Liberal Landscape

I was in Honolulu a couple of weeks ago for the first time since 2022. I particularly wanted to ride on Skyline, Honolulu’s new (or at least newish) elevated railroad. The first segment of Skyline (between the western terminus and Aloha Stadium) began offering service in June of 2023. The second segment (to Kalihi Transit Center) opened much more recently, in October of 2025. There are now approximately 16 miles (25 km) of lines in service. The line is now 80% complete. (Skyline as currently envisaged will be approximately 20 miles (32 km) long.)¹

Except for several airport people movers, Skyline is the first driverless urban rail line in the United States. But, on a world scale, it’s not a particularly innovative system. Kōbe opened a short driverless line in 1981. Lille launched what was arguably the world’s first substantial driverless metro system in 1983, and Vancouver inaugurated the first North American driverless urban rail transit line in 1985. Dozens of cities in Europe, Latin America, and (especially) Asia now have driverless metros. The United States came rather late to this technology.

Skyline is almost entirely elevated (there is a short surface section near the line’s railyards). It was decided long ago that the price tag of building a subway would be prohibitive. The cost of construction has still turned out to be enormous. The line, when the next segment is completed, will end up having cost more than twelve billion dollars, much more than was predicted in the original plans. Other U.S. urban rail lines built in recent years have also proven ruinously expensive, with costs per kilometer many times higher than new lines in most other countries.

Both segments completed thus far are essentially suburban. Here’s a map:

Map of part of the Honolulu area showing the location of Skyline. The nominal scale of the map is 1:75,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 8-1/2-x-11-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly derived from files downloaded from the Hawaii Statewide GIS Program and the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited all the data. Click on the map to enlarge it.

Segment 1 lies entirely outside the U.S. Census definition of Urban Honolulu. Some of the outer parts of the line run by farmland or land that appears essentially vacant.

Train just northeast of the Keone’ae/University of Hawai’i West O’ahu station. Note the relatively empty surroundings.

Segment 2 includes a stop at Honolulu’s airport. Both segments also pass close to important educational facilities as well as some residential areas with medium density. Here’s a map showing the line’s route superimposed on a density map of part of central Honolulu:

Map of part of central Honolulu showing the relationship between Skyline and population density. Population density is shown by census tract; figures are from the 2020 census. See map above for additional information about data sources. Click on the map to enlarge it.

Note, however, that the line now open does not really serve any of Honolulu’s densest districts, the kinds of places where congestion is such a serious problem that a rapid urban rail line seems the only transportation solution. Honolulu does in fact have such places. The urban area has only a million people, but, by the Census Bureau’s “population-weighted density” method of measuring urban density, Honolulu was actually the fourth densest major urban area in the country in the 2010s (and it’s now the fifth densest by traditional measures). Road congestion is definitely an issue. The densest (and, not coincidentally, the most transit-oriented) parts of Honolulu—Waikiki, Kaka’ako, Downtown, some working-class districts not far from Downtown and Waikiki, and the area around the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa—are not yet served by Skyline, and some of these may never be.

Much of the currently operating line runs through light-industrial districts and carscapes close to the Pearl Harbor shoreline.

Much of Skyline’s right-of-way is next to, or over, major arterials.

It does pass through some more or less middle- or working-class neighborhoods, but even here, the stations are often several blocks from traditional commercial districts and higher-density residential areas. The spatial relationship between the location of Skyline’s stations and the likely origins and destinations of potential customers is not ideal. The current eastern terminus, for example, is at the Kalihi Transit Center. Several bus routes terminate here, so this seems like a logical place for a station. But to get from the Transit Center to the medium-density, economically heterogeneous neighborhood of Kalihi on foot, you have to cross a freeway and walk through several blocks of non-residential land.

The Kalihi Transit Center, which adjoins the Kahauiki/Kalihi Transit Center Skyline station. Note the not very pedestrian-friendly surroundings.

Skyline really doesn’t yet serve any unambiguously well-off districts either, even though some of Honolulu’s inner-city gentrified neighborhoods are arguably the most transit-friendly places in the city. Here’s a map showing Skyline’s route superimposed on a per capita income map of central Honolulu:

Map of central Honolulu showing the relationship between Skyline’s route and per capita income by census tract (from the 2018/2022 ACS). See first map above for additional information on data sources. Click on the map to enlarge it.

There are several reasons why Skyline has been built where it has been. One reason is political. Building the line has always been controversial. A referendum in 2008 favored building it, but only 53 percent of voters said yes. The referendum was preceded by more than a decade of arguments about the need for a rail line in Honolulu, and, even though they lost the referendum, opponents have never quite given up, and, as costs have mounted, there has always been a danger that construction would be halted completely. It would be hard to prove this, but it appears that the outer part of the line was built first partly to assure that at a certain point it would be ridiculous not to add the parts of the line that would make it useful. Other factors surely played a role too. The outer part of the line was the easiest to build, and construction through mostly low-density areas was the least disruptive. The newly-built line has also served as a demonstration that an elevated railroad line doesn’t have to be an obnoxious neighbor. Reluctance to impose an elevated railroad on denser residential and commercial areas appears to have been a key factor in determining Skyline’s routes.²

The initial predominantly suburban segments have, inevitably, not attracted many users. With segment 1 in place, Skyline had approximately 3,000 passengers a day. Since segment 2 opened, there have been something like 10,000 daily riders. These are not the kinds of statistics that would seem to justify spending twelve billion dollars. Trains are running fairly empty.

Inside a Skyline train. Note the open gangways—and all the empty seats. Most of the trains I rode were even emptier.

It is projected that, when the line reaches Downtown, it will have many more riders, and no doubt it will. But will it really have 80,000 riders a day, as has been projected? I’m not so sure.³

Despite the modest passenger loads, the Honolulu Department of Transportation Services to its credit has been taking advantage of driverless technology and is running trains frequently. There is service every ten minutes between 4 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. and then every fifteen minutes between 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. That’s 110 trains a day in each direction (with an average of fewer than 50 passengers per trip). When I rode the line, service was consistently on time. The technology, of course, permits running trains even more frequently without incurring extra labor costs, and headways are supposed to be even shorter when the line reaches Downtown.

Skyline has inevitably been affected by cultural issues. Hawai’i is theoretically a bilingual state. English and Hawaiian are both official languages. In practice, though, there are very few native speakers of Hawaiian left, and the proportion is particularly small in Honolulu. But recorded announcements on the trains about door closings are given in English and Hawaiian; the stations have bilingual signs with information on local history; and all the stations’ main names are in Hawaiian only. The stations also have English-language names, but they come second in official announcements and are printed in a smaller font than the Hawaiian names on official signs. The Hawaiian names often have little to do with present toponyms or land uses. They are typically historical. The official name of the Airport station, for example, is Lelepaua. It refers to a fishpond that once lay nearby. The official tie-ins with the precolonial landscape strike me as being quite wonderful, but I’m guessing that the insistence on having official names that mean little to most residents will mostly serve as ammunition for those who are uncomfortable with a “woke” mindset.

