Ranks are named for the people who actually did this, and each one tells you what it cost them. The plates on the wall are things a transit agency would be proud of — or quietly ashamed of — and every one teaches something true. A rank is not a badge: it changes how precisely the game does what it told you it would. All of it is read from the engine, not written for this page.
A rank opens on the blended score below — ridership, mode share, coverage, equity, solvency, standing, legacy and honours, eight terms with the arithmetic shown — so it cannot be bought with one good number. What a rank does is narrow the band around every decision: a Draughtsman reading “approval −3” should expect anything from −5 to −1; the Acupuncturist gets −3. Your highest rank ever reached sets the band, so it never widens again.
Harry Beck · London · 1902–1974
Drew the London Underground diagram in 1931, in his own time, while employed as an engineering draughtsman in the signals office. He threw away true geography and drew the network as a circuit: straight lines, 45-degree angles, even spacing between stations, and the Thames as the single concession to the real world. Every metro map on earth is now a copy of it.
Nothing is running yet.
Ebenezer Howard · Letchworth & Welwyn · 1850–1928
A parliamentary stenographer with no training in architecture or planning, he published "To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform" in 1898 and proposed the Garden City: a capped population on land held in common, ringed by a permanent agricultural belt, with the land value uplift returned to the community rather than to landlords. Then he actually built two, at Letchworth in 1903 and Welwyn in 1920.
Something has been drawn.
Frank Pick · London · 1878–1941
Ran London Transport as a design problem. He commissioned the Johnston typeface in 1916, standardised the roundel, hired Charles Holden to build the Piccadilly line stations, and set a rule that every element a passenger touched — sign, seat moquette, ticket, poster, litter bin — was part of one system. He was the reason a Londoner could read the network without being told how.
Under construction, in every sense.
Ildefons Cerdà · Barcelona · 1815–1876
A civil engineer who surveyed working-class Barcelona inside its medieval walls, found life expectancy of 23 years among labourers against 39 among the rich, and concluded the city had to be rebuilt rather than reformed. His 1859 Eixample plan laid a uniform grid across the plain outside the walls, with buildings on two sides of each block only, gardens in the middle, and sunlight and ventilation as design constraints rather than luxuries.
A line exists and people use it.
Frederick Law Olmsted · New York & Boston · 1822–1903
Won the 1858 competition for Central Park with Calvert Vaux and then spent forty years arguing that a park is infrastructure. He sank the park's four cross-town roads below the landscape so traffic could pass without breaking it — a grade-separation idea that predates the motor car — and built the Emerald Necklace in Boston as a drainage system, a flood defense and a park at the same time.
Early days. The shape of something is visible.
Patrick Geddes · Edinburgh & Bombay · 1854–1932
A biologist who came to cities through ecology and left them the rule the profession still quotes: diagnosis before treatment. Survey the place first — its geology, its trades, its people — and let the plan follow from what you found. In the Edinburgh Old Town and later across India he practised what he called conservative surgery: clear the worst, keep the fabric, thread light and air through what stands.
A credible start with room in every direction.
Georges-Eugène Haussmann · Paris · 1809–1891
Given Paris by Napoleon III in 1853 and seventeen years to rebuild it. He drove boulevards through the medieval core, laid some 600 km of sewer, brought in clean water from the Vanne and the Dhuis, built parks at both ends of the city, and set the building code — height, roof angle, stone facing — that still makes central Paris look like one building.
Working, and beginning to matter.
Daniel Burnham · Chicago · 1846–1912
Ran the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and then wrote the 1909 Plan of Chicago, the first comprehensive plan for an American city. It gave Chicago the continuous public lakefront it still has, a regional highway and rail scheme, and a consolidated freight terminal, and it was sold to the public through a civic committee and a school textbook rather than through the council.
Past the demonstration stage and holding.
William Barclay Parsons · New York · 1859–1932
Chief engineer of New York's first subway. He went to London, Paris, Budapest and Glasgow, came back and argued against the deep-bored tube the financiers preferred, on the grounds that a shallow cut-and-cover line with short stairs would actually be used. Ground broke in March 1900; the IRT opened from City Hall to 145th Street in October 1904.
A real system that carries real numbers.
Jane Jacobs · New York & Toronto · 1916–2006
Wrote "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in 1961 against the entire orthodoxy of her profession, and won. Mixed uses, short blocks, old buildings alongside new, dense enough for a street to be watched by the people living on it: the checklist every planning department now recites started as a book arguing that planners had been destroying exactly the neighbourhoods that worked.
