New or newish rail transit lines and pedestrian facilities in Istanbul

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.