Skyline is in most ways a modern rail transit system. The cars have open gangways. There are electronic signs with next-train information. There are recorded announcements inside the trains with next-station information. The platform edges have gates that open only when the train has fully stopped. The stations all have elevators, and some have escalators. And there is plenty of protection against sun and rain in and around the stations.

Lelepaua, the Airport station. Stations are pretty much all the same. In a mostly low-rise landscape, the stations all seem huge.

I walked under the tracks in several places and was impressed by the fact that the concrete columns really do dampen sound to a considerable extent. But the elevated structure does, of course, cast shadows.

Newish pedestrian and bicycling path along the train tracks between the Keone’ae and Kualaka’i stations. The overhead trains are fairly quiet.

The line is not particularly fast. Its top speed is 55 mph (89 km/h). That means that train riders can sometimes see cars on nearby highways that are moving faster than the train. Because the line has numerous curves, however, it’s likely that trains with a higher top speed would not have been able to go much faster.

The ride is surprisingly “wobbly.” There is a lot of vibration when the train is moving quickly. The problem may be related to faulty construction of many crossovers. This problem is supposed to be fixed eventually.

The line’s chief problem remains that service to the majority of Honolulu’s most important and most transit-oriented destinations will not be available for many years, if ever. Downtown won’t be reached until 2031, and the Downtown stations will be at the edge of Downtown. Many of those commuting to and from the main office clusters will have to walk several blocks to get to the stations. Note that the projected 2031 completion date assumes that construction goes more smoothly than it has so far. The new segment—which will end at the Civic Center—is approximately 3.3 miles (5.3 km) long. It’s not clear why it will take five years to build a little more than three miles of elevated track, but the construction of Skyline has generally required much more time than was anticipated.

Ala Moana, Honolulu’s most important retail district and Skyline’s projected terminus, is less than a mile beyond Civic Center, but no date has been proposed for adding the Ala Moana segment. Some have claimed it will never be built. I am sure there will be major battles when the residents of increasingly gentrified Kaka’ako (between Downtown and Ala Moana) are faced with the prospect of an elevated railroad running next to their expensive condos. There are theoretical plans to build extensions to Waikiki and the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, two of the places that generate the largest number of transit passengers in Honolulu, but no precise plans have been drawn up for these extensions.

There is hope that the existence of Skyline will change Honolulu’s urban geography in ways that will make the line more useful. Zoning has been altered in certain places to encourage the construction of TODs. But Honolulu isn’t growing very fast at all, and there is no reason to believe that there will be a huge amount of housing built near stations even if zoning allows it.

In other words, building Skyline has been like building other new urban rail lines in North America. It’s been a slow and expensive process, and the result has not so far been an unambiguous success. But Honolulu’s highways really are badly congested, the line is certainly pleasant to use, and there are many people in Honolulu who are delighted that Skyline has finally opened.

I spent several days in Riyadh in October.⁴ I was particularly interested in riding Riyadh’s new Metro, all 176 kilometers of which opened in December 2024 and January 2025—an astonishingly quick opening of a substantial new system. I also wanted to visit an urban area of nearly eight million people where I’d never been.⁵

Some background, as usual, is in order. Unlike the big Gulf cities—Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha—with which it competes, Riyadh has a several-centuries-long history as an important place.⁶ The availability of some water and the city’s location at the junction of several trade routes assured Riyadh’s continued importance, as did its reputation as a center of religious learning. Riyadh remained a very traditional place as late as the early 1950s, when it was still a largely mud-brick, walled city only several hundred meters in diameter.

Oil started flowing on a large scale in eastern Saudi Arabia in the mid-1950s, and Riyadh began what are now seven decades of rapid growth. The walls of the old city were torn down, and the city slowly began to spread out and to acquire some modern features. But, even in the 1970s, it was still full of mud-brick buildings and occupied something like five percent of the space that the contemporary city covers. The Riyadh described in an excellent 1977 book by German urban geographer Heinz Pape had very little in common with the city of today.⁷

In 1971, the well-known Greek urbanist Constantinos Doxiadis was hired to plan a new large city. Doxiadis proposed a grid made up of huge 2-km-x-2-km blocks, and that’s more or less the pattern that’s been followed ever since, even as the city has grown into an enormous place stretching something like 60 km north-south and 40 km east-west.⁸

Doxiadis envisioned a city in which most movement would take place by automobile. There was little public transportation except taxis in Doxiadis’ Riyadh. The arterial roads and freeways that ran along the block borders were wide and typically did not have sidewalks that could easily be used for travelling very far. Shop owners did sometimes provide sidewalks that allowed movement between cars and shops, but there was no attempt to standardize these, so even moving between adjacent buildings could be awkward. This is still the pattern in much of Riyadh. Walking along streets involves passing through numerous parking lots and/or encountering a substantial number of stairs and level changes.

Street corner along Musa Ibn Nusair Street in central Riyadh. Where is a pedestrian supposed to go?

But not everyone had access to a car in Doxiadis’ Riyadh. Immigrants from the countryside were often too poor to buy a car, and, as time went on, more and more of the population came to be made up of foreign immigrant workers. These days, it seems likely that more than half the inhabitants of Riyadh—several million people—are foreign immigrants.⁹ Many of these are professionals who are paid quite well, but most foreign immigrants have modest jobs, and they’re often not paid well at all. These immigrant workers—most from South Asia but many from other places including the Philippines and the poorer Arab countries—typically do not own cars and are potential users of public transportation.

In recent years, Saudi Arabian governments have been obsessed with planning for a world in which Saudi oil is much less central to the economy. Much of this planning is summed up in the label “Vision 2030.” Vision 2030 involves a complicated effort to modernize many aspects of Saudi Arabian life. It includes plans for changes in the status of women, the role of work in citizens’ lives, the position of Saudi Arabia in the world—and the geography of cities.

With respect to cities, Vision 2030 implicitly proposes a reduced role for the automobile—and better public transportation—in Saudi Arabian urban areas.¹⁰ There’s been, for example, a major effort in Riyadh to install usable sidewalks in certain parts of the city. Some of the original work here was done on Tahlia Street. This is a major east-west street that passes through the Olaya neighborhood, an area in Riyadh where many of the landmarks of the contemporary city—the Kingdom and Faisaliyah Towers, for example—have been built. Conveniently, Tahlia Street happened to be wider than it needed to be. The dream was to create something like the Champs-Élysées, a street that that would attract both tourists and locals. Wide, flat sidewalks with attractive street furniture were indeed installed on Tahlia Street in the first decade of the 21st century, and parking lots right next to buildings were eliminated. Numerous shops, restaurants, and cafés opened. The first time I visited I was disappointed to find that there were hardly any pedestrians on the street, and the restaurants seemed deserted. It took a couple of days to realize that Riyadh—maybe more than anyplace else in the world—is a city where, if they have a choice, people do not leave their homes until late in the afternoon. The street does become a little livelier at sundown and even more bustling in mid-evening.

Tahlia Street at dusk.

