| The Hochbahngesellschaft was co-founded by Siemens & Halske and Deutsche Bank in 1897, which opened the construction and operation of Berlin's urban rail transit. When BVG founded in 1929, a mass urban public traffic system had established, consisting of the urban rail transit and two other major transport systems, namely:trams and buses. Though Berlin experienced many twists and turns during the First World War, the period (1897-1929) remains the time for the first round as well as the peak of the Berlin's urban rail transit construction and development. Even today, people still benefit from the rail transit constructed and expanded at that time.What's more, Berlin's urban rail transit had been through forms during that period, such as:the private economy in the time of the Empire, the co-existence of private and local capital and owned by the municipal authorities during the Weimar Republic, which laid foundation for its thorough transformation as public goods. The newly emerged urban rail transit was inevitably to have a connection with the policy orientation of the local government (i.e. cities) since it posed huge impact to the industrialization and the space structure. For this reason, the service targets of rail transit were not simply shifted from "elites" to the "public". Instead, the transformation reflected the process of shifting from the open society advocated by Kant, Fichte and Humboldt in their liberalism between the late 19th century and 1920s to the social democracy marked by "welfare society" from the perspective of local politics.This paper attempts to tease out the historic development of Berlin's urban rail transit in the late 19th and early 20th century. Based on that, the author tries to explore the differences between the private transport companies and local governments in terms of urban rail transit's construction and operation in two eras, namely:the Empire and the Republic, so as to shed some light on the major changes of urban society in Germany.
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