golodhendil
Active Member
I mean, goodness gracious, of course "metro" is short for metropolitan - it is where the short form came from! Whether it was a direct adoption of the term or a sort-of rederivation (as is the case for DC, but which explicitly chose the "metro" moniker for its worldwide reference to rapid transit - go look up the history), there is little ambiguity among anyone that "metro" refers to the rail system in the context of transit. Just go on the street in DC and ask anyone to take you to the metro - no one is going to take you to a bus stop (unless you specify Metrobus; or unless you're in one of those American cities that futilely try to brand their bus systems as "Metro" in order to attract ridership, such as Cincinnati). And so what if the systems aren't exclusively in underground ROWs? Even the original lines of the original Metro has significant aboveground / elevated sections. No one in Paris, in the 1900s or nowadays, would call the elevated sections anything other than Metro, just like no one in London would call a "non-tube" section of the Tube anything other than Tube/Underground, or no one here would call the aboveground sections of our subway anything other than subway.You've reverted to my comment about Metro meaning Metropolitan, like the DC Metro is shorted from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, such systems do not refer exclusively to an underground right-of-way.
Then your doubt could have been cured easily by a simple Wikipedia or Google search, if you don't feel like checking the respective system's websites (or, here you go: метро, メトロ, 메트로), and transliterate the Cyrillic, Katakana or Hangul into Latin alphabet and see what they say. Or just check their English websites and read their official English names. And even if it were all just Westerners projecting their own terminology, why would they have used "Metro" if that word, to quote yourself, "only means metropolitan, nothing specific about transit"? (Of course, the East Asian systems also have a common term derived from their common linguistic tradition of translating, rather than transliterating, foreign terms into Sinic ones - 地鐵/地下鉄/지하철, or literally "underground railway")Also, I highly doubt Russia, Japan, China, and Korea use the English/French term of Metro, but have their own native language term, which we replace with what Westerns might call it.
Um, double-u tee eff? So underground railways built by cut-and-cover (such as the MetR and the District, or the Paris Metro, and pretty much at least parts of most systems) are suddenly "surface transit"? I mean, one can reasonably point out the difference between a cut-and-cover underground vs a deep-bore tube, but to consider the former to not be underground at all? Are you sure you know what you're talking about? If you are going to quote Wikipedia almost verbatim, at least read a couple of sentences further down.Until the 1890s there were not underground railroads, unless you count the Thames Tunnel or other Brunel rail bridges, so what a surface railroad called itself is immaterial to the question of what subsurface transit was called after the innovation of tunnelling supportive shields. To take that tact, the Tower Subway was built in 1869, which was the template used by C&SLR in the 1890s for the first 'tube'.
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