A serious regional network, run well.
Shinji Sogō · Japan · 1884–1981
Took over Japanese National Railways in 1955, when every expert view held that railways were finished and the money belonged in highways, and pushed through the Tōkaidō Shinkansen: new standard-gauge alignment, no level crossings, no freight, 210 km/h. It opened nine days before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and changed what a train was understood to be, everywhere.
One of the best systems on the continent.
Jaime Lerner · Curitiba · 1937–2021
An architect who became mayor of Curitiba three times and could not afford a metro, so he built one out of buses. Dedicated center-lane busways, pre-paid boarding through raised tube stations, level entry through wide doors, articulated vehicles: metro capacity and metro dwell times at a fraction of the cost. Bogotá, Mexico City, Istanbul, Guangzhou and most of the world's bus rapid transit descend from it.
A network the rest of the continent studies.
ranks.ts — RANKS, minScore, decisionSpread(); score.ts — scoreVerdict(). Robert Moses is not on the ladder; the reason is in Jane Jacobs’ entry, where it belongs.
Coverage pulls against farebox recovery; expansion pulls against a clean repair backlog. A wall you could sweep by playing well in one direction would be a wall that had not understood its own subject. Bronze is worth 10 honour points, silver 25, gold 50; the hidden ones say nothing until you have done them.
228 plates · 109 bronze · 74 silver · 45 gold · 23 hidden
Open a line and carry a passenger
Track carries nobody. A line is track plus a service plus the vehicles to run it, and plenty of real projects have got the first without the rest.
Open 5 stations
Five stops is a starter line anywhere; the original 1904 New York subway opened with twenty-eight.
Open 10 stations
Ten stations is roughly the whole of the Seattle light rail network on the day it opened in 2009.
Open 10 km of track
Ten kilometres is a single corridor, and a single corridor is where every network that ever worked began.
Run a metro line
A metro is the only mode that can move 30,000 people an hour past a point, and the only one that costs a billion dollars a mile to bury.
Run a commuter rail line
Commuter rail is the cheapest way to reach thirty miles out and the hardest way to fill a train at two in the afternoon.
Run a light rail line
Light rail is the mode American cities have actually built since 1980, because it is the most rail a referendum will pay for.
Run a streetcar line
Every American city over 50,000 people had streetcars in 1920; by 1970 seven did.
Run a bus rapid transit line
Curitiba showed in 1974 that a bus with its own lane and a proper station carries like a train at a tenth of the cost.
Run a bus route
Buses carry half of all American transit trips and get about a tenth of the attention.
Run a ferry
The Staten Island Ferry carries 70,000 people a day for free, and has done since 1997.
Have two lines meet at a station
A transfer is where a line becomes a network; the trips it makes possible are the ones no single line could.
Run three lines at once
Three lines is the point where a map becomes necessary.
Install five station upgrades
A second entrance can add more riders than a new station, at a twentieth of the price.
Open a station with 500 or more parking spaces
A parking garage is the most expensive way ever devised to get a rider to a platform, and in a suburb it is often the only one that works.
Open 25 stations
About the size of the Baltimore Metro and the Miami Metrorail put together, and either would call that a system.
Open 50 stations
Fifty stations is a network people give directions by, which is when it starts changing where they choose to live.
Open 50 km of track
Fifty kilometres is more rail than Houston has built in twenty years of trying.
Run a single line 25 km long
A line this long lives or dies on its speed: at 30 km/h it is a fifty-minute ride nobody chooses.
Have five stations where lines meet
Five interchanges is a grid, and a grid is the shape that serves trips nobody planned for.
Open 5 km of tunnel
Tunnelling costs five to ten times a surface line and is the only way through a downtown that is already built.
Open 5 km of elevated track
Elevated track is a third the cost of tunnel and every neighbour under it knows exactly what it sounds like.
Run eight lines at once
Chicago runs eight rail lines; every one of them is a colour, because Chicago worked out in 1993 that names do not fit on a map.
Install twenty-five station upgrades
Agencies that keep improving stations they already have are the ones whose ridership keeps growing after the opening-day bump.
Make every one of at least ten stations fully accessible
New York has been retrofitting lifts since 1990 and still has a subway that a wheelchair cannot use at two stations in three.
Run a single line with twenty or more stops
The milk trains of the 1920s stopped at every dairy siding, which is where the name comes from; the A train makes forty-four stops and nobody calls it that.
