I visited Helsinki straight from Copenhagen with its wide selection of metro lines. I was admittedly surprised when I saw the Helsinki transit map showing only 1 metro line - but when you overlay the tram routes on top, then add the busses, all of which are are able to be accessed via a single ticket, it all makes sense.
It's basically the same with Toronto. People give the subway network so much shit for being lacking, but if you overlay even just the bus network (since the tram more or less just serves downtown area) you see that the overall network is actually pretty good for the scale it is trying to work in. Of course, that arrangement is starting to reach it's capacity so more backbone is needed to support the growing population size. Which is why they're doing subway extensions, high frequency tram on dedicated tracks, and so on. Buses, afterall, are still traffic. And we all know you can't fix road traffic by adding more traffic (ie more buses)... You can only delay it enough. Better and higher capacity modes needs to come into play. Likewise, in an attempt to reduce traffic they're also building more and better bike routes. Which may hopefully convert some people into biking.
My engineer friend claims that Helsinki metro cannot have crossing lines because the trains are too heavy. Crossing lines would need to be dug too deep to be economically viable, and would not make a convenient change from one line to another. Might be one reason why local trains and certain buses and trams have to serve as trunk lines too.
@@VHemmila While that might be true, I think the bigger reason for Helsinki not having more lines is just the fact that there is not really any place with high enough density to build it. Pretty much the only viable place line you could build would be Kamppi-Pasila, but as the trip is already very well served by trains and buses, it wouldn't make any sense
Yup, the commuter rail takes the role of the Metro on lines towards Vantaa, as well as parts of Espoo, and creates a trunk network with the metro, the trunk busses and the light rail.
The Metro operates east-west, and trains north-south, conversing in the city centre. The new high speed tram also operates between metro and train stations from Itäkeskus to Keilaniemi.
A good mention is also that there's a reason for the two colours of buses, orange buses stop less frequently and thus do longer connections faster and always connect to a major transit hub plus you don't need to show your ticket to the driver so enter through whichever door you want, while the blue buses work in a more typical way with frequent stops and front entry only.
@@krissp8712 yes. They have much longer distances between stops and mostly stop at places where you can change to another bus or transit type. They work like metro lines pretty much. Edit: I mean top comment already explained this lol
As a person from northern helsinki i think you missed a massive part of the capital areas public transport, the train. Trains in helsinki are the primary transport for moving people on the north-south axis from and to the city centre, much like the metro does on the east-west axis. The larger capital area is populated in such a way that the population density spreads like a semi-circle, not only east and west (which in my opinion is the impression that the video could leave on unknowing viewers). The two train lines (one going north-west and the other north-east), along with the metro lines, lay the foundations of the transportation web with both taking equal responsibility and with the bus routes filling out the details left in-between. Amazing video tho and this channel was a wonderful find, the algorithm brought a blessed gift, all hail the algorithm.
@baaaabaa2617 yeah I was about to comment something similar. This is a great video and explains very well how the metro works, but Helsinki transport is so much more. The trains, the high frequency BRT-style bus lines (runkolinjat), the new light rail line and the future expansion of the system (Vantaan ratikka, Vihdintien ratikka etc.), the trams, the wonderful city bike system. The list goes on. There is so much interesting stuff happening in Helsinki transit right now, and it's a joy to use the transit system every day. I remember that one day coming from work in northern Helsinki, and having to pass by Verkkokauppa in Jätkäsaari before going to Hakaniemi, I got to use every possible mode of transport besides the ferry in a timespan of little more than an hour. The bus, the train, the tram, the city bikes and the metro. All connecting with each other very conveniently and with minimal wait time.
I was an exchange student at the Uni of Helsinki for a semester and lived in Pasila a five-minute walk from the station. I loved the easy access it gave both to getting to the city center and then for exploring all the stops north as well. I'm very envious of Helsinki's design and miss it quite a bit.
@@urbanmobilityexplained I'm here for more Helsinki videos! I spent (only) about a week there, last year, but would love to go back and explore more, because it felt like a particularly easy place to get around in. I was warned that Finns aren't particularly a warm people, but I noticed that the ease of public transit was, in a way, an incredibly welcoming (and warm) thing, because it helped me help myself, which felt very much in line with Finnish sensibilities.
I learned this hard way in cities skylines because it really punishes for bad design in the game by creating traffic jams; half the game is fighting traffic jams so I kinda know what I talk about, spent several hundreds of hours in the game so I call myslf a self taught traffic designer :D Effects of good design are visible irl here in Helsinki, I arrived at the airport, went to a small kiosk for a snack, paid it at self service checkout, proceeded to train station and waited 10 mins, travelled to the city centre and went for a lunch, then went to a metro+tram connection to home. The trip from airport to home was 6€. Not overcrowded, not trashed, not late, just properly working transit with good coverage and reliability. Only issues I had was when the trams stopped working due to snow, but that will be my first winter at helsinki mistake and lessons will be learned :D It was like there was a public transit pipeline that I stepped in abroad that took me home, and it was damn efficient.
When the metro line opened to Espoo, some connections from Espoo neighborhood got worse. Good straight lines were removed to make extra trip to metro stop making the trip, in some case, 30min longer. Not surprised if some people (handful) got cars after this.
I just visited Helsinki, and I gotta say, Helsinki has probably the best urban design I have yet seen. It has high density buildings, a tight transit network and still not forgetting the green spaces (ok, "white spaces" for half of the year). All new developments have good walking paths, bicycle paths and transit access. Ground level is designed that shops and gastronomy can take place. And the buildings are high density, but not in a way that makes one feel small and caged in. They obviously know exactly what they are doing. Only pitty is: Finnish winters.
Helsinki is unique in that it doesn't have really high density skycrapers like other cities of that size. Instead, the city chose to limit density. Apartments are capped around 5 floors, and buildings are spread out with greenery in between. It feels much more like a large town, than a cramped metropolis.
@@Anon-cf4qe Very VERY few cities have a "high density" skyscrapper area. And when it comes to housing density, the number gets much more smaller. If you look at the most dense cites and centers it is usually NOT the cities with large skyscrapers, but high density housing. With multiple floors 5-10 but not much more. Please tell a number of cities in "Helsinki size" that have a large skyscraper area in Europe, to prove me wrong. (American cities do not count, because they have basically only 2 modes: Skyscrapers and SFH, not many multi-floor buildings.)
As an American who's lived in Finland since 2019... its nice to see this breakdown of my local transit network and why it works so well. I never really stopped to consider how critical the entire Länsimetro project (the initiative name for all of this) was since for me, it's just always been here. I had the convenience of moving here about a year after after the first westward expansion opened and have lived in Matinkyla, literally next to that Metro stop in the video, almost the entire time. It is a bit surreal seeing a RUclips video showing off the shopping center next to my home XD I could recognize every single stop you showed in the video too because something fun they did was have unique art designs for each stop. My American friends and family who visit are always amazed at the convenience of the transit system and they're jealous I don't need to own a car out here! But I think its not impossible to do this in American suburbs - though it requires a consistent commitment given the length of time and cost to make it a reality. The westward extension project in Espoo took about 15 years from final approval to the full line opening all the way. Not an overnight solution, but a forward thinking one. Thanks for this cool video!
That's so nice to hear! I moved away from Helsinki 4 years ago, I don't miss many things, but encompassing public transport is one of those. I really took it for granted for 20 or so years. I wish I don't sound patronizing, I just noticed some of us here are making total a**es of themselves. You don't need to pay them any mind (and I hope no one else will, too).
I think it's better to build a separate north-south line or two to avoid interlining. When a line has more than two branches, and sometimes only two branches, if the main stem doesn't have at least three or four tracks the transit train and platform congestion is going to be fierce.
And that's a dumb fucking idea. It's gonna cost another billion dollar and be delayed 10 years or so. No thank you... Tram and buses work well, metro is a total waste of money in the suburbs 😂😂😂
@@sesaarinen I really like the old east metro, it goes where you need it to go and is at least as fast as a car, but I don't understand what they were thinking with the west branch. It takes forever and you still have to continue with a bus. I always take a rental car to that direction. F.ex. Ruoholahti - Saunalahti - Ruoholahti takes about 2h with metro+bus+bus+metro and 40 min with a car. And it would take 50 min with straight busses.
Everywhere in the world, thanks to places like Paris and Madrid, Metro is some kind of train, mostly underground. Leave it to the US to call a bus, stuck in city traffic, "Metro".
@@IndustrialParrot2816 Can you elaborate or let me know where I can find more info on this? I am interested in finding more info about this, but I cannot wrap around my head how it works coz LA seems to be using busses for commuting long distances as described in the video.
The capital region is also going through a kind of LRT phase now. They recently built a ring line and are planning one more as well. Then there's 1 in Vantaa, 1 in Espoo and a few more in Helsinki going out to suburbs. I do however hope they convert the Malmi airport line to a metro instead as it has potential for really high capacity.
IMHO, all airports should have train and metro connections. Ideally, the trains would be high speed rail and connect to cities without airports. Metro rail would, of course, connect to city centers and even suburban metro lines.
@@ScramJett In this case the Malmi airport isn't an active commercial airport, I believe it's only used by some smaller flight schools or skydiving clubs
Very nice video, George, but it's a little misleading. Most of it was about Espoo, which is a city on its own. Here in Helsinki, the metro is complimented with trams, commuter trains, buses, and - of course - walking and biking. Helsinki has sprawl, but nothing like Espoo. I don't want to be mean, but this video would be comparable to labeling a video on Toronto's transit and then mainly talking about buses in Mississauga :)
Most of the footage in the video was actually the metro/bus station at Matinkylä, which is not even that near Espoo, so it's not quite the same. It would be roughly the equivalent of Toronto turning the GO train into a high frequency metro style service, and then making a massive bus terminal at Port Credit station and having a bunch of feeder lines coming from Mississauga and other areas around there.
Espoo is not really a separate city except in governance. It doesn't have a downtown. It's just an area of land next to Helsinki, and its population is centered around the highways to Helsinki, especially to four equally important districts. @@mdhazeldine Matinkylä is one of the four major disctricts of Espoo, so it's not only near Espoo but one of its four major districts. The rest of the footage is from Tapiola, which is one of the three other ones. And the nearby Kehä I road as well, which recently received massive upgrades for car traffic.
@@mdhazeldine Not sure if you mixed up Espoo and Helsinki there, but Matinkylä is one of the 4 major higher density areas in Espoo. If you search for Espoo on a map you will find an area called Espoon keskus, which in reality is the smallest and least important of those 4 areas. Espoo is essentially all sprawl, with Helsinki functioning as its central area. Of the extended metro line only the first two stations are in Helsinki, while the remaining 11 are in Espoo.
@@sebastiansandvik825 I don't know the area, I was just looking around on Google maps to try and understand how it all worked. Espoo is made out to look like a small area of density with some forest in between it and where the Metro/bus station is, so it looked like a separate place to my untrained eye.
I have never lived in Helsinki but have visited often and to be honest I used the trams and bus all the time using the tram as the arterial route into the city centre because the HSL tram and bus services were punctual and when it is cold they can give you an alert for the next tram / bus coming in x minutes.
The blue colour means that its a local bus that doesn't do that far and stops at every stop. The orange colour means it goes a little bit further and stops around every other stop.
If i remember correctly hsl busses use blu for standard busses. And orange for busses where you can hop into the bus anywhere and not need to show your ticket at the front
I live in a California suburb with all of these elements: good bus route network and all buses converge on a light rail station to get into the bigger city. But the bus frequencies are 30 or 60 minutes on most routes during the week. Only the Main St bus route runs every 20 mins. It's still one of the busiest light rail stations in the system though. We could be so much better like Espoo with more transit funding. I wish we had 5-10 min bus frequencies anywhere.
Also, compared to "one more lane" or rather "several more lanes" on a highway, uprading bus networks to proper frequencies of at least every 15 min, better every 10 min wouldn't cost all that much. The political will isn't there however.
