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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I always find it a bit odd when people call it the London Underground or the Paris Métro. Nobody else calls their subway either of those. If you rode the Underground (of for that matter, the Tube/chube), or the Métro, I know where you were in the world.

Maybe it's trying to make Chicago, New York and Tokyo feel better? I dunno.

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Underground, perhaps (although German's U-Bahn is the equivalent). Metro, accent aside, is in common use worldwide, isn't it? (Tokyo, Washington DC, to name two Metro systems)

When people say Metro I think the Mexico City Metro. "Metro" is not only used to brand the trains, but also the BRT service ("Metrobús").

When people mention The Tube I do think London though. I haven't heard anyone else call their subway "the tube". To be fair though, the London Underground _is_ quite more tubular than other systems around the world.

I think only New York calls it the Subway? Most cities seem to have their own nickname or just call it the Metro.

Los Angeles does call the light rail system "Metro". The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Los Angeles County (or "MTA"), is often shortened to "Metro". The website is even www.metro.net - which covers busses and rail, but when people around LA say "we took the Metro" they typically mean the light rail system, which is mostly above ground, but there are underground segments of it. When they say "we took the MTA" they usually mean a bus line specific to the MTA system. There are many other local bus lines in addition to MTA, like Culver City Bus, Big Blue Bus (Santa Monica), etc., and "MTA" was always used to differentiate bus lines. It's pretty much only the rail system getting called "Metro" in LA from my experience.

Nah plenty say Metro. We say it in Amsterdam, or Barcelona for example as well.

Same in Poland. It's both a generic term ("Metro w Londynie" == London Underground) and a name for a specific system (Metro in Warsaw)

Many places call the "subway" metro, or underground.

Hard to understand what you might mean. Tokyo also has a rail system called Metro.

“Métro” is the generic term in French, so more cities than Paris have one. And they call it “the London Underground” in London and I don’t think they really think of making Chicago feel better every day.

In DC we call our system The Metro. It's more common than you think.

Metro is the name in many cities, not just Paris

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