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.
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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 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.
New York should read and weep.