This Japanese Metro isn’t in Japan | Dhaka Metro

one thing that I think would surprise the average viewer of this channel is the incredible number of new subway and Metro systems being built throughout the part of the world that we often call the global south from Delhi to Sao Paulo but some of these new Metro systems like the MRT lion 6 in Dhaka Bangladesh look familiar and they almost hearken to Tokyo but that's got to be a coincidence or is it [Music] if you've noticed recently a lot of cities in the global South have been opening really impressive new Metro and other Transit projects and some of these projects with their stainless steel rail cars and their front fascias with an exit door placed just so sort of look like Japanese Subways it's almost like subway builders in Tokyo took a wrong turn and ended up in the world's ninth largest city but wait let's step back DACA has a Subway Seattle doesn't have a Subway Houston doesn't have a Subway Denver doesn't have a Subway and even Los Angeles doesn't have all that big of a Subway despite having nearly 20 million people in its metro area and being in one of the richest countries on the face of Earth indeed at the end of 2022 DACA opened the first metro line in Bangladesh known as the MRT line six because yes Dhaka is planning in building a much much larger system the first phase of the line runs 11 kilometers North through the western part of the city and it has a fully elevated alignment with Nyan stations built to allow for what appears to be up to 10 Car Metro trains in the future well and the trains they already have are moving hundreds of thousands of riders every single day already across nine stations that's more than the entire rail system in Los Angeles across nine stations in fact when the line first opened service was only around every 8 to 10 minutes during Peak periods but it's already been increased to be more frequent because it can't keep up with demand oh and did I mention that the Stations of course have platform screen doors or in this case Gates and as it turns out the already well under construction second phase will extend the line even further connecting the servers to the city center and then sometime after to the city's main railway station where connections will be possible to Mainline rail Services as well as other under construction MRT lines ultimately in a lot of ways daca's first metro line is already nicer than a lot of the Metro lions in the United States or Canada and given it has platform Gates and has trains with a top speed of up to 100 kilometers per hour it's nicer than a lot of Metro lines anywhere in the world but how did this actually happen well as it might not surprise you Japan was involved UC Japan has been on quite the infrastructure quest in the last couple of decades funding Trends and infrastructure projects with the condition that they buy products from Japanese companies and use Japanese consultancies to help design and develop their systems in the case of DACA they looked at the various lines the city was planning found the one that they thought was the most promising and got on with building meanwhile the trains which are powered by 1500 volt DC overhead wires like seemingly every other Metro system in the world these days and can run up to 100 kilometers per hour on standard gauge tracks are pretty much de facto standard Japanese Metro trains manufactured by Kawasaki in Japan and no surprises they look great I would love to have trains like this in my city and as you might imagine various other systems on the metro line are from Japanese companies including the electrical systems and the signal and as it turns out this is far from the first place that Japanese companies and the Japanese government have gotten involved in building a Subway right now Japanese companies are building a Subway in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam and they're actually already working on several different lions in Manila the capital of the Philippines including a really impressive line called the north south commuter rail which will be roughly 150 kilometers long and have multiple different service patterns with large JRE style Mainline emus the trains themselves will be made by famous Japanese Railcar manufacturer j-track and they reminded me a lot of the SRT Red Lions in Bangkok if you don't know about that project then you should watch the video up here and as it turns out Japan funded and built Metro lines are already in operation in quite a few places my personal favorite is probably the 13 station Jakarta MRT in Indonesia which because of its Narrow Gauge tracks and its trains which have a really slick design with a really cool logo would look right at home in a Japanese City like Osaka or Tokyo now well let me seem like I'm a big fan of these Japanese overseas metros I'm really more of a fan of Japanese metros in general because while these projects are good and that they bring public transportation of a high quality to lots of different cities they have some serious issues for one lines like the MRT and DACA have really high costs in fact the MRT and DACA is nearly as expensive as underground Subways in the most cost effective Subway building countries around the world which probably means that those Japanese companies are making a good amount of money off of the project at the same time with projects like this there's a real risk that if knowledge isn't transferred to locals who actually live in Bangladesh well then the country might become dependent on Japan for building Subways it wouldn't be good for the growth of the MRT system in DACA for the city to become completely dependent on Japan for building its Subways or really any other country ultimately the places that are cost effective at building Transit have internal expertise within public agencies that are capable of Designing procuring and building the project themselves that being said I should say cities like New York Toronto Sydney and London not to mention Los Angeles are also building extremely expensive Transit projects and and these cities can probably afford to pay Crazy Prices more than DACA but they also do build bad Transit projects to varying degrees and few of them are as well used as the MRT Line 6 in DACA they also aren't Japanese Subway Lines thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 461,708

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, public transit, public transport, public transportation, train, subway, metro, underground, rail transport, urban planning, dhaka, dhaka metro, bangladesh, tokyo, japan

Id: 4Hpic8WMvkk

Length: 6min 17sec (377 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2023