I was in Paris in July, and was thoroughly impressed with the metro system. I always had an impression that Paris was a dirty city by western-european standards but I actually found the metro stations incredibly clean (and I travelled on multiple lines and through hub stations like Chatelet). In comparison, my city, Ottawa, has struggled to get one line functioning reliably in almost five years of trying, and the stations are filthy by comparison.
I work in rail software. One reason NA is moving slower than expected is software standards. No, really.
Europe does rail pretty well, all things considered. Well enough that companies (like mine) eventually get subcontracted to build things for the North American market as well. Problem is, rail is a highly regulated industry, which means lots of mandatory software documentation.
European countries all use the EN documentation standards. The US and Canada tend to use the IEEE-1558 and its ilk. Neither document is a subset of the other; there exists no easy list of differences between the two standards to allow compatibility.
So the actual software development goes pretty smoothly -- then someone realizes there's no standard-conforming documentation and the whole project grinds to a halt. Often for years, because the number of people who are fluent in writing docs for/translating docs between both standards in any given country, you can count on one hand. I am rumored to be one of them.
There’s also the other way around it, which is just allowing both regulatory regimes.
The FRA basically just did this for European rail vehicle standards, which are different than US ones significantly. The issue is that the US market is generally too thin to support US-specific passenger rail manufacturers who would happily comply.
It mostly legalizes European trainsets with minor adjustments, though Japanese sets would need significant reworking since they follow yet another standard. But this is important, because an FRA-compliant vehicle at 220MPH basically does not exist, and those have become legal if in their own exclusive right-of-way; and alternative compliance trainsets can now operate with regular American freight trains below 125MPH, which is basically the entirety of the network today anyways.
Maybe with a substantial investment into ML. I'm looking into this possibility myself, with a Django backend and a zillion possible fields to fill out.
That's just a Canadian problem. Canada is the most overrated of all the developed countries and once you travel you realize that even some developing countries are now better than that. The smugness and the sense of superiority they have at not being the US is delusional.
The US is like this too. Almost no American cities have reliable public transit, and even in those that do, like NYC or Chicago, the stations are pretty filthy in my experience.
Also, I feel like this is an unusually hostile comment.
Not just hostile, but an ironically delusional comment considering what you're correct in stating about the U.S, but also that Ottawa is a newsworthy exception among cities in Canada with municipal trains, save for perhaps the first week after Montreal's recent build.
To anyone who's "started travelling" (how smug), they'd realize that Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, maybe even Calgary and Edmonton to lesser extents have viable or great municipal train systems. They aren't Tokyo great, or Paris great, but they are pretty good and usually clean.
Among developed countries, I can think of a few that since visiting, while novel, I've actively chose Vancouver over; other cities in Canada would probably not win out, but that's why broad statements about countries shouldn't be taken seriously.
Definitely. I live in Vancouver and it's quite good for North America.
There's also a decent amount of anti-public transit people here that tend to make their job a bit harder. I live in a part of town where almost everyone except me drives and I remember chatting to my neighbors when we had a transit funding referendum. The details are a bit hazy because I think it was around 2016 but in my area people were more or less unanimous when it came to preventing public transit funding.
I do have a few personal gripes about the new skytrain line being full at rush hour but for what it's worth I had the same issue with the main circle line in Tokyo. Rush-hour is rush-hour no matter what your method of transport.
Agreed on all fronts. Those Tokyo lines are insane at rush hour, and almost dead silent at every other time; it's kind of the nature of homogenous commute types, it's just hella more efficient to do it with trains than anything else we have. Thankfully, the new subway extension should help distribute people a little more evenly, and I believe TransLink is looking start running longer trains, which should provide a little more capacity at peak times.
DC has an advantage in newness and in materials selection (tiny tiles with lots of grout looks cool for 5 minutes), as well as having relatively fewer station layouts.
It was specifically a Great Society program meant to contrast with Soviet metros and their ornate architecture. NYC and London have the issue where they were first generation systems trying to figure out what worked and what did not.
DC’s general height limits in conjunction with typical American SFH friendly zoning also do not help utilization.
That’s america in a nutshell. We can’t infringe on people’s precious individual expression and self actualization after all. That said in the DC system, expense was traded off in favor of cleanliness and lack of crowding—the stations are enormous (and very costly).
As a newly-minted Canadian I've noticed that as well. I moved to Toronto from Istanbul five years ago and while I was away, Istanbul added 75 kilometers to its metro. That's longer than the entire Toronto Subway.
All this talk about being a world-class city, while nobody knows when Eglinton Crosstown, a "subway" line using streetcar ("LRT") tech that's been "in progress" since 2011, will open. Don't even get me started on SmartTrack :)
The term "World class city" is meaningless to people who aren't politicians or consultants pitching to the International Olympic Committee.
NYC and Chicago are dream cities for many, some Torontonians included. Does that mean that their transit stations aren't teeming with capybara-size rats? That they don't have problems with homelessness and poverty?
And I say this as someone who lives in the 'burbs and is upset that the LRT delays have continued as long as they have.
It isn't just a "Canadian" problem. You see that all over the USA too.
Also, why the hostility? I've never met a Canadian that expressed a sense superiority about not being part of the USA. I've met plenty who are proud of their national identity, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's quite admirable too, in my opinion. Nation-building isn't easy.
I am not the parent but the comment does have some merit (and I say this as a Canadian). For a lot of things we simply gloat that we’re better than the US and then end up thinking that our work is done.
Classic case is health care (‘look, we spend less than the US and have free healthcare’) where instead of looking up to countries with better healthcare outcomes than us, we look down on America and act smug. Other cases include our climate record, and post secondary education.
I am yet to meet a fellow Canadian who hasn’t complained about our health care system. It seems to be one of the main discussions around provincial elections.
> Classic case is health care (‘look, we spend less than the US and have free healthcare’)
Who is saying this, other than low-information Americans on social media hung up on the word 'free'? Every Canadian knows that the reality is much more complicated with capacity shortages since Covid, and an opportunistic provincial government in Ontario doing its very best to push further privatization.
A very large part of Canada's national identity is "not being the US". The two countries are so similar, that Canadians hold on with their fingernails any marginal difference and any criticism is responded to with "it could be worse, we could be like the US".
I don't know. I heard this narrative a lot more during the trump era, and I rarely hear it now. I have a pet theory that it comes up in popular Canadian culture when a republican is in office and dies down when a democrat is there.
Maybe it’s changed, but the “Canadian identity” has long been this amorphous thing many Canadians quietly fret over because nobody is quite sure what it is but they're sure it exists.
Since US and Canada are so similar, a lot of the discussion of identity are around the differences, which to me is a weird way to talk about a national identity.
It also comes up a lot when someone mentions something positive about the US that Canada struggles with, say economic growth - then it becomes a common refrain of “yes, but at least X is better in Canada than the US”.
It’s also used commonly in discussions in healthcare - any change is described as “Amerification” of the healthcare system even those the change would just make Canada more like European systems.
Maybe it’s unavoidable being right next door to the US, I don't know.
Bashing Canada is like hitting Mickey in Disneyworld. Having said that, just google 'an honorary member of the Third World' to find the answer is (was actually) Canada.
I was in Montreal recently and the metro is one of the nicest I’ve used. It was on time, reliable and well designed. The stations are all architecturally interesting, and some of them even “beautiful”. The trains are very comfortable and unlike most metro’s, the lighting is soft and doesn’t overwhelm your senses when taking at night. Also for anyone interested in trains, the rubber tires on an interesting touch, albeit limiting if they wanted to expand the metro above ground.
I disagree that it's easier than the NYC subway. The 'zone' system is complicated for tourists who aren't used to dealing with that. Contrast to NYC subway where it's $2.90 (formerly $2.75) to walk thru the turnstile and go anywhere. It seems like Paris is adopting a similar model which is nice to see. NYC also has nearly 170 more stations than Paris.
What is hard to use about it ? The machine or the teller will give you the proper ticket.
Plan highlighting the zone are in every stations and cars. ( on top of the doors )
Not living there anymore but I think those zone are on the way out anyway. They make it more expensive for folks with less income.
> I actually found the metro stations incredibly clean
it depends on the time of the day and the standards you're used to.
