Can anyone in other west coast cities speak about the crime on the new transit systems? I'm in Portland, and for the first time in my life, I'm worried about crime on mass transit. Maybe it is just the automated news feeds that are circulating stories of stabbings and attacks that have heightened my internalized hysteria. At the same time, I've felt a larger presence of people on mass transit who seem to be dealing with a mental health crisis of some kind. And, it makes me feel less excited to bring my kids with me when I ride. This article does not touch on that.
When I listen to my friends that ride buses and BART the major complaint is people doing utterly foul things like pissing or shitting. Or being harassed. Being harrased depends a lot on sex age etc. My GF's who looks like she lives in Walnut Creek gets harassed. Me who looks like an old skinny biker does not.
Got to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year.
> Got to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year.
Seems like the issue is lack of security/policing, not the number of passengers. There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent.
> There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent.
I think you can go a lot further: almost all public transport networks, regardless of type or usage, don't have this problem to any extent.
Some people in large European or Asian cities don't like using public transport because of overcrowding, slow journey times, cost, inflexibility, infrequency, strikes, "terrorism" or whatever. I know people who would cite each of these reasons.
I don't know anyone who would say there is excrement or urine in the vehicles or stations, or even unwashed people. It's that rare.
Bay area residents needs to pressure their politicians into fixing the problem. That means some combination of
- extra policing
- extra cleaning
- extra public toilets
and maybe working out some long-term solution to the mentally ill homeless people.
If a dog or child pisses everywhere do you tolerate it? There is a way to deal with it. It does not start with the word "tolerance" though, so no, politicians aren't going to be pressured into solving anything, because they were the ones that got voted in in the first place to turn a blind eye. People get the society they deserve.
> people doing utterly foul things like pissing or shitting
Based on my (very limited) experience of SF, that seems like an area-wide issue. I've travelled reasonably extensively and SF is the only place I've been where I've suspected more of the shit on the path (inside and out) was human than canine.
Tokyo's rail transit is at 40m passengers a day. We don't have the poo. We do have occasional vomit from drunk salary men. Fortunately it gets cleaned up relatively quickly. The cars are clean unlike SF.
I take the BART in the SF Bay Area daily, and if you take it before 10 PM it feels safe, though can be annoying because it's not always the cleanest. Then again, I feel safer than on the road (where there's at least a handful of massive accidents each way, everyday) and I've definitely been in friends' cars that are not to the same cleanliness standard I hold my own things to.
When I was in Atlanta, I regularly took MARTA, which travels through some rather slummy areas. Beyond the faregates, you're going to be rather safe. I personally felt safer riding the train in Atlanta than I did driving around in a car in Southeast DC.
I don't think crime is any worse on mass transit than it is in the surrounding areas. I suspect that most of your fears are driven by media bias: crimes that happen in the crime-ridden section of town are inherently less newsworthy than crimes that happen outside of it.
Weird that they don't mention New York's awful inefficiency, especially since it was reported by the same paper. NYC tax payers are already spending billions and not getting much to show for it.
I’m surprised by this article. Most people seem to agree that the the metro systems of NYC, Philadelphia, and DC are much better than those of the west coast. LA’s is unusable for most people because there aren’t enough stops. Seattle’s light rail is definitely gaining steam as it adds more stops.
Right. I'd like the West Coast transit systems to match those available in NYC, DC or Boston. It could be done 20 years from now if we started laying down more subway now.
Scooters and self-driving cars is not a transit system.
I think LA's is only really usable to get to/from DTLA. The nice part is DTLA is becoming more eventful, so you actually want to go there sometimes for non-work reasons.
Getting anywhere else is a bit of a crapshoot for the last-mile. I don't think LA's train system is ready for primetime until it can reasonably get into LAX; preferably with a more direct route from the westside that doesn't detour through DTLA.
Having lived in both Seattle and DC... this is wrong, at least comparing those two. DC managed to build a new line out to Dulles with others in the works, Seattle's light rail is a joke if you're trying to use it for more than a straight line through the city.
A common misconception people have about the DC metro is that it belongs to DC, but the abbreviation WMATA has nothing to do with DC for a reason. Maryland, Virginia, and I believe even the Federal Govt have to be a part of any changes that happen there. Given that, it's an absolute wonder that anything works.
Boston supposedly has the north/south station rail connector project under way again. It's only been half a century. I'll believe it when I see it. Even then I won't ride on it for a few years in case the ceiling falls down.
"underway" is a generous way to describe it. There's been no funding allocated, and there's no plans to allocate funding at the moment. There are studies underway, but there have been studies done dozens of times over decades.
Although there does seem to be some political support for getting it done this time.
And the lack of some sort of beltway line that connects the ends of the existing subway lines. As it stands anyone who has to cross the city by rail needs to go through the city.
Well one part they don't discuss is ridership numbers increased as the number of in town jobs increased, not because they built out their systems. Plus when factoring in increased rail ridership much can be found in decreased bus usage. In some cities they reduce routes to force the issue.
Plus none of these systems brings in enough in fares to cover a majority of their expenses let alone put a dent in their deferred backlogs. Instead the new angle is to go after rider sharing services with new fees and you can bet the scooter invasion is ripe for taxation.
I do find it interesting they talk about the recent surge in EV scooters as being a benefit. I wonder who led that charge. I was amazed that just one company has twelve thousand scooters in the NYC area! Public planners cannot easily factor those in and given NYC weather where to these end up in winter?
If you want to see the statistics as reported to the Federal Government on ridership numbers and cost per mile check out the spreadsheets at [1] the FTA
California transit numbers show a decline and that two thirds and more are by bus in a 2018 June report. Plus the percentage [2]. A large share of the systems need replacement and this is not factored into new taxes. Throw in the transit only reduces emissions per mile when compared to solo drivers but worse those numbers are moving close to parity as cars become more efficient
Mass transit is a good idea but technology is rapidly displacing it and it only appears cheap because riders don't pay but a fraction of the cost. In fact most are paid by people who cannot even make use of it
none of these systems brings in
enough in fares to cover a majority
of their expenses
Public transit systems often generate a bunch of economic value they can't (or find it isn't politically acceptable to) capture in fares.
For example, if trains to the financial district save each rider 1 hour per day, and the riders are 70% stockbrokers on $150/hour and 30% janitors on $15/hour, a fare of $40/day might maximise revenue but be unpopular with voters as it excludes all the janitors.
Or if a new public transport system means for the same commute time I can travel further, and that means I can buy a family home for $300,000 instead of $450,000 it's going to be difficult for the public transport to capture much of the value created in fares.
As a poor sod needing to go to the Aussie consulate between Beverly hills and Santa Monica from Irvine, I'm incredibly lucky that the train was 5 mins late, because there wasn't much else to do that day: last train for the morning left 9:02am, next train 4:30pm!
And I thought Perth's public transport was shit in comparison to Singapore/Hong Kong/London/Berlin, boy have I got new found respect for it!
Irvine is not part of LA's public transportation system...
And in the case of London and Berlin, you're comparing national rail systems to that of a single city that could easily fit the 4 cities you mentioned within its borders and still have room for Paris and Tokyo. And let's not even get started on the LA metropolitan area, which is geographically the largest in the Western world.
Irvine is about as far out as Mandurah from Perth and it goes about that far again north: if LA's public transport system was actually well designed it would be.
The article doesn't really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed).
If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college.
What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?
I am not saying the subways shouldn't be built or that planning decades ahead is bad. I love subways. But in the area of transportation we will see huge changes in the coming decades.
Of course there will be changes. But the subways and light rails will still be required for a certain level of throughput. The New York City subway, for example, carries 60K people per hour per direction on a pair of tracks, while a car lane carries somewhere in the range of 2K per hour per direction. Self driving cars may improve lane utilization, but not by up to 30x. Shoving people into cattle cars hurtling down a track is just more space-efficient than dedicating an engine and seats for at most four people at a time.
Scooters and bikes have an effective range, particularly in places like LA that can have quite long commute distances.
Motive power source doesn't really change much.
Intra-urban flight would increase required energy for transport a lot and also move the crapshoot that is today's roads and traffic above our heads, ready to hurtle down at us.
Boring tunnels being cheaper has yet to be proven, since the main issues with tunneling are that tunnels have to be tailored to ground conditions.
Shuttles to Mars doesn't change how I get to and from work across town, the same way that airplanes did not.
On the Select Bus Service (certain express routes) in NYC, passengers buy tickets outside the bus and ticket inspectors spot check them during the ride, similar to trains. Passengers can get on through the back door as well. This significantly improves embarkation time, making it similar to a train.
Subways have multiple cars per train, anywhere from 1 to 10, most places falling into 4-6. A bus has one; even articulated buses usual have a smaller capacity than a single subway car.
In theory, but NYCs rarely go that fast. This is changing though. I saw a news article recently about how they are lifting the speed limits on some sections of track as repaired signals come online.
Though this probably counts as rarely, least some of the trunk line I've been on give the illusion of high-ish speeds. Examples:
- Queens Blvd express (Forest Hills to Roosevelt Ave, Roosevelt to 36 St)
- 7 Ave IRT express (from far downtown to 96th St)
- Lexington express (City Hall to 125th, save for going through the switches south of 42nd St)
It is worth noting that NYC and DC have fundamentally different design philosophies that result in different average speeds.
