My Little Underground

It’s weird how different cities take such different approaches to transit. I recently came across the fact that my family’s hometown of Birmingham, England, is the largest city in Europe without a subway. On the other hand, my current home of Kitchener-Waterloo’s light rail system makes it the smallest city in North America with any sort of rail transit system. And some Scandinavian cities have more of a commitment to transit: Oslo has more subway stations than Toronto, despite being only about a quarter the size.

So I was curious about what city has the most subway stations per capita in the world. I Googled it, and discovered there are all kinds of complications to the question: How do you define where a city ends? What part is served by the transit system? What if the subway also runs into neighbouring communities? But then I found that none of that matters, because there’s a clear winner: Serfaus, Austria. It has a subway system with four stations, serving a town of 1000 people. 

Okay, you've probably already guessed there has to be more to it than that, and indeed there is: Serfaus is a ski resort, so it often has far more than the local population to move around. And it's not a full sized subway: more like a “people mover” you might see at an airport. Interestingly, it doesn't even have wheels; it floats on compressed air. And it pulls itself along by a cord, like a cable car. Which is fitting for a ski resort.

The idea is to get people from the parking lot at one end of town to the base of the ski hills at the other end. That allows them to maintain a car-free community, which is nice for that little mountain retreat ambiance. Though as one tourist page points out, it does mean that a lot of visitors miss out on most of the village entirely.

So, Serfaus being a ski resort means that their money and transit needs are far beyond that of a normal thousand-person town. But on the other hand, it’s not like they get a million people at a time show up to ski: it’s still a pretty bold choice given the number of people they’re moving around. This has me wondering what other formats a town can take on. For instance, could there be some universe where my hometown of Woodstock (population, 46,000) has such a system? Maybe: I also came across Aubagne, France which is approximately the same size, and has a light rail system. Though it should be noted, it’s on the outskirts of Marsaille, so it’s not totally analogous. But having said that, it’s hard to imagine a satellite community here being so concerned with public transit.

And that brings up the problem that sinks many urban planning solutions imported from Europe to North America: we have cities built around the car. You probably could have a city of that size built around public transit, but it would have to be a really densely-populated place to have everyone in range of a small transit system. It would be very expensive in the suburban wonderlands that most small towns in Canada are. Trying to imagine a densely-populated small-to-midsize city is about as hard as visualizing a village with a subway.