Weird, California has estimated population of almost 39 million, while whole Finland has population of 5,5 million :D And we can make some bus lines run on 5-10 mins interval. It's a matter of politics and where local government puts tax revenue money. Here we put it a lot into financing transit paid by residents who live in the capital area. (Municipal tax). Whics is a fixed 5,3% form income in Helsinki at the moment. But same tax revenue is divided to also other services, infrastructure and health care.
Which metro area? I also live in a California suburb, but I wouldn’t say it has nearly the same elements as Helsinki. I’m in the Sacramento metro area.
@@FeeliksKilpi welcome to California, land of poor planning and tax policy. Most tax increases (including sales taxes to fund transit) require a 66% supermajority vote to pass, so outside of favorable metro areas (like the Bay Area, San Diego, and LA), raising revenue for transit is virtually impossible. Most times, such revenue is mandated to be shared with road widening projects and most transit agencies operate on a shoestring budget. I was born here but I may leave and move to somewhere with better transit (and bike infrastructure) so I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to get around when I’m too old to drive.
Yeah it's a shame when there is a bus service but the it only runs once or twice per hour. It might as well not run at all. If a bus line exists, it really should run every ten minutes minimum. So many car trips could be replaced with bus trips in Melbourne, Australia, but the frequency on many lines is appalling. Once or twice per hour on lots of lines. And that's only during the day. Evenings and weekends are once per hour or two, if they run at all. And yet the routes are there, the vehicles are there, the drivers are there. Most of our buses are quite modern, clean and comfortable too. They are just being underused.
I'm sure somebody already mentioned it but an important part of our public transit and the transfers system is that the same ticket is valid for all transportations whether it's metro, local train, bus, tram or the ferry. The ticket is valid for 90 minutes and during that time you can transfer as many times as you please without any extra cost. You can also finish your journey without having to buy a new ticket if you're in the middle of your train journey for example when the ticket expires.
@@finlanderxxthat's just the same as of you were riding without a ticket in the first place. It's also not an easy mistake to make IMO, at least not for locals. The app tells you which zones you need, and it's announced on the metro and trains when there's the last stop before a zone change. And they mostly correspond to the city borders that used to be effective zone borders before the current zones were introduced. The zones are not as detailed as in say, London.
5:13 This is exactly what we did with the Lynnwood Link Extension in Seattle! For decades Community Transit ran peak-only trips from all over Snohomish County to Downtown Seattle, but once we extended our metro into the County, not only do all of those trips end at the station, but they now have more resources for new routes and are now able to provide all-day and bidirectional service up into the rural parts of the county! Of course there are a lot of local bus routes too and they’ve been reconfigured to feed into the stations and tons of new ones were added. We’re seeing tens of thousands of new riders, and this is FAR from the end of our metro expansions, which have already been funded for projects through 2042.
As a Shoreline resident who uses the Lynnwood extension, and who has used Helsinki's transit system multiple times, I am not sure you can compare Espoo to Lynnwood, or Helsinki to Seattle. The new Link extension is a good first step...😀
Thanks, good video. Espoo is still very car dependent though. Many metro stations are connected to large malls with big parking garages. And these are often situated close to a major highway with a lot of traffic, which isn't optimal for the residents in the newly built apartments.
@@XGD5layer True, it's more like car oriented. You can get almost anywhere without a car, but it is a little less convenient and many areas are unpleasant for pedestrians.
You forgot to mention the HSL app. The citys own public transit app with directions for when to leave and where to go, a tracker for your buss, QR codes for checking tickets, the monthy/yearly transit subscriptions and more. It plays a big role in making transit smooth by taking a big load off the passangers back
Still missing: nfc payments for single fares. Oyster style pay-as-you-go-plan. Those might still be on the far horizon...? But unfortunately, the HSL app is basically mandatory as it is the only convenient way to pay for rides. (No ticket sale on board.) For route planning I prefer the Nysse app. Great thing the data is open so other apps can be used!
I live literally on same building complex as some public transit stations shown on the video, and I have taken HSL app / route planner for granted. I've recently spent some months on and off at Singapore - which has great public transit, which is largely helped by the fact it has population of whole Finland in land area of Helsinki capital area - and I was surprised that local colleagues basically suggested using Google Maps for public transit. It's not bad, but HSL route planner is a lot better; I've found out in Singapore occasionally that Google Maps may have bus stops couple hundred metres from their real location, etc, not to mention that it has a bit odd logic on calculating travel times...
Your pronunciation of Espoo and Helsinki were really really good! Almost suspiciously so... 😄 It's always interesting to see how a place one has lived their whole life looks to other people and this was an interesting look at the eventual success of länsimetro (west-metro, as it is called in Finnish), which I can assure you did not go through without hiccups. It is so easy to focus on the problems and annoyances of a system that you use daily that you only ever realize how good it actually is when you either see public transit in other cities or someone from the outside marveling at it.
Assuming that he's from Germany, German and Finnish do have some overlap in pronunciation and even few shared words that have exactly the same pronunciation. Finnish written language was formalized quite late, so there might have been some influence from trade partner countries.
Walking is fairly safe, although some areas with large car traffic volumes are unpleasant. For cycling the biggest problem is the city centre. The routes are somewhat incoherent, not always well linked together
Well, they're talking about the suburbs of Helsinki (technically in another city, Espoo but as Espoo doesn't have it's own identity they're effectively suburbs of Helsinki) where walking and cycling is much less pleasant.
Calling the suburbs of Helsinki "a hostile environment for walking and cycling" is really disingenuous. Literally every place has nice, wide footpaths and bike paths, which are also signed, so that people know where to go.
@@Tuppoo94 acreed. Especially Helsinki has really put effort into it over several years and Espoo has now followed with a very much improved biking network. Obvs you won't see bike lanes alongside all main roads (take parts of Mannerheimintie where bike traffic is moved a block to the side), but the key is to understand that the routes used for biking might differ from what you would take by car or walking. I much prefer biking from Espoo to Helsinki than any other MoT, since it gets me door-to-door usually as fast as public transportation would (my eBike has been my first car for years already).
It's not that hostile if you find the routes and stick on them. However, everything is being re-surfaced, so we ride on gravel through construction yards at the moment. I cycle into the city to work 15km from Espoo, and only encounter 3-4 lights on the route, a few more crossings though. Not bad actually. I'm lucky there's this thing called "Baana". It has just been kinda extended to go under the railway station which is even better.
5:25 And this is a big problem. They bought back straight bus lines for rush hour, but they are only available for few hours and only one direction at a time and not on weekends. I used to be able to get from Helsinki center where I live to Espoo Saunalahti in 25 min with a bus, now it takes over 50 minutes. And a car is still the same 20 min. To Matinkylä I take the metro and even Kivenlahti is ok, but anywhere where you have to change to a bus takes forever without a car.
Thanks for the wonderful video from a local resident! It's crazy to see the places I grew up in featured so prominently, I recognized every location immediately. Great footage! The thing is, the Espoo solution of building malls on top of most metro stations is not what cities should strive for. It might be a good step to take in urbanizing a suburban "city", but the issue is that the services are very heavily concentrated into a small region, while most of the region is still low-density housing. You still have people commuting long distances. You also have the mall problem: Malls are private spaces. They're not good places to spend time in. I would prefer outdoor areas, even with the winter climate. Sadly, it seems most locals disagree. The ideal solution should be like Helsinki city center: people already living on top of the services. Espoo's (and Helsinki's) desire to build malls on metro stations also means that there's considerably less reason to go to the Helsinki city center in the first place, which has lead to the decline of the Helsinki center. I wish we would build more Helsinki center -style areas with the same density, because that is what we have a shortage of, hence the prices. Since bombing the suburbs is fairly unpopular, this is a reasonable step to take, but please listen people, malls are not things to strive for. Make good, dense local environments!
So canceling convenient bus service from Espoo to Helsinki city center and forcing people to use bus+metro and spend time walking, using escalators and waiting for the next vehichle is a great way to get citizens of Espoo to switch from cars to public transport ... yeah right.
As someone who lives in Helsinki I have no desire to get a driver’s license, simply because the public transit works so well. That is a sentiment Ive heard from a lot of my friends who live here too^^
Actually, Perth has a similar system. The trains are intended for longer distances, while the buses are intended for shorter trips or trips to the train. My daily commute is bus-train-bus, and the terminals make transfers easy. However, I will say that some suburbs are basically screwed unless they have a car, and inter-suburb connectivity isn't that great.
In Melbourne, they introduced bus services called Smartbuses that ran at 15min frequencies and connected key destinations, though they still get stuck in traffic due to lack of priority, Nevertheless, people would use it. Not sure why they stopped expanding those services after 2011 though, probably because opening new flashy train stations is more attractive to the politicians.
@@samsam21amb, there are two issues in Queensland. One is the politics (rail is owned by the state government, while buses are owned by the Brisbane City Council) and the other is infrastructure constraints (only some of Brisbane's routes could have reliable 15-minute off-peak frequency, as express and freight services need to be accounted for). Solve both, and that would enable a tidy up of the public transport network in Brisbane.
I'm not Finnish but I moved to Finland almost entirely because of its public transit. I'm in my late 20's now and I don't have a car nor a drivers license, and there has never been a moment where I felt like I needed one. It's been really convenient and has saved me a ton of money in the long run.
Hub and spoke model works for public transit when rapid rail enters the mix... Edmonton did this in 1978 when it opened North America's first modern LRT system modelled on the Frankfurt Metro and for a city with only 500,000 people at the time it was an instant hit... And this is only a fraction of what the city used to have back in the 1920's when it had 56,000 residents and 92 km of rail... The only thing still lacking are those suburb to suburb rapid connections which most cities typically ignore as this video mentions!
Thank you very much George for making many videos about Finland and Poland. Please make videos about Oslo and Bergen in Norway as well. Thank you for filming in person and editing and putting a lot of efforts into this! I appreciate you
Urban sprawl is resolved with medium density and mixed use. Although the capital region is still ridiculously expensive compared to the rest of the country. What buys a studio there, buys a mansion elsewhere.
I don't think that calling Espoo or any other Finnish city pedestrian or cycling hostile is pretty harsh. Sure you might have wide roads but almost everywhere there are still dedicated routes for cycling and walking. The most used routes also usually have under or overpasses to avoid using crosswalks.
@@XGD5layer Helsinki is better than a lot of those places since they have dedicated bike lanes on the sidewalk. The only thing harsh about biking in Helsinki is that you can't do it from January-April due to ice.
Now Espoo also has a new 25km long light rail line called Jokeri, operation between western Espoo and eastern Helsinki and circling the Helsinki city center. This service replaced a busy bus route. The city of Espoo (315,000 inhab.) is a part of the capital region (1,25m inhab.)
It is crazy to have a video made about one’s own hometown’s public transit. I’ve always looked at Amsterdam and the like in these kinds of videos with envy without realizing how good I have it :D I am one of the citizens who lost their direct bus access to downtown Helsinki in the last decade because of the west metro, and oh boy was I temporarily angry at this stupid useless train, but this video finally made me understand the logistical nightmare that the system before was, and living a very suburban life with a metro station in a walking distance (25 minutes, if I’m commuting that goes by bike or the aforementioned new bus lines) is actually very useful and amazing even on a global scale. You also chose the best places to film this video, I even felt a little violated because of how close to my home so many of the scenes of the video was. ”THIS suburb” yeah bro relax stop pointing at my house :D
It should also be noted that after the metro has been built it becomes very easy to develop that area. While it's good that pushes bring a lot of people to metro station, there is also lot of new higher density housing near the metro station. Another extreamly nice thing about transfer ares is that they are areas with cafes and restaurants and metros go incredibly often. So you can easily facilitate a small break of eating something. So if you have bad transfer (10 minute wait) you eat for 15 minutes and catch the next one. Or if you come from university or your job you can catch the first metro to espoo and eat while you wait for the bus. It makes the transits so much more pleasant and flexible since you can easily combine other activities in the middle.
