Quick attempt to compile a list of old cities with large numbers of transit stops.

[randomness]

A couple of notes on this compilation:

• I used Wikipedia. It has its limitations, but I wanted something I could put together fast.


• Specifically, I started from Wikipedia's List of metro systems, because it has an easily sortable list.


• I chose number of stations, not system length, or ridership, or even opening date, because the particular item of interest in this map is the station names.


• To get city founding dates, I looked at the Wikipedia page "History of (city)" where there is one, the city page if not. Again, limitations. But again, fast.

Here's the list of all cities with a hundred or more metro stations, with the total number. Where there are multiple systems operating, I give the total of all systems listed under that city name in the Wikipedia list.

New York City: 456 (including the New York City Subway, Staten Island Railway, and PATH)
Seoul: 377 (all operators, but not including Incheon)
London: 315 (including DLR, which the preceding map does not include)
Paris: 303
Madrid: 300
Tokyo: 293 (including Tokyo Metro, Toei Subway, and Rinkai Line, but not Yokohama)
Shanghai: 263
Beijing: 232
Moscow: 196
Mexico City: 195
Berlin: 173
Chicago: 145
Barcelona: 141
Delhi: 137
Shenzhen: 131
Guangzhou: 130
Busan: 128
Osaka: 123
Santiago: 108
Singapore: 105
Vienna: 104
Milan: 103
Taipei: 103
Stockholm: 100

---

Of these, only eleven were in existence as a city in 1014, although not necessarily under their current names: Seoul, London, Paris, Madrid, Beijing, Barcelona, Delhi, Guangzhou, Osaka, Vienna, and Milan.

A number of fairly old cities just fail to make the cut: Oslo, founded around 1000 CE, has 97 stations. Nanjing, founded in 495 BCE, has 92 stations. It'll likely have eight more built within a couple of years. Chongqing is also eight stations shy of a hundred, and is also likely to break a hundred soon. Hamburg has 91. It was repeatedly destroyed between 810 and 993 CE (and later, for that matter), but evidence exists to support it having been around before 1014.

Founding dates for many cities are just estimates, so the cutoff is quite arbitrary. So is the cutoff of a hundred stations. Finally, just what constitutes a metro system is something endlessly debated on the list's talk page. (Seriously. The list has eighteen pages of talk archives.)

(Edited for slightly more clarity, I hope.)

Comments

[cityratbuddy.livejournal.com]

What's your criteria for an "old" city? I can't think of many major cities that aren't at least a century old.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

1000 years old.

That's based on the Medieval Tube Map I posted earlier, which refers to a date of 1086. I just went with a round 1000 years, for 1014 CE.

I can only think of one major city offhand that's a century old that also has an extensive subway system: Shenzhen. It was founded in 1979. Before that there was kind of a village there and some rice paddies, but no actual city. It's a serious boom town.

[cityratbuddy.livejournal.com]

Now I'm really confused. If 1000 years is your criteria why did you include NYC? You single out a few as being around in 1014 underneath the list. Or maybe I'm just misreading and the paragraph under the list is the true old city list.

That is a very interesting fact about Shenzhen! I can't think of any city that's grown as quickly.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

You are confused, yes, but that only means that I was unclear.

Or maybe I'm just misreading and the paragraph under the list is the true old city list.

Yeah, the list is just my first pass to go through and find all the cities with lots of subway stations. Then I winnow down the list to the true old city list, which is only 11 cities.

I'll edit to make it more clear.

[cityratbuddy.livejournal.com]

Continents: 5 for Asia, 6 for Europe. Europe wins!
Countries: China, Spain and Italy have 2 each, making it a 3 way tie.

The whole concept of "city" (vs. town or village) is a vague one. I looked at many definitions and their numbers all differed vastly in the number of inhabitants. I usually teach that usually villages have hundreds of people, towns usually have thousands, and cities usually have hundreds of thousands, though that's even debatable. You hear of people calling a place with 10,000 a city. It makes teaching the word "city" to ESL students difficult.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

The whole concept of "city" (vs. town or village) is a vague one.

That's very true, particularly in the period I'm looking at.

To be clear, I'm not trying to be very exact here. This was just an interesting idea to see what cities might benefit from the "Medieval Tube Map" treatment.

And as other people have pointed out, there's no reason one has to go that far back just because the folks who did that map did. But it is more fun to do that map with a system that has many stations. Xi'an is really old and has a subway now, but it only has two lines.

[cityratbuddy.livejournal.com]

That means the next step is finding 11 folks who might want to do an medieval version of one of these cities' stations. Not a small task! :) Thankfully I'm exempt due to not knowing much about those 11 cities. Of the 11, I only visited Barcelona. Great place! I only rode the subway 2 times.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Not a small task! :)

True! But not really the problem I was interested in, fortunately. :)

Great place!

I really liked Barcelona, too.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

What does the scatterplot of founding date vs. station count look like? That might reveal something interesting.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Good question. I think I'd actually want to go farther down the list, possibly to 50 stations or so, as this sample is quite small.

The other point, which is something cityratbuddy observes above, is that geography is very important. Individual plots by continent probably make sense.

[cos]

I was confused about why you didn't include Boston, which surely has more than 100, so I checked the link.

The List of metro systems page you linked to says 51 in the table, but that 51 has a reference which doesn't actually include the number "51" anywhere in the document. The "51" text itself is a link to the Wikipedia page for "List of MBTA subway stations", and that page says there are 145 stops. That doesn't include the Commuter Rail, which is Boston's parallel to New York's PATH. If you included 137 Commuter Rail stations the total would be 282. That number feels right in comparison to New York's 456. I'm quite puzzled about the 51 number in the Wikipedia table, and if they intended to omit Commuter Rail for Boston but include PATH for New York I'd be puzzled by that too, but it's hard to tell because I don't know where that 51 came from.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

It's under [note 74] over by "Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority". They don't count the Green Line, which is light rail.

(edited to fix stray line break)

[cos]

That is very bizarre! And they don't count the Commuter rail either, why?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

The decision process is probably somewhere in the eighteen pages of talk archives but I took one look at it and decided that for my purposes I was just going to take the list as given.