New York's system is designed around walking to stations. All the way to the end of the lines, stations tend to be about a half mile apart. There are express lines but even those become locals on at least one end, with half-mile stop spacing.
DC's is an auto-oriented system, where you're expected to drive to the stop and then take the train in from the suburbs. As a result, while there is dense stop spacing in the center, distances between stations in the suburbs get progressively longer and longer. It's over these long stretches in the suburbs that DC is able to attain much higher speeds.
>No - subway trains can travel 50 mph or more - a bus can’t do that on city centre roads.
If you have really comprehensive coverage in a densely built area you'd be stopping too often for those top speeds to matter.
This is the problem with the Acela. It can technically go up to 150mph, but it has to stop so often that it averages 60mph for the journey.
For longer distances with limited stops, the speed and shigh capacity of a train are good. But to really fill out coverage in a dense area, short wait times and short distances between stops and destinations should be your chief considerations. Buses and streetcars just do that better. Though really, once you get past a certain level of density you need all of the above.
It isn't really that fair, the critical time sink starts shifting to offload/onload time and there is a lot of waste having to load each bus individually.
This is why developed subway systems with high usage end up with large trains, that's the best way to speed up the system, reducing the delay caused by trains waiting for other trains that are stopped in the station.
Even a "train" of two buses is impractical for most bus routes because of the weight, poor turning radius and so on. I'm pretty sure going any longer than two is virtually impossible.
For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.
It was also built when nobody who the government cared about owned land in the West, before pesky environmental regulations, and when 20MPH was an acceptable speed for a train.
Today California High Speed Rail and Texas Central and Florida's Brightline have to deal with angry suburban neighbors, angry farmers, and legal and environmental review processes that are the result of a century and a half's worth of hindsight.
Seattle is taking 30 years or so to build a handful of miles of track.
There really isn't any "environmental impact" for construction within the city (the environment there is already destroyed). But that sure does provide fodder for endless delays and expense.
> 20MPH
Travel from Omaha to San Francisco was 4 days at the opening, including stops. The distance was 1,912 miles. So the average was indeed 20, but to achieve that average (including stops) it must have been going at least 40 on much of the route.
Quite a difference from the alternative, months of walking.
If you like, the first Boston subway was completed in 1897, it took 2 years, and it was all done with muscle, too.
The Boston subway was built by tearing up a street from building wall to building wall, and several people died during the process. Seattle's light rail construction is far less disruptive and deadly.
Seattle is a bit of an odd case when talking about construction timelines, because the projects are drawn out mostly due to a state law that limits how much Sound Transit can bond out at any given time. Anything more aggressive than that would require passing a 60% vote threshold, which would be quite the landslide election. (It's also how the first Seattle subway attempt died.)
Environmental impact doesn't just concern spoilage of a pristine environment; among other things, it can consider impacts on drainage and runoff, noise pollution, construction impacts, efficacy at diverting car trips and CO2 emissions, etc.
> For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years.
Actual construction, even nowadays, is pretty fast. What takes 20-40 years is the long-term planning. By comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was advocated first in 1832 (before most of the American West was even American), and serious planning first started in the late 1840s and early 1850s, which led to the Gadsden Purchase in 1853.
Um... Its estimated that somewhere between 1,000-2,000 people died building the first transcontinental railroad. That wouldn't exactly be acceptable today.
No, but we also have lots of mechanized equipment now that eliminates most of the danger and speeds up work enormously. There's really no excuse for construction taking as long as it does now.
One of the things I don't really see mentioned about scooters is they're less ideal in cold/wet weather. So I'm not sure if the east coast can really capture the benefits as well as California.
that seems to be unreasonably long. In germany, both the city I am studying at and the city I was born are undertaking big changes in their transportation infrastructure, and both don't take that long. In munich, building just started and is expected to last unit 2026 [1]. And we always complain that it's taking too long to plan and build!
40 years seems to be crazy! You would have to start repairing the old stuff when the whole project is finished.
Or are you talking about the whole process, including the financing? Then it's more understandable, many big project here also stall for 20 years until everyone has enough money and the political will to follow through. But I thought the financing is covered due to the sales-tax increase.
While it's easy to complain about projects not moving for 20 years, the sums are often quite enourmus and i am not sure whether inefficiencies are to blame, or whether gathering enough money just takes a long time.
It's simply the planning of it. A lot of the 100 mile expansion is not planned to start until 10-20-30 years from now. I guess that's due to financing.
Let's not get too smug with things like Stuttgart 21, Transrapid München, or cities like Aachen getting rid of their tram network (and regretting it now AFAIK). And having a public that values and prioritises mass transport is not a given.
Admittedly, I'm a bit torn on this. Since infrastructure is so important to the liveability and growth of a city, and any sort of long-term thinking is a good thing. But predicting the future is hard, and having a 40 year plan survive (short-term) politics is also unlikely.
I agree, i think I was more confused. I thought he meant the time to realize the projects, not the complete cycle from estimating whether it's doable to financing to building.
There are also project on hold for 30 years in munich.
Part of it is spreading out the costs over time. None of the individual construction projects is taking 40 years, LA Metro just has a grand plan for the next 15 years, the 15 years after that, etc. Some things take time because of environmental reviews, buying land (or legally forcing people to leave), planning, things like that.
Another reason why they are building in stages is that some of the new transit projects aren't as useful until other ones are finished. For example, there's plans for a big tunnel (a few miles longer than the one you linked) that they're trying to finish in time for the 2028 Olympics (although construction hasn't started yet). A lot of the projects on the other side of the tunnel are being done with the purpose of getting people to the tunnel,
> What will the technology be like in 20-40 years?
> Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets.
> Few, if any, combustion engine cars
> Truly self driving cars
If history has taught us anything, it's that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. The infrastructure of NYC, LA, Seattle, San Francisco, etc will not look much different in 2059 than it does today.
I don't think history has taught us that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. Every technology the OP mentioned exists in nascent form today and didn't 10 years ago. It's totally believable that all of them will be widely deployed in 20-40 years.
The world 20-40 years ago was far more primitive than it is today.
You wrote: "Every technology the OP mentioned exists in nascent form today and didn't 10 years ago."
That is not true. Here's the list: "cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?"
How cheap does a cheap electric scooter need to be? Because we had electric scooters 10 years ago. Definitely so if you include "nascent" forms. More specifically, the electric scooter dates from around 1920 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped . The Segway PT came out in 2001.
Bikes of course are 19th century technology.
Airbag helmets are new.
Electric cars were popular in the early 1900s.
CMU was working on self-driving cars in the 1980s; the Navlab drove across the US in the 1995, and was autonomous 98% of the time. Surely that counts as "nascent", yes?
Drone taxis sound like the proposed helicopter taxis of the 1950s, or flying cars, or jet packs, though without a driver. Drones have been around for more than 10 year. Passenger-carrying drones? That is indeed new.
"Boring tunnels in multiple levels"; many subway systems have multiple levels. What has been new about that in the last 10 years which wasn't deployed earlier, not even in nascent form?
"Shuttles to Mars". I don't know how to judge that one. In 1989 when Bush Sr. announced the Space Exploration Initiative, would you have said that it was a nascent project? You didn't know that that it wouldn't pan out, just like we don't know now if SpaceX's plans will pan out.
The world 20-40 years ago was far more sophisticated than you seem to think.
>If history has taught us anything, it's that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. The infrastructure of NYC, LA, Seattle, San Francisco, etc will not look much different in 2059 than it does today.
I think there is a Bill Gates quote about how most people overestimate how much things will change in one year and underestimate how much they will change in ten.
Of course, when you find yourself 10 years in the future you'll probably just forget how different your city used to be because the changes unfolded too slowly for you to notice they were changing. In most of these cities, for example, the infrastructure might look the same but the way people are using it is very very different.
I’m from an LA suburb. I’m able to get to Santa Monica/Culver City, LAX, and J-Town just with light rail and a free transfer depending on where I need to go. In terms of time efficiency, it’s comparable to driving (faster than driving/parking in rush hour but not as fast during off hours).
LA metro is dropping track like crazy and way more usable than it used to be. And it’s cheap. $1.75 each way or monthly pass.
>Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too.
None of those are mass transit. Personal vehicles are fine and dandy, but they can only move one person at a time and will always, by definition, take up more space and resources per person than a solution that can ferry tens or hundreds of people at a time.
Scooters and bikes are not exclusive of mass transit -- they complement mass transit by working on the "last mile" problem that no mass transit system has ever really found a good solution to.
In a walkable area there is no "last mile" problem for able bodied people. A mile is a perfectly reasonable 20 minute walk provided the streets are safe. And if the streets are built safely, scooters and bikes will be usable as a natural consequence.
And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway.
Scooters and bikes are great supplements to a system, but they won't actually do much good without a mass transit system to be the backbone for getting around.
>20 minutes is practically an entire commute. It’s not at all reasonable to burn that much time on the last mile alone.
If 20 minutes is "practically an entire commute" then you're already in a dense enough area to where transit coverage should minimize the number of people who are a mile away. At that point, proximity to transit just becomes part of what you pay for in your house. If the transit is there, development patterns will tend to build up around it.
The median commute time in the US is 25 minutes, up to 32 in the most congested metro areas. This is overwhelmingly due to driving on freeways across suburbia, enabled by sufficiently low density.
>The median commute time in the US is 25 minutes, up to 32 in the most congested metro areas. This is overwhelmingly due to driving on freeways across suburbia, enabled by sufficiently low density.