I am from Rome, not the cleanest city in the World I might say, but I used to go to Paris frequently, my ex girlfriend lived there for 10 years and I found Paris a terrible patchwork of "looking clean, but not really clean", "smelly and not in a good way" and "rats on the streets of the center not scared at all by the people" together with "there are actually people living in the catacombs below the building I'm currently living in and we can't do anything about it"
We both were victims of robbery a few times and attempted robbery several times (one time I put my hand in the pocket of my jacket and shacked hands with a burglar that was looking for something to steal) in the metro stations, so we usually were very worried when we had to get one, we ended up walking a lot to avoid the stress, which ironically turned out to be a great idea, if there's something good I can totally agree about Paris is that it is one of the best cities to take a long walk.
I assume that this is an advertising piece to promote the newfound cleanliness for the upcoming Olympic games in the city, it's happening the same in Rome for the 2025 Jubilee.
Every metro feels like a miserable experience when compared to what you have in Tokyo. This extends to trains in Japan in general. Transport is expensive in Japan, but quality is unmatched on all aspects I can think of: timeliness, reliability, service, comfort, security, cleanliness, extensiveness,... From what I've heard, working for JR (Japan Rail) is considered a honor.
I think the Paris metro is average-good compared to my experience in other countries. It has its quirks, and strikes are a thing but I have used it extensively (I have lived in Paris for several years) without big problems, and I arrive most of the time within a few minutes of the expected time (in Tokyo, that's seconds!).
> working for JR (Japan Rail) is considered a honor
Also the thing to remember is that part of the reason JR works so well is because of the defined career path.
For example, you don't just become a Shinkanzen driver, you have to follow the career path:
- Work two years as station attendant
- Work two years as a conductor
- Work two years as a standard (non-Shinkanzen) train driver
Only then can you progress to the Shinkzansen training and examination.
The result is you have people working on the railways who are intimately familiar with both the system as a whole and the impact they and their actions can have on others. Which is a very Japanese thing, life is not just about you but your impact on others around you.
As a foreign tourist from presumably from NA or Western Europe, then it will seem pretty affordable compared to your home country. Relative to Japanese cost of living and average income however, certain lines and services can be pretty expensive (particularly the shinkansen and certain JR services).
> Every metro feels like a miserable experience when compared to what you have in Tokyo
I’ve never taken it, but I’ll note I’ve never personally taken public transport to match Bangkok’s BTS and MRT, which are both excellent, although it’s very irritating they haven’t implemented cross-system billing yet
Unavoidable except if you price it up so much that people start using the car again. For the same reason why there will always be be traffic jams no matter how many streets there are and how many lanes they have.
And I'm not even talking about how the Paris metro is narrow, dark and stinky.
The Paris area train system (if you consider metro + other trains) is reliable inside Paris, and the very close suburbs, but as you get further away it gets extremely shitty. In some cities (with RER) daycare will refuse families where both parents work in Paris because they know they can't reliably be on time to pick up the kids and will end up with late parents.
Also metro stations in Paris are so close it's very slow. The only exception is line 14 which is the most recent. It's also the best line but it's the only one.
Overall, they're making a big fuss about the Grand Paris and while it is a big deal, it's not going to make it the best transportation system for cities of that size. I'm just really catching up on fixing the very broken transportation system for anyone living outside of Paris itself - which is only 105m2, very small for the population living in the greater Paris area. It's roughly the size inside the Yamanote line.
First, it's unfair to compare any subway to Tokyo. Tokyo's public transit system is on a different planet. It will always win by a landslide.
Second, the Paris metro is dramatically better than New York's in terms of pleasantness of the experience and arguably better than London's and DC's, both of which are pretty pleasant by any standard that does not include Tokyo.
It's precisely because Tokyo is the best that we should compare everything else to it. That's the standard that every urban planning expert and functioning council should try to achieve.
Nah...Shanghai metro is no where near Tokyo in terms of pretty much every aspect. The only thing it is better is price (starting from 3 CNY, or about 60 JPY, whereas Tokyo metro starts from 180 JPY).
It has better toilets, infrastructure, newer trains, much bigger (thus stations are almost always nearby), and integrated as a system as opposed to multiple metros in Tokyo, and so on.
Better toilets? When was the last time you came to Tokyo? Just before a bunch of big international events leading up to the Olympics, there was a crazy (re-)building boom for public toilets. And, if I know anything from experience in mainland China, their initial build is "wow" and (lifetime) maintenance "sucks". The public toilets will stink like most big cities in China after a couple of years. Where as Japan will put incredible effort into maintaining their public toilets.
Newer trains? Yeah, sure, because the network is newer. I can recall riding the maglev in Shanghai from the airport. The first thing that I noticed: The seat covers were filthy. So typical mainland China.
"[M]ultiple metros in Tokyo"? Use the Suica/Pasmo payment card. Hardly anyone thinks about what operator they are riding in 2023: They are thinking about destination and convenience. And, be real: The reason why Tokyo has so much complexity is the age and history of the system. (London, Paris, Berlin, and NYC have similar stories.) If Shanghai was rich in 1920 (well, it was, but that wealth was controlled by colonialists) and building metro lines, it would surely look different today.
Better toilets? Seriously? The toilets in the Shanghai Metro (or in China, in general) are among its worst features. Many are quite dirty and smelly, and most, if not all, lack soap and toilet paper.
Regarding infrastructure, yes it's new in Shanghai, but new != better. For example, the station floors may look shiny in Shanghai, but they become quite slippery on rainy days—a non-issue in Tokyo. Another example is that many trains in Japan have different air conditioning in different cars even within the same train, a subtle but welcome feature for those sensitive to temperatures—no such thing in Shanghai. Lastly, unlike Japan, metros in Shanghai/China still lack public timetables in 2023. A timetable can save you a lot of time by allowing you to plan your trip.
I agree that the integrated metro system in Shanghai is better for travelers.
It is too bad that the Seoul metro doesn't get similar coverage. I guess there are fewer Seoul geeks here compared to Tokyo geeks. The metro, including suburban and high-speed rail is "knock your socks off" good.
I was told that there is a hotline for depressed Japanese when they come to Paris and find out that it's not like the stories they are told.
"Paris Syndrome is a psychological condition experienced almost exclusively by Japanese tourists who are disappointed when the city of lights does not live up to their romantic expectations."
The Japanese Embassy in Paris now has a 24-hour hotline for Japanese tourists suffering from the syndrome, whose symptoms can range from depression and anxiety to acute delusional states, dizziness, sweating, hallucinations and "feelings of persecution."[1]
I am not sure what one even has to do to get mugged in NYC. And I am saying that as someone who has walked across Manhattan through Times Square on multiple occasions after midnight, all while very properly inebriated.
However, there is imo no way to avoid seeing rats if you used NYC subway more than once and had your eyelids up.
I'll be the first to admit the city cleaned up a lot between my first vist there in the late 1970s and more recently a year or two ago ... that said, for whatever reason, a lot of non American first time visitors seem to still carry that '70s image of NYC as a crime hub.
Might be all those 'classic' NYC films exporting a vibe.
I still haven't seen an NYC rat chase a cat while carrying a pizza though, admittedly I'm an infrequent and short term visitor.
I was a frequent visitor to Manhattan in the 2000s, and I generally felt very safe at any time in midtown, and the upper east and west sides. My recent visit last year (the first in 10 years or so) was shocking in how much Manhattan had deteriorated in terms of safety. I don't know what it was like in the 70s so I can't compare.
I’ve heard of a reverse cultural phenomenon of people visiting rural villages in England and being surprised at the prettiness of them, where most English people would find them mundane.
I can believe that - hoping to experience it first hand in the near future. Still, was impressed by Paris in general (or at least, was more impressed than I expected to be!)
This is a bit of an exaggeration. The Paris metro is about as fast as the Tokyo metro, its just that the Tokyo metro is a larger and denser system, since it is serving a larger and denser city.
Tokyo's metro region is smaller than Paris and fits more than 3 times the people. The metro's top speed is up to 5 times as fast as Paris's metro. It's on a completely different scale. And given that Paris is Europe's second busiest metro system it tells you something.
