Liberal Landscape

The recreational path known as the Miami Underline grew by 2.1 miles (3.4 km) on April 24.¹

Map showing the Miami Underline trail as well as Metrorail, the Metromover, and non-Underline pedestrian facilities in central Miami. The nominal scale of the map is 1:30,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. The base data here come mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. They have been modified substantially. The map is clickable and downloadable, but note that this site’s host server does not allow images to be stored at their original resolution, and, if you zoom in too far, the image will be blurred.

The Miami Underline, when finished, will run along Miami’s (mostly) elevated railroad, Metrorail, between Brickell, just south of downtown Miami, and South Dadeland, a suburb almost exactly 10 miles (16 km) to the south. There is a real need in Miami for a facility like this—Miami may have fewer recreational trails than any U.S. urban area of its size. The obvious places to build such paths—along the Bayfront and the Miami River—are largely occupied by private developments, and Miami is not the kind of city where governments are going to force property owners to cede land to a recreational trail. There are a few places along the Bayfront and the Miami River where public access is possible, and there are paths in some such places—chiefly near downtown Miami—but they are short. Miami also lacks any major public park (like Central, Lincoln, Golden Gate, or Forest Parks) where recreational trails could be inserted. There is quite a substantial trail in Miami Beach that continues into Miami Beach’s northern neighbors, Surfside and Bal Harbour, but Miami Beach is not Miami.  The Miami Underline’s route was just about the only place where a sizable trail could be built. It’s not, however, ideal.  I walked along the complete alignment in 2022, and, as I reported then, the busy adjacent roadways (especially U.S. 1, the South Dixie Highway), the heavily trafficked cross streets, and the noisy elevated railway overhead are all potential problems. Hardly anyone was using the M-Path, a simple trail along the route that was established when Metrorail was built in the 1980s.

I explored the added segment when I was in Miami last week. It starts impressively with the hard-to-photograph but substantial Hammock Playground, just southwest of Southwest 15th Road. Advocates of the Underline promised a path surrounded by native vegetation, and the playground sits right next to Simpson Park, a remnant tropical forest.

The Hammock Playground along the Underline.

The path’s next six-tenths of a mile (1 km) run between the lightly trafficked Southwest First Avenue and Metrorail, which, in this stretch, sits mostly at ground level behind a high wall.

The shared northernmost stretch of the newly added Underline segment.

Southwest of there, the path crosses a couple of roads. It solves the crossing problem to a large extent by providing, first, well-marked and vividly painted crosswalks and, second, a button that activates flashing yellow lights. It didn’t look as though most users—and especially not cyclists—were bothering with the button, but these crossings, which are pretty open, did not seem unsafe.

Crossing Southwest 26th Road.

Southwest of there the path has separate lanes for cyclists and pedestrians. Pedestrians are supposed to use the right-of-way furthest from the parallel highway, but not all users were respecting the rules.

Runner on the Underline trail. The photo was taken from the pedestrian bridge over the South Dixie Highway just north of the Vizcaya station. The person running is actually on the bicycle (rather than the pedestrian) lane.

Southwest of Vizcaya Station and just about all the way to Dadeland, the planned route sits right next to South Dixie Highway, a very busy road that’s a continuation of both Interstate 95 and a major arterial, Brickell Avenue. The new segment for the moment only runs approximately two-thirds of a mile (1.1 km) beyond Vizcaya, but that’s enough to get a sense of what the Underline’s builders are planning. Cyclists and pedestrians are separated here, and some new native vegetation has been planted, but it hasn’t had a chance to grow much yet, and the trail feels very open to the South Dixie Highway. There are two street crossings where trail users are expected to obey a traffic light that also allows turns off South Dixie Highway. Southbound drivers who want to make a right turn are warned about users on the Underline, but Metrorail columns prevent their actually seeing the pedestrians until they’re turning. I did not feel very safe at these crossings.

Sign on the South Dixie Highway that’s supposed to ensure pedestrian/cyclist safety at a crossing.

The Underline now ends just north of Coconut Grove station, approximately 7.3 miles (11.8 km) north of South Dadeland. Construction continues. It’s hoped that the full trail will open by the end of 2025.

I was impressed at how many more users the new segment of the Underline has than I saw on the old M-Path. But I wouldn’t say that it was really busy. When I stopped to take photos, I sometimes had to wait quite a while to get a person in the picture. The Underline’s builders, however, expect that the trail will become busier as it gets longer and becomes better known.

There are a few other elevated railways that pass over underused land in the United States that either now have or could have a recreational trail. For example, there’s been a modestly used trail under the BART tracks in El Cerrito since 1973. The Red and Purple lines now being reconstructed in northern Uptown and southern Edgewater in Chicago could also acquire a recreational trail. Because of the street-crossing problem, none of these trails is ideal, but they do represent a distinct way to take advantage of an awkward land-use problem.

Between 1998 and 2019, I visited Hong Kong more than a dozen times. The chief reason was that I was so fond of—as well as fascinated—by the place. Hong Kong satisfies just about all my urban aesthetic preferences. Above all, it’s very dense, with approximately 28,100 people per square kilometer (72,900 per square mile) of buildable land.¹ Hong Kong’s population density is, in other words, similar to that of Manhattan’s, but the built-up part of the city covers four and a half times as large an area. Hong Kong is actually in some respects a more high-rise place than Manhattan. According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, it has more buildings taller than 150 m than any city in the world.² Furthermore, the proportion of Hong Kong’s population using public transit to get to work—approximately 78%—is probably higher than in any other urban area.  Privately owned automobiles, while rising in number, play only a modest role in ordinary commuting. In addition, while I can’t prove it with numbers, certain parts of the northern end of Hong Kong Island seem to have as high a concentration of activities as any place in the developed world.³

Crowds in Causeway Bay, 2024.

Despite the enormous concentration of people and activities, Hong Kong seems to be an extraordinarily efficient place. Train delays are rare. Even traffic generally moves without major backups. Hong Kong is also a pretty safe place. The rate of serious crime is low.

Curiously and somewhat amazingly, Hong Kong, much of which is quite mountainous, may, along with its other distinctions, have more of its territory in parkland than any other city of its size. Approximately three-quarters of its land area is so steep as to be considered unbuildable, and much of this zone is officially parkland. The views from Hong Kong’s hills and mountains never cease to astonish. There are no sharper contrasts between intense urbanism and unbuilt-on land anywhere in the world. I used a view from the slopes of Victoria Peak as a banner for this blog during the first eight years of its existence. Here’s a recent update.

View from Lugard Road, 2024.

There is no doubt that my positive feelings about Hong Kong have been based largely on its morphology, its physical structure. I’ve enjoyed being in Hong Kong without ever having sustained close personal contact with Hong Kongers. I have had numerous discussions with Hong Kongers over the years that have left me with the impression that citizens of Hong Kong who speak good English (a substantial part of the population) are unusually sophisticated and have traditionally been quite willing to discuss just about any subject openly. It’s significant that in many ways some of them appear to have had closer links with the Western world than with Mainland China, a place that many Hong Kongers have viewed with a certain wary disdain.

I’d last visited Hong Kong in December 2019, when the Umbrella Movement was still active. I stayed away from the protests of course—the presence of foreigners gave the People’s Republic evidence to support its specious claims that the Movement was the result of foreign interference. I did happen to be walking on the pedestrian bridges between the Star Ferry Pier and Central one evening when thousands of people were on their way home from a major demonstration. I’ve probably never been in the middle of a crowd of such, well, calmly happy and satisfied people.

In June 2020, the government took advantage of the Pandemic lockdowns to pass long-threatened security legislation despite enormous demonstrations by Hong Kong’s citizens opposing this step. Since then, the government has jailed numerous people for offenses ranging from wearing a “Free Hong Kong, revolution of our times” t-shirt to publishing newspaper articles urging Hong Kong’s independence. Hong Kongers have suddenly been subjected to the whims of some of the world’s most thin-skinned and ruthless autocrats. Any deviations from absolute conformity on certain subjects have often led to severe punishment.

It’s true that Hong Kong has never been a genuinely democratic place. It was, of course, a British colony between 1841 and 1997. In negotiating the terms of the handover to China, Britain apparently attempted to assure that the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region would be a democratic one, but China resisted, and only some of the members of the Legislative Council (LEGCO), Hong Kong’s legislature, have ever been elected. Still, during the last couple of decades of British rule, the government tried to be responsive to public opinion, and Hong Kong was a pretty free place. You could say or publish what you wanted without having to be worried that you’d be jailed for it. Similar conditions prevailed during the first 23 years after the handover. Hong Kong had a very free press. No subject was off the table. All this ended abruptly in June 2020.

It’s also the case that, for the moment, many aspects of the “one country, two systems” regime are still in place. Hong Kong has its own currency and its own legal system. It still generally uses traditional (rather than simplified) Chinese characters. Traffic moves on the left rather than (as it does in China proper) on the right. The commonest language of public conversation is Cantonese, not Mandarin. You need to pass through Immigration to cross the China/Hong Kong border. And, most important, China has not (yet) imposed the “Great Firewall.” There is still online access to, for example, The New York Times, The Guardian, Gmail, and Google in Hong Kong (all of these, and millions of other, sites are blocked in China). I tried a search on “Tiananmen Massacre” while I was in Hong Kong and ended up with a result very much like that I got with the same search in Chicago. But talking about the Tiananmen Massacre in public can now get you a long jail term. I find this extraordinarily depressing.

I thought for a while I might never visit Hong Kong again, but, lured in part by low air fares, I spent a few days there in late September and early October. I ended up with complicated feelings.

Short of war, the physical form of cities rarely changes abruptly. Hong Kong’s distinctive morphology remains more or less as it was. To someone who likes cities to be dense and a little overwhelming, Hong Kong remains an agreeable place. The most obvious change I noticed was the complete absence of graffiti (which have been banned; writers of graffiti can be jailed). Also, the whole city was plastered with posters and banners advertising the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic. (Why do authoritarian states think repeating the same message endlessly will convince anyone?)

