 When we talk about great transit systems, we often are talking about bigger cities, from Barcelona to New York to Tokyo. But as I've said before, I think it's important to consider what smaller cities should be aiming for, because like it or not, I don't think Salt Lake City or Edmonton is ever going to be the size of Tokyo. But that doesn't mean they can't provide high-quality zero-emissions public transit to their residents. At the same time, on the other side, I think it's interesting to consider what the future is for many of our smaller public transit systems. It's pretty clear that for a large city like Toronto or New York, the goal is to just have a web of subway and regional rail lines that go everywhere. But what about a smaller city that maybe just has a couple light rail lines right now, as well as Houston? Because yeah, Houston's weird. And actually, believe it or not, but the Spanish city of Valencia offers a lot of interesting insights about what a small lure city can do with its public transit network. So let's talk about its strange, but also very comprehensive metro, the very creatively named Metro Valencia. So Valencia has a very interesting network. It's what I might refer to as a spaghetti bowl of light rail, and it's perhaps unexpectedly quite good, despite feeling a little all over the place at some times. As with any good transit system, the network follows the shape of the city, which in particular sprawls out along the coast of the Mediterranean. Valencia doesn't exactly have a fully light rail metro network, but rather a hybrid of tram slash light metro slash suburban rail. Oh transit terminology. But in many ways, metro feels like the best catch-all term for it. Now, this is not an explainer video per se, but I am going to try to give you a lay of the land around Valencia and its metro. So let's do that. Despite me thinking that letters would be a nice thing to introduce into the Metro Valencia wayfinding system, because I always think they work quite well when you have a sort of bifurcated rapid transit network with two main styles of service, today the system consists entirely of numbered lines from 1 up to 10. Lines 4, 6, 8 and 10 have modern low floor trams, mostly operating on the sort of tram style alignments you would expect. And within the dense urban center of Valencia itself, except for line 10, the western extent of which is tunneled, despite it otherwise being a pretty typical low floor tram line. On the other hand, the 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9 lines have these adorable little two and a half meter wide light metro trains that look kind of like the high floor light rail that you see in cities like Edmonton, St. Louis and LA, at least if you squint. And since some of these cities are also adding low floor tram lines to their networks, I think having some familiarity with Valencia's metro network could be really helpful. Even if like about half of the metros out there today, it doesn't really match the metro definition. Before Metro Valencia existed, Valencia was served by a number of one meter narrow gauge suburban rail lines to the north and south of the city, operating with 1500 volt DC overhead power lines. These services originally ran into surface terminals at the north and south of the city center. Now, like in an RER or S-bond style system, tunnels eventually replaced those terminals, though these tunnels didn't immediately connect, meaning that through running was not an initial feature of the system. That said, the initial tunnel still did provide a lot of benefit, bringing lines closer to the city center and freeing up space from the surface terminals. Eventually though, in the 1980s, the tunnels were joined up, and in the mid 1990s, the original network sort of ceased to exist as it was originally conceived. That said, the fact that the Metro Valencia network at one point existed kind of disconnected from itself as a north and south section is something that's pretty unique for a rapid transit system. And kind of reminds me of Istanbul, which I talked about in a recent video. A generally fun urbanist tangent I do have to go on is that Valencia turned its river into a city center park. Essentially, because the river traveling through central Valencia flooded so badly and so frequently, in the mid 20th century, it was rerouted south of the city. The old river valley through the center of the city was then turned into a park that cuts across the city center, which provides a ton of controlled water features, other attractions, and bridges passing over it since this was originally a river valley. There are also two metro stations under it, which is kind of interesting. I should also mention the crazy city of the arts complex, which was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and is completely otherworldly. Now of course, over time, more metro lines were built across the city center, including an east-west line across the core of the city, which connected to the original north-south tunnel line, and enabled even more through running along with other service patterns, including a pattern where trains go from the southern leg of the north-south tunnel to the eastern leg of the east-west tunnel. In the 1990s, modern trams were added as well, with the first modern tram system in Spain, and this is despite the fact that the whole network is still known again as Metro. These tram lines connect with the high-floor lines to provide additional service in the urban core. Now I should mention that the trams are also narrow, specifically meter gauge. Despite this though, they don't actually interline with the high-floor metro lines. Now Valencia isn't giant, but its rail network is really comprehensive at over 160 kilometers long. What's even more unique though is where that length comes from. Most notably, the integration of those original suburban rail lines into the