Railways started to operate in Finland in 1862 from Helsinki to Hämeenlinna, 100 km's north from Helsinki. Public transport in the city of Helsinki started in 1888 with horse drawn carriages. First horse tram rails were laid in 1981 and electric power was taken into service in 1900.
Motor bus services started to grow in 1920's to the directions were rails were not built. For the first there was plenty of independent companies, but during the World War II Helsinki city bought the united transport company that was then organized to City Transport Authority.
Tramways expanded to the 1950's. New rolling stock was purchased for suburban services. Helsinki population expanded and suburbs were built outside the old city center. The public transport was planned to take care with high speed tram lines using multiple unit tram trains.
But then the automotive industry learned to make cars cheaper and cheaper, and the labor parties proposed in Helsinki City Council, that public transport must be put under ground to free the streets for private cars.
During the 1960's plans were made to replace plenty of old buildings in the city center with motorways. Tramways were planned to close and public transport would be taken care with an underground system.
The motorway building was luckily cancelled, but in 1968 Helsinki signed an order to be a pilot customer for Valmet rail industry as new age metro train production. In Valmet the managers thought that the demand for heavy metro trains would explore in the world at the time the high cost of metro building led into cancellation of metro plans in many cities.
The key features of Valmet metro trains was welded aluminum body and 3-phase brushless drive motors with semiconductor control. These really were revolutionary technologies, but unfortunately applied to wrong kind of rolling stock. And what was also sad was, that these revolutionary trains were the largest in the world being wider than wide Finnish railway loading gauge, 3200 millimeters. This making the track geometry much similar to railway lines and difficult to implement into a city structure.
Soon after the metro decision the closure of the tramway system was cancelled and new articulated trams was ordered. Railways local traffic was developed to a S-Bahn-like style, and one commuter train line was built during 1970's. But the road traffic started to dominate Helsinki area transport. Metro line replaced the buses on the motorway beside. The bus lines were cut to end to metro stations, and the connecting service system had born. This extended the travelling times. During the operating of the metro the share of public transport has decreased from 70% to the recent 40%.
Helsinki has planned to extend the metro line to the western neighbour city Espoo. This has caused a long political war since 1980's. With it's low population density, Espoo is not interested in investing to a heavy metro and cut the straight bus lines to connecting service. Neither is Espoo interested in increasing the population density, as it prefers to offer a higher living quality alternative on the Helsinki urban area.
Light Rail has been taken as an alternative in Espoo. A pressing group started to promote Light Rail in 1989, and the city of Espoo adopted the idea soon. The Ministry of Transport and the Helsinki area cities called 3 auditors to evaluate the Helsinki urban area transportation system in 1992, and the auditors analysis supported the idea of a Light Rail system to the area. But Helsinki is strongly against Light Rail to enter the area to compete against it's heavy metro.
Commuter trains connect suburbs and neighbour cities to Helsinki. They have own rails for the nearest distances from Helsinki, where the service frequency is high. Pure connecting bus service was planned for trains too, but for public resistance part of the straight bus services has remained.
New low floor trams were delivered to Helsinki from 1999. Some minor extensions of tram lines has been built for few new areas, but the Helsinki authorities consider trams as slow street tram system not capable for suburban service.
At the moment Helsinki has 555,000 inhabitants and population density is 3020 pers./sqkm. Helsinki city urban area has 1.2 million inhabitants with population density of 405 pers./sqkm. Urban area includes plenty of forest, so the population density at the built areas varies from 1000 to 1700 pers./sqkm.
The 120 units tram fleet carries daily 193,000 passengers. 108 metro coaches
carry 182,000 and 167 commuter trains 88,000 passengers. So the trams are the
most important public rail transport system even though the network covers only
the city centre area of Helsinki.
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This page created at 25.3.2003 / AA.