Firstly, that's more like exurbia than suburbia. Suburbia is characterized by low density sprawl surrounding a denser, urban core that acts as the economic anchor. This is also where the nightmarishly long commute times tend to be: (https://www.caliper.com/featured-maps/xus-commute-time-mapti...).
Secondly, people decide where to live and work based on commute times. In other words, people consciously choose to live in places that are within a 30 minute commute from work, and they structure their days (when they wake up, when they leave the office, etc) around minimizing it. This same mechanic works if the transit is available. People will consciously choose to live closer to the transit hubs that minimize the lengths of their commutes, promoting density around the bus or train routes.
This is why the "last mile" problem is not as relevant of a consideration as people think once you get past the "windshield bias" a bit. Firstly because if everyone is within a mile of a transit option then that means the [i]worst case scenario[/i] is that someone has to walk a mile, and most people will choose to live within a space that's even less than that.
And secondly, because a mile isn't actually that terrible of a walk, especially if you make the walk a pleasant one. I live 2 and a half miles from my office. If I ride the bus it takes me about 20 minutes door to door with maybe 5 of those minutes involving walking to/from the bus-stop. If I walk the whole way it takes me about 45 minutes. Despite the walk being more than twice of long, though, I'm honestly indifferent between the two options. My only real consideration is whether I'm in a hurry or not, and usually if I'm in a REAL hurry I'll take a cab.
Even if it's raining, I often just take my umbrella and walk the commute because the walk is, in itself, enjoyable. It's not just a means of conveyance, it's a stroll and a source of exercise. There are plenty of murals to look at, a park to stroll through, flowers and landscaping to see, shop windows to look in on, sidewalk cafes to people watch people on awkward first-dates, etc.
>And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway.
Lots of disabled Americans ride around on scooters (4-wheeled motorized carts). They would do much better on the streets of Europe where there's bike lanes and nice sidewalks than in suburban America, though they'd have problems navigating the shops.
>Lots of disabled Americans ride around on scooters (4-wheeled motorized carts).
I believed we were talking about the razor scooters/scoot-share services, which are too finicky for people with mobility issues to be able to use on bumpy streets.
The types of scooters you're talking about basically use the same infrastructure as wheelchairs. So if you're pedestrian friendly and have inclusive urban design (like curb-cuts) that won't really be a big deal.
Berlin has 26 subway lines. Some of them (S-Bahn) interconnect with intercity rail, so there are times when you can transfer from a subway to a train on the same platform.
I would really like to know what makes you think Berlin public transit is "pitiful"...
I think London has a greater ridership (5m tube, 6m bus) than NY (5m subway, 3m bus - http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/). Buses really are the secret to how London gets around.
There's a subjective side to this argument, I suppose, but having lived in both cities I'd argue that Berlin's public transportation is _at least_ a couple orders of magnitude better than NYC's.
The U-Bahn / S-Bahn / Deutsche Bahn / Autobus / Tram inter-connectivity are at least on par with what NYC has to offer (adjusted for geographic factors and population density), and that's before getting into KPIs like on-time arrival percentages, individual line uptime, and peak hour commuter congestion. And then there's the more intangible differences, which are nevertheless important to humans - like vehicle cleanliness, station upkeep... the list goes on and on.
Compare the Berlin Hauptbahnhof to Penn Station. Or the U1 to the L, or the J/M/Z. Or peak-hour Alexanderplatz to Union Square. Or the M29 to... I don't know... the NYC bus of your choosing. My god. Throw whatever numbers you want out there as a counterargument, but I know which I'd prefer in just about any scenario.
> Ever been to Paris ? London's transit is fairly bad compared to it. Or to Lyon (which is vaguely SF's size) ?
I have. As of 2010 (before Cuomo's tenure began), New York had unambiguously better public transit overall than Paris, in addition to serving a city with four times the population of Paris.
Cuomo is doing his best to "fix" that, but in 2018, I'd still take NYC over Paris as far as public transit is concerned.
I have lived in both cities but I'm French so probably biased. The transportation system in Paris is overall much better. Denser, more lines, cheaper, and unlike New York it keeps growing. It's also more reliable (even though it has its share of issues).
I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on Long Island, spent a summer in Seattle, and I live in San Jose now.
One can't speak for the entirety of the either coast, but no city in CA comes close to what NYC offers in terms of public transportation.
And what NYC offers is a true car-free lifestyle which carries you to work, leisure, and back home via public transport.
E-scooters aren't a reliable way to get anywhere yet, and who knows if they'll ever be, not to mention that they are not for everyone. My grandmother is not going to ride one -- nor my wife, for that matter, nor should the kids. But the Subway is a common denominator.
This reflects in the daily ridership. MTA carries an order of magnitude more passengers than, say, BART. The same can be said about overall transit ridership[1].
East Coast vs. West Coast is a silly comparison when NYC Metro alone has more ridership than nearly all other major metro areas combined (including both Coasts, the Midwest, and the South).
So it's really NYC vs. Anywhere Else, and Anywhere Else still sucks when it comes to public transport because, in practical terms, most people aren't commuting by public transport in Anywhere Else, but they do in NYC.
You can't slap a Lime scooter on a suburban development and call that "public transport". And a self-driving car is still a car, a glorified jitney cab if and when it arrives. And it's not going to solve the problems of the car-centric (sub)urbanism[2] anyhow.
The mistake the article makes here is a classic one: percentage growth vs. absolute value. Doubling from, say, 500K in a metro area with 7M population is going to be a bit easier than doubling the 14M ridership in a 20M metro.
As for the problems - people on HN of all places should be the ones who understand scale and that some problems simply don't exist when the scale is insignificant.
I want every city to be a public transit success story, but as it currently stands - the rest of the country will be playing catch-up for a long time.
Seattle actually has extremely high transit ridership and walk commmute share, which is pretty impressive considering how the transit system is mostly buses right now. And by 2024, major centers in the region will be connected by rail transit that is faster than road travel. Anecdotally, I live pretty well without a car here; I use Uber and Lyft when transit don't work out, and if I want to hike usually one of my friends will have a ride. So it feels just like back home in New York, except the trains and buses have a better chance of showing up on time.
I think there is an objective measure here. Just plot a 30-minute transit radius around the centers of various cities and you'll get a sense of the transit size of the city vs. covered population. Some cities are notoriously "small," like SF, despite it being on some best-to-live-without-car lists. You can't go very far before practically needing a car: so what if you can get there by transit if it takes 1-2 hours and inconsistently? NYC, Boston are "large." Seattle is even worse than SF in this regard.
Transit is all about density. There is no way the west coast can beat the east coast in transit practicality for another 100 years.
Boston and San Francisco have realitively equivalent population densities and population. So this makes a very good comparison of the two regions.
For example my 4.5 mi commute in sf takes around 25 min. That’s similar to what I remember from Harvard square to Boylston street which is an equivalent distance.
Yes. Apartments.com has a nice visualization where you specify a mode, destination, and time limit, and it lights up all the listings in range. It’s really shocking how small SF is for sane commute times (20–45 minutes).
Seattle is okay for US standards, but still a disaster and embarrassment compared to other first world cities. And everything that can be done to make biking or walking more awful is being done.
Many cross-walks have a very short walk timer, so even able-bodied people like myself struggle to cross in time. Police don't ticket drivers blocking intersections and crossings [0], so almost every crossing is blocked in the morning and afternoon. Divers regularly run red lights. I'm sure it will take a few people to die first, as right now the police's mandate seems to be to get the rich people in their fancy vehicles home quicker than any kind of safety. Not to mention the construction that means you're going to have to switch street sides a few times during every journey.
Buses are okay for north-south trips, but non-trivial trips can be as slow as walking, because a lot of routes only intersect downtown. The only use for light rail I've found is getting to SeaTac, but even then you need to live on the right side of the city. The streetcar is pathetic, and has never helped me get to work to to a friends house due to the route.
I guess with a programmer's salary, it's okay since just getting an Uber and Lyft is no big deal, but for everybody else, it sucks. And sometimes, I feel like the only reason a token effort is being done about public transport is so people can feel smug and claim Seattle is progressive, left-leaning. Meanwhile, everybody still drives everywhere.
One simple fix Seattle could do downtown would be to make all the crosswalks all way, and increase the walk times. At the same time, make it illegal for cars to turn right on red and you’d dramatically increase pedestrian safety and increase car throughput.
However it won’t happen with our current city council.
I wish I could upvote you more. Sadly, scale is the one thing most of us tend to completely forget when it comes to public transportation. We think of a peice of hardware, wire it up with an app and a saas platform and call it transport. It might be just that - transport, but it's nowhere near public transportation
I think the point is that west coast cities are willing to invest in their systems, not just live off of what past generations built. Here in NYC we've been living off the investments of past generations for a long time, not even maintaining it adequately. It's shameful. I don't know what happened to the can-do attitude that New Yorkers were once famous for.
> Here in NYC we've been living off the investments of past generations for a long time, not even maintaining it adequately.
That's a recent development. The MTA hit its peak of reliability and performance about a decade ago. Since 2010, which coincidentally is the exact time that Cuomo took office, things have plummeted.
> It actually was a coincidence, as the practices leading inevitably to the current situation have been going on for decades.
