Sunday 21 June 2009

Cities with Tubes (underground trains)

I for one love the flexibility and ease of travelling around a large city on the tube. In my home city of London the tube makes zipping around the sights and attractions quick and easy and somewhat affordable if you buy the correct ticket. In any city which has an underground transit system you will definitely see the advantages of a tube if you are used to travelling across town on a bus in the middle of rush hour. You could argue that tubes can be just as uncomfortable and sweaty in rush hour as buses as you will get packed on, but some places such as Tokyo have employed people to make sure every last person is squeezed into the carriage by using force if necessary. In Hong Kong however, the journey’s can be much more pleasant as the carriages are air conditioned so even on the snuggest journey you can be pretty confident that your armpits will remain dry. This is a rarity because many of the underground networks are very old and an effective air conditioning system would be expensive to put in place.

I found a wiki site which lists all the cities in the world which have an underground transit system. This is a good reference if you would like to visit a city knowing that travel around it is easy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems#A

Another good article I found shows arguably the best underground systems in the world.

http://www.virgin-vacations.com/site_vv/11-top-underground-transit-systems-in-the-world.asp

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3 Comments:

At 23 June 2009 at 11:20 , Anonymous Marcus said...

Ya, its a great experience to travel through tubes in London and underground in US. I just get fascinated every time i travel.

 
At 18 July 2009 at 12:23 , Blogger Saadia said...

Hi! Good to have you back.

London and Paris have always been touted as having the best underground systems in the world. I agreed till my latest experience in - sadly - London. Too many hiccups in the service. It was not just once, in a span of 2 weeks, that we had to settle for alternate bus services because the lines had disruptions.

Not to mention, of course, that in the recent heat wave, the tube weather went into the 40s, which was obnoxious.

I've been to London quite a few times and this was a first. So it made me very sad. The papers were right in asking: "how can we host the Olympics 2012?"

 
At 18 July 2009 at 13:40 , Blogger Alex @ The Travel Blurb said...

Hello,

Yes I have been a bit poor with posting of late mainly due to web hosting issues/decisions and lack of spare time. I have a new webhost lined up because I want to create a WordPress blog so my efforts are in that right now. However, I am very keen to start blogging and have some topics up my sleeve.

You must have been over in London in the past month. It was far too hot on the tube and around rush hour it is totally packed. I read interestingly that is illegal to transport cattle in temperatures over 27 degrees but humans on the tube travel in up to 40 degrees!

The system will break when the 2012 games start and the UK will embarrass itself. In winter and outside of rush hour I cant fault the service at all. You can arrive on the platform and there will be a train along in no longer than 4 minutes, and thats if your unlucky. I also learnt recently after the strikes that london tube drivers get around £40,000 a year salary and roughly 40 days holiday! Not a bad life.

Hope all is well with you.

 

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