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Comment by teractiveodular | Hacker News Reader

This article really needs to mention Japan, who pioneered and perfected the idea and its smooth integration into the subway network. It's common in Tokyo for a train to start as a limited express that travels long distances at speed, then transition into an all-stops subway, tunnel through Tokyo, and then morph back into an express for the long haul out. Some trains on the Toyoko Line do this twice: express, subway in Tokyo, express, subway again in Yokohama.

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If only they'd give them sensible names so I could remember whether a Commuter Rapid is faster than a Special Rapid or a Limited Express. (Maybe it makes more sense in Japanese)

The Japanese order is pretty consistent: futsu (Regular) < junkyu (Semi-Express) < kyuko (Express) < kaisoku (Rapid) < tokkyu (Limited Express) < chotokkyu (Superexpress, better known as Shinkansen/bullet train). It's the random branded Nantoka Liners that throw me off.

Even shinkansen lines have different speed classes, the fastest ones weren't covered by the previous cheaper JR pass.

Tangentially related, in the Netherlands there's 2 types of train, Sprinter and InterCity.

The Sprinter is the one that stops at every small station along the way, whereas the InterCity is the one that speedily goes only to the major stations.

This has always annoyed me to an unreasonable degree

InterCity makes sense to me (inner vs inter). I’m guessing “sprinter” has more to do with being advertised for shot trips. Still silly though.

Doesn't this describe the Metropolitan line in London, which is the first one?

And that's not how the Parisian RER works - they have very few stops in the city of Paris itself, to prioritise long distance travel and make it faster (somewhat as a reaction to how unsuited the Paris metro, which has a ridiculously dense stop network, is for long distances).

The TFL service, the actual Metropolitan Line, only goes from London to Amersham. It used to go to Aylesbury, which is at least a moderate sized town, but it hasn't since electrification last century.

Amersham is a 13th century market town. It's not tiny, but it's certainly not a city.

Now, there are mainline services running on the same physical rails which do move passengers between London and other cities, but those don't turn into a stopping underground service, the trains leave those shared rails inside London and run to a terminus station, Marylebone. Marylebone is an Underground station, but only in the same sense as say King's Cross or Waterloo - the Underground is separate though located in the same warren of buildings and tunnels.

The Elizabeth Line is closer to the model explained here, running a fast long distance service, a metro service and then back to fast long distance. Reading isn't a city but it's more significant than Amersham and those are core London services not a terminus with the option to change.

The Elizabeth line doesn't run a particularly fast long-distance service - it stops at all stations [1] between Reading and London.

If you wanted to go from Reading to somewhere in central London, it would be faster to take a non-stop express which terminates at the edge of central London and then change onto the Elizabeth line than to take it all the way. The service to Reading is more about providing a local service between Reading and its surrounding small towns.

[1] except Iver

> The Elizabeth Line is closer to the model explained here, running a fast long distance service, a metro service and then back to fast long distance

It only has 5 stops with generous distance between them in London/Zone 1, which is equivalent to Parisian RERs. Not really what I would call metro service.

Interesting how both sibling comments (by sofixa and twic) complain about opposite things: that Elizabeth is not a metro service (i.e. it's fast) and the other that it's not fast, it stops at all stations (i.e. it's a metro).

It's interesting because both are true: outside of central london is a metro service, in central london is a fast service. The parent op explains it pretty well in the last paragraph:

> running a fast long distance service, a metro service and then back to fast long distance.

the met has express services that skip stations

London also created Thameslink in the 1980s by linking existing suburban rail north and south of the city. It's not as fancy as the new Elizabeth line, but it did make a big difference to a lot of people commuting to the City of London, saving them the extra time of changing from rail to tube.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thameslink

> the Paris metro, which has a ridiculously dense stop network, is for long distances

I think it's interesting how the most recent line (n° 14) has way less stops, instead focusing on covering more distance

Yes line 14 is very much an express link. The original project name was METEOR, which was an acronym for “rapid east/west metro” (METro Est Ouest Rapide) (although it’s more of a south-east to north-west link).

Yep, because a big part of the drive for it is to reduce the overcrowding on the lines 1 and A, and thus it needed to be as fast as possible to actually be competitive with them.

Funnily this was so successful this led to overcrowding on the 14, hence the extension of the line E to take some of the traffic from the 1, A and 14; and the 14 itself was extended to connect one of the airports and a bunch of suburbs under heavy redevelopment.

The Metropolitan line stock only has a top speed of 100kmh and I would reckon it doesn't even reach that

Could you share a link with more details?

Here's a pretty solid overview in the late, lamented JRTR.

https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr63/pdf/14-21_web.pdf (PDF)

The article also notes that the Parisian RER was inspired by Tokyo, and throws casual shade by noting that public transport in Paris at 3 billion trips per year is just a small fraction of Tokyo's 15 billion trips.

> The article also notes that the Parisian RER was inspired by Tokyo, and throws casual shade by noting that public transport in Paris at 3 billion trips per year is just a small fraction of Tokyo's 15 billion trips.