Have four lines call at one station
A grand union is a junction where every line crosses every other; Chicago's Loop has had one since 1897 and Paris's Châtelet–Les Halles serves eight lines.
Have lines of three different modes call at one station
A station where a bus, a tram and a train meet is a network in one building; Hoboken Terminal has done it with a ferry since 1907.
Install every kind of upgrade at one station
Second entrance, lifts, a shop and a car park at one stop is what a suburban rail station looks like in Tokyo, where the station is the town centre.
Open 100 stations
Washington Metro reached a hundred stations in 2022, forty-six years after it opened.
Open 150 km of track
Dallas has the longest light rail network in the country at about 150 km, and the arguments about whether that was the right shape continue.
Run a single line 50 km long
The interurbans of 1910 ran fifty miles between cities on electric cars, and this game is named for them.
Have twelve stations where lines meet
Paris has a métro interchange every few hundred metres downtown, which is why nobody there needs to know the map.
Open 25 km of tunnel
Twenty-five kilometres of tunnel is more than Los Angeles has dug in forty years of subway building.
Run a metro line of five or more stations that never comes to the surface
A fully buried line costs five times a surface one and is the only kind that fits under a city already built; Washington's Red Line runs thirty-two kilometres underground.
Run fifteen lines at once
New York has run out of letters twice: the subway has had a K, an H and a V, and riders still argue about which one went where.
Carry 10,000 weekday journeys
The point at which a line stops being a demonstration project and starts being infrastructure.
Run a line every five minutes or better in the morning peak
Below about a ten-minute headway riders stop reading timetables, and below five they stop checking their phone.
Reach 90% on-time performance
Ninety percent is where most American rail systems report themselves, once the definition of late has been agreed.
Own twenty-five vehicles, with a line running
A vehicle spends about a fifth of its life in the shop, so twenty-five bought is twenty in service.
Run 10,000 vehicle-km on a weekday
Vehicle-kilometres are what service costs; passenger-kilometres are what it earns, and the ratio is the whole business.
Run a line in every period of the week, nights included
New York is one of very few systems on earth that never closes, and it pays for it in maintenance done around moving trains.
Run an express or skip-stop service
The New York subway's four-track express lines are the reason it can serve both Harlem and Wall Street from the same tunnel.
Run a line at the longest train its mode allows
A longer train is the cheapest capacity there is, until the platforms run out.
Give one line a different headway in every one of the six periods
A timetable shaped to the day is cheaper than one flat headway, and harder to remember; the Swiss solve it with clockface patterns that repeat every hour.
Run a line in the two peaks and at no other time
Peak-only service is the most expensive kind there is: the vehicles and crews for three hours a day sit idle for the other twenty-one, and the accountants still call it a saving.
Run a line at night and at no other time
Chicago called them Owl cars in 1900 and London prefixes them with an N; the night bus carries the shift workers the daytime timetable was never drawn for.
Run single-car trains every two minutes in the morning peak
Frequency and length are the two ways to add capacity, and a two-minute headway of one-car trains has chosen the expensive one; Vancouver's SkyTrain runs short trains this often and gets away with it by having no drivers.
Carry 100,000 weekday journeys
Roughly what Portland's entire MAX system carries. A serious network.
Run a line every three minutes or better in the morning peak
The Moscow Metro runs trains ninety seconds apart at rush hour, and has since the 1950s, with no computer in the loop.
Reach 95% on-time performance
Ninety-five percent means one late train in twenty, which a daily rider notices about once a month.
Hold 90% on-time performance for three years
Riders forgive a bad month and remember a bad year; three good ones is what a reputation is made of.
Carry 10,000 a day for a year with almost nobody standing in a crush
Crowding is the one service failure riders never adapt to, and the one an agency cannot fix without buying vehicles.
Own a hundred vehicles, with a line running
A hundred railcars is roughly the fleet of Portland's MAX, and a maintenance bill to match.
Run 100,000 vehicle-km on a weekday
A hundred thousand vehicle-kilometres a day is a mid-sized American rail agency's entire output.
Carry a million passenger-km on a weekday
Passenger-kilometres reward long trips; boardings reward short ones, and which you count decides what you build.
Ten years running with no maintenance backlog at any point
The least glamorous achievement here and the one most real agencies fail. Deferred maintenance is a loan at a terrible rate.
