Lisbon: The public transit design utopia

Lisbon is a public transit aficionado’s dream. Whether it is the unique Elevador de Santa Justa or the city’s iconic yellow trams, picturesquely winding their way up the steep narrow streets. In this City Snapshot, Dr Chris Hale heads west and argues that Lisbon’s metro should be what puts this ancient city at the forefront of public transit design.

All cities like to claim to be unique, but there is nowhere else on the planet like Lisbon. Once the seat of a mighty empire, Lisbon retains a sense of grandeur in particular locations and precincts. But the city has clearly mellowed over the past couple of centuries. And is these days more a collection of quirky neighbourhoods.

Lisbon offers a much better sense of personal intimacy than other former empire seats such as Berlin, Paris, London, or even Brussels – all of which feature a threshold number of inhuman vistas and over-scale architectural moments. You can try hard to enjoy Berlin, but you’ll definitely enjoy yourself in Lisbon – whatever your starting mood, and without trying.

With a great many steep hills, as well as extensive water frontages, in Lisbon you’re only ever a couple of hundred metres away from a magnificent vista. And once you’ve reached a particular corner of the city, the effort of getting there lends itself to lingering around that place for deeper exploration.

Lisbon’s small trams blur the lines between real public transport and a toy train set. Probably with the carrying capacity of the latter, and a similar sense of fun.

But Lisbon’s more important contribution to world transport concepts comes from its relatively new metro system. It was inaugurated in 1959, initially as a Y-shaped network but has progressively grown since to encompass 56 stations on 4 separate lines to date.

The latest extension is currently under construction, to close the loop of the Green Line between Rato and Cais do Sodré, with two new stations: Estrela and Santos.

This expansion will also link to other public transport modes, namely Comboios de Portugal’s Lisboa-Cascais line on the national railway network and river ports linking Lisbo, to its south shore neighbouring suburbs across the Tagus River.

While there have been slow efforts in some international metro and rail systems to brighten up stations and give them more character, Lisbon has definitely set the benchmark.

While I’ve been lucky to travel and experience a great many rail systems in world cities – Lisbon’s metro is the most fun, and the least sterile. And in this regard, Lisbon should be the world’s main provenance of rail and metro design cues over the coming decade.

Dr Chris Hale is the founder and CEO of Hale Infra Strategy, which does infrastructure planning for East Coast Australian cities. This is one of a series of his City Snapshots of public transport networks on LR, slightly updated from his posts on LinkedIn.