Earlier this month, metro operators from across Europe, Latin America, and North America came together in Montréal for the COMET 2025 Western Meeting. There were 27 attendees from 16 organisations gathered to exchange knowledge and good practices.
During the meeting, participants shared insights and explored key challenges and innovations shaping the future of urban transit, including fiscal resilience, safety and security strategies, service performance drivers, renewal projects, and the evolving impact of automation.
A highlight of the meeting was the behind-the-scenes tour of the Montréal STM network, offering a close-up look at station operations and maintenance facilities.
The TSC extends its sincere appreciation to Metro de Madrid for hosting an outstanding expert workshop last week. For three days, 21 COMET members and 3 ISBeRG members gathered to discuss conversion to metro automation, with topics ranging from platform doors to systems integration and interface management.
Metro de Madrid also arranged technical visits to their OCC, the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium and Station, and COMMIT (the Centre of Operations for Maintenance and Monitoring of Installations and Telecommunications).
The TSC is delighted to announce that Chengdu Metro and Chongqing Rail Transit, both based in China, officially joined the COMET community in March.
Chengdu Metro began operations in 2010 and has grown impressively to over 600 kilometres in just 15 years, making it the 4th largest metro in the world by total network length, following Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing. The system is known for its modern design, with clear digital signage and passenger information systems. It serves an average of 3.5 million passengers daily.
Chongqing Rail Transit operates 12 lines covering more than 550 kilometres. The network includes two high-capacity monorail lines—Lines 2 and 3—which are the longest and busiest monorail lines globally. Their system also features the world’s deepest metro station, located 116 metres underground, showcasing the city’s unique topography and engineering innovation.
We warmly welcome Chengdu and Chongqing to the group and look forward to their contributions to our global metro benchmarking and knowledge-sharing community.
Metro reliability is a crucial element of metro operations and customer service. During the core COVID-19 period, metros’ attention seemed to shift away from reliability to more pressing needs at that time, however it is clear that reliability has returned to one of metros’ top priorities as ridership returns.
The research collected the line-level data from 23 metros for 182 lines. It reviews how metros measure reliability and set reliability-related targets. It also investigates reliability performance based on both the network- and line-level data, and explores the successful initiatives that have been implemented by metros for reliability improvement.
The TSC was very honoured to participate in the successful COMET 2024 Annual Meeting hosted by Singapore SMRT last week. The event brought together approximately 85 metro leaders from 28 cities around the world. Under the theme of “Building Fundamentals and Resilience”, the event included the CEO / COO Day where metro leaders openly shared their experiences about preparing for future needs relating to service quality, financial sustainability, and staffing.
The delegates had the opportunity to visit SMRT’s Kim Chuan Depot, where SMRT showcased their cutting-edge in-house technology to ensure system safety and reliability. During the event, member metros celebrated COMET’s 30th anniversary together. The remarks from Hong Kong MTR and Buenos Aires EMOVA highlighted the collaboration, benchmarking, and knowledge exchange amongst metro peers in the past three decades.
The TSC is incredibly proud of the partnership with members from the 45 metro organisations around the world. We very much look forward to many more years of collaboration in the future.
The TSC warmly welcomes Chennai Metro who recently joined COMET to become the third Indian metro in the group after New Delhi and Bengaluru.
Chennai city houses more than one-third of India’s automobile industry and is one of the leading IT hubs in India. Chennai Metro started revenue service in 2015. Currently the system consists of two lines and 41 stations, spanning 54.1 km. The existing ridership is approximately 300,000 a day. Unlike most other Asian metros, Chennai Metro outsources most of its operations and maintenance work.
As passengers continue to return to using metro more frequently post COVID-19, many metros have experienced constraints on train and station capacity. In some cases, this increased congestion can also result in safety issues that can have catastrophic impacts on customers and the reputation of the metros themselves.
This study summarised magnitude and trends in congestion on metro systems, and further looked at the implemented technologies that allow for mitigations to be put in place. It also identified emergency response and congestion management training that is provided to regular station staff and operational staff on trains.
Concerns for congestion on trains
An overview of best practices for managing congestion in stations and on trains is discussed in the report, with a focus on smaller and shorter-term solutions that can be deployed quickly by member metros.
The TSC continues to present key findings of recent studies through webinars to reach a wider audience within the members metros. The Congestion Management Webinar was held in June, looking at best practices to handle congestion both on platforms and trains. It focuses on technology solutions, training, and deployment of staff. Members heard very informative presentations from Seoul Metro, Metro de Santiago, and Taipei TRTC on their challenges and solutions for congestion management.
The Employee Satisfaction Webinar was held in July presenting an insight into several aspects of employee satisfaction in metros, including measuring satisfaction, metro survey results, and implemented initiatives. MRT Jakarta and London Underground shared information on their latest employee satisfaction initiatives as well as the outcomes.
Example slide from Employee Satisfaction Webinar on key drivers of employee satisfaction across the group
In July, members gathered together online for the second Virtual General Meeting of the year. The TSC gave members an update on member participation, ridership recovery, and group development.
In addition, the TSC presented the Data Insight Webinar to members last week sharing the latest data findings from the KPI and daily / monthly data. The highlight of the webinar also includes the results from the 2024 Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSS). There are 30 COMET members participated in the CSS this year, with Atlanta MARTA, Washington WMATA, and Honolulu Skyline taking part for the first time.
In the last five years, more than half of COMET metros have been impacted by flooding (74%), high winds/storms (62%) and extreme heat (50%), and many have also been impacted by cold weather and snow (45%), drought (22%) and wildfire (16%). Concerningly, three quarters of metros have noticed an increase in weather events impacting metro operations in recent years. These events pose significant risks to metro infrastructure, operations and the safety of passengers and staff.
Factors Making a Metro Vulnerable to Extreme Weather
The latest COMET study on Preparing for Extreme Weather and Climate Change reviews how member metros prepare for and manage upcoming periods of extreme weather and their plans to adapt infrastructure and operations in the longer term to deal with the impacts of climate change.
COMET members and the TSC had a very fruitful meeting in June in Washington, DC. Washington WMATA successfully hosted the COMET 2024 Western Meeting, receiving attendees from 20 metros across all regions. The focussed sessions looked at hot topics for the western world, including safety and security, smooth upgrades to fleet and signalling, resilience and fiscal sustainability, and a metro roundtable on workforce development and retention.
Delegates were invited to the technical visit to the new Metro Integrated Command and Communication Centre, where WMATA showed preparations for the upcoming Fourth of July celebrations.
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