It is unfortunately a bit hard to compare the length of the system, since it's hard to distinguish between the local lines that are not operated by tokyo metro vs. the longer distance ones.
The metro's top speed is up to 5 times as fast as Paris's metro.
I would not call the Tokyo subways lines (both companies) very fast when riding a local train. I went to Paris for a week and found the metro lines fairly similar.
You are correct, taking the reference speed as measurement is not a valid line of reasoning.
The average speed is higher, the speed is lower the closer the stations are together, but the speed also depends on the line; i.e. the Ginza line added ATS(automated train stop, added in 1993). I just learned that Paris' Line 14, that went into service in 2022, also drives at accelerated speeds, it's the first line with ATS in Paris. I think the main problems that need to be addressed with respect to higher speed transportation are the following:
1. the breaking system needs to be assisted (ATS)
2. the railway needs to be replaced and reinforced
3. turn angles can't exceed a certain degree
1 and 3 are a design issue that isn't really addressed in older metro system, and 2 is probably a political problem. Contrary to my previous belief it seems that France is at least trying to address some of the points in their metro extensions, which is nice.
The tokyo metro is much cleaner and does not smell like piss, has none of the homeless population living in and you can be safe in day and night. Only a blind person with a blocked nose could pretend its about the same.
Tokyo metro has its drawbacks as well, namely, I found the stations rather difficult to navigate for foreigners. Of course this being Japan there are many nice people eager to help everywhere, but (again of course) they don’t speak english.
Tokyo has signs in English everywhere. It is difficult to navigate the first time you are looking for a connection but after a few days you get used to how things work and how to find your way. There are also tons of apps you can use to help you.
In Tokyo it's simple for a foreigner, open Google Maps, enter your destination, the app gives you the number where you have to go, you take your train, and that's it.
Last time I was there Google Maps weren't good at navigating through the stations. And the signs at the stations were difficult to follow compared to other metro systems I'm used to.
I'm sure everyone is able to figure it out, but IMO they could take some inspiration from e.g. London or Paris.
One tiny thing they could do to improve metro stations: Put big stickers on the floor that guide you to an interchange or an exit. Most stuff in Tokyo is "up" (overhead signs), but they could also use "down" to improve things. I was recently traveling on the metro in Kunming (Yunan Province, China), and I noticed they use the "down" part very well to guide you -- with Chinese and English. It was very helpful in more complex stations.
One more idea: Tokyo metro stations don't make a lot of use of colour schemes. I have used some metros that use very loud colour schemes all throughout the station to guide you to interchanges. Again: Very helpful for visitors.
It also helps to learn the Katakana alphabet, which is easy enough for any computer nerd that one can do it on the plane to Tokyo. You can then sound out the syllables on signs and know that
アキハバラ sounds like "Akihabara" and thus you're on the right train.
You just need to learn that there are multiple metros and some JR trains, and then it will become easy to understand. Modern metro apps and maps can calculate the path using all of those without any problem.
I remember finding it very busy, but we’ll organise - helps that most signs are bilingual.
And the station staff are really helpful if you look lost.
The hardest part was the ticket machines but that’s common all over I find.
What year did you ride the Tokyo metro? Jesus, on most lines there are four languages -- Japanese, English, Korean, Chinese. And, the newest ticket machines have many, many more languages -- even Thai!
I was there in 2014 and was struck by how gross the metro stations in Paris were. I was there again this month (got home yesterday) and was struck by how much cleaner and nicer the stations seemed. I assumed (with no information) that they’ve been cleaning them up in advance of the Olympics. In any case, my experience this time was quite good. Certainly way better than the NYC subway (still not as good as Tokyo).
If there was a labour strike, then obviously people would not be cleaning up. In Italy, waste management workers were on strike for part of 2023, leaving the capital Rome with piles of trash on the sidewalks for long periods of time.
maybe you went on different lines that the ones I'm using, but I never found the most of the stations clean. Or it's just still better than what you're used to (I don't have much experience with subway in other cities)
I certainly did not take all of the lines and did not alight at all stations I crossed, but I was still prepared for much worse! To provide a point of comparison - the busiest stations in Ottawa all smell of urine almost all the time and they see much less traffic than their counterparts in Paris. It is in some ways a uniquely Ottawa problem but it was still nice to use the Paris metro to travel in the city.
Vienna metro was even cleaner and slightly less sketchy than Paris, but that is also not a fair comparison in terms of size and demographics. The Delhi metro is almost equally impressive as Paris's in convenience but feels about as clean as Ottawa.
For anyone interested to learn about the nighly cleaning routine for the Delhi metro, I strongly recommend to Google something like this: Why is the Delhi Metro clean?
Most Indians gush at the cleanliness of the Delhi metro. It is a world ahead of most average India Rail cars and stations. (I'm not speaking of long distance, upper class cars. Those are amazing, but ridiculously expensive.)
The old Marunouchi and Mita trains used to be pretty dirty (by Tokyo standards!), but both have been upgraded in the last five years. The classic "oyaji smell" is gone from both trains now.
When I was there in 2008, Paris was filthy by western standards. But oddly the Metro system was cleaner than NYC (though NYC is also filthy by western standards).
How about Berlin's S-Bahn and U-Bahn? I was really impressed when I travelled there on holiday. Very clean, punctual, and frequent. The stations are pretty old, but well maintained, and the train cars were reasonably new and clean.
The idea that Paris is a particularly dirty city is spread by far right groups to fuel racism. I've traveled to many large cities / capitals and Paris is at worst average. Exceptions like Tokyo (that everyone loves to parrot when the subject comes up) are precisely that, exceptions.
It is funny to call fueling racism when saying Paris is particulatly dirty while at the same time admitting it cannot be compared to city like tokyo.
Because I guess if compared then it would look particularly dirty.
By the way seoul is also way cleaner than Paris, I believe Singapore too.
Having been to Tokyo, Singapore and Seoul, I can categorically say that Seoul is not in the same league as the other two. Having said that, all three are far and away cleaner than my city of Melbourne, Australia, which has taken an absolute dive in the last 15 years (I've been studying and working in the CBD for 40 years).
Holy crap -- I have posted so many times today and I forget to mention Singapore (and Hongkong). Hat tip to you, sir/madam. Singapore's subway is very clean. In my experience, the total system load is way higher in Hongkong, but they do a tremendous job keeping it clean.
Compare to Stockholm... Paris will be "dirty", as ofc there is way more people. But still. But yes if you come from Canada or USA, Paris will look amazing to you.
I respect the 40B investment by Paris, but also mentionable is that city by car is very doable. It almost felt like a secret treat we had this rainy summer holiday - no congestions and we could park side of street at all the hot spots paying with one of the parking apps.
I mainly know the older, shallow line inner city routes. I've used the existing ?SNCF? Hookups to Orly, CDG and the Thalys North into Amsterdam, it works well. Paris was always an exemplar for modernisation in a time where the O.G. London underground was a bit moribund (rubber wheels) but retention of the carnet system beyond its life and a surge in London transport investment rather upended things.
This is a huge expansion. Being brave enough to build rings is great: most capital cities obsess with spokes to existing hubs, or like the Elizabeth line do a single slash across.
Moscow’s situation is funny in part because a number of diagonal slashes is closer to what the city needs (the central parts are probably an order of magnitude over design capacity during rush hour and essentially never under it), but the plan for those got turned into a ring because apparently the infrastructure to turn trains around at the ends was too difficult to build.
The other new ring is a fairly old preexisting train line that used to be cargo-only; it had the potential to be great, but unfortunately the ridiculously long connection times have made the real thing somewhat niche—if both your origin and your destination aren’t on it, the ten to fifteen minutes’ walk will likely make the result worse than just going through the center. And two connections are just never worth it.
(There’s a whole story behind how building stupid useless connections came to be viewed as a virtue in Moscow transport planning—look up “Vykhino effect”. Doesn’t make the result any less shit, though.)
Aren't the diagonals also being built? Primarily, if I recall correctly, by reusing existing passenger rails corridors and connecting their services instead of terminating them at the main stations.
Fair point, though those are not the ones that people were talking about since the 90s—but then nobody could imagine you could wrangle the railway (a national service with a peculiar culture) into cooperating with the metro (a municipal one), that’s unironically an achievement of the current city administration.
