Liberal Landscape

Mexico City (as I wrote in an earlier post) has been trying to mitigate serious congestion and air-pollution problems for something like the last sixty years. The city has constructed a major metro system. It’s legislated limits on car travel. It’s closed polluting factories. And it’s insisted that gasoline be reformulated. Despite these efforts, Mexico City still has congestion and air-pollution problems, but they’re no longer generally considered to be among the world’s worst.

Mexico City’s efforts to build new infrastructure that provides alternatives to automobile use have continued. On February 6, 2026, it opened the final section of El Insurgente, a new suburban rail line, and, in September 2024, Cablebús Line 3, a new overhead cable line, began service. I went to Mexico City to ride both lines last week.

El Insurgente. One of the problems with Mexico City’s rail system has been that it doesn’t take passengers far enough from the central city. Mexico City spreads fifty or more kilometers from the Centro Histórico to the west, north, and east, but the Metro barely manages 20 km. Metro lines are particularly scarce in the western parts of the urban area.

Middle and outer suburban areas in many big cities in Europe and North America are served by suburban railroads. Trains on these lines can generally move more quickly than on traditional subway lines, in part because stations are more widely spaced. Mexico City has had a 27-km-long suburban railroad on its northern edge—the Tren Suburbano—since 2008. A branch of this line to the newly established Felipe Ángeles International Airport is scheduled to open later this year. There have been proposals to create similar suburban lines along the rights-of-way of other existing freight railroads—just about all of which are in northern Mexico City—but, partly because most of these lines spend most of their time in industrial rather than residential districts, no one’s ever made a completely convincing case for converting them to passenger use. Thus, movement to and from Mexico City’s suburbs has largely been along roads, which are typically massively overcrowded and subject to traffic jams.

The suburban area in Toluca Valley, west of Mexico City, illustrates the issue. Toluca Valley consists of a high (2600 m) fairly flat plain. Its population these days is sometimes given as 2.5 million and has been growing steadily. The valley is separated from Mexico City by the Sierra de las Cruces, a mountain range generally more than 3000 m high. A freeway and an older highway cross the Sierra, but traffic is often so heavy that speedy journeys are impossible.

The new suburban rail line, El Insurgente,¹ provides an alternative way to move between the Toluca Valley and Mexico City. It was essentially built from scratch. It’s a substantial 58 km (36 miles) long and cost something like six billion dollars to build.². Note the map below. The brown line on the left represents El Insurgente. It’s a major addition to Mexico City’s rail facilities.

Map of part of the Mexico City area. The nominal scale of the map is 1:250,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are derived in part from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited the data. Note that all the transport routes but the roads are shown with 30% transparency. This means that, when two routes occupy the same (or nearly the same) location, both are visible on the map. When two routes are shown with different colors, you end up with a color mix that (I acknowledge) may be confusing. The map is clickable, enlargeable, and downloadable.

Because El Insurgente was built largely in an already populated area, it couldn’t be put on the surface without blocking roads. 48 km of the line are elevated. El Insurgente also includes a 5-km tunnel under the Sierra.

Trains are supposed to run every ten minutes. I believe that that’s a shorter headway than on any other North American suburban rail line with the exception of Montréal’s new REM. But I had to wait fifteen minutes for two of the three train rides I took, and the third ride included an unscheduled stop of twenty minutes so another train could move in the other direction. (All trains were using only one of the two tracks.) Newspaper stories report that such delays have been common.³ The authorities say they are fixing the problem. When things are working right, the complete trip takes about fifty minutes. This is pretty fast for an urban railroad. The train’s speed is supposed to be 120 km/h (and 160 km/h in the future), but most of the trip is slower.

The stations along the lines are huge. They’re all set up for much longer trains than the five-car trains that are now in use.

Inside the Toluca Centro station.

One oddity is that there appear to be no working countdown clocks in the stations. Thus, passengers tend to crowd the tracks while waiting for a train. This didn’t seem very safe to me.

Passengers waiting in Observatorio station for a delayed train to arrive.

A factor here is that there are enough passengers so that a seat is not guaranteed.

Inside a train during the most crowded part of its run, between Observatorio and Santa Fe stations.

In the Toluca Valley, the train mostly runs in a corridor of high-tension electric wires that was apparently vacant when construction started. The stations do not appear to be near traditional commercial centers. It’s more than 2.5 km, for example, between the Toluca Centro station and the colonial center of Toluca, and it’s not an easy or pleasant walk. The problem starts when you try to cross the arterial that parallels the train tracks. This is probably never safe since drivers of turning vehicles can’t be counted on to defer to pedestrians. Another problem is that there’s no proper sidewalk for much of the way. It’s likely that most passengers arrive by bus, van, or car.

