The Rapid Transit Railways of the World

Henry F. Howson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000363357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Transportation & Navigation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

When originally published in 1975, (here re-issuing the 3rd edition of 1985), this was the only genuinely introductory textbook to the subject of transportation planning. The introductory chapter places the issue of transport in its broader societal context, relating it to demographic, socio-economic, political and environmental considerations. The increasing importance of technology is recognized in the chapter which covers commonly used software packages. As a whole the book provides a basic introduction to the traffic estimation stage of the transport planning process and forms a general guide and survey to the whole subject.

Part One
Introduction

1. Above: Vienna: tram descending under Getreidmarkt on circular route; below: Vienna: Schwedenplatz Station on the Stadtbahn.

2. Above: Paris: pneumatic train at Etoile, Metro station; below: Paris: new rolling stock at Metro Line 3.

The term ‘Rapid Transit’ has been defined as meaning ‘any form of public transport separate from other transport, operating at high frequency to carry large numbers of passengers at consistently high speeds’. The term is probably of American origin and has not been in general use until recent years, but has now come into wide use to describe the underground-surface railways, individually known as the Subway, Metro, Underground or U Bahn, that are being built or planned increasingly in and around large cities.

This surge of activity seems to be based on assumptions that cities will continue to attract people, and city centres will continue to attract large day-time populations coming in from the outer suburbs. The first assumption seems at least to be reasonable, since throughout history urban life has justified itself by offering employment, education and a wider social life.

The basic reason for this immensely costly urban railway construction now under way becomes apparent only when one tries to consider what alternative means there are for moving large numbers of people into and out of cities. It may well be argued that elaborate systems of urban motorways, at elevated or sub-surface level, offer the most economic means of distribution for both passengers and merchandise within city and metropolitan areas. Using these road systems, commuters can, and do, travel independently by automobile from their homes to their offices or factories; and merchandise, broken down into suitably sized consignments, similarly and swiftly reaches its destination.

It does in fact happen like this. Major cities without urban mass transit rail systems have neither choked to death, nor has their traffic slowly ground to a halt, as was grimly foretold, simply because frustrations and economic losses resulting from congested central streets have in themselves imposed some sort of regulation and orderly movement.

But even the most modern and sophisticated of such cities are not immune from the ill effects of an overdependence on the motor vehicle. Most of them appear to have attracted or generated more surface traffic than their thoroughfares can cope with. Automobile traffic in Caracas, for instance, is reported to have semi-congealed during recent years into a continuous 7 mph flow, maintained over long periods – and there are many others similarly affected. London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Chicago – quote any large city of like prominence, in fact, and it will concede to a traffic problem: not one arising from any deliberate indulgence towards the motor vehicle, but one that simply grew as a by-product of evolution, in this case the evolution of individual mechanised transport from the horse-drawn variety.

City traffic authorities now generally accept that something more than a system of urban highways is desirable to cope with a daily surge of commuters, shoppers and the like that may swell a daytime population to double that of a night-time population. The ideal for planners is some form of mass transport that at peripheral points will channel traffic into well defined paths, preferably condensing it from 100 vehicles carrying 200 passengers into one vehicle carrying them all – and at central points to discharge them to find their own way on foot, perhaps assisted by moving walkways, to their respective destinations. For the travelling public this media must essentially be swift, safe, reasonably comfortable and economically acceptable. In short, it must be attractive enough to wean them away from their own autos.

London Transport, in opening its new Victoria Line, thinks it has found the answer. It states ‘with more passengers, particularly commuting motorists, going by Underground, the new line will bring relief to traffic-congested streets above ... ’. In comparing the double-tracked Victoria Line with an imaginary motorway of equal carrying capacity, its designers calculated that the Tube’s total capacity when completed, with trains running at two-minute intervals, will be 25,000 passengers per hour in either direction – and that a motorway with comparable total capacity would need no less than eleven traffic lanes. Similar calculations in America are even more favourable towards rapid transit, and other countries have presumably reached the same conclusions since, after weighing capital costs, economic loss from temporary disruption during construction, availability of manpower and materials and the fact that rapid transit railways tend to be under-employed during offpeak hours: all this against short and long term transportation requirements – and almost certain long term benefits – they have decided in favour of the rapid transit urban railway.

