flickering pictures

That beast up there is Tokyo’s subway map (click the map for a larger image), and it scares the bejeesus out of me. According to Infoplease, it provides 2.6 billion rides each year, and is over 281km long.

Tokyo’s subway is by no means the longest though — the Beijing network, pictured below, is set to overtake London’s in that department (with 562 km of track) by 2020. That’s slightly more than a drive from New York to Boston, back to New York, and then back to Boston. Or perhaps more helpfully, it’s farther than the ride from London to Milan.

In terms of traffic though, no city can touch Moscow’s subway (below), which carries 3.2 billion passengers each year. It’s got a pretty nifty design too — sort of like a spider sitting on a no-smoking sign.

It’s interesting (maybe just to me) that while the Moscow network seems designed to bring people from the suburbs into the city centre, the Beijing and Tokyo subways take people from anywhere to anywhere on a sort of grid. It also seems curious that there’s a ring around Moscow’s city centre with no subway stops — like a dead zone through which the commuting masses must pass twice a day.

And the last one is from Seoul, the burgeoning city of 10.4 million people where I’ll be heading in a few weeks. One look at this monster and I’m already looking forward to asking passers-by where the heck I’m staying and how on Earth to get there.

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