Signs advertising the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic near the Exposition Centre.

In addition, I had a sense there were fewer foreign (or anyway Caucasian) faces on the streets of Central than there used to be. This is presumably in part the result of the fact that some foreign firms have left, and in part because tourism from the West has dried up (my United flights were two-thirds empty).

There have also been a few changes in areas of particular concern to this blog. For example, there have been two major additions to Hong Kong’s already deeply impressive rail system. The East Rail extension to Admiralty (which includes a new tunnel under the Harbour) has been completed, as has the extension of the (former) West Rail Line through a broad swath of Kowloon that was previously not served by trains at all; this segment has been joined to the Ma On Shan branch and is now known at the Tuen Ma Line.

Inside an East Rail train under the Harbour.

Here’s a map.

Map emphasizing rail lines and pedestrian facilities in northern Hong Kong Island and southern Kowloon and vicinity. There are several places in Hong Kong where two or even three MTR rail lines run beside or on top of each other; these are difficult to show clearly on a geographically accurate (as opposed to schematic) map. The nominal scale of the map is 1:40,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve modified some of the data quite a lot. The map is clickable and downloadable, but note that this site’s host server does not allow images to be stored at their original resolution, and, if you zoom in too far, the image will be blurred.

Also, the Promenade along the Harbour that circles the Exposition Centre has (perhaps temporarily) been extended east for some distance, and the park between the Star Ferry Pier and the Exposition Centre has come closer to being completed.

Newish “promenade” on reclaimed land between the Star Ferry Pier and the Exposition Centre.

Pedestrian walkways have also been extended somewhat east of the Exposition Centre. These allow traffic-free walking between the new subway station there and the adjoining parts of Wan Chai.

Pedestrian walkway between the Exposition Centre, the Wan Chai ferry pier, and Wan Chai proper.

Furthermore, the West Kowloon Cultural District (the subject of an earlier post) has come closer to being completed. Some of the site is still under construction, but the M+ Museum is now open in its permanent quarters (although it’s no longer allowed to hold uncensored exhibitions). Furthermore, there is a great deal more parkland available (but most of it is fenced off and not accessible to people walking about).

Most of these changes in Hong Kong’s physical structure were planned long before the security law was passed, but, despite the Pandemic and Hong Kong’s new politics, they’ve moved forward pretty efficiently. Other long-planned changes remain underway although Hong Kong’s sluggish economy may slow their implementation.

There is no denying that authoritarian regimes do have some advantages when it comes to building infrastructure. It’s pretty clear, however, that many (and perhaps most) people in Hong Kong would have preferred not to be living under such a regime. Of course, this issue has never been put to a vote.

I spent a few days in Montréal last week and naturally went and rode on the now year-old REM (Réseau express métropolitain). I was particularly interested in figuring out just what the REM is. Is it a light-rail line, as some of the REM’s own publicity suggests?  Or perhaps a new metro system? I ended up thinking that what the REM most resembles is a suburban railroad—but with the kind of service you’d expect on a metro. In other words, the REM is the closest thing in North America to a regional railroad, although it’s definitely a new type of regional railroad. This may take a little explanation.

Defining what a regional railroad is isn’t easy, but let me try. In North America at any rate, it’s a rail rapid-transit system with frequent service that runs to a significant extent on long-existing rail lines.¹ Often, it also incorporates new rail lines through the city center or to other useful destinations. An important feature of regional railroads is that their fares are integrated with those of other urban transit lines.

Incorporating a regional railroad into an urban area’s transit system has numerous advantages. It adds frequent transit service to new areas. Because stations are further apart than on traditional urban transit systems, a regional railroad is comparatively fast; it can be a kind of express subway. Because fares are integrated with those on other transit lines, passengers can make free or inexpensive transfers to many more destinations. And, because a regional railroad ideally runs through city centers rather than terminating there, railroads can avoid expensive inner-city storage of rolling stock.

Several large European cities—Paris, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Oslo, Madrid, and Moscow, for example—have established regional railroads under various names: the RER in Paris, the S-Bahn in German-speaking cities, the T-bane in Oslo, the cercanías in Madrid, and the Central Diameters in Moscow.

In the Western Hemisphere, only São Paulo appears to have a “real” regional railroad. São Paulo‘s Metrô and its long-existing suburban lines have maintained separate corporate identities but have been combined into what is in effect one system. Most suburban trains now operate at rapid-transit frequencies, and one can travel on the whole system with one ticket. In some cases, elaborate transfer bridges and tunnels between the two systems have been built (with electronic tickets, physical connections like these have become less necessary).

Several North American urban areas have transit systems that include suburban rail lines, and there has been talk in several places about using these lines to build regional rail systems as defined above, but no urban area has fully implemented such a system. Toronto may come closest. Toronto’s GO rail and bus lines and TTC subway and bus lines (as well as bus routes run by certain regional operators) achieved fare integration in February 2024, but, for the moment, there is no through-running even on GO’s Lakeshore line, where headways outside of rush hour are every thirty minutes. Most other suburban rail lines in Toronto run much less frequently (and none of the rail lines is electrified).² Philadelphia’s transit system also comes close to having a “real” regional railroad. Its two groups of electrified suburban railways, which once terminated at two separate stations, were connected by new tracks in 1984, and the combined lines are shown on official schematic transit maps. But service is infrequent on all but the central spine of this system, and there is no fare integration. There is fare integration between the new or newish railroad lines in Denver and Salt Lake City and other RTD and UTA lines, and Denver’s Airport line has fifteen-minute headways during the day, but other rail lines in these urban areas run much less frequently, and the railroad services in Denver terminate at Union Station rather than running through the central city. Other North American transit systems are just about all further from the ideal. Suburban railroads almost never run at rapid-transit frequencies (except in a couple of places where several lines come together near their termini), and there is no fare integration with other transit systems or through-running on these lines. Transit operators in several cities—Boston, for example—have discussed instituting regional rail service, but, thus far, only Montréal has actually begun to operate such a system, although, even there, through-running won’t start until next year.³

The 17-km REM segment that opened last year is in some ways atypical, since hardly any of it relies on long-established railroad rights-of-way. It runs between Central Station and suburbs on the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River. Its Central Station alignment has been there since Central Station opened in 1943, but the line works its way down to the Saint Lawrence on a newly-built elevated guideway.

REM train passing through Griffintown, just south of Montréal’s Central Station. A station here is planned.

Most of the line runs down the middle of the A10 autoroute. Only one station—Du Quartier—is located in a heavily built-up district. I’m pretty sure that most passengers arrive at stations by car or bus.

REM train arriving at Du Quartier station. Photo taken from a pedestrian bridge over Autoroute 10.

The southern terminus, Brossard, sits next to an enormous parking lot—and not much else.

The Brossard parking lot early in the morning. The REM’s southern terminal station is in the background.

The initial line has been carrying around 24,000 passengers a day.⁴ It’s crowded with commuters during rush hour.

Inside a REM train heading to central Montréal during the morning rush hour.

But it tends to run pretty empty at other times.

Inside a reverse-commute REM train at Central Station early in the morning.

New stations—even those above ground—all have platform doors and HVAC systems. The fact that the stations are more or less indoors makes even those that sit in the middle of a freeway reasonably comfortable places to wait (although there isn’t much seating).

Inside the Du Quartier REM station.

The lines that are supposed to open next year will all pass through Montréal’s CBD and the 106-year-old Mount Royal Tunnel and serve several somewhat walkable neighborhoods in the outer city. They will intersect with the Métro in a couple of places and, of course, with numerous bus routes. The western branch planned to have the most service—the northern line to Deux-Montagnes—runs along a right-of-way that was used as a suburban commuter line for several decades. Most places along the route could be classed as “medium-density suburban.” The other two western branches take advantage of old rail rights-of-way only for a short distance. The middle branch will largely run elevated through car country next to a freeway. The southern branch (not scheduled to open until 2027) will end up at Trudeau International Airport. It’s hoped that passenger loads on the new lines will be substantial. We’ll see.

Map of Montréal and vicinity emphasizing REM and Métro rail lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. Commuter rail lines, most of which have only prevailing-direction weekday rush-hour service, are not included. The nominal scale of the map is 1:100,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly derived from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited all the data. REM U/C = REM line under construction. I was unable to find an up-to-date file for the latter. As a result, there may be some small errors in the location of the pending REM routes. As usual, pedestrian and bicycle facilities are sometimes not as clearly distinguished on the ground as they seem to be on the map. The map is clickable and downloadable, but note that this site’s host server does not allow images to be stored at their original resolution, and, if you zoom in too far, the image will be blurred.

The REM’s great innovation—which differentiates it from most other regional railroads—is that it’s driverless.

Since there is no engineer’s cab, the REM has front windows that provide excellent views of the right-of-way.

Like some other driverless transit systems, the REM runs short trains (of two or four cars) at frequent intervals, around every two-and-a-half minutes during rush hour. It can do this easily since additional labor costs from frequent service on a driverless metro are minimal. Money was also saved by the need only for short stations.

There is complete fare integration with other transit systems in Montréal. A single ticket allows one to ride on all of Montréal’s transit lines within the fare zone and time limits stated on the ticket.

In other words, thanks to its frequent suburban service, the REM comes closer than any other North American transit system to being a regional railroad as defined above.

Notably, however, the REM’s builders and operators do not call it a regional railroad. It’s a “light metro” (or “métro leger” in French). Perhaps “light” has a positive connotation in both languages, while “regional railroad” is too technical a term to be widely understood (it wouldn’t be understood by many urban transit specialists in Europe or Asia either).