The advantages of rapid transit might be summarized as follows: Such an urban railway or system of railways of conventional design, by assuming the character of an additional artery or arteries not subject to congestion, absorbs much of the traffic normally using surface routes and thereby alleviates surface congestion. An urban railway occupies less land than a highway of comparable capacity, and less still if it is raised on aerial structure in outer areas and descends below-ground within city confines. In the long run such a railway is likely to be a social and economic attribute to a city, and to more than repay its cost in revenue plus indirect benefits.

Rapid Transit around the World

The very earliest of urban railways were transport entities in themselves, the bulk of whose passengers were pedestrian at either end of their journeys. Today, such railways work integrally with other forms of transport, principally with feeder bus services, but increasingly with ‘park and ride’ patrons who drive their cars or autos to outer stations and sometimes complete their journeys with a short ‘in-town’ bus trip. The motor truck or lorry and the automobile have in fact become most important cohesive factors in city life, the former by facilitating and speeding distribution of commodities, and the latter by providing a degree of mobility without which a city dweller’s life could become hum-drum. For the foreseeable future, therefore, motor transport will probably be the prime influence in city traffic planning, in which the Metro, Subway or Underground will play its important part.

So many suggestions or proposals for new metropolitan railways in different parts of the world are coming up for consideration, or have led to detailed planning, that it is next to impossible to keep track of them all. Most of them are linked with comprehensive plans for city development, the latter in turn often stemming from great changes that are taking place in the productive and social life of whole countries, particularly the ‘newer’ countries. For example, in Brazil, Sao Paulo is fast expanding in consequence of its position at the centre of the principal industrial region of Latin America. From less developed areas of Brazil it attracts workers seeking and obtaining better living conditions through employment in commercial and industrial enterprises. Population has grown fantastically over recent years and is now more than $5\frac{{\displaystyle 1}}{{\displaystyle 2}}$ millions in the municipal area and seven millions in the Greater Sao Paulo area, embracing several satellite towns.

A long sustained building boom has created a new Sao Paulo with innumerable high buildings, and with it a public transport problem. This, it is reported, is to be alleviated by the building of an underground railway system at an estimated cost of $38om. Across the Pacific 6,000 miles east of South America lies the Australian continent, where only twelve million people live in its three million square miles, and two and three quarter millions of them are concentrated in a narrow coastal belt, with a favoured climate, that extends north and south of Sydney. Most of these live in the Sydney metropolitan area, which has generated enough traffic to warrant a long, rapid transit commuter railway being built to serve the city and suburbs, additional to the existing suburban network. In the sparsely inhabited Australian continent, Melbourne has also decided on an underground railway as a means of freeing congested central streets from traffic congestion, and there has been mention of two other cities with like ideas.

In European Russia there are already five Metro systems serving major cities; and in Soviet territory east of the Urals, where development is probably more pronounced than anywhere else in the world, cities that were virtually only settlements fifty years ago may well follow the ‘Metro’ trend in European Russia, and themselves possess systems within the next ten to twenty years.

In the United States of America the pattern of development has stabilized and one might say that the USA is largely consolidating and expanding its industries. Its cities may not grow much larger, but their metropolitan regions are developing, and although in the past America has neglected mass public transportation (with some notable exceptions) the Federal Government is now actively encouraging it on a regional basis. There is an increasing awareness in America that however efficient the highway network around a city may be, it is likely to produce growing confusion where highways empty into a city centre, unless there is some form of mass transportation to take over there and relieve the flow.

The State of California, where abundant nature has produced a population explosion, is particularly interesting from a ‘rapid transit’ point of view. Within the State, two large complexes, Los Angeles and San Francisco, contain nearly twelve million people, about half of the total Californian population. Los Angeles and its environs constitute the largest built-up area in the world. (Viewed from above the Griffith Observatory there seems no end to it.) Public services generally are hard put to keep up with this fast-growing complex, where an extremely big and costly rapid transit project has been under consideration for years; but public reaction to it up to the present has not been sufficiently favourable to give it the go ahead. Meanwhile the city’s public transport and its highly efficient road system are presumably able to cope. This situation is reflected in other growing American metropoli, but Los Angeles is referred to here principally for comparison with San Francisco and its Bay Area, which resemble it in growth potential.

