Washington Metro: Easy.
London Underground: Ridiculous. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
That's just right for suburban railway or an overland tram into the city (not to mention local buses).
as for my college home, Tallahassee has only about 125k people during the peak of the school year.
Although the city is twice as big, check out the tram-train network of Karlsruhe [pdf!]. There are tram networks in cities smaller than 125k people.
Subways don't make sense in Florida, anyway, because you'll run into water after digging only a couple of feet.
Not all tunnels are cut into rock (like mountain tunnels or much of the subway in Manhattan). Subways usually run in soil under groundwater (including most of the London Underground), and even rock tunnels can pass water-bearing layers, so that's no problem.
The elevation is simply too low.
Amsterdam and Rotterdam do have subways -- you can't go lower than that :-) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
People 30 kilometers in "banlieue" often have the same commute time ...
Used too. "When the abyss stares at me, it wets its pants." Brian Hopkins
you are the media you consume.
Interesting...
Opened in 1896, it is the third oldest subway system in the world after the London Underground and the Budapest Metro... It remains one of only two underground railways in the UK outside London, ...The tracks have the unusual narrow gauge of four feet (1.22 m), and the tunnel diameter of 11 feet (3.35 m) is considerably smaller than on the London Underground. It is one of the few long-lived metro systems that have never expanded from its original route,
That makes me think, since I will be moving to Aberdeen in a couple of weeks, that will be the first town in Britain I then will have lived, that does not have Underground.... It will be strange.
Opened in 1896, it is the third oldest subway system in the world after the London Underground and the Budapest Metro
When I went to school in then West Germany, I shocked my French teacher with a correction when she got to speaking about the Paris Metro (started in 1900) as "the world's second". (It was the fourth.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
The city I grew up in opened up its first light rail line a few years ago. Ridership has exceeded expectations by quite a margin. There are plans in the works for another line to connect the downtowns of Minneapolis and St Paul (downtowns are 12 miles apart, they are both large-ish American cities that happened to grow adjacent to each other). My guess is that it'll be up and running in 5 years or so.
http://www.reed.edu/~reyn/seoul_linemap_english.jpg keep to the Fen Causeway
Moscow Metro: Perfect in it's simplicity and reliability. Plus beautiful. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
(You should watch the film Kontroll, should it get into a DVD store near you. Marek already saw it, so it must be available in the US.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
The Moscow Metro is undoubtedly one of the wonders of the world, that is for sure. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
Cool. Looks like Spain has some wacky systems too... Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
I remember asking a LA friend about taking public transportation from the airport to his house, he just laughed, public transporation doesn't exist in LA he said :).
As I understand it, the RER, like the Chicago Metra, is not the same system as the Metro, or the el. They are different services on different tracks. Whereas in London it must be the case that the trains to the suburbs are just more stops along the subway line. So the London Underground is taken as one system, where as the Metro and RER are considered distinct entities. An assertion whose validity anyone who has tried to get on the RER with a Metro ticket can attest to. :) Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
The Paris Metro is exclusively a subway under dense inner cities. The RER connects suburban railways across long tunnels with less frequent stations. But if you look at the London Metro, several of its lines go out into the suburbs, even outside Greater London. In fact some lines were re-designated back and forth as subway lines or suburban railway lines. What's more, the suburban railways and subways complement each other inasmuch as there are no subways in South London, but the railways are more dense.
Berlin's S-Bahn also runs on separate track, has a major cross-city tunnel (preceding the RER concept by decades), and complements the subway. In many German cities, there is a "Stadtbahn", which is a mix between our usual notions of trams (form of the vehicles, inner-city street sections), subways (trunk lines moved underground or new sections) and suburban railways (the lines often go out into agglomeration towns).
In fact you can see the differing concepts on the differing line density on the to-scale maps someone liked. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I assume everyone can agree on a central station (and that the choice won't likely change the graph), and you have a graph per D (cool animation anyone?), choice of D might be less consensual
You're allowed to add bridges and stuff crossing nature elements by consensus.
The mainline network has mostly fallen outside of this pattern. It's much easier to get a tube line built or extended than it is to add to the rail system - even the commuter rail lines. There are currently two rail schemes in bureaucratic hell in London - one NS (Thameslin 2000), one EW (Crossrail). Both have been through the committee and planning mill for more than twenty years, and neither seems to be any closer to being built.
So the Tube is effectively filling in the gaps with its own expansion program, especially in the East - at least to the limited extent that it can.
The only big RATP trick is that La Defense is zone 3 using RER but still zone 1-2 in metro, of course lots of worker prefer to pay 3 zones and use the faster RER :).
Boston has a lot of homeless / near homeless people with "eccentric" mental health issues that are well known by the locals. The guy I remember best was probably in his thirties and rode around on a 3 wheeled low to the ground bicycle with a pole and American flag on the back of the bike. He was always singing made up songs at high volumes in approximately the way Barney from the Simpsons might. I saw him every three months or so all around the city during my time there. Back when Orkut was new the Boston group had a thread on him and other "famous" locals like him.
I learned later it was normal to bump in people if you wanted to exit in NYC, no need for "sorry" :).
Parisians do wait on the side of the door so people can exit.
My second surprise was that to change direction you sometimes had to exit the station, repay and go in to go in the other direction: in Paris you can always change direction without repaying.
My third surprise is that a token can get you anywhere, in Paris you have more and more expensive "zones".
To be honest, my first time with the metro in Paris, I had a backpack and when I tried to pass the "portique", it closed on my backpack so I was stuck a few seconds until the next guy did put its ticket to unlock the door :).
Is it true? Ah competition...
a minute with the map to work out which lines you want to use, and a basic knowledge of north south east and west and anyone can get where they want with very little trouble.
(And I live in a town with a population of about 3000 (And we have a university where half the population dissapears every summer)) so it should be even harder for me. ;-) Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
The system that made my head explode was Montreal. Not because it's complicated, because it's really not complicated at all. The problem was that with severe jetlag, and an A-Z which showed the streets running on a N-S grid, I kept losing my bearings. It took a couple of days to work out that the A-Z was tilted around 45 degrees to true north.
After that, everything became easy.
Montreal has the most musical metro in the world. The gearing on the trains plays an arpeggio (about a quarter tone flat on F#, B, F#) as they're starting up. And the names on the announcements sound fantastic, with that unique Quebecois twang.
