When you consider the worlds greatest transport networks, the vast majority of them have some type of through-running regional and suburban rail (these services have overlapping roles and often use shared infrastructure), from Paris, to London, to Tokyo, and Sydney.
But there is a surprisingly large set of cities — some with very good public transport — that actually sort of lack substantial regional rail, if they have any at all! I think looking at these cities can be a great way to learn more about suburban or regional rail’s value, and some of the drawbacks of the worlds greatest transport networks.
The network I think of first when it comes to the ratio of transit acclaim to regional rail is Singapore. The city is certainly acclaimed for its public transport, but none of it is “regional rail”, and Singapore doesn’t even really have suburbs that look like how most people imagine suburbs.
The natural other city that comes to mind on this issue is Hong Kong, which has a ton in common with Singapore. While Hong Kong is larger it also doesn’t really have suburban or regional rail in the traditional sense, I think parts of the former KCR network do feel regional or at least suburban in nature - especially given the connections to border crossings with mainland China (though this has decreased as the lines have become MTRified, with metro style trains and amenities), and the Airport Express is Express and thus also gives a feeling of high-speed, region-scaled travel.
Regional and suburban trains, or a lack thereof, is actually a bit of an issue across Mainland China as well. Some suburban services exist, but they pale in comparison to systems seen in Europe or other parts of Asia. Efforts to expand this have mainly been focused on suburban metro, and I will highlight some of the problems with this a bit later on in the article! What’s interesting here is that India, another country which has built a lot of metros as of late, has a lot of significant suburban rail networks — though the country really needs to work on reimagining them completely - because they are generally in very poor shape, and upgrading them would unlock transit potential like the world has never seen before.
Another place where regional and suburban trains are somewhat lacking is in some of the large public transport networks of Latin America, such as Mexico City and to a lesser extent Santiago. I actually proposed a new series of city center tunnels for CDMX in my video about the cities transport network, and I really do believe such a project has the potential to be a game changer.
As I said, Santiago is a bit better on this issue, and appears to actually be planning a through-running scheme for regional railways it has been slowly building (at low cost, I might add), though the project comes close to the CBD without directly connecting into it — a hard problem to solve without diverting the central part of the network.
Perhaps the city that comes to mind for me first is Vancouver, the city where I grew up and easily one of the best public transport systems in North America. Vancouver is great with SkyTrain, SeaBus, and even commuter rail (a few trips into the CBD in the morning and out in the evening) — but it has no large-scale suburban mainline passenger railway network. The reasons for this are not so complicated but can be quite informative: rail lines in Metro Vancouver do exist, but they tend to be oriented towards port freight traffic — this not only means they are generally very busy with large trains shipping containers and various resources and raw materials, but, that they are also located in low-lying areas often along waterways where industry, but little housing, typically exists. These alignments following low-lying areas were perfectly natural for cost-effective freight rail line construction, but their circuitous nature also makes them rather indirect for local passenger transport.
You might be able to make similar arguments about a lack of regional rail in a lot of other North American cities, but I would argue that this is a case of generally not having built a network, through upgrading and augmenting legacy railways — rather than that truly being completely impractical as in Vancouver.
The natural question to ask here is: “Hong Kong and Singapore already have great urban rail networks, so why do we need regional rail?”. This question is very interesting and can lead to a lot of insights that those cities might even want to consider in the long term.
The first big reason that arises is that regional rail (or suburban rail if thats your preferred term) allows faster travel across cities than metros are typically able to. Thats because of a combination of both trains capable of higher speeds and less stops which usually exist because regional trains are larger and thus stations and infrastructure is more expensive close to dense city centers You can really see the benefit of this when you take a suburban train from say London’s Stratford to Liverpool Street — this trip is much longer on the Tube’s Central line than on the various suburban services that operate, because the suburban services go really fast and don’t stop.
Having a mode of high speed transport that sits above metros is actually very useful, especially in large or even just sprawling cities. In such places, even a metro operating at fairly high average speeds can take over an hour to travel from the suburbs to the city centre, not to mention actually crossing the city as a whole.
This is a real issue for metro systems in places like China, and also other cities like Mexico City or even Singapore, where long journeys can require a lot of stops and thus are sometimes not competitive with car travel — or even just as convenient as we would like. The reality of big cities is that they have a lot of valuable resources and amenities, but they are often physically far apart, and enabling the type of economic and social activity we want to create vibrant places means better connection.
