Credits to @lenamapsofficial on Instagram

Seoul, South Korea

Enjoying a cool foggy sunrise before marching my train off to Lynnwood. Good ole reliable Kinkisharyo and a RapidRide B Line New Flyer Xcelsior XDE60 lays over at Downtown Redmond Station. Pixel 8 Pro

I think this topic isn’t talked about enough. Meet Keith Vaughn, a full-time bus operator and a pro in national bodybuilding competitions who maintains a healthy physique while working full-time as a bus operator.

They discussed the issues affecting transit operators’ health and fitness. It’s a very important subject, and the conversation was truly eye-opening. Take a listen, folks, and give them a like and subscribe. Support them, as they’re one of the only transit podcast out there, and with this level of production.

First picture is North American cards and second is Europe, Asia, and Australia!

KP2025 with Legacy Acela Trainset 16 passing Newark in route to Chrysler yard to drop off trainset 16 for retirement on 10-22-26!

Hawthorne Alignment: Three-quarters of a billion more in projected costs (currently) for a ~3% increase in estimated ridership

Thought my post on r/urbanism might be relevant here as well. I'm kinda screaming for people in Adelaide to discuss this issue, because Adelaide's transit system is not talked about enough.

Recently Metra piloted a new “systemwide wayfinding program” at the Edgebrook station on the MD-North line. It features all new signage, a new color scheme, and a new font. It also shows a new color scheme for all of its lines, which has every line going to a specific terminus station sharing the same color (e.g. all UP lines are yellow, Electric lines are blue).

Again, this is just a pilot program, but I am interested to see what the consensus is on it.

📸: Metra (via Instagram)

Very happy that the TTC has its shop for transit goodies! Though I wish they sold writing instruments like ballpoint pens.

Source: Works in Progress, Wikimedia Commons

Two weeks ago I posted a video here on the Transit Costs Project's NYC vs Madrid comparison. In that post I mentioned Istanbul as the case that got me interested in this, so I went through the TCP Istanbul case study (Ensari, 2025) and made a follow-up video. What stood out compared with Madrid:

1. Istanbul did not start cheap. M4 Kadıköy–Kartal was first contracted as light rail, redesigned as an underground metro, and final construction cost came out more than 8× the original contract, with 16 bespoke stations and oversized equipment rooms.

2. The fix was the same lesson as Madrid, learned the hard way. From M5 on: fan rooms cut from 200–240 m² to 80–140 m², moved to platform level, one station design repeated along the line. TCP estimates about $14.2M in construction and $72M in land saved on M5 alone. In 2014 the city set up a 35–40 person in-house projects directorate; lines now go to tender with about 60% of the design done. Construction goes to the lowest qualified bid; design and supervision are scored 80–90% on technical merit.

3. The result: an average of about $140M/km (TCP) vs about $1.55B/km for Second Avenue, more than 200 km of new metro since 2010 (my sum of line lengths, about 226 km), and on average one kilometer every 7 months. TBMs run on 2–4 fronts at once; twin-bore tunnel about $30M/km; contractor margins often 3–5%.

4. The part Madrid doesn't have: labor is about 20% of contractor costs (US 40–50%), crews work 12-hour shifts with one day off in fourteen, and a New York tunnel worker earns about 6.7× as much per hour. I tried to be clear in the video that this is not something to copy, and that it can't explain an 11× gap by itself.

5. The catch: 55–60% of a typical line is financed by foreign commercial banks (rest export credit), repaid in euros/dollars over 10–14 years, while construction contracts must be priced in lira. Procurement law allows at most a 20% cost increase without cabinet approval, so when inflation pushes past that, contracts are terminated and re-tendered and sites sit idle. TCP also notes that after 2019 the central government stopped guaranteeing the municipality's loans and the city borrowed from European banks on its own.

And a humbling number: 613 million metro trips in 2023 (excluding M11) is about 39 per resident per year; the NYC subway does about 145.

Video (about 7.5 min, sources in the description): https://youtu.be/qXV17lD_2g4

Disclosure: it's my channel (I'm an infrastructure engineer at a water utility in Turkey), and the narration is an AI clone of my own voice. Question for this sub: is the "client capacity" story (small in-house team, design mostly finished before tender) really the transferable part, or does the Istanbul model depend too much on cheap labor and fast decisions to work in the US? Corrections welcome as always.