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Comment by victor106 | Hacker News Reader

I take the subway almost everyday since the past 7 years and its been getting worse.

NYC should learn something from Toronto and London. They have the best subway systems IMHO.

If you think London is good, wait til you try the subway in big Asian cities like Taipei, Tokyo, or Seoul.

Don’t forget the subway lines in basically every Chinese city! Beijing has overcrowding issues, but Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou all have phenomenal metros.

As a native New Yorker I was blown away by the Shenzhen subway when I visited last year.

It's spotless, easy to navigate (lots of language-free signs with really clear intuitive diagrams of where to go), and almost eerily fast and smooth-riding. And 5 bars of LTE the whole time.

A thing built 6-10 years ago will always be more modern and less run down than a thing built 60-100 years ago. Time will tell how well the Chinese systems age.

Tokyo's subway turns 90 this year, and while the older stations aren't as flashy as new ones, it remains remarkably efficient & functional.

I love Toronto, but its subways (and transit as a whole) need improvement as well. Not just that, council seems hell-bent on throwing 3+ billion dollars down the morass that's the Scarborough extension.

[rant over]

Yeah, I recently moved back to queens from the city and what used to be a 30-45 min commute 5-6 years ago now takes me 60-90 minutes.

Everyone in Toronto loves to complain about the TTC, but the few lines we have here are pretty reliable.

We just need to expand the system further. The Eglinton line and the Finch LRT will help.

If you look at the TTC system as a whole it's the streetcar lines that take a lot of flack, but I blame that on:

* General age of the fleet (not helped by Bombardier's delayed deliveries)

* Lack of dedicated streetcar lanes; it's still shocking to me that streetcars packed full of passengers are allowed to be held up by single-passenger vehicles

I'm quite shocked people think Toronto's transit system is on par with London

The assumption that Toronto is on par with London, NYC or other large metro areas is a common delusion of those living there.

It's a matter of population and density, imho.

Toronto has mostly low-density housing, with spots of very high density- generally, around subway stations. From a plane the other day, I noticed you can see all the subway lines from a very far distance just by looking for lines made of tall building clusters. This is a feedback relationship though- where there is density, we put subway lines, and where there are subway stations people build more density.

London, by contrast, has more of a medium-density everywhere. You could put a tube station just about anywhere in London and you'd have a large number of people who can and would walk to it.

Still, I'm quite happy with the quality of the lines we do have. I just hope that as we build more, that can be maintained.

Lived in London for 1.5+ years and in Madrid for several years afterwards, and I think Madrid's system is better (not that London's is bad overall).

Cleaner, more modern, frequent trains, less delays.

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