Copenhagen Metro Research Articles

Measuring the service reliability and the passenger experience in frequence-based transport systems

This article explores the application and limitations of operational Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in frequency-based metro systems, specifically focusing on the Copenhagen Metro and Greater Copenhagen Light Rail. Recognizing that currently used KPIs, which primarily measure the frequency of station departures, fails to capture crucial aspects such as travel time reliability and system responsiveness during disruptions, the study proposes a reevaluation of the assessment focus. It delves into alternative measures that consider both the reliability of departures and the quality of the passenger experience. The research methodology evaluates metro performance through a variety of new KPIs, emphasizing time metrics like deviation and stability, thereby providing a more nuanced understanding of service reliability. This preliminary exploration seeks not only to enhance operational assessments but also to aid strategic planning and the execution of improvements within high-frequency public transportation systems. The article underscores the need for more adaptive, comprehensive KPIs that reflect the true operational realities of metro systems, suggesting that such advancements could significantly improve passenger satisfaction and system efficiency.

Innovation through the EIA tender: a case of Copenhagen metro and the SDGs

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a case where the SDGs have been integrated into the tender of an environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the construction of a new metro in Copenhagen, Denmark. The case gives insight into the impact that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can have on three phases of the EIA, namely i. pre-tender, ii. tender, and iii. post-tender process. By using the theoretical framework, ‘spaces for practice’ and action research, the study uses instances of collaboration between actors to understand how an EIA process responds to the introduction of new demands through the EIA tender. The study shows that incorporating SDGs as a part of the EIA tender can be a way of introducing innovations and new methodological approaches to EIA practice and reorienting conventional practices to provide greater opportunity for actor engagement, coordination, and negotiation, with the potential to drive EIA in more goal-orientated directions. In addition, the new spaces for stakeholder interactions have provided opportunities for collaborating on a commonly agreed approach towards SDG-integration, determining the appropriate scope of SDG relevance, and negotiating the role that SDGs should have in the forthcoming EIA process for the Copenhagen Metro project.

Particulate air pollution in the Copenhagen metro part 2: Low-cost sensors and micro-environment classification

In this study fine particulate matter (PM2.5) levels throughout the Copenhagen metro system are measured for the first time and found to be ∼10 times the roadside levels in Copenhagen. In this Part 2 article, low-cost sensor (LCS) nodes designed for personal-exposure monitoring are tested against a conventional mid-range device (TSI DustTrak), and gravimetric methods. The nodes were found to be effective for personal exposure measurements inside the metro system, with R2 values of > 0.8 at 1-min and > 0.9 at 5-min time-resolution, with an average slope of 1.01 in both cases, in comparison to the reference, which is impressive for this dynamic environment. Micro-environment (ME) classification techniques are also developed and tested, involving the use of auxiliary sensors, measuring light, carbon dioxide, humidity, temperature and motion. The output from these sensors is used to distinguish between specific MEs, namely, being aboard trains travelling above- or under- ground, with 83 % accuracy, and determining whether sensors were aboard a train or stationary at a platform with 92 % accuracy. This information was used to show a 143 % increase in mean PM2.5 concentration for underground sections relative to overground, and 22 % increase for train vs. platform measurements. The ME classification method can also be used to improve calibration models, assist in accurate exposure assessment based on detailed time-activity patterns, and facilitate field studies that do not require personnel to record time-activity diaries.

Particulate air pollution in the Copenhagen metro part 1: Mass concentrations and ventilation

The Copenhagen Metro comprises four lines, the M1, M2, M3 and M4, with 25 subterranean stations and an additional 14 stations above ground, serving ca. 80 million passengers annually. In this study we measure fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in stations and in trains across the entire system. In partially underground lines, high PM2.5 concentrations with an average of 109 μg m−3 are found in below-ground stations. The observed correlation between PM2.5 concentration and distance between a station and a tunnel exit is attributed to ventilation via the piston effect. The piston effect via tunnel draught relief shafts was therefore found to be relatively limited. Filter samples of particulate matter are analysed using particle-induced X-ray emission and show an iron content of 88.6 % by mass which is quite different from above-ground particulate matter and consistent with particle production by train wheels, rails and brakes. The average concentration measured at the stations of a recently opened (2019) fully underground M3 closed loop line is 168 μg m−3, further demonstrating that while piston effect-driven ventilation is effective in close proximity to tunnel openings, it is relatively limited via tunnel draught relief shafts. Measurements onboard trains show even higher PM2.5 concentrations and the patterns in CO2 concentrations suggest carriage ventilation by tunnel air. Ventilation via doors during platform stops caused a drop in observed PM (and CO2) at stations, but the system is surprisingly polluted despite its recent construction. CO2 mixing ratios ranged from ambient to around 600 ppm. Measures should be taken to control PM levels using a combination of source control and increased clean air supply of the Copenhagen and other similar metro systems.