That these are being “built” is once again a bit too strong a statement—the rail lines were already there and in use for cargo and the occasional suburban train. (The veeery slooow speeds at which the latter went between the big stations had relegated them to the sole use of urban arcanists and the occasional exhausted hiker disembarking from his long-distance train.) There’s some renewal of the aging rails, to be fair, and the stations are new.
Two problems with these:
First, the stations are too few and once again too far away from anything else. (Nobody’s fault—the rails are sometimes a century older than the metro and the outward creep of the city limits.)
Second, unlike on the ring, the trains on the chordal lines (I refuse to call them “diameters”) are operated according to the railway rules, meaning there are too few of them to be able to disregard the schedule, the schedule itself is at best a suggestion (and woe is you if you don’t keep track of train cancellations), and the stupid multi-hour midday “maintenance breaks” are still in place.
I’ve used these lines for weekly commutes, and if they fit your problem well, they can be very useful. But overall I’d say they are even more situational than the ring, and it’s frustrating compared to my utopian headcanon of how well they could work. Or hell, to the RER lines in Paris, even if those connections are no joke either—nevermind the Barcelona Rodalies, which are (or were, two decades ago) the platonic ideal of suburban/urban rail transport interconnection.
That's very interesting. I currently live in Barcelona, and most people would be very surprised to see Rodalies held up as any sort of platonic ideal of anything. Though it is true that it could be a great transit network, given the necessary investment in its maintenance and improvement. Perhaps in two or three more decades.
I think you are too harsh on the Russian railway - it did carry a lot of people on their daily commute from their satellite towns to Moscow. The schedule is also quite reliable. It wasn't used much for intra-Moscow travel due to the issues mentioned, that is correct.
I was too young to remember clearly at the time, but I think I experienced the Vykhino railway-metro connection a few times in the early 2000s. I don’t seem to remember the original connection that’s said to have given the name to the “Vykhino effect” (wherein the suburban rail arrived at and the metro departed from the opposite sides of the platform, and you could cross it unimpeded, leading to the metro trains being completely full straight from the first stop—the “effect”) was still in operation then. I think the fence was already there on the platform and you had to use the disgusting, stinky, cramped tunnel? (That before the railway started fencing away everything in the name of better ticket controls.)
Yes, the Metro trains were chock full (think Tokyo), and you could only board a train if it skipped Vykhino if you needed to do so on some later station.
I don't think it is possible to be physically unable to enter the train in 2023 (unless football fans return from thei match). In 2003 it was expected.
The rubber wheel metros are mostly a result of lobbying by Michelin. They're an interesting curiosity, but I think there is a reason why they haven't really caught on outside of France...
The Paris Metro lines using rubber tires are almost all retrofitted (line 1, 4, 6 and 11, only line 14 was operated with rubber tired trains from the start).
Retrofitting actually has some advantages for old lines with short station distances, tight curves and steep gradients, whereas new lines can be planned with the limitations of rail technology in mind.
The Chinese have nearly doubled the metros built in both number and mileage in the last two decades. And pretty much none of those are rubber tired either.
Rubber tired metros are also a niche in new metros.
The East Asian economic miracles are all heavily export dependent. Part of the pillar of this industrial strategy is to heavily support emerging technologies, because they can then gain economies of scale, first mover knowledge, etc. This has happened before, with technologies like plasma screens, LCDs and LEDs, and is now happening in China with solar panels and electric cars. They have developed such advanced manufacturing capabilities so quickly and are now almost insurmountable market leaders, or at least major competitors.
Railways are also part of this strategy. China, Japan and Korea all export railway products from high speed rail to subways to monorails, and so in this context rubber tired metros are another niche technology to get an edge in. Note that this strategy doesn't always work; no one outside of these countries is very interested in maglev trains, for example.
---
The other part of this is development finance. Countries that do not have know-how with big infrastructure projects often look to international institutions to build projects and secure financing. And part of the deal is that if you take French money you must spend it on French suppliers, and this is true for basically any country doing this kind of lending, so basically the lender is getting both interest payments and spending towards its economy. The Chinese and Japanese compete a lot for railway projects in particular; Japan built the Taiwanese HSR and the Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City metros, China is currently building high speed rail in Thailand and Laos, etc.
Those benefits have eroded a bit over time. Rail vehicles have become pretty good at acceleration and deceleration, with acceleration often being limited due to passenger comfort.
Similarly high(er) grades of 8%-10% are now quite possible with high-performing vehicles.
8-10% Woah: Where? Tokyo's Toei Oedo (circle) line is considered steep by modern standards and has special cars with "linear induction motors" that can traverse up to 5% grade.
Wikipedia claims reason for the linear motor on the Oedo line was a smaller loading gauge and therefore smaller tunnels required.
And generally speaking 5 % wouldn't be considered very steep at all by modern standards. Gradients up to 4 or even 5 % weren't uncommon even on older rapid transit systems dating from a century ago, and for modern multiple units I'd regard 4 to 6 % as about par for the course.
And in hilly terrain, a number of systems definitively go beyond that into the 8 – 10 % range, including some new built systems (e.g. the light rail systems in Stuttgart, Tenerife and Jerusalem).
One (or more?) of Paris metro lines is rubber wheel, the one up to la defense, rubber is simply better at climbing hills. The ouchy line in Lausanne is also rubber for the same reason (since it climbs from lake geneva up and up).
Unless you go with a rack railroad, or maybe a cable way, you are only climbing hills with rubber.
So they say indeed! Interesting! I have lived there long enough and didn't notice. They are all pretty quiet. To be fair, it's possible to run on rubber and still mess it up, noise-wise, like BART does with gusto.
To follow up on my previous comment: BART is a master class in institutional incompetence, the Peter Principle in action if you will. So, yes, BART uses steel track and wheels with a steel outer surface but they've still managed to fuck it up ten ways from Sunday.
The article you linked to talks about all the money that BART's thrown at the noise problem without addressing the elephant(s) in the room: BART cars are aluminum tubes that are inherently noisy and BART wears its tracks aggressively. The first iterations had carpeted floors which absorbed some of the noise, but those got predictably gross.
Much of the track noise comes from corrugation because the wheels are dragged over the track. Other systems might grease their wheels so that there's more slip in turns, BART can't. Other systems sand the tracks in wet weather so you don't skid, BART can't. Modern systems have anti-skid systems so that you don't wear the wheels. Bombardier's anti-skid system is awful. So the new cars flat spot the wheels at a much higher rate than the old and you get noisy track (and noisy trains as they thump thump thump down the track). BART grind the rails and the noise goes away for a bit, but it eventually comes back with a vengeance because they're doing everything they can to avoid addressing the underlying problems.
They’re fine. They make for less noise, less vibration, and better acceleration. They might be more expensive to maintain and less common, but there is nothing archaic about them.
One interesting correlation I found is that the rubber tyre metro’s also have platform doors, and the steel wheel metro’s dont have doors on the platforms.
Not really. AFAIK there are platform doors on lines 1, 4, 14 and 13.
Lines 1, 4 and 14 have rubber tyres and platform doors because they are fully automated (or in the case of line 4 in the process of being fully automated). So far Paris only fully automates rubber tyres lines.
Line 13 has classic metal tyres and is only semi-automated, but it has platform doors because it is very high traffic. Most Parisians avoid line 13 at rush hours because it is probably the most packed line in the city.
> This is a huge expansion. Being brave enough to build rings is great: most capital cities obsess with spokes to existing hubs, or like the Elizabeth line do a single slash across.
The equivalent in London would be the Overground which while largely cobbled together from existing tracks was a huge improvement. If you change you can even go in a ring. The projected ridership for these new lines in Paris looks to be about triple that of the Overground.
The Elizabeth line (along with Thameslink) is more like Paris' RER.
I disagree. Look at something like the Chicago el which is a true hub and spoke system. The el needs a ring line since any trip that doesn’t start or end in the loop generally requires taking the bus which is fine but not rapid transit.
By contrast look at the Yamanote line in Tokyo for a great ring that provides tons of connections and gets tons of ridership.
Beijing has 6 official ring roads. There is also a 7th but it isn't considered part of urban Beijing.