On a world scale, there is nothing particularly remarkable about Tahlia Street (I don’t think it ever becomes as busy as, for example, the Champs-Élysées), but, in Riyadh, a public space where people of all classes, genders, and nationalities were encouraged to mix was apparently quite startling. The street was considered to be a success, and, as the Metro was built along Olaya Street, several kilometers of reasonably high-quality sidewalks were installed there as well. This part of Riyadh is now fairly “walkable.” The sidewalks are still pretty empty for most of the day, but, in the late afternoon and evening, native Saudis can be found walking along them. These sidewalks are not perfect. Dangerous detours for construction are startlingly common.

Construction blocking the sidewalk along Olaya Street,

And, since drivers (despite what the law says) do not feel they have to defer to pedestrians when they’re making a turn or emerging from an off-street parking area, pedestrians do have to be very careful.

An alternative to walking on the sidewalks is walking in parks. But Riyadh, for a city of its size, at present has hardly any parks, and they’re shockingly unavailable. It was recommended that I check out King Abdullah Park and Salam Park, both in older neighborhoods in south-central Riyadh. Both parks are surrounded by formidable fences, and both charge an admission fee (11.5 riyals (3.06 USD) and 5.75 riyals (1.53 USD) respectively). Both are open only for limited hours, King Abdullah Park between 1300 and 2400 and Salam Park between 1600 and 2400. The two times I visited King Abdullah Park, however, it was closed even though it wasn’t supposed to be. There were a small number of people walking around the 2.5-km walking path that circles the park’s perimeter. I was told that there are normally more users in the early evening.

The walking path around the perimeter of King Abdullah Park. The sign says that we’re at 1950 m.

Let me add that much larger King Salman Park, which will be built where the old airport was, is under construction (it’s the light green area on the map below). This park will be enormous, one of the world’s largest urban parks. But it’s not open yet.

The new Metro is the most important (and expensive) component of the effort to reduce the role of the automobile in cities. It’s at the core of Vision 2030’s plans. One of the reasons the government has put so much effort into sidewalks is that officials wanted to make sure that people could get to Metro stations.¹¹

The Metro covers nearly the whole urban area with a kind of grid. Here’s a map:

Map of Riyadh emphasizing rail transit lines. Pedestrian facilities are shown too. The nominal scale of the map is 1:200,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-11-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly derived from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited some of the data. The light-rail line in the northeast serves the women’s Princess Nourah University and apparently may be used only by women. Click on the map to enlarge it.

The Metro is the world’s longest driverless metro. The system takes full advantage of driverless technology. Trains come frequently (at least every six minutes or so) even in off hours, and they’re short, four cars long on the main north-south Blue Line in west-central Riyadh, two cars long elsewhere. (All the stations were built for four-car trains, however.)

Oncoming four-car train on the Blue Line in southern Riyadh. As in most of the urban area, almost all the buildings in working-class southern Riyadh have only one, two, or three stories. Skyscrapers are generally confined to the new city center along Olaya Street and in the high-prestige northwestern parts of the city.

Trains and stations are equipped with the latest in electric signage. Signs (and announcements) in Arabic and English provide next-station and final-destination information. Stations all have countdown clocks.

I rode nearly the whole system when I was in Riyadh. My general impression is that it’s one of the world’s most luxurious metros.¹² It feels as though no one was too worried about expenses when it was being constructed. Nearly half the system is underground, in some places far underground. All the central-city underground stations have several exits, each equipped with an elevator and many with escalators as well.¹³

Escalators at (I think) the National Museum station.

Stations where two or more lines come together were in several cases designed by starchitects and are particularly extravagant. The above-ground station at the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD), for example, was designed by Zaha Hadid Associates and looks like no other metro station in the world.

The elevated Metro station at the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD). Some of the District’s dozens of skyscrapers are also visible.

The KAFD station feeds into a series of above-ground walkways that take passengers throughout the District.¹⁴

Walkway between the KAFD Metro station and the King Abdullah Financial District.

There will soon be a 3.6-km-long monorail as well for those who’d rather not walk.

The underground station at Qasr al Hokm was designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta. It appears to sit under what looks like a flying saucer. This is mostly a design feature, but it does have the advantage of allowing access to the upper mezzanine without having to use stairs, an elevator, or an escalator.

The Qasr al Hokm station entranceway.

Below ground, there is plenty of artificial and natural light.

Waiting for a train at the Qasr al Hokm station. Note the natural light at the right and the designed light panels on the left.

As in Dubai and Qatar, the trains have three classes. There’s a first class; a “family” section chiefly for women; and a zone for everyone else (euphemistically labelled “singles” in English, “individuals” [afrād أفراد] in Arabic). The latter class can be very crowded, especially on the lines with only two cars. It appears that at least half of the passengers in this last class are usually foreign workers, although (if dress is any indication) Saudi men ride here too.¹⁵

Inside the section for “individuals” on a Blue Line train. This car is much less crowded than usual.

Fares are pretty reasonable. Regular tickets cost 4 riyals (1.07 USD). First-class tickets are 10 riyals (2.67 USD). Tickets are valid for two hours and can be used to extend trips on buses. Three-day and one-week passes (at 20 and 40 riyals respectively) are also available.

The Metro is said to have an eventual capacity of 3.6 million people a day. The figure presumably supposes the use of four-car trains on all the lines and lowered headways between trains. Current ridership is way below that. There were 25.2 million passengers in the third quarter of 2025.¹⁶ By my calculations, that means that there were 280,000 riders a day, less than a tenth of the eventual theoretical capacity. I don’t know whether the passenger loads are disappointing to the authorities. Saudi newspapers, or those published in English anyway, do not appear ever to suggest that there might be a problem, and I wasn’t in a position to ask anyone about this.

The construction of the Metro has been accompanied by the establishment of new bus lines, including three BRT lines. Bus stops are often air-conditioned and sometimes feature countdown clocks.

Air-conditioned bus stop on Olaya Street with next-arrival sign.

It’s arguable that there’s never been a case in which a car-dependent urban area has been converted into an urban area in which cars become a significantly less important way to get around. One reason for this is that, in car-oriented cities, it’s not easy to get to new rail stations on foot or by transit. The fact that metro-building in Riyadh was accompanied by sidewalk construction and improvements in the bus system is certainly a sign that the system’s planners understood what needed to be done. Only time will tell whether they’ll actually succeed.

When I was in Jersey City last month, I naturally noticed the recreational trail along the Hudson. A little research revealed that it’s part of an entity called the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway that’s planned to run between Bayonne and the George Washington Bridge, a distance of something like 18.5 miles (30 km) (although perhaps more given the fact that the waterfront has a pretty irregular edge).

Map of the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway and vicinity. The Walkway is shown by a thick dark green line. The thin, medium green lines show other pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The thin grey lines indicate ordinary roads. Data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap and have been edited in many places. Nominal scale of the map is 1:70,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on a 6-x-14-inch sheet of paper. The map is clickable and downloadable.