The Paris metro area is 11 million, while Tokyo's is 38 million. So the difference isn't as huge as it initially seems, and I'd bet Paris will start catching up with the Grand Paris Express (4 new automated lines, the first one of which is a loop in the metro area and will be very high capacity) and all other related projects (there are like 10 different trams being built in various parts of the metro area, a new airport express, a bunch of BRTs, RER extension and hell even a cable car).

Edit: did some digging, and I'm not buying the number for Paris. Surprisingly the total number of trips isn't a number referenced in Ile de France Mobilités (the organising authority)'s Open Data [1], and they're the only ones that would have all of it, instead of just metro/some RERs/etc.

Statista say that for 2022 (year still impacted by Covid), there were 1.3 billion trips on the metro alone [2]. And the metro is a small part, RERs cover much wider territory and have much higher capacity, and there are of course a bunch of trams and a few hundred bus lines. And there are also people commuting by regular intercity trains or even TGVs, but they're a small minority.

According to OMNIL (observatory of mobility in Ile de France), there's a total of 4.1 billion trips on public transit (including metro, RER, Transilien regional trains, trams, buses and night buses) in Ile de France for 2023 [3].

4.1 billion vs 15 billion for less than 1/3 of the population means that Tokyo and Paris actually aren't all that far off.

Per capita, this makes for 394 trips per year per inhabitant for Tokyo, and 372 for Paris. Of course both cities receive lots of tourists and business travel, so this is skewed somewhat. And as I said, Paris is undergoing a massive expansion in number and length of lines, so it will surpass Tokyo in a few years (initial sections of the line 15 will open in 2025).

1 - https://data.iledefrance-mobilites.fr/pages/home/

2 - https://fr.statista.com/themes/5703/la-mobilite-en-ile-de-fr...

3 - https://omnil.fr/trafic-annuel-et-journalier

When you say "surpass Tokyo", it really depends what you mean by Tokyo's metro. A lot of the stats literally talk about the central Tokyo subway network, which consists of 13 lines [1]; when in reality that's just one amongst a huge number of other operators that comprise the Greater Tokyo rail system, arguably consisting of 121 lines, excluding trams [2]. Given that this article is about regional transit, I think that's a fair comparison.

Taking that into account, as far as number of rail lines are concerned, Paris would probably need to at least quintuple its rail lines before it gets even close.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Greater_Tokyo#Rai...

Number of lines is an irrelevant metric, especially when you think about the fact that there are multiple private operators in Tokyo, and thus multiple competing lines in various places. Compared to Paris where lines were always centrally planned, and thus there is only overlap if there are capacity issues (lines A, 1, to a lesser extent 14 and E).

Length of track will similarly be skewed towards the city with the overlapping competing lines.

Passenger kilometres travelled, number of trips, etc are more relevant.

Not a link, but there are many lines that do this; the poster mentions Toyoko line, which (as of now) goes

Hannō > Kotake-Mukaihara: Seibu Ikebukuro Line

Kotake-Mukaihara > Shibuya: Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin Line

Shibuya > Yokohama: Tokyu Toyoko Line

Yokohama > Motomachi-Chūkagai: Minatomirai Line

Those are all different companies operating on the same rights of way seamlessly! When you reach the through service stops, it just looks like any normal stop - there is generally no interruption in service, it just stops for some seconds and proceeds onwards like nothing happened. If you visit Tokyo you would notice that sometimes you'll see Tokyo Metro-branded trains on JR tracks, or Toei-branded trains on Keio tracks, and so on.

Many lines are like this; if you look up any of the central railway lines in Tokyo on Wikipedia, you'll see on their station charts notes about their through services. Some more instances:

Odakyu Line > Tokyo Metro Chiyoda Line > JR Joban line

Keio Line > Keio New Line > Toei Shinjuku Line

Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line > Tobu Skytree Line > Tobu Nikko Line

JR Chuo Sobu Line > Tokyo Metro Tozai Line > Tōyō Rapid Railway Line, and so on.

Here's a somewhat morbid link that really hit home how far these Tokyo-area trains can travel in a day (suburban express to urban and back again, times four):

https://soranews24.com/2024/07/03/man-passes-away-on-tokyo-t...

Well, not sure if exactly this but it sounds like what I am occasionally using to commute to Geneva, Switzerland. Regional train, traveling up to 120kmh (trains have same speed limits as cars here apparently), then enters the Geneva and stops in like 6 places in its newly-built 'subway' (it doesn't have a lot of stops, but then again Geneva is tiny compared to megacities mentioned).

I mean it covers all the stops there are in the city, of which with single line in small city there aren't that many. And then goes to neighboring France, and on the way back picks up french commuters coming daily for (much better paid) work.

There are no dedicated subway trains per se that I am aware of, just this. Helps me a lot to get close to my workplace, although drawback of this is long stops, I guess due to being proper big double decker swiss train and overall a massive behemoth.

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