"not a big truck," but a "series of tubes"

January 4, 2008 10:03 PM

What other cities (worldwide) have installed subway systems long after being "established?"

A year or so ago, I visited Boston and was blown away by the convenience and affordability of the T. As a native of the Cincinnati area, I was shocked to discover this MetaFilter thread about it's abandoned subway I had never heard about. What would it take to finish the system in Cincy (besides wads of cash, of course)?

Maybe someday when I'm fabulously wealthy, I'll spearhead a project!

posted by cdmwebs to travel & transportation (52 comments total)

Los Angeles comes to mind. It was all built in major metropolitan areas starting in the 1990's.
posted by cali at 10:08 PM on January 4, 2008

Wow, I had no idea LA's was so new.

BTW - this link from your Wikipedia link has some good info.
posted by cdmwebs at 10:10 PM on January 4, 2008

Moscow springs to mind. First line open in '35 or so... I'd imagine most major European and Asian cities that have subways would fall into your criteria London (of course), Tokyo.. etc as the citis themselves are significantly old.
posted by edgeways at 10:15 PM on January 4, 2008

Rome. The subway system's fairly limited because they tend to run into ruins every time they dig, and the archaeological work that these discoveries mandate tends to slow down the whole process.
posted by occhiblu at 10:17 PM on January 4, 2008

Bangkok?
posted by sevenyearlurk at 10:18 PM on January 4, 2008

BART (not really a subway)
posted by caddis at 10:20 PM on January 4, 2008

Athens, Greece.
posted by infinityjinx at 10:21 PM on January 4, 2008

Pretty much any major European city, such as London, Rome, Paris, Madrid, etc. Rome's is definitely a special case, as occhiblu pointed out. It's always being worked on.
posted by cmgonzalez at 10:27 PM on January 4, 2008

It's a weird question, rather backwards, I think. What cities installed subway systems *before* being established, or even while they were being "established? I can't think of any cities which weren't around quite a while (even many centuries) before putting in subway systems. The two oldest subway systems in Europe - in London and Budapest - were both built many hundreds of years after the cities were founded, for example.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 10:27 PM on January 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

Washington DC
posted by mzurer at 10:27 PM on January 4, 2008

I think what the poster means by 'established' is 'after the dominance of automobile traffic over other forms of transportation,' but I could be wrong. So, for instance, the London Underground was pretty extensive by the time automobiles became common after the second world war.
posted by jedicus at 10:34 PM on January 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

Dee Xtrovert: you make a good point. Fortunately you were able to discern what I was after though.

I guess I'm looking for examples of how it was accomplished, or specific accounts of the processes involved from proposal to implementation, etc. Does that make more sense?
posted by cdmwebs at 10:35 PM on January 4, 2008

After posting, jedicus has it.
posted by cdmwebs at 10:38 PM on January 4, 2008

Chengdu, Sichuan, China. It's being built right now.
posted by sleslie at 10:38 PM on January 4, 2008

Athens has technically had a metro for 150 years (granted the city was "established" a hell of a long time before that), but only since the 2000 expansion has it been an extensive, modern system.
posted by Bromius at 10:55 PM on January 4, 2008

London is in the list, mentioned repeated, and it claims to be the first subway anywhere, which seems plausible to me. Evidently it was just normal coal-fired steam locomotives they'd use at first and there are woodcut pictures of people collapsing out of the Underground stations, convulsively cought, soot marks all over their clothes, with smoke pouring out from the entrance to the station. I've been there a few times in recent years and it's all nice and clean now but the tricky things are the complexity and the difficulty in finding out whether any of the lines on your route are down for repairs. There's only ONE underground transit web site, the other ones are rail service sites that might have times and stations for some underground connections but don't know about outages. (oops, doesn't meet your establishment guideline but these other three do.)

Atlanta - saw it ten years ago, small at the time (2 lines) but bright and clear and pretty.