It's true that the corruption within the MTA and TWU have been around for decades, but it's not true at all that it's a coincidence that everything started to go downhill as soon as Cuomo took office.
Cuomo literally does not believe that it is his job to oversee a statewide agency, despite the fact that every other governor - including his own father, when his father was governor - have taken on this responsibility.
Unsurprisingly, when the public official in charge absolves themselves of responsibility for holding the MTA and TWU accountable, things fall apart pretty quickly.
> Cuomo was uninterested in maintaining it, aside from scant, hollow PR moments.
Cuomo even deigned to make hollow PR statements about the subway to the press? I must have missed those.
I'm being flippant, but not without reason: Cuomo has taken the subway exactly twice in the last decade, went out of his way not to take public transit when running for re-election (lest it be interpreted as him admitting responsibility for the system), and undermined Andy Byford at the one job he ostensibly hired him to do in the first place.
It's not that Cuomo is all talk and no action. When it comes to public transit, he isn't even "talk". He's just completely absentee, and downright proud of it.
The Cuomo family are pieces of shit, always were. I can't believe NY has made the same mistake twice! Absolute corrupt pieces of shit.
Americans need to fix this political mess and start electing smart people who aren't in someone else's pocket. The corruption in NY and the whole east coast is rampant! And it's bad everywhere mind you, but NY absolutely is the epicenter of it.
eh it's flashier and more fun to build something new than maintain something old. Not to mention people forget that building new stuff means needing to allocate budget to maintain it...
> eh it's flashier and more fun to build something new than maintain something old. Not to mention people forget that building new stuff means needing to allocate budget to maintain it...
This statement may be true, but it's completely irrelevant to the specific problems facing the NYC transit system at the moment.
At least from what I've read, the primary problem have been a lack of financing for maintaining the current system. The subway does need to move to a more advanced signaling system, but there's no reason why the old-fashioned signaling system has to be falling apart.
> At least from what I've read, the primary problem have been a lack of financing for maintaining the current system. The subway does need to move to a more advanced signaling system, but there's no reason why the old-fashioned signaling system has to be falling apart.
Since 2010, Cuomo has raided the coffers in order to fund his own personal projects (like an upstate ski resort), yes. But it's not just a matter of funding: due to corruption and a complete lack of oversight, costs are out of control because the MTA and TWU, as well as private contractors, are able to siphon off absurd amounts of money by inflating costs or even committing outright fraud: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
True, but people also forget that new infrastructure, when well timed, can accelerate growth and expand the base. New York should know that more than any place. How do we know when to invest in infrastructure? I'd say that the affordable housing and transportation crises we're facing in US cities is the economy screaming at us to build.
Absolutely, agree 100%. A major problem is that economic growth has been spent on, say, propping up ski resorts in upstate new york, instead of reinvested in the subway. It's really an absolute travesty the way the system has been managed.
It won't be so nice in Brooklyn when the l-train shuts down this year. Commute times will double and overcrowding will be a nightmare.
NYC public transportation is great, but its incredibly expensive and falling apart. (NJTransit + Amtrak have had major problems in the last few years)
There doesn't appear to be any fixes in the works. It seems like they're just hoping the problem goes away or that the federal government will spend billions on new infrastructure.
This is the NYT. They approach everything from an investment mindset. For investors, growth matters more than turnover, more than profits. So it is no shock that the NYT evaluates public transport in terms of percentage increases and the number of new market players. Thier target readers are people looking for places to park thier money, not plebs looking for comparative city commute options.
Disclosure: former Los Angeles native here. Beats? no, the california metro systems are dwarfed by NYC. Beating a hundred year old system? absolutely.
"Ford to City: Drop Dead" in 1975 was an omen for the NYC systems. local, state, and national politicians have all chosen to just ignore NYC metro in the hopes it magically gets better or starts running on time.
Having visited NYC to visit my sister, I can say that what LA lacks in ridership it makes up for in overall investment. New railcars for the NYC system are slated for 2023, whereas Metro LA sees new cars on a yearly basis. The LA high speed project, for whatever political boondoggle it might be, was approved and is in construction. our single tap NFC metro cards are good not just for the LA system, but for most if not all surrounding city systems. I can use an LA TAP card on Santa monica, Culver city, and LA city buses with no penalty.
I also get the equivalent of groupon deals with my tap card. Half price bulgogi or even a free coffee, just for having a metrocard. Its surely no coffin nail for the iron juggernaut of NYC, but its a perk.
Most LA buses and subways all have free Wifi, with the exception of some larger express lines.
LA also has sixteen new transit projects, all green-lit, some of them individually over a billion dollars. This is just the city of los angeles, not the state.
Also, Caltrain stops going south from San Francisco five minutes after midnight. BART stops going north 25 minutes after midnight. At 25 after midnight all rail service out of San Francisco stops - which is 90 minutes before last call.
In New York City you have the LIRR, PATH, NJ Transit, Metro North, Amtrak and subway trains running all night.
It's true NYC subways started having problems in the past few years as ridership has grown and long-needed maintenance has been underfunded, but the politicians are (supposedly) fixing that.
What's funny is that they mention that NYC is reluctant to use scooters but don't mention how dangerous those things are in the snow. NYC has wayyy different weather than LA, Austin etc.
or even how insanely crowded NYC is in general. It might make sense to have scooters in a less crowded neighborhood in Brooklyn, but try driving through lower Manhattan on a scooter...
I don't think this would be much of problem, as there is only snow on the streets of NYC for a few hours of a few days a year. The plowing/salting/traffic volume means that the roads are almost always clear, even on the mere ~21 days where there is snow accumulation in unused areas (like the parks).
Most people in NYC don't even drive snow-capable cars, and on the very few days we have snow on the streets the roads are absolute chaos.
You'd just mandate that the scooter companies disable the scooters when the city tells them to. The robust public transit system would mean that those who normally ride scooters would have no problem getting to their destination.
"E-scooters aren't a reliable way to get anywhere yet, and who knows if they'll ever be, not to mention that they are not for everyone. My grandmother is not going to ride one -- nor my wife, for that matter, nor should the kids. But the Subway is a common denominator."
I used to think so, but some European cities really do offer counterexamples. I'm thinking of places like Munich, Vienna, and Copenhagen. It's not uncommon to see people there who, by American stereotypes, wouldn't be expected to ride scooters: moms with kids, men in suits, etc. Perhaps the urban cultural gap is so vast that what you're saying is indeed true of the US, but I wouldn't take it as a given.
The El is ok if you live near a stop and are going downtown (Loop) or to the airport. But there are huge areas that are not practical to get to via the El. You need to then use buses, which are slow and don't seem to follow much of a timetable.
West coast cities have one key advantage that reduces their requirements for public transportation given appropriate city planning: 12 months of weather suitable for biking/walking/etc. That 3% of Seattle routinely commutes from the suburbs on a bicycle is impressive but only practical because the weather supports it.
Yes, obviously NYC has the best transportation in the US. But the point of the article isn’t to compare NYC vs. everywhere.
But ignore NYC for a second (I acknowledge that many people who have lived there find this impossible) and look at the rest of the East Coast. Only the DMV area and Boston have any sort of large-scale public transit.
Portland's transit system is OK. The MAX works well, but it has been neutered by NIMBYism: the new orange line has only a few stops in Milwaukee and goes no further. (And for that they hired three full time cops when it opened). The green line was supposed to be a loop, but it simply goes out to the Clackamas Town Center (just a few miles south of the border with Portland proper). The yellow line stops short of Vancouver, WA across the river, and we spent $4.5 million on coming up with several failed plans for a new bridge. The new line headed SW has to be voted on by the city of Tigard. It'll go up to the bottom of the OHSU hill, but they chose to simply increase the number of shuttles.
The buses are mostly reliable and can get you downtown. But several areas feel underserved, especially if you live outside Multnomah county.
They're closing a few downtown stops that saw low usage to speed things up, but it will still be sluggish. I think the only real solution would be to move the Red/Blue lines to the transit mall and put all the downtown track underground with a cut-and-cover tunnel.
Also, the attempts to get the Yellow line into Vancouver fell through because the Washington legislature voted against it. There are renewed efforts to build it, though.
Of course it is easier to build out new infrastucture to exacting specifications than it is to update 100+ year old infrastructure to meet modern demands.
The west coast epitomizes postwar American culture - car infatuation, suburban sprawl, and so on. Transit is growing in the west coast, sure, but transit needs a critical mass of convenience for people to actually live without depending on their car (or choosing to own one at all)
We're not going to see cities go all-in on transit while self driving cars are on the horizon.
Maybe after cars drive themselves, when people learn traffic is still not getting better, more cities will get serious about transit infrastructure.
For the West Coast, the simplest solution is electric buses with dedicated lanes. Buses better serve the existing low density sprawl than trains. Lack of infrastructure is not the problem, the roads are already built. The real problem of course is lack of political will. Every road with two lanes gets at least one dedicated bus lane. Single occupant traffic would slow to a crawl making the buses faster. Buses would run on time because they have an empty lane. Additional bus routes would be added everywhere, paid for by significant increases to gas taxes. It would certainly work and be more efficient than our current mess, but of course would never be politically viable.
Dedicated lanes don't do much to help; the capacity of virtually all city streets is limited by the capacity of the intersections, not the streets themselves.
Give buses priority at intersections, or even better build them dedicated overpasses if you want to see buses really move.
