The Unique Railways of Brussels

The pre metro concept is certainly unique and show good long term planning. Do you think that if you had the chance to plan a city from scratch, public transportation should be done in a way that is like maybe bus, pre tram, tram, pre metro, metro? Since I know that one of the big points you like to make is using the right tool/mode for demand.

Still waiting for prague😢

I seem to have missed the memo that turning loops are now outdated… Seems to be more of a personal opinion again.

Il faut plus de lignes de métro à Bruxelles

Some of the tram routes have a significant amount of reserved track once they get into less urban areas – particularly thr 39 and 44 out towards Tervuren.

Great video! When you said the thing about turning loops for trams I thought about my city, Rotterdam, where the tramnetwork is pretty old fashioned compared to Brussels. Maybe you can do a video about it someday!

Love it! Thanks for doing Brussels. Belgium has a very long history with trains, once having a major railcar manufacturing industry. It still has the busiest rail tunnel in the world and one of the highest passenger rail kilometers per capita.

As a person living in Brussels, loving the city while seeing its problems (helps not to be Belgian), I think your video is somewhat too positive. Sure, the long-term planning of pre-metro in 60s was great, however, the city also banked heavily on car-centered infrastructure – the decision that it's been now slowly fixing for the past 10 years (the progress is very clear!).

On the metro however, I think the system is really not that good – in fact, I would say one of the worse in Europe. First, in spite of official 4 lines, in reality it only has 2.5. Second, the coverage is quite poor – there are several important locations, and even whole neighborhoods that are not connected (mostly the poorer Western communes – Ganshoren, Jette, Saint-Agathe – but also spots like Jourdan or Flagey). Third, mismanagement and budget overrun of the M3 projects are forcing the regional government to omit other potential extensions and pushing the public opinion against the metro (already many civil society groups protesting and even asking to stop the M3 project). Of course, I hope it goes through and Brussels gets a system that the EU capital deserves, but it's not easy in the Belgian political system (which alarmingly leaves the country capital behind).

do Chinese metros.

You should do Belgrade, Serbia.

How does work a city with 2 million people and no metro.
How it had perfectly located rail station, only for it to be relocated 5km from city center and make way for Dubai style high raise.

It's a national sport here in Belgium to bash/hate on public transit & most are justified doing so.
Overall, the metro system in Brussel is a breeze to use, very much on time, except one odd incident a year. And the app with QR code, to buy tickets from your mobile phone, present it to a scanner on the gate & you're through!
There are also other ways:
Buy a ticket from a vending machine,
Badge with your credit card directly,
With the application, as described above.
And, the good thing is with 1 ticket, you can go anywhere, since it's valid for 1 hour 😀
Would be nicer if the metro was designed to cover every neighborhood in Brussel, but that's a question of budget. Even the new M3 line is experiencing severe cost-overruns due to "unforseen" geological conditions.

The fact that you didn't include the new tram line 10 that opened the day of the upload is unfortunate. Now the video is already outdated. 😅 Still free engagement I guess.

I always find the S-train branding funny as they haven't really done anything to deserve that title. Unlike in Germany or France where they were specifically constructed to move large volumes of people efficiently, here they're just the remnants of the old heavy rail network with a lick of new paint. It's run by the national railway service and not the local transit agency, which should say enough.

The "RER" project is extremely slow…
When i was a kid, we had the "L" trains (local trains), but nobody really knew these lines because nobody cared and rolling stock was outdated.
Then, the first step toward a regional express network was to rebrand some "L" lines into "CR" lines, for "City Rail". Rolling stock was painted a bit and modified to accept cyclists (probably mountainbike olympic medalists able to jump aboard these super old trains with their bikes).
And then they converted these lines into "S" lines, for "Suburban", with some decent communication about the network lines, a few new stops and the schuman-josaphat tunnel.
Next step will be to finalize the doubling of tracks on every major inbound line… this still has some way to go… Doubling of frequencies won't happen before that, i'm afraid. Until then, the S-trains don't really benefit intra-brussels mobility.
Take the example of the municipalities Uccle and Forest. They have an S-train line with 3 stops in Uccle (Moensberg, Caelvoet, Stalle) and one in Forest (Forest-Est). Yet, they are served by 1 train per hour… this is pretty much useless. The line could serve as a form of north-south metro, helping locals reach downtown Brussels in 10-15 minutes only… but here you need to quadruple frequency to see any use.

For being a capital city that belongs to a country that is governed by a myriad of governments who are built on linguistic fault lines, the Brussels transport provider MIVB/STIB manages to be the best public transport provider of Belgium. I only hope the national railways and Flemish bus & tram service someday to be able to compete with the quality that MIVB/STIB offers.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but it would be interesting to see a video about the Porto metro.
The system is a bit of a combination of light rail, metro and suburban rail, with an S-Bahn adjacent layout.
It's also the first European metro to use Chinese trains.

How is are Venezuelan gangs working out with the Latino gangs on the south side such as the Satan Disciple’s, Latin Kings, Saints, Gangster two six ?

I think there is one big elephant in the room in transit in Brussels, namely that the trains are run by the national company and the STIB/MIVB do not run any. This leads to the train company focusing pretty much exclusively on regional, intercity and international lines and only doing suburban or city lines as an afterthought. The train company would be perfectly happy ignoring Brussels if it wasn’t so central.
I lived in a number of areas in the city and you’d have these beautiful rail lines, sometimes 4 lines, electrified, perfect, which could connect a lot of the outer parts of town… running 2 trains per hour. Because they are trains set up to go to some small village out in the countryside, even though there are tons of people close by without a station, or having a station but low frequency or little choice in destinations, ending up having to take slow buses, and frequently the car

They'll also have a new pretty long tramline all the way from Brussels to Willebroek.
But they didn't even start working on it yet as of now.

Also, Antwerp has a pretty big tram/pre-Metro network with lots of underground trams going underneath the whole city and the "Schelde"

As a train driver here, a train every 15 minutes is not feasable at all, mostly because staff, train and infrastructure shortage. And we're all used to driving to different places, staying within brussels won't get many motivated

6:17 the east west pre metro was opened in the 1960s ; it was the full metro that was opened in the mid 1970s.

Very happy to see a video from my adopted home. Hanover is next, right? 😍

There were excellent comments on what the S-Train system is lacking, so im not gonna add to them, but one thing you did not mention is that the neighbourhoods to the South East (Elsene/Ixelles and Uccle) are severely underserved by rail, with no immediate plans to rectify that, unfortunately…

As a Belgian thank you for this video. The internet decided to hate Brussels, so i think its refreshing to watch a positive video about my capital city.