In the Sierra de las Cruces and in the Sierra’s Mexico City foothills, El Insurgente runs through what appears to have been mostly unbuilt-on land. I can’t think of another post-World-War-II passenger railroad in North America that provides better scenery.

A key station on the line is in Santa Fe.

Santa Fe train station. Note the modern apartment buildings on the hill behind the station.

Santa Fe could fairly be called an “edge city.” It may be the most important center of corporate skyscrapers in Mexico City, although the area along the Paseo de la Reforma west of the Centro Histórico remains competitive. But, for some companies, the latter district is a bit too gritty, and Santa Fe provides a prestigious alternative. Santa Fe’s abundant high-end housing and (it’s said) superior air quality have made it attractive for wealthy people as a residential zone as well.

Santa Fe began to acquire something like its present form in the 1990s. Despite all the tall buildings, it seems to have been built to be moved around in mostly by automobile. Its effective center is Centro Santa Fe, said to be Latin America’s largest shopping mall.⁴ The Centro is surrounded by huge parking facilities.

The Centro Santa Fe from El Insurgente’s train station. Note the elaborate parking facilities and the apartment buildings up the hill.

Most of the rest of Santa Fe is at a higher elevation than the Centro, and it’s a steep climb to get to it. There are buses, vans, and taxis in Santa Fe, and there are sidewalks in most places—service staff need to get to their work. But some of these sidewalks are not maintained very well. Here’s a section of the sidewalk between the new train station and the Centro Santa Fe:

Sidewalk between the Santa Fe train station and the Centro Santa Fe.

No one, in other words, would say that Santa Fe is very welcoming to pedestrians. I’d think that this might limit usage of the new line, but El Insurgente’s been carrying 50,000 people on some days. (This is, however, way below the projected 250,000.)

Cablebús Line 3. Mexico City, like some other Latin American cities, has been building overhead cable lines (teleféricos in Spanish)⁵. In Medellín, La Paz (Bolivia), and Rio de Janeiro, these lines have been used to provide public transit to economically marginal, hilly neighborhoods. Such districts typically lack the kinds of arterials on which bus lines could easily operate or along which rail lines could be constructed. Teleféricos are not very fast (20 km/h is a typical speed), and the number of people who can be transported per hour is not very high, but they can be built much more cheaply and quickly than rail lines. The fact that they give their riders incredible views is a bonus.

The Vasco de Quiroga terminal station on Cablebús Line 3. Staff are present to assist passengers boarding the cars, which move slowly through the stations.

Mexico City’s Cablebús Line 3, unlike Lines 1 and 2, doesn’t really serve a particularly marginal area. It starts near the Constituyentes Metro station in Chapultepec Park and takes riders to the upper part of the park (which mostly consists of cemeteries) and ends up in the modest settlement of Vasco de Quiroga. The station there is an awkward 450 m from the Vasco de Quiroga station of El Insurgente. The line provides striking views of Chapultepec Park and of the tall buildings in and around Santa Fe.

View from a car on Cablebús Line 3. The tall buildings in the center of the photo are in Santa Fe.

It can’t be claimed that Cablebús Line 3 is a really important piece of infrastructure, but it does fill a modest gap in the Mexico City transport grid. It also has far more potential to be attractive to tourists than the cablebús lines in much poorer neighborhoods in northern and southeastern Mexico City. It’s been attracting a respectable 15,000 passengers a day.⁶

Mexico City is planning to add at least two more cablebús lines in the southwestern parts of the city over the next year.

Conclusion. I ended up being impressed by Mexico City’s continued success in creating alternatives to the automobile, but I remain cynical about whether putting new transport lines in automobile-oriented places can cause much of a modal shift without a radical change in the character of the landscape in these places.

Advertisement for Aqua Line at Bandra-Kurla Complex.

I recently spent several days in Mumbai, where I rode the new Aqua Line (Metro Line 3) several times. The Aqua Line is Mumbai’s first subway line, and, because its route takes it through many of the city’s most important destinations, it’s a particularly important facility. The line was opened in full just a few months ago, in October 2025, and, when I was in Mumbai, the city was plastered with signs like the one shown above: the authorities believe that the Aqua Line is the key to Mumbai’s becoming a modern city.

Some background, as usual, is in order.