It really does suck. I lived between 3rd and 4th ring road in the eastern mid section (around san yuan qiao), and my work was on 4th ring in the northwest section in zhongguancun. So...around the loop I went, it makes the trip 20-30% longer. Line 10 (a loop line between 3rd and 4th ring, line 2 would be the inner loop around 2nd ring) theoretically takes me straight to work from near my house, but I almost never took it because it was just too long (and it was just easier to sit in a taxi on 4th ring if I timed my to work and from work time right).
I started my last stay there in 2007 (my first was in 2002), line 10 only just opened a couple of years after I moved there, let alone all the other subways that were no longer ring lines. Today is very different!
Back in 2002...I had to bus it to xizhimen a lot to grab a subway to sanlitun (forget the name of the station) on line 2! That sucked, but line 2 is a pretty small loop (so lots of time on bus). In 1999, my first trip there, it was only line 1 and 2, and line 1 was broken at Xidan (4th ring was also still a ditch they were building out). Fun times!
A ring is an important traffic egress/ingress source. More often than not, your destination is directly on the ring and you're not using it to make two connections, just one is sufficient.
Moscow inner ring has around the same number of stations than all the ones inside it (counting connections as one each)
NY metro is very fare friendly to working class ~$3 flat for anywhere in the network, and not considering subsidies, monthly etc.
Willing to give up art and deco for keeping the fares where they are - agree modern tech upgrades is necessary and is being made now with Biden's admin help. I hope they keep the low fares
I wanted to check their respective median household incomes and am shocked to discover that they are about the same. NYC at $70k and Paris at $72k. I had no idea parisians were making yankee money.
L.A. has actually been much better than NYC at building new transit infrastructure over the last 40 years: https://archive.ph/sbTkC. NYC, though, is obviously starting from a much higher base. L.A. should also be working harder to build more faster, but it's not the laughing stock it once was.
You're very generous with LA. The few lines it's built recently (eg Exhibition Line) are so slow that no one in their right mind would take it unless they have absolutely no better option. In Paris, public transport is always the first option.
The speed yes it’s not ideal and at a minimum there should be signal priority or just remove at grade crossings entirely, but land use in LA is really really not good for transit. The built environment is designed to support automobile use and that will hopefully change through TOD.
My point is the distances regularly covered in LA would be absolutely unthinkable in Manhattan and the more urban parts of the outer boroughs, let alone Paris which is a smaller city than San Francisco. So on the one hand we need better land use to reduce distance traveled and on the other improvements to overall speed.
By contrast New York has a built environment that is absolutely fantastic for transit but cannot build enough to fully capitalize on it. Their costs are astronomical and going up.
Traffic reached a tipping point where rail was a viable if not better option. The pandemic changed the calculus a bit but in general never underestimate LA traffic.
Thirty years ago, the rule of thumb was that to get from point A to point B for all points A and B in the L.A. area it will take about an hour. I think these days that rule of thumb has gone up to 90+ minutes, although it’s over a decade since I left L.A.
One thing people don’t realize is that the LA Metro area actually has a greater population density than the New York Metro area. Yes, Manhattan and some of the boroughs have higher density than you’ll see anywhere in Los Angeles, but the low-density areas in L.A. are higher density than the low density areas in NY.
If you start digging into statistics, LA hasn't been getting all that much value out of its public transit investment. Using 2009 and 2019 as base years (partially because 2020+ are screwed up because of the pandemic and partially because that's where I can actually reliably source data quickly), the LA metro area went from 6.2% mode share in 2009 to 4.1% in 2019. NYC increased from 30.5% to 31.6% in the same time frame, and most of the other US cities-with-decent-transit posted similar small inclines (DC being the big exception, but this decade saw an epic meltdown with WMATA, so that's to be expected).
This is a cool infrastructure project, but they really need to sort out ticketing.. Everyone else has adopted contactless EMV with capping, but in Paris they're only introducing the equivalent to London's Oyster (which frankly is a legacy ticketing system in itself and was introduced back in June 2003; over twenty years ago) now in the form of Navigo Easy for tourists. When I last visited, the t+ tickets were paper magstripe tickets that I could only buy using a terminal which required chip+pin and didn't have a proper touch screen but some weird roller you had to use..
They also need to simplify the tickets structure. It is great from obvious which ticket to buy when you are outside of Paris.
And when I write "they", it is from the perspective of a native of Versailles who still has to think hard when looking at the web site in his own language. I cannot imagine for a tourist.
Maybe this has improved (I hope so) but everytime someone visited, I had to do a new PhD in ticketology.
not to mention that we managed to buy a return ticket for CDG "for nothing". because on Sunday morning that part of RER B was not running due to some scheduled work, and the replacement bus ran once every hour, which we missed by a few minutes (because we spent time buying and eating fresh croissants, yes, whahah! but were also completely unaware that we really should go to catch that bus ...), so we had to get a taxi.
oh, and we managed to get trapped at the Versailles station, because we had no idea that the ticket we bought for Zone1-4 was "dans" Paris. whatever that means. of course we got a very stereotypical pointing out by the otherwise kind station attendant :D
oh and the BigMacs in Paris are the best so far I had in Europe... how? and why? and what's the secret!?
> not to mention that we managed to buy a return ticket for CDG "for nothing". because on Sunday morning that part of RER B was not running due to some scheduled work, and the replacement bus ran once every hour, which we missed by a few minutes (because we spent time buying and eating fresh croissants, yes, whahah! but were also completely unaware that we really should go to catch that bus ...), so we had to get a taxi.
The road to CDG is currently a shitshow. I took it two or three weeks ago and what normally takes 45 minutes took almost 2 hours. Good thing I always plan to spend quality time at the airport.
There are plenty of road (and not road) works in the northern part of Paris for the Olympic Games and you never know what you get (and as the mayor of Paris said, we will be late anyway)
> oh, and we managed to get trapped at the Versailles station, because we had no idea that the ticket we bought for Zone1-4 was "dans" Paris.
Weird, because any of the 5 train stations in Versailles should be in zone 4 and you shouldn't had any issue to leave the station... Though honestly, I feel like there's a bunch of things that aren't clear with the RATP system, especially for people who aren't local.
The Big Macs are probably because of some regulation that France established for fast food, and it was in particular targeting McDonalds.
They have to use traceable meat and they can't serve sandwiches if they are not very fresh (no standby allowed like before). I can't find the legislation or any article explaining this because it is quite old (probably 20 years +) but I believe it is something like that.
So, it ensures high quality sourcing as well as fresh cooking, it makes sense that it's better. But it is also way more expensive than neighboring countries in my experience.
I'm comparing it to fresh sandwiches from Barcelona, Budapest and Zürich.
The last one is important, because there's a huge protectionist tariff on beef in Switzerland, so McDonalds is either buying super cheap import meat or using local. (And my guess is that they are not importing, it's simply noticeably worse.)
McDonald in Switzerland is more expensive and often worse than comparable stuff in France, living here near border (Geneva) so had plenty of experience. Many better and healthier options are simply not there in CH menu.
You really see they squeeze every bit of quality to have the cheapest menus possible (I guess due to high CH wages), but at the end they cost the same as normal restaurant with lunch menu offer, so only desperate or not-so-smart people go there when there is competition (after 10pm situation is different unfortunately).
> oh, and we managed to get trapped at the Versailles station, because we had no idea that the ticket we bought for Zone1-4 was "dans" Paris. whatever that means. of course we got a very stereotypical pointing out by the otherwise kind station attendant :D
This is almost a tradition Versailles (or at least used to be - there were changes in the zoning and since I hardly take the train anymore I do not know what the zones are now).
The traditional way is to look surprised and desperate and to go to the attendant with a sad face and they wave you through.
Rhôôôô (← the typical annoyed French grunt). This was some kind of non-event and everyone played along (even our government). No worries, there are much more dangerous things in Paris to be afraid of.
>and the replacement bus ran once every hour, which we missed by a few minutes (because we spent time buying and eating fresh croissants, yes, whahah! but were also completely unaware that we really should go to catch that bus ...), so we had to get a taxi.
YTA here bud, if you had spent less time on the pastries you wouldn't of missed the bus!
