Canada is a weird country. Most big cities have rail systems, but every single one, almost, is very different from one another. Vancouver has small automated subway trains with linear motor tech. Calgaryen Edmonton have high floor trams in a suburban dedicated railway right of way. Montreal has a rubber-tired French style metro, Toronto has an American style subway, and Ottawa has trams in a subway. Every city did something different, with wildly different specifications, from the design of the trains to the designs of the lines themselves. And this isn't all that uncommon. From the UK to the US, different cities have built different rapid transit systems, with different designs and specifications. But in China, the approach to what transit do we build is very, very different. And it's why China has built more metro in the last 20 years than the rest of the world combined. So let's look at how they did it. Welcome to RM Transit, a channel where we talk about subways in China and standardization. In the last few years, while North American cities have been arguing about the benefits of streetcars versus subways, Chinese cities have been building. In the last 20 years, China has built over 6000 kilometers of new subway lines. To put that into perspective, that's the equivalent of building the quite large Berlin U-Bahn system nearly 40 times over, or the New York subway over four times. They're now more than 25 cities in China with subway systems, ranging from big to small for China. And getting that much built quickly, as well as on a fairly tight budget, has meant doing some things differently from the rest of the world. This is what the metro in Chengdu looked like in 2013, and this is what it looks like today 10 years later. And so, instead of doing what the Canada's of the world do, China decided that in the entire country, there shall be five different types of train. And in order to do this, the transportation industry in China, from universities to rolling stock, train makers, to metro systems themselves, all came together to develop standards for every rapid transit system in the country, from using standard gauge on all lines to standardizing the grades and top speeds of different systems, as well as standardizing the electrical voltages, third rail or overhead line, as well as standardizing things like environmental impacts, what the limits for sound generated by trains would be from different distances at different speeds. This successfully led to a nationwide standardization of subway trains, as well as infrastructure, largely derived from the excellent Hong Kong MTR system. There is literally a published manual with standards for the entire nation. If you go to Wikipedia and start looking at different Chinese subway lines, you'll notice something. The rolling stock subway trains are virtually always denoted the same way. They're probably made by CRRC, the National Rolling Stock Builder in China, but then they're usually referred to as either type A or type B or some other type, as well as a number of cars. For example, Chengdu Line 7, Chengdu's Loop Line has six car type A trains. In Guangzhou Line 11, which is also a loop, uses eight car type A trains. Both use exactly the same scheme for electrification, overhead line 1500 volts DC. Even in Toronto, the street cars and the LRT routes which use very similar vehicles don't use the same electrical voltages. And that means different electrical equipment needed attraction power substations and on the vehicles. Now, the meaning of type A in China is actually pretty simple. It means a subway car, an individual one, is 22 meters long roughly by 3 meters wide, roughly, with five doors per side. As you can see, this is very much the standard that you would see in Hong Kong, where virtually every service uses the same type of train design with five doors per side per car, which is really unusual outside of Hong Kong and the rest of China. So in this case, Chengdu's Line 7 puts together six of these cars, whereas Guangzhou's Line 11 puts together eight. And there doesn't need to be bickering about what capacity is right when planning the line. These standards actually say how much capacity each different train type delivers. If you need between 45,000 and 70,000 people per direction per hour to be moved by your subway system, you go across the column to the capacity level and you see type A. And then you choose within that range depending on the number of cars in your train. It makes everything much simpler than in the rest of the world, where these kinds of decisions can literally take months if not years. And a faster project is also a less expensive one. Of course, type A is at the top of the capacity spectrum, and there are a number of other types with different capacity ranges and features. There are two other types, known as B and C, which denote different capacities of subway trains. Type B is derived from Beijing subway, which historically was designed with lower capacity trains than, say, Hong Kong or Shanghai. There is also the Type D, which is designed for the kind of modern suburban lines that we're seeing pop up in China, as well as higher speed metro services, as well as Type L, which refers to linear induction motor trains, surprising that they gave them their own entire category. But these are trains similar to the Toei Awaido Line in Tokyo, or the Vancouver Sky Train. Now, to be fair, these standards aren't quite so simple. There are variants of each standard as needed. So for example, Shen Du Line 18, one of those aforementioned express metro lines, actually uses a high speed variant of the Type A car. And Hili Chongqing uses a variant of the Type A car that's better at climbing steep grades. There are, of course, various lines that don't fit the standard, like, say, the Trans-Lor lines that exist in a few places. But for the most part, new lines built in China fit the standards that are nationally decided. And that simplifies the entire manufacturing, logistics, planning, engineering, and design process for new rapid transit. To be perfectly fair, other countries have certainly made attempts at standardization nationwide, from the US to Germany, and many more, but no country has achieved it at the same level as China. Now, when we talk about reducing the cost of big infrastructure projects, a big element of that is to keep building. If you keep building your engineers and planners gain expertise with each project and get better and better, and can deliver projects for lower and lower cost. But it can be really hard to keep building, even in a single, large city. The beauty of China's system is that since lines are nationally engineered and planned, these same engineers can constantly be gaining more and more expertise. In China, a set of rolling stock engineers who just did a project in Hanzhou can then go to Qingdao and build a very similar project with similar specifications. The same dude who made cab drawings for Guangzhou one week might be doing them for Shanghai, the next. And once your technologies and planning methods are super standardized, you can start rolling out new technologies incredibly fast. Cities like Vancouver might have got automated trains first, but no one is building as many of them now as China. A good example of this is that the Singapore MRT or Sydney Metro feel rather novel still as high capacity automated metros. But what I bet you didn't realize is that Shanghai alone has a whole handful of different automated high capacity metro lines. Line 18 anyone? The standardization of train design and door spacing is also why Chinese systems basically always have screen doors. It's the exact same design process from one station to the next. It's actually more of an oddity to see a Chinese metro station without screen doors than with. And when the capacity, frequency, and size of trains or standardized as well as the screen door design, well the entire station can basically be standardized. Since a lot of the variability from one underground box to the next is just how many escalators, elevators, and stairwells you need to build dependent on capacity, which you can determine using the national standard. Bigger trains mean more platform screen doors, more stairs, more escalators. It's comparatively simple. And this is a big part of why China can build a high capacity metro line for similar prices to other countries building tram lines. It also means that subway stations that are sometimes as much as a thousand kilometers apart look basically indistinguishable. It's kind of part of why I haven't made a ton of transit explained videos on China. It's not because the systems aren't good, they're just all quite similar. Though I will do more transit explained videos on China, so if you're interested in that, go down below, subscribe, and hit the bell icon so you don't miss any future videos. Standardization also means that the size and weight of trains are standardized, and so precast concrete segments used for overhead guideways, but also for tunnels can be standardized and manufactured at scale, a scale even larger than seen on projects in other countries. The individual segments can even be basically the same from one city to the next because the gradients and curves are also going to be standardized. All together, this means a different model of thinking about transit. One that through focusing a lot on vehicles and developing a standard means that planners no longer really need to think about the vehicles very much. It's a simple process deciding between one train and another, and once planners have done that, they can focus on more important things like the places that people actually are, rather than the tunnels they're passing through. Transit becomes a lot simpler. It's about moving people, a means to an end, a black box even, and that's something that we could all learn a lot from. Thanks for watching.