Or just give them the IR transponders that emergency services use to trigger the light in some places and have it go green for the bus rather than red for everyone. You'd accomplish almost the same result with less trade-offs.
Giving one vehicle priority tends to increase complexity and causes a distraction which increases risk of accidents (which clog up the road making the bus late). This is why the modern doctrine for EMTs is to drive in traffic like everyone else and use lights/sirens only in the most time critical cases and when doing so will substantially affect travel time.
Seattle has bus priority at multiple intersections and it does not cause problems.
At those intersections busses arrive at the curb lane to pickup/dropoff. Then a special light tells the bus driver that it is ok to proceed into the intersection, while all other cars have a red signal. The bus pulls out and leapfrogs traffic.
Actually, they do. Take a look at the MetroBus infrastructure in Mexico City[0] for example. Buses run on time, on an extensive, dedicated lane network.
Of course it would help, since an overloaded intersection causes a large backlog and waiting in line (for multiple light changes) is how each vehicle pays the cost of the backlog.
With dedicated bus lanes, you skip the backlog and cross on the next light, so intersections do not undo the advantage of dedicated lanes.
You don't have to take my word for it - just ride any good dedicated lane system at a high traffic time and note your relatve speed of progression versus car traffic.
I ride a dedicated BRT lane system every day. Part of the way they have overpasses and it's super fast. Then they hit downtown and have dedicated lanes but have to deal with normal intersections. It's dog slow.
Do you mean it is slow compared to the portion with no overpasses, or slow compared to vehicles w/o dedicated lanes passing through the same intersections?
Passing through intersections is never particularly fast (except perhaps at night on empty reads with sensors far enough away to turn the light green before you even get there) - but at peak times dedicated lanes help a lot even when intersections are involved because you skip the queue.
It's slower than the car lanes; there are so many buses that the bus lane is more backed up than the car lanes. They are in the process of building a subway that'll take many of those buses out of downtown, though. (Ottawa, Canada).
Yes - a single dedicated bus lane doesn't work if there are so many buses that lane is busier than the car lanes! That would be a fairly unusual case in my experience though.
I am envisioning this more for urban arterial roads that typically have 35mph and two to three lanes of traffic in one direction. Most of these roads have light priority already.
Infrastructure can't be sustainably paid for by usage fees. There are too many externalities for any individual person to have to shoulder.
The benefits of a transit system accrue to people who aren't using it as much as to people who are. A bus that transports 60 people means you just took at least 30 vehicles off the road (and that's a super conservative estimate). That extra capacity is a benefit to people riding bikes, walking, and driving. So why would you expect only the bus rider expected to pay into the system while everyone else benefits?
Simplest solution for the transit planner, maybe; but for people who want to get around, who wants to be stuck in a bus? Why should we settle for a crappy, minimally-functional experience? Let's build good transit that people will actually want to use.
. . . I like riding the bus though. You get a window instead of being stuck in an underground tunnel. It's quieter than the train. And the drivers can actually make detours and improvise if there are problems.
The only issue is traffic, which dedicated lanes and automatic right of way takes care of. There is also the issue of having to wait outside in bad weather for it, but if you keep headways low that's not so bad if you're already committed to having to walk to the bus shelter.
Huh? What kind of trains have you been riding? Buses are noisy and have herky-jerky motion because they drive in traffic and have noisy diesel engines and are constantly accelerating and braking and turning. Trains ride on metal rails with no traffic in their way.
Of course, the shitty subways in America's east coast cities somehow manage to be extremely noisy and bumpy; I'm not sure how they manage that. Subways in better places don't have this problem in my experience.
Subway trains roll on tracks in concrete tunnels that reverberate sound. They're extremely loud. It's metal on metal with grinding disc brakes.
>Buses are noisy and have herky-jerky motion because they drive in traffic
Buses are huge. They're generally too huge to accelerate or decelerate rapidly, so I have no experienced this herky-jerky motion you're talking about. That's much more likely in a car.
>and have noisy diesel engines
At this point most big cities I've been in the buses run on CNG, which is still super loud but burns much cleaner. Eventually they'll be all electric fleets though, and should be predictably quiet.
>Subway trains roll on tracks in concrete tunnels that reverberate sound. They're extremely loud. It's metal on metal with grinding disc brakes.
The German subways I've ridden manage to be reasonably smooth and quiet.
>Buses are huge. They're generally too huge to accelerate or decelerate rapidly, so I have no experienced this herky-jerky motion you're talking about. That's much more likely in a car.
I guess you've never ridden a bus in a city. Buses can brake very effectively, like most vehicles with air brakes, and lots of riders have to stand on them, so you get thrown around a lot more than a rider in a car who's belted into a bucket seat.
>The German subways I've ridden manage to be reasonably smooth and quiet.
That's probably more about good soundproofing for inside the train. But even in Tokyo I found the trains to be rather loud.
>I guess you've never ridden a bus in a city.
I ride one every morning, usually standing. It hasn't been a problem and I actually find our subway trains to be more prone to hard stops and starts. Intra-city buses rarely exceed 30 miles an hour anyway. I usually feel bad for the elderly, the injured, and the pregnant because it actually can be hard for them if they're stuck standing. But my ire is usually reserved for people who fail to give up their seats rather than the concept of riding a bus.
If buses arrived every five minutes and had a dedicated lane, people would not be stuck anywhere and people would certainly want to use it. Here is a thought. Walk to your nearest busy street. Assume you could convert half the number of cars to buses and that a bus would have about 20 riders. When you count 40 cars go by, that is how often the bus would arrive.
Ottawa managed this by building a massive BRT system with its own roads and off grade bypasses, as well as dedicated lanes in the downtown area. They're beginning to implement light rail [1], which is fairly simple for them as they can upgrade the existing BRT lines with rail, increasing the capacity and decreasing maintenance costs. As you said, they faced initial political opposition, but I think the political will problem is a one-time cost -- once you have the network in place and the benefits are realized it becomes easy to change or upgrade it.
Both BRT and LRT don't necessarily solve the first- and last-mile problems, though. Many US cities are using park-and-ride stations, but that can just spread traffic out instead of eliminating it. It's important to create networks for short trips to and from transit stations with things like bikes and scooters.
The post's title different from the article's title : "Why the West Coast Is Suddenly Beating the East Coast on Transportation". Anyone else seeing different titles?
Also, the article is nothing but PR for the NYC transportation commissioner. Of course the NYC commissioner is going to say X is beating NYC because she wants more funding. She could have gone to Boise, Idaho and came back with similar story.
Electric scooters and a couple of test rides in self driving cars means the west coast is beating the east coast on transportation. Really? NYC metro area by itself outshines the entire west coast when it comes to public transportation. I couldn't take this article seriously. There is certainly room for improvement and investment in the NYC metro area, but what's the point of "east coast vs west coast" comparison that is simply not true.
The thing that makes mass transit work is walkability. There are 3 million people in NYC who use the subway every day. They can do that because the walkability of the neighborhoods complements the mass transit.
In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation we have to do one or both of those things. Otherwise we can build all we like and no one will ride. Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car and you’re not going to get reasonable walkability until you de-prioritize the car.
Competition also drove the Soviets to get lots of their people killed because they cared more about hitting arbitrary deadlines to win the geopolitical dick-measuring contest than they did about safety or even accomplishing their goals.
(And before I get called out: Yes, I realize NASA got people killed for the same reason but the difference is seriously orders of magnitude. NASA's failures were publicized while the USSR's were covered up. Many cosmonauts perished and all records of them were removed, they were airbrushed out of photos, erased from official documents, etc. The world will never know their names.)
That's just the thing though: Western cities are increasingly de-prioritizing cars, and Eastern cities are falling behind.
There are parts of Phoenix that are more bikable than much of New York.
LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle have started pouring money into their new transit systems, while MTA and NJ Transit and Port Authority keep having their budgets cut, leading to reliability so low that it's driving people into cars.
The East Coast used to be the star of American transportation, not much anymore.
Phoenix's Light Rail is also a nice improvement - I hope it expands. I know they're trying, some neighborhoods are resisting though - they argue it brings in riff-raff lol
Genuine question - what has SF poured money into? What we need here is expanded BART service and electrified Caltrain, unfortunately NIMBYs in Atherton/Palo Alto block that at every move.
Totally agree. In fact, the BART board recently rejected an extension into Livermore, which would have brought down a lot of car trips from the East Bay Area into San Francisco. And a BART train through the South Bay would be great, as would extension to Santa Cruz, Marin, and Napa.
"LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle have started pouring money into their new transit systems, "
As far as LA goes the results are not exactly convincing. I wonder if 't seven possible to have decent public transportation in an area that's as spread out.
LA's rail system connects Downtown, Pasadena, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, and Long Beach. The rail systems under development will add in the airport, the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys, and South LA.
LA's bus system is the largest in the world on the basis of coverage, and is the most-heavily used bus network in the Western world.
Maybe it works if you live one of the centres but I have tried several times to use it and each time a 45 minute drive would have been replaced with a 3 hour trip.
That's because only 50% of the money goes towards things you expect it to go toward: labor costs, operations, and maintenance. The other 50% goes to unfunded pensions, debt service, and health care (mostly unfunded).
Man, it's almost like we could suddenly afford to do a lot of big projects if we just nationalized healthcare and pensions so it wouldn't have to be factored into labor costs.