In the years since Québec’s “Quiet Revolution,” Montréal has been a North American pioneer in several areas of urban development. It was, for example, the first North American city in which aesthetic appeal played a central role in the design of subway stations (1966) and the first city with an extensive network of underground passageways in its CBD (also 1960s). It was also an innovator in downtown pedestrianization (1980s-), and it was the first North American city to construct numerous protected bicycle lanes (early 2010s). The REM, which really is different from any other North American rail system, seems to continue the pioneering tradition.⁵

I am sure that there are lots of people in the world of transit who have pondered using the REM as a model for other cities. Its ability to run trains frequently without incurring enormous labor costs is a potential game changer. Several suburban rail lines in Boston and Chicago (among other cities) would seem to be good candidates for much more frequent service if labor costs could be kept down—and transfers to other transit services became cheap or free. But there would be substantial starting costs: even short stations turn out to be expensive to build, and electrification and new rolling stick would be needed in most cases. And any new system would require considerable debugging. The REM certainly did.⁶ It’s easy to imagine that the REM’s role in the development of North American urban transit will (like that of Montréal’s elegant Métro before it) turn out to involve a challenge to other cities that they will find very hard to meet.

Governments of most cities in Western Europe have been trying over the last thirty (or more) years to reduce the role of the automobile in urban transportation. They’ve built new rail lines and renovated old ones. They’ve created elaborate bicycle infrastructure. And they’ve tried to improve conditions for pedestrians.

Comparison of efforts in different cities is difficult; there is no unambiguously best way to do this. But it is arguable that, when it comes to producing prose about the new policies, the French have been as prolific as anyone. This is particularly true when it comes to describing work to improve conditions for pedestrians. Lyon¹ and Bordeaux², for example, have issued elaborate plans for pedestrianization. Strasbourg, at least in proportion to its population,³ has arguably done more planning than any other urban area. Its government has produced at least two substantial plans for new pedestrian infrastructure, in 2011⁴ and in 2021.⁵ These plans have been widely disseminated. Some staff members have been making a career of going around the world to describe the plans.⁶ It’s significant that the pedestrian plans appear to have attracted a considerable amount of local support.⁷ Strasbourg’s tourist office has argued that the city’s walkability is one of the chief reasons for paying a visit.⁸

Much of what’s in Strasbourg’s plans would not surprise anyone. Walking, the plans argue, accounts for a substantial proportion of daily trips, but, during the several decades (the era of “tout automobile”) when improving conditions for drivers seemed like the most important goal of urban planners, pedestrian spaces were consistently reduced in size. Pedestrians not only need more space, the plans contend, but they also need to be made more secure. Pedestrian traffic should be kept as separate as possible from automobile—and bicycle—traffic. Possibly the most distinctive component of Strasbourg’s plans has been a proposal to build what are called “magistrales piétonnes,” a term that can be approximately translated as “pedestrian arterials.” These are substantial corridors devoted more or less exclusively to pedestrian use. The latest (2021) pedestrian plan shows one such arterial—between the train station and the Parc de l’Étoile in Neudorf (a distance of approximately 1500 m) —mostly completed and a couple of others—to the Rhine and along the Ill River—well underway. It also proposes a network of such magistrales piétonnes covering the entire urban area.

I went to take a look at Strasbourg’s pedestrian arterials (and other new non-automotive infrastructure) late last month. As it happens, I didn’t know Strasbourg very well. I’d been there only twice before, in 1969 and again in 2008, both times for a day or two. I’d been impressed the first time by all the half-timbered buildings that had somehow survived into modern times (although I was skeptical as always about the extent to which many of these might have been [re]created mostly to please tourists), and I’d been impressed on the second trip by the then still newish tram system, one of France’s largest. The first line opened in 1994, and the system’s been systematically enlarged in the decades since then. In 2017 it reached Kehl, a suburb across the Rhine in Germany. This branch is one of the world’s very few international tram lines.

Map of Strasbourg and vicinity emphasizing rail transit lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The nominal scale of the map is 1:50,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on a 14-x-14-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly derived from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited all the data. Note that “pedestrian facilities” include some streets that are open to vehicles part-time. It also includes substantial sidewalks in a few places. It does not include streets classified as “living streets” in the OpenStreetMap database, that is, streets open to automobiles but with pedestrian priority. The map is clickable and downloadable, but note that this site’s host server does not allow images to be stored at their original resolution, and, if you zoom in too far, the image will be blurred. 

Map of central Strasbourg emphasizing rail transit lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The nominal scale of the map is 1:20,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on a 14-x-14-inch sheet of paper. See notes with preceding map for additional information.

The one nearly completed magistrale piétonne starts with a large pedestrian space in front of the main train station.

The Place de la Gare.

It continues to the heart of the central city, running along the Rue des Grandes Arcades, perhaps Strasbourg’s most important commercial street.

The pedestrianized Rue des Grandes Arcades.

South of the central city the designation of a street as being part of the magistrale piétonne has mostly meant that it’s acquired wider sidewalks and a protected bicycle lane. Here, for example, is a photo of a part of the Route du Polygone, a kilometer or so south of the Rue des Grandes Arcades.

Along the Route du Polygone, south of central Strasbourg.

Here’s another example: the Quai des Bateliers, which runs along the Ill River, Strasbourg’s inner-city river, along which a second medium-distance magistrale piétonne is being built (there are still gaps).

The pedestrianized Quai des Bateliers, which runs along the Ill River.

In addition to the newish pedestrian areas along (or essentially replacing) surface streets, Strasbourg also has pedestrian paths along its watercourses, notably the Ill River and associated streams. Many of these are located where there were once towpaths. These paths, however, are often not quite continuous.

Near water-level path along the Ill River.

There are also pedestrian paths along the Canal du Rhône au Rhin and other man-made watercourses that run through what was once a major industrial area south of the central city. This area’s renewal is a component of the Deux Rives/Zwei Üfer project, which proposes using the land on both sides of the Rhine for housing, commerce, and parks. The area’s walkability has been touted as one of its virtues.

Paths along the Bassin d’Austerlitz, part of the Canal du Rhône au Rhin, now lined with new housing and the Rivetoile shopping center.

One of the suggestions in the pedestrian plans is that officials should be aware of pedestrian preferences in everything they do. Perhaps this is the reason that the two substantial bridges on the newish tram line to Kehl incorporate wide paths for pedestrians and cyclists. There are now two pedestrian/cyclist bridges over the Rhine—plus a sidewalk on the main road bridge! Perhaps because this part of the urban area is still somewhat industrial, there aren’t a huge number of pedestrians or cyclists on the bridges, but there are a few.

The pedestrian/cyclist/tram bridge over the Bassin Vauban. Both the path and the tram line end up in Kehl, Germany.

I wouldn’t say that Strasbourg’s central-city pedestrian streets are perfect. Cyclists and scooter drivers sometimes—illegally—ride on some of them, and van drivers—legally—make deliveries on some pedestrian streets early in the morning. There is also (as elsewhere) the awkward problem of “pedestrian-priority” streets, where drivers are supposed to give way to pedestrians. This usually doesn’t work smoothly—pedestrians typically cede the right-of-way first.

There is also, as everywhere, an awkward problem where pedestrian paths are interrupted by major roads for cars. Such intersections usually have traffic lights, and drivers tend to obey them, but sometimes pedestrians face a long wait. Here’s a photo of the crossing of the original magistrale piétonne and the Quai du Général Koenig, just south of the central city (note the large number of pedestrians and cyclists).

Crossing the Quai du Général Koenig.

Strasbourg certainly seemed to me a congenial place for pedestrians. There are lots of people walking on the streets not only in the central city but in many of its residential districts as well. There are also a very large number of cyclists.⁹ Perhaps because facilities for pedestrians and cyclists are so good, there are actually relatively few cars in central Strasbourg. On the whole, it appears to be quite a secure place for pedestrians. Even in the outer city, drivers usually defer pretty much automatically to pedestrians in crosswalks and when making turns.

I wouldn’t say, however, that, despite all the planning, pedestrians seemed dramatically if at all better off in Strasbourg than in other big French cities. After all, it’s become pretty standard to pedestrianize streets in central cities in France. The more or less completed magistrale piétonne isn’t visibly marked as such, and it doesn’t feel a whole lot different from other pedestrianized streets in Strasbourg—and elsewhere in France. The planning of magistrales piétonnes may have encouraged the authorities to make Strasbourg’s pedestrian corridors more continuous than in some other cities, but it doesn’t appear to have resulted in corridors that are physically distinctive. They’re still quite impressive, however. No North American city has attempted anything like the amount of pedestrianization that is widespread in Strasbourg and many other French (and Western-European) cities.

View north from the Haliç Metro Bridge (2014), a bridge that takes subway trains and pedestrians across the Golden Horn. The park on the right is one of several newish parks on the shores of the Golden Horn.

I’ve been in Istanbul twice in the last few weeks, first in early May, then in mid-June. Except for a couple of stops at the enormous new airport, I had last been in Istanbul in 2014. Between 1969 and 2014, I’d visited Istanbul quite a few times and had come to know the city moderately well.¹

Since my first trip, Istanbul has changed enormously. In 1969, the urban area had a population of something like two million.² Today, more than fourteen million—and perhaps as many as sixteen million—people live in the Istanbul metropolitan area.³ If Istanbul is counted as a European city, it’s the second largest (Moscow is first). It’s considerably larger than London or Paris.

Most of the population growth of Istanbul over the last half century has taken place in newly created neighborhoods outside the old city. Istanbul now sprawls over something 1500 square kilometers. Newer parts of the Istanbul area are extremely diverse. There are informal settlements (gecekondular), and there are also numerous neighborhoods of high-rise apartment buildings for middle-class and wealthy residents.

View of diverse neighborhoods climbing the hills on Istanbul’s Asian side. The photograph was made from the recreational path along the Sea of Marmara.

Density is generally pretty high (the average is approximately 10,000 people per square kilometer), but many of the newer parts of the urban area were built in part to accommodate automobiles. Since (roughly) the 1970s, there has been a major effort to construct highways to facilitate traffic movement throughout the region. An elaborate freeway network now covers much of the Istanbul area. It includes three bridges and a tunnel across the Bosporus (1973-2016). A new tunnel is planned.

Just as is true almost everywhere, road building has not been able to keep up with demand. Istanbul has had a congestion problem for many decades. Traffic jams on freeways and urban streets are extraordinarily common. Traffic accidents occur frequently. Air quality, despite the proximity to large water bodies, is sometimes poor.

