the U2-S5 in Bad Homburg and planned U1-S6 at Niddapark), though other lines also are planned to intersect the S-Bahn including the U5 extension to Frankfurter Berg (interchange with the S6), Nordmain'sche S-Bahn (U6 at Ostbahnhof) and Regionaltangente West (Höchst and Eschborn Süd). Of course, to immediately mention the elephant in the room, the U-Bahn is not a proper metro due to the lack of grade separation so a lot of portions are still at grade and even street running in case of the U5 (incidentally, they tend to happen more on the branches except on the A line) but it still has a lot of potential which makes it IMO still a good anecdote. Another notable deviation on is the lack of interchanges within the U-Bahn except the triange in the centre as well as the B-C interchange at Bockenheimer Warte. The north also resembles more of a traditional railway so even if it were fully grade separated, most of the tracks would still be at grade or at most on embankments (it is a former railway except within Riedberg). On top of that, the S-Bahn trains have a higher door density compared to the U-Bahn trains (per 100m, 18 pairs of doors on the S-Bahn, 16 on the U-Bahn).

What I learned from this video: Metros gain capacity by frequent turnover of the passengers. No one is expected to stay on one for very long, so comfort is held to a basic level. The emphasis is on passenger permeability, so they have multiple doors and multiple connection points. Trains have more passenger time per trip, so this prioritizes speed of the vehicles and passenger comfort.

Awesome! Love this channel, thanks for the detailed video.

something about the london undergrounds branching: Each line on the london underground built for a very long time was a completely separate railway company, every other line was a competitor above all else. While a lot of these companies realistically were operating multiple lines every companies services was simply labeled as one line anyway.