The cost still exists — you’re just moving it. Instead of factoring it into the labor cost and being part of the money allocating to the particular job, you’d just see lower allocation, and have the same problem.
The only real difference would be that the comparison in funding/cost between equivalent US and EU work would be more fair (also achieved by de-nationalizing healthcare and pensions in the EU).
Unless of course you’re also suggesting that nationalization would reduce global costs, but nothing about this particular thread supports/suggests that
>Instead of factoring it into the labor cost and being part of the money allocating to the particular job, you’d just see lower allocation, and have the same problem.
Why would you have the same problem? The project gets cheaper because the labor to do it (and administrative overhead to make sure the benefits are given) are cheaper. In a world where dollar values and sticker shock aren't significant determinants of transit policy your point might make sense, but we don't live in that world.
Also, transit funds are usually raised locally while nationalized social services are funded nationally. So the costs would actually fall on different entities and a broader tax-base if you did it this way.
Not true. Healthcare service costs in other industrialized countries are much lower than the US, because of their better systems. So, for instance, if you need hip replacement surgery and you have to pay for it out-of-pocket, it'll cost you a small fraction if you get it done in Belgium than in the US.
As always, comparing on consumer medical costs is difficult, especially because an (insured) person in the US doesn’t pay anything close to sticker price, and neither does the insurance company. Im not sure what the real cost per operation comes out to be, if you’ve got anything regarding that
>Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car
As I've said said so many times before, every nation gets the government it deserves. Americans don't want bikeable or walkable cities, so we don't have them. Europeans do want them, so they have them.
>In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
Yep, I was in Germany recently, and the large cities I visited all had excellent subway/train systems, as well as bike paths on all the major roads. And unlike bike lanes in US cities, the bike lanes were on the same level as the sidewalk, physically separated from the cars. The cities themselves were far more dense too: not as dense as Manhattan, but still far more dense than your typical American suburban "city", so it was very feasible to get around by bike and subway and also tram (electric streetcar).
We're not going to de-prioritize the car because Americans just can't think that way; they can't stand the thought of having to share space with strangers. So we're going to continue building more roads, and getting worse and worse congestion. It's not ever going to get better, because generally, when you look at the history of human societies, things rarely get fixed before there's a total collapse or disaster of some kind. Humans in groups just aren't smart enough to avoid disasters even when they're plainly obvious.
Ugh classic hype machine bullshit confusing the derivative with the function itself.
West coast is still total shit in land use, other than parkland allocation sometimes, and until they make the hard choices to undo a century of mistakes, can they catch up with the east coast's century of stagnation.
Not just derivative, but relative change (derivative normalized by current value). There are transit systems on the east coast growing faster in absolute terms - they just have large existing systems so the relative growth is lower.
It's worth noting that Boston has been investing quite a bit in improving the T.
New rail cars are being added to all lines over the next 4 years. As another poster mentioned, a new North/South link project is likely to start soon. The Green Line is being extended into neighboring Somerville. The article seemed to focus solely on NYC.
NYC's subway's are at a halt unfortunately. The MTA unions have paralyzed innovation and development.
The West coast has an opportunity to one up them, but a lot of money gets appropriated and given to contractors without a lot of actual results a lot of the time.
It's so sad to see how the NYC's subway is falling into ruin. I spent my adolescent years living in Brooklyn in the 1980's, and used the subways a lot. Pre-Giuliani, they were filthy and covered with a lot of urban camouflage, but they could be trusted to be there roughly on schedule. When they replaced them with the shiny stainless steel cars, it was even nicer. I moved away from NYC, but whenever I visit, it's sad to see the network, which worked really well in the past, be in such a sad shape. It's like the system got built, and then never maintained. What kind of idiots run such a large system in a world class city?
Well the West Coast may be beating on getting voters to agree to dump money into long term transit projects. Actually getting them built in our lifetimes and then getting people to use them is a very different problem.
For years and years Seattle and LA doubled down on a automobile oriented infrastructure system that clearly wasn't working, but voters finally gave up and got tired of it. Given that referendums are so difficult to win, especially ones that impose higher taxes, this is a commendable achievement.
Not mentioned is the other west coast success story, Vancouver, which has lead North America transit growth, with ridership up 5.7% in 2017. This has been driven by major government investments to drive expansion and improve services across the board. Additionally the system has not been hindered by ride share competition.
West coast public transportation will absolutely never beat East Coast transportation and I say this as a person who has lived on the West coast my entire life. In fact West coast public transportation will always be significantly worse than the east coast.
It doesn't matter what initiatives or policies are being implemented on the West coast. It is literally financially and physically unrealistic to have any transportation system even remotely close to what they have in NYC on the West Coast.
The reason is the layout of cities. West Coast cities are mostly suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl does not lend well to public transportation. For public transportation to work, you need a high density city. Los Angeles will never be walkable and will never have a subway system that all people use regularly simply because the city is too spread out.
Lets put it to numbers:
L.A. County has 4,084 square miles.
New York City has 304.8 square miles.
For LA county to build a network of rails with the same effectiveness of NYC, the size of the NYC subway needs to be replicated approximately 13.4 times.
The NYC subway system has about 236.2 mi of rail. AN equivalent system for the same coverage in LA will be 3165 mi. The current longest subway system in the world is the Shanghai Metro at 420 mi.
Effective Public transportation will not work on the west coast due to physical limits and impossibilities. If you want to live in a city with great public transportation you need to live in a city of apartments. Any city where you can have your own backyard is a city that is not dense enough.
> There is at least one bright spot: Citi Bike has become an essential part of the city’s fabric. The bike-share system has 12,000 bikes across Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens and recently announced plans to expand under new ownership by the ride-hail company Lyft, which will triple the number of bikes.
Almost a non-sequitur to mention Citi Bikes in particular when there are far more notable examples like Lime. This must be a paid advertisement.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadGot to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year.
Seems like the issue is lack of security/policing, not the number of passengers. There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent.
I think you can go a lot further: almost all public transport networks, regardless of type or usage, don't have this problem to any extent.
Some people in large European or Asian cities don't like using public transport because of overcrowding, slow journey times, cost, inflexibility, infrequency, strikes, "terrorism" or whatever. I know people who would cite each of these reasons.
I don't know anyone who would say there is excrement or urine in the vehicles or stations, or even unwashed people. It's that rare.
Bay area residents needs to pressure their politicians into fixing the problem. That means some combination of
- extra policing
- extra cleaning
- extra public toilets
and maybe working out some long-term solution to the mentally ill homeless people.
Based on my (very limited) experience of SF, that seems like an area-wide issue. I've travelled reasonably extensively and SF is the only place I've been where I've suspected more of the shit on the path (inside and out) was human than canine.
I don't think crime is any worse on mass transit than it is in the surrounding areas. I suspect that most of your fears are driven by media bias: crimes that happen in the crime-ridden section of town are inherently less newsworthy than crimes that happen outside of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Scooters and self-driving cars is not a transit system.
Getting anywhere else is a bit of a crapshoot for the last-mile. I don't think LA's train system is ready for primetime until it can reasonably get into LAX; preferably with a more direct route from the westside that doesn't detour through DTLA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crenshaw/LAX_Line
...although its utility will be limited until they connect it to the Red/Purple lines, and that's still on the drawing board.
But once that and the connection to red/purple is done, I'd say LA's public transit would be in a reasonably usable state.
A common misconception people have about the DC metro is that it belongs to DC, but the abbreviation WMATA has nothing to do with DC for a reason. Maryland, Virginia, and I believe even the Federal Govt have to be a part of any changes that happen there. Given that, it's an absolute wonder that anything works.
Although there does seem to be some political support for getting it done this time.
Plus none of these systems brings in enough in fares to cover a majority of their expenses let alone put a dent in their deferred backlogs. Instead the new angle is to go after rider sharing services with new fees and you can bet the scooter invasion is ripe for taxation.
I do find it interesting they talk about the recent surge in EV scooters as being a benefit. I wonder who led that charge. I was amazed that just one company has twelve thousand scooters in the NYC area! Public planners cannot easily factor those in and given NYC weather where to these end up in winter?
If you want to see the statistics as reported to the Federal Government on ridership numbers and cost per mile check out the spreadsheets at [1] the FTA
California transit numbers show a decline and that two thirds and more are by bus in a 2018 June report. Plus the percentage [2]. A large share of the systems need replacement and this is not factored into new taxes. Throw in the transit only reduces emissions per mile when compared to solo drivers but worse those numbers are moving close to parity as cars become more efficient
Mass transit is a good idea but technology is rapidly displacing it and it only appears cheap because riders don't pay but a fraction of the cost. In fact most are paid by people who cannot even make use of it
[1] https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd/data-product/monthly-module-...
[2] https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3860
For example, if trains to the financial district save each rider 1 hour per day, and the riders are 70% stockbrokers on $150/hour and 30% janitors on $15/hour, a fare of $40/day might maximise revenue but be unpopular with voters as it excludes all the janitors.
Or if a new public transport system means for the same commute time I can travel further, and that means I can buy a family home for $300,000 instead of $450,000 it's going to be difficult for the public transport to capture much of the value created in fares.
As a poor sod needing to go to the Aussie consulate between Beverly hills and Santa Monica from Irvine, I'm incredibly lucky that the train was 5 mins late, because there wasn't much else to do that day: last train for the morning left 9:02am, next train 4:30pm!
