Delhi Metro vs The World!

While working on these previous Delhi Metro posts, I began to wonder how the metro compared with other systems around the world, and found a few pretty interesting resources that I thought I should share.

It turns out that a whole lot of cities (far more than I had previously thought, for example who knew Tehran had such an extensive system!) have some sort of metro system, and there are cities with systems growing much more rapidly than Delhi's (see Beijing and Shanghai), and with much more "modern" - or at least more glitzy - infrastructure (apart from those two Chinese examples also see Madrid). Not that this necessarily reflects badly on Delhi Metro - maybe it's just that their objectives are different to those of other systems.

All these expanding systems have matched or will soon match, and in some cases will soon supersede (in length and ridership) the existing "superstars" of metro systems such as the Tokyo, New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Hong Kong, Seoul and Mexico City systems.

Apart from the pages on individual metro systems linked to above, wikipedia also has some interesting lists such as:

List of metro systems and Metro systems by annual passenger rides.

Treehugger also has some fun stuff, such as slideshows of The world's 7 greatest subways, The world's most impressive subway maps, and subway systems from around the world drawn at the same scale (including Delhi Metro!).

And I couldn't not include this great slideshow of the World's best alternative subway maps!

There are a ton of other resources available online (and offline), but these are what I came across in the past few days!