There is another barrier that the public transport system removes in Helsinki (and probably in Finland as a whole) is that once you buy a ticket, it can be used for a duration (normally 1.5 hours) regardless of the type of public transport (bus, tram, metro, except city-to-city train). E-ticket through phone is dominant, making purchasing and checking very convenient too.
Isn't this...obvious? Toronto has been running transit in this way for decades. Almost every subway station outside of the wider downtown area is a large bus terminus
Many people hate this arrangement. Instead of hopping on a bus and reading your favourite book all the way to your destination you have to hop off the bus at the metro station walk and take an escalator or two to get to the metro. That is worse from the passangers point of view, even if the bus would be slower (which it usually isn't as the switch over takes time). Great on paper, not so great for people. So many people opt out of the public transport and switch to private cars. I would if I had not left Helsinki 30 years ago for rural pastures where there space to do the things I want to do at the prices I can afford.
I was born in and have always lived in Helsinki. I've always liked how well the public transport works, but it's been developed greatly since my youth. Now the system as a whole (including all the various modes of transport) crisscrosses very comprehensively to align at all the major and minor hubs. It's very well designed, highly reliable (save for some understandable missed schedules in the winter), safe, and fairly quick. HSL (the Helsinki Regional Transport Authority), which administrates and manages the system, is owned by the various municipalities around Helsinki, so including Helsinki itself and some of the adjacent municipalities. It partners with various private companies who actually operate the lines. This arrangement works really well, but I hope that will be the extent of the privatization in the future too. I hope HSL itself is never privatized because I'm quite sure that would lead to problems.
Perth Western Australia works on the same principle, trains run up the middle of the freeway with train/bus stations, thous busses run from one station out through the suburbs to anther station
The transit system is still too centered around funneling people to central Helsinki IMO. I live in Espoo about 1km away from a metro stop and getting to the more northern parts of Espoo is still a pain, there are no decent connections from the metro line to the train lines up north, and often you have to take a bus that goes through a ton of neighborhoods (which takes a lot of time) or take the metro to Helsinki and take the train back to Espoo to get to the northern parts of Espoo. My brother lives right next to a train station in Espoo and the most convenient way for me to get to where he lives by transit is taking a bus and walking about 1.5 km (or waiting ~15 minutes for another bus to not have to walk), so most of the time I end up biking since it's more convenient and often quicker, especially late in the evening when the buses run less often. Even with all the transit upgrades Espoo is still a car centric city and convenience to drivers is always put before transit practicality.
Many of busses are gradually swapped for electric version. They can recharge on terminal station. Also, Helsinki has light rail, functioning like surface Metro and extensive tram network. So, most of public transport is already electrical. As for cars, expensive parking means daily parking in the centre is unaffordable, but for one-off trip is fairly easy to find a spot.
Great point there but I'd like to highlight that the hub-and-spoke system (which Espoo does a very extreme version of based on what's said here) has great flaws in that it's still unnecessarily centered only upon the rail stations, and that feeder routes are typically very inefficient to operate due to one-way flow of demand. The better way forward (which HS should evolve towards now that they've got a stable transit mode share) would be to focus on creating "long feeders", either providing coverage connections to multiple stations along the same rail line, or connecting between different rail lines in the region, if any. These are more efficient to operate, and enables the city to do more with fewer bus resources. I'm from Singapore, where we've been running feeder routes since 1978, and over time their downsides become more apparent as more people ride public transit -- large mammoth fleets must be maintained to run them very frequently (our suburbs are much more dense, requiring feeder frequencies around 5-8 min), but are empty more than half the time as demand is heavily skewed towards only a single direction at a given time. Often, long feeder routes here manage to achieve what feeders can do with fleet sizes half that of feeder routes, while enabling access to more than just the nearest rail station. Sadly, hub-and-spoke is the new ideology being pushed by our planners, who insist on feeders as solution to everything, disadvantaging new towns with suboptimal connections.
Ottawa, Canada used to be quite similar to Helsinki with busses going straight through the core, though albeit, we had a bus highway or, Transitway. The issue wasn't strictly that buses would be stuck in traffic but, due to the sheer amount of buses trying to enter and leave the core (all being funneled in and out via said bus highway/Transitway), it wasn't uncommon to see 20-30 busses all back to back. Overcrowding at Soviet-esque utilitarian Transitway stations also became an issue. Come 2019, and a 12.5km "LRT" (it's more akin to light metro as it's 100% grade separated with metro-like stations, though incorrectly uses two coupled trams) has been built to replace the old East-West bus Transitway alignment. Route optimization occurred and further entrenched the hub/spoke model Helsinki has. People aren't happy about the added transfers either, however the city doesn't really care to solve that issue. Few years later, and we're now seeing pretty dire times for our transit system. The choice for using tram vehicles for metro service proved to cause frequent shut downs (up to weeks/months), shotty construction work lead to wheels cracking or going flat, overhead wires snapping, water leaks in underground station tunnels, stations that were designed for California and not Canada, and not to mention TWO derailments so far (I cannot make this up). This has knock on effects as now, the train is the backbone of the transit system as busses funnel people into stations. Without the train, busses from other routes have to be pulled from service to serve as a rail replacement service; often packed. On top of all this, the new "LRT" has in fact, increased overall commute times for most people comparative to the old Transitway system. It's unfortuante we've seen more residents buy cars *because* of investments into our transit system rather than a lack of it. The key takeaway here is that if a metro system is being built, and transit agencies want to follow the Helsinki model, they need to ensure damn well that their metro system isn't low capacity, can handle higher frequencies and higher speeds, and offer viable alternatives if in case the metro shuts down either due to maintenance or if your train derails... Twice 😒 I would however, like to end this comment on a positive note by saying despite all this, I really think our LRT, while slow, will improve. A fix is underway for the bogies/axles and overall I think it can't get much worse.
Metro made transit from Espoo to city center slower. For car owners It's great as due to lower traffic you can now get to city center much faster! It's a win-win. Commute from North of Vantaa to Espoo on the other hand is bad. By car it take 35-45 minutes, by transit it take 1h35min.
Depends a lot where you live(d) in Espoo. And also if you're just going to the center Helsinki or for example to offices a bit past the center, which would force you to drive more through the inner city. Where I used to live in Espoo, and for the trips I would need to make now, the metro definitely improved things. But if you're deeper into the detached-house suburbs and had a decent direct bus to Kamppi before and didn't/don't need to go further now either then, yea, many people still prefer cars.
As a finn I've been in the Helsinki city centre with both car and public transit. They've really succeeded in making the public transport more convenient and enjoyable than single car use.
This is quite similar to how the current REM branch in Montreal that runs from downtown into the south shore suburb of Brossard works. The two main REM stations of Panama and Brossard have huge bus terminals that allow the REM--which over the river runs in a highway median--to service the low density 'burbs. It isn't unique, either. Montreal Metro and Exo commuter rail stations act as termini for the various bus routes in the city.
When they build the Espoo line I was living in Kirkkonummi, which is past Espoo but still what you would call a suburb, and traveled to work to the city center of Helsinki. While the busses did help people commute for non-city center routes, people like me who did have to commute to the city center were kind of left behind a bit. My commuting time went from 50 min to 1 hour 10 min. That eventually forced me to move to another area. But that was years ago, maybe they improved on this already.
You forgot to mention other backbones of the transit system: 3 branches (and multiple lines) of S-bahn style commuter trains and the light rail: metro alone does not carry the suburbanites in Helsinki region😅 Also you seem to mix up the Helsinki city (population 600 000) and Helsinki capital region (population 1.2 million), the metro extension is almost completely located on Espoo which is not Helsinki, rather a city in capital region
To be fair espoo is only as big as it is because Helsinki is the Capital. And because of espoo's urban planning means that there is not a clear Downtown in a wider picture it functions in a similar way to Helsinki's eastern suburbs like itis or Vuosaari
@@suprememother Espoo is still an independent municipality with its own city council and all the other municipal services. No one from Espoo call themselves that they are from Helsinki, they have a strong Espoo identity even though parts of it is very close to the Helsinki city centre. You won’t call people from New Jersey New Yorkers do you?
I'm a transit and active mobility enthusiast from Kirkkonummi, which is right next to Espoo, and while I appreciate this video, I have some problems with it. Firstly, some graph choices are rather misleading. It is my opinion that simply showing a HSL map would've been a better choice at 0:20 than just showing our only metro line on an otherwise empty map. It gives a wrong impression to those not from or familiar with HSL transit network (HSL - Helsinki Regional Transport Authority). On top of the metro line, we have 3 main commuter rail lines with very high frequencies on much of the route length. Comparable to Stockholm metro's frequencies. Thus, they perform a similar role to the metro. So the statement that: "The metro does not provide much coverage" is only half true. Besides those, Helsinki city center is home to an extensive and frequent tram network. All of these modes work together. Secondly, the comparison at 8:10 is just bad. The two cities mentioned are two of the most well-known cycling cities in the world. I think it would've been much better to compare Helsinki to say Dublin, Ireland or Oslo, Norway. You know, actually comparable cities. If you really wanted to use those two cities, then a share of active mobility should've been included for better accuracy. What matters is the amount of car trips and car ownership rate (the lower, the better), not whether trips are made by public transit or not. Thirdly, since this video is supposed to be centered around Espoo and transit in suburbs, then a statistic about modal share of transit and car ownership of Espoo should've been included. Those statistics are really not hard to find. Helsinki and Espoo are two different cities with different urban form. You can't use statistics about the former when talking about the latter. Lastly, some facts overly positive. There are no busses in the HSL area that run every 5 minutes by my extensive knowledge. Former bus line 550 (featured in this video), now express tram 15, did run at very high frequencies, like 7.5 minutes, but not every 5 minutes. And if it did, it was the only one. Most important bus lines run every 10 minutes in Helsinki and every 10-15 minutes in Espoo. So, saying every 10-15 minutes is more accurate than every 5-10 minutes. Oh and the bus at 6:52 is the one I take when I go to Matinkylä, Espoo. Usually I take the train. Quantity shouldn't come at the expense of quality. That's really what I want to say.
I agree that I've never encountered any 5 minute buses, but many of the "high-speed" orange lines (like 500 and 600) do run every 7-8 minutes or so, at least during rush hour.
You should revisit and cover the train network and light rail systems that we have! There’s lots of plans surrounding pretty large extensions to the light rail too, which could provide some interesting insight into the bigger picture of the whole transit network of the entire metropolitan area
Great video! I would add the HSL app with the built-in Trip Planner to be part of the success as well, the ease of planning a trip to everywhere with the app showing the route, the connections and alternatives is pretty great.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the train. Many of the lines either by overlap or individually provide decent 10-20 minutes service, especially the P/I loop serving the airport HEL (lentoasema).
My grandma in helsinki lived very close to the gigantic bus terminal site so i saw it being built basically from a ground zero sized deep hole to an underground terminal with several levels of mall above it and even some apartments above the mall. There are many huge malls right next to it like forum and stockmann and a few more. There are also many underground streets with shops and stuff that connect different areas. I remember having a view over the exit street from the terminal (there's a small triangular park there) and there were always at least one bus driving there 24/7, or up to ten at rush hour, kinda noisy lol. The subway is very contemporary and there is also a pretty vast tram network on the street level
...and it works great. I'm an American, living in Helsinki with my family, and we can get to quite a few places in Helsinki, Vantaa, and Espoo thanks to the great metro, bus, and train network. Even some of the ferries work with our transit cards!
