[canucklehead2]

Yup. What was just said... Edmonton for example was originally designed and built as a "pre-metro" using Siemens-Duwag U2 high floor cars operating in a central subway beneath downtown that was designed for 5-car trains which can and do run during peak hours. Each train can in theory move a cool 1000 people in 5 cars at once. This was modelled directly on Frankfurt and there are a couple of cool but hard to find books on the subject that go back. Outside the core, the stations are about 1 km apart or more.

Calgary in theory is also a "pre-metro" however it's closer to an LRT in that its stops are much closer together on most lines and it operates at grade on a transit-way downtown instead of using a subway tunnel (although it's always been planned but not built except for a short abandoned stretch building under the City Hall/Administration Building blue wedge... And until recently it only could use 3-car trains because the downtown stations weren't designed for longer trains. That has since been changed with the rebuilt platforms all upgraded for 4-car trains...

So... Clear as mud! ;-) But as you can tell there's a lot of overlap and blurring of lines even when cities use the exact same rolling stock they are sometimes run entirely differently, although if you look at all the studies the advantages of both systems are virtually identical. They deliver an operating system that runs at about 30 km/h.