Prague Commissions a Feasibility Study for a Fifth Metro Line It Cannot Currently Afford

Prague councillors approved on 7 September that the Institute of Planning and Development (IPR) should prepare a feasibility study for a fifth metro line, according to Expats.cz. Metro D is still being built; this is the first formal step towards whatever comes after it. What the decision buys is a study, not a line. There is no final route, no permit and no construction start date.

The route on the table

The proposal, currently called Metro E, would run from Smíchov through Pankrác, Bohdalec, Žižkov and Vysočany to Letňany, and on towards a planned northern terminal for the high-speed rail network. Read as a list of districts, it is a deliberate avoidance of the centre: a passenger travelling between two of those places today is routed through the middle of the city even when the two points are close together.

The idea is not new. Expats.cz traces a circular Prague metro back to transport studies of the late 1980s, revived in 2022 by the then deputy mayor for transport Adam Scheinherr. That more ambitious version, Metro O, would eventually have closed a ring around the city, with a Smíchov–Pankrác section among the first to be built. Even the name is unsettled — E or O — which is a fair indication of how early this is.

The number that will shape it

The city estimates the line at around 220 billion crowns in today's prices if the whole route were built underground, and Expats.cz reports plainly that Prague could not finance the project as a single investment.

That constraint is why the study is framed the way it is. It will examine three configurations: conventional underground metro, surface metro, and light rail for some or all of the route. Calling the project a metro may turn out to be premature. A line assembled partly at grade, with light rail on the outer sections, is a different piece of infrastructure with a different cost, a different capacity and a different relationship to the streets it runs along — and on the corridor being described, much of which is not dense inner city, that is a serious question rather than a compromise.

The political reception makes the same point from the other side.

The fifth line is currently beyond the financial capabilities of the capital.

— Tomáš Portlík, mayor of Prague 9, speaking to iDnes.cz as reported by Expats.cz

Portlík, a candidate for Prague mayor, argued that the city will need the line as its major development areas expand, but that it should be discussed in stages, with a realistic long-term timetable rather than a promise of early construction.

Why this is worth noting anyway

A feasibility study is easy to dismiss as paper. In Prague it is not, because the alternative is a line drawn into the Metropolitan Plan and defended for decades without anyone establishing what it would actually cost or carry. The study is supposed to determine whether the route makes economic and transport sense, what form the line should take and how it could be built. Those are the questions that decide whether a corridor gets protected, which in turn decides what can be built on the land along it — and the corridor named here runs through Bohdalec and Vysočany, which are precisely the brownfield districts where the city expects growth.

For comparison, the dates Expats.cz sets out for the existing network: line C opened in 1974, line A in 1978, line B in 1985, the most recent extension to Nemocnice Motol in 2015, and the first section of line D is currently planned for 2032. On that record, a fifth line whose route is not yet fixed is not a project with a decade attached to it. The study is worth watching because of what it rules out, not because of when it might break ground.