Congested metro materialities: how platform escalators afford “friction” in the Copenhagen Metro

ABSTRACT This paper will unfold affordances of the material setting in the Copenhagen Metro and its role for passenger movements and “capacity issues”, zooming in on the role of platform escalators at the underground station of Nørreport. The analysis will focus particularly on “congestions” as causing friction for the vision of the Copenhagen Metro as a “travelator of continuous movement”. However, friction can be understood as equally an impeder and enabler of movement, and although the platform escalators are not innocent, they are also not determining congestions to happen on the platform in a top-down manner. Such situations are equally staged bottom-up by passengers’ embodied practices and their motivations, metro “literacy” and ways of managing the presence of others in the metro. However, the movement possibilities afforded by the material setting can be hard to negotiate for passengers with lesser able bodies or lesser metro literacy. Through empirical examples, the paper contributes with nuanced understandings of “capacity issues”: rather than a pure quantitative mismatch between the amount of platform sqm’s and the number of passengers, capacity issues reflect the multiple affordances of the material setting and how these are negotiated through the agency of human actors in mobile situations. Connecting these insights to design, this paper suggests a dual approach to “solving” capacity issues that simultaneously makes the Metro increasingly well-functioning by reducing the movement impeding friction from the physical setting, while allowing the friction of passengers’ embodied practices as a good accessible and inclusive public space.

Particulate Air Pollution in the Copenhagen Metro Part 2: Low-Cost Sensors and Micro-Environment Classification

Particulate Air Pollution in the Copenhagen Metro Part 2: Low-Cost Sensors and Micro-Environment Classification

Particulate Air Pollution in the Copenhagen Metro Part 1: Mass Concentrations and Ventilation

Particulate Air Pollution in the Copenhagen Metro Part 1: Mass Concentrations and Ventilation

Intra-urban industrial restructuring in the city of Copenhagen: workplaces and employment changes in metro- and non-metro-served areas, 2002-2012

ABSTRACT This study analyses intra-urban locational restructuring in the City of Copenhagen ten years after the opening of the Copenhagen Metro in 2002. The locations and growth dynamics of workplaces and employment are examined by examining changes in entry and exit, growth and decline, and relocation in and out of both metro- and non-metro-served areas of the city. As a result, this study demonstrates the strong spatial restructuring that has taken place in the city of Copenhagen by covering multi-dimensional processes, including sectoral shifts, renewal and relocation.

Transience and Tunnel Esperanto: A study of multilingualism, work and relationship-building on a tunnel mining project

AbstractThis paper investigates multilingualism as language and communication discourses and practices in a Copenhagen metro tunnel construction project. This project is characterized by transience: continual time-space changes of work organization and staff relations combined. In this scenario, a highly international and multilingual staff composition puts focus on language and communication. Based on interviews with managers and workers from one of the project’s contractors, as well as observations of daily work in the tunnels, the analysis demonstrates participants’ discursive constructions oflanguageandcommunication, sometimes linking these concepts to work, sometimes to relationship-building. I argue that these constructions are closely interlinked with the workplace’s transient status and conditions, and draw out how they have empowering as well as exploitative implications for the workers.

Active Enactment and Virtuous Circles of Employment Relations: How Danish Unions Organised the Transnationalised Copenhagen Metro Construction Project

Transnational workers on large-scale construction projects are often poorly included in national industrial relations systems, which results in employment relations becoming trapped in vicious circles of weak enforcement and precarious work. This article shows how Danish unions have, nonetheless, been successful in enacting existing institutions and organising the construction of the Copenhagen Metro City Ring, despite initially encountering a highly fragmented, transnational workforce and several subcontracting firms that actively sought to circumvent Danish labour-market regulation. This is explained by the union changing their organising and enforcement strategies, thereby utilising various power resources to create inclusive strategies towards transnational workers. This includes efforts to create shared objectives and identity across divergent groups of workers and actively seeking changes in the public owners’ attitude towards employment relations.

