Platform for the future: How the metro is transforming the way Copenhagen moves

By Luca Meregalli, Project Director, Hitachi Rail

Perhaps the most valuable part of any journey is what you learn along the way.

When we started the Copenhagen Metro journey twenty years ago, to an extent we were travelling into the unknown – the very idea of driverless trains sounded like something from the pages of a science fiction novel. But two decades later these trains provide a transport heartbeat to one of Europe’s great cities, serving 39 stations and carrying now ten million passengers per month.

If you put this into a global context, it’s a good example of the kind of project we have to deliver if we want to reach net zero. One of the important things we need to do is to get more people to use public transport and I believe that our work in Copenhagen is a clear demonstration of what can be achieved when we all pull together.

The key to this success story is the passion to turn technology into safe and reliable mobility. Data powered our first journeys – it informed the collaboration with our client and the decision-making that set us on our way. Data told us more about people’s habits, we expanded to a 24/7 service in 2009 and we haven’t looked back since. For me, this is the moment where the Metro’s driverless trains became an integral part of living in the city – it was no longer a “nice-to-have”, it was a “must-have”.

The next stage of the evolution was when we opened the Cityringen in 2019. An entirely underground 17-stop 15.5 km loop through central Copenhagen and Frederiksberg, it connected the Metro with the rest of the city’s transport network. Data drives the efficiency of the service and Cityringen quickly opened up better and more affordable access to the city and its key hubs.

At the heart of this evolution is smart mobility, the delivery of digital solutions that improve and optimise the whole transport system – things like smart ticketing, real-time information updates and integrated multi-modal traffic management. Twenty years ago, our stations were served by traditional ticketing machines but by 2005 Denmark was pioneering a smart ticketing approach and the development of technology and smart phones specifically have really unlocked the possibilities for smooth, safe and efficient travel around the city.

For example, for the opening of the Tour de France in Denmark this summer we had more than 500,000 people travelling on the Metro in one day with punctuality close to perfection – this meant we were offering half a million people a sustainable and social choice, something we could only have dreamed of even five years ago.

As a social innovation business, Hitachi’s role is to pioneer the data-driven technology which powers projects such as the Copenhagen Metro. In this case, the foundation is to provide the technology which underpins a safe and efficient transport system but increasingly our role is to optimise the journey experience through data-driven solutions such as smart mobility.

And, as we said at the start, we learn as we go along – we can see the impact of such huge numbers of people using the Metro today and our job now is to keep investing in the right technology for tomorrow. Just as data has powered the Copenhagen Metro journey so far, data is the key to the next stage of the journey as it informs the important decisions that we make for the future.

Ultimately, we want to attract more people to use the Metro which means we need to improve the service and data is the brain which helps us optimise our resources to operate and maintain the whole system. This includes everything you can see as part of your journey experience, but it also includes many things you can’t see such as predictive maintenance, seamless monitoring of conditions, wear, noise and vibrations.

Two decades on, our customers’ expectations are higher than ever but with technology and data on our side, I believe Hitachi can go beyond these expectations and continue to deliver a sustainable and future-fit Metro system for this great city.