Why automated metros are the future
High-tech transit can be cost-effective transit. Just look at Canada.
Today is publication day for my book, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution! To mark the occasion, I’m publishing a brief excerpt from Chapter 6, “The Canadian School of Public Transit.” This excerpt is also running in “City of Yes,” an excellent urbanist Substack by Ryan Puzycki focused on the intersection of urban theory and practice.
It’s often said that the future of transportation is electric and autonomous. In the US, this saying is typically applied to cars. But what if we were talking about transit all along? While the US has been fixating on a future of EVs and AVs, other countries have been investing in a different transportation future defined by high-tech metros.
Name a major global city—Cairo, Mumbai, Paris, Seoul, Santiago, Istanbul, Guangzhou—and odds are good that they are in the midst of a dramatic transit-building program. Compared to US transit systems, the latest metros being constructed around the world look like they rolled straight out of science fiction. Picture driverless trains arriving every ninety seconds, platform screen doors that protect waiting passengers from falling into the tracks and allow for climate-controlled stations, endless open gangways that enable passengers to spread out along the entire length of the train, and subways traveling upwards of one hundred miles per hour.
Only two US cities currently have transit ambitions remotely close to those of other major global cities: Los Angeles and Seattle. In the absence of a significant federal transit-building program like the one that produced the “Great Society subways” of the 1970s, these two cities took matters into their own hands by passing multiple regional transit funding measures over the past several years.
Seattle will soon get an east–west connection to the fast-growing technology hubs of Bellevue and Redmond, in addition to its popular north–south line linking downtown, the University of Washington, and SeaTac airport. Los Angeles now has not one, but two subways across downtown. And before the 2028 Olympics, it will open long-planned transit links to UCLA, Beverly Hills, and LAX that will revolutionize transportation for Angelenos.
But Seattle and LA are not pursuing the most advanced transit technologies. Instead, they’re mostly building relatively slow, low-capacity light-rail lines that must contend with surface intersections. These cities, as well as other US cities doing more piecemeal transit expansions, are struggling to get construction costs under control and have been forced to curb their ambitions accordingly. Heavy rail subways and elevateds, totally liberated from surface intersections, have become too expensive to even contemplate.
The few subway projects that have recently been undertaken in the US are among the most expensive in the world. A short leg of New York City’s Second Avenue Subway, which was begun and then halted in the 1970s, was finally completed in 2017 at a cost of $2.6 billion per mile. BART’s San Jose extension is expected to cost $2 billion per mile. LA’s D Line subway to UCLA will cost about $1.4 billion per mile. Comparable subway projects in Copenhagen and Madrid cost around $300 million per mile, a price tag similar to some surface-running light-rail projects in the US.
Eric Goldwyn, a professor of urban planning at New York University and the head of the Transit Costs Project, has made it his life’s work to understand and try to fix this discrepancy. As with any hard problem, there’s no silver bullet. “It’s all this mundane stuff,” he told me. “It’s not a technological issue. It’s a political will issue.”
Cut down on procedural and administrative hurdles. Limit veto points and the scope of environmental review for projects that will clearly benefit the environment. Use a replicable kit of parts. Copy from other places where transit is cheaper. Build smaller, less elaborate stations. Build elevated trains rather than subways. And if you have to dig, do so using old-fashioned cut-and-cover techniques rather than expensive boring machines that are imperceptible to people on the surface. The politics of transit construction are “all about minimizing disruption,” Goldwyn said. “That mentality leads to expensive choices.”
Some of Canada’s most recent projects have followed Goldwyn’s playbook. By using well-proven technologies from France and building out its stations with a repeating, kit-of-parts design, Montreal’s REM (for Réseau express métropolitain) automated metro system is projected to cost US$159 million per mile, even after recent cost escalations. That price point will make it possible for Montreal to build what amounts to a brand new, forty-two- mile metro system, overlaid on the old one, for about US$6.7 billion. That’s a similar pricetag to the two-mile next phase of the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan.
How does Montreal do it? The company building the REM, an arm of Quebec’s well-resourced and politically powerful pension fund, was granted master permitting authority along the project’s right-of-way. That means that since the project’s initial approvals, the company never again had to ask permission from other government agencies or utility companies to carry out its work.
The REM’s design helps reduce costs, too. The REM’s high-frequency automated trains, which can be run as often as every 90 seconds, allow for the construction of relatively small stations without sacrificing capacity. And almost the entire system is elevated, not out of sight and out of mind in a tunnel. “If transit is a priority,” Goldwyn said, “it needs to be given the authority to do unpopular things.”
Automated, elevated metros like Montreal’s REM or the even more extensive SkyTrain system in Vancouver are rare in the US. For the most part, Americans only encounter this technology on airport people movers. But embracing automation on new or existing transit lines could go a long way toward reducing the cost of building and operating transit. And it could significantly improve the passenger experience, with faster and more frequent trains, and safe, comfortable stations protected by platform screen doors.
This global transit best practice is slowly filtering into the American consciousness. In 2023, Honolulu opened the first short segment of its Skyline automated, elevated metro system, and just this month, the line was extended to Inouye Airport, as it eventually makes its way downtown. DC’s Metro is also planning to automate its existing lines over the next two decades, which will increase speeds and lower wait times. A proposed transit line over the Sepulveda Pass in Los Angeles could potentially be automated. And so might the Interborough Express connecting Brooklyn and Queens.
The rest of the world has decided that this is the future of urban transportation. Perhaps America will eventually get onboard. At the very least, the examples of other countries should inspire Americans to dream bigger about what their transit systems can look like. If US cities could build automated metros at Montreal costs, the possibilities are endless.
The Unfinished Metropolis is available on Amazon, Bookshop.org, and at select bookstores, including Unnamable Books and Book Culture in New York, and Book Passage in San Francisco. Stay tuned for more book events in San Francisco and New York.
So excited for your work and this day!
Congratulations on pub day!!