I’ll confess that, despite a long-standing interest in urban recreational paths, I’d never heard of the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway, although planning for it began in the 1980s and construction started in the 1990s. Chalk this up, if you will, to New York chauvinism. There have been only half a dozen casual references to the Walkway in the New York Times, and there’s never been a feature story on one of the longest and most attractive pedestrian features of the whole New York area. Streetsblog NY doesn’t appear ever to have mentioned it at all.

The great attraction of the Walkway is the view of the Manhattan skyline across the river.

Users on the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway in Edgewater, New Jersey.

If, like me, you have an image of Manhattan’s skyline that was more or less imprinted in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, you will be startled by the changes that views from the Walkway make clear. More than some U.S. cities, New York has in certain ways remade itself over the last several decades. It’s added more than a dozen supertall skyscrapers—plus hundreds of smaller but still tall buildings. I can’t think of an urban recreational path with more striking views of a city.

For much of its history, the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway has been under the aegis of a more or less private entity called the Hudson River Waterfront Conservancy. The Walkway’s existence, however, is chiefly owing to an official state Coastal Zone Management plan from 1988 requiring developers who construct new housing near the Hudson River waterfront to include open space and a walkway along the river. As it happens, the river’s waterfront was ripe for redevelopment in the 1990s. It was lined with obsolete factories, warehouses, railroads, and port facilities, and, then as now, there was a huge demand for new housing in the New York area. The law requiring developers to construct a walkway was contested by the real-estate industry but was declared legal in a 1999 court decision.¹⁷ It seems, however, that developers and local housing associations have continued to try to block access to the Walkway; there have been numerous court cases as a result.¹⁸ In fact, there isn’t much doubt that the Walkway enhances the value of new housing developments on the Hudson. Even if some potential residents were a little nervous about living right over a public recreational path, it’s likely that most of them still valued this amenity.

Requiring that private developers do most of the building had an obvious downside. Since housing development was at first quite scattered, so were segments of the path. Only five miles had been opened by the end of the 1990s,¹⁹ and the path is far from complete today. But, as I’ve pointed out in another post, it’s quite common for urban pedestrian facilities to take decades to build. Governments never view them as high-priority projects.

Jersey City and Hoboken, the largest cities on the shoreline, apparently did develop some segments more or less on their own. Jersey City’s new financial center acquired a wide walking path early in the 21st century.

The Hudson River Waterfront Walkway near the Exchange Place PATH station.

Hoboken has a well-used locally built section of Walkway too, just north of the train station.

Crowds on the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway just north of Hoboken Terminal.

Hoboken is continuing to develop its portion of the Walkway. The part of the Walkway below the hill where the Stevens Institute of Technology sits, for example, once consisted of a narrow sidewalk along the Hudson. A high-quality path is now being added there.²⁰

Sign with a picture of the planned new Walkway segment in Hoboken. Hoboken is almost alone in having a separate bicycle lane along its parts of the Walkway.

Further north, most Walkway construction has indeed been done by housing developers, who have put up a massive number of mostly midrise apartment buildings and row houses along the Hudson shore. They’ve all added a recreational path too (although it’s often narrower than the thirty feet the law called for).

New housing along the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway in Edgewater. This is a fairly typical Walkway scene.

There are still substantial gaps, however. Most of the Bayonne waterfront, for example, is an active port. There is no prospect that it’s going to be converted into housing with a recreational path any time soon. Much further north, the path is interrupted several times, once, for example, by a huge Superfund site. For the moment, pedestrians have to take a narrow sidewalk along a very busy roadway to get around this area. Still further north, there is a similar detour around a site that once contained a refinery.

Diversion along River Road in Edgewater around what was once a refinery.

So far as I can see, detours are never clearly marked with signage. When I was first walking north along the Walkway without an adequate map and came to the north end of the Superfund site, it was so unclear where I was supposed to go in the car-oriented district that I’d arrived at that I gave up and turned around. It was only later that I discovered instructions on the Conservancy’s website for how to cross the gaps. (But these instructions led me, near the George Washington Bridge, onto the winding, hilly, nearly sidewalkless, and quite dangerous east side of River Road.)

The problem may be that it’s not clear who should be making and maintaining signs. The developers of the paths? The municipalities? The Conservancy? (The Conservancy says it’s the municipalities.)

There’s a similar problem when it comes to repairs. Thanks to Hurricane Sandy and other storms and normal wear-and-tear along a tidal waterfront, parts of the Walkway are in poor shape.

Cracks in the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway in Edgewater.

While developers or condo associations seem to be the entities responsible for Walkway maintenance, they haven’t always been very enthusiastic about doing this necessary work.

Despite these obvious problems, the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway seemed to me a pretty impressive facility that deserves to be better known.

Anyone who’s been on the Hudson waterfront of Manhattan over the last thirty or so years has noticed that Jersey City has been growing a serious skyline. The buildings are generally unremarkable, and the highest are nowhere near as tall as dozens of skyscrapers in Manhattan, but, still, several are more than 200 meters in height. Only a few U.S. cities have more buildings of this size. Jersey City’s skyscrapers include both office and residential towers. Most are clustered in the corner of Jersey City east of roughly Jersey Avenue, south of the roads that carry traffic to and from Holland Tunnel, and north of the Morris Canal Basin.

Jersey City skyline looking north across the Morris Canal Basin from Liberty State Park.

Jersey City’s urban bona fides have been enhanced by its acquisition of a substantial light-rail system.²¹

I’ve been in Jersey City several times over the years. I had last been there at some point early in the current century. At that time, despite the nascent skyscrapers and the light-rail tracks, the area around Exchange Place—the center of Jersey City’s skyscraper complex—was somewhat disappointing. There were only a few pedestrians. The newish corporate buildings seemed designed to be approached chiefly by automobile. Surface parking lots occupied a great deal of space, and there was still a considerable amount of gritty industry in the area.

I was in the same parts of Jersey City again in both early and late September, and I was a little bowled over by the changes.

A light-rail train at Exchange Place. Jersey City’s financial industry is mostly located nearby.

The industrial buildings have mostly been torn down or converted into apartment or office buildings. There is a huge amount of new, mostly high-rise housing, and older row houses have mostly been upgraded.

Grove Street, inland from Exchange Place. Grove Street is arguably the center of traditional gentrification, in which there was a slow replacement of some of the old population as buildings were renovated.

There are also what look to be thriving retail centers around the Exchange Place, Grove Street, and Newport PATH stations, especially the latter.

Crowds near Newport Centre, a large mall, which is surrounded by tall office and apartment buildings.

The most astonishing feature of this area is that it’s teeming with pedestrians. This part of Jersey City is one of the few places in the United States where a substantial dense, walkable, and transit-oriented neighborhood has been created in the last few decades.²²

The changes in Jersey City, however, are ongoing and incomplete. There are still surface parking lots near Exchange Place, and the swath of northern Jersey City through which massive amounts of Holland Tunnel traffic pass constantly is still a ragged carscape, filled with gas stations, big box stores, and huge parking facilities.

Surface parking lot between the Exchange Place and Newport stations.

