Global Underground: How Metro Systems Became the 21st Century’s Most Expensive Waiting Room

The Underground Empire: How Metro Systems Became the World’s Most Expensive Tombstones
By our correspondent who has spent too many hours staring at tunnel walls

They say you can tell everything about a civilization by where it chooses to bury its dead. These days we skip the cemetery and go straight to the metro: climate-controlled, Wi-Fi-enabled, and only occasionally on fire. From Lagos to Lima, the planet is busy knitting together a subterranean nervous system—an international federation of fluorescent tubes where humanity pays to stand nose-to-armpit while pretending the person coughing behind them definitely doesn’t have tuberculosis.

The numbers are almost adorable. Roughly 200 cities now operate some form of metro, moving an estimated 170 million people a day—roughly the population of Bangladesh, give or take a rush-hour stampede. London’s Tube, the geriatric patriarch, still uses stretches of Victorian brick that predate the discovery of penicillin; Shanghai’s system, meanwhile, sprouted 800 kilometers of track in two decades, a pace that suggests city planners mainline espresso and never sleep. If you stitched every metro line together you’d have about 15,000 kilometers of electrified irony: the same species that can’t agree on carbon budgets can, miraculously, coordinate platform screen doors.

Why the sudden global obsession with going underground? Partly it’s civic vanity—nothing says “We’ve arrived” like a $10 billion hole in the ground except, perhaps, a $10 billion hole with minimalist signage in Helvetica. Partly it’s traffic Armageddon: Jakarta didn’t build an MRT because officials love spelunking; they built one because the alternative was watching the city achieve spontaneous fossilization. But mostly it’s real-estate alchemy: announce a metro stop and watch nearby farmland transmute into glassy condos where a broom closet costs more than the average civil servant’s lifetime wages. The train arrives, the poor relocate, and voilà—geographic inequality now departs every three minutes.

Of course, every metro is a local psychodrama dressed up as infrastructure. In Tokyo, white-gloved “pushers” cram commuters into carriages with the tenderness of a sushi chef, while Parisians use theirs as a mobile existential café—Gauloise smoke replaced by mango-scented vape clouds. New York’s subway doubles as a mobile museum of American decay: delay announcements delivered in the same monotone whether the culprit is “signal problems” or “passenger under train,” a civic shrug that says “Welcome to capitalism, mind the gap.” Meanwhile Moscow’s stations resemble czarist jewelry boxes, proof that if you’re going to herd citizens like studded sardines you might as well provide chandeliers for the viewing.

Spend enough time down there and you notice the universal lie: signage promises “If you see something, say something,” but everyone’s headphones are noise-canceling the apocalypse. A forgotten backpack can clear a platform in Berlin within minutes; in Lagos the same backpack gets adopted by a family of street vendors who use it as a pop-up kiosk. Security theater varies accordingly—London has cameras that can read the date on a coin; Caracas simply hopes the power stays on. Yet despite the divergent budgets, the experience converges: we descend, surrender daylight, and place our lives in the hands of an anonymous driver who may or may not be having an existential crisis.

The pandemic briefly threatened this shared delusion. Suddenly breathing on strangers was frowned upon, and ridership plummeted faster than a crypto scam. Urbanists predicted the “end of metro,” replaced by leafy bike lanes and remote work in pajamas. Instead, cities emerged hungrier for tunnels: Bangkok extended lines, Cairo finally opened its third phase, and Sydney dug a second harbor crossing—because if you’re going to sink into debt, you might as well be literally underground when it happens. The metro, like cockroaches and LinkedIn invitations, survives everything.

Environmentalists argue each new line is a climate lifeline, coaxing commuters out of tailpipe nostalgia. Critics counter that the embodied carbon in all that concrete could moonlight as a minor volcano. Both miss the darker point: metros are the world’s most expensive confession booths. We descend to escape the mess we made upstairs—gridlock, smog, rent—and briefly tolerate equality enforced by proximity. For five stops the investment banker and the street sweeper share the same pole, inhaling the same fungal breeze, united in the hope that the lights don’t flicker.

Will we still be digging a century from now? Probably. Sea-level metros are already under consideration in Amsterdam and Miami—Venice on rails, complete with gondolians tapping Oyster cards. Elon Musk’s Boring Company promises tunnels for Teslas, because the one thing missing from public transit is the chance to get stuck in a traffic jam… underground. And if climate tips the way scientists whisper, future archaeologists will find our fossilized platforms perfectly preserved: bones clinging to paper coffee cups, headphones fused into ear canals, a species that solved the problem of going nowhere… faster.

Until then, the escalators keep moving, a conveyor belt of polite denial. We tap our cards, descend into the humming dark, and agree—without a word—to pretend this is all perfectly normal. The metro is not just a ride; it’s the world’s longest group therapy session, hourly fare payable in existential dread. Next time the doors slide open, remember: you’re not late for work, you’re early for the apocalypse. Mind the gap.