Subway talk??? I haven‘t listened yet but the best subway system that I’ve encountered is the Oslo subway. Oslo isn‘t a big city by any means, so maybe it’s kind of cheating, but it‘s kind of impressive how overkill it is, and I think @"billy "#201 will appreciate parts of the design if they like Glasgow’s loop design.
I had the pleasure of being showed around Oslo for a few days by a dear friend of mine who grew up there and was happy to act as a tour guide, which also meant using the subway system a good deal as well (along with trams and at least looking at the buses!)
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Oslo's downtown core is covered by the complicated looking section in the middle, Der Ringen Des Trainelungen, where all of the current lines overlap. Stations that service multiple metro lines or multiple metro lines overlapping for part of their route isn't unique, but I don't believe I've heard of or seen another city's transit system do it to the same degree of density of overlap, or anything like that double looping downtown congestion relief line that can take you the full way around clockwise along the loop like that Line 5 one does.
If this looks confusing, basically how it works is that for the busiest stops within the downtown core, and thus the ones that it would be most convenient to take short trips between to zip around the downtown core really fast, are serviced by as many lines as possible, as many as 5 lines (and an extra looping section of Line 5). Meaning, depending on your station of origin as well as the station at your destination, you can likely get on multiple trains that will be passing through your destination. If you're going from Majorstuen station (on the bottom left of the loop) to Blindern station (on the left side of the loop) you can get on a train heading counter clockwise that's operating on either Line 5, or Line 4. If you're going from Majorstuen station to Jernbanetorget station (along the bottom of the loop), you can get on the first train available that's heading in the right direction, since all lines overlap at that station.
During peak hours and because this is so well automated, a train is coming into the station literally once a minute, and the trains operate at a super high efficiency in general since instead of most people waiting in the same station for a train on the single Line they need to get to their destination, there is always a mixture of people who can get on the first available train or on multiple viable trains or who are waiting for room on a specific Line, distributing riders more evenly across the whole network.
The Lines themselves go out to different kinds of residential areas but the extremities of the fast and high capacity subway/heavy rail system (as opposed to the trams and buses) go out quiet an impressive distance, serving what most of us probably understand as suburbs. My friend took me all the way to the end of the Frognersteren Line 1, which is the subway line that goes up to the highest elevation in the world. It basically snakes through a lightly populated, _Girl With The Dragon Tattoo_ antagonist ass rich people suburb/private land area, along the black metal ass forests.
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This is the station at the end of that Line.
So basically as someone whose main experiences with transit systems is the Toronto Transit Commission, which is mostly bullshit, the Oslo Metro was downright utopian by my standards.
Anyway who else out there is autistic (and loving it)