Mumbai has in common with many other cities that date from the colonial era—among them, New York, Hong Kong, Boston, and Dakar—a rather awkward geography. The colonizers of these cities wanted a good port that could easily be defended. Thus, in New York and Hong Kong, they chose a small part of a modest island, and, in Boston and Dakar, they chose the end of a long peninsula. The original site of Mumbai was on a small island, but, thanks to extensive landfill, it’s become the end of a peninsula. The locations of all these colonial-era cities became a problem as the cities grew into enormous places. There was a need to move a huge number of people and goods every day to a location surrounded on three sides by water and with only so much room for transportation facilities to the interior.

Mumbai’s solution to the problem was the development of several multi-track suburban railroad lines that ended up at two stations near the end of its peninsula: Churchgate and Chhatrapati Shivaji (formerly Victoria) Terminals. These rail lines have been transporting more than seven million passengers a day. It’s likely that, among the world’s suburban railroads, only Tokyo’s far larger number of lines carries more passengers.⁷

Mumbai’s suburban lines have been famously overcrowded for decades.⁸ Because very little of the rolling stock even today is air-conditioned, passengers must often hang onto the sides of the trains’ open doors, and some fall off every day.

Mumbai also has a 20-km-long monorail line, the first segment of which opened in 2014. The line was constructed at the behest of the company, Scomi Engineering Berhad, that built Kuala Lumpur’s monorail. It runs through industrial and medium-density residential areas in east-central Mumbai that are mostly served poorly by the suburban railway system. The Mumbai Monorail has never had a large ridership, in part because its route is not very useful and in part because it’s rather slow. The line has often been closed because of mechanical difficulties. The construction of the Mumbai Monorail seems to have been an experiment that just didn’t quite pan out. While there have been plans to add new lines, no one’s moved to implement these for many years.

Passengers getting off a train at the terminus of the Mumbai Monorail. Photograph made in 2014.

Like other Indian cities, Mumbai, thanks in part to national-government support, has started to build a system of more conventional metro lines in recent years, but, because (like Kolkata) it already had an urban rail system, it’s tended to go about the process in a different way than, say, Delhi, which has traditionally had only a modest number of suburban rail lines. Mumbai’s first metro line, the Blue Line (Metro Line 1), which opened in 2014 (after the Monorail), cuts east-west across the suburban rail lines, connecting stations on these lines with a couple of important commercial areas.

Map of part of the Mumbai area emphasizing rail transit lines and pedestrian facilities. The nominal scale of the map is 1:110,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on a 17-x-11-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly derived from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited all the data. 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 Blue Line is entirely elevated. Its stations are huge.

The Airport Road station on the Mumbai Metro’s Blue Line. Note the train up the track. The air quality index was over 300 when I took this photo.

It mostly runs along a busy road that carries massive amounts of traffic.

Andheri-Ghatkopar Link Road, under the Blue Line. The traffic jam-up is more or less typical.

Trains on the Blue Line run frequently—every three-and-a-half minutes for much of the day—and an enormous number of passengers—something like half a million a day—are carried. This is a very high passenger load for a line only 12 km long.

Passengers waiting as a train arrives at the Blue Line’s Airport Road station.

Mumbai’s next metro lines were sections of the Red and Yellow Lines (Line 2 and Line 7). They are being operated for the moment as a single service that follows an upside-down U-shaped itinerary. The line runs through economically heterogeneous northern outer-city neighborhoods that are served to some extent by the Western suburban line, but the routes of the metro lines generally operate much closer to dense housing areas than the Western Line. Like the Blue Line, these lines are entirely elevated. Unlike on the Blue Line, the stations have waste-high platform doors that prevent passengers from falling onto the tracks. An elaborate elevated corridor allows transfer to the Blue Line.

Blue Line train from a bridge connecting the Yellow Line’s Andheri West station to the Blue Line’s D.N. Nagar station.

The Aqua Line (Metro Line 3) is far more ambitious. Its 33.5 kilometers (20.8 miles) run between Cuffe Parade, near the southern end of Mumbai’s peninsula, and Aarey, in northern Mumbai. Because it’s almost all in subway and mostly runs under major streets, the Aqua Line is able to take passengers closer to many more important places than either the suburban rail lines or the elevated metro lines. It has stops, for example, at several clusters of office and residential buildings near the end of Mumbai’s peninsula. It also has stations at both major suburban rail terminals as well as at Mumbai Central, where many long-distance trains terminate. There are additional stops at the two Airport terminals; the new Bandra-Kurla Complex, a major commercial center; and other significant places on Mumbai’s densely populated peninsula. It complements the main suburban train lines and is being widely advertised as the “backbone” or “lifeline” of public transport in Mumbai. See the photo at the beginning of this post.

The Aqua Line is a much more modern rail line than the elevated lines. Like several other new Asian subways, it puts older metros in cities like New York and Chicago to shame. All the stations are air-conditioned and have full-height platform doors.

