The metro as a city-building feature

"The metro of Bilbao was opened in 1995 and it's been extended in the last years and it reaches now about 30 communities. It is making people feel that they belong more and more to one single community because they can move from one place to the other in minutes, very easily. The metro is not only transportation system. It has to be a safe place, where people feel happy, so, in Bilbao and around Bilbao, when teenagers go out on Saturdays, parents ask: "How are you are going to come back, by metro?" and if the answer is "yes", they are happy, because the metro is the safest part of the town. It is clean, everyone, every kind of people uses the metro, it is fast, it is reliable, and on top of that we have in the Bask Country, our own tax system, so we pay taxes for ourselves, so we own the metro, because we paid for it, and we want it to be the best metro in the world, if we can," said Alfonso Martinez Cearra, general director, Bilbao Metropoli-30, a public-private partnership set up to revitalize metropolitan Bilbao.