Living directly in view of a metro entrance within the inner city will be have noise from people using it, but one minute walk away is considered perfect in Europe.

Many people who visit me for the first time comment on this.

On the very quietest summer night, when there's no ventilation systems running etc, I can sometimes hear an occasional dum-dum, dum-dum when I lie in bed. The tunnel is directly under the building.

In suburbia closer is also better, but away from the track is better than along the track of it's above ground.

The idea of security concerns sounds ridiculous to me.

False. I live in Madrid and being near a metro station a. Has no issues (for almost all stations) and b. is considered highly desirable. 10 minute walk is considered a lot (mine is 5, to either of the two nearby stations - at 10-12 minutes I can walk to four stations). These are genuine underground metro. They're deep and vibrations are mostly not an issue.

The article paints a somewhat biased view of the construction process. It gives too much credit to Gallardo and the pp and conveniently ignored the serious issues in the sam Fernando de Henares área created by too rapid construction that ignored environmental and design issues in the Sandy soil near the Jarama river. Several hundred apartments have been condemned because of it and a whole neighborhood affected ...

But it is the best metro I've seen in Europe or north america. Most usable and cheapest to use.

Surely you'd be _more_ secure near a station as there are more "eyes on the street" near an activity hub than tucked away in an isolated suburban node

> vibration/noise

That’s not true of most modern metro lines that are generally bored and not cut and covered.

Bored metro lines create no noise on the surface and are preferred nowadays because there is barely any constraint on the routes you can create.

Cut and covered are only used when creating whole new districts.

The "undesirables" they're concerned about are robbers, teenage gangs, or people on drugs who loiter around train stations. The lower-class people don't want to be around them either.