The transformation of Jersey City has involved a great deal of gentrification. Note these maps, which show per capita income by census tract in Jersey City and surrounding areas in 1979 and in the 2018/2022 period.

On this map, the heavy black lines represent municipal boundaries, and the thin black lines represent tract boundaries. The dark blue lines show PATH and New York subway routes, while the light blue lines on the later map show light-rail routes. The park boundaries are recent and may not be accurate for the earlier map (but Liberty State Park was opened in 1976). GIS data are from several different sources that don’t fit together perfectly. White areas can be either tracts with no income data or places where the different GIS files don’t quite jibe. The census boundaries were downloaded from NHGIS. The basic geographic data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. The municipal boundaries come from the NJ Geographic Information Network. The nominal scale of the maps is 1:60,000. That’s the scale the two maps would have if they were printed together on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. See text below for information on the census data. Click the maps to enlarge them.

The map can only be understood if one understands the peculiarities of the data. The data from 1979 come from the long form of the 1980 census; the data for 2018/2022 are from the 2019/2023 American Community Survey (ACS) and are expressed in 2023 dollars, which were worth about 24 cents in 1979 dollars. In both cases, per capita income is shown in quartiles from national tract-level data. Figures for the two periods are not quite comparable. While the whole country had long since been “tracted” by the time of the 2019/2023 ACS, only part of the country had been “tracted” in 1980; rural areas were generally excluded. There are lots of exceptions, but rural areas in the United States are generally poorer than urban and suburban ones, so, if the whole country had been “tracted” in 1980, the tracts in Jersey City that end up in the lowest quartile might have been moved to a different quartile, most likely the next quartile up. There would still have been a dramatic difference between the two periods. In 1979, most of Jersey City was quite poor. In 2018/2022, it was quite well-off. There are still a few poorer areas in southwest Jersey City and around Journal Square on the west side of town, but, on the whole, Jersey City and some neighboring municipalities (especially to the north) have to some degree earned their description by real-estate brokers as a “gold coast.”

I acknowledge the arguments against gentrification, but, since most of the prosperous areas of Jersey City along the Hudson waterfront were largely filled with railroad lines, factories, and warehouses in 1979, it’s likely that there was only a modest amount of displacement—and that it occurred over several decades.

In the United States, numerous cities sit on rivers. In many cases, smaller cities (or neighborhoods) across the river from the CBDs of major cities have ended up being places to which poorer people have been pushed. Camden, N.J., and East Saint Louis, Ill., are classic examples. Oakland and perhaps Brooklyn have sometimes been considered “poor cousins” too, and so have Jersey City, Newark, and (less clearly) Hoboken.

Much of Jersey City and all of Hoboken have broken out of this pattern over the last two or three decades. They’ve become prosperous, dense, and extremely urban places.

The Chicago Transit Authority (the CTA) recently finished work on the main component of its Red and Purple Modernization Project (RPM).

The RPM project is an attempt to modernize and add capacity to the North Side Red Line, the CTA’s busiest line by far. The added capacity was furnished chiefly by the creation of an overpass for northbound Brown Line trains just north of the Belmont station. Previously, Brown Line trains had had to cross three active tracks, and delays were frequent. The overpass opened in 2021.

A northbound Brown Line train (at right rear) crosses the new overpass, while southbound Red and Purple Line trains (at left) arrive at Belmont station. Before the overpass opened, trains moving in one direction or the other would have had to wait.

The RPM project also includes several minor improvements. For example, in conjunction with the overpass project, a nearby section of track on the main north-south line was straightened.

The most substantial component of the RPM project is a 1.3-mile (2 km) set of four elevated railway tracks with four stations. It replaced four tracks that had sat on an embankment. It was opened to service on July 20, 2025.

Map showing the new 1.3-mile segment, which runs from just north of the Berwyn station to just south of the Lawrence station. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap and the Chicago Data Portal. The nominal scale of the map is 1:10,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-5-inch sheet of paper.

The replacement of the 1.3-mile segment occurred mostly because the old stations in this segment were too narrow to be made accessible. There was simply no room on the platforms for escalators, elevators, and wheelchairs. A secondary reason for the project was that the old embankment carried tracks too close to the street level. Trucks occasionally got stuck at the bridges.

Two different lines—the Red Line and the Purple Line—use these four tracks. The Red Line provides 24-hour service between the South Side and Howard Station, near the Chicago-Evanston border. The Purple Line (the Evanston Express) provides rush-hour service between the Loop on the south and Evanston and Wilmette on the north. It makes only one stop—at Wilson Avenue—between Belmont station and Howard station; it does not stop in the 1.3-mile segment. The Red Line runs in the middle two tracks, between which the stations are located. The Purple Line runs on the outer tracks.

The CTA decided to maintain full service during construction. Each pair of tracks—east then west—was torn down in turn and replaced by new, elevated tracks on concrete columns. During the five years that the project took to implement, Red and Purple Line trains had to share the two working tracks. This worked better southbound than northbound, since the north end of the 1.3-mile segment is only approximately 2.7 miles (4.3 km) south of Howard, the Red Line’s northern terminus, and it was possible to dispatch trains in a way that usually kept them separated. Going northbound, however, there were sometimes substantial delays. The 1.3-mile segment is approximately 18 miles (29 km) from the Red Line’s southern terminus at 95th Street, and, in those 18 miles, northbound trains have to pass through Chicago’s CBD (where there are six stations), two major-league baseball stadiums, and numerous other possible sources of delays. It was often impossible to keep to the theoretical schedule. The northbound Evanston Express wasn’t much of an express during the five years of construction. The delays occurred even though only two temporary stations on the 1.3-mile segment were used for the first three years of the project, and only one temporary station was open during the project’s last two years.

Construction was, as always, messy and noisy. The Pandemic slowed work by approximately a year. The CTA did try to notify residents about its construction schedule and has promised a linear park under the new tracks—for 2026 or 2027.

Construction at the Argyle station in 2023. The new structure is at right, the still-active old tracks at left.

The CTA described the RPM as its largest project ever. This is not really accurate, although the project may have been CTA’s most expensive. The Orange Line to Midway Airport (completed in 1993) and the Blue Line extension to O’Hare (completed in 1984) were much larger-scale projects. It’s true, however, that even in inflation-adjusted dollars, they were cheaper than the RPM.²³

The trains are definitely quieter than they were on the old embankment, although they were never as noisy on the embankment as they are on the traditional El structure, where they remain very loud.

View south from Argyle station on opening day.

The new stations all have escalators and elevators, and the platforms are much wider than in the old stations. There is plenty of digital signage in all the stations.

Crowds at the Berwyn station on opening day.

There are also artworks.

Art at the new Argyle station.

It would make sense to ask whether the Red Line needs four stations in 1.3 miles of track. The CTA’s management apparently thought of eliminating at least one station (Lawrence, for example, is a quarter mile from the next station in each direction) but feared creating an uproar. All the stations have advocates. The neighborhood is pretty dense by Chicago standards; bus lines cross the CTA tracks at all the stations except Argyle; and there are commercial developments at all the stations.