metro means that the metro network extends 25 kilometers to the northwest of the city center and almost 50 to the south, with some low-frequency services at the farthest extent of the network that feel more like a low-end regional rail service than metro. In many ways though, that kind of feels to me like a micro-sized version of Tokyo with through running of regional rail lines into city center subway tunnels. And of course, while from one perspective, metro services that operate hourly sound horrible. On the other hand, suburban rail services that operate once an hour and go all the way into the city center by utilizing subway tunnels that exist actually sounds pretty good. Everything is about how you frame it. I should also mention that the extreme extents of the suburban rail network are very different from other parts of the system. Most notably, they include a lot of single track, go through completely rural areas, and also have a decent number of level crossings. But all of this means that a number of small towns near Valencia get rail service that directly connects them into the city center. On top of all of this, the city has very much, for better or for worse, adopted the Zurich model of service naming. Despite there being ten routes on paper, in reality there's more like four or five lines with a heavy dose of interlining and branching. Now I'm of really mixed opinions about this. On one hand, numbering train services is a really easy way to differentiate between different services, especially in the case where you might have one service that ends earlier along the same line as another service. But at the same time, it is also super confusing because in most cities, New York City not being included in that, a different number means a different line with different physical infrastructure. At the same time, the massive amount of interlining through the city center can make the Metro map quite hard to follow. Confusing connector blobs all over the place, a section of tram lines floor in six that operates as a one-directional single track loop, and the fact that different services aren't really differentiated on the map, so your suburban rail service looks like your downtown Metro service looks like your downtown tram service. That's not to make any mention of the fact that one section of line, which might have a train every hour, can look the exact same as a section of line that has a train every two minutes. Of course though, it is a bit of a challenge to wave find for a network like this, because the city center tunnels and advanced singling in the core of Valencia mean that it's natural to try to run as much service through them as possible. And as you would expect, that network is still growing. If you're wondering why line 10 would be a tram line that is half tunneled and half on the surface but yet has a single service because well, no city would ever do that, you're actually on to something. And Valencia plans on augmenting the initial service of line 10 with new lines 11 and 12 that would travel on different routes on the surface but would show the capacity and speed of the city center tunnel. At the same time though, this feels like a very weird case where the city center tunnel is a stub end tunnel rather than through running to the other side of Valencia. Unsurprisingly, the city also has a heavier and higher capacity main line Circonia service, which serves the greater urban area and suburban areas on top of the Metro. And this system isn't actually tiny, it has five different lines and it even has a city center suburban rail tunnel that isn't really in the city center but sort of off to the east. And what that allows is trains from the north to still access the main rail terminal in Valencia, which is approached from the south. The city also unsurprisingly has connections to the excellent Spanish high speed rail network. Now I personally find the amount of rapid transit in Valencia super impressive as with a lot of Spanish cities and maybe that's not so surprising because Valencia is not really a small city. It has over two million residents in the urban area and is the third largest in Spain. And of course that's in part because like other cities in Spain the network uses small trains, improvements to existing rail networks and simple stations to keep construction costs low and build more transit. Something that North American cities should obviously pay attention to. I also think North American cities could learn a lot from using tunnels strategically to allow trains from the suburbs but also from outlying towns to travel right into the city center. Well Edmonton, LA and St. Louis all have or are building city center light rail tunnels they could all use them much better by extending those suburban light rail services into outlying towns but also by providing additional service within the tunnel to create a metro style service within it. They could also probably afford to build more light rail tunnels. I think these cities should all have multiple and that would allow not only for more capacity for longer distance lines but for more of those metro style services in the dense urban course while also minimizing the number of times people have to transfer in these often very large urban areas. Instead of investing in traditional North American diesel commuter rail they could also take a page from Valencia by instead building extensions of their light rail networks to outlying towns utilizing a lot of single track but also electrification and the nice trains that the light rail networks offer. Trams could also be used to provide more circumferential service including in the dense city centers to help densify them while also providing more local form of higher order transit. Suffice to say like many cities Valencia's rail network has a ton of unique features and we should do our best to learn from it. Thanks for watching.