Rhine-Ruhr Railways
In this video Reece Martin (RMTransit) talks about the rail network in Germany's northwestern megaopolis along the Rhine and Ruhr rivers, which is similar in size and population to the Los Angeles region. The region is split into two comprehensive transit districts, and this video focuses on the northern one. A later video will look at the southern district.
The northern transit district, Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Ruhr, contains the cities of Dusseldorf (pop. 644K), Essen (588K), Duisburg (495K), Bochum (386K), Wuppertal (351K), and other cities. The larger ones are the size Seattle was in the 2000s and 2010s. The southern transit district, Rhein-Sieg Verkehrsgesellschaft, contains Cologne (1 million) and Bonn (336K) among others. (Population sizes source.)
There's a lot of heavy industry (especially in the northern part), some rural areas, and a very active and diverse music and sports scene. It even applied to host the 2032 Olympics. (It lost to Brisbane.) It's served by regional rail and local high- and low-floor light rail systems and trams. Several of the light rail systems use a single tunnel in city centers. Reece doesn't mention any of the many bus feeder lines and rural express buses, but he does mention other transit modes such as several hanging monorail systems (including the famous Wuppertal Schwebebahn).
While the Puget Sound region is smaller with only four major cities (Seattle, Bellevue-Redmond-Kirland, Tacoma, Everett), we have similar modes of transportation: regional rail (Sounder), light rail (Link), streetcars (Tacoma, South Lake Union, Capitol Hill) and the monorail which was supplied and built in that region, close to Cologne. The Rhine-Ruhr region decided to focus on regional rail connections between its urban centers, while we focus on light rail connections. We plan to double up our downtown tunnel, while the cities in the Rhine-Ruhr region tend to use a single tunnel or one per direction (east/west, north/south).
What other things do you see in the Rhine-Ruhr network? Or how it compares to Pugetopolis transit?
This is an open thread...