[1] The metro connects with the City Rail and Nizhny Novgorod Central Diameters systems at the Moskovskaya station.

Developing design documentation, modifying roads and tram lines, and demolishing houses were time-consuming.

The first line was 7.8 km (4.8 mi) long, with six stations (Moskovskaya, Chkalovskaya, Leninskaya, Zarechnaya, Dvigatel Revolyutsii, and Proletarskaya), a depot and an engineering building.

Throughout Russia, segments which opened in the early 1990s were mainly completed; bankrupt companies and workers struggled to finish them.

[6] On March 1, 2022, construction began on two stations in the Upper City on Line 1: Ploschad Svobody and Sennaya.

The second stage, the Line 2, would run west from Moskovskaya station into the Sormovsky City district or Sormovo.

The third stage would incorporate a combined auto-metro bridge across the Oka, bringing the Avtozavodskaya Line into the city centre.

The fourth and final stage would be the Line 2 to the Meshcherskoye Ozero residential area north-west of the railway station, on the Volga.

The order in which the stages were opened was influenced by industry-specific Soviet-era passenger flow and the depot-placement issue; cross-river traffic was less heavy.

During the Soviet era, the line was called Avtozavodsko-Meshcherskaya and was intended to last until the residential micro-district near Meshchersky Lake was built.

Despite a longer line than other Russian Metro systems at the time (including Novosibirsk, Samara and Yekaterinburg), its passenger traffic was one of the lowest with a 16.8 million annual ridership in 2004.

In comparison, the Novosibirsk system had almost double the annual ridership of the Nizhny Novgorod Metro.

The first was the extension of the Sormovskaya Line to the Strelka station, near the Nizhny Novgorod Stadium for the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

The third proposal is the eastern extension of the line in the city centre, with construction of the Operny Teatr and Sennaya stations.