Community of Metros News: COMET 2024 Annual Meeting in Singapore, 21-24 October

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.

Community of Metros News: COMET 2023 Annual Meeting in Dubai, 12-16 November

The Transport Strategy Centre (TSC) together with Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) of Dubai welcomed over 70 attendees from 28 member metros during the COMET 2023 Annual Meeting in Dubai. This was the first major opportunity for all COMET members to come together in person since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The meeting started with an executive day based on the themes of financial, operational, and environmental sustainability. Metro executives discussed shared challenges in the new post-COVID period, and heard wide-ranging discussions on the potential future opportunities from other metros.

The remainder of the meeting consisted of breakout sessions on the topics of technology and innovation, KPI presentations across several success dimensions, and structured discussions on the topics of staffing and reliability. Members also heard the latest update on Transport for London’s Elizabeth Line 18 months after its opening, and from new member Bangalore BMRC on their challenges and lesson learnt from its rapid network expansions.

During technical visits, delegates visited the multi-agency Enterprise Command and Control Centre, Expo Station, and RTA’s Operational Control Centre where members had discussions with Dubai metro operator, Keolis-MHI, and learnt the details about the operations and maintenance contract. Thank you to RTA for its generous hosting of a very interesting and successful COMET Annual Meeting.