Background

Metro service to use the international name derived from the original Metropolitan Line of London (1863) is the mode capable of doing the greatest amount of useful work, carrying massive volumes of people, fast and efficiently, at the city scale. It is a means of transport that was quite a simple but effective railroad operation when first instituted a little more than 100 years ago, and the improvements in the intervening time have been gradual and largely marginal. It is only in the last few years that significant technical changes have been made, but those modifications do not really affect the basic character of service as experienced by users (except for air conditioning). The recent advances have addressed efficiency and safety issues primarily (power supply, braking, and control systems), moving toward automated operations. If construction of the Second Avenue subway along the East Side of Manhattan indeed gets started by 2004 and is eventually completed, its riders would have no difficulty also using the parallel line opened in 1904, had it remained in its original state. The cars of that time could be run on the new line.

The mode under discussion in this chapter carries many names: rapid transit, heavy rail transit, subway, metro, the tubes or the underground, the U-Bahn ( not the S-Bahn), and the T. They all mean the same thing, but we will favor here heavy rail transit, which is the more precise technical designation, and metro,