Keep a fleet of twenty or more vehicles above 90% condition
A railcar is designed for thirty years and most get forty, which is not the same thing as looking after them.
Carry 25,000 a day with a transfer on one journey in four
Transfers are the sign a network is doing what a line cannot; riders hate them, and they use them anyway.
Keep a line running for five years while it covers under a quarter of its cost from fares
Every network has one: the route that loses money and cannot be cut, because the people on it have no other way to get anywhere.
Carry 500,000 weekday journeys
Only a handful of North American systems are at this scale. You are one of them.
Carry 1,000,000 weekday journeys
A million a day puts you level with the Chicago L and behind only one other system on the continent.
Hold 95% on-time performance for a full year
Punctuality is bought with maintenance and spare vehicles, and both are the first things cut in a bad budget year.
Own four hundred vehicles, with a line running
Four hundred cars needs a second yard, and yards are the land nobody will sell you.
Carry ten times the weekday riders you carried four years ago
Ridership grows in steps, not slopes: a line opens, the city notices a year later, and the tenfold jump is three decisions made in the right order.
Reach 20% farebox recovery
About where the American bus system as a whole sits; four dollars in five come from somewhere other than the rider.
Reach 40% farebox recovery
About where a well-run US light rail system lands. The rest is somebody else's decision to keep funding you.
Issue a bond
Nearly every mile of rail in America was built on borrowed money, and the arguments were always about who would repay it.
Repay 00 million of debt early
Early repayment is the one thing a board never gets thanked for, and the thing the next board is most grateful for.
Carry 10,000 a day at half the era's going fare or less
New York held its subway fare at five cents from 1904 to 1948, which is most of why the private operators went broke.
Carry 10,000 a day at twice the era's going fare or more
A high fare is a choice about who the system is for; commuter railroads make it deliberately.
Commit a billion dollars of capital
A billion dollars buys about ten kilometres of light rail at surface, or one downtown subway station.
Borrow to within a hundredth of your debt capacity, with fifty million or more outstanding
An agency at its debt ceiling has one lever left, and it is the fare; the MTA reached this point in 2010 and riders have been paying for it since.
Charge double the fare in the morning peak and still carry 10,000 a day
Washington Metro's peak fare is about a third above off-peak and the region complains about it; doubling it is a policy paper made flesh.
Charge nothing at the weekend while charging something on weekdays, with a line running
Weekend riders are the cheapest to carry, since the trains are running anyway; several German cities have tried free Saturdays to get people used to the idea of the tram.
Set a flat fare of exactly .75 and carry someone at it
New York charged .75 a ride from 2015 to 2023, the longest a subway fare has held still there since the nickel; the card itself was retired in favour of tapping.
Reach 60% farebox recovery
Sixty percent is BART on a good year and Toronto on an ordinary one; nobody in the US gets there on buses.
Reach 80% farebox recovery
London's Underground covers its operating cost from fares and then some, which is why its fares are what they are.
Hold an AA rating or better with debt outstanding
Borrowing cheaply is worth more over thirty years than almost any single project decision.
Hold an AA rating or better, with debt outstanding, for four years
Ratings are a memory: one bad year costs a notch and four good ones buy it back.
Issue ten bonds
A regular issuer gets a better price than a rare one, provided the last ten were repaid.
Run ten or more stations for two years with no debt at all
A debt-free agency answers to nobody's underwriter, which is rarer than it sounds and not always wise.
Close three years running without an operating deficit
Most agencies balance a year by cutting service; the trick is to balance three without anyone noticing.
Hold a billion dollars in cash
A reserve is what lets an agency keep running through the year its sales tax collapses.
Earn a tenth of your operating cost from something other than fares
Hong Kong's MTR makes more from property than from trains, which is the secret of its farebox recovery.
Repay every dollar of at least ten million in debt in a single payment
Public debt is refinanced, rolled and restructured; almost nobody simply pays it off, because the day you do, the board asks what the money was for.
Cut the fare and take in more fare revenue four months on than before
Fare elasticity in American transit averages about minus a third: cut the fare and you carry more people and earn less. Beating that means the fare was the thing keeping riders away.
Cover your operating cost from fares alone, a year or more into service
Essentially no US transit system does this. Hong Kong and Tokyo manage it; they also own the land around the stations.
Hold a AAA rating, with debt outstanding, for four years
Only a handful of transit agencies have ever held the top rating, and every one of them has a dedicated tax behind it.