The "one subway line" catch isn't totally wrong but not quite right either. There are actually two lines with a short branch in the east. More importantly, there is the suburban rail which was upgraded and at its centre has a heart shaped line with good frequency (mostly every 10 min), it connects Downtown to the airport but a lot of suburban subcentres on the way. Also, a light rail has opened connecting the suburbs with each other and another light rail line is under construction connecting downtown with the peninsula south east. Last but not least, downtown itself is full of tram lines, but those do not really extend into the suburbs. Helsinki is doing a lot to repair planning mistakes of the past and indeed it is quite successful at it.
it is only one line with two branches. There are no different colour codes for different lines, such as in other metro maps with more lines, so it is only one line
Even this more about metro and busses, you should remember private busses and also our trains system as well. If you aren't from the south (Uusimaa) or near this region, you've to drive with your own vehicles, take longer drive with train or flights. Sadly due to not many workers who drive the buses we also have to cut down few stops which used to located in the long vehicle roads and if you try to go shopping near that are you could still do it but you've to walk at least 10-30mins to your desired location.
Excellent video. A few points though. You should have mentioned that this video is about the “Capital Area” or the “Helsinki Metropolitan Area”. Because the “suburb” that is mentioned in the video is actually a different city, Espoo. The Helsinki Metropolitan Area as a whole is a better example. This is because it is not just bus or metro but also tram lines, light rail and local trains.
This paints a quite pretty picture of the West metro line but the reality is far from it. The bus service in Espoo was already really good before the West metro. The busses ran way more often than once per hour. Usually 30 or 20min interval which is far enough. The travel times to Helsinki city center actually went up for a large number of people in Espoo because many bus lines were removed when the metro came and swapping from bus to metro still usually takes a moment in time which a bus would ride a long way. Also the walking distance to the nearest bus stop increased for many which is bad especially for everyone who have difficulty with walking. There has already been a couple of major redesigns of the bus network after the metro started operating. Because they just cant get the system to work as well as it did before the metro. And lets not even start to discuss the night traffic that became absolutely horrible after the metro...
as many others already said commuter trains play a relevant role in traffic as commuter trains can be accessed with the same ticket as metro and buses so in case i wish to go from east where i live to north where my friend lives i go to metro take to the central railway station from where i pick a commuter train northwards its all rather easy
I lived in Vantaa for just over a year. The Helsinki metropolitan are is hands down one of the most pleasant places to live on earth (if you can deal with under 8 hours of daily sunlight during the winter).
From my experience as someone who moved out of espoo to central helsinki couple of months ago the bus network didn't fix last mile issue at all. there were still almost a kilometer walk to our closest stop. Trips to central helsinki took 50 minutes IF there was no need to wait for a bus, when we could get there by car in 20 minutes or less. also trips inside espoo (besides metrostop to metrostop) are still almost impossible with public transit. City planning in Espoo also categorizes large parts of the city as car dependant meaning there will not be any change in the situation in years. Also the busnetwork supporting newly built metrostations really only work for couple of stations leaving most of the stations without or very poor bus intake and making those stations useful for only those that live next to or are willing to drive there by car. Stating that helsinki has far less cars per household than finland's average is misleading since helsinki's suburbs are cities of espoo and vantaa that are both VERY car centric cities.
There are also other rail options that supplement the system, the local train that runs from the outer capital regions to the center and espoo's new speed tram. Travel inside the capital region has become even more convenient.
As a Helsinki based Finn, I must add that it isn't so much about dissuading people from using cars, but making getting a car a lower priority. Nobody needs to give up driving, less people just need to do so in the future. I've never even considered buying a car, since the public transport is so convenient. Admittedly, this is supported by the fact that Helsinki is not the most comfortable place to drive in, but it is mostly the public transport system
As a former Esponian, I really liked my fast, scenic, 4 x per hour bus service to the center of Helsinki. Way better than transferring into a dark tube with an endless number of stops inbetween.
I have so many unanswered questions. How do we plan good suburban bus routes? Even suburban bus stops have small ctatchment areas. Also, how is a bus transfer to a metro somehow competitive with driving a personal vehicle? That seems like driving would be half the time
All great questions! The first one has no definitive answer - suburban bus networks are always resource-constrained, and thus subject to tradeoffs of coverage and frequency. Helsinki, for example, focuses its service on select “trunk routes” to be high frequency, resulting in longer walks and smaller catchment areas. Montreal (with REM) on the other hand, emphasizes lower frequency routes that provide more coverage. Both models have proven successful in their own respects, but come with pros and cons. To the second question: in the case of Helsinki, the transfer to the metro definitely resulted in longer travel times for many. However, this travel time much more consistent (b/c the metro is not subject to traffic) compared to the old direct bus routes, and is definitely time competitive during rush hour. And many people choose transit over driving, even if it may take longer, because it’s down time to rest or do other things, not having to actively drive.
I think it is more also a question about "what kind of suburb". If it is that classic American style isolated areas with detached houses in rows and only one feeder road it might be more difficult. But the suburbs of Espoo and possibly other Finnish cities are usually like small towns or villages with their own centers (because that's what they kind of usually were before growing together) with multiple entries and exits (for all cars, pedestrians and bicycles) towards adjacent suburbs and usually have a distinct main road in the middle of the suburb, so the busses have kind of have a central location for a pickup at the suburb and of course the stops along the way every few hudered meters to the metro station. Also the video made Espoo look very sparsely populated because we have a lot of trees covering buildings, but if you look from google maps satellite view you see that there's a lot of houses or apartment buildings and roads and paths hidden in the trees. And I think that is a good thing for estetics of course but low angle aerial drone shots may make it look like the place is 70% uninhabited. :D
The largest contributing factor to the success of public transportation in the area is the HSL system connecting throughout many cities in the area. With a single app or a monthly ticket you will be able to use all trains, trams, metros, and buses in that given area (the most populated area in the country).
Helsinki, espoo and vantaa (espoo and vantaa r big cities, part of helsinki metropolitan area)r all aggressively building new tram connections all over the cities, and theres now fast trams that goes from city to another
Great video. One thing what i want to point up is about "too expensive". I think the comment comes from trying to make the metro automated. Yes. It was the plan, but because Siemens (which was creating the automation system), the metro did not finish in time. The metro line was finished 5 years later what was planned. After all, what Siemens did was they raised hands up and gave up. After this they had to modify metro stops to include facilities for metro car(?) drivers, because they didn't plan to have toilets or other services for drivers. Ofc the metro will be automated, bruh. We don't need toilets there. In 2020, Siemens were sentenced to pay €4.9 mil because breaking the contract, and €3 mil of "refund of purchase price". The original sum that was demanded is €200 mil.
Another fun and kinda huge failure are metro stops: These are too short. No, those are okay length for today's amount of people, but they also planned to make metro stops longer for future in mind. The amount of people, who uses metro currently, is not that high, but in near future they might need to make metro cars(?) longer, so more people could fit into metro. And for this, today's stops are too short. The idea to make longer stops for future in mind was cancelled because the price tag. But when they need to modify stops to fit longer cars(?), it might be even more expensive. All important machines needed for trams were stored right to end of the stops. So when they need to extend stops, they need to relocate those important machines somewhere else. And that means they need to halt the metro line until modifications are done. 🙂
8:15 There are car share cars everywhere. You don't need to own a car in Helsinki center because the closest one is probably within looking distance and you don't have to pay for parking. I don't own a car but every time there is at least two people buying single tickets it's about the same price as a car, unless you plan to spend a long time where you are going.
The public transport in Helsinki and capital region in Finland actually manages to serve even those living further away and coming by car to the region. There are these commuter car parks (liityntäpysäköinti) where you can park your car for free or cheaply and take the metro or train to the city centre where parking is more of a nuisance and more expensive.
We actually have two metro lines here, M1 and M2 but they go 80% the same main line. Other just goes a bit further in Espoo and in the East-Helsinki they both have three stops in their independent lines, one a bit more south and other more north.
Some things that were missing out here were the specific geography of Helsinki, which is located in a peninsula, with inhabited islands and water on three sides. This together with the growing urbanisation and number of inhabitants, it's not sustainable to have more and more cars driving in and through the centre. Also, the city centre is planned to be more and more walking friendly to lessen the desertification that is already happening. And so one of the main arteries going east-west through the centre, Pohjois-Esplanadi, has lost one of its two lanes for pedestrians. New bike lanes have been introduced to attract light traffic. Also, there is little street side parking space. It has been made more expensive for residents. For visitors, there's underground parking which is quite expensive. Electric cars get 50% discount on public parking. All these measures are also pushing people to use public transport.
I live in Helsinki. You could have added that the pedestrian and bicycle facilities are also good in the suburbs, including mostly apartment buildings instead of single homes.
Not only do you have buses feeding into the stations, but many Helsinki Metro stations have huge park & rides so people can park up their cars and catch the train
I visited Helsinki straight from Copenhagen with its wide selection of metro lines. I was admittedly surprised when I saw the Helsinki transit map showing only 1 metro line - but when you overlay the tram routes on top, then add the busses, all of which are are able to be accessed via a single ticket, it all makes sense.
It's basically the same with Toronto. People give the subway network so much shit for being lacking, but if you overlay even just the bus network (since the tram more or less just serves downtown area) you see that the overall network is actually pretty good for the scale it is trying to work in. Of course, that arrangement is starting to reach it's capacity so more backbone is needed to support the growing population size. Which is why they're doing subway extensions, high frequency tram on dedicated tracks, and so on.
Buses, afterall, are still traffic. And we all know you can't fix road traffic by adding more traffic (ie more buses)... You can only delay it enough. Better and higher capacity modes needs to come into play. Likewise, in an attempt to reduce traffic they're also building more and better bike routes. Which may hopefully convert some people into biking.
Don't forget about the local train network. It's essentially just a second metro system.
My engineer friend claims that Helsinki metro cannot have crossing lines because the trains are too heavy. Crossing lines would need to be dug too deep to be economically viable, and would not make a convenient change from one line to another.
Might be one reason why local trains and certain buses and trams have to serve as trunk lines too.
@@VHemmila While that might be true, I think the bigger reason for Helsinki not having more lines is just the fact that there is not really any place with high enough density to build it. Pretty much the only viable place line you could build would be Kamppi-Pasila, but as the trip is already very well served by trains and buses, it wouldn't make any sense
Sorry for the local train letters, they are "traditional".
The city and the surrounding metropolitan area also has a sizeable commuter train network.
Yes a similar example would be Toronto which has 5 commuter rail lines and 3 subway lines with many many many many buses
Yup, the commuter rail takes the role of the Metro on lines towards Vantaa, as well as parts of Espoo, and creates a trunk network with the metro, the trunk busses and the light rail.
The Metro operates east-west, and trains north-south, conversing in the city centre. The new high speed tram also operates between metro and train stations from Itäkeskus to Keilaniemi.
now if only they could fix the eastern vantaa transport issue..
@HoneyDoll894 luckily the new tram line will significantly improve the situation in eastern Vantaa.
A good mention is also that there's a reason for the two colours of buses, orange buses stop less frequently and thus do longer connections faster and always connect to a major transit hub plus you don't need to show your ticket to the driver so enter through whichever door you want, while the blue buses work in a more typical way with frequent stops and front entry only.
I think of the orange buses as extension to the metro. They are amazingly good.
@Austrian_Painters_TopGuy
Asiaa
I miss the times when each bus company had its own livery. Nowadays everything is the same and the HSL livery is incredibly ugly and cheap looking.
Ah, so the orange is bus rapid transit or express then? Cool.
@@krissp8712 yes. They have much longer distances between stops and mostly stop at places where you can change to another bus or transit type. They work like metro lines pretty much.
Edit: I mean top comment already explained this lol
As a person from northern helsinki i think you missed a massive part of the capital areas public transport, the train.
Trains in helsinki are the primary transport for moving people on the north-south axis from and to the city centre, much like the metro does on the east-west axis.
The larger capital area is populated in such a way that the population density spreads like a semi-circle, not only east and west (which in my opinion is the impression that the video could leave on unknowing viewers).