Road-based public transportation has been one of the casualties of automobilization. As late as the 1980s, public transportation in Istanbul chiefly involved buses and vans (dolmuşlar) on public roadways that simply could not operate efficiently because of traffic tie-ups. This is a problem, since millions of people in Istanbul have no access to a car and depend on public transportation to get around.⁴

Traffic at a standstill on the highway that leads to and from the Avrasya (Eurasia) Tunnel. Photograph taken in Yenikapı.

Istanbul’s planners and other government officials have been well-informed about developments in Western European urbanism for decades, and they were certainly aware in the 1980s that many Western European cities had begun to try to mitigate automobile congestion by building new rail transit lines on a large scale—and also by creating more spaces for pedestrians. Turkey was generally doing well economically in these years, and it was clear to many people in a position to make decisions that it was time to follow Western Europe’s lead.⁵ The victory of the Motherland Party in 1983 national elections and in 1984 local elections set the stage for formulation of new urban policies. Prime Minister Turgut Özal and Istanbul mayor Bedrettin Dalan worked together for nearly a decade to implement these, and, while there was a hiatus in roughly the 1990s, governments in the years since have continued along much the same lines.⁶ As in many of the world’s other major urban areas, while governments in Istanbul over the last few decades have continued to work on improving the road network, there has been a shift toward supporting alternatives to movement by automobile. On the one hand, an elaborate rail network has been built; and, on the other hand, steps have been taken to make it easier to get about on foot, particularly in the central city.

I tried on my recent trips to take a close look at more or less recent developments in both of these areas.

Rail transit. When I was first in Istanbul, there were only modest rail facilities: somewhat decrepit suburban railroads along the European and Asian shorelines of the Sea of Marmara and the Tünel, a short underground funicular railway connecting Karaköy with Beyoğlu, 560 m away and 60 m higher. The Tünel (1875) is claimed to be the world’s second underground urban railroad, after London’s.⁷ Istanbul had had a tram system, but it was closed in the 1960s.

The first new lines were rather short. In 1989, the M1, a “light metro” line between Aksaray, a major commercial center on the Historic Peninsula, and Esenler, a rapidly growing residential district roughly seven km northwest of Aksaray, opened. Over the next few years, it was extended west to a long-distance bus station and then (via a separate branch) to what was then the city’s major airport, Atatürk Airport. In 1992, it was joined by the T1, a six-km-long tram line between the old train station, Sirkeci, and Topkapı, near the Theodosian Walls that more or less mark the edge of the old city. The line has since been extended in both directions. The T1 could be classified as a light-rail line. It mostly runs down the center of relatively wide roads. Tracks were eventually protected by a formidable fence. In crowded Sultanahmet, the tram line occupies an entire, narrow street. It operates in traffic only in a few places, but there are numerous level crossings with traffic lights. Thus, it isn’t very fast, but it’s definitely faster than a bus could be.

A T1 tram crossing Galata Bridge. The tram line has its own right-of-way in the center of the roadway.

The first metro and tram lines attracted a substantial number of passengers. A consensus developed that more lines were needed, and, in the last 35 years, Istanbul has opened an astonishing 243 km of fully grade-separated, mostly underground, modern metro lines and 45 km of partly grade-separated light-rail lines (these figures include the initial sections). The lines are generally state-of-the-art. Electronic signs in stations and in cars provide travel information. Metro trains have open gangways. Handicapped access is common. And the newest metro lines are driverless and have platform doors.

The Alibeyköy station on the M7 line. Note the platform doors. This is one of the few above-ground stations on Istanbul’s newer Metro lines.

In addition, the long-existing electrified suburban railroads running along the Sea of Marmara have been thoroughly renovated and joined via a 13.5-km-long rail tunnel under the Bosporus. The result is a 77-km-long regional passenger rail line with frequent service that is pretty well integrated with the Metro and light-rail lines. Istanbul also has four funicular railroads (including the Tünel) and two overhead-cable lines (teleferikler) that connect additional points. Among European cities, only Moscow has added comparable amounts of track over the last thirty-five years. And Istanbul isn’t finished. More than 100 km of additional rail lines are now either under construction or very close to being begun. And there are plans to add more track in coming decades, including an express metro across the Bosporus. Here are maps.

Map of Istanbul and vicinity emphasizing rail transit lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The nominal scale of the map is 1:175,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly derived from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited all the data. Note that “pedestrian facilities” include some streets that are open to vehicles part-time. It also includes substantial sidewalks in a few places. The map is clickable and downloadable, but note that this site’s host server does not allow images to be stored at their original resolution.

Map of central Istanbul emphasizing rail transit lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The nominal scale of the map is 1:50,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. See notes with preceding map for additional information.

Istanbul’s urban rail system has several peculiarities.

The system’s planners have aimed to cover the entire metropolitan area with a kind of grid rather than to orient the lines to a central business district. This makes sense, because Istanbul, in addition to its historic centers, has several outlying commercial districts, and desire lines (as is normal in a large urban area whose morphology has been influenced by the automobile) move in all directions. One problem with this approach, however, is that the lines that do pass through the traditional centers (the M2 and T1) can be tremendously overcrowded at the height of rush hour despite running with very short (sometimes less-than-two-minute) headways, while some of the outer-city lines, despite longer headways, have relatively few passengers. The M11, a 46-km-long, 120 km/h line to the new airport, for example, gets by with four-car trains that run every twenty minutes through stations designed for longer trains.

Inside an M2 train on a not-so-crowded holiday afternoon.

Another peculiarity is that there are no free transfers. You have to pay every time you enter a station, even when you’re just taking one of the funiculars. Riders who register their transit cards (that is, most riders except tourists) do get a discount for additional rides within two hours. And fares by European standards are pretty low, approximately 0.55 USD at the rate of exchange that was available when I was in Istanbul. But trips that require several transfers can seem expensive.

Also odd: Except on the Marmaray line (where you have to pay extra to cross between Europe and Asia), the cost of rides is not distance-based. You pay the same no matter how far you’re going as long as you stay on the same line.

Also distinctive: You sometimes have to walk quite a way when transferring. It’s nearly 500 m, for example, between the Haliç station on the M2 line and the Küçükpazar station on the T5 line and approximately 300 m (plus six long escalator rides) between the lines that stop at the two Gayrettepe stations. The two Kağıthane stations are just as far apart.

Still, Istanbul’s rail lines are generally considered an enormous success. It’s hard to find meaningful up-to-date statistics, since some lines have only just opened and Covid has affected ridership, but it appears that the Metro, the tram lines, and Marmaray have been attracting something like two million passengers a day in all. Bus usage is close to three million rides a day, more than that of the rail lines, although presumably rides are on average shorter than on trains.⁸ It’s really hard to imagine Istanbul without all the new or newish rail transit.

Pedestrian facilities. Istanbul’s governments have also put a great deal of energy since (roughly) the 1990s into improving pedestrian facilities in Istanbul, partly by reducing the areas that automobiles can access and partly by reconstructing substantial parts of the city.  

To understand the recent emphasis on pedestrian facilities in Istanbul, it’s important to say that Turks seem as likely to walk places as people in Western Europe.⁹ Except along the freeways and boulevards that have been added since the 1980s, central Istanbul is full of people on foot. Many pedestrians, it’s true, are tourists (especially in Sultanahmet), but there are plenty of Turks as well.

Crowds moving through Eminönü. Eminönü is a major transit hub. There are two tram stops, and a Metro station and a bus terminal are nearby. In addition, numerous ferry lines terminate here. Eminönü is also adjacent to several tourist attractions.

A factor may be that central Istanbul is one of the world’s great urban places for walking, and not only because its built environment contains such a complicated mixture of buildings from many different eras. The key fact is that, because it was already a large city before the automobile came along, it’s very dense. The population of the city in 1914 was 1.1 million; it was the 19th largest city in the world.¹⁰ Virtually the entire population lived either in the Historic Peninsula, east of the Theodosian Walls (that is, in what is now the municipality of Fatih), or else in Beyoğlu (across the Golden Horn from the Historic Peninsula) or in Üsküdar (on the Asian side). Nearly the entire area was built up to a high density, and walking was the main transportation mode for a large part of the population. This area has changed enormously since then. Several roads have been pushed through the old city, and spaces around some of the older buildings (like Aya Sofia) have been opened up. But at least a large part of the urban fabric of the old city still dates to some extent from the period before World War I. Streets can be extraordinarily narrow. Buildings typically touch neighboring buildings. Residential, commercial, and religious land uses are jumbled together. Poor people and (thanks to gentrification) an increasing number of well-off people live in close proximity.¹¹ Istanbul’s central neighborhoods work for pedestrians in part because they still to a large extent have the fine-grained texture of the older city. The pleasures of walking in central Istanbul are not exactly a secret. Turkey’s best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, has written eloquently about this subject.¹²

Walking in central Istanbul, it must be added, has its issues. Sidewalks, if they exist at all, are sometimes in poor shape. There are frequent steep slopes. And car drivers cannot be counted on to defer to pedestrians at crosswalks or when making turns. That’s one of the reasons that reducing car usage has been an important component of pedestrianization.

Pedestrian life in Istanbul has been facilitated by government actions that (like the building of new rail transit lines) began in the 1980s with the newly elected officials of the Motherland Party. One of Mayor Dalan’s major goals was to clean up the Golden Horn region, which (thanks to earlier government efforts) had become a center of often highly polluting industry. In the 1980s, the waters of the Golden Horn were horribly polluted, not just by industry but also by uncontrolled sewage runoff. Mayor Dalan somehow managed to bulldoze hundreds of factories—and to replace them with dozens of parks, which are now some of Istanbul’s most important spaces for pedestrians. ¹³ His administration also managed to modernize Istanbul’s sewage system, thus making proximity to the waters of the Golden Horn a pleasure rather than something to be avoided.

Path and park on the south bank of the Golden Horn. A T5 tram is visible on the left.