Moscow I haven't been to but there was a show on the History Channel or something called Stalin's Mega-city. And it said that the entirety of the subway system was built by volunteers, can you believe that? Stalin just said "It would make the Motherland proud to have a subway in the capital." and people just streamed in and did it! Working with hand tools, lots of them got killed, but they did a good job.

St. Petersburg, Russia
posted by XMLicious at 11:04 PM on January 4, 2008

Oh, and in addition to underground subway lines Boston has secret subterranean roads for buses. It's quite disorienting if you go to take the silver line and a bus pulls up instead of a train.
posted by XMLicious at 11:07 PM on January 4, 2008

"Amsterdam decided on the construction of a metro system in 1968." (from the wikipedia article). The first line didn't begin operation until 1977. Also, Lisbon ("Construction was started on 7 August 1955, and actual service began on 29 December 1959"), Istanbul (the system was "initiated in 1992 and was completed in 2000"), and Marseille ("Line 1 was opened in 1977") had late-ish metros. This wikipedia page on third-rail lines is interesting.
posted by tractorfeed at 11:15 PM on January 4, 2008

Amsterdam is also a hell of an engineering problem - it's a damn marsh. It's no wonder they had to wait so long, because they just didn't have the technology to monitor the ground shifting underneath their feet. Nowadays, they've got thousands of mirrors mounted along the routes, registering wayward millimeters.

Moscow's subway system is gorgeous, by the way. Marble. Statues. Chande-friggin'-liers. They're also buried so deep that civilians used them as bomb shelters during the war: even on their escalators (they move at warp speed), getting to the trains will take you something like three minutes, if I recall correctly.
posted by laughinglikemad at 11:32 PM on January 4, 2008

Budapest is doing a fourth line now, and (as mentioned) they've got the oldest subway in continental Europe. It's years and years overdue and skillions of forints over budget, and quite a lot of people claim it will never be finished because it's just a means by which corrupt politicians can scam money, so what's the incentive.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 11:36 PM on January 4, 2008

Delhi got its subway system, on budget and 3 (!!) years ahead of schedule, in 2002 . Also, all major cities in India are now in various stages of getting one.
posted by sk381 at 11:43 PM on January 4, 2008

Moscow's does look amazing - inside, layout (cool Google Map mashup) and ridership!
posted by cdmwebs at 11:52 PM on January 4, 2008

Shanghai!
posted by roomwithaview at 11:56 PM on January 4, 2008

Vancouver's SkyTrain (opened in 1985) is mostly elevated except downtown, where the tracks are underground. The new line currently under construction will also be partially underground. I guess it's not a true subway though.
posted by good in a vacuum at 11:58 PM on January 4, 2008

Both Toronto and Montreal have built new lines in recent years, using a combination of cut-and-cover and bored tunnels.
posted by loiseau at 12:28 AM on January 5, 2008

Oh, incidentally half-built and abandoned subway lines and stations are not rare. As an example Toronto began work on a subterranean LRT line along Queen Street West but abandoned it. Toronto also abandoned a subway station which allowed travel from the north/south line to the east/west line without changing trains, after only a few months of use.
posted by loiseau at 12:33 AM on January 5, 2008

There is (was) an abandoned subway under New York City--built by a man who tried to start a public subway system in NYC 30 years before the idea actually took.
posted by anaelith at 1:04 AM on January 5, 2008

Seoul's first subway line was built in 1974, but lines have been continuously added, one by one. Even now, line 9 and the Bundang line is currently under construction.
posted by suedehead at 4:10 AM on January 5, 2008

People have been living in and around the Cairo area for a few millenia. The subway system has two lines built in the 60s or 70s (most of the lines are on former train tracks). Two more are "being built" as we speak, but don't expect to be able to get a subway out the airport anytime soon.
posted by Deathalicious at 4:19 AM on January 5, 2008

Dee Xtrovert, it was common for subways or elevated trains or trolley lines to spearhead development into new areas during the expansion of Brooklyn and Queens and suburban Boston.