The two train lines (one going north-west and the other north-east), along with the metro lines, lay the foundations of the transportation web with both taking equal responsibility and with the bus routes filling out the details left in-between.
Amazing video tho and this channel was a wonderful find, the algorithm brought a blessed gift, all hail the algorithm.
Obviously it isnt possible to explain both in 10 minutes but i would've wished for a bit more
@@baaaabaa2617 Thanks for your comment. Maybe for a future video! ☺
@baaaabaa2617 yeah I was about to comment something similar. This is a great video and explains very well how the metro works, but Helsinki transport is so much more. The trains, the high frequency BRT-style bus lines (runkolinjat), the new light rail line and the future expansion of the system (Vantaan ratikka, Vihdintien ratikka etc.), the trams, the wonderful city bike system. The list goes on.
There is so much interesting stuff happening in Helsinki transit right now, and it's a joy to use the transit system every day.
I remember that one day coming from work in northern Helsinki, and having to pass by Verkkokauppa in Jätkäsaari before going to Hakaniemi, I got to use every possible mode of transport besides the ferry in a timespan of little more than an hour. The bus, the train, the tram, the city bikes and the metro. All connecting with each other very conveniently and with minimal wait time.
I was an exchange student at the Uni of Helsinki for a semester and lived in Pasila a five-minute walk from the station. I loved the easy access it gave both to getting to the city center and then for exploring all the stops north as well. I'm very envious of Helsinki's design and miss it quite a bit.
@@urbanmobilityexplained I'm here for more Helsinki videos! I spent (only) about a week there, last year, but would love to go back and explore more, because it felt like a particularly easy place to get around in. I was warned that Finns aren't particularly a warm people, but I noticed that the ease of public transit was, in a way, an incredibly welcoming (and warm) thing, because it helped me help myself, which felt very much in line with Finnish sensibilities.
Good transit heiarchy is basically the solution
This person gets it 🔥
Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!
I learned this hard way in cities skylines because it really punishes for bad design in the game by creating traffic jams; half the game is fighting traffic jams so I kinda know what I talk about, spent several hundreds of hours in the game so I call myslf a self taught traffic designer :D Effects of good design are visible irl here in Helsinki, I arrived at the airport, went to a small kiosk for a snack, paid it at self service checkout, proceeded to train station and waited 10 mins, travelled to the city centre and went for a lunch, then went to a metro+tram connection to home. The trip from airport to home was 6€. Not overcrowded, not trashed, not late, just properly working transit with good coverage and reliability. Only issues I had was when the trams stopped working due to snow, but that will be my first winter at helsinki mistake and lessons will be learned :D It was like there was a public transit pipeline that I stepped in abroad that took me home, and it was damn efficient.
When the metro line opened to Espoo, some connections from Espoo neighborhood got worse. Good straight lines were removed to make extra trip to metro stop making the trip, in some case, 30min longer. Not surprised if some people (handful) got cars after this.
@@ceres4828 Fun fact: Cities: Skylines is a game made by a Finnish game studio. :)
I just visited Helsinki, and I gotta say, Helsinki has probably the best urban design I have yet seen. It has high density buildings, a tight transit network and still not forgetting the green spaces (ok, "white spaces" for half of the year).
All new developments have good walking paths, bicycle paths and transit access. Ground level is designed that shops and gastronomy can take place. And the buildings are high density, but not in a way that makes one feel small and caged in.
They obviously know exactly what they are doing. Only pitty is: Finnish winters.
Cites (and rurban areas alike) most definitely suck in winter.
@@XGD5layer Well countryside is definitely worse.
Sure for a vacation time, it's wonderful. But not as regular days.
We embrace the winters here too by having ice roads, even on sea ice 😅
Helsinki is unique in that it doesn't have really high density skycrapers like other cities of that size. Instead, the city chose to limit density. Apartments are capped around 5 floors, and buildings are spread out with greenery in between. It feels much more like a large town, than a cramped metropolis.
@@Anon-cf4qe Very VERY few cities have a "high density" skyscrapper area. And when it comes to housing density, the number gets much more smaller.
If you look at the most dense cites and centers it is usually NOT the cities with large skyscrapers, but high density housing. With multiple floors 5-10 but not much more.
Please tell a number of cities in "Helsinki size" that have a large skyscraper area in Europe, to prove me wrong.
(American cities do not count, because they have basically only 2 modes: Skyscrapers and SFH, not many multi-floor buildings.)
As an American who's lived in Finland since 2019... its nice to see this breakdown of my local transit network and why it works so well. I never really stopped to consider how critical the entire Länsimetro project (the initiative name for all of this) was since for me, it's just always been here. I had the convenience of moving here about a year after after the first westward expansion opened and have lived in Matinkyla, literally next to that Metro stop in the video, almost the entire time. It is a bit surreal seeing a RUclips video showing off the shopping center next to my home XD I could recognize every single stop you showed in the video too because something fun they did was have unique art designs for each stop.
My American friends and family who visit are always amazed at the convenience of the transit system and they're jealous I don't need to own a car out here! But I think its not impossible to do this in American suburbs - though it requires a consistent commitment given the length of time and cost to make it a reality. The westward extension project in Espoo took about 15 years from final approval to the full line opening all the way. Not an overnight solution, but a forward thinking one.
Thanks for this cool video!
Thanks for sharing your experience with us!
@Austrian_Painters_TopGuy what the fuck is wrong with you
@Austrian_Painters_TopGuy Äänestitkö persuja?
@Austrian_Painters_TopGuy Shut up, he already is. You have no reason to hate American immigrants.
That's so nice to hear! I moved away from Helsinki 4 years ago, I don't miss many things, but encompassing public transport is one of those. I really took it for granted for 20 or so years.
I wish I don't sound patronizing, I just noticed some of us here are making total a**es of themselves. You don't need to pay them any mind (and I hope no one else will, too).
Recently Espoo published a plan to Add two new branches to the metro line to serve the nort-south - traffic better.
I think it's better to build a separate north-south line or two to avoid interlining. When a line has more than two branches, and sometimes only two branches, if the main stem doesn't have at least three or four tracks the transit train and platform congestion is going to be fierce.
I remember riding the then very short line in Helsinki in September 1988. THis is all so amazing to see
And that's a dumb fucking idea. It's gonna cost another billion dollar and be delayed 10 years or so. No thank you... Tram and buses work well, metro is a total waste of money in the suburbs 😂😂😂
Estimated opening 2060. I’ll be dead and buried when they open it. And in the meantime, Espoo’s public transports suck majorly.
@@sesaarinen I really like the old east metro, it goes where you need it to go and is at least as fast as a car, but I don't understand what they were thinking with the west branch. It takes forever and you still have to continue with a bus. I always take a rental car to that direction. F.ex. Ruoholahti - Saunalahti - Ruoholahti takes about 2h with metro+bus+bus+metro and 40 min with a car. And it would take 50 min with straight busses.
In american terms: The metro is the arterial road and the bus is the local road 😄
Kinda except there are systems like this in the US, this is What Los Angeles and Seattle are doing right now
Everywhere in the world, thanks to places like Paris and Madrid, Metro is some kind of train, mostly underground. Leave it to the US to call a bus, stuck in city traffic, "Metro".
@@borstenpinsel Santa Cruz METRO is a bus. There's an unused railroad along Highway One from Davenport to Watsonville.
@@IndustrialParrot2816except LA has 10 times the population and should probably build more than lgiht rail and low frequency bus routes
@@IndustrialParrot2816 Can you elaborate or let me know where I can find more info on this? I am interested in finding more info about this, but I cannot wrap around my head how it works coz LA seems to be using busses for commuting long distances as described in the video.
I hope every town has this kind of connectivity someday
The capital region is also going through a kind of LRT phase now. They recently built a ring line and are planning one more as well. Then there's 1 in Vantaa, 1 in Espoo and a few more in Helsinki going out to suburbs. I do however hope they convert the Malmi airport line to a metro instead as it has potential for really high capacity.
They're also building more regular tram lines in pasila and korkeasaari. For the future, Espoo also published a plan to add two branches to the metro.
IMHO, all airports should have train and metro connections. Ideally, the trains would be high speed rail and connect to cities without airports. Metro rail would, of course, connect to city centers and even suburban metro lines.
@@ScramJett In this case the Malmi airport isn't an active commercial airport, I believe it's only used by some smaller flight schools or skydiving clubs
@@martinsederholm786It closed down 2 years ago and will be converted to a residential area.
The second metro line will be a pre-metro tunnel to speed up the suburban tram services.
Malmi's days are numbered :-(
Very nice video, George, but it's a little misleading. Most of it was about Espoo, which is a city on its own. Here in Helsinki, the metro is complimented with trams, commuter trains, buses, and - of course - walking and biking. Helsinki has sprawl, but nothing like Espoo. I don't want to be mean, but this video would be comparable to labeling a video on Toronto's transit and then mainly talking about buses in Mississauga :)
Most of the footage in the video was actually the metro/bus station at Matinkylä, which is not even that near Espoo, so it's not quite the same. It would be roughly the equivalent of Toronto turning the GO train into a high frequency metro style service, and then making a massive bus terminal at Port Credit station and having a bunch of feeder lines coming from Mississauga and other areas around there.
Espoo is not really a separate city except in governance. It doesn't have a downtown. It's just an area of land next to Helsinki, and its population is centered around the highways to Helsinki, especially to four equally important districts.
@@mdhazeldine Matinkylä is one of the four major disctricts of Espoo, so it's not only near Espoo but one of its four major districts. The rest of the footage is from Tapiola, which is one of the three other ones. And the nearby Kehä I road as well, which recently received massive upgrades for car traffic.
@@mdhazeldine Not sure if you mixed up Espoo and Helsinki there, but Matinkylä is one of the 4 major higher density areas in Espoo. If you search for Espoo on a map you will find an area called Espoon keskus, which in reality is the smallest and least important of those 4 areas. Espoo is essentially all sprawl, with Helsinki functioning as its central area.
Of the extended metro line only the first two stations are in Helsinki, while the remaining 11 are in Espoo.
@@sebastiansandvik825 I don't know the area, I was just looking around on Google maps to try and understand how it all worked. Espoo is made out to look like a small area of density with some forest in between it and where the Metro/bus station is, so it looked like a separate place to my untrained eye.
@@mdhazeldine I'll chime in and say they're indeed different.
I have never lived in Helsinki
but have visited often and to be honest
I used the trams and bus all the time
using the tram as the arterial route into the city centre
because the HSL tram and bus services were punctual
and when it is cold
they can give you an alert for the next tram / bus coming in x minutes.
Thanks for sharing!
Those blue and orange bus color schemes are gorgeous and clean
The blue colour means that its a local bus that doesn't do that far and stops at every stop. The orange colour means it goes a little bit further and stops around every other stop.
Most of the blue buses and all of the orange ones are electric, which are quiet, quick and much nicer than the old diesel ones we used to have
If i remember correctly hsl busses use blu for standard busses. And orange for busses where you can hop into the bus anywhere and not need to show your ticket at the front
@@glorpri True.
@@finlanderxx 34% of busses in 2023 are electric.
I live in a California suburb with all of these elements: good bus route network and all buses converge on a light rail station to get into the bigger city. But the bus frequencies are 30 or 60 minutes on most routes during the week. Only the Main St bus route runs every 20 mins. It's still one of the busiest light rail stations in the system though. We could be so much better like Espoo with more transit funding. I wish we had 5-10 min bus frequencies anywhere.
Also, compared to "one more lane" or rather "several more lanes" on a highway, uprading bus networks to proper frequencies of at least every 15 min, better every 10 min wouldn't cost all that much. The political will isn't there however.