Mayor Dalan was, however, guilty of doing some damage to pedestrian life when his administration added several new major roads through the central city. Some of these (for example, Karaağaç Caddesi) blight the waterfronts he helped clean up.¹⁴ Perhaps most damaging of all was Tarlabaşı Boulevard, which was rammed through Beyoğlu between the Atatürk Bridge and Taksim Square. A substantial swath of high-density residential land in Beyoğlu was destroyed in the process of building this boulevard. But another consequence of the building of Tarlabaşı Boulevard was that it allowed İstiklal Caddesi, a major commercial and residential street in Beyoğlu, to be converted into a pedestrian corridor. The pedestrianization of İstiklal Caddesi in turn encouraged middle-class resettlement in a dense urban neighborhood that had become more than a little out-of-fashion. The street today is perhaps Istanbul’s most important pedestrian thoroughfare. It’s crowded between mid-morning and late evening. The “nostalgic tram” line that runs, mostly on a single track. down the middle of the street adds to its charm. Many side streets in Beyoğlu have also been pedestrianized. And, at the northern end of İstiklal Caddesi, Gezi Park is now just about the largest open space in Istanbul’s modern center, thanks to the placement of most traffic in tunnels below the park.

İstiklal Caddesi.

Across the Golden Horn, the Historic Peninsula has been subjected to an even more aggressive pedestrianization process. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, with the help of the municipality of Fatih as well as Gehl Architects and the Turkish branch of Embarq, has managed to pedestrianize at least 295 streets. It’s true that many of these streets are so narrow that automobile access was practically impossible, and it’s also true that, on some streets, deliveries are allowed during certain hours and that enforcement of the laws seems spotty.

Pedestrianized street in the Historic Peninsula,

Nonetheless, in a large part of the eastern end of the Historic Peninsula, it appears to be the case that most people once again get about chiefly on foot. Tram travel seems to be the second most important travel mode. Automobile travel is probably a very distant third.¹⁵

There has also been a continuous attempt to improve the lot of pedestrians elsewhere on the Historic Peninsula. For example, along Ordu Caddesi as it runs through neighborhoods like Laleli, the traffic lanes on either side of the T1 corridor have recently been replaced by sidewalks. These sidewalks are now extraordinarily wide, and car traffic is no longer allowed on a once major artery. This is a pretty major reworking of urban space. (Scooter drivers and even motorcyclists, however, seem to use the sidewalk with impunity.)

Crowds near the Beyazıt-Kapalıçarşı (Grand Bazaar) station on the T1 line, where a very wide sidewalk has replaced traffic lanes. A tram can be seen in the background.

Elsewhere in Istanbul, accommodation of pedestrians plays a role in planning even in places where automobiles would be harder to eliminate. In, for example, the Mecidiyeköy area in Şişli, and even northeast of there, where shopping malls and secure high-rise apartment buildings that have plenty of parking dominate the landscape, there are wide, often crowded sidewalks, open-air cafés and restaurants, and subway stations with special underground entrances to important buildings.

Sidewalk in the Mecidiyeköy area (Şişli) during the Kurban Bayramı holiday period, when some shops are closed and there are surely fewer pedestrians than there usually are.

In recent years, Istanbul has also created a number of recreational corridors. The longest of these are along the Sea of Marmara, where there are almost continuous walking and bicycling paths for several kilometers on both the Asian and European sides of the city.  The corridor on the Asian side is by far the more crowded of these.

Pedestrians and cyclists on the parallel paths along the Sea of Marmara just east of Bostancı on Istanbul’s Asian side.

The comparable paths and linear parks on the European side were strikingly empty every time I visited—I typically had to wait a long time even to get a single user in a photo. I’m not absolutely sure of the reasons for this. One factor may be that most of the adjacent neighborhoods are a little less dense than on the Asian side. Also, the European side’s seafront parks are bordered by a noisy and polluting freeway, Kennedy Caddesi. A larger issue is that there seem to be few cyclists and runners in Istanbul (a city-wide bike-share system has had difficulty staying in business). It’s possible that Turkish culture may for some reason discourage such individual exercise activities. This has not stopped the urban-area governments from making a major effort to accommodate potential users, however.¹⁶

The rather empty bicycle and pedestrian paths in the linear park along the Sea of Marmara on Istanbul’s European side. Kennedy Caddesi is on the right.

Some other new recreational corridors also seemed a little empty to me. The path along the newly rebuilt Sirkeci-Kazlıçeşme rail line that just opened at the beginning of this year is an example. This rail corridor here was once used by both long-distance trains from the rest of Europe and suburban local trains on their way to Sirkeci station. With the opening of the Marmaray, the route lost much of its traffic. It was recently rebuilt as a largely one-track local rail line, and the space taken up by unneeded extra tracks was turned into a modern recreational path.

The Sirkeci-Kazlıçeşme rail line and the parallel recreational path just west of the Cerrahpaşa station. Note Kennedy Caddesi, essentially a freeway, on the left.

The path seemed to me an interesting and pleasurable place to walk along. It passes working-class neighborhoods that still contain Ottoman-era wooden houses, and you get a close-up view of the reworked train line. Unlike the case with many of Istanbul’s sidewalks, the surface is in great shape. But hardly anyone was using the path when I visited, something that made me worry a little about security. (The path has few entrances and exits.)

One of the other long-distance paths I visited seemed similarly underused. The Kağıthane Yeşil Vadi Bisiklet ve Yürüyüş Yolu (2022-2023) is a bicycle and pedestrian path along Kağıthane Creek, which flows into the Golden Horn. The once-industrial valley through which it runs is being turned into a corridor of apartment buildings and offices, and the path has a shiny new surface but only a few users.

The brand-new bicycle and pedestrian path along Kağıthane Creek.

There is, however, no shortage of users along the recently renovated but older path that follows the shore of the Bosporus in Üsküdar. This path provides spectacular views of central Istanbul and shipping on the Bosporus. The late afternoon crowds make up what must be one of the largest passeggiate in the whole Mediterranean basin.¹⁷ It appears that the inhabitants of Istanbul prefer their pedestrian corridors to have lots of, well, pedestrians.

Late afternoon strolling in Üsküdar.

So far there is not much indication that the massive effort to add rail lines and pedestrian facilities in Istanbul has had much of an effect on the area’s traffic problems.¹⁸ In 2021, Istanbul was classified in the TomTom traffic index as having the world’s worst traffic congestion.¹⁹ It hasn’t been easy anywhere in the world to persuade a large proportion of automobile drivers to switch to other transport modes, and Istanbul has had the same difficulties here as every other big urban area.

On the whole, however, I was pretty impressed at the extent to which Istanbul, a city in a middle-income country in a part of the world where one doesn’t expect to find much resistance at all to automobilization, has put such so much energy into creating new rail transit lines and better spaces for pedestrians. There isn’t much doubt that the rail lines have improved life for those inclined or compelled to use public transportation and that the new facilities for pedestrians have made it easier and more enjoyable for people to move on foot around many parts of the city.

I spent several days in Seville last month. I had previously been less familiar with Seville than with any of Spain’s larger cities (I did spend a few hours walking around there in 2010).

Like just about every other city in Western Europe, Seville has been putting a good deal of energy in the last few decades into encouraging alternatives to the automobile, but, like some other mid-sized cities (the Seville urban area has a population of approximately 1.5 million), it hasn’t gone as far in this direction as a few larger (and more congested) places. It was interesting to see what’s been accomplished—and what remains to be done.

Map of Seville and vicinity emphasizing rail transit lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The nominal scale of the map is 1:50,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly derived from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited all the data. Note that the bicycle routes along waterways are typically open to pedestrians too.

Seville does, for example, have a Metro (which opened in 2009), but it’s a single 18-km line, using CAF light-rail rolling stock. The line is fully grade-separated; it’s mostly underground; and it has platform doors and good electric signage in both the stations and inside the cars. The trains I was on were pretty full—but the line (on weekends) was only running single-car trains with 15-minute headways. (Headways are shorter on weekdays.) Seville’s Metro carried approximately 56,000 passengers a day in 2023, up from a pre-Pandemic high of 44,000.¹ It is, in other words, one of the few metros in the world with higher passenger loads in recent times than it had pre-Pandemic. But 56,000 passengers is arguably not an enormous figure in a European urban area of Seville’s size. There is a general sense that Seville has been somewhat backward when it comes to rail transportation.² A second line—confusingly, Line 3—is under construction.

The San Bernardo station of Seville’s Metro.

Inside one of the Seville Metro’s cars.

In addition to the Metro, there is a short tram line, which makes it a little further into the Casco Antiguo—the city’s historic center—than the Metro. The tram line is in the process of being extended to the (main) Santa Justa train station, which the Metro misses by more than a kilometer.

The city has also built an impressive network of sidewalk bicycle lanes. Its post-World-War-II districts tend to have wide streets and wide sidewalks, so there is definitely room for these. Most of the users I saw on Seville’s bike lanes were driving scooters, however, not riding bicycles.

Sidewalk bicycle path along Avenida Eduardo Dato.

In addition, there are numerous pedestrian and bicycle paths along some of the city’s waterways. There is a bit of a story here. Seville owes its Age-of-Discovery importance to its location on the Guadalquivir River, which was then easily navigable to the Mediterranean. ³ Like many of the world’s other rivers, the Guadalquivir in its natural state sometimes flooded, causing an enormous amount of damage. Starting in the late 19th century, Seville’s administrators gradually altered the Guadalquivir’s once winding course so that it would flow straight (more or less north-to-south) well west of the historic city. A new water body, essentially a lake separated from the Guadalquivir by a substantial lock, was created at the edge of the city; it incorporated parts of the former course of the Guadalquivir as well as entirely man-made sections. It’s known as the Dársena of the Guadalquivir, or the Canal de Alfonso XIII. There are now walking/bicycling paths along parts of both the Dársena of the Guadalquivir and (less often) the river itself. They’re not continuous and, in places, are paved with cobblestones that look great but are not ideal for movement on foot or by bicycle. These paths get quite a bit of use despite their limitations.