I’m sure that some people have thought of this project as a kind of model if the CTA ever decided that it wanted to replace its extraordinarily noisy El tracks. There are in fact a few other parts of the system where two tracks could be added to the alley or street where a current line runs, for example, along parts of the Brown Line as it passes through the Near North Side. Given the length of time that the current project took to implement, I’m not sure that many people are still thinking along these lines.

Still, even if the new 1.3 miles of track are short and cost a great deal of money, it’s certainly nice to have a smoother and quieter ride and four new, accessible stations.

In September 2021, I put up a post on the geography of carfree (or car-free) households in the United States during the 2015/2019 period. It drew more traffic than any other post on this site.

The data presented on that post were generated for the five years before the Pandemic. During the Pandemic, several newspaper stories suggested that numerous previously carfree households had acquired an automobile or planned to do so,²⁴ and some academic studies argued that this in fact may have happened to a limited extent.²⁵

The Census Bureau released American Community Survey data for the 2019/2023 period at the end of 2024. The years covered included the height of the Pandemic. There was a one-year overlap with the 2015/2019 data, although the numbers had to be recompiled since the 2015/2019 data were generated for 2010 census tracts, while the 2019/2023 data were collected for 2020 census tracts.

These data suggest that there was indeed a small decline in the proportion of carfree households during the years of the Pandemic. In the 2015/2019 period, 10,583,011 out of 121,906,312 households (8.68%) were carfree. In the 2019/2023 period, only 10,768,298 out of 128,702,462 (8.36%) households were carfree.²⁶

The (small) decline in the proportion of carfree households may have been larger for those tracts where carfree households were scarcer. Note the following table that shows the number of tracts in each of the size categories identified on the maps below.

It looks as though the bulk of the many tracts added to the database (which were largely the result of tract splits in the fast-growing edges of urban areas) had few carfree households. But most of the tracts with a large proportion of carfree households stayed relatively carfree.

As in the earlier period, the overwhelming majority of extraordinarily carfree tracts were in large cities, and most of these were in New York. If we exclude 20 tracts with fewer than 60 households, there were 399 tracts in which 75% or more of households were carfree. 374 of these were in New York, 10 in San Francisco, 4 in nearly roadless parts of Alaska, and 3 each in Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Anyone with a knowledge of American cities could see after a glance at the maps below that there is clearly a close relationship between residential density and carfree status. There is also some relationship between carfree status and the long-established availability of good rail transit, which, of course, is also highly correlated with population density.

For the larger and denser cities, there is little correlation between carfree status and income. In New York City, there is actually a positive (although not very significant) correlation (+.158) at the tract level between carfree status and per capita income. Some of the most carfree neighborhoods—Greenwich Village and the Upper East and West Sides, for example—are quite well-off these days. In several other of America’s larger and denser cities, there is also only a modest correlation between carfree status and income, although this is complicated by the fact that tracts in the American Community Survey are identified by county, not municipality. Some figures: Cook County (i.e., Chicago) -.043, Suffolk County, Mass. (i.e., Boston) -.137, and Washington, D.C. +.115. Well-off places like Chicago’s North Side Lakefront, Boston’s Back Bay, and Washington’s Georgetown are by American standards pretty carfree but not to the extent that, say, the Upper West Side of Manhattan is, and poorer neighborhoods in these cities generally have levels of car ownership not much different than in similarly dense well-off neighborhoods. There are also well-off but smaller and only moderately carfree areas in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle (correlations between carfree status and income were -.178, +.053, and +.038 respectively). Philadelphia’s well-off Center City is as carfree as anywhere outside of New York, but Philadelphia has so many much poorer carfree areas that the correlation between per capita income and carfree status at the tract level is -.514.²⁷ Relatively carfree areas in other cities also tend to be poorer, and the correlations between carfree status and per capita income are also typically quite negative (examples: Los Angeles County -.263 and Saint Louis City -.598). but there are some exceptional neighborhoods even in these cities, for example, part of Santa Monica in Los Angeles, the Central West End in Saint Louis, as well as South Beach in Miami Beach and (not shown on a map in this post) Waikiki in Honolulu.

These maps don’t look very different from the maps for the earlier period, but there are a few minor changes here and there as well as some cartographic differences. Note the following:

[1] All the maps have a nominal scale of 1:200,000, a little more than three miles to the inch. That’s the scale the maps would have if printed on 11-x-11-inch sheets of paper.

[2] All the maps use the same class intervals and colors as on the New York map. And I’ve employed purple for light rail lines rather than the pink I used on the earlier set of maps.

[3] The maps include urban rail lines, divided into two categories: “Subways, etc.” and “Light rail, etc.” The distinction between these two categories is a little arbitrary. Most subway lines use “heavy rail” rolling stock and are completely grade-separated, but a few Chicago lines have level grade crossings, and I’ve included the JFK AirTrain in the “Subways, etc.” category, since it’s so substantial and so clearly tied to New York’s subway. “Light rail, etc.” includes not only light-rail lines but also streetcars, cable cars, and certain airport people movers. Many light-rail lines in the United States are partly (and in one case completely) grade-separated, but I believe they all use light-rail (rather than heavy-rail) rolling stock. None of the maps includes the (generally suburban) rail lines that chiefly run on traditional mainline railroads. A few of these lines in New York and Chicago may have affected car ownership to a limited extent. Note, for example, all the somewhat carfree neighborhoods on the extreme South Side of Chicago, where the electrified Illinois Central (now Metra Electric) used to provide frequent subway-style service (a contributing factor to the low levels of car ownership in these neighborhoods is that they’re all quite poor).

[4] Crosshatching shows census tracts where no data were reported for 2019/2023. These tracts all have few residents. They consist mostly of either airports or industrial zones. A few large parks and cemeteries are included too.

Here are the maps:

It would seem like a no-brainer to compile a map showing the change in the tract-level extent of automobile ownership between 2015/2019 and 2019/2023, but this is not as easily done as one might imagine. There were numerous census-tract boundary changes, and, while there are standard ways to redistribute data to accommodate this, they tend to lead to geographical distortions. The chief problem, however, is that American Community Survey data are all estimates, based on a rather small sample at the tract level. For most tracts (where carlessness is rare), the margins of error in the count of vehicle-free households are larger than the estimates of the number of households where no vehicle is present. While I believe that the Census Bureau does some data-cleanup to make sure that no clearly improbable figures appear, the survey-to-survey changes where small numbers are concerned are not very meaningful. I did generate the two maps below for the central New York area. These maps show the change in the number and proportion of carfree households between 2015/2019 and 2019/2023. These maps should be more reliable than comparable maps for anywhere else in the country since the figures are generally larger. I dealt with the boundary-change problem by moving data for 2019/2023 to 2015/2019 tract boundaries on the basis of which tract the centerpoint of the later tracts fell into.²⁸ This should work fine when (as is usually the case) tracts were simply split between the two survey periods. Some cleanup would be necessary for more complicated border changes, of which there were hardly any in the area shown on the map. Thus, the map reflects the data pretty accurately. The important thing is that there aren’t obvious geographical patterns in the maps. Perhaps there was a bit more of an increase in car ownership in the Bronx than anywhere else in New York City, but the difference is not dramatic. I’m pretty sure that most of what look like substantial changes in the number of carfree households are the result of population changes and the inevitable imperfections in the data.²⁹ Note on the second map that the proportion of households that were carfree did not change much in most tracts.