T+ ticket are officially phased out right now, but for some reason still work. You can install their app to buy and use electronic tickets or a temporary card where you can store electronic ticket.
The app is incompatible with tons of phones. I have a pixel 4a, hardly an obscure or ancient phone, and for some reason it's not compatible with the app.
Was that recent? I was in Paris in August and I still had to buy paper t+ tickets to ride the metro. It felt very outdated.
I live in SF and travel regularly to NYC and both of those just let me tap my phone and go. It honestly felt weird for the US to be ahead of a major European city in this way.
It depends on the station. Some stopped to sell tickets and just sell refillable cards.
But you can use cards, ticket, or phone in any station.
The only thing you can’t use, which, in 2023 is pretty stupid, are payments cards (so neither Apple Pay and Google Pay). They even had a long fight with Apple for years to get full access to the NFC API instead of going with just payment cards.
Ironically, there are a lot of other cities in France that are compatible with payment cards, but not Paris.
I can imagine that it’s not the same scale to upgrade Paris ticketing vs the smaller cities but since they’ve done a major overhaul anyway …
Paper tickets might be good for anonymity, but that can't be guaranteed. I haven't used the ones for Paris, but many have a unique code printed on the ticket that could be linked with the bank that you used to purchase it through. One would need to buy the ticket with cash to guarantee anonymity, and that itself only with the assumption that 'out-of-band' information isn't obtained (for example, from surveillance cameras or unique identifiers on the cash).
It is possible to have fully digital ticketing with complete anonymity (again, assuming no external surveillance) using zero-knowledge proofs. As far as I'm aware, no such systems have been implemented for ticketing yet, but rapid progress is being made in implementing these for general-purpose digital identity situations.
There's also the much more pedestrian^ option, used for instance in Brussels, where the transport company simply promises not to track individuals even when it would be possible for them to do just that. That said, in Brussels I personally got the impression that a large proportion of passengers did not present tickets when entering a bus or tram, and indeed the Brussels Metro trains don't require that anyway. Thus tracking of individuals' movements would be quickly thwarted by apathy on the part of passengers!
Anonymity cannot be guaranteed, but between the two options, the phone or reusable card based version is guaranteed to invade your privacy to a much larger extent.
At worst, a paper ticket can reveal your location when you buy it, when you start a journey, and possibly when you transfer or end a journey. It's already a close to ideal system: it provides proof of the right to travel in the event of a ticket control, without needing to reveal your identity, destination, past or future journeys, home address, phone number, banking details, or any other extra info. Out of band info exists in either case.
A phone app, which is what everything trends towards and seemingly what most people want to use, almost certainly has access to enough information from your device to uniquely identify you. The default will be to ask for your location, and most will grant it. Now the app knows who you are, where you live, exactly when you travel, who with, to what destinations, etc.
The trend is always towards more surveillance. Regardless of what is technically possible, digital will always struggle to achieve the levels of privacy and anonymity that are trivial with century old technology.
I grew up with the paper tickets, and remember being jealous of people with a Navigo. They could go through the gates so fast, and the contactless tech and little "bling" sound the gate makes when they touch in seemed so futuristic and cool! I never thought I'd come to see the paper tickets as almost too good to be true. That they have survived this long feels like a glitch in history, and in a rapidly evolving world they're a strong reminder of what's being lost.
With the systems in use today, I completely agree: paper tickets give away less information, and even less so on the 'gateless' metros that sibling commenter Too mentioned, such as in Berlin. I'd say that the systems that are most invasive are VISA/Mastercard-based ones such as the London Underground; TfL have immediate access to your bank details from the moment you pass the turnstile.
I hope that digital options which are as private as paper tickets will be implemented, because I don't want 'digital' to mean 'surveillance' by default!
> that I could only buy using a terminal which required chip+pin
Some machine have contactless payment support, it's indicated on them. Sure it would be better to have more but the option exists at last, and I guess more equipment will be upgraded in the future. If anything this is the smallest issue with the subway and the capital in general.
I don't live in Paris anymore but the last time I went you could use your phone very easily to buy and use tickets. The paper thing is a legacy super thing as older people are not familiar with it, bit all means of buying transport have a digital option afaict
Tickets are a relic of the past as a workaround because managing the (back-then exclusively physical) money at each fare collection point was impractical.
Nowadays money is no longer physical for the vast majority of users (instead cards/phones are used), so there is no need for tickets anymore as managing an EMV transaction is just as easy as some internal ticketing operation (in both cases you'd need a network-connected computer).
I'd say "easy" is an overstatement. You have to install an app and master their weird terminology (to get a reasonable price you buy a "carnet" of 10 tickets).
And of course it still only works with Android.
Easy would be following what's being done in major transit systems all over the world: Let people immediately pay for rides without installing or thinking about anything, by tapping their phone on the turnstile. And for a bonus, adopt TfL's fare capping so people don't have to try to game the various discount options.
My point is that the entire offering has lagged behind what I'd expect in terms of ticketing from such a major European city. TfL don't even do a particularly good job at what they do, but they at least get some of the basics right.
Maybe Paris will support iPhones properly and get contactless working in 2030, at this rate?
We went for a week in February and couldn't find a single place that had the Navigo Easy cards in stock - the paper tickets were awful and wouldn't work straight out of the vending machine, ended up wasting a lot of money.
I was able to install the app to buy rolls of tickets (actually heavily discounted on the app vs in person) and use the app via NFC to pay. Never had to deal with paper tickets outside of the airport.
The NYC metro pass system has all of those exact same issues. I find it frankly absurd to be nitpicking such details in the face of such an accomplishment.
what? omni is everywhere and it works great. transfers, weekly caps (slightly less benefits than a weekly pass but still). what is your issue with nyc subway exactly?
> The NYC metro pass system has all of those exact same issues
I wouldn't expect anything else from an American attempt at a public transport (sorry, "public transit") system, unfortunately. Sadly it seems like a very car-centric culture has taken hold in the states which has stifled investment and innovation when it comes to public transport.
OMNY will eventually fix things using tech 'borrowed' from Oyster when it's fully rolled out (which must be soon), but until then it seems like a poor system.
> I find it frankly absurd to be nitpicking such details in the face of such an accomplishment.
The whole customer proposition is important; not just the infrastructure. I am sure the Elizabeth Line in London wouldn't have seen the adoption it has (well in excess of predictions) without an easy-to-use fares system.
Meanwhile Seattle is planning to maybe-kinda-sorta begrudgingly start building one single light rail line to the west side of the city in the next few decades. Maybe it'll be ready by the time I retire.
As a Seattle resident I don’t mind it being gradual, but it is painful seeing its compromised again and again. For example, using slow light-rail vehicles on a regional length line, abandoning a centralised transfer hub, and monumental station designs that are either hundreds of feet underground or hundreds of feet in the air with escalator after escalator adding minutes to every trip.
In 1993 I remember thinking that the skytrain line to UBC in the Vancouver west side would be complete by the time I needed to go to university. They started building it a couple years ago, it's in progress now and last I checked due to people in the neighborhood complaining it won't make it all the way to the university. You have to complete the trip on a bus.
I guess Seattle and Vancouver really do have a lot in common.
Just wait till you read how many (stunning) stations and lines of track in highly sanctioned (and supposedly beyond corrupt) Russia has laid in Moscow, it’s depressing. If they can do it on time and under budget, why can’t America?
The one big advantage single party dictatorships have is that they can build infrastructure way faster than democracies can. There is no opposition party to block spending, and no one to complain about safety issues (I'm sure a bunch of people have died building those stations and tunnels but there were no records). They can also suppress worker complaints about unpaid overtime, and they don't have to negotiate with worker's unions.
China is the same way. They can build infrastructure like nobody's business.
That's only half true. Every party has various blocks, there are still interest groups and various levels of government (city, region, national). You still need to get everybody in line, just not in the same way. Spain has a higher democracy index than the US, yet they build infrastructure cheaper and faster.
To be honest, and this is just my opinion, when it comes to scaling up and scaling out public infrastructure I don't particularly give a damn about what the land owners think.
I guess that goes for almost everyone. Until you are the person disowned. Nimby.