One of the newer sections of the pedestrian/bicycle path along the Dársena of the Guadalquivir (the Canal de Alfonso XIII).

One of the cobblestone sections of the pedestrian/bicycle path along the Dársena of the Guadalquivir (the Canal de Alfonso XIII). The building in the mid-background is the 13th-century Torre del Oro.

Seville’s most striking feature may be its huge historic center, the Casco Antiguo. Some of the street layout here (and some bits of a few buildings) date back to Seville’s status as an important city (and sometimes the capital) of Muslim al-Andalus. More of the morphology of Seville’s Casco Antiguo dates to the city’s status as the chief port from which Spain sent ships to the New World during the “Age of Discovery.” Seville during this period eventually became one of Europe’s largest cities.⁴ Age-of-Discovery Seville corresponds roughly to today’s oval-shaped Casco Antiguo, which is approximately 3 km north-south and 2 km east-west. This doesn’t sound large, but the Casco Antiguo is one of the largest spaces in Europe where narrow, irregular streets have survived into modern times—and where there have hardly been any Haussmannian “piercings.” The area is not only heavily built-up; it’s still densely populated. Gentrification has to some degree reversed a 20th-century decline in population. ⁵ It’s also the center of Seville’s prosperous tourist industry.

The Casco Antiguo, with its narrow, irregular streets, is a pretty awkward place for automobiles. But automobile drivers in the years after World War II nonetheless insisted on accessing the district on a large scale, polluting the air and making life for pedestrians increasingly difficult.

A narrow street and a much much narrower sidewalk in Seville’s Casco Antiguo.

Spain on average has Europe’s densest cities. Many Spanish cities have historic quarters that are as dense as (if smaller than) Seville’s. A common response has been to pedestrianize most streets. In one case—Pontevedra in Galicia—cars have been nearly eliminated from the historic center. Seville for all sorts of reasons—perhaps above all the sheer size of the Casco Antiguo—has had a great deal of difficulty in following the lead of other cities here. Instead, it’s built several underground garages in the Casco Antiguo’s plazas. These, of course do very little to reduce traffic; they actually encourage and legitimize it. There have been constant discussions over the last several decades about what else to do.⁶ In the end, there has been a good deal of pedestrianization, particularly in the southern (more touristed) parts of the Casco Antiguo. Many streets have also been declared “pedestrian priority,” but, as elsewhere, this works awkwardly. Pedestrians inevitably feel they have no choice but to scatter when a car comes down these streets.

Pedestrianized street in the Casco Antiguo.

One problem is that it’s been difficult, owing in part to the extreme complication of the street geometry and also to residents’ insistence on using cars near their homes, to create continuous pedestrian corridors. This is an intractable problem that most definitely hasn’t been solved. There’s a similar but less severe issue in the quarters just north of and just across the Dársena from the Casco Antiguo, which are also characterized by narrow, irregular streets and where there simply isn’t enough space for automobiles and pedestrians to coexist safely. Here too, there’s been a certain amount of, well, patchy pedestrianization.

In other words, while Seville, like other Western European urban areas, has pushed back a little against the automobile during the last two or three decades, it has resisted moving as far in this direction as some of its counterparts elsewhere.

Along Avenida Insurgentes, a major arterial in Mexico City. This street now includes lanes for cyclists and for a Metrobús BRT line. There is also a well-used sidewalk. Note the electronic sign which features constantly changing messages for drivers to ignore. The current sign reminds drivers that they must yield to pedestrians.

I’ve been in Mexico City twice in the last couple of months, first in mid-January and then in late February. Except for a very brief visit in 2013, these were my first trips to Mexico City in something like twenty-five years.¹ As usual, I was particularly interested in taking a look at new non-automotive transportation facilities. There was a lot to see.

The context is that Mexico City has had a car problem for a long time. It used to be said—back between, say, the 1960s and the early 1990s–that, thanks largely to automobiles, its air quality was the worst in the world. In the 2010s, Mexico City was also sometimes classed as the world’s most congested city mostly because traffic moved so slowly there. As a result, governments have put a great deal of effort into creating alternatives to the automobile, and some of what they’ve done is quite striking. It’s these alternatives that I was mostly interested in.

Map of part of the Mexico City area. Note that the urban area continues quite a way beyond the map, especially to the north, west, and east—Mexico City is, of course, a huge place. The nominal scale of the map is 1:170,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 8-1/2-x-8-1/2-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are derived in part from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap and in part from the files available at the Portal de Datos Abiertos run by Mexico City’s government. I’ve edited all the data. The lines shown for the Mexicable routes (the northeastern teleféricos that are mostly in the state of México) are only approximate; I couldn’t find a premade GIS file or even a trustworthy map of these routes. Note that all the transport routes but the roads are shown with 30% transparency. This means that, when two routes occupy the same (or nearly the same) location, both are visible on the map. When two routes are shown with different colors, you end up with a color mix that (I acknowledge) may be confusing. The map is clickable, enlargeable, and downloadable.

It’s important to note that, despite all the traffic, central Mexico City is, I’m glad to say, full of pedestrians. Sidewalks are found just about everywhere except along freeways, and, while many are in poor shape, they’re often crowded. Major streets are lined with stores that mostly seem to be doing decent business. There are also sidewalk kiosks and itinerant merchants in many places. Much of central Mexico City is, generally, a bustling, “vibrant” place. The pedestrian/car traffic interface is, however, as awkward as it is in most cities of the Global South. Numerous intersections lack traffic lights, and drivers of turning vehicles ignore the laws stating that they must yield to pedestrians. Crosswalks are essentially meaningless.² Part of the problem is surely that there’s the same close relationship between automobile ownership and social class that’s nearly universal in the Global South. As everywhere, wealth comes with privilege. Some well-off people have little sense that they should ever defer to the poor.³

Pedestrians (mostly) waiting to cross an intersection where they theoretically have the right of way. Because the road on the left leads to a freeway entrance, there is a huge amount of traffic, and the wait can last several minutes. Similar situations, of course, occur in the United States as well.

The most costly step that governments have taken to deal with the problem has involved the construction of an elaborate subway system. The first Metro line opened in 1969, and the system has grown quite a lot since then. With approximately 200 route kilometers, it’s now the third largest in the Western Hemisphere (after New York’s and—just barely—Washington’s subways). It also has the third largest number of passengers, nearly three million a day. Only New York and (by a tiny margin) São Paulo have more.⁴ In taking Metro rides in the course of my recent trips, I had the sense that the system has been maintained pretty well. Newer components of the system are state-of-the-art.  It’s true that some of the more-than-fifty-years-old stations and cars were looking their age in small ways. I couldn’t help but notice, for example, that the stone in some of the stairways leading to and from the stations has gotten rather dangerously worn down. There are, however, plans to renovate older stations and to replace the most ancient rolling stock. The subway’s chief problem may be that it covers such a small proportion of the urban area. It barely reaches into México state, which now has a larger population than Mexico City. It doesn’t even cover Mexico City very comprehensively. For example, it doesn’t get anywhere close to Santa Fe, on the city’s western edge, which contains what is now probably the region’s most prestigious office district. The Mexico City urban area has well over 20 million people and covers an area with a diameter of more than 100 km in all directions. Its subway system is useful in something like 15% of this area.⁵

The Coyoacán station (1983) on Line 3 of Mexico City’s Metro.

Inside a Line 3 train.

In more recent years Mexico City has also constructed the Metrobús, an elaborate set of BRT routes the first of which opened in 2005. Most of the original lines run along major streets on separate bus-only lanes and stop in middle-of-the-road stations that you prepay to enter; they are similar to the lines in Curitiba and Quito—and Jakarta. There does not seem to be much if any signal preemption, and the buses I was on spent as much time stopping at red lights as in stations, but they are definitely faster and more reliable than traditional buses. The Metrobús network now has seven lines, and there are something like a million passengers a day. (Some routes—the lines to the Airport and along the Paseo de la Reforma—are not really BRT lines though; they don’t have separate lanes or stations. There are also BRT lines in México State called Mexibús lines. I haven’t ridden these and haven’t included them on the map.)

A Metrobús, having just left a station, waiting with other traffic at a red light on Avenida Insurgentes. Note also the minimally protected bike lane.

There is also one more recent infrastructural intervention that’s been quite specifically designed to help people in some of the late-20th-century informal settlements in Mexico City’s periphery. Governments in the Mexico City area (like those in several other Latin American cities, among them Medellín, La Paz, and Rio de Janeiro) have been building overhead cable lines (or aerial trams, teleféricos in Spanish) to peripheral areas. These lines aren’t speedy, and they can’t carry all that many passengers, but they’re surprisingly cheap to build, and they can be faster and safer than their chief competition: privately-run vans and minibuses that must maneuver through traffic on circuitous roads.⁶ Depending on how one counts them, there are now four or five such lines in the Mexico City area. The first (2016), called the Mexicable, was entirely in México state. It joined hilly sections of Ecatepec de Morelos with a major road. More recent teleférico lines all connect to Mexico City’s Metro lines. The two lines (one with a branch) in Mexico City (2021-) are known as cablebuses and are said to be the world’s longest overhead cable lines (they’re 9 and 10 km long).  The cablebús line that I took (ignoring warnings from middle-class Mexicans about venturing into a dangerous part of the city) provided a truly spectacular view of parts of Mexico City’s periphery.

View looking roughly north from Cablebús Line 1. Note how solidly built-up the neighborhoods below are. Many rooms in these dwellings must be windowless. Numerous buildings in hilly areas can only be reached via long stairways.

The city has also done a good deal of pedestrianization. Many streets and plazas in the Centro Histórico are now pedestrian-only, at least most of the time. Some (I’m delighted to report) are also no-smoking. On weekends they attract an astonishing number of visitors.

Pedestrianized Avenida Francisco I. Madero in the Centro Histórico. The red sign on the left announces that smoking is forbidden in the area.