Spatial restructuring and uneven intra-urban employment growth in metro- and non-metro-served areas in Copenhagen

This paper addresses the wider benefits of major investments in urban transport and discusses the relevance of giving attention to time and geographical scale in the analysis of employment growth before, under and after the introduction of new urban transport infrastructure. Using descriptive statistics in combination with OLS modelling, the paper analyses the intra-urban employment growth by workplace in regard to the opening of the Copenhagen Metro in 2002. The study identifies strong employment growth in the case of Copenhagen and higher employment growth in metro-served areas compared to non-metro-served areas in the first ten years after the opening of the Metro. The study also finds that when zooming in on the local scale, employment growth has been unevenly distributed along the metro corridor leading to a spatial restructuring of intra-urban employment patterns. This highlights that geographical scale and time is of critical importance when addressing the development of employment in areas that have witnessed investment in infrastructure. Moreover, the paper shows that especially the existing urban structures of the built environment, supporting planning policies, the local economic context and the preconditions for the development seems to be of great importance when assessing intra-urban restructuring of employment.

Swimming or Drowning in the Depths of Partnership

AbstractThis exploratory research paper seeks to consider the problems that may arise in the process of creating deep and lasting partnerships in public‐private partnerships (PPPs). It does this by contrasting two case studies of very different PPPs, Copenhagen's metro project and Melbourne City Link. The paper puts forward the case for the author's concern that a deep partnership could lead either to mercantile government or quasi‐governmental private parties and thus lead to a diminution of the benefits of PPPs. The paper concludes that these concerns are relevant and need to be considered and guarded against no matter the contract conditions.

Creating Copenhagen's Metro – On the role of protected spaces in arenas of development

The conception of Copenhagen's Metro is analysed as part of a strategy to rescue Copenhagen from a stalemate in transportation and city space planning and to transform it into a pole in Europe and the locomotive of Denmark's development. Through an arenas of development (AoD) analysis, we argue that Copenhagen's economic difficulties were due to three arenas: Denmark's national transportation strategy; the regional fiscal balance; and Copenhagen's transportation and planning. To remedy this stalemate, the Danish national government and Copenhagen's administration were instrumental in staging a new arena, the Metropolitan Area problem, which made possible the creation of protected spaces for policy changes, transportation solutions, and a redefinition of Copenhagen's Metropolitan Area.

Effects of Job Accessibility Improved by Public Transport System: Natural Experimental Evidence from the Copenhagen Metro

This study examines the effect of accessibility to urban jobs via a public transport system on individual earnings and commuting behaviour. The effect of improved public transport based accessibility on these outcomes is determined by exploiting the exogenous variation in access to a public rail and Metro system resulting from the construction of a new terminal Metro station connecting southern townships to Copenhagen city centre. The results show that public transport based job accessibility has a positive and permanent effect on individual earnings. The increase in earnings is associated with a change in commuting patterns as the improved access to public transport facilitates a shift from employment within the township to better paid jobs in the city centre, as well as in other suburbs of the Copenhagen Metropolitan area.

Construction challenges for urban tunnelling – The Copenhagen Metro Circle Line

AbstractThe Cityringen (The City Circle) project is the latest phase of the metro system in Copenhagen, Denmark. The phase comprises the construction of 17 new stations, three shafts, a control and maintenance centre and 16.5 km of twin‐tube tunnel excavated by four Earth Pressure Balance TBMs. The design and build contract was awarded in January 2011 and inauguration is planned for late 2018.The geology in the project area includes 10 to 30 m of Quaternary sand, gravel and clay tills underlain by limestone, often containing benches of flint or other hard horizons. The stations and shafts are constructed with secant pile walls or diaphragm walls. Permeation grouting is undertaken for one cavern and grouting for the break‐in and break‐out of the TBMs.Groundwater control is carried out by pumping from abstraction wells at the bottom of the deep excavation, treating the abstracted groundwater and recharging between 95 and 100 % of the groundwater.A monitoring system consisting of a comprehensive database system has been adopted, where real time information from the TBMs and from buildings and structures adjacent to the works is collected. Movement is monitored by an extensive 3D monitoring system together with extensometers, inclinometers and piezometers.

