 Every December a lot of things happen. I make a bunch of videos, Santa gives children around the world lots of gifts, and China opens a whack of new metro lines. That's cool, but have you ever wondered why China decides to open so many new metro lines every December? Few countries are building as many metro lines as China. We're literally hundreds of kilometers of new track, tunnel, and elevated guideway are opened every single year. And with building lines comes opening lines. And wow, China opens a lot of new lines every single year. And this is even as the Oprah style metro distribution strategy of you get a metro, you get a metro, you get a metro, you get a metro, you get a metro, and you get a metro starts to wind down. And for some reason every December without fail, the transit media of the world as well as social media in general gets inundated with pictures of new CRRC manufactured trains operating on beautiful gleaming new concrete structures around China's many massive cities. Many of which you probably have never even heard of. This year alone, Taijou, Bo Shan, Beijing, Nanjing, Hefei, Wuhan, Yiwu, Xi'an, and Xindao have all got new metro lines. Actually scratch that these are just the cities that got new metro lines in December. In fact, in the past few months, Shenzhen has actually opened over 100 kilometers of new metro. And by the way, if you like metro systems and hearing about cities building lots of metros, you should subscribe to the channel and hit the bell icon down below so you don't miss any future videos. We're going to be covering more cities than ever before in 2023, so I think it will be a good year. Now to be fair, in the last two years, a lot of the numbers for amount of metro being opened in China have been juiced a bit by the fact that China has really gotten bitten by the high-speed regional metro bug. Sort of like BART, but if BART had been expanded to every major city in the United States. China has taken this concept, expanded upon it, and mass produced it for tons of different cities. And the nice thing about these lines is they add a lot of kilometers of track without you needing to build too many of the costly stations that are most of the budget for a transit project anyways. I've talked about lines like this in the past from Chengdu Line 18 to Guangzhou Line 18 and Line 22, but even small cities like Taizhou, well as small as a city with 6 million people can be, are now getting express regional metro systems. They even have passing tracks at some locations to enable a mix of express and super express trains. And of course these lines also use overhead power, have nice modern trains with beautiful digital wavefinding that makes me just excited, and platform screen doors and a lot of them are semi if not fully automatic. How is all of this possible? Well, China builds metros for the prices that North America builds tramways, and as I've mentioned in previous videos, Chinese metro systems are highly standardized. There are really 5 main models of train that are used in varying configurations across the whole country. Ultimately, there are a lot of big economies of scale going on in China and virtuous cycles for that matter. And best of all, the Chinese metro systems don't get stuck in traffic, which is something that China, despite building all of these metros, still has a lot of. But while all of this is great, it doesn't answer our ultimate question, which is why do all of these new lines get opened every December? Fortunately, our de facto RM Transit East Asia correspondent, JR Urbain Network, can follow him on Twitter over here, actually has an answer for us, and it's pretty simple. Procrastination. Basically, opening any line at the beginning of the year in China is pretty difficult. Because of the Chinese New Year celebrations that happen in either January or February, the whole country kind of shuts down, with people traveling around to go see family and the like. And at the same time, every new line has a built-in testing regime that requires several months of intensive tests. So if you want to open a metro line in China, the earliest you could really probably do it is around May. At the same time, to hit the opened in 2022 mark or whatever, that local governments want to hit so that they can show their political masters that they are indeed building out their metro systems, they really do only need to open in the last few weeks of the year. And so many projects simply do. You can kind of imagine how this would create a self-reinforcing cycle where December is metro opening month. And at the same time, if projects that aren't completely essential for capacity do get done a bit earlier, well, that's some extra time for testing or potentially phasing construction work to be a little longer so that you have to pay less money. In transit, as and in life, there are many complicated questions. But sometimes the answers are just really simple. Thanks for watching.