Metro station
A station provides a means for passengers to purchase tickets, board trains, and evacuate the system in the case of an emergency.
The location of metro stations are carefully planned to provide easy access to important urban facilities such as roads, commercial centers, major buildings and other transport nodes.
The barrier may be operated by staff or more typically with automated turnstiles or gates that open when a transit pass is scanned or detected.
[5] Access from the street to ticketing and the train platform is provided by stairs, concourses, escalators, elevators and tunnels.
[6] A subway station may provide additional facilities, such as toilets, kiosks and amenities for staff and security services, such as Transit police.
In some stations, especially where trains are fully automated, the entire platform is screened from the track by a wall, typically of glass, with automatic platform-edge doors (PEDs).
These open, like elevator doors, only when a train is stopped, and thus eliminate the hazard that a passenger will accidentally fall (or deliberately jump) onto the tracks and be run over or electrocuted.
The doors add cost and complexity to the system, and trains may have to approach the station more slowly so they can stop in accurate alignment with them.
The tunnel for Paris' Concorde station is decorated with tiles spelling the Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen.
On the Tyne and Wear Metro, the station at Newcastle United's home ground St James' Park is decorated in the clubs famous black and white stripes.
Some metro systems, such as those of Naples, Stockholm, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tashkent, Kyiv,[7] Montreal, Lisbon, Kaohsiung and Prague are famous for their beautiful architecture and public art.
The Paris Métro is famous for its Art Nouveau station entrances; while the Athens Metro is known for its display of archeological relics found during construction.
And the London Underground is famous for its oxblood red faïence blocks including pillars and semi-circular first-floor windows station buildings designed by Leslie Green.
Sir Norman Foster's new system in Bilbao, Spain uses the same modern architecture at every station to make navigation easier for the passenger, though some may argue that this is at the expense of character.
Metro stations usually feature prominent poster and video advertising, especially at locations where people are waiting, producing an alternative revenue stream for the operator.
Recently, stations have appeared with monolithic concrete and steel instead of assembled pieces, as Ploshchad Tukaya in Kazan.
In the Moscow Metro, approximately half of the stations are of shallow depth, built in the 1960s and 1970s, but in Saint Petersburg, because of the difficult soil conditions and dense building in the centre of the city this was impossible.
[9] Depending on the type of station, the rings transmit load to the columns either by "wedged arches" or through Purlins, forming a "column-purlin complex".
In the Saint Petersburg Metro, pylon stations include Ploshchad Lenina, Pushkinskaya, Narvskaya, Gorkovskaya, Moskovskie Vorota, and others.
Not long after, the first two-level single-vault transfer stations were opened in Washington DC in 1976: L'Enfant Plaza, Metro Center and Gallery Place.
In the Saint Petersburg Metro all single-vault stations are deep underground, for example Ozerki, Chornaya Rechka, Obukhovo, Chkalovskaya, and others.