Change in the number of carfree households by census tract, New York and vicinity, 2015/2019-2019/2023.

Change in the proportion of carfree households by census tract, New York and vicinity, 2015/2019-2019/2023.

The most important lesson here may be that there really are a few urban neighborhoods in the United States that, to one degree or another, have resisted becoming car-centric and that these areas are holding their own despite the Pandemic. Some of these areas have low levels of vehicle ownership because of poverty, but others are quite prosperous. A few of these neighborhoods, in fact, are among the most expensive places to live in North America. But these areas are relatively small islands in a country of car-dependent places.

I visited both Milan and Rome late last fall. I spent a few days in Milan in mid-November and a few days in Rome in mid-December. I’d been to both cities several times over the years but not since 2012. On my recent trips, I made a point of looking at the ways in which the cities have attempted to join other cities in Western Europe in pushing back a little against the hegemony of the automobile.

First, some background: Milan and Rome are, speaking roughly, cities of approximately the same order of magnitude, but, as is true everywhere, the numbers depend on where one puts the boundaries. The commune (political city) of Rome, with approximately 2.75 million people on January 1, 2024, is roughly twice as populous as the commune of Milan, which had only approximately 1.37 million.³⁰ But the metropolitan areas are much closer in size. The città metropolitana of Rome had 4.22 million people, and the città metropolitana of Milan had 3.21 million in 2023.³¹ Most non-Italian sources, however, put the Milan region ahead. Demographia, focusing on continuous built-up areas, says that the Milan metropolitan area’s population in 2023 was 5.47 million, while the Rome metropolitan area had only 3.24 million. Eurostat also ranks the Milan metropolitan region first, with 4.93 million, while Rome’s metropolitan region had only 4.29 million (these figures are for 2022).³²

Both Milan and Rome are large, complicated urban areas with a huge range of functions. Both have medieval cores (centri storici) of narrow, irregular streets that have been protected assiduously in the years since World War II. The centri storici of both cities are (roughly speaking) surrounded by 19th- and early 20th-century zones of substantial residential and commercial buildings along mostly wider streets. Many of these districts have become pleasantly gentrified, while others have remained less prosperous. Both cities also have diverse and almost always much lower-density suburbs stretching far from their centers.

But Milan and Rome are in some ways quite different from each other. These differences are rooted in their histories. A simple-minded summary would suggest that, while Milan was sometimes a significant place in Roman times, it has chiefly functioned as a center of commerce and industry since the Middle Ages. Rome, in contrast, while often having an important economic role, has also been a political and/or religious center for something like 2500 years.

The two cities’ different foci and histories have had major consequences for their contemporary morphology.

In the second half of the 20th century, Milan found itself with huge areas in its central city that were felt to be devoted to economically obsolete land uses. These were chiefly former industrial areas (but included a too-small fairground). Redevelopment seemed called for, and Milan allowed large corporations to use some of these areas—notably Porta Nuova and CityLife—for corporate skyscrapers, shopping centers, and apartment buildings, often separated by parkland. These new districts are busy, apparently successful places. They are easily accessible both by public transport and by walking from neighboring districts, but there’s also plenty of parking. With their tower-in-a-park designs, both reflect 20th-century ideas about urbanism. They are quite different in character from the surrounding, densely built-up pre-World-War-II neighborhoods.³³

CityLife, a district of starchitect-designed skyscrapers, a big shopping center, and parkland. CityLife, approximately 2.5 km from Milan’s center, replaced what was felt to be an inadequate space for Milan’s trade fairs.

Road junction, Porta Nuova, Milan. Note the wide roads—automobile access was important to Porta Nuova’s developers. But so was pedestrian, bicycle, and transit access—note the wide crosswalks. The central part of the Porta Nuova development sits on a Corbusier-style platform. The park—the Biblioteca degli Alberi [“Library of Trees”]—is surrounded by office and apartment buildings and a shopping center.

There is nothing comparable in central Rome. Rome has never had a major industrial function, but it does have its own version of obsolete central-city land use. It entered the 20th century with substantial areas of ruins dating from classical Rome. In some earlier periods, these had served as quarries, but, in the era of mass tourism, protection and restoration were clearly the way to go. In so far as Rome has had a need for large new office buildings at all, it’s mostly put them in EUR, approximately nine kilometers south of the Centro Storico, an area that (a little embarrassingly) was planned in the fascist period.

Another difference: Milan, with its role as a center of commerce and finance (and perhaps, if there’s any truth to the stereotype, with a more northern European culture) is richer than Rome. Its GDP per capita in 2021 was 59,901 euros, Rome’s was only 38,697 euros.³⁴  Milan is thus as well-off as most northern European cities; Rome isn’t. This difference has had a major effect on what each city’s government has been able to do.

Both cities have a lot of cars, many more in proportion to their population than in most large northern European cities. Milan had 504 cars per thousand inhabitants in 2021, Rome 626.³⁵ These figures would not seem high in the United States, but they’re higher than in most of Western Europe’s other large cities. Roughly comparable figures for Berlin, London, and Vienna are 331, 350, and 366.³⁶ 

Buildings in central Milan and Rome mostly predate World War II, and they generally do not come with parking. There are some underground garages, but most locally-owned cars are parked on the streets. It’s a little startling to see how much space is given over to parking in surface areas of central Milan and Rome. Both cities (but especially Rome) have many (usually 19th-century) wide streets that include median strips that were once the sites of tram lines or parks that have come to be used as parking lots. These days, it’s rare in northern Europe to find parking in analogous spaces.

Parking in the Via Giovanni Pacini’s median strip, near Lambrate station, Milan. Other parts of this street’s median strip are used as a linear park.

Parking in the middle of the Via Santa Costanza, not far from the Sant’Agnese Metro station, Rome.

In addition, Rome often has parallel parking even on streets of medium width. Of course, this precludes the construction of protected bicycle lanes along these streets.

Parallel parking in Rome.

In the older parts of Rome especially, there is absolutely no “daylighting” of corners. Parked cars block most crosswalks, apparently more or less legally. There are certain parts of Rome’s Centro Storico where, thanks to the narrow streets and much narrower (or non-existent) sidewalks, it’s pretty miserable to be a pedestrian. Driving must be nerve-racking too.

Non-pedestrianized street in Rome’s Centro Storico.

Traffic jams in Milan and Rome are, unsurprisingly, pretty common. Pollution is a problem in both cities, particularly Milan, and especially in winter.

Curiously, drivers in central Milan and Rome are as deferential to pedestrians in crosswalks as any urban drivers in the world. They can be counted on to stop. I was startled to observe that pedestrians often use crosswalks without even glancing to see whether vehicles are coming. (Pedestrians who tried this in, say, Chicago would probably not survive a month.) Despite generally good driver behavior, pedestrian deaths and injuries on urban streets are not rare in either Milan or Rome.