And I thought Perth's public transport was shit in comparison to Singapore/Hong Kong/London/Berlin, boy have I got new found respect for it!
And in the case of London and Berlin, you're comparing national rail systems to that of a single city that could easily fit the 4 cities you mentioned within its borders and still have room for Paris and Tokyo. And let's not even get started on the LA metropolitan area, which is geographically the largest in the Western world.
If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college.
What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?
I am not saying the subways shouldn't be built or that planning decades ahead is bad. I love subways. But in the area of transportation we will see huge changes in the coming decades.
Scooters and bikes have an effective range, particularly in places like LA that can have quite long commute distances.
Motive power source doesn't really change much.
Intra-urban flight would increase required energy for transport a lot and also move the crapshoot that is today's roads and traffic above our heads, ready to hurtle down at us.
Boring tunnels being cheaper has yet to be proven, since the main issues with tunneling are that tunnels have to be tailored to ground conditions.
Shuttles to Mars doesn't change how I get to and from work across town, the same way that airplanes did not.
https://ny.curbed.com/2018/12/19/18146933/mta-new-york-subwa...
New York's system is designed around walking to stations. All the way to the end of the lines, stations tend to be about a half mile apart. There are express lines but even those become locals on at least one end, with half-mile stop spacing.
DC's is an auto-oriented system, where you're expected to drive to the stop and then take the train in from the suburbs. As a result, while there is dense stop spacing in the center, distances between stations in the suburbs get progressively longer and longer. It's over these long stretches in the suburbs that DC is able to attain much higher speeds.
If you have really comprehensive coverage in a densely built area you'd be stopping too often for those top speeds to matter.
This is the problem with the Acela. It can technically go up to 150mph, but it has to stop so often that it averages 60mph for the journey.
For longer distances with limited stops, the speed and shigh capacity of a train are good. But to really fill out coverage in a dense area, short wait times and short distances between stops and destinations should be your chief considerations. Buses and streetcars just do that better. Though really, once you get past a certain level of density you need all of the above.
This is why developed subway systems with high usage end up with large trains, that's the best way to speed up the system, reducing the delay caused by trains waiting for other trains that are stopped in the station.
An articulated bus might be able to move closer to 100 people comfortably.
For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.
Today California High Speed Rail and Texas Central and Florida's Brightline have to deal with angry suburban neighbors, angry farmers, and legal and environmental review processes that are the result of a century and a half's worth of hindsight.
There really isn't any "environmental impact" for construction within the city (the environment there is already destroyed). But that sure does provide fodder for endless delays and expense.
> 20MPH
Travel from Omaha to San Francisco was 4 days at the opening, including stops. The distance was 1,912 miles. So the average was indeed 20, but to achieve that average (including stops) it must have been going at least 40 on much of the route.
Quite a difference from the alternative, months of walking.
If you like, the first Boston subway was completed in 1897, it took 2 years, and it was all done with muscle, too.
Seattle is a bit of an odd case when talking about construction timelines, because the projects are drawn out mostly due to a state law that limits how much Sound Transit can bond out at any given time. Anything more aggressive than that would require passing a 60% vote threshold, which would be quite the landslide election. (It's also how the first Seattle subway attempt died.)
Environmental impact doesn't just concern spoilage of a pristine environment; among other things, it can consider impacts on drainage and runoff, noise pollution, construction impacts, efficacy at diverting car trips and CO2 emissions, etc.
Actual construction, even nowadays, is pretty fast. What takes 20-40 years is the long-term planning. By comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was advocated first in 1832 (before most of the American West was even American), and serious planning first started in the late 1840s and early 1850s, which led to the Gadsden Purchase in 1853.
Personally, I’m fine with any large transit project as long as it goes faster than a car and cheaper as well.
that seems to be unreasonably long. In germany, both the city I am studying at and the city I was born are undertaking big changes in their transportation infrastructure, and both don't take that long. In munich, building just started and is expected to last unit 2026 [1]. And we always complain that it's taking too long to plan and build!
40 years seems to be crazy! You would have to start repairing the old stuff when the whole project is finished.
Or are you talking about the whole process, including the financing? Then it's more understandable, many big project here also stall for 20 years until everyone has enough money and the political will to follow through. But I thought the financing is covered due to the sales-tax increase.
While it's easy to complain about projects not moving for 20 years, the sums are often quite enourmus and i am not sure whether inefficiencies are to blame, or whether gathering enough money just takes a long time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_line_2_(Munich_S-Bahn)
Admittedly, I'm a bit torn on this. Since infrastructure is so important to the liveability and growth of a city, and any sort of long-term thinking is a good thing. But predicting the future is hard, and having a 40 year plan survive (short-term) politics is also unlikely.
There are also project on hold for 30 years in munich.
Another reason why they are building in stages is that some of the new transit projects aren't as useful until other ones are finished. For example, there's plans for a big tunnel (a few miles longer than the one you linked) that they're trying to finish in time for the 2028 Olympics (although construction hasn't started yet). A lot of the projects on the other side of the tunnel are being done with the purpose of getting people to the tunnel,
> Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets.
> Few, if any, combustion engine cars
> Truly self driving cars
If history has taught us anything, it's that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. The infrastructure of NYC, LA, Seattle, San Francisco, etc will not look much different in 2059 than it does today.
We'll probably still be using JavaScript, too. :/
The world 20-40 years ago was far more primitive than it is today.
That is not true. Here's the list: "cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?"
How cheap does a cheap electric scooter need to be? Because we had electric scooters 10 years ago. Definitely so if you include "nascent" forms. More specifically, the electric scooter dates from around 1920 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped . The Segway PT came out in 2001.
Bikes of course are 19th century technology.
Airbag helmets are new.
Electric cars were popular in the early 1900s.
CMU was working on self-driving cars in the 1980s; the Navlab drove across the US in the 1995, and was autonomous 98% of the time. Surely that counts as "nascent", yes?
Drone taxis sound like the proposed helicopter taxis of the 1950s, or flying cars, or jet packs, though without a driver. Drones have been around for more than 10 year. Passenger-carrying drones? That is indeed new.
"Boring tunnels in multiple levels"; many subway systems have multiple levels. What has been new about that in the last 10 years which wasn't deployed earlier, not even in nascent form?
"Shuttles to Mars". I don't know how to judge that one. In 1989 when Bush Sr. announced the Space Exploration Initiative, would you have said that it was a nascent project? You didn't know that that it wouldn't pan out, just like we don't know now if SpaceX's plans will pan out.
The world 20-40 years ago was far more sophisticated than you seem to think.
I think there is a Bill Gates quote about how most people overestimate how much things will change in one year and underestimate how much they will change in ten.
Of course, when you find yourself 10 years in the future you'll probably just forget how different your city used to be because the changes unfolded too slowly for you to notice they were changing. In most of these cities, for example, the infrastructure might look the same but the way people are using it is very very different.
LA metro is dropping track like crazy and way more usable than it used to be. And it’s cheap. $1.75 each way or monthly pass.
Tl;dr it’s awesome now and getting better!
None of those are mass transit. Personal vehicles are fine and dandy, but they can only move one person at a time and will always, by definition, take up more space and resources per person than a solution that can ferry tens or hundreds of people at a time.
And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway.
Scooters and bikes are great supplements to a system, but they won't actually do much good without a mass transit system to be the backbone for getting around.
If 20 minutes is "practically an entire commute" then you're already in a dense enough area to where transit coverage should minimize the number of people who are a mile away. At that point, proximity to transit just becomes part of what you pay for in your house. If the transit is there, development patterns will tend to build up around it.
Firstly, that's more like exurbia than suburbia. Suburbia is characterized by low density sprawl surrounding a denser, urban core that acts as the economic anchor. This is also where the nightmarishly long commute times tend to be: (https://www.caliper.com/featured-maps/xus-commute-time-mapti...).
Secondly, people decide where to live and work based on commute times. In other words, people consciously choose to live in places that are within a 30 minute commute from work, and they structure their days (when they wake up, when they leave the office, etc) around minimizing it. This same mechanic works if the transit is available. People will consciously choose to live closer to the transit hubs that minimize the lengths of their commutes, promoting density around the bus or train routes.
This is why the "last mile" problem is not as relevant of a consideration as people think once you get past the "windshield bias" a bit. Firstly because if everyone is within a mile of a transit option then that means the [i]worst case scenario[/i] is that someone has to walk a mile, and most people will choose to live within a space that's even less than that.
And secondly, because a mile isn't actually that terrible of a walk, especially if you make the walk a pleasant one. I live 2 and a half miles from my office. If I ride the bus it takes me about 20 minutes door to door with maybe 5 of those minutes involving walking to/from the bus-stop. If I walk the whole way it takes me about 45 minutes. Despite the walk being more than twice of long, though, I'm honestly indifferent between the two options. My only real consideration is whether I'm in a hurry or not, and usually if I'm in a REAL hurry I'll take a cab.
Even if it's raining, I often just take my umbrella and walk the commute because the walk is, in itself, enjoyable. It's not just a means of conveyance, it's a stroll and a source of exercise. There are plenty of murals to look at, a park to stroll through, flowers and landscaping to see, shop windows to look in on, sidewalk cafes to people watch people on awkward first-dates, etc.
Lots of disabled Americans ride around on scooters (4-wheeled motorized carts). They would do much better on the streets of Europe where there's bike lanes and nice sidewalks than in suburban America, though they'd have problems navigating the shops.