Rochester, NY also has an abandoned subway.
posted by Jahaza at 4:31 AM on January 5, 2008

Munich's U-Bhan was constructed specifically for the 1972 Olympics
posted by Neiltupper at 4:34 AM on January 5, 2008

Most of the Vienna U-Bahn is relatively new (1976 or later).
posted by sueinnyc at 4:43 AM on January 5, 2008

So I guess the answer to the OP's follow-up question is 1) the Olympics, 2) being a major city in a developing country with a booming economy, or 3) being Canadian, ie environmentally conscious.

There was an article in Business Week a couple months ago that gives a brief overview of the current subway boom, probably related to the above number 2: Subways: The New Urban Status Symbol.

(I keep a weblog mostly about the expanding Shanghai subway system: Shanghai Public Transportation.)
posted by msittig at 5:32 AM on January 5, 2008 [1 favorite]

You may want to watch Three to Get Ready: A Progress Report from BART, which chronicles the efforts at digging the subway beneath San Francisco and building the underwater channel that carries BART through the bay in the late 60's.

caddis, BART isn't a subway? Wha?
posted by eschatfische at 5:45 AM on January 5, 2008

The first ride on Atlanta's MARTA train (some of which is underground) took place in 1979. link.
posted by amtho at 6:01 AM on January 5, 2008

Pittsburgh's subway (which reuses a lot of old trolley routes if memory serves) wasn't built until the 80s.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 6:23 AM on January 5, 2008

You totally need this book: Transit Maps of the World. Has pretty much every map of every transit system. I love it.
posted by waylaid at 6:56 AM on January 5, 2008

Warsaw, Poland. Opened in 1995, expanding.
posted by ellenaim at 7:05 AM on January 5, 2008

When I lived in Vienna in 1976, they were in the process of basically building the UBahn from scratch. My entire memory of Vienna is of 5-story holes in the ground.
posted by nax at 7:20 AM on January 5, 2008

Tokyo. Population was already well over a million when the first two subway lines were laid in the '20s (never mind the fact that the city is earthquake-prone). The metro system has continued to lengthen existing lines and lay down new ones ever since. The Nanboku line went into operation in the 90s, and the Oedo line opened up in 2000. The city of Tokyo is also building an underground ring road, an audacious project they began working on about 20 years ago.

Barcelona is currently adding a couple of subway lines. Bilbao got a spanking new subway system and tram system in the 90s.
posted by adamrice at 7:34 AM on January 5, 2008

Building on mzurer's answer:
Here's a link to the History section of the Wikipedia article on the Washington, D.C. Metro. Construction started in 1969 and the first stretch opened in 1976. As someone who has commuted every day on the Metro, it gets a lot of use.
posted by awesomebrad at 8:07 AM on January 5, 2008

Nanjing, China, where I am right now, is in the beginning of building it's subway system. The 5-million or so city is one of the oldest in the country (or, at least, the region is one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas of China), and yet it's 1-line subway began operations just a year or so ago. A second line is currently under construction, with late 2008 publicized as the opening date for that line; I've read about plans to have 5 lines or so by 2020 or later. That second line will make a world of difference for the system's usefulness.

Relatedly, here's a transit-map-looking map of all the cities in the world with subways. As noted above, I think any city on the map that isn't in the western half of the US automatically fits your criterion.
posted by msbrauer at 8:19 AM on January 5, 2008

I don't think the Cinci subway could be restarted from where it left off. Whatever was built in the 20s is either in very poor condition or does not conform to modern subway standards. It basically would have to built from scratch which in modern downtowns is a major undertaking.

TBMs are generally used to bore the tunnels these days rather than open cuts as was done in the pictures shown on the website. Downtown streets are a maze of underground utilities which would be extremely costly to remove and replace. Most new subways in major cities are situated deep underground where they do not come into conflict with utilities or building foundations. Depending on the conditions of subsurface Cinci this may not be a difficult task. Groundwater levels and solidity of the subsurface material are important factors in the cost.

