Subway Blunders in Europe – Can TransLink Learn From Other’s Mistakes?

More from the LRPPro.

Herr K. is a German transit specialist from Germany and gives wonderful insight to the pitfalls of building new subways for the sake of building new subways. The following post shows theAi??problems and counter productiveAi??resultsAi??of building subways and metros, where ordinary trams would do just fine. There are lessons to be learned, but I’m afraid TransLink is an “old” dog that just can’t be taught new tricks!

Ai??Nuremberg has both a driverless metro and trams (streetcars).

> We must build lots of light rail, cheap, as cheaply as possible to
> reach those so called transit hostile areas. They seem to be able to
> do it in Europe – pity! M

Muenchen and Nuernberg show pretty well how Europeans fail at transit
system design, too. >;-> and X-(

In Muenchen, at the beginning of the 60s, experts had recommended to
extend the existing streetcar system out to the periphery on new lines
built on separated row, even with grade-free road crossings where
possible at low expense. Work on this had already been started in the
50s and got pretty far. The result was an excellent, extensive and
dense network, attractive for both passengers and the operator.

There are some photographs of some of those extension lines in operation
and after decomissioning on

http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/gh-has_hah.html
http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/gh-suedwest.html

Text in german without translation, sorry. But the images speak for
themselves, I think.

Especially these photos imho illustrate the standard to which these
lines were built:

http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/fotos/2448-1993-10-03-rue_750px.jpg
http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/fotos/2007-1993-09-rue_kef_750px.jpg
http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/fotos/2032-1986-03-18-obh_750px.jpg
http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/fotos/2007-1993-09-obh_750px.jpg
http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/fotos/2044-1993-09-obh_750px.jpg
http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/fotos/2043-1984-07-due_750px.jpg
http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/fotos/3021-1983-08-has_750px.jpg
http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/fotos/2610-1991-02-17-zue_750px.jpg
http://www.tram-muenchen.de/geschichte/fotos/2606-1991-02-17-nrs_750px.jpg

For the city center, the experts had recommended building a few tunnels
under the main choke points and especially under the entire area which
is today pedestrian zone. After municipal authorities had taken over
planning of these tunnels, however, they got more and more extensive,
eventually creeping into a plan to replace the entire streetcar network
by a full-blown subway. This plan was decided nearly 50 years ago.

Today, after “investing” a few billion EUR, the subway network does not
cover a larger area than the streetcar network around 1965-1975 and it
doesn’t allow to travel significantly faster, if travel time is mesured
from door to door. In fact on lots of (especially tangent) relations
where the streetcar network offered a direct connection, today you are
forced to make detours and change trains, losing time.

Another issue is that the dense surface network was replaced by just
three trunk lines (which are split up into branch lines towards the
ends), which resulted in hopeless overcrowding of some stretches during
rush hours and especially of the connecting stations. Besides, the
subway network offers less stations, so walking distances have been
significantly increased for the passengers. When living in Muenchen, I
almost always preferred to go by bicycle because it was faster than the
subway.

In the end, the streetcar network has never been entirely replaced,
some lines that had been closed, but without replacement by subway,
even had to be reopened because busses were inefficient in handling the
volume of passengers who stubbornly refused to take a detour
underground.

Today, the streetcar network is slowly being revived and new lines are
being planned. One streetcar extension line that had been planned in the
early 60s and for which the row had already been reserved, eventually
got opened in 2011. One streetcar line that was closed without
replacement by subway in 1983 got reopened the next year after protests
by the citizens flooded the town hall, closed again in 1993 and might
be reopened again in the near future.

For the north and the southwest of the city, there are now plans for
the construction of entire new streetcar subnetworks, including some
stretches of extension lines built in the 50s/early 60s which were
closed in the 80s/90s.

One important short tangent connection, which was planned as part of a
loop line around the entire city before WW1, never got built due to
WW1, depression and then WW2, and it was the only segment of that loop
line that was never completed. Today, the only thing that prevents it
from finally being built is the county government whose opposition to
the city council’s decision is nominally based on the false pretension
that the streetcar line would wreak havoc to park it has to pass
through. On a row where currently diesel busses operate, the tarmac
would be replaced with grassed tracks. A few hundred meters north of
this row, a six lane “highway” passes through the same park. The real
reason of course is just that the county government is in the hands of a
different political party than the city council and is has been like
this for decades now.

The “tunnel mania” of the subway planners gave some “interesting”
results. For example, when the technical university of Muenchen moved
some of the engineering faculties to a new campus outside the city in
the middle of nowhere, it took roughly a decade to built a subway line
there. This line passes underneath a place named Garching, essentially
a tiny village, they have a maypole on their village square with a
subway station underneath. Next to this village, the tunnel passes even
below a potato field (or is it a cow paddock?) before reaching the
campus.

During the decades of subway tunnel construction, suburbanisation has
progressed further outward, creating more traffic. With the result that
the suburban commmuter network (“S-Bahn”) got overloaded, especially on
its main trunk line which passes in a tunnel under the city. Plans for
adding two separate tracks for commuter trains and connecting stations
with the urban network to an existing surface bypass line south of the
immediate city center have been put aside by the politicians. They
could have been implemented by now, at comparatively low cost.

Instead, a new tunnel parallel to the existing one was planned, with
connection to the existing urban network at stations which are already
hopelessly overcrowded. The cost for the tunnel, as usual, rose during
the planning stage and in the end financing could not be warranted so
the project is stalled.

So while a foreigner coming to Muenchen might think this city has an
excellent transit network, as someone who has lived there for a few
years I beg to differ. After decades of tunnel contruction with >10
billion EUR wasted, large areas of the city still have no decent
connection while the subway and the commuter network are overcrowded
and unable to handle more traffic. Besides the fact that tangent
connections are missing and busses (not only on these relations) are
stuck in gridlock during rush hours.

In Nuernberg, which mostly imitated the system at Muenchen, they built
a single-track (!) subway tunnel to the airport, which before was
served by 12m busses every hour or so. Right before arriving at the
airport, the tunnel passes underneath paddocks, community gardens and a
small forest.

The Nuernberg system is really a “nice” example how to screw up an
outrageously expensive transit system. One false pretense for building
the subway was, among others, that it would provide a higher capacity
than the streetcar. But actually, the subway was built with stations
only for 75m trainsets, very narrow platforms at some stations and few
and narrow staircases.

As it happens, one of the most cramped stations is the one that has to
handle the most passengers, during the annual christmas market, which is
*the* touristic event in this city.

Sincerely,

W.