The big smoke of Shanghai got a bit bigger this past weekend, as the city’s metro system expanded once again Saturday, but this time by sufficient length for it to be able to legitimately claim the title as world’s longest metro system.
It was on 23 January that Line 15 of the Shanghai Metro began operation, officially adding 42.3 kilometres to the system’s network, to claim the title from Beijing which the nation’s capital had held for many years.
The entire system length now comes in at 743 kilometres, excluding the Maglev and the Jinshan Railway which, while linked to the system, are not technically part of the Shanghai Metro.
Saturday also marked Shanghai’s third metro line opening in as little as a month. On 26 December, Line 18 and an extension to Line 10 both commenced operations, reports Railway Gazette.
Line 15 is also notable for being driverless and the longest line in China operating GoA4 (Grade-of-Automation 4), whereby trains may operate automatically at all times, including the actions of opening/closing doors, detecting obstacles and reacting to emergencies. There are no staff on board concerned with ongoing train operations.
Other metro lines operating GoA4 can be found in Dehli (India), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Lille (France), São Paulo (Brazil) and Tokyo (Japan). Nanjing will also be joining this at-present exclusive GoA4 club with the opening of Line 7, it is hoped by the end of this year.
Looking at the bigger picture, the five longest metro systems in the world are all in China. The rest of the top 5 is rounded out by Beijing, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Shenzhen, with Nanjing coming in at number 9 in the league table of world’s longest metro systems.
However, as with many statistics of this sort, it all depends on how they are calculated. Using a different metric produces another set of results altogether.
New York retains its crown as system with the most number of stations, at 424. Shanghai, with 381 therefore still has some way to go before it can take that mantle too. The city’s Line 14 and an extension to the existing Line 18 shall both be opened later this year, which will bring Shanghai’s total number of stations close, but no cigar; 4 short of New York, at 420.
As for annual passenger flow, Shanghai again loses out, this time to Seoul. The South Korean capital saw 2.923644 billion passenger journeys in 2019, according to the city’s Seoul Metropolitan Subway Transportation Statistics.
Shanghai, which had 2.83469 passenger journeys in 2020, is therefore also set to surpass Seoul. But not when the parts of the Seoul system operated by Seoul Metro Line 9 Corporation and Seoul Light Rail Transit are factored in, they being separate from the Seoul Metro, and operating as regional links, with one line in particular being over 200 kilometres long. Passengers numbers would then be very much higher, as would the total length of the overall network, some 439.7 kilometres longer than Shanghai.
