Berlin fits perfectly well in this list. Post-unification investments just bridged the gaps in the network and refurbished a couple of stations. The trams in the east complement the Underground which runs mainly in the west part of the city. And the S-Bahn just got its pre-war network restored. A network which was set up by a single entity, the DR. Berlin is nothing special anymore. Just another city with a decent public transport system.

@ ant6n Spandau, Köpenick, Potsdam and Henningsdorf, they are all urban centres of their own and not suburban either. @ all Don't lively public square and being suburban exclude each other? Just a thought.

A rapid transit stop is probably right at a civic square, though if someone found a square with trams on three sides and lots of people connecting between them, I could work with that. Is the condition of three tram routes on a square actually made to exclude the numerous tram junctions of two routes?

My first thought was Alexanderplatz as well. So I contribute a few more pictures of it: [1] [2] [3] [4]. But I'm not so sure whether it is successful at being an urban space. Although not being a square Piccadilly Circus is still an important transport node in London and a lively urban space. Frankfurt's Konstabler Wache might fit the criterias. I can't judge whether it is pleasant place where people like to go though.

@ Alan This is not a problem in an ideal grid where every destination is within walking distance of both a north-south and an east-west line. This is a rather uneconomic approach and therefore far from ideal. I have no idea how densely a city has to be populated to sustain such a close-meshed network.

@ Jarrett In an idealised grid network, the maximum number of connections for almost any trip is one. In an orthogonal grid network many trips require two interchanges actually as lines run parallel to each other and never intersect. As for Delhi, their metro network is still developing. At this premature stage coverage has certainly the greatest priority. Once the blue and the green lines are extended, the numbers of necessary interchanges are cut automatically.

@ J B I don't say that they are equally overvalued. @ Alan Levy The US are flooded with consumer goods from several countries, one in particular. Such excessive supply boosts purchasing power. But only on these goods. Domestically manufactured goods or investments in infrastructure which can't be imported are rather expensive in comparison. This kind of purchasing power is rather misleading in my eyes. More important is what domestically produced goods and services does a US Dollar buy. And this seems to be little.

Simple answer: the US-Dollar is overvalued. The same can be said about the Pound Sterling.

Sprawl repair reminds me of the ill-fated attempts of remodelling European cities to fit car transport in the 1960s and 70s. Today we consider this policy a failure. Not that public transport is generally better than individual transport, but that any transport solution has to fit the urban environment and not the other way around. Even if that means to leave American suburbs as car-dependent as they are and offer just a minimum of PT there. If you want to create or re-create dense urban developments then do it in inner-cities or areas close to that. Suburbs 30 km off the metropolitan centre are more likely to be abandoned once energy and therefore car transport becomes unaffordable than turned into a PT-oriented areas.

calwatch wrote: How do you enforce POP when it's that crowded? You don't enforce it at all. Instead you can make people pay for it by adding a surcharge on ticket prices for the Asian Games or for any other event that causes the temporary overcrowding.

David in Ottawa: Still, I would think that in a CANZUS context, a city with a population of less than 200,000 is unlikely to get an internally-oriented* light rail line, nevermind an entire network of lines like Almere's busways. Cities like Le Mans (144'000) and Mulhouse (111'000) contradict your assumption that they were too small for trams which both re-introduced in recent years. I don't know what you mean by CANZUS though. As for Almere, most of their bus network is served by 8 pairs of buses per hour or more, some branches even by 16. Considered that trams attract more users than buses and that the town keeps growing the introduction of trams seemed to me a rather sensible move.

@ David in Ottawa Almere's population is 186,000. Very few people would be arguing to put an internal LRT system into a city of that size, but even so it still has *five* railway stations, with what looks to be a sixth on the way at the 'Almere Poort' to the west. I strongly disagree with this perception. Towns and cities half the size of Almere run trams successfully. Almere is by all means of the right size for a tram network. The decision in favour of buses was made in the 1970s or 80s when buses were regarded superior to trams. This has changed, however. I for one wouldn't be surprised if the bus-ways were replaced or added by tracks in the future.

Buses should never run on motorways in the first place. Buses are meant to serve areas where people live, work or shop. A motorway is quite a distance off such areas (for a good reason). So these bus routes just run through on motorways but they shouldn't. For fast services with greater stop spacing there are railways. The real travesty and anti-poor policy in London is the price structure of TfL which forces the poor to take buses even for long trips. Abandoning this bus lane isn't.

Services every 15 minutes might be frequent for intercity connections, but for innercity routes certainly not. And not just in New York but almost everywhere outside North America. Yesterday I caught myself getting rather impatient when waiting longer than longer than two minutes. I even wondered whether a minute in Berlin last longer than 60 seconds.

I don't share the assumption that orthogonal grids were better for public transport systems. 50% of the routes in an orthogonal grid run parallel to each other and don't allow interchanges between them. Thus increases the number of interchanges in the whole system which makes it less convenient, distributes additional load to interchange stations and transverse lines. An orthogonal grid network might be simple to draw. It doesn't deliver the maximum benefit for transport system, however.