Keywords: visual nuisance, metro railway systems, passenger perception, visual nuisance index, railway aesthetics, bid assessment, metro stations.

Metro railway systems constitute essential components of sustainable urban mobility. Besides their transport function, they can influence the visual quality and identity of urban environments. However, the perception of visual quality remains largely subjective, while objective assessment criteria are still limited. Furthermore, unlike technical and operational characteristics, which are commonly evaluated through established standards, the visual nuisance lacks universally accepted assessment criteria. To address this gap, this paper proposes a quantitative methodology for evaluating the visual nuisance of metro railway systems. The methodology builds upon previous visual nuisance assessment frameworks developed for urban mass transportation systems. The proposed approach assigns evaluation criteria to key metro structural elements and combines them into a Visual Nuisance Index. The methodology is applied to selected stations of the Athens Metro system, demonstrating its ability to provide a systematic and comparable assessment of visual nuisance. The framework may be applied during procurement and bidding processes, design assessment, and the evaluation of improvement measures in metro systems.

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