High speed regional rail tunnels like the Elizabeth line, the Paris RER, and various German S-Bahn systems also enable faster travel across a central business district — making already convenient short trips even shorter, and expanding the capacity to move people. The general consensus I see in the public transport field is that mainline rail tunneling is the preferred alternative to something like the Express trains of the New York City Subway, because you get the typically larger and faster trains of the suburban network, and access to the existing suburban railway network from new tunnels or corridors — which can often be fairly short.
Regional rail links also presents the ability to through route some mainline trains. In many city’s urban mainline rail corridors (for example the Stadtbahn in Berlin, or the Marmaray in Istanbul) provide space for some number of intercity trains, and at the very least can be used to move equipment and create diversion routes when absolutely necessary, strengthening transport network reliability and also allowing the experimentation of new travel concepts without committing to separate long-distance intercity transport infrastructure.
A new regional rail tunnel can also mean a big upgrade to a lot of routes all at once. If you look at the Munich S-Bahn for example, a number of routes heading out from the city centre were able to benefit from the new tunnel, offering better service speeds and connectivity than could previously be offered, and beyond what a metro could practically offer. That’s because upgrading outlying branches to metro standards would ultimately be impractically expensive in many cases, but also would be unlikely to deliver sufficient capacity. Existing suburban rail lines very frequently feature trains that are substantially larger than metro trains in the same city, and since trains from any individual branch among a large number of suburban branches will have limited frequency in a city centre tunnel, they need to deliver capacity through physically longer trains. This type of construction of suburban lines that may have a lot of single track and level crossings probably wouldn’t make sense when starting anew, since the incremental cost of double track and grade separation on a brand new piece of infrastructure should be rather small, but the potential capacity increase is enormous. This, I’d argue, is a big part of why networks like Singapore and Hong Kong do not have a lot of branches: The costs of a branch are often just as high as a mainline, but now you’re utilizing it far less. The dynamic of regional rail allows very high costs from large infrastructure in a city center and very low costs from simple stations in suburban areas - which may sometimes limit branch line capacity - naturally lending itself to the development of many branches.
Now, despite all of this, cities like Vancouver, Hong Kong and Singapore do not have high quality existing suburban rail networks that they could use to create a modern high capacity regional rapid transit system, so what should they do?
Vancouver presents one case: suburban metro, which we also see in Mexico City, as well as under construction in Montreal with the REM. Suburban metro has its benefits, but it will still be speed- and capacity-limited when compared to more traditional regional rail schemes. But cities like Vancouver probably aren’t going to build a ton of traditional at-grade mainline rail, so they need to be smart and strategically invest in speed-ups and capacity expansion through other schemes — like building additional metro lines with different speed and capacity characteristics. Probably the more compelling option for big cities with high public transport demand like Hong Kong and Singapore are a combination of high-speed and express metro routes.
High-speed metro is an emerging transport solution seen in cities such as Guangzhou, Seoul, and Delhi. The idea is basically a metro-like train with lots of doors and capable of 120 kph+ operating speeds that operate on a route with wide station spacings. It presents a lot of the benefits of through-running regional rail, but with suburban operations more like suburban metro, and infrastructure that is potentially more modest. Since high-speed metros are going to have wider station spacings than traditional metro, they will also possibly be less expensive per kilometre built, as stations tend to be the most expensive element of such projects.
There is also express metro, which looks like a souped up and rationalized version of the express trains in New York City. You probably don’t have to have quad-track along the whole line, but strategic passing loops and quad-track sections of line can allow for much faster trips on the longest journeys. This is actually what you see with the Hong Kong Airport Express, but in Hong Kong only Airport services get to benefit from the passing loops. Some Chinese high-speed metros are actually also offering express services in addition to their high speeds.
All in all, regional rail provides an essential transit service in all manner of excellent transit cities, and asking questions about how that same niche can be filled in cities that do not benefit from a traditional mainline railway network is critical. Not only can it help highlight some of the real issues that still exist in great transport networks, but it also presents an excellent lens for understanding the value of through running regional rail in cities that already do have high quality suburban rail service.
Vancouver's other problem is the all the railways are privately-owned by at least three different railways (CN, CP, BNSF). That's the reason TransLink claims they can't increase WCE service.
We've also torn up a lot of legacy railways (like the Arbutus corridor) that now can't be used for heavy rail services again.
The least Vancouver should do is increase service on the WCE, but IMO there should be at least two more regional/suburban rail lines (one that crosses the Burrard Inlet and one that crosses the Fraser River.
Railways in Japan make great use of several levels of express on two track, regional lines, with four tracks at stations. For example, between Kyoto and Osaka, semi-express trains make local stops at one end, to a mid-point, then express to the other.