Light Rail Line 3 and Its Urbalis CBTC Signalling
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means · The full record behind this page
Line 3 of Guadalajara's light rail opened in September 2020, running more than 21 kilometres and 18 stations, thirteen elevated and five underground, across Zapopan, Guadalajara and Tlaquepaque. Alstom delivered it under a 2014 turnkey contract covering the signalling, the high-voltage and traction substations and traffic control, all managed through its Urbalis 400 communications-based train control system, together with 18 Metropolis trains carrying video surveillance and passenger information. SITEUR operates the line.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
At delivery the supplier described the line as expected to carry around 230,000 passengers daily. It opened during the pandemic carrying about 75,000 users a day, had carried more than 164 million people by its fourth anniversary, and reached daily counts of over 150,000. The supplier's fifth-anniversary statement describes 233,000 passengers a day as what the system is designed to carry.
🎓 Lesson
The figure published at the opening as an expectation and the figure published five years later as the engineering ceiling are almost the same number, which is the tell: what was presented as demand was the design capacity. Measured against its own trajectory the line has done well, roughly doubling since it opened. The automation reads the same way in reverse. The line runs on the kind of train control that can support unattended operation, and no source read for this entry names a date on which trains began running with nobody aboard.
Sources
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 8 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 8 addressable claims, 2 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 8
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-df6f8693993905b1
quantitative
Line 3 of Guadalajara's light rail opened in September 2020, running more than 21 kilometres and 18 stations, thirteen elevated and five underground, across Zapopan, Guadalajara and Tlaquepaque
Sources carrying this claim
clm-674393c5907fa468
quantitative
Alstom delivered it under a 2014 turnkey contract covering the signalling, the high-voltage and traction substations and traffic control, all managed through its Urbalis 400 communications-based train control system
Sources carrying this claim
clm-37a73a9393f8c25d
quantitative
together with 18 Metropolis trains carrying video surveillance and passenger information
Sources carrying this claim
clm-555d414c947415b1
descriptive
SITEUR operates the line
Sources carrying this claim
clm-4a164ef0cc22a9e0
quantitative
At delivery the supplier described the line as expected to carry around 230,000 passengers daily
Sources carrying this claim
clm-5e0bac5e6dba6596
quantitative
It opened during the pandemic carrying about 75,000 users a day, had carried more than 164 million people by its fourth anniversary, and reached daily counts of over 150,000
Sources carrying this claim
clm-818adf229e8e0050
quantitative
The supplier's fifth-anniversary statement describes 233,000 passengers a day as what the system is designed to carry
Sources carrying this claim
clm-cd183842cec025f7
descriptive
no source read for this entry names a date on which trains began running with nobody aboard
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:d6cb26ce6ec6c540ab89943058bf736d82cfc7f05440a9e33b5dd9c87ce38722
- 8
- of 8 claims mapped
- 2
- source dossiers
- 2
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- Sistema de Tren Electrico Urbano (SITEUR)
- Actor types
- utility, national-government
- Funding model
- public
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
2 source dossiers
Alstom, on delivering Line 3 (supplier)
- Stable source ID
src-08dab84bb8f307df- Publisher
- Name not classified · alstom.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2020-09-14
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-24
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-24
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
The supplier's delivery announcement. Verbatim: 'Alstom has officially delivered Line 3 of Guadalajara urban transportation network, a new line expected to carry around 230,000 passengers daily', 'The line covers nearly 21 kilometres, covering 18 stations through the cities Zapopan, Guadalajara and Tlaquepaque', 'It will be operated by the local operator SITEUR', and 'traffic control systems based on Urbalis 400, Alstom's CBTC system'. A supplier account, so treated as the operator side of the record rather than an independent one.
Alstom, on Line 3's fifth anniversary (supplier)
- Stable source ID
src-2fc90c7e25a2e91b- Publisher
- Name not classified · alstom.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2025-09-12
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-24
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-24
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
The supplier's fifth-anniversary statement. Verbatim: 'to more than 164 million people by its fourth anniversary, with daily counts reaching over 150,000 per day', 'The system is designed to carry up to 233,000 passengers per day', and 'The line covers more than 21 kilometers with 18 stations, 13 elevated and 5 underground'. Also gives the roughly 75,000 daily users at opening and the 2014 contract scope. Neither this statement nor the 2020 one says who is in the cab.
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Light Rail Line 3 and Its Urbalis CBTC Signalling” — Guadalajara, Mexico. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/guadalajara-tren-ligero-line3/ (last verified 2026-08-24). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.