Quote:
Originally Posted by ChargerCarl
Virtually no city has 24 hour subway service except New York.
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Copenhagen! And London.
But yeah, most European cities close their metros for 3 or 4 hrs (2.30 -5.30) for maintenance as parts of the system won't have double tracks (read: still work while a train sits offline).
London claimed that problem for years, even though it had up to sixtuplet tracks. And it's nightlife was huge for decades - during the 90's 500,000 clubbers hit the capital each night, during the 00's the Soho Triangle alone had become the world's largest nightlife district pulling in 500,000 each night and 1 million on weekends, whose streets stayed packed till 5am, while rival districts like Shoreditch, Islington and Vauxhall worked the other sides. They relied on a huge fleet of night buses after 1 am to ferry them home. Since then soaring rents has forced much of the nightlife out of the centre
It took 25 years but finally the Night Tube has been introduced last year, after tortuous talks with the country's strongest trade unions, which had always been the biggest unsaid setback - 'drivers' are paid $62,000 for daytime shifts, and refused to change hours - in the end they had to hire a whole new army of people (who don't even drive, but press the button for opening the doors), at a time when they were meant to be cutting staff as their bloated salaries were a financial black hole.
They run every 8 minutes on the weekends, serving an average 180,000 each night-dawn window. Even though demand has fallen - too little too late imo, but at last.