Constructing it would require shafts at important points where stations are needed and then drop a TBM down to create concrete-encased tunnels between stations. Some of the most recent subway routes I've seen in Madrid are very deep and need to be reached by taking escalators several levels down. Madrid continues to develop their subway system and it has vastly expanded since its beginning in 1919.

Would it be viable or cost effective? It's hard to say and would depend on the transportation needs of the city. Dense downtowns almost require it but the city has to have a strong public transportation need. People will not automatically drop their desire to take cars because there is a subway. I admit it is sexy and took the metro over the bus when I lived in Madrid.
posted by JJ86 at 8:19 AM on January 5, 2008 [1 favorite]

If you want a great example of what it takes to install a new subway in a major city, look at the construction of the Second Avenue subway (or T line) in NYC. The project was envisioned in the 1920's, ground was broken in the 70's, and construction has been halted several times due to financial and property constraints along with the rediculously mismanaged bureaucracy that is the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

I believe there have been no fewer than three separate groundbreakings for the line over the years, with each city administration vowing that "this time" would be the time to finally complete the project. Most New Yorkers have resigned themselves to the fact that, despite the incredible need for it, the Second Avenue subway will never be a reality and remain one big money pit (money tunnel?).
posted by soy_renfield at 8:24 AM on January 5, 2008

St. Louis, Missouri's MetroLink was built in the early nineties and was recently expanded. Most of it is aboveground, but there are parts in downtown that are subways. St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the US in 1900 and was the first city in the US to host the Olympics in 1904.
posted by rabbitsnake at 10:29 AM on January 5, 2008

Construction on the Washington, DC Metrorail system started in 1969 and is still in progress today, although the latest addition was finished in 2004. Basically, it seems to be all about funding, funding and funding. First of course for construction, but mostly for operation. Fares don't pay for everything. So, having a plan for operational funding is definitely key to get city planners on board. While Metrorail's funding is not solvent (due mostly to bickering between four entities: D.C., Maryland, Virginia and the U.S. federal gov't), it had the backing of the federal gov't when it started.
posted by General Malaise at 10:57 AM on January 5, 2008

Along with the Second Ave line in NYC, take a look at the intricacies of the East Side Access project, to link the LIRR with Grand Central - not exactly a new subway system, but a major re-routing and retooling of transit in an extremely developed area.
posted by pupdog at 7:30 PM on January 5, 2008

I guess I'm looking for examples of how it was accomplished, or specific accounts of the processes involved from proposal to implementation, etc.

Not quite what you asked, since I don't think there are any underground tracks, but Charlotte just inaugurated North Carolina's first light-rail line, after approving a sales tax earmarked for rail transit almost ten years ago and fighting back a repeal effort on that tax this past November.
posted by mediareport at 9:45 PM on January 5, 2008

Hong Kong's MTR opened in 1979.
posted by meowzilla at 10:43 PM on January 5, 2008

waylaid - I ordered it from Amazon. Looks fantastic!

Bonus: Which of the already mentioned cities have a body of water nearby and are somewhat hilly? Boston was pretty flat, as is NYC. The only one that immediately comes to mind is San Francisco...
posted by cdmwebs at 2:44 AM on January 6, 2008

As an example Toronto began work on a subterranean LRT line along Queen Street West but abandoned it.

Construction never actually began on that line, but they did change the plans for Queen and Osgoode stations in order to accommodate it.
posted by oaf at 7:39 AM on January 8, 2008

oaf: As an example Toronto began work on a subterranean LRT line along Queen Street West but abandoned it.

Construction never actually began on that line, but they did change the plans for Queen and Osgoode stations in order to accommodate it.

Yeah, there was a partially built tunnel. No tracks in it. I think I heard it got filled in a few years ago. I know a guy who got a look in it about ten years ago though.
posted by loiseau at 9:30 PM on January 8, 2008