Boarding an Aqua Line train.

Stations are air-conditioned and are impressively elaborate. All the stations have mezzanine floors (called “concourses” in English). Many stations have numerous exits. Sometimes it’s possible to walk a substantial distance through tunnels that lead to particular destinations. The intricate pedestrian tunnels are important given that sidewalks in Mumbai, as almost everywhere in urban India, are often in appalling shape. They also mitigate to some extent the extreme difficulty that pedestrians experience whenever they want to cross a major road.

There are escalators and elevators in all the stations, although not at every exit. Wheelchair users are accommodated in the trains and at the elevators—although not, of course, on Mumbai’s sidewalks (which must limit the usefulness of the metro’s features for the handicapped). Also appreciated: There are (as on most new Asian metros) clean bathrooms in every station.

Escalators at the Marol Naka station.

There are elaborate electronic signs and prerecorded announcements in Marathi, Hindi, and English both in the trains and on the platforms. Trains can run driverless, although they’re apparently not yet doing so. The cars (as on the elevated lines) have open gangways. Designers have clearly been at work. Light blue (that is, aqua) is a common color on the trains and in the stations.

Despite the use of driverless technology, the operation of the Aqua Line is rather labor-intensive. Many, maybe most, people buy tickets at the staffed ticket offices. You have to pass through an elaborate security system to get to a station’s entrance gates. There are separate lines for men and women; everyone is scanned by same-sex guards. Besides the guards at the gates, there are security personnel on the platforms. Every station also has a separate office for the stationmaster and his or her staff. And the stations (including the toilets) are cleaned frequently by special staff.

The paper tickets use QR codes to open the gates. There can be backups at the gates when a train arrives and disgorges a substantial number of passengers.

Trains run frequently, something like every five minutes or so for part of the day and otherwise (I believe) at least every ten minutes.

Half of one car in every train is reserved for women. The women’s sections seem to be rather empty. Much more than in Delhi (or on the new Gulf metros), women apparently feel safe enough in the main cars of the train—a good sign, I think.

The Aqua Line has been carrying something like 180,000 passengers a day.⁹

Inside a semi-crowded Aqua Line train.

This is fewer passengers than on the much shorter Blue Line and is actually many fewer passengers than the authorities were expecting. Outside of rush hours, trains did not seem especially crowded to me. It was always easy to get a seat.

Relatively empty Aqua Line train at midday.

Fares seem quite reasonable by world standards. The price of tickets depends on distance. It costs 70 rupees (approximately 0.77 USD) to ride the whole line. It needs to be said that this is much more than it costs to go a similar distance on the suburban rail lines.¹⁰ The fare difference may account for the fact that there has been a smaller shift in passenger loads from the suburban trains to the Aqua Line than the authorities anticipated. Many Indians have incomes that, by world standards, are quite low, and what seem like small differences in price can have a major effect on what people choose to do. One consequence of the difference in fares is that passengers on the Metro are much more likely to be professionals or white-collar employees than the passengers on the suburban trains. Or so it seemed to me.

The Aqua Line connects with several other rail lines as well as with hundreds of bus lines. Several new metro lines are under construction, and, as these open, the Aqua Line will have even better connections. One problem here though is that there is, as yet, no fare integration in Mumbai. Even when you’re changing from one metro line to another, you have to buy a new ticket. Thus, long trips that require several lines can end up being, in local terms, rather costly. There is now a phone app (Mumbai One) that, in theory, allows ticket purchase on the Metro, the monorail, suburban rail, and some bus lines, but I don’t believe that users get a discount if they transfer.¹¹ Perhaps this will change in future years.

Despite this caveat, I was quite impressed by the Aqua Line. It provides state-of-the-art, comfortable, and speedy service in an urban area where high-quality public transportation has been in short supply. It’s the product of a new, modern India.

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.)¹²

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.¹³

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.¹⁴

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.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶

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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸

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.¹⁹

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.²⁰ 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.²¹ 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.²²

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.²³ 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.²⁴

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.²⁵

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.²⁶

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 2025.²⁷ 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.²⁸ 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.²⁹ 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,³⁰ 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.³¹

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.³²

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.³³

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.³⁴

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,³⁵ and some academic studies argued that this in fact may have happened to a limited extent.³⁶

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.³⁷

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 -.514.³⁸ 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.³⁹ 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.⁴⁰ 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.⁴¹ 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 2023.⁴² 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).⁴³

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.⁴⁴

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.⁴⁵  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 626.⁴⁶ 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 366.⁴⁷ 

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.⁴⁸

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.⁴⁹

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.⁵⁰

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 24.⁵¹

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.