Abstract Urban rail transit networks (URTNs) have experienced rapid development and have been receiving much attention recently. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze the topological characteristics of urban rail transit networks, and we find that the average degrees of nodes of urban rail transit networks lie in the interval [2, 2.45], most of the average shortest path lengths between pairs of nodes belong to the interval [10, 16] and the average betweenness of nodes and edges linearly increase with the increase of the number of stations. Moreover, the cumulative probability distributions of the degree and shortest path length can be fitted by exponential distribution and Gauss distribution, respectively. The network failures of the urban rail transit networks are discussed and we also discover that the highest betweenness node-based attack is the most effective method to destroy the network.