Weird, California has estimated population of almost 39 million, while whole Finland has population of 5,5 million :D And we can make some bus lines run on 5-10 mins interval. It's a matter of politics and where local government puts tax revenue money. Here we put it a lot into financing transit paid by residents who live in the capital area. (Municipal tax). Whics is a fixed 5,3% form income in Helsinki at the moment. But same tax revenue is divided to also other services, infrastructure and health care.
Which metro area? I also live in a California suburb, but I wouldn’t say it has nearly the same elements as Helsinki. I’m in the Sacramento metro area.
@@FeeliksKilpi welcome to California, land of poor planning and tax policy. Most tax increases (including sales taxes to fund transit) require a 66% supermajority vote to pass, so outside of favorable metro areas (like the Bay Area, San Diego, and LA), raising revenue for transit is virtually impossible. Most times, such revenue is mandated to be shared with road widening projects and most transit agencies operate on a shoestring budget. I was born here but I may leave and move to somewhere with better transit (and bike infrastructure) so I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to get around when I’m too old to drive.
Yeah it's a shame when there is a bus service but the it only runs once or twice per hour. It might as well not run at all. If a bus line exists, it really should run every ten minutes minimum. So many car trips could be replaced with bus trips in Melbourne, Australia, but the frequency on many lines is appalling. Once or twice per hour on lots of lines. And that's only during the day. Evenings and weekends are once per hour or two, if they run at all. And yet the routes are there, the vehicles are there, the drivers are there. Most of our buses are quite modern, clean and comfortable too. They are just being underused.
I'm sure somebody already mentioned it but an important part of our public transit and the transfers system is that the same ticket is valid for all transportations whether it's metro, local train, bus, tram or the ferry. The ticket is valid for 90 minutes and during that time you can transfer as many times as you please without any extra cost. You can also finish your journey without having to buy a new ticket if you're in the middle of your train journey for example when the ticket expires.
But if you go just one stop over the area your ticket is valid for, it can cost you 80 euros
@@finlanderxxthat's just the same as of you were riding without a ticket in the first place.
It's also not an easy mistake to make IMO, at least not for locals. The app tells you which zones you need, and it's announced on the metro and trains when there's the last stop before a zone change. And they mostly correspond to the city borders that used to be effective zone borders before the current zones were introduced. The zones are not as detailed as in say, London.
5:13 This is exactly what we did with the Lynnwood Link Extension in Seattle!
For decades Community Transit ran peak-only trips from all over Snohomish County to Downtown Seattle, but once we extended our metro into the County, not only do all of those trips end at the station, but they now have more resources for new routes and are now able to provide all-day and bidirectional service up into the rural parts of the county!
Of course there are a lot of local bus routes too and they’ve been reconfigured to feed into the stations and tons of new ones were added.
We’re seeing tens of thousands of new riders, and this is FAR from the end of our metro expansions, which have already been funded for projects through 2042.
As a Shoreline resident who uses the Lynnwood extension, and who has used Helsinki's transit system multiple times, I am not sure you can compare Espoo to Lynnwood, or Helsinki to Seattle. The new Link extension is a good first step...😀
Thanks, good video. Espoo is still very car dependent though. Many metro stations are connected to large malls with big parking garages. And these are often situated close to a major highway with a lot of traffic, which isn't optimal for the residents in the newly built apartments.
You don't really need a car as a resident of those places
@@XGD5layer True, it's more like car oriented. You can get almost anywhere without a car, but it is a little less convenient and many areas are unpleasant for pedestrians.
What Helsinki and Tampere have been able to achieve with their revolutionary thinking to public transit is truly a miracle.
As a Finn, this was one of the best videos about urbanism.
You missed the train tho
Maybe for a future video? Thanks for watching 💯
You forgot to mention the HSL app. The citys own public transit app with directions for when to leave and where to go, a tracker for your buss, QR codes for checking tickets, the monthy/yearly transit subscriptions and more. It plays a big role in making transit smooth by taking a big load off the passangers back
Still missing: nfc payments for single fares. Oyster style pay-as-you-go-plan. Those might still be on the far horizon...? But unfortunately, the HSL app is basically mandatory as it is the only convenient way to pay for rides. (No ticket sale on board.) For route planning I prefer the Nysse app. Great thing the data is open so other apps can be used!
I live literally on same building complex as some public transit stations shown on the video, and I have taken HSL app / route planner for granted. I've recently spent some months on and off at Singapore - which has great public transit, which is largely helped by the fact it has population of whole Finland in land area of Helsinki capital area - and I was surprised that local colleagues basically suggested using Google Maps for public transit. It's not bad, but HSL route planner is a lot better; I've found out in Singapore occasionally that Google Maps may have bus stops couple hundred metres from their real location, etc, not to mention that it has a bit odd logic on calculating travel times...
The bus is the underrated sleeper hit of public transit
Your pronunciation of Espoo and Helsinki were really really good! Almost suspiciously so... 😄
It's always interesting to see how a place one has lived their whole life looks to other people and this was an interesting look at the eventual success of länsimetro (west-metro, as it is called in Finnish), which I can assure you did not go through without hiccups. It is so easy to focus on the problems and annoyances of a system that you use daily that you only ever realize how good it actually is when you either see public transit in other cities or someone from the outside marveling at it.
Assuming that he's from Germany, German and Finnish do have some overlap in pronunciation and even few shared words that have exactly the same pronunciation. Finnish written language was formalized quite late, so there might have been some influence from trade partner countries.
If you call Helsinki an hostile environment for walking an cycling, you should come to RIga, Latvia. Cycling in Helsinki for me was paradise on earth
Walking is fairly safe, although some areas with large car traffic volumes are unpleasant. For cycling the biggest problem is the city centre. The routes are somewhat incoherent, not always well linked together
Well, they're talking about the suburbs of Helsinki (technically in another city, Espoo but as Espoo doesn't have it's own identity they're effectively suburbs of Helsinki) where walking and cycling is much less pleasant.
Calling the suburbs of Helsinki "a hostile environment for walking and cycling" is really disingenuous. Literally every place has nice, wide footpaths and bike paths, which are also signed, so that people know where to go.
@@Tuppoo94 acreed. Especially Helsinki has really put effort into it over several years and Espoo has now followed with a very much improved biking network. Obvs you won't see bike lanes alongside all main roads (take parts of Mannerheimintie where bike traffic is moved a block to the side), but the key is to understand that the routes used for biking might differ from what you would take by car or walking. I much prefer biking from Espoo to Helsinki than any other MoT, since it gets me door-to-door usually as fast as public transportation would (my eBike has been my first car for years already).
It's not that hostile if you find the routes and stick on them. However, everything is being re-surfaced, so we ride on gravel through construction yards at the moment. I cycle into the city to work 15km from Espoo, and only encounter 3-4 lights on the route, a few more crossings though. Not bad actually. I'm lucky there's this thing called "Baana". It has just been kinda extended to go under the railway station which is even better.
5:25 And this is a big problem. They bought back straight bus lines for rush hour, but they are only available for few hours and only one direction at a time and not on weekends. I used to be able to get from Helsinki center where I live to Espoo Saunalahti in 25 min with a bus, now it takes over 50 minutes. And a car is still the same 20 min. To Matinkylä I take the metro and even Kivenlahti is ok, but anywhere where you have to change to a bus takes forever without a car.
A new light rail service called "Raide Jokeri" opened recently to feed the metro
It also feeds the local train lines, if I had to guess perhaps even more than they do the metro.
rip 550
Helsinki just gets it! Well done!
6:52 This is genius for a bus terminal, I love it! It also makes the buses feel like a higher form of transit.
Thanks for the wonderful video from a local resident! It's crazy to see the places I grew up in featured so prominently, I recognized every location immediately. Great footage!
The thing is, the Espoo solution of building malls on top of most metro stations is not what cities should strive for. It might be a good step to take in urbanizing a suburban "city", but the issue is that the services are very heavily concentrated into a small region, while most of the region is still low-density housing. You still have people commuting long distances. You also have the mall problem: Malls are private spaces. They're not good places to spend time in. I would prefer outdoor areas, even with the winter climate. Sadly, it seems most locals disagree.
The ideal solution should be like Helsinki city center: people already living on top of the services. Espoo's (and Helsinki's) desire to build malls on metro stations also means that there's considerably less reason to go to the Helsinki city center in the first place, which has lead to the decline of the Helsinki center.
I wish we would build more Helsinki center -style areas with the same density, because that is what we have a shortage of, hence the prices. Since bombing the suburbs is fairly unpopular, this is a reasonable step to take, but please listen people, malls are not things to strive for. Make good, dense local environments!
Great example! Frequent service and easy transfers are keys to drawing riders to transit from autos.
Thanks for watching! 😊
So canceling convenient bus service from Espoo to Helsinki city center and forcing people to use bus+metro and spend time walking, using escalators and waiting for the next vehichle is a great way to get citizens of Espoo to switch from cars to public transport ... yeah right.
As someone who lives in Helsinki I have no desire to get a driver’s license, simply because the public transit works so well. That is a sentiment Ive heard from a lot of my friends who live here too^^
As an Australian, I wish I could pin this to every State and Commonwealth infrastructure agency. But they’ll ignore it as always.
Actually, Perth has a similar system. The trains are intended for longer distances, while the buses are intended for shorter trips or trips to the train. My daily commute is bus-train-bus, and the terminals make transfers easy. However, I will say that some suburbs are basically screwed unless they have a car, and inter-suburb connectivity isn't that great.
I’m pretty sure Perth does quite well, but all the other states - especially qld & sa - need to do better.
In Melbourne, they introduced bus services called Smartbuses that ran at 15min frequencies and connected key destinations, though they still get stuck in traffic due to lack of priority, Nevertheless, people would use it. Not sure why they stopped expanding those services after 2011 though, probably because opening new flashy train stations is more attractive to the politicians.
@@samsam21amb, there are two issues in Queensland. One is the politics (rail is owned by the state government, while buses are owned by the Brisbane City Council) and the other is infrastructure constraints (only some of Brisbane's routes could have reliable 15-minute off-peak frequency, as express and freight services need to be accounted for). Solve both, and that would enable a tidy up of the public transport network in Brisbane.
I'm not Finnish but I moved to Finland almost entirely because of its public transit. I'm in my late 20's now and I don't have a car nor a drivers license, and there has never been a moment where I felt like I needed one. It's been really convenient and has saved me a ton of money in the long run.
From where did you move here?
What a excellent video! Even as a local, I havent really seen our public transportation explained quite like this. Good job, sir 👌
Thanks a lot for your kind words! ☺
Hub and spoke model works for public transit when rapid rail enters the mix... Edmonton did this in 1978 when it opened North America's first modern LRT system modelled on the Frankfurt Metro and for a city with only 500,000 people at the time it was an instant hit... And this is only a fraction of what the city used to have back in the 1920's when it had 56,000 residents and 92 km of rail... The only thing still lacking are those suburb to suburb rapid connections which most cities typically ignore as this video mentions!
same in calgary, ctrain alone had 9 million trips last month
Thank you very much George for making many videos about Finland and Poland.
Please make videos about Oslo and Bergen in Norway as well.
Thank you for filming in person and editing and putting a lot of efforts into this! I appreciate you
Thank you for your comment! We have not yet planned any video in Oslo or Bergen, but we take note of it for future videos 😀
Excellent video. Really opened my eyes to an ingenious way to resolve transportation in urban sprawl. Thank you and subscribed.
Thank you! 💫
Urban sprawl is resolved with medium density and mixed use. Although the capital region is still ridiculously expensive compared to the rest of the country. What buys a studio there, buys a mansion elsewhere.
I don't think that calling Espoo or any other Finnish city pedestrian or cycling hostile is pretty harsh. Sure you might have wide roads but almost everywhere there are still dedicated routes for cycling and walking. The most used routes also usually have under or overpasses to avoid using crosswalks.
It's hostile in comparison to great cycling places, i.e. there's still a great deal to improve
@@XGD5layer Helsinki is better than a lot of those places since they have dedicated bike lanes on the sidewalk. The only thing harsh about biking in Helsinki is that you can't do it from January-April due to ice.
