E.g. one of the 'metro's in the UK is a tram system in Manchester. And the one thing people might call a 'metro', when compared to other cities and countries is the London Underground, which everyone including the government[1] calls The Tube. And that's just a red ring with a blue line through it.
The more I think about it, the more bizarre it makes us Brits sound. Tubes, choobs, toobays...
The London Underground is the world's oldest underground railway. The very first line to be built was the Metropolitan Railway (now called the Metropolitan line), which opened in 1863.
So in a sense, you could say London was the first city to name their underground railway after the term "metropolitan".
Depends. Around here it's the Hochbahn. Wuppertal has the Schwebebahn, and a long time ago the Köln-Bonner Eisenbahn had the Silberpfeil racing along the Rheinuferbahn.
Some of the agencies here don't fit the problem of 'M' meaning 'Metro', for example the last logo (Row 7) is described as Liverpool's metro system. It is not a metro system but a full train operating company and the 'M' is for Merseyrail
Creating a distinctive symbol to represent an entity to the general public is a made up problem?
What's the alternative? Have a paragraph of text on every sign? Perhaps: "This cavity provides access to a subterranean network of locomotives that provide a means to traverse the city"
Trying to stylise the letter M to be distinctive is pretty circuitous - just use an icon of a train! You remove the problem almost entirely, and get a symbol which is easily recognisable even to people who don’t speak the local language.
In Sydney, in the last 10 years our icons have been replaced by stylised letters. T stands for train (not Taxi or Tram), except when it doesn’t and M stands for Metro (which everyone still just calls the train), L stands for light rail (which everyone calls Trams)… it was so much more clear when there were just icons.
I'm curious to know if and how you would then distinguish between a metro and the national railway, or other types of railway. I suppose one could argue they should all have the same symbol, but I feel that distinction can be helpful to people using the services.
Maybe not the symbol, but the article artificially constraining itself to 'M' seems a bit suspect to me. In my country the symbol for the metro isn't even M [1]
That page appears to show only one icon for trains, one for trams, and one for subways. No variation or alternative options.
I can see incorporating something like that into the signage around the facilities, or even in the logo, but the entire point of a logo is that it is relatively unique and distinctive and separate from all other things that might be like that — which is the exact opposite of this kind of standardized international icon.
The metro system tends to be a source of pride for cities and their inhabitants, and I think there's room for a bit of diversity in this regard. I love the classy humanist typography and colours of the London Underground, but they certainly wouldn't fit the dinky Glasgow Subway.
And Glasgow can leverage graphic design in other interesting ways. The logo of the subway consists of a grey inner circle and an orange outer circle, representing the two lines which always run anti-clockwise and clockwise respectively. This colour scheme is used everywhere on the subway, so you always know which platform your train is at.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Mu...