A plan to link Tehran’s old Mehrabad Airport to Imam Khomeini International Airport (IKIA) through by subway has now been placed on the top of the Tehran Metro Company agenda, director general of the company Habil Darvish said at the weekend.
“One of the key projects for the current Iranian year (started March 21) is completion of the metro link between IKIA and Parand Station—in Tehran Province, which would later be extended to the planned Aftab International Exhibition station in Aftab city, south of the capital,” he said. The government is supposed to meet the investment needs of the project “and the Tehran Municipality will help fund the new subway lines,” he said without elaboration, the local media reported.
The company is also responsible for completing the construction of Mehrabad Airport metro station till the end of April, the managing director of the airport Ali Rostami said.
Tehran Metro
The Tehran metro is a rapid transit system--a high-capacity public transport system operating in urban areas across continents - that consists of four operational metro lines and a fifth regional rail line. Services operate between towns and cities with more stops over shorter distances than intercity rails.
There are also two lines under construction which would connect the huge and expanding metropolis from southeast to northwest (Lines 6 and 7). The lines use standard gauge and are mainly underground. Ticket price is fixed for each journey, regardless of the distance traveled, but with prepaid tickets (electronic cards) the costs are less.
Seniors may travel free on the metro. On all Tehran metro trains the first, second, and the last carriages are reserved for women, while they can still use other carriages freely. According to the available data, the number of carriages has increased dramatically from 60 in 1999 to 1,080 currently.
Statistics
The number of trips made so far on the Tehran subway exceeds 5.5 billion a year. Considering the country’s 80 million population, the metro has carried 60 times the entire population which puts it in tenth place globally in terms of the number of passengers.
It carries more than 3 million passengers a day, the deputy for technical research at the metro company Mohammad Montazeri says. Currently there are 148 cities across the world with access to subway transport, reportedly carrying 150 million passengers across major cities, junctions and satellite towns, especially people shuttling between distant low-cost suburbs and the workplace in the sprawling cosmopolitan areas where housing is simply unaffordable for many fixed-wage earners.