Perhaps the most interesting (although, I’d be the first to admit, probably most marginal) new transportation development has been the growth of facilities for bicycles. Among cities in the Global South, it seems likely that only Bogotá and Sao Pãulo have more bicycle lanes than Mexico City. It’s claimed that there are now more than 300 km of such lanes, although there is a real issue about what should be counted. The term “carril bici” is used not only for well-protected corridors but also for unprotected painted lanes and lanes that cyclists share with buses. (I didn’t include “bús-bici” lanes on the map above.). I wouldn’t say that Mexico City’s bicycle lanes are often crowded, but they do get a fair amount of use. Car drivers (thanks in part perhaps to government advertising campaigns) do to some extent respect cyclists when they’re making turns.

Protected bicycle lane on the Paseo de la Reforma, perhaps Mexico City’s most prestigious street.

Mexico City also has one off-road rail trail that runs roughly north-south, mostly along the foothills in the western side of the city. It replaced a closed railroad to Cuernavaca and is known as the Ciclopista Ferrocarril de Cuernavaca. Parts of it opened in 2004. I visited the trail in two, surely atypical, places. In the first, near Chapultepec Park, there were hardly any users, even on a Saturday afternoon.

The Ciclopista Ferrocarril de Cuernavaca just west of Chapultepec Park.

I also visited the trail as it passes through Nuevo Polanco, where the railway line is still present and where 10 km of the trail have been designated the Parque Lineal FC (“Railway linear park”). The trail here is quite busy (but only for a short distance).

The Parque Lineal FC, an atypical section of the Ciclopista Ferrocarril de Cuernavaca, as it passes through Nuevo Polanco. This is the only part of the Ciclopista where there are separate pedestrian and bicycle lanes. The Museo Soumaya can be seen in the background.

In general, bicycle lanes are most common in central Mexico City. This substantial and diffuse area is the busiest and most congested part of the region. More remote areas, where people tend to be poorer and more dependent on public transportation, have fewer bicycle facilities (although there are exceptions, including some places where there are bicycle lanes leading to Metro stations with bicycle parking facilities).⁷

The logic of building bicycle facilities is clear enough. Bicycles take up a smaller space than automobiles and don’t cause air pollution. Bicycles are also more easily available to poor people than cars. And bicycle lanes are a whole lot cheaper to build than just about any other new infrastructure. The problem, as everywhere, is that bicycling is often perceived (not inaccurately) to be rather dangerous—and also hard work. The fact, however, that so many people turn up for Mexico City’s Sunday ciclovía (where, as in most big Latin American cities, many important streets are closed for bicycle riders) suggests the possibility that cycling really could take off—someday.

Sunday morning ciclovía on the Paseo de la Reforma. Note the sheet being draped across the roadway to prevent cyclists from disobeying a red light. As elsewhere in Latin America, Mexico City’s ciclovía is a labor-intensive event.

While there have been plenty of pollyannaish journalistic articles⁸ claiming that Mexico City was becoming a center of bicycling, the few figures that I’ve seen suggest that the modal shift toward bicycle use has been modest. According to one source, between 2007 and 2017, trips by bicycle grew from 2.0% to 4.7% of all Mexico City trips. This doesn’t seem so bad until you consider that the same source reported that the modal share of car trips rose from 28.7% to 43.6%, while public-transit trips plummeted.⁹ I haven’t been able to find more reliable and up-to-date figures on bicycling in Mexico City. 

One distinctive feature of the geography of the Mexico City region is that most of its population now lives outside the city itself, mostly in the state of México, where, in general, there has been much less energy put into creating alternatives to the automobile than in Mexico City proper. There are many reasons for this. Among them has been the presence in Mexico City of ambitious mayors like current presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum and current Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The state of México is the site of two new commuter railroads (one far from finished), but the Metro system barely enters the state. There are plenty of exceptions, but the millions of people living in México state are, in general, poorer than those living in Mexico City. It could be argued that the relative absence of new infrastructure there is a pretty classic case of spatial injustice.

Governments have also tried to deal with Mexico City’s pollution and congestion problems in ways that haven’t directly involved creating alternatives to the automobile. Lead gasoline has been banned. Pollution controls are mandated for new cars. Older vehicles with certain license plate numbers are not allowed to be driven on certain days (the “Hoy no circula” program). There have also been attempts to reduce industrial pollution. Power plants, for example, have been converted from coal to natural gas, and no one has tried to keep obsolete factories operating. But—perhaps unwisely—governments have continued to build new highways and haven’t done anything to prevent the continued dispersal of population and activities or the growth of automobile ownership. Still, as a result of  government efforts, air quality really is much better these days than it was, say, thirty years ago, although one of the reasons you hear less about Mexico City’s air pollution problem in recent years is that places like Beijing and Delhi have demonstrated that air quality can get a lot worse than it’s ever been in Mexico City. There are still frequent pollution alerts.¹⁰ Air pollution was pretty bad on several of the days I was in Mexico City. On the day I left, air quality was also compromised by ash from Popocatépetl Volcano.

And there are still too many cars in Mexico City. Traffic jams are common. On my first trip, an 8-km midday Uber ride from the Airport to my hotel took an hour and a half, spent mostly in stopped or slow-moving bumper-to-bumper traffic on freeways. My Uber driver said there was nothing unusual about this, and, in fact, I couldn’t help but notice that traffic in one direction or the other on a freeway near where I was staying was essentially stopped for much of every weekday. Major city streets are also often just jammed with cars, although traffic usually does manage to move every time a slow-to-change traffic light turns green. Perhaps you don’t hear so much any more about congestion in Mexico City because cities like Lagos and Dhaka have it even worse.

To sum up: the Mexico City’s governments have been trying for several decades to solve the area’s pollution and congestion problems. Much of what’s been done resembles actions in other urban areas. Public transportation has been improved; some streets and squares have been pedestrianized; and bicycle transportation has been encouraged. Furthermore, available fuels have been reformulated; modest limits on driving have been instituted; and industrial pollution has been reduced. It can’t be said that the region’s problems have been solved, but they really have been mitigated, even though the urban area now has many more people and a vastly larger number of cars than it did in earlier decades. Perhaps that’s the most that could have been expected.

I spent several days in Nice in late November. I’d been there twice before, in 2008 and in 2014. Like many other people, I find Nice an agreeable place. Its dense central city, its extraordinarily diverse population (which includes visitors from all over the world), the views of the Mediterranean on the south and of Alpine foothills on the north, and the mild climate are all components of Nice’s allure. (I try not to think too much about the fact that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has often done better in Nice than in any other large French city.)

In terms of the themes of this blog, Nice’s Promenade des Anglais is the city’s most distinctive feature. The Promenade is a 7-km-long pedestrian and cycling path that follows the shoreline of the Baie des Anges from Rauba Capeu, a peninsula just southeast of Nice’s central business district, to the city’s airport southwest of the central city. Except on (rare) foggy days, it’s always easy to see from one end of the Promenade to the other. Because the Airport’s runways run more or less parallel to the shoreline, you also get to see airplanes taking off and landing. And, since the Promenade is usually busy, it’s a great place for people-watching. The Promenade des Anglais is certainly one of the world’s most distinctive and enjoyable-to-use urban recreational paths.

In some ways, this path is very much like its counterparts elsewhere. It runs along a body of water. Motor vehicles are forbidden (although scooters do use the bicycle lanes). There’s a daily transformation of the path from a place mostly frequented by more or less serious runners, pedestrians, and cyclists early in the morning to crowds of tourists in the afternoon to a mix of occasionally inebriated revelers on some evenings.  Here are maps.

Map of Nice and vicinity emphasizing pedestrian and cycling facilities and tram lines. The nominal scale of the map is 1:40,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 8-1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper. GIS data come in part from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited the data to some extent. Note the extreme contrast in building density between the fairly flat built-up portions of the city and the much more diffuse hilly areas. The map is clickable, enlargeable, and downloadable.

Map of central Nice and vicinity emphasizing pedestrian and cycling facilities and tram lines. The nominal scale of the map is 1:17,500. For information on the map’s sources, see text accompanying previous map.

In other ways, however, the Promenade des Anglais is somewhat different from comparable paths in other cities. In places, it’s much wider than most of the world’s urban recreational paths. For a 375-m stretch near central Nice (just east of the covered-up Paillon River outflow), it’s approximately 25 m wide, including the bicycle lanes. Elsewhere it’s mostly narrower but still wider than similar features in most other cities. It’s 15 or 16 m wide for a 2-km stretch west of the Paillon outflow. West of the Rue Gardon, it’s still 8 m wide. The path does become narrow at both ends, as it circles around Rauba Capeu and approaches the Airport. Here are some photos.

View of the Promenade des Anglais and of Nice’s beachfront looking roughly west from the Colline du Château, which makes up the bulk of the Rauba Capeu. Note the varying widths of the pedestrian/cycling path.

The Promenade des Anglais’s walking and bicycling paths late on a warmish November morning.

The path’s chief claim to fame may be that’s quite old. I can’t prove it, but it’s possible that the Promenade des Anglais has been used more or less continuously for more years than any other urban recreational path in the world.¹ The path opened in 1824 and will thus be two hundred years old in the coming year.

An often-repeated oral history attributes its founding to wealthy expatriate Englishmen who’d been wintering in Nice since the late 18th century. With some help from his countrymen, a Reverend Lewis Way paid for the initial sections. The goal was to create a place for English expatriates to walk along the coast. Construction was also intended to provide transportation and an income for impoverished residents of Nice who’d come to the city as a result of crop failures due to drought. The initial segment was built just west of the then difficult-to-cross Paillon River. The path was gradually widened and extended west as a result of action by the local government, which reported to the Duke of Savoy until 1860. This process took several decades—just as extending pedestrian paths today often does.

Note, however, that I’ve only been in a position to consult secondary sources.² I haven’t been able to locate any period descriptions of how the early path was actually used, but it does seem credible that furnishing English visitors with a place to walk really was a goal. The literature on the history of pedestrian life suggests that numerous well-off Englishmen in the early 19th century did a great deal of walking.³ It’s easy to imagine that the early Promenade des Anglais (originally called the Camin dei Ingles in Nissart, the local Romance language) was used, just like the path today, both for recreational walking and for commuting along the beachfront.