Repay billion of debt early
A billion dollars repaid ahead of schedule is a network that has stopped being a liability on somebody's books.
Run service for ten years without ever closing a year in deficit
In an era subsidised for seventy cents on the dollar this is unusual. Before 1960 it was the only way to survive.
Run a year drawing no operating subsidy worth mentioning
Before 1964 there was no federal operating subsidy at all, and the private companies that ran transit mostly went bankrupt.
Commit ten billion dollars of capital
Ten billion is roughly what Seattle's voters approved in 2008, and what the Second Avenue Subway's first three stations cost.
Reach 50% public approval
Half the region on your side is enough to win a referendum in a good year.
Reach 60% public approval
Transit agencies poll better than almost any other public body, until the fare goes up.
Come through a local election still in office
Transit is on the ballot whether or not it is on the ballot; the board that arrives inherits your budget.
Win a board vote to raise the fare
A fare rise is the one decision a board cannot delegate, which is why it happens so rarely and so late.
Live through ten different events
Nothing in transit goes to plan; the plan is what you do when it does not.
Answer ten board-level decisions yourself
The decisions that reach the top are the ones nobody below wanted to own.
Come through an election with public approval under half
Transit chiefs do not stand for election, but their boards do, and a board elected on an unpopular agency arrives looking for someone to blame.
Gain fifteen points of public approval in a single month
Approval moves fastest on openings; a new line adds more goodwill in its first month than a decade of running it on time.
Hold public approval above 70% for a full election cycle
Approval is what buys you the next referendum. It is also the first thing a fare rise costs you.
Reach 80% public approval
Eighty percent approval is the level at which a mayor starts appearing in your ribbon-cutting photographs.
Come through three local elections
Twelve years is longer than any American transit chief has lasted this century.
Win five board votes to raise the fare
Small regular rises hurt less than one big one; agencies that learn this keep their farebox recovery.
Reach 70% institutional trust
Trust is whether the council believes your cost estimate, and it is built one project delivered on budget at a time.
Live through thirty different events
Thirty different kinds of trouble is a full career's worth, and every one of them has happened to a real agency.
Reach 80% council support outside the sandbox
A board this friendly will vote you the borrowing; it will also expect a station in every member's district.
Run twenty-five stations with almost no local opposition
Opposition to construction is a cost like any other, and the agencies that manage it best are the ones that finish on time.
Within a year of a derailment, hold public approval at 70% or better
A derailment is the event agencies fear most, and the ones that recover are the ones that publish the report before the newspaper does.
Reach 90% public approval
Nine in ten is beyond politics; the network has become part of how the city thinks of itself.
Come through five local elections
Twenty years across five boards is a career, and a network that outlived every politician who voted for it.
Complete every objective in the scenario's mandate
A mandate met is rarer than a network built; most agencies quietly rewrite the promise before the deadline.
Reach 90% institutional trust
An agency trusted this far gets its grants approved on the nod, and one scandal takes a decade of it back.
Reach 5% transit mode share region-wide
Five percent of every trip in the region is already a top-ten American metro.
Put 20% of the metro within walking distance of a stop
Coverage is the number a politician asks for first and a finance director asks about last.
Complete a station-area development
Transit-oriented development takes years to fill, which is why the ridership from it arrives long after the ribbon is cut.
Avert 10,000 tons of CO2 a year, net of what the system emits
A full train averts emissions; an empty one produces them, and a diesel bus with four riders is worse than the cars.
Save the region a million hours of travel a year
Time saved is the largest benefit in every transit business case and the one no rider ever sends a thank-you note for.
Add a hundred thousand residents within walking distance of the network
Population near a stop is the one number that predicts ridership better than anything an agency controls.
Run five lines with no station in common
Parallel lines never meet, and neither do their riders: a network without a transfer is five separate businesses sharing a logo.
Run ten lines of a single mode
A one-mode network is easy to maintain and hard to grow: the mode that fits the trunk is the wrong one for the suburbs, and the other way round.
Have every one of five or more lines call at the same station
A pure radial network is the shape of every American system built before 1950, and the reason every one of them is empty at the weekend.
Reach 10% transit mode share region-wide
Region-wide, not downtown. Only a few US metros are above this, and they spent a century getting there.
Reach 15% transit mode share region-wide
Fifteen percent is Chicago or Boston: a region where not owning a car is a normal thing to do.
Put 30% of the metro within walking distance of a stop
Thirty percent within a walk means the network has left downtown and is serving the places people actually live.
