Which cities have the best public transport networks? Comparing the world's metro systems by age, size and ridership

Ask which city has the best public transport network and the answer depends entirely on what "best" means. Quality-of-life indices score cities on affordability, safety and coverage. A simpler question — which networks are actually the oldest, the longest, and the most heavily used — has a very different answer, and it comes straight from the engineering and ridership data of the world's metro systems.

The clearest published comparison of transit quality is Arcadis' Sustainable Cities Mobility Index 2017, which scored 100 cities against 23 indicators and put Hong Kong first, followed by a run of European capitals — Zurich, Paris, Prague, Vienna and London among them. McKinsey's 2018 Elements of Success study reached a similar conclusion from a different angle, ranking Hong Kong, Singapore and Greater Paris as the strongest all-round public transport performers among 24 global cities. Neither index answers a more basic question: which networks are physically the biggest, the oldest, or the most heavily used? For that, the most complete dataset is Wikipedia's crowd-curated List of metro systems, which as of 2018 tracked opening dates, route length, station counts and ridership across roughly 177 metro systems worldwide.

The oldest networks

London's Underground is the starting point for any history of rapid transit. Its first section, the steam-hauled Metropolitan Railway, opened in 1863 as the world's first underground passenger railway; the world's first deep-level electric line, the City & South London Railway, followed in 1890. Budapest's Millennium Underground Railway (1896) and Glasgow's cable-hauled Subway (also 1896) came next, both still running along their original routes. Chicago's elevated "L", whose South Side line first ran on 6 June 1892, and the Paris Métro, which opened in 1900, complete the five oldest systems still in operation.

Across the roughly 177 metro systems in the 2018 dataset, the typical opening year worked out to about 1984 — an estimate pulled forward by the wave of new Chinese and Indian systems built since 2000. Strip those out and most of the world's older networks cluster in the 1890–1930 window.

The longest networks, then and now

In 2018 the Shanghai Metro was the world's longest system at around 637 kilometres, with the Beijing Subway close behind at roughly 599 kilometres — both measured before the two networks' respective end-of-year extensions in December 2018, which pushed Shanghai to 705 km and Beijing to 637 km within weeks of each other. London's Underground (402 km), Guangzhou (about 391 km) and New York (roughly 380 km) rounded out the top five. The Chinese figures have kept climbing since: current Wikipedia data puts the Beijing Subway at 909 km and the Shanghai Metro at around 890 km, meaning both cities have added the equivalent of an entire London Underground network in under a decade.

Which network has the most stations

Length is not the same as coverage. Despite ranking only third by distance, the New York City Subway has long had more individual stations than any other network — 424 — a legacy of the closely spaced stops built by competing private operators in the early 20th century and later merged into one system. In the 2018 comparison, Shanghai (324 stations), Seoul's numbered lines 1–9 (307), Beijing (306) and the Paris Métro (302) followed. China's expansion has since closed much of that gap: current figures put Shanghai at 415 stations and Beijing at 409, both narrowing in on New York's count even as their route lengths keep growing too.

The busiest networks

Ridership is where the numbers get genuinely large. In the most recent full-year figures available for each system at the time of the 2018 comparison — mostly 2016 — Beijing's subway carried about 3.66 billion passenger journeys, ahead of Shanghai (3.40 billion), Seoul's lines 1–9 (2.86 billion), Guangzhou (2.80 billion) and Tokyo Metro (2.64 billion). New York, despite its station-count lead, carried "only" about 1.76 billion journeys that year — fewer than half of Beijing's total.

A network can have more stations than anywhere else in the world and still carry less than half the passengers of the busiest single system.

Ridership versus population — a different kind of "best"

Raw ridership favours big, dense cities almost by definition, so a more revealing comparison sets annual journeys against the population a network actually serves. On that measure the extremes are striking: the Milan Metro, serving a city of about 1.4 million residents, recorded roughly 468 million rides in the 2018 comparison — well over 300 times the resident population, a ratio driven by commuters and visitors who live outside the city boundary rather than by residents riding the metro hundreds of times each. Taipei, Munich and Hong Kong's MTR show a similar pattern, each with annual ridership many multiples of the core population, while New York's subway — serving 8.2 million residents with 1.76 billion rides — sits at a still-high but far more modest ratio of roughly 21 rides per resident a year.

The gap illustrates a genuine quirk of this kind of comparison rather than a flaw in the maths: most "metro population" figures in the underlying dataset use the city proper rather than the wider commuting region, so any system serving a small, tightly-drawn city with a large daytime working population will produce numbers that look implausible until that distinction is made explicit.

So which network is "best"?

None of this settles what Arcadis or McKinsey would call the best public transport network — that verdict depends on affordability, safety, frequency and how easy a system actually is to use, not on raw scale. But the two views are complementary. The quality indices consistently reward cities — Hong Kong, Singapore, Zurich, Paris — that pair strong ridership with genuine day-to-day usability. The scale data shows why that combination is hard to build: it takes over a century of continuous expansion, in London's and Paris's case, or roughly a decade of extraordinary investment, in Beijing's and Shanghai's, to put a network in a position to be judged "the best" in the first place.

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