@@Anon-cf4qe Yeah, only would lose to like maybe max 5 countries (w/ Netherlands being #1?) I reckon.
I love Helsinki’s metro! It’s so smooth and quiet! Can’t wait for the border to open so I can visit again lole
Now Espoo also has a new 25km long light rail line called Jokeri, operation between western Espoo and eastern Helsinki and circling the Helsinki city center. This service replaced a busy bus route. The city of Espoo (315,000 inhab.) is a part of the capital region (1,25m inhab.)
It is crazy to have a video made about one’s own hometown’s public transit. I’ve always looked at Amsterdam and the like in these kinds of videos with envy without realizing how good I have it :D
I am one of the citizens who lost their direct bus access to downtown Helsinki in the last decade because of the west metro, and oh boy was I temporarily angry at this stupid useless train, but this video finally made me understand the logistical nightmare that the system before was, and living a very suburban life with a metro station in a walking distance (25 minutes, if I’m commuting that goes by bike or the aforementioned new bus lines) is actually very useful and amazing even on a global scale.
You also chose the best places to film this video, I even felt a little violated because of how close to my home so many of the scenes of the video was. ”THIS suburb” yeah bro relax stop pointing at my house :D
oooooh that's actually really useful, great video!
Thanks a lot for watching! 😊
It should also be noted that after the metro has been built it becomes very easy to develop that area. While it's good that pushes bring a lot of people to metro station, there is also lot of new higher density housing near the metro station.
Another extreamly nice thing about transfer ares is that they are areas with cafes and restaurants and metros go incredibly often. So you can easily facilitate a small break of eating something. So if you have bad transfer (10 minute wait) you eat for 15 minutes and catch the next one. Or if you come from university or your job you can catch the first metro to espoo and eat while you wait for the bus. It makes the transits so much more pleasant and flexible since you can easily combine other activities in the middle.
There is another barrier that the public transport system removes in Helsinki (and probably in Finland as a whole) is that once you buy a ticket, it can be used for a duration (normally 1.5 hours) regardless of the type of public transport (bus, tram, metro, except city-to-city train). E-ticket through phone is dominant, making purchasing and checking very convenient too.
Isn't this...obvious? Toronto has been running transit in this way for decades. Almost every subway station outside of the wider downtown area is a large bus terminus
It's surprisingly not. Lots of cities make the mistake of trying to run services to and from the city centre instead of to a nearby subway line.
Was just gonna say that this seems like a more modern and refined execution of the TTC.
Many people hate this arrangement. Instead of hopping on a bus and reading your favourite book all the way to your destination you have to hop off the bus at the metro station walk and take an escalator or two to get to the metro. That is worse from the passangers point of view, even if the bus would be slower (which it usually isn't as the switch over takes time). Great on paper, not so great for people. So many people opt out of the public transport and switch to private cars. I would if I had not left Helsinki 30 years ago for rural pastures where there space to do the things I want to do at the prices I can afford.
What a success story! Thank you for this presentation!
Thank you for watching! ☺
I was born in and have always lived in Helsinki. I've always liked how well the public transport works, but it's been developed greatly since my youth. Now the system as a whole (including all the various modes of transport) crisscrosses very comprehensively to align at all the major and minor hubs. It's very well designed, highly reliable (save for some understandable missed schedules in the winter), safe, and fairly quick.
HSL (the Helsinki Regional Transport Authority), which administrates and manages the system, is owned by the various municipalities around Helsinki, so including Helsinki itself and some of the adjacent municipalities. It partners with various private companies who actually operate the lines. This arrangement works really well, but I hope that will be the extent of the privatization in the future too. I hope HSL itself is never privatized because I'm quite sure that would lead to problems.
Great video, thanks!
Helsinki has a very smart urban policy.
Thanks a lot for watching! 🙏🏾
Very proud of my hometown!
Perth Western Australia works on the same principle, trains run up the middle of the freeway with train/bus stations,
thous busses run from one station out through the suburbs to anther station
Greetings from Finland, Espoo. This video was great!
Thanks for watching!!
8:21 How about Espoo?
The transit system is still too centered around funneling people to central Helsinki IMO. I live in Espoo about 1km away from a metro stop and getting to the more northern parts of Espoo is still a pain, there are no decent connections from the metro line to the train lines up north, and often you have to take a bus that goes through a ton of neighborhoods (which takes a lot of time) or take the metro to Helsinki and take the train back to Espoo to get to the northern parts of Espoo. My brother lives right next to a train station in Espoo and the most convenient way for me to get to where he lives by transit is taking a bus and walking about 1.5 km (or waiting ~15 minutes for another bus to not have to walk), so most of the time I end up biking since it's more convenient and often quicker, especially late in the evening when the buses run less often. Even with all the transit upgrades Espoo is still a car centric city and convenience to drivers is always put before transit practicality.
Many of busses are gradually swapped for electric version. They can recharge on terminal station. Also, Helsinki has light rail, functioning like surface Metro and extensive tram network. So, most of public transport is already electrical. As for cars, expensive parking means daily parking in the centre is unaffordable, but for one-off trip is fairly easy to find a spot.
Really good and well made video
Thanks a lot!
Great point there but I'd like to highlight that the hub-and-spoke system (which Espoo does a very extreme version of based on what's said here) has great flaws in that it's still unnecessarily centered only upon the rail stations, and that feeder routes are typically very inefficient to operate due to one-way flow of demand. The better way forward (which HS should evolve towards now that they've got a stable transit mode share) would be to focus on creating "long feeders", either providing coverage connections to multiple stations along the same rail line, or connecting between different rail lines in the region, if any. These are more efficient to operate, and enables the city to do more with fewer bus resources.
I'm from Singapore, where we've been running feeder routes since 1978, and over time their downsides become more apparent as more people ride public transit -- large mammoth fleets must be maintained to run them very frequently (our suburbs are much more dense, requiring feeder frequencies around 5-8 min), but are empty more than half the time as demand is heavily skewed towards only a single direction at a given time. Often, long feeder routes here manage to achieve what feeders can do with fleet sizes half that of feeder routes, while enabling access to more than just the nearest rail station. Sadly, hub-and-spoke is the new ideology being pushed by our planners, who insist on feeders as solution to everything, disadvantaging new towns with suboptimal connections.
Ottawa, Canada used to be quite similar to Helsinki with busses going straight through the core, though albeit, we had a bus highway or, Transitway. The issue wasn't strictly that buses would be stuck in traffic but, due to the sheer amount of buses trying to enter and leave the core (all being funneled in and out via said bus highway/Transitway), it wasn't uncommon to see 20-30 busses all back to back. Overcrowding at Soviet-esque utilitarian Transitway stations also became an issue.
Come 2019, and a 12.5km "LRT" (it's more akin to light metro as it's 100% grade separated with metro-like stations, though incorrectly uses two coupled trams) has been built to replace the old East-West bus Transitway alignment. Route optimization occurred and further entrenched the hub/spoke model Helsinki has. People aren't happy about the added transfers either, however the city doesn't really care to solve that issue.
Few years later, and we're now seeing pretty dire times for our transit system. The choice for using tram vehicles for metro service proved to cause frequent shut downs (up to weeks/months), shotty construction work lead to wheels cracking or going flat, overhead wires snapping, water leaks in underground station tunnels, stations that were designed for California and not Canada, and not to mention TWO derailments so far (I cannot make this up). This has knock on effects as now, the train is the backbone of the transit system as busses funnel people into stations. Without the train, busses from other routes have to be pulled from service to serve as a rail replacement service; often packed.
On top of all this, the new "LRT" has in fact, increased overall commute times for most people comparative to the old Transitway system. It's unfortuante we've seen more residents buy cars *because* of investments into our transit system rather than a lack of it.
The key takeaway here is that if a metro system is being built, and transit agencies want to follow the Helsinki model, they need to ensure damn well that their metro system isn't low capacity, can handle higher frequencies and higher speeds, and offer viable alternatives if in case the metro shuts down either due to maintenance or if your train derails... Twice 😒
I would however, like to end this comment on a positive note by saying despite all this, I really think our LRT, while slow, will improve. A fix is underway for the bogies/axles and overall I think it can't get much worse.
Metro made transit from Espoo to city center slower. For car owners It's great as due to lower traffic you can now get to city center much faster! It's a win-win. Commute from North of Vantaa to Espoo on the other hand is bad. By car it take 35-45 minutes, by transit it take 1h35min.
Depends a lot where you live(d) in Espoo. And also if you're just going to the center Helsinki or for example to offices a bit past the center, which would force you to drive more through the inner city.
Where I used to live in Espoo, and for the trips I would need to make now, the metro definitely improved things. But if you're deeper into the detached-house suburbs and had a decent direct bus to Kamppi before and didn't/don't need to go further now either then, yea, many people still prefer cars.
This was a good and informative video, thanks.
As a finn I've been in the Helsinki city centre with both car and public transit. They've really succeeded in making the public transport more convenient and enjoyable than single car use.
This is quite similar to how the current REM branch in Montreal that runs from downtown into the south shore suburb of Brossard works. The two main REM stations of Panama and Brossard have huge bus terminals that allow the REM--which over the river runs in a highway median--to service the low density 'burbs. It isn't unique, either. Montreal Metro and Exo commuter rail stations act as termini for the various bus routes in the city.
When they build the Espoo line I was living in Kirkkonummi, which is past Espoo but still what you would call a suburb, and traveled to work to the city center of Helsinki. While the busses did help people commute for non-city center routes, people like me who did have to commute to the city center were kind of left behind a bit. My commuting time went from 50 min to 1 hour 10 min. That eventually forced me to move to another area.
But that was years ago, maybe they improved on this already.
This bus transfer station is awesome.
You forgot to mention other backbones of the transit system: 3 branches (and multiple lines) of S-bahn style commuter trains and the light rail: metro alone does not carry the suburbanites in Helsinki region😅 Also you seem to mix up the Helsinki city (population 600 000) and Helsinki capital region (population 1.2 million), the metro extension is almost completely located on Espoo which is not Helsinki, rather a city in capital region
To be fair espoo is only as big as it is because Helsinki is the Capital. And because of espoo's urban planning means that there is not a clear Downtown in a wider picture it functions in a similar way to Helsinki's eastern suburbs like itis or Vuosaari
@@suprememother Espoo is still an independent municipality with its own city council and all the other municipal services. No one from Espoo call themselves that they are from Helsinki, they have a strong Espoo identity even though parts of it is very close to the Helsinki city centre. You won’t call people from New Jersey New Yorkers do you?
I'm a transit and active mobility enthusiast from Kirkkonummi, which is right next to Espoo, and while I appreciate this video, I have some problems with it.
Firstly, some graph choices are rather misleading. It is my opinion that simply showing a HSL map would've been a better choice at 0:20 than just showing our only metro line on an otherwise empty map. It gives a wrong impression to those not from or familiar with HSL transit network (HSL - Helsinki Regional Transport Authority). On top of the metro line, we have 3 main commuter rail lines with very high frequencies on much of the route length. Comparable to Stockholm metro's frequencies. Thus, they perform a similar role to the metro. So the statement that: "The metro does not provide much coverage" is only half true. Besides those, Helsinki city center is home to an extensive and frequent tram network. All of these modes work together.
Secondly, the comparison at 8:10 is just bad. The two cities mentioned are two of the most well-known cycling cities in the world. I think it would've been much better to compare Helsinki to say Dublin, Ireland or Oslo, Norway. You know, actually comparable cities. If you really wanted to use those two cities, then a share of active mobility should've been included for better accuracy. What matters is the amount of car trips and car ownership rate (the lower, the better), not whether trips are made by public transit or not.