Put 40% of the metro within walking distance of a stop
Coverage and efficiency pull against each other. Getting here means you chose to serve people who will never pay for themselves.
Give the lowest-income quintile at least 75% of the job access everyone else has
Most American networks were drawn for commuters, and the map of who they left out is a map of income.
Land 60% of the region's growth within walking distance of your network
The argument for rail over buses in one number: permanence moves where people build.
Complete five station-area developments
The Tokyo private railways built the suburbs their lines serve and made their money on the houses, not the fares.
Avert 100,000 tons of CO2 a year, net
A hundred thousand tons a year is about twenty thousand cars taken off the road for good.
Save the region ten million hours of travel a year
Ten million hours a year is a thousand working lifetimes, handed back to a region every twelve months.
Cut the region's average commute by two minutes
Two minutes off the average commute, across everyone including the drivers, is a large network doing its job.
Cut peak congestion 10% against the no-transit counterfactual
Transit's biggest effect is on the people who never board it, and this is that effect measured.
Earn one of the city's victory conditions
Every target here is set against the city as you found it, so the bar is honest in New York and in Omaha.
Put a station in every kind of district the city has, from downtown to the office parks
Networks drawn for the commute serve two kinds of place; one that reaches the campus, the warehouses and the mall is serving the trips the census never counted.
Reach 20% transit mode share region-wide
One trip in five is Toronto or Montreal, and no American region outside New York has managed it since 1960.
Reach 25% transit mode share region-wide
New York territory. At this point the network is not serving the city so much as shaping it.
Reach 33% transit mode share region-wide
A third of all trips is Tokyo or Hong Kong, and it is achieved with land use as much as with track.
Put 50% of the metro within walking distance of a stop
Half a sprawling American metro within a walk of rail is close to the practical ceiling, and very expensive to hold.
Give the lowest-income quintile at least 90% of the job access everyone else has
The measure that separates a network built for commuters from one built for a city.
Draw 25 percentage points more growth to your corridors than the region would have seen anyway
Measured against a counterfactual of the same growth with nothing built. This is your doing, not the region's.
Avert a million tons of CO2 a year, net
A million tons a year is the whole climate case for a metro system, and it only appears once the trains are full.
Save the region a hundred million hours of travel a year
At this scale the network is the region's clock: it decides when the workday starts and how far away home can be.
Cut the region's average commute by five minutes
Regional commute times have barely moved in fifty years of road building; five minutes back is a historic result.
Earn three of the city's victory conditions
Three of the six pull in different directions on purpose; holding them together is the skill.
Earn all six victory conditions
No real agency has done all of this at once; the ones that came closest had a century and a monopoly.
Add a million residents within walking distance of the network
A million people within a walk of rail is the difference between a transit system and a transit city.
Take office in Minneapolis–Saint Paul
The Twin Cities tore out 500 miles of streetcar by 1954 and opened their first light rail line fifty years later.
Take office in New York
The subway carries more people before lunch than most American systems carry in a year.
Take office in Chicago
The Loop elevated has run around downtown since 1897, and the city still argues about the noise.
Take office in Boston
Tremont Street, 1897: the first subway in the Americas, dug to get streetcars out of a traffic jam.
Take office in the Bay Area
BART was designed in the 1960s for a region that then voted, county by county, on whether to join it.
Take office in Washington
Metro opened in 1976 with vaulted stations designed to make a subway feel like a civic building.
Take office in Philadelphia
The Market–Frankford line has run since 1907 and still shares the city with trolleys and a subway–surface tunnel.
Take office in Portland
MAX was built with money the region refused to spend on a freeway, which is the whole argument in one decision.
Take office in Denver
FasTracks was voted through in 2004 as a hundred and twenty miles of rail, and the last of it is still not open.
Take office in Seattle
Seattle voted down a federally funded subway in 1970; the money went to Atlanta and built MARTA.
Take office in Los Angeles
Los Angeles once had the largest electric railway on earth and is now rebuilding, mile by mile, what it scrapped.
Take office in Atlanta
MARTA has been fenced in by county votes since 1971, which is why a metro of six million has two rail lines.
Take office in Houston
Houston has two million more people than when it opened its first light rail line in 2004 and most of them drive.
Begin five runs
Nobody gets a network right the first time; the real ones took a century of second attempts.
Take office in three different metros
The same line that fills in Boston runs empty in Houston, and knowing why is most of the job.
