Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Then the metric doesn't make much sense, IMO.
London has a gigantic rail network that covers the entire SE of England. It probably isn't going to have super-high rail ridership per mile compared to a city like Prague or Barcelona, which have smaller systems, with urban-focused Metro and proportionally less suburban rail.
I mean, if London had a crappier rail system, it would rank higher. Just get rid of all the suburban lines, and magically the system becomes "more efficient". That doesn't make much intuitive sense.
And London isn't a particularly high density metro, so individual lines shouldn't have crazy high ridership. Most of SE England is village-like; you don't have giant suburban commieblock slabs everywhere like in Rome or Madrid or anywhere in Eastern Europe. Why would suburban London villages generate massive per km ridership?
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The underlying idea is that per-km ridership is a measure of net efficiency, i.e. whether you're moving as many people as you can relative to the infrastructure you've got. Now, nobody's going to argue that the Tube in central London is pretty damn good (although I personally think the Paris Métro is the best system in Western Europe and quite possibly the world).
The reason why this discussion is getting messy is because the Tube
isn't limited to the primary city (cities) the way the Métro is. Large chunks of it really do behave more like commuter rail, and even S-Bahn style commuter rail naturally has lower per-km ridership than a Paris-style métro. This implies that pure per-km ridership is not the best way to benchmark given a hybrid system. One could perhaps consider a system of hybrid benchmarking, where outlying sections of the Tube -- which mostly service suburbs -- are benchmarked as commuter rail akin to London's other commuter rail lines, while the inner sections are benchmarked to a métro standard of some sort.
All that said, there is one other potential sort of benchmarking which might be more oblique but more useful: profitability. But using that as a benchmark implies that you're running your urban rail network in such a manner as to turn a profit to begin with -- something we only expect out of East Asian (Japan and Hong Kong, maybe Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea?) urban rail networks.