Even if drivers are better behaved than in many places, a general consensus has come into being over the last thirty or so years in both Milan and Rome that public policy needs to focus on reducing urban automobile use. Most of what’s been done will be familiar.

There have been, for example, some limitations on traffic in the central cities. The rules are complicated, and enforcement is said to be spotty, but the general rule is that highly-polluting vehicles are banned from central Milan and Rome during certain hours. In addition, Milan has a congestion charge. There are substantial fines for violators.

Signs describing some of the rules for vehicle access to Area C, Milan.

There has also been a great deal of pedestrianization. Efforts in this direction have been much more modest than comparable efforts in, say, Paris, but they’ve nonetheless changed the character of the central cities. In Milan, for example, the piazza in front of the Duomo and many nearby streets have been permanently pedestrianized.

The pedestrianized Via dei Mercanti near Milan’s Duomo.

There are also several cases where only a lane of traffic has been left in place, for example along parts of the Corso Garibaldi, a generally high-end shopping street.

The Corso Garibaldi, Milan. Note the sign describing the limits on motor-vehicle access.

There has also been a great deal of pedestrianization in the Navigli district, where surviving canals have been turned into tourist attractions. And there are instances of small-scale pedestrianization throughout the older parts of the city.

In Rome, the northern half or so of the Via del Corso, a major shopping street, was pedestrianized many years ago, and numerous nearby streets as well as the Piazza del Popolo at the Corso’s northern end have been similarly forbidden to most motor-vehicle traffic (although exceptions are made for deliveries and taxi drivers going to hotels).

The northern end of Rome’s Via del Corso on a Sunday morning.

Pedestrian paths have also been created in the areas in Rome where ruins from classical Rome have been stabilized and made more or less open for visitors, although some of these paths are a little uncomfortable to follow these days owing to construction work on a Metro Line C extension and preparations for Jubilee visitors.

Pedestrians making their way between the Coliseum and Piazza Venezia on a route now altered by the construction of a Metro Line C extension.

There are plans to create a seven-kilometer pedestrian path that will take visitors to a number of archaeological sites, but this path does not yet exist.³⁷

As in Milan, there are also instances of pedestrianization scattered widely in the city’s older sections.

Because definitions of pedestrianization are not consistent and the rules for individual pedestrian areas change frequently, it’s difficult to describe pedestrianization with precise maps and figures. The following maps are based in part on data from OpenStreetMap and give an approximate idea of the areas in Milan and Rome that have been pedestrianized.

Map of most of the comune of Milan and some of its inner suburbs emphasizing rail lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. 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.

Map of the central part of the comune of Rome, emphasizing rail lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The nominal scale of the map is 1:40,000, as on the Milan map. Rome has three rail lines that don’t quite fit the categories used on the map: the interurban Roma-Nord line to Viterbo, which is shown in orange since it runs on city streets in Rome; the Roma-Giardinetti line, also shown in orange since its remaining section also uses streets; and the Roma-Lido line, shown in red since it’s fully grade-separated. See notes with Milan map, just above, for additional information.

Steps have also been taken, especially in Milan, to encourage bicycle use. Both cities have set up bike-share systems and constructed some protected bicycle lanes. Milan has plans to build an enormous spider grid of protected bikeways, although it doesn’t seem as though a huge amount of progress has been made here.³⁸

Protected bicycle lane and adjoining supplementary pedestrian lane along the Corso Buenos Aires in Milan.

Rome, with its hills and its insistence that parallel parking is an appropriate use for wide streets, has many fewer cyclists than Milan and has only scattered protected bicycle lanes that most definitely do not make up what anyone would call a network. It has established a bike path (open to pedestrians) along the Tiber, but the Tiber passes through central Rome in a trench several meters below street level, and the path is evidently not considered completely safe. When I was trying to photograph it, I had to wait a long time for a human (a lone runner) to come along.

Recreational path along the Tiber. The path has both dirt and paved sections.

There have also been major improvements in rail transportation. Milan and Rome both came late to the establishment of Metro systems. Several other large Western European cities had opened their first metro lines by the 1920s. But in Rome the first line (although started in the 1930s) didn’t open until 1955, and Milan had to wait until 1964 for its initial line to begin service. Both cities have continued adding track in succeeding decades. Milan now has five lines. The two newest lines are driverless and take full advantage of driverless technology: trains and stations are short and service is much more frequent than on the older lines.

Inside a car on driverless Metro line 4, Milan. Note the open gangways.

Rome has been slower to add lines, arguing (not unreasonably) that digging in Rome, which inevitably encounters archaeological artifacts, is extremely expensive since it must be carried out with great care. It now has what could be called two and a half lines (one is still under construction). Milan’s lines are nearly twice as long as Rome’s and (not surprisingly) carry more than twice as many passengers.³⁹

The Termini station (1955) on Rome’s oldest Metro line, line B.

Both cities also have reorganized their suburban rail lines to make them more useful. Milan has moved much further than Rome in this direction, building a through tunnel (the Passante) for several lines that offers frequent RER/S-Bahn-type service for a regular transit fare in the central city. The lines that don’t go through the Passante mostly end up in Garibaldi station, where transfers between lines and to and from the Metro are possible. Rome’s suburban lines are more traditional. There is only one through line (the FL1). It offers fifteen-minute headways on much of its route. Other lines still end up in the two main rail terminals, Termini or Tiburtina, and provide somewhat less frequent service. 

Both cities still have legacy tram lines. Milan has kept a substantial part of its old tram system intact and even uses a great deal of 1930s rolling stock. Rome runs more modern vehicles, but it’s preserved a much smaller proportion of its old system. Still, there are a couple of lines that cross the 19th-century city, most with branches in the outer city. Most lines in both cities run in dedicated street medians and have middle-of-the-street stations. But the lines are just about all pretty slow. Stops come along frequently, and trains spend a lot of time stopped at red lights.

Trams in the Via degli Scipioni, Milan.

Tram in the middle of Via Emanuele Filberto, Rome.

Italy has something of reputation for being a little backward in comparison with other countries in Western Europe, and I wouldn’t say that its attempts to reduce the role of the automobile in Milanese and Roman transportation do anything to contradict its reputation. But, by American standards, both Milan and (to a lesser extent) Rome have still done a great deal to update their rail transportation and to improve life for pedestrians and (in Milan anyway) cyclists in their central cities.

The recreational path known as the Miami Underline grew by 2.1 miles (3.4 km) on April 24.⁴⁰

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.⁴¹ 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.⁴² 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.⁴³

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 very likely most) people in Hong Kong would have preferred not to be living under such a regime. Of course, the people of Hong Kong have had absolutely no choice in this matter.

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.⁴⁴ 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).⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶

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 other 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.⁴⁷ 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.⁴⁸

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 stock would be needed in most cases. And any new system would require considerable debugging. The REM certainly did.⁴⁹ 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.