Take office in two different decades
In 1920 the problem was too many streetcars; in 1975 it was none. The city was the same one.
Begin twenty runs
Twenty administrations is more than most cities have had transit chiefs since the streetcars went.
Begin five runs in Minneapolis–Saint Paul
The Twin Cities are the game's home metro, and five attempts at them is about how many the region itself has made at a rail network since 1954.
Take office in every one of the thirteen metros
Thirteen regions, thirteen different answers to the same question of how people should get to work.
Take office in all eight decades
A century of American transit in one career, from the interurban to whatever comes after the car.
Still in office after one year
The first year is spent finding out what the last administration did not tell you.
Still in office after three years
Three years is about how long a rail line takes to build once the arguing stops.
Still in office after five years
Five years is a long tenure for an American transit chief; the average is closer to three.
Carry passengers for five years
Ridership takes about five years to settle after a line opens, as the city rearranges itself around it.
Still in office after ten years
Ten years is what a federal funding agreement asks an agency to promise, and what most cannot.
Still in office after twenty years
Twenty years is the design life of a bus and half that of a railcar; you have replaced one and are shopping for the other.
Still running after thirty years
Long enough to have replaced your original fleet, rebuilt your track, and outlasted several administrations.
Reach the end of a ten-year term with the agency still standing
Neither bankrupt nor dismissed: the run simply reached the end of its clock, which is how most real careers end too.
Run a line with a single stop
A line with one station goes nowhere by definition, which has not stopped several from being funded.
Demolish a station
Cities have torn out more transit than they have built; at least yours came down on purpose.
Rename a line
A renamed line costs a new map, new signs and a year of people using the old name anyway.
Withdraw a line
Ending a service is the hardest decision in transit; the riders who remain are the ones with no alternative.
Run a line for a year at under 10% of capacity
Not a failure state — a lesson. Coverage you cannot fill is coverage somebody is paying for. Dallas built the longest light rail network in America this way.
Run a service at over 120% of capacity
Riders are being left on platforms. Popular is not the same as adequate.
Run a line at a four-hour headway in some period
Some American commuter lines really do run three trains a day; the timetable fits on a business card.
Undo ten times in one run
Real agencies cannot undo a station; they call it a study and move it fifty metres.
Open fifty stations in the sandbox
Without a budget every line is worth building, which is exactly why the sandbox teaches less than it seems to.
Run lines in eight different colours
Colour-coding lines dates to 1908 in New York, and every system since has run out of colours that read at a glance.
Have a kilometre of built track that no line uses
Abandoned right-of-way is how half of America's rail trails began, and how several of its light rail lines did too.
Run a skip-stop service
Chicago ran A/B skip-stop on the L from 1948 to 1995, and a generation learned which letter their station was.
Place ten vehicle orders
Railcars are ordered years ahead and arrive late; the agencies that ride out a boom are the ones that ordered before it.
Run a line of five or more stops that is a straight line
A perfectly straight line serves whatever happens to lie along it; the cities that grew up around railways are the ones that bent the railway to reach them.
Run a loop line that ends where it began
The Circle line in London stopped being a circle in 2009 and became a spiral, because a loop with no terminus has nowhere to recover from a delay.
Open a station named after a numbered highway
A station called Route 128 or I-95 tells you what it was built next to and who it was built for; Boston has both, and both are car parks with a platform attached.
Rename lines five times inside a single year
Every rename is a new map, new signs and a year of riders using the old name; Metro Transit renamed its rapid buses three times in a decade and the drivers still say "the 16".
Open a station thirty kilometres or more from the centre of the metro
Thirty kilometres out is where commuter rail earns its name and where every other mode loses money; the Long Island Rail Road runs a hundred and ninety.
Undo twelve times in a row
Twelve consecutive undos is a plan being unbuilt from the end; real agencies do the same thing over a decade and call it a phased approach.
Open ten stations within a kilometre of one another
Streetcars in 1910 stopped every two blocks and it is the reason they averaged eight miles an hour; every modern agency consolidates stops and every neighbourhood fights it.
Run a line of three or more stops that never leaves one census tract
A line inside one tract is a people mover with a timetable; airports build them, and so did Detroit, whose People Mover circles downtown at four percent of its designed ridership.
Run five lines in the same colour
Boston has five Green Line branches and a map that needs letters to tell them apart; colour was supposed to be the thing that made letters unnecessary.
