Moscow’s situation is funny in part because a number of diagonal slashes is closer to what the city needs (the central parts are probably an order of magnitude over design capacity during rush hour and essentially never under it), but the plan for those got turned into a ring because apparently the infrastructure to turn trains around at the ends was too difficult to build.
The other new ring is a fairly old preexisting train line that used to be cargo-only; it had the potential to be great, but unfortunately the ridiculously long connection times have made the real thing somewhat niche—if both your origin and your destination aren’t on it, the ten to fifteen minutes’ walk will likely make the result worse than just going through the center. And two connections are just never worth it.
(There’s a whole story behind how building stupid useless connections came to be viewed as a virtue in Moscow transport planning—look up “Vykhino effect”. Doesn’t make the result any less shit, though.)
Aren't the diagonals also being built? Primarily, if I recall correctly, by reusing existing passenger rails corridors and connecting their services instead of terminating them at the main stations.
Fair point, though those are not the ones that people were talking about since the 90s—but then nobody could imagine you could wrangle the railway (a national service with a peculiar culture) into cooperating with the metro (a municipal one), that’s unironically an achievement of the current city administration.
That these are being “built” is once again a bit too strong a statement—the rail lines were already there and in use for cargo and the occasional suburban train. (The veeery slooow speeds at which the latter went between the big stations had relegated them to the sole use of urban arcanists and the occasional exhausted hiker disembarking from his long-distance train.) There’s some renewal of the aging rails, to be fair, and the stations are new.
Two problems with these:
First, the stations are too few and once again too far away from anything else. (Nobody’s fault—the rails are sometimes a century older than the metro and the outward creep of the city limits.)
Second, unlike on the ring, the trains on the chordal lines (I refuse to call them “diameters”) are operated according to the railway rules, meaning there are too few of them to be able to disregard the schedule, the schedule itself is at best a suggestion (and woe is you if you don’t keep track of train cancellations), and the stupid multi-hour midday “maintenance breaks” are still in place.
I’ve used these lines for weekly commutes, and if they fit your problem well, they can be very useful. But overall I’d say they are even more situational than the ring, and it’s frustrating compared to my utopian headcanon of how well they could work. Or hell, to the RER lines in Paris, even if those connections are no joke either—nevermind the Barcelona Rodalies, which are (or were, two decades ago) the platonic ideal of suburban/urban rail transport interconnection.
That's very interesting. I currently live in Barcelona, and most people would be very surprised to see Rodalies held up as any sort of platonic ideal of anything. Though it is true that it could be a great transit network, given the necessary investment in its maintenance and improvement. Perhaps in two or three more decades.
I think you are too harsh on the Russian railway - it did carry a lot of people on their daily commute from their satellite towns to Moscow. The schedule is also quite reliable. It wasn't used much for intra-Moscow travel due to the issues mentioned, that is correct.
I was too young to remember clearly at the time, but I think I experienced the Vykhino railway-metro connection a few times in the early 2000s. I don’t seem to remember the original connection that’s said to have given the name to the “Vykhino effect” (wherein the suburban rail arrived at and the metro departed from the opposite sides of the platform, and you could cross it unimpeded, leading to the metro trains being completely full straight from the first stop—the “effect”) was still in operation then. I think the fence was already there on the platform and you had to use the disgusting, stinky, cramped tunnel? (That before the railway started fencing away everything in the name of better ticket controls.)
Yes, the Metro trains were chock full (think Tokyo), and you could only board a train if it skipped Vykhino if you needed to do so on some later station.
I don't think it is possible to be physically unable to enter the train in 2023 (unless football fans return from thei match). In 2003 it was expected.
Speaking about rings, Moscow metro now has three of these.