The metro spread from five European capitals to every inhabited continent — and Asia built most of its systems after 2000

From London (1863), Budapest (1896), Paris (1900), Berlin (1902) and Athens (1904) to the wave of Chinese and Indian openings in the 2010s–2020s. The source snapshot counts 214 cities in 63 countries operating 957 metro lines as of 16 May 2026 (en.wikipedia.org); this page plots the … system records present in the extracted excerpts, covering … cities in … countries — a partial view, not the full worldwide table. Years follow the source convention: when commercial service at metro standards began.

1863

first service opened 1863–1949 1950–1989 1990–2009 2010–2026 · dot size grows with the number of listed systems in the city

Dots sit on approximate city-centroid positions inferred for plotting only — they are not station coordinates. Drag the slider or hover a city for its systems and opening years.

The first four decades were entirely European: London (1863), Budapest (1896), Paris (1900), Berlin (1902) and Athens (1904) — Buenos Aires (1913) was the first system in this set outside Europe. en.wikipedia.org

Mainland China's first subway was Beijing (1971) and its second Tianjin (1984); Shanghai followed only in 1993, yet by the 2010s–2020s cities from Chengdu (2010) to Nantong and Jinhua (2022) were opening in an almost annual cascade. en.wikipedia.org

India's Kolkata (1984) stood alone for nearly two decades until Delhi (2002); the newest entries in the excerpt are Bhopal, Indore and Patna (2025) and Meerut (2026), with Astana (2026) the latest in Central Asia. en.wikipedia.org

Africa appears with three systems in the excerpts — Cairo (1987), Algiers (2011) and Lagos (2023) — while the interwar wave belonged to Tokyo Metro (1927), Osaka (1933) and Moscow (1935). mic-ro.com

Country by country: every system in the supplied excerpts

Opened	City	System	Source

Source: the current operational-systems table of Wikipedia's “List of metro systems” (snapshot dated 16 May 2026: 214 cities, 63 countries, 957 lines), cross-checked against the World Metro Database. Definition per the source: electrified urban rapid transit on segregated rights-of-way; “opened” is the year commercial service at metro standards began, which can postdate an older predecessor railway. This report is a best-effort extraction of two contiguous excerpts of that table, not an exhaustive export: it plots every valid system row supplied, carrying country and city forward where the source omits them. London's 1863 year is taken from the source article's lead statement rather than the table excerpt. One Russian row (Nizhny Novgorod) arrived truncated without a year and was dropped. Dot positions are approximate city centroids inferred for plotting only. Station counts, lengths and ridership were cut for space; see the source pages for those columns.