The coming of French rule in 1860 was, eventually, associated with a substantial increase in the path’s length, width, and pavement quality.⁴ 1870s photographs reveal that there was a division between a pedestrian path and a path for horses and horse-drawn vehicles.⁵ The paths were at least partly paved around 1880.⁶ The building of a bridge (the Pont des Anges) over the Paillon River in 1890 allowed the path to be extended east. Things didn’t change radically after motorcars came along in the 1890s. Motorcars just used the former horse path.

The Promenade des Anglais took something like its present form in the 1930s, when Mayor Jean Médecin ordered improvements in both the pedestrian path and the path for motor vehicles. The former was extended out onto the beach and was put on a kind of dyke. A beachside wall was added to keep out waves that could strike during storms. The adjoining roadway became a four- or five-lane arterial with a median. It’s often described as a kind of early freeway, but it wasn’t really; there were (and are) traffic lights and pedestrian crossings. Numerous photographs from the 1920s suggest that the pedestrian path was heavily used despite the arrival of the automobile. But users in those days were definitely not for the most part obsessive exercisers. The photos show crowds of people watching events or mingling near Nice’s CBD. It was not until the last third of the 20th century (or even later) that running, bicycling, and walking for exercise came to be important for large numbers of people in France and other Western countries and the Promenade des Anglais came once again to be used in ways that would presumably have been somewhat familiar to the English expatriates who built the original path.

There have been additional changes in more recent years. In 2020, the parallel roadway’s eastern sections were put on a diet; only a one-way single lane remains. The separate bicycle path, established some years ago, was extended to the Airport in 2022.⁷ More recently, a fatal accident stimulated authorities to add pedestrian crosswalks at frequent intervals along the bicycle path; there is some question as to whether these have had any effect.⁸

Note that, from the point-of-view of many automobile-oriented residents of Nice, the parallel arterial road (also called the Promenade des Anglais) is much more important than the path for pedestrians and cyclists. Users of the pedestrian path (including me) have often been bothered by the proximity of this busy highway, and there have been numerous proposals to pedestrianize, or at least shrink, it, but tourists don’t get to vote in elections, and most Niçois have been unenthusiastic about eliminating or even downsizing the roadway.⁹ Highly-polluting vehicles (including most trucks) have been banned, and it’s been claimed that the opening of tram line 2 in 2018 and 2019, which runs parallel to the Promenade des Anglais much of the way just a block north, has reduced the amount of traffic on the roadway by 20,000 vehicles a day, but the road is still there. In Nice, as in most of the world’s other cities, it hasn’t been easy to reduce automobile use by even a small amount without eliciting strong protests.

Nice has, interestingly, created a new Promenade on top of the covered-up Paillon River, whose users to a much larger extent than users of the Promenade des Anglais seem to be local residents.¹⁰ The Promenade du Paillon partly consists of land that’s been parkland for decades, but the park has been improved with the kind of fountain that children and adults are invited to play in as well as a very fancy playground. Here are photos.

The Promenade du Paillon as it cuts a green swath through central Nice. Nice’s central city is small but, generally, denser than the central parts of most other French provincial cities. This is a northwestern view from the Colline du Château.

Crowds on the Promenade du Paillon walking by the Mirroir d’eau, an elaborate water fountain that encourages passersby to play in it (although maybe not so much on a cool day in November!).

The Promenade du Paillon is being extended north to a block that once held a bus station and a mid-rise parking facility. There’s a possibility that it could one day be linked to the pedestrian paths that line the uncovered Paillon as it passes through working-class neighborhoods a kilometer or so north, but there are a number of unmovable buildings along the way, among them the Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain, a convention center, and a newish Novotel.

Nice, like many other French cities, has also done its share of encouraging an increase in the use of “soft” (that is, doux in French) modes of transport by pedestrianizing numerous central-city streets, constructing protected bicycle lanes, and building new tram lines. The fact that the urban area has an unusually dense central city and that its most heavily built-up residential areas consist of narrow corridors of fairly flat land guarantee that there’s a good fit between public transport and land use. Trams, which run often during most of the day, tend to be pretty full, and Nice’s central city is a busy, apparently thriving place.

A tram along Avenue Jean Médecin, a major shopping street in Nice’s CBD. Ordinary motor vehicles are not allowed on this street.

But it’s Nice’s beachfront Promenade des Anglais that remains the city’s most distinctive feature and a major draw for tourists and residents.

The sign-holders, the drummers, and the group supporting the cloth subway car are marching around La Carolina Park (Quito’s largest inner-city park) advertising the Metro. The sign (translated) reads: “Quito’s Metro has arrived. Quito is being reborn.” Note the striped pedestrian and cycling paths. Many Quiteños use La Carolina Park for walking, running, or cycling. 

I spent several days in Quito last week. I particularly wanted to ride the Metro, the city’s brand-new subway. Quito’s Metro had opened commercially a week earlier, on December 1. It had been a long time coming. Construction started in 2013. The Metro opened briefly in May 2023 but closed quickly when it was realized that the system was not yet ready; there had apparently been major problems with coordinating the system’s many contractors—as well as with ticketing.¹

Ticketing remains a problem. There are no ticket machines. Most passengers line up at understaffed windows and pay the fare (45 U.S. cents) in cash.² If only because this is an awkward amount of money, the majority of customers must wait for change. There were enormous lines outside certain stations on the Sunday (December 10) when I first rode the system.

Long lines of passengers waiting to be allowed to purchase tickets at the San Francisco station.

The problems don’t end with a purchase. Tickets are paper tickets with a QR code. Turnstiles that allow entrance to the system have scanners. You have to position the QR code in a particular place under the scanner to enter the system. I can attest that this doesn’t always work.

The entity responsible for public transport in Quito—the Empresa Pública Metropolitana de Movilidad y Obras Públicas—would like users to set up accounts that allow entry to the system by QR codes on smartphones. To create an account you have to fill out an elaborate form and submit it, either in person or online. Ecuador is one of those countries where electronic payments are rare—most people use cash for everything—and I gather that, despite relentless advertisements, relatively few people have set up accounts. This is obviously a real problem.³

Except for the ticketing issue, the system seemed to be operating smoothly when I was there. The trains (from the Spanish firm, CAF) were running without glitches (although neither the next-train signs in the stations nor the informational signs in most train interiors were working). The cars—powered by pantographs touching overhead wires—are standard contemporary metro cars with open gangways. Oddly, there are no advertisements in the trains. The trains’ exteriors are decorated with stylized pictures suggesting some of Quito’s distinctive features.

Metro train, probably in La Carolina station.

The stations—also completely without advertising of any kind—are sparkling. They are all similar, although adjacent stations are colored differently, and the geography of some stations is altered by the presence of multiple exits. There are substantial mezzanines in all (or nearly all) the stations, and, because there are few columns, views from the mezzanines down to the tracks are possible. There are escalators here and there. All stations also have elevators, but I never saw anyone using one.

Station stairs and escalators, probably San Francisco station.

Directional signage in the stations is quite elegant.

All platforms have system and local maps as well as a chart of fares.

The system—impressively—is entirely underground.

Riders in many cases were visibly delighted. I’d never before been in a subway where a large proportion of the passengers were walking around staring at features of the system, smiling, and taking selfies.

Sunday afternoon on a crowded Metro train.

There were ample reminders of how new some of the Metro’s features were to some passengers. Numerous people hesitated to get on the escalators. Many standing passengers clearly did not realize that it’s a good idea to hold on to or lean against something while the train is in motion. And not a single passenger getting on a train was willing to wait for passengers to disembark. (Of course, this happens even on some subways—Delhi’s for example—that have been around for a while.)

Quito, as I mentioned in an earlier post, has a very distinctive geography. Most people live in a long valley perhaps 45 km long and something like 5 km wide, oriented roughly north-south (but actually north-north-east/south-south-west). The valley is bordered by a high volcano on the west and substantial hills on the east. Air quality in Quito is often poor. I was able to smell motor-vehicle exhaust just about every moment I was in Quito, even on a Sunday, when many roads are closed for a ciclovía and most businesses are shut. (The 2850-m altitude may not help.⁴) The air-quality problem—and the fact that so much movement runs in a fairly narrow corridor—make Quito a good candidate for serious public transport, and governments have been willing to play their part. In the 1990s, the city established what is now called Metrobús-Q, a BRT system consisting of three more or less parallel corridors along the central part of the valley (one route, the Trole, is partly served by trolleybuses). The Metro adds a new north-south corridor. The Metro route is approximately parallel to the BRT lines, but the Metro serves a few places—for example, the heart of the Centro Histórico, the Plaza de San Francisco—that the BRT lines mostly miss by a few blocks.

Map of part of Quito emphasizing the Metro, Metrobús-Q lines, and pedestrian facilities. The nominal scale of the map is 1:75,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11 x 8-1/2 inch sheet of paper. GIS data come in part from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap.  I’ve edited the data to some extent. The map is clickable, enlargeable, and downloadable.

The stations are fairly far apart. The Metro has 15 stations along its 22.5-km route⁵ and takes about half as long—34 minutes—to make a full trip as the BRT vehicles can manage over the same distance.

The Metro was financed partly with tax dollars and partly with loans from many different sources. It was surely a major undertaking for a country like Ecuador, which, despite the presence of oil in the Amazon and a reasonably prosperous agricultural sector, is not at all wealthy.⁶

In recent years Ecuador has been going through a difficult period. There have been intractable political conflicts, and the country has been suffering from a major crime problem associated in part with the drug trade. During my recent trip, I stayed (as many foreigners do) in La Mariscal, a neighborhood which, within living memory, was a dense, healthy, bustling more or less middle-class place. It still is, to a large extent, by day, but, because of fear of crime, La Mariscal’s sidewalks now tend to be deserted at night. It’s pretty impressive that Quito has been able to construct an elaborate Metro system despite the country’s problems.