I and my family have been there twice. Thrice if you count my grandfather's quarry disowned by the Nazi's. Me and my parents were lucky to live in a lawful society. Where, at the very least, you can use the law to demand a fair price for the property, else we would've been without a house and without the money to get something new. First the garden for a road. Then the rest of the house for a new trains tunnel. We aren't some rich landowning, rent extracting family; just two working parents with a mortgage loan.
It makes me understand why people oppose windfarms, public infra and such. Even though I also consider such projects crucial to survive the coming decennia.
It's way behind of population growth since new construction is going on like crazy. Still better than nothing and important places became accessible, such as 300 years anniversary park with its waterfront. Also shaved 30-40 minutes from a trip to Kotlin.
Pretty sure the OP is referring to the more relevant fact that in the last decade they've built over 100 new stations and continue to do so at a rate of about 12 new stations every year, no slave labor involved.
That's an odd take: where I grew up (Korea), everybody loves subway stations, and "I'll bring in more subway stations!" is a reliable way for politicians to buy more votes. Everywhere, including the most expensive districts.
I'm afraid the American phenomenon of turning their nose up at public transportation projects is just that - a distinctly American phenomenon. They don't know what they are missing.
I'm sure it can be attributed to a lot of factors.
Geographically, the USA has a lot of space, so it's relatively easy to sprawl. Some places have to be more space-efficient.
Ideologically, the USA has always been about individual rights, private property and self-reliance. Car ownership fits that model of thinking better.
Politically, private companies have always had a lot of influence over government. When the car became widespread, it was easy to influence governments to build highways, favour cars in roads, pass parking minimums, etc.
Historically, the USA has a history of segregation. Public transit mixes people from around the city, and I'm sure at a certain point in time there were people in power interested on reducing that as much as possible. I mean, there's that whole event with Rosa Parks as an example [1].
Moreover, a lot of the USA is "new". With a shorter tradition of city-building and more of a blank canvas to start, I'm not surprised what people expect and how they try to build their cities is different.
Real question: Why don't Korean car companies lobby against the metro? Same in Japan. In the US, the car companies were heavily invovled in the demolition of some mass transit (post WW2).
When an entire nation has bought on the idea that X is desirable, lobbyists can only go so far: you might as well ask why American factory owners don't lobby against Thanksgiving breaks.
Another complication is that subway stations reliably increase real estate prices, and in Korea everybody desires higher real estate prices for their town. (Of course we then complain that the prices are too high and vote for the opposition. And then we demand the new government to increase real estate prices just for my town. The cycle continues. Don't ask me why, it's a whole can of worms.) In Korea, a company lobbying against subway would fare about as well as a company lobbying for real estate tax hike, that is, very poorly.
Or we still haven’t, depending on how you decide which is the biggest airport. BWI had slightly more passengers than Dulles last year; Dulles had slightly more flights than BWI.
It has light rail service to Baltimore, but the Amtrak/MARC connection to DC is many miles away from the airport, connected via an awful shuttle bus that dawdles around the woods wasting 20 minutes of your day. Plus the trains are extremely infrequent. The option exists, but only in the most nominal way.
The airport line from and to the city (RER B) is literally the worst I ever took anywhere in the world. Two issues: there's no room or equipment at people's height for luggages which is infuriating. And it's shared with the local people going to and from the North suburbs, making it very crowded at times. I don't understand why there isn't a dedicated line, or at least a dedicated express train going on the line.
If the RER B is "literally the worst [you] ever took anywhere in the world", then you mustn't have taken public transportation to the airport in many places. At least the RER B... exists! There are so many places where the airport can only be reached via car or taxi, it's insane. Many other places have just a bus. Usually a terrible bus.
Anyone else ever experienced the public transportless hellscape of Cancun airport? Where a short ride into the city is a cool 75 usd, rideshare is chased off by the cartels, and the walk to the highway to take a collectivo bus with incomprehensible route numbers is 1.5 miles away in sweltering jungle heat?
Or how about Tampa, Asheville, Austin or any other medium sized us airport, where train transport doesn't exist at all
How about Boston Logan which is only connected to the main Metro lines by a crappy bus that will add a nice 30 minutes and luggage heaving to your journey
I literally love the rer. It can be much shittier lol
I have to defend Logan just a little here. The new Airport station is a lot less convenient than the old one, but the Blue Line isn't really that useful unless you live in East Boston anyway (or on the Orange Line with a transfer at State St). The Silver Line to South Station is at least as good as the bus to new Airport. Once you're there, you're on the Red Line and by extension a couple stops from the Orange or Green lines.
You are not wrong about Cancun, but you can take the ADO bus downtown for about $6, or rent a car for $25/day in low season or $50/day in high season with downtown return.
Supposedly there was an agreement reached between the federal government and Uber/Didi and they will be able to pickup in January. Remains to be seen. I hope they put the national guard in the terminal to keep the taxi drivers in line.
Actually, about half of RER Bs are express lines which go straight from CDG to Gare du Nord without any stop. They include a large luggage storage area at floor level, in the middle of the car. When you are at the CDG station, check if your train is going to be an express train or if it will stop at all the local stations before you jump in!
> I don't understand why there isn't a dedicated line
Obviously, because it would take away capacity for the regular users?
It's among the most heavily used lines in the world and tourists are probably a single digit percent of users, or less, so whatever funds available are better used to increase global capacity than to provide a better experience for a few people taking the plane.
CDG is also one of the busiest airports in the world and is used by French residents, not only tourists. If they can fill trains with airport traffic then obviously the demand is there, and that makes the other trains nicer for commuters who no longer have to step over luggage and get bonked by giant backpacks.
CDG is comparable to Heathrow. Before the pandemic, Heathrow Express carried 17k passengers/day. That's a bit over 100 passengers per departure, or about 1/6 of the capacity. It turns out that even the busiest airports in the world are barely busy enough to justify dedicated rail service.
Dedicated airport trains are expensive, because the fixed costs are high and somebody has to pay the bills. Their passenger numbers are often naturally low, because they only make a few stops, which are not where most people are going. Metro lines and local / regional / long-distance railway lines that would exist without the airport are always more cost-effective. For many people, they are also more convenient, because they go to the right direction and stop at the right place.
PS: To elaborate, I took this train once and 2 men got on and started a big fight. I was thinking of getting off but the surrounding area looked like a bad one.
I've never taken it since. If there was a nonstop airport express it would be lot safer (and faster)
As a German, living in a car-centric city with egregious and never-finished public transport projects in rich districts, but no functioning public transport, this makes me envious. And it seems very well-thought out, focusing on connecting suburbs.
Please, let this project finish successfully and inspire others to quit the madness of resource waste that is car scapes.
Train connections are a wonderful thing. They really shrink the space between two locations like no other transportation type. Just hop in, read a book or newspaper and suddenly you are somewhere else.
For me it’s a one hour car ride to the next major city (in southern Germany). With the train it takes 25 minutes.
Indeed, the US’s adoption of high speed rail essentially stopped after that point. Which means we have a handful of trains that go about 100 mph and not much infrastructure to support anything better than that which came later.
It’s not backwards, it’s dysfunctional. I remember my dad telling stories of how in rural Bangladesh, flood control levees would fail and have to be rebuilt each year because they were shoddily made by workers who cut corners. The US is the same way. The DC Metro was built as a fully automated system in the 1970s. That has been shut down since 2009–at the expense of ride quality and frequency—because WMATA let all the associated sensor infrastructure decay.
Depends on how you view it: Only a felt 50% of my train journeys in Germany are on time these days, for those with tight connections proably even less. But basically all of the delayed/rerouted ones are still faster / more convenient than any public transportation you find in 99% of the US.
I occasionally travel with DB for almost 18 years no. I cannot remember a time in this period where it was either much better or much worse than now. Of course that's a subjective observation. I take care that I choose direct trains and if I have to change trains in between, I always plan for a delay and take a early connection accordingly. With this strategy I have a positive experience with train rides.
Jealous. There were great “interurban” lines (sort of like light rail of today) all up and down the US East Coast and beyond. At one point you could ride these little local trains on a journey from Philadelphia to New York! Talk about a connected metropolis!
