The great era of metro railways is just beginning
ON a winter's morning in 1863, a revolution in urban living began.
A group of dignitaries boarded a train in Paddington on the growing north-western fringes of London, and travelled by tunnel six stops to Farringdon, just north of the old heart of the city.
The Metropolitan Railway, which you can still ride today as part of the London Underground, was the first to put regular trains on dedicated tracks, cutting through the gridlock that would otherwise plague modern cities.
Over the years, networks sprouted in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Moscow, Hong Kong, Cairo and elsewhere. By 2013, they encompassed more than 130 cities, stretching 10,922km – sufficient to get you from the Equator to the North Pole.
What's most remarkable is what has happened since. Far from slowing down, we've added almost as much track in the past 10 years as was built in the previous 150, hitting 20,453km in 2023, according to new figures from UITP, the International Association of Public Transport.
Not all urban railways are considered metros. (The UITP counts only figures for lines running regular services on dedicated tracks. That means that many suburban commuter services, street-running trams and light railways, and lines with only occasional services are excluded from the figures – not to mention buses and minibus services.)
The great era of metro railways is only just dawning.
That might seem surprising if you live in one of the many developed cities where extensions of ancient public transport systems are slow, multibillion megaprojects that can take decades to finish. Pay a visit to Asia, however, and it's immediately obvious where the growth has been.
From a 19 per cent share of the global track network in 2012, China had grown to a 43 per cent share by 2023. The boom extended to the most isolated places. After barely seven years in operation, the Guiyang Metro in the mountainous backwater of Guizhou province carries more passengers than Chicago's L train, opened in 1893.
Mainland China has 28 systems busier than Guiyang, including the four biggest globally in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
It's by no means exclusively a Chinese story. Over the same decade, metros carrying more than a hundred million passengers annually have been opened in Dhaka; Salvador, Brazil; Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai; and Lima. Riyadh's, which started in December, will hit the same scale during its first 12 months in operation.
Dozens of smaller networks have started up since 2013, too, in Doha, Ho Chi Minh City, Isfahan, Jakarta, Lagos, Lahore, Panama City, Quito and a host of other places.
Not every transit project is a success. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Abuja, Nigeria, Chinese-built public networks opened in 2015 and 2018 respectively struggled due to poor planning, sparse timetables and a shortage of local parts.
In Karachi, the biggest city in the world to lack a metro network, a commuter railway circling the city was closed in 1999 amid a welter of mismanagement, fare dodging and corruption. Talks about reopening it with yet more Chinese money have been dragging on for years.
Those are exceptions, though. Once built, most metros attract the passionate loyalty of their passengers and the enthusiastic assent of urban planners, ensuring that money will be found to keep them going through the darkest times.
After all, the past decade's boom took place against the backdrop of probably the single biggest blow ever suffered by urban public transport – the Covid-19 pandemic. The collapse of office work during lockdowns, followed by the more gradual shift towards working from home, was financially devastating.
At the time, many feared that public transport may enter a death spiral, as declining ticket sales forced networks to reduce services, further depressing passenger numbers.
Covid-19 has left a long shadow, to be sure, but things are improving rapidly. As many as 58 billion people took trips by metro in 2023, according to UITP, finally surpassing the 57.9 billion in 2019. That's helping to repair budgets.
In the worst days of the pandemic, London's Mayor Sadiq Khan warned that one of the Underground's lines may have to close altogether to help the city balance its books. In 2024, Transport for London posted its first operating surplus in the transit agency's 25-year history.
The shift of billions of passengers from roads to rails is helping save hundreds of millions of metric tonnes of carbon emissions, but that's probably not the largest benefit. While the carbon footprint of a metro trip is vastly smaller than in a private car, it's about the same as that of a shared minibus – the main competitor in the developing megacities where urban rail networks are growing fastest.
Instead, the greatest advantage of the shift is the way that it is freeing hundreds of millions from the drudgery of endless traffic.
A future where it's more pleasant to live and work in the walkable centres of dense cities rather than sprawling, car-dependent suburbs will be one that's better for the climate, for our economies and for human happiness, too. — Bloomberg
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy.
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