Preview: Geomechanics and Tunnelling 3/2014

AbstractMetros in large cities / U‐Bahnen in GroßstädtenDavid Cyron̆, S̆tefan Ivor, Petr Hybský, Karel Rossler: A new dimension for the Prague MetroMarc Comulada, Carlos Henrique Turolla Maia, Hugo Cassio Rocha: Urban shield tunnelling developments applied for the extension of Sao Paulo's MetroSoren Eskesen, Jared Stubbs, Enrico Paulatto: Construction challenges for urban tunnelling – The Copenhagen Metro circle lineOskar Sigl, Bernard Millen, Giorgio Höfer‐Öllinger: Rock mass behaviour of weathered, jointed and faulted Khondalite – Examples from the underground crude oil storage caverns, Visakhapatnam, India

Transit Oriented Development in Copenhagen, Denmark: from the Finger Plan to Ørestad

Ørestad is Copenhagen’s linear new town being built over a 30year period around stations on an elevated, driverless mini-metro line. Copenhagen Metro’s construction was to be financed by the sale to developers of publicly-owned land along the route. The Øresund Bridge from Malmö in Sweden also facilitates substantial international commuting by rail and road to Ørestad. This paper briefly assesses Copenhagen’s 60year record of transit-oriented development since its internationally renowned 1947 Finger Plan. It focuses principally on analysing Ørestad’s progress since the late 1990s in creating transit-oriented development of jobs, housing and retail, education and leisure facilities. The paper finally examines how Ørestad is contributing to Copenhagen’s economic growth and relieving pressure on Copenhagen’s Central Business District.

Safety walkarounds predict injury risk and reduce injury rates in the construction industry

"Safe Workplace"-a simplified and educational version of the Finnish building construction methodology involving safety walkarounds where a number of safety indicators are inspected and evaluated-is in widespread use in the Danish construction sector to evaluate physical safety standards proactively at construction work sites. Data from the construction of the Copenhagen Metro were analyzed to determine the method's ability to predict injury risk related to joint responsibilities and individual worker responsibilities. A statistically significant association between the risk level as measured by the Safe Workplace methodology and injury risk was found. The relative risk of injury increased with the number of safety indicators violated and was elevated for safety indicators reflecting both individual and joint safety responsibility. The observed injury risk was not elevated in the post-safety walkaround period for safety indicators of individual responsibility, but the joint responsibility indicators retained an elevated injury risk level. The data support the hypothesis that safety walkarounds both predict and prevent injuries. Safety indicators of individual responsibility are more likely to be corrected than those of joint responsibility.

Disability retirement among workers involved in large construction projects

The aim of this study was to evaluate the incidence of disability pension among workers engaged in the construction of the Øresund Link or the Copenhagen Metro, representing high levels of safety management. The study subjects (n = 1,808) were followed for disability retirement. Age standardized incidence ratios (SIRs) were calculated and compared with SIRs of disability pension established in a previous study of workers engaged in the construction of the Great Belt Link (N = 5,882), representing a low level of safety management. Compared with all economically active men, the age SIR of disability retirement was 2.22 (95% CI = 1.61, 2.98) among the study subjects and 2.29 (95% CI = 1.9, 2.67) among workers at the Great Belt Link. No significant progress was found in the incidence of disability pension among the study subjects despite substantial improvements in safety management compared with the Great Belt Link.

Cost Overruns and Demand Shortfalls in Urban Rail and Other Infrastructure

Risk, including economic risk, is increasingly a concern for public policy and management. The possibility of dealing effectively with risk is hampered, however, by lack of a sound empirical basis for risk assessment and management. This article demonstrates the general point for cost and demand risks in urban rail projects. The article presents empirical evidence that allow valid economic risk assessment and management of urban rail projects, including benchmarking of individual or groups of projects. Benchmarking of the Copenhagen Metro is presented as a case in point. The approach developed is proposed as a model for other types of policies and projects in order to improve economic and financial risk assessment and management in policy and planning.