You can still easily do this to get from Philly to NYC. Septa to Trenton, get off and switch to NJT to Penn Station. Runs hourly and costs ~$1. It does take a bit longer than Amtrak, though + Amtrak can be purchased for ~$20 if you time it right
I like the NYC subway for a lot of reasons, but man is it in a bad state. Chambers street station for example. Last time I was there it looked similar, if not worse than in this 2015 photo [1].
Comparing it to the second busiest metro in the Americas, it's crazy how Mexico City Metro, which isn't always "nice", is still so much nicer and much cheaper [2]. Even comparing it to cities with more similar economies— systems in London/Paris are cheaper per ride, but also much nicer.
If that's in reference to OMNY, it's worth mentioning that Paris is actually far behind e.g. New York and London in ease of use in ticketing and turnstiles since in those places you no longer have to even buy tickets or think about anything: just touch your normal payment card on the turnstile.
Although that does seem like the easy part compared to actually building the stations and lines, which is why it's weird Paris hasn't caught up in that area.
I understand your sentiment. I think the way the project is presented ("Let's make the trip to Birmingham 30 mins shorter") is not very helpful either. And while I lack the knowledge to assess the project, I've read some counterpoints to this in an article linked here on hn.
I think it went along the lines of: the couple tracks running from the north towards London from Midlands are all at the edge of their capacity. The HS2 will take some load off those and thereby increase the capacity by X percent for all the commuter trains.
edit: I haven't been following this in the past year. Now I see they scrapped the Euston hub.
Microsoft is one of the most successful corporations in the world, and is widely considered to be undergoing a sort of renaissance under Nadella, so while the intent of this put-down is clear, its expression is pretty clumsy.
Couldn't you just say or link to something concrete to make your point instead? The cost problems of large American projects are incredibly well covered in the media; you're a trivial Google search away from lots of great material here.
It’s been unsuccessful at building high-quality, user-facing products. Which is where I was going with the analogy. The US makes plenty of money too, but falls short in building things you can point to.
I own an iPhone. It’s as buggy as Microsoft products. In the end, Microsoft products are Okay. The reason people criticize Microsoft is politics. First you decide which side is the right one (that’s easy, it’s Linux) and then you use Bad Faith to make the wrong side look as bad as possible.
I have no dislike of Microsoft as a company. But its products and its ability to execute suck. We deployed Office 365 at work and all the rewritten apps are total crap (Outlook, Teams, etc.) They can’t even manage to maintain their own browser engine, which is pathetic for such a large company. I have a surface Duo 2, which is a promising device that’s just a total disaster in execution. The Surface line is sometimes good, but the execution is so bad. They have no ability to sync up with Intel release cycles, so the hardware is perpetually six months to a year old when new surface models are released.
Can you give an example? Generally speaking, when you buy hardware with bundled software, the hardware is cheaper because the software company is paying the hardware vendor to bundle, effectively subsidizing some of your cost.
They merely managed to not destroy it like they do with everything they touch. Doing nothing isn't an accomplishment. Having a look at Azure DevOps might make you aware of what could have gone wrong if they actually touched GH
Our foreign policy experiments are a relatively small percentage of our GDP. It’s not like the money isn’t there for these projects. Even with the foreign wars, the US still spends significantly less of GDP on public services than other developed countries.
> With the same ticket, passengers will be able to take the new métro, change to a bus, then hop on a train to get where they need to go. It practically eliminates the need for a car
The usual bullshit by designers who never consider there are people who need to carry stuff to where they want to go. Or people who cant walk properly anymore. Or people who care about safety at night.
I actually find it rather impressive how accessible public transit can be. It’s quite common to see people with poor or no eyesight and wheelchair users. Also common to see older folks carrying their shopping in a little pushcart. Cities can also be quite safe at night, though this is more true of non-US cities. Cars are also expensive and transit is accessible to low income people.
I understand that you have a particular perspective, probably in a car centered area, but I think you would be very surprised to see the diversity of people using transit in a city like Paris at all hours of the day. It’s a system that works and works well.
It sounds like you failed to consider what “practically” means. It’s all about bringing the use of cars to nearly zero, with the understanding that for the few people who truly need a car all the time, or the many people who need a car a few times, the options still mean that the cars being used go down. For what it’s worth, people who need to carry stuff generally have all sorts of choices between bags and carts, and people who can’t walk well are usually served decently well by accessible stations and trains. Safety is of course a personal preference but solving it by sitting in a two ton bubble is kind of the wrong way to go about it, no?
People who have problems to walk tend to avoid taking public transports that long walkways, long connections, stairs (and elevators or escalators not working, which is a frequent problem in Paris), lots of people who are in a hurry to get somewhere else. It makes for a stressful and pitiful experience. They are much better served by having their own car to remove all the pain.
Sure, public transport is all fine when you are a teenager or a young adult, but thinking it's a good solution for people of all ages and medical conditions is just believing in a lie.
> but solving it by sitting in a two ton bubble is kind of the wrong way to go about it, no?
There is safety with known risks, which is taking a car and driving somewhere, and then completely unknown and random risks when taking public transports in Paris. I prefer known risks any day.
This is definitely not universally true. As long as the transit doesn’t suck (like, miles of walks, long delays) it is commonly used by people of all walks of life. For people with certain disabilities (e.g. vision problems) driving may be completely out of the question and having public transportation can be liberating. Now, I can understand there being issues with things being broken or not wanted to be buffeted around during rush hour, but those aren’t fundamental problems with it. You can definitely improve these by, for example, providing multiple elevators, or at-grade stations. Calling an Uber or taxi once in a while in the absolute worst case is still a massive win for everyone.
And, for what it’s worth, the risks are only unknown if you don’t take public transit. People who are frequent riders know all the good and bad lines and what times to take them just like you probably know which parts of the city you don’t want to drive through at night. Not to mention that a clean, safe, well-trafficked subway can often directly skip you through parts of the city you don’t want to go through.
> Safety is of course a personal preference but solving it by sitting in a two ton bubble is kind of the wrong way to go about it, no?
Safety is also largely a psychological issue. People don’t want to be safe (most of the time they have no clue), they want to feel safe (which depends on personal experience and prejudice). Even a quick and dirty analysis of accidents statistics shows that driving is much less safe than public transport.
How is stuff like this so hard to understand? If you really need to carry something big, or cant walk (and dont have accommodations?), you can just use a car as needed. The point is to make the need for a car as small as possible.
I live in Paris. Just got a 200€ fine coming back from a running session.
Beware, RATP rule enforcers are now dressed as civilians and targets gullible individuals who breaks stupid rules, (mistook my pass with my credit card when i tried to check-in : 50€ for forgetting my pass, and 150€ for entering an quasi-empty bus by the middle door).
I see why RATP resorted to racketeering after all this over-budget fiasco. Hope it's worth it.
I always find it a bit odd when people call it the London Underground or the Paris Métro. Nobody else calls their subway either of those. If you rode the Underground (of for that matter, the Tube/chube), or the Métro, I know where you were in the world.
Maybe it's trying to make Chicago, New York and Tokyo feel better? I dunno.
Underground, perhaps (although German's U-Bahn is the equivalent). Metro, accent aside, is in common use worldwide, isn't it? (Tokyo, Washington DC, to name two Metro systems)
When people say Metro I think the Mexico City Metro. "Metro" is not only used to brand the trains, but also the BRT service ("Metrobús").
When people mention The Tube I do think London though. I haven't heard anyone else call their subway "the tube". To be fair though, the London Underground _is_ quite more tubular than other systems around the world.
Los Angeles does call the light rail system "Metro". The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Los Angeles County (or "MTA"), is often shortened to "Metro". The website is even www.metro.net - which covers busses and rail, but when people around LA say "we took the Metro" they typically mean the light rail system, which is mostly above ground, but there are underground segments of it. When they say "we took the MTA" they usually mean a bus line specific to the MTA system. There are many other local bus lines in addition to MTA, like Culver City Bus, Big Blue Bus (Santa Monica), etc., and "MTA" was always used to differentiate bus lines. It's pretty much only the rail system getting called "Metro" in LA from my experience.
“Métro” is the generic term in French, so more cities than Paris have one. And they call it “the London Underground” in London and I don’t think they really think of making Chicago feel better every day.