The transportation problem in San Francisco was faced up to ten years ago with the decision to build an inter-county rail rapid transit system seventy-five miles long and to re-route the downtown portion of San Francisco’s street car system underground as part of the same project, as well as to integrate new and existing bus services with rapid transit services. Unlike Los Angeles, which is accessible by land from many directions, San Francisco’s business and social hub, a comparatively small area of high prestige value concentrated in the tip of the peninsula, is limited in its busiest approaches to two great road bridges and the Bay ferries, which it is imperative to relieve of overburdening traffic. A newly-built double-tracked Tube tunnel now lying beneath the Bay, through which rapid transit trains will run between San Francisco and the mainland, will accomplish this.

One might say in appraisal of the situation of the two cities that Los Angeles can just about afford to wait, perhaps to observe the operation of the Bay Area Rapid Transit project and profit thereby, but that San Francisco could not afford to wait, and in the event is acquiring the most advanced rapid transit system in the world.

The tide of rail rapid transit construction is slowly reaching more large cities in the USA, as will be seen in the main text of this book; and in Canada the future may reveal a similar picture. Toronto and Montreal have endured the inconvenience and upheaval inherent in the projection of underground railways through the heart of cities, but the Subway in one and the Metro in the other are now regarded as beneficial attributes, repaying their cost gradually but surely in the tangible form of enhanced land values, and intangibly in time saving and social gain.

In the Far East, Japan is an obvious candidate for the best means of mass transport available to move its teeming millions into and out of its astonishingly fast-growing cities. Several of the biggest are located along the Pacific coastal belt of lowland on Honshu Island (Japan’s mainland), which is otherwise mainly mountainous. Until 1964 they were connected by the Japanese National Railways’ narrow-gauge trunk railway, and since then also by the super-speed New Tokaido Line of standard gauge. This is planned eventually as an end-to-end trunk railway that will stretch unbroken for 1,200 miles from the northern Hokkaido Island, through a long undersea tunnel to Honshu and thence down to the southern tip of Kyushu Island.

Many Japanese cities were heavily damaged during World War II, but more or less ever since the arduous job of reconstruction was concluded, underground railway construction has been going on in the three biggest cities, and now Yokohama has also begun work on a four-line network totalling thirty-nine miles, which it is hoped will be completed by 1985. Although Japan is rapidly making good her pre-war deficiency in first-class roads, in railways it has always had, and still maintains, complete confidence in their viability and efficiency. The intensive use of railways is nowhere more pronounced than in urban areas, which are threaded by many private lines as well as those of the JNR.

The policy now is to interwork their suburban services with those of the conventional rapid transit or subway lines, so that the big dormitory areas around at least four principal cities, served either by suburban trains or subway trains, will practically nowhere be out of reach of one service or the other. To make this possible, Japan has added in the seven years ending 1968 no less than forty-seven miles of new subway or rapid transit route to its existing systems, and as much again is in plan or actually under construction.

Finally there is the southern hemisphere, in which only about 20 per cent of the world’s population live, and where at present the only integral rapid transit system is that in Buenos Aires. There are four other southern cities, additional to the Australian cities mentioned, which have tentative plans, but it is in the northern half of the world that most future underground railway activity will take place.

Airport Links

Apart from its function of providing mass transportation for cities, rapid transit has recently acquired an additional role, that of providing rail links between cities and their airports. A conventional rapid transit line with intermediate stations that links Cleveland, Ohio, with its airport, and is the first of its kind in America, was opened in 1969. Early reports quote a satisfactory number of air travellers using the line and no doubt its operation will attract the keen interest of other transit authorities.

Another American airport line, this one operating between New York and its Kennedy Airport, has been suggested, and there have been similar suggestions regarding London and its Heathrow Airport. In Kiev in the Ukraine the first section of a passenger monorail between the city and its Borispol Airport is reported to be going into service in 1970. On this monorail li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
• PART TWO: REVIEW OF WORLD RAPID TRANSIT SYSTEMS
• PART THREE: RAPID TRANSIT SYSTEMS PLANNED OR PROPOSED
• SHORT GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS