Madrid Metro Research: Grounding a Comparative Infrastructure Study in Expert Evidence

Adwita took on this brief at Polysee after the team identified the question: why had Madrid built its metro so cheaply when countries like Ireland and the UK had not managed the same? The topic was proposed by other team members, but from that point forward, she owned the full research workstream.

Her first move was to break the problem into its defining variables: what Madrid had done differently, what structural factors explained the cost gap, and whether those factors were replicable in other geographies. She built the research framework from scratch, mapping the key dimensions before touching a single source.

With the framework in place, she carried out extensive secondary research and then moved to primary validation. She reached out to and interviewed expert sources, including the head of Metrolink Ireland, to stress-test the team's assumptions against practitioner knowledge. She also cross-referenced the Madrid findings against the Delhi Metro to test whether the hypotheses held across different geographies and institutional contexts.

Two assumptions did not survive that process. Her initial framing had not adequately accounted for the geographic differences between Madrid and Ireland, nor for the significant wage gap between Spain and cities like Dublin or London. The expert interviews surfaced both factors clearly, and she revised the analysis accordingly rather than defending the original framing.

The final output was published as a long-form research piece on the Polysee platform. Before publication, her findings went through several rounds of internal discussion, where the expert-grounded evidence shaped the direction of the final narrative. The research was then handed to team members with deeper knowledge of the Irish context, who used it as the foundation for a real-time comparator analysis against current Irish infrastructure developments.