How Madrid built its metro cheaply

Madrid tripled the length of its metro system in just 12 years — faster and cheaper than almost any other city in the world. What can its expansion teach other cities?

By Ben Hopkinson. He is head of research at Britain Remade, where he works on policy development and analysis. Excerpts:

"In 1995, the Madrid Metro was 71 miles (114 kilometers) long. That would make it the 51st longest metro in the world today, reasonable considering Madrid is the 57th largest city in the world by population. Yet 1995 was the beginning of a revolutionary building spree. Over the course of the next 12 years, the metro grew by 126 miles (203 kilometers), nearly tripling in length. This expansion made it one of the world’s fastest-growing metros, on par with Beijing and Shanghai. Today, Madrid has the sixth longest metro outside of China, and the third longest in Europe after London and Moscow.

The new lines went all over the Community of Madrid, the region the City of Madrid is in. They included links to Madrid’s airport, a new circular line around the city center, extensions into the suburbs packaged with new homes, and new cross-city lines. There was even a circular line connecting five different towns to the southwest of the city of Madrid called MetroSur (South Metro)."

"Madrid was able to build so much because of one thing: low costs. The 35-mile (56 kilometer) program of expansion between 1995 and 1999 cost around $2.8 billion (in 2024 prices). New York’s 1.5-mile extension of the 7 subway to Hudson Yard cost about the same (adjusted for inflation). London’s Jubilee Line Extension, built at the same time as Madrid’s expansion, cost nearly ten times more per mile than Madrid’s program. The World Bank described Madrid’s costs as ‘substantially below the levels that were internationally considered possible’. Since the 1990s, Madrid, and Spain as a whole, has continued to build infrastructure at some of the lowest costs in Europe."

"Madrid’s success provides four key lessons for policymakers and engineers in places that struggle to cheaply build new transit.

• City-level powers rewarded fast, inexpensive delivery. The structure of the Community of Madrid concentrated the planning, funding, and construction powers at the right level to deliver the project. This enabled political entrepreneurs to make electoral promises about delivering new infrastructure and have their political fortunes dependent on success.
• Time is money. The regional government streamlined environmental and planning processes and the company that oversaw construction expedited the building by tunneling 24/7.
• Trade-offs matter and need to be explicitly considered. The metro planners recognized the trade-offs that exist between station design and cost, signaling complexity and how much testing is required, and tried-and-tested technology versus innovation.
• A pipeline of projects enables investment in state capacity. Madrid built the necessary state capacity to deliver the project, with experienced engineers and managers working in-house to deliver the technical design and oversee construction. The public company tasked with construction could pay extra to hire experts and procured based on cost and quality instead of just the lowest-cost bid."

"Former Madrid Metro boss Manuel Melis Maynar’s advice that ‘design should be focused on the needs of the users, rather than on architectural beauty or exotic materials’, wasn’t followed by London’s Jubilee Line Extension, built at the same time as the Madrid Metro extensions. Each of its stations had a different architect, creating large, complex designs with vast chasms between the surface and the tracks. While these were popular with architecture critics – several stations were shortlisted for Britain’s most prestigious architecture award, the RIBA Stirling Prize – they were also expensive to construct. London Bridge’s Jubilee line station cost £217 million in 2024 terms.

Madrid took a different approach. As far as possible, stations were standardized, using copy-and-paste designs. This simplified the engineering and design work required, while construction crews would gain experience and efficiency in building stations. The new stations are simple and replicable and are also easy to navigate. Busier stations have sculptures and murals to add character, a far cheaper way to spruce up a station than building an architectural behemoth. While per-station costs aren’t available, even if the entire budget of the 1995–1999 program was only spent on stations, they would still be just £60 million each in 2024 terms, less than a third as much as London Bridge’s Jubilee line station."