Thirdly, since this video is supposed to be centered around Espoo and transit in suburbs, then a statistic about modal share of transit and car ownership of Espoo should've been included. Those statistics are really not hard to find. Helsinki and Espoo are two different cities with different urban form. You can't use statistics about the former when talking about the latter.
Lastly, some facts overly positive. There are no busses in the HSL area that run every 5 minutes by my extensive knowledge. Former bus line 550 (featured in this video), now express tram 15, did run at very high frequencies, like 7.5 minutes, but not every 5 minutes. And if it did, it was the only one. Most important bus lines run every 10 minutes in Helsinki and every 10-15 minutes in Espoo. So, saying every 10-15 minutes is more accurate than every 5-10 minutes.
Oh and the bus at 6:52 is the one I take when I go to Matinkylä, Espoo. Usually I take the train.
Quantity shouldn't come at the expense of quality. That's really what I want to say.
I agree that I've never encountered any 5 minute buses, but many of the "high-speed" orange lines (like 500 and 600) do run every 7-8 minutes or so, at least during rush hour.
You should revisit and cover the train network and light rail systems that we have! There’s lots of plans surrounding pretty large extensions to the light rail too, which could provide some interesting insight into the bigger picture of the whole transit network of the entire metropolitan area
Great video!
I would add the HSL app with the built-in Trip Planner to be part of the success as well, the ease of planning a trip to everywhere with the app showing the route, the connections and alternatives is pretty great.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the train. Many of the lines either by overlap or individually provide decent 10-20 minutes service, especially the P/I loop serving the airport HEL (lentoasema).
My grandma in helsinki lived very close to the gigantic bus terminal site so i saw it being built basically from a ground zero sized deep hole to an underground terminal with several levels of mall above it and even some apartments above the mall. There are many huge malls right next to it like forum and stockmann and a few more. There are also many underground streets with shops and stuff that connect different areas. I remember having a view over the exit street from the terminal (there's a small triangular park there) and there were always at least one bus driving there 24/7, or up to ten at rush hour, kinda noisy lol. The subway is very contemporary and there is also a pretty vast tram network on the street level
...and it works great. I'm an American, living in Helsinki with my family, and we can get to quite a few places in Helsinki, Vantaa, and Espoo thanks to the great metro, bus, and train network. Even some of the ferries work with our transit cards!
Thanks for sharing!
This reminds me that each city is u ique, and responses to transport challenges would best if designed for that city.
The "one subway line" catch isn't totally wrong but not quite right either. There are actually two lines with a short branch in the east. More importantly, there is the suburban rail which was upgraded and at its centre has a heart shaped line with good frequency (mostly every 10 min), it connects Downtown to the airport but a lot of suburban subcentres on the way. Also, a light rail has opened connecting the suburbs with each other and another light rail line is under construction connecting downtown with the peninsula south east. Last but not least, downtown itself is full of tram lines, but those do not really extend into the suburbs.
Helsinki is doing a lot to repair planning mistakes of the past and indeed it is quite successful at it.
it is only one line with two branches. There are no different colour codes for different lines, such as in other metro maps with more lines, so it is only one line
Even this more about metro and busses, you should remember private busses and also our trains system as well. If you aren't from the south (Uusimaa) or near this region, you've to drive with your own vehicles, take longer drive with train or flights. Sadly due to not many workers who drive the buses we also have to cut down few stops which used to located in the long vehicle roads and if you try to go shopping near that are you could still do it but you've to walk at least 10-30mins to your desired location.
greetings from finland,nice vid and i am still waiting to get metro lines to cover city area like in stockholm
Excellent video. A few points though. You should have mentioned that this video is about the “Capital Area” or the “Helsinki Metropolitan Area”. Because the “suburb” that is mentioned in the video is actually a different city, Espoo.
The Helsinki Metropolitan Area as a whole is a better example. This is because it is not just bus or metro but also tram lines, light rail and local trains.
This paints a quite pretty picture of the West metro line but the reality is far from it. The bus service in Espoo was already really good before the West metro. The busses ran way more often than once per hour. Usually 30 or 20min interval which is far enough. The travel times to Helsinki city center actually went up for a large number of people in Espoo because many bus lines were removed when the metro came and swapping from bus to metro still usually takes a moment in time which a bus would ride a long way. Also the walking distance to the nearest bus stop increased for many which is bad especially for everyone who have difficulty with walking. There has already been a couple of major redesigns of the bus network after the metro started operating. Because they just cant get the system to work as well as it did before the metro.
And lets not even start to discuss the night traffic that became absolutely horrible after the metro...
as many others already said
commuter trains play a relevant role in traffic as commuter trains can be accessed with the same ticket as metro and buses so in case i wish to go from east where i live to north where my friend lives
i go to metro take to the central railway station from where i pick a commuter train northwards
its all rather easy
Thanks for your comment!
I lived in Vantaa for just over a year. The Helsinki metropolitan are is hands down one of the most pleasant places to live on earth (if you can deal with under 8 hours of daily sunlight during the winter).
Quite interesting to learn about even as a local, beyond just knowing its here.
From my experience as someone who moved out of espoo to central helsinki couple of months ago the bus network didn't fix last mile issue at all. there were still almost a kilometer walk to our closest stop. Trips to central helsinki took 50 minutes IF there was no need to wait for a bus, when we could get there by car in 20 minutes or less. also trips inside espoo (besides metrostop to metrostop) are still almost impossible with public transit. City planning in Espoo also categorizes large parts of the city as car dependant meaning there will not be any change in the situation in years. Also the busnetwork supporting newly built metrostations really only work for couple of stations leaving most of the stations without or very poor bus intake and making those stations useful for only those that live next to or are willing to drive there by car. Stating that helsinki has far less cars per household than finland's average is misleading since helsinki's suburbs are cities of espoo and vantaa that are both VERY car centric cities.
There are also other rail options that supplement the system, the local train that runs from the outer capital regions to the center and espoo's new speed tram. Travel inside the capital region has become even more convenient.
This was interesting and Well made video.
As a Helsinki based Finn, I must add that it isn't so much about dissuading people from using cars, but making getting a car a lower priority. Nobody needs to give up driving, less people just need to do so in the future. I've never even considered buying a car, since the public transport is so convenient. Admittedly, this is supported by the fact that Helsinki is not the most comfortable place to drive in, but it is mostly the public transport system
As a former Esponian, I really liked my fast, scenic, 4 x per hour bus service to the center of Helsinki. Way better than transferring into a dark tube with an endless number of stops inbetween.
Almost thought you were Estonian, but had to read again, you were from Espoo
I have so many unanswered questions. How do we plan good suburban bus routes? Even suburban bus stops have small ctatchment areas. Also, how is a bus transfer to a metro somehow competitive with driving a personal vehicle? That seems like driving would be half the time
All great questions! The first one has no definitive answer - suburban bus networks are always resource-constrained, and thus subject to tradeoffs of coverage and frequency. Helsinki, for example, focuses its service on select “trunk routes” to be high frequency, resulting in longer walks and smaller catchment areas. Montreal (with REM) on the other hand, emphasizes lower frequency routes that provide more coverage. Both models have proven successful in their own respects, but come with pros and cons.
To the second question: in the case of Helsinki, the transfer to the metro definitely resulted in longer travel times for many. However, this travel time much more consistent (b/c the metro is not subject to traffic) compared to the old direct bus routes, and is definitely time competitive during rush hour. And many people choose transit over driving, even if it may take longer, because it’s down time to rest or do other things, not having to actively drive.
From my point of view, it's competitive when it's cheaper and less of a hassle.
I think it is more also a question about "what kind of suburb". If it is that classic American style isolated areas with detached houses in rows and only one feeder road it might be more difficult. But the suburbs of Espoo and possibly other Finnish cities are usually like small towns or villages with their own centers (because that's what they kind of usually were before growing together) with multiple entries and exits (for all cars, pedestrians and bicycles) towards adjacent suburbs and usually have a distinct main road in the middle of the suburb, so the busses have kind of have a central location for a pickup at the suburb and of course the stops along the way every few hudered meters to the metro station.
Also the video made Espoo look very sparsely populated because we have a lot of trees covering buildings, but if you look from google maps satellite view you see that there's a lot of houses or apartment buildings and roads and paths hidden in the trees. And I think that is a good thing for estetics of course but low angle aerial drone shots may make it look like the place is 70% uninhabited. :D
The largest contributing factor to the success of public transportation in the area is the HSL system connecting throughout many cities in the area. With a single app or a monthly ticket you will be able to use all trains, trams, metros, and buses in that given area (the most populated area in the country).
Amazing urban transit system.
Helsinki, espoo and vantaa (espoo and vantaa r big cities, part of helsinki metropolitan area)r all aggressively building new tram connections all over the cities, and theres now fast trams that goes from city to another
Great video. One thing what i want to point up is about "too expensive". I think the comment comes from trying to make the metro automated.
Yes. It was the plan, but because Siemens (which was creating the automation system), the metro did not finish in time. The metro line was finished 5 years later what was planned. After all, what Siemens did was they raised hands up and gave up. After this they had to modify metro stops to include facilities for metro car(?) drivers, because they didn't plan to have toilets or other services for drivers. Ofc the metro will be automated, bruh. We don't need toilets there.
In 2020, Siemens were sentenced to pay €4.9 mil because breaking the contract, and €3 mil of "refund of purchase price". The original sum that was demanded is €200 mil.
Another fun and kinda huge failure are metro stops: These are too short.
No, those are okay length for today's amount of people, but they also planned to make metro stops longer for future in mind. The amount of people, who uses metro currently, is not that high, but in near future they might need to make metro cars(?) longer, so more people could fit into metro. And for this, today's stops are too short.
The idea to make longer stops for future in mind was cancelled because the price tag. But when they need to modify stops to fit longer cars(?), it might be even more expensive. All important machines needed for trams were stored right to end of the stops. So when they need to extend stops, they need to relocate those important machines somewhere else. And that means they need to halt the metro line until modifications are done. 🙂
What's the intro song at 1:02 ?
EDIT: Pär Hagström - Nocturnalized
Nocturnalized by Par Hagstrom
8:15 There are car share cars everywhere. You don't need to own a car in Helsinki center because the closest one is probably within looking distance and you don't have to pay for parking. I don't own a car but every time there is at least two people buying single tickets it's about the same price as a car, unless you plan to spend a long time where you are going.
The public transport in Helsinki and capital region in Finland actually manages to serve even those living further away and coming by car to the region. There are these commuter car parks (liityntäpysäköinti) where you can park your car for free or cheaply and take the metro or train to the city centre where parking is more of a nuisance and more expensive.
We actually have two metro lines here, M1 and M2 but they go 80% the same main line.
Other just goes a bit further in Espoo and in the East-Helsinki they both have three stops in their independent lines, one a bit more south and other more north.
Some things that were missing out here were the specific geography of Helsinki, which is located in a peninsula, with inhabited islands and water on three sides. This together with the growing urbanisation and number of inhabitants, it's not sustainable to have more and more cars driving in and through the centre. Also, the city centre is planned to be more and more walking friendly to lessen the desertification that is already happening. And so one of the main arteries going east-west through the centre, Pohjois-Esplanadi, has lost one of its two lanes for pedestrians. New bike lanes have been introduced to attract light traffic. Also, there is little street side parking space. It has been made more expensive for residents. For visitors, there's underground parking which is quite expensive. Electric cars get 50% discount on public parking. All these measures are also pushing people to use public transport.
Thank you for your comment!
I live in Helsinki. You could have added that the pedestrian and bicycle facilities are also good in the suburbs, including mostly apartment buildings instead of single homes.
Bravo!
San Francisco Bay area definitely need this
Not only do you have buses feeding into the stations, but many Helsinki Metro stations have huge park & rides so people can park up their cars and catch the train
Around 3:15 and 9:30 there were some jarring visual jump cuts that could have been hidden if the B roll was on screen instead!
5:52 The bus route your seeing retired in 2024 because most of the passengers use the light rail