Run two lines with exactly the same stops
Two lines on one set of stops is one line with a headway you have not admitted to; New York runs the N and the W this way on purpose and confuses tourists as a side effect.
Run a line whose track changes between tunnel, viaduct and street six times end to end
Chicago's Blue Line leaves a subway for an elevated, drops into a freeway median and ends in a tunnel under an airport; every change of level is a ramp somebody had to pay for.
Run a full year of the game at the fastest clock
A year at eight times speed is a board that has stopped reading the papers; most of what goes wrong in transit went wrong while somebody was not looking.
Write fifty saves across your career
Fifty saves is a player who has learned what an event can do to a balance sheet.
Run twenty lines in the sandbox
Twenty lines with nobody counting the cost is a map, not a network; the difference is what the rest of the game is about.
Run three lines at once at under a tenth of capacity, a year in
One ghost line is a mistake and three are a policy; Dallas built the longest light rail network in America this way and is still deciding what to do about it.
Build a single stretch of track forty kilometres long with no station on it
The interurbans this game is named for ran forty miles between towns without a stop, which is why they died the moment the road beside them was paved.
No plate matches. to see the whole wall.
achievements.ts — ACHIEVEMENTS, CATEGORIES, HONOUR_POINTS. Most plates carry a progress rule in the game, so the wall can say “34 / 50” rather than only “not yet”. A plate, once earned, is never un-earned.
The score is recomputed from the state every time, never accumulated, so a save cannot drift from it. Every term is normalised against something real and arguable — the anchor is printed beside it — and time in office multiplies what the network is worth rather than adding to it, so thirty years of an empty network scores nothing.
| Component | What is measured | Anchor | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ridership | Weekday journeys per resident | 0.30 a resident is a strong US metro; New York is about 0.45 | 320 |
| Mode share | Share of every regional trip taken by transit — not commutes, not downtown | 5% region-wide is top-ten in the US; 25% is New York | 240 |
| Coverage | Share of the metro within walking distance of a stop | 55% within a walk is about the practical ceiling | 180 |
| Equity | Job access for the lowest-income fifth, against everyone else | 1.0 is parity; under 0.6 the network is built for commuters only | 200 |
| Solvency | Farebox recovery, debt headroom and repair backlog — multiplied, not averaged, so excellence at one does not excuse failing another | 40% recovery is a well-run US light rail system; 55% is excellent | 220 |
| Standing | Public approval × 0.5, council support × 0.3, institutional trust × 0.2 | 85% is about as high as a transit agency ever polls | 160 |
| Legacy | Growth drawn to your corridors above the no-build counterfactual | 35 points above the counterfactual is a region genuinely reshaped | 180 |
| Honours | Honour points earned over the 5,190 on the whole wall. Not multiplied by tenure: a plate is already cumulative | Gold is worth five bronze; several plates are mutually difficult on purpose | 300 |
| Points on the table | Before tenure: 1,500 on the network, 300 on the wall | 1,800 | |
0.55 + 0.7 × √(years ÷ 20)
The seven network terms are multiplied by time in office: ×0.55 on day one, ×1.25 after twenty years, and no higher. A network two decades old has proved something a two-year-old one has not; it must not become the whole game.
score.ts — tenureMultiplier()
10 25 50
109 bronze, 74 silver and 45 gold come to 5,190 points. Earned points scale linearly into the 300 the wall is worth on the score — well under the “no single component can carry a run” line, which is half the top rank.
achievements.ts — HONOUR_POINTS, MAX_HONOUR_POINTS; score.ts — ACHIEVEMENT_WEIGHT
0 · 90 · 190 · 300 · 420 · 550 · 690 · 830 · 990 · 1,180 · 1,400 · 1,650
The score at which each station on the ladder opens. Ranks are a high-water mark: the game remembers the best you have reached across every city, and that is the rank your decisions are read at.
ranks.ts — RANKS, rankFor(), nextRank(); career.ts
realised = declared × (1 + spread × u), u ∈ [−1, 1]
When a memo declares what a choice will do to approval, trust, the council or the cash, the engine realises it inside a band whose half-width is your rank’s spread: ±60% for a Draughtsman, ±5% for the Acupuncturist. The band is symmetric and mean-preserving, so a rank buys certainty, not better odds; the memo prints the band; a cost is a price and never moves. When the realised figure lands more than a point from the declared one, the log says so.
ranks.ts — decisionSpread(); events.ts — decisionConfidence(), choiceBand(), realiseChoiceEffects()
