The Most Unexpected Place You'll Find a Metro | Lausanne Metro

we talk a lot about metros on this channel from Paris to Tokyo to Istanbul but would you guess that one of the world's most interesting metros is in a city of just around 250 000 people that's not big as it turns out though the Swiss city of lausanne has not one but two Metro lines well at least on paper we'll talk about that shortly nonetheless let's look at one of the smallest automatedist rubber tiredist platform screen door having us little metros in the world the lazan Metro foreign and Kurt for their on-the-ground footage from lausanne featured in this video as you might know Switzerland has a crazy amount of trains and they are really good but what Switzerland some oddly does not have is a lot of metros in fact it has just one and it's weird and it's in lausanne which is within the general orbit of Geneva if you're curious the lazan Metro is a two-line affair and remember the city isn't Tokyo so the network doesn't extend to the moon and back it's just around 14 kilometers long but in these 14 or more specifically 13.7 kilometers there are 28 different stations as I mentioned before the system has two lines but M1 which is well over half the length of the entire system and in the tradition of the Brisbane Metro the Birmingham Metro and Capital Metro in Austin Texas it really really shouldn't be called a Metro for one much of the line is single track and I'm not necessarily suggesting that a Metro can't have single track on it but it probably shouldn't be 50 single track of course the reason for this is good Swiss engineering organization before Electronics before concrete and all and frequencies are generally good at around every 10 minutes or so that being said despite the high platforms the line has Road Crossings and tracks running right next to streets without much protection at all so it's just not very metro-like and it's generally not claimed that the system is all the documentation I've seen suggests that M1 is light rail I just find it funny that it's part of a quote unquote Metro System line M2 though is an entirely different Beast like many hilly cities lausanne previously had a funicular system running through the middle of it from the main train station down to Lakeshore eventually this funicular was converted to a rack Railway and got the name Metro which reminds me a lot of the Leon metros line sea a metro rack Railway hybrid that I covered in a previous video but lausanne took it even further when in the 2000s it turned it into the most Metro like Metro Lauzon had seen yet with frequent service and no cables or rack tracks even more interesting this line would use trans similar to one seen in Paris in Santiago no not those trains yes rubber tire trains the despite being built in the 2000s the lausanne Metro adopted trains really similar to the mp89 trains in Paris or the ns-93 in Santiago making it one of those few cities to use the Paris derived reper Tire Metro Tech but in this case it was basically a requirement the line is incredibly steep remember this was an old funicular so the track climbs grades of up to 12 percent and this is all while operating a frequent every three minute Metro style service albeit mostly below ground in tunnels the grades overall are so steep that to avoid having to make them even steeper between stations the stations themselves are even on grades plazan station the main National Railway Station of the city looks like this now you might think that this is a cute tourist attraction for the mini mountain and chocolate obsessed visitors Switzerland sees every year but this really is mass transit and the M2 line moved around 70 000 people a day in 2013. beating expectations as many small Metro lines seem to that's similar in numbers to the Miami Metro rails system which uses much larger trains but at a much lower frequency and is in the city many times the size of lausanne seventy thousand a day is actually just very respectable given the line is less than six kilometers long what other Metro lines out there doesn't beat let me know in the comments this hasn't come without its issues though because train frequencies across the whole line are limited somewhat by the ReUse of old tunnel segments from the funicular and a single track section along the line in one such tunnel which allows only one train going in One Direction at a time to fix this the line is being upgraded with a new section under lausanne's main train station that will be better located and double tracked more trains will also operate bringing frequency to levels better than every three minutes in a city of just a couple hundred thousand people I think the lesson here is that even a small City can justify a Metro on the right Corridor High ridership difficult geography and short overall length and M2 is not some Antiquated system of the past despite being a small system M2 with its 14 stations is fully automated and features platform screen doors at every station as well as a very paris-esque internal seating arrangement on the trains this is really a master class in adopting the best practices for much more established transit systems to better a city that just isn't all that big this isn't suggesting that every Transit line should be a Metro that clearly doesn't make sense cost or benefit wise but it does show that the idea that a city of any significant size could be too small for a Metro isn't necessarily true and that if you provide a great Transit service people will will use it thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 155,687

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, public transit, public transport, public transportation, train, subway, metro, underground, rail transport, urban planning, lausanne, switzerland, swiss, lausanne metro

Id: MCHyjqYItfA

Length: 5min 41sec (341 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2022