I believed we were talking about the razor scooters/scoot-share services, which are too finicky for people with mobility issues to be able to use on bumpy streets.
The types of scooters you're talking about basically use the same infrastructure as wheelchairs. So if you're pedestrian friendly and have inclusive urban design (like curb-cuts) that won't really be a big deal.
London is the only city in Europe that even comes close to offering what NYC alone does in terms of public transit.
Even Berlin, the second largest city in the EU, has pitiful public transit in comparison.
I would really like to know what makes you think Berlin public transit is "pitiful"...
The U-Bahn / S-Bahn / Deutsche Bahn / Autobus / Tram inter-connectivity are at least on par with what NYC has to offer (adjusted for geographic factors and population density), and that's before getting into KPIs like on-time arrival percentages, individual line uptime, and peak hour commuter congestion. And then there's the more intangible differences, which are nevertheless important to humans - like vehicle cleanliness, station upkeep... the list goes on and on.
Compare the Berlin Hauptbahnhof to Penn Station. Or the U1 to the L, or the J/M/Z. Or peak-hour Alexanderplatz to Union Square. Or the M29 to... I don't know... the NYC bus of your choosing. My god. Throw whatever numbers you want out there as a counterargument, but I know which I'd prefer in just about any scenario.
I have. As of 2010 (before Cuomo's tenure began), New York had unambiguously better public transit overall than Paris, in addition to serving a city with four times the population of Paris.
Cuomo is doing his best to "fix" that, but in 2018, I'd still take NYC over Paris as far as public transit is concerned.
http://www.muenchen-touristeninformation.de/MVV-Schnellbahnn...
http://www.hungarybudapestguide.com/wp-content/uploads/detai...
https://www.s-bahn-berlin.de/pdf/VBB-Liniennetz.pdf
I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on Long Island, spent a summer in Seattle, and I live in San Jose now.
One can't speak for the entirety of the either coast, but no city in CA comes close to what NYC offers in terms of public transportation.
And what NYC offers is a true car-free lifestyle which carries you to work, leisure, and back home via public transport.
E-scooters aren't a reliable way to get anywhere yet, and who knows if they'll ever be, not to mention that they are not for everyone. My grandmother is not going to ride one -- nor my wife, for that matter, nor should the kids. But the Subway is a common denominator.
This reflects in the daily ridership. MTA carries an order of magnitude more passengers than, say, BART. The same can be said about overall transit ridership[1].
East Coast vs. West Coast is a silly comparison when NYC Metro alone has more ridership than nearly all other major metro areas combined (including both Coasts, the Midwest, and the South).
So it's really NYC vs. Anywhere Else, and Anywhere Else still sucks when it comes to public transport because, in practical terms, most people aren't commuting by public transport in Anywhere Else, but they do in NYC.
You can't slap a Lime scooter on a suburban development and call that "public transport". And a self-driving car is still a car, a glorified jitney cab if and when it arrives. And it's not going to solve the problems of the car-centric (sub)urbanism[2] anyhow.
The mistake the article makes here is a classic one: percentage growth vs. absolute value. Doubling from, say, 500K in a metro area with 7M population is going to be a bit easier than doubling the 14M ridership in a 20M metro.
As for the problems - people on HN of all places should be the ones who understand scale and that some problems simply don't exist when the scale is insignificant.
I want every city to be a public transit success story, but as it currently stands - the rest of the country will be playing catch-up for a long time.
[1]http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/transit-ridership
[2]https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611557/self-dr...
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TL;DR: NYC mass transit carries more people than systems in all other major metros combined[1]. Any comparison - including this article - is silly.
Transit is all about density. There is no way the west coast can beat the east coast in transit practicality for another 100 years.
For example my 4.5 mi commute in sf takes around 25 min. That’s similar to what I remember from Harvard square to Boylston street which is an equivalent distance.
Many cross-walks have a very short walk timer, so even able-bodied people like myself struggle to cross in time. Police don't ticket drivers blocking intersections and crossings [0], so almost every crossing is blocked in the morning and afternoon. Divers regularly run red lights. I'm sure it will take a few people to die first, as right now the police's mandate seems to be to get the rich people in their fancy vehicles home quicker than any kind of safety. Not to mention the construction that means you're going to have to switch street sides a few times during every journey.
Buses are okay for north-south trips, but non-trivial trips can be as slow as walking, because a lot of routes only intersect downtown. The only use for light rail I've found is getting to SeaTac, but even then you need to live on the right side of the city. The streetcar is pathetic, and has never helped me get to work to to a friends house due to the route.
I guess with a programmer's salary, it's okay since just getting an Uber and Lyft is no big deal, but for everybody else, it sucks. And sometimes, I feel like the only reason a token effort is being done about public transport is so people can feel smug and claim Seattle is progressive, left-leaning. Meanwhile, everybody still drives everywhere.
[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/vid...
However it won’t happen with our current city council.
I have nearly been run over multiple times by some jackass who doesn't look where he's going making a right turn when I have a walk signal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's a recent development. The MTA hit its peak of reliability and performance about a decade ago. Since 2010, which coincidentally is the exact time that Cuomo took office, things have plummeted.
It's true that the corruption within the MTA and TWU have been around for decades, but it's not true at all that it's a coincidence that everything started to go downhill as soon as Cuomo took office.
Cuomo literally does not believe that it is his job to oversee a statewide agency, despite the fact that every other governor - including his own father, when his father was governor - have taken on this responsibility.
Unsurprisingly, when the public official in charge absolves themselves of responsibility for holding the MTA and TWU accountable, things fall apart pretty quickly.
Cuomo even deigned to make hollow PR statements about the subway to the press? I must have missed those.
I'm being flippant, but not without reason: Cuomo has taken the subway exactly twice in the last decade, went out of his way not to take public transit when running for re-election (lest it be interpreted as him admitting responsibility for the system), and undermined Andy Byford at the one job he ostensibly hired him to do in the first place.
It's not that Cuomo is all talk and no action. When it comes to public transit, he isn't even "talk". He's just completely absentee, and downright proud of it.
Americans need to fix this political mess and start electing smart people who aren't in someone else's pocket. The corruption in NY and the whole east coast is rampant! And it's bad everywhere mind you, but NY absolutely is the epicenter of it.
This statement may be true, but it's completely irrelevant to the specific problems facing the NYC transit system at the moment.
Since 2010, Cuomo has raided the coffers in order to fund his own personal projects (like an upstate ski resort), yes. But it's not just a matter of funding: due to corruption and a complete lack of oversight, costs are out of control because the MTA and TWU, as well as private contractors, are able to siphon off absurd amounts of money by inflating costs or even committing outright fraud: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
NYC public transportation is great, but its incredibly expensive and falling apart. (NJTransit + Amtrak have had major problems in the last few years)
There doesn't appear to be any fixes in the works. It seems like they're just hoping the problem goes away or that the federal government will spend billions on new infrastructure.
What will it look like in a decade?
"Ford to City: Drop Dead" in 1975 was an omen for the NYC systems. local, state, and national politicians have all chosen to just ignore NYC metro in the hopes it magically gets better or starts running on time.
Having visited NYC to visit my sister, I can say that what LA lacks in ridership it makes up for in overall investment. New railcars for the NYC system are slated for 2023, whereas Metro LA sees new cars on a yearly basis. The LA high speed project, for whatever political boondoggle it might be, was approved and is in construction. our single tap NFC metro cards are good not just for the LA system, but for most if not all surrounding city systems. I can use an LA TAP card on Santa monica, Culver city, and LA city buses with no penalty.
I also get the equivalent of groupon deals with my tap card. Half price bulgogi or even a free coffee, just for having a metrocard. Its surely no coffin nail for the iron juggernaut of NYC, but its a perk.
Most LA buses and subways all have free Wifi, with the exception of some larger express lines.
LA also has sixteen new transit projects, all green-lit, some of them individually over a billion dollars. This is just the city of los angeles, not the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail#Future
TL;DR: When compared to an entire state, and factoring in current and future investment, the west coast is crushing NYC.
In New York City you have the LIRR, PATH, NJ Transit, Metro North, Amtrak and subway trains running all night.
It's true NYC subways started having problems in the past few years as ridership has grown and long-needed maintenance has been underfunded, but the politicians are (supposedly) fixing that.
Most people in NYC don't even drive snow-capable cars, and on the very few days we have snow on the streets the roads are absolute chaos.
You'd just mandate that the scooter companies disable the scooters when the city tells them to. The robust public transit system would mean that those who normally ride scooters would have no problem getting to their destination.
I used to think so, but some European cities really do offer counterexamples. I'm thinking of places like Munich, Vienna, and Copenhagen. It's not uncommon to see people there who, by American stereotypes, wouldn't be expected to ride scooters: moms with kids, men in suits, etc. Perhaps the urban cultural gap is so vast that what you're saying is indeed true of the US, but I wouldn't take it as a given.
But ignore NYC for a second (I acknowledge that many people who have lived there find this impossible) and look at the rest of the East Coast. Only the DMV area and Boston have any sort of large-scale public transit.
The buses are mostly reliable and can get you downtown. But several areas feel underserved, especially if you live outside Multnomah county.
Also, the attempts to get the Yellow line into Vancouver fell through because the Washington legislature voted against it. There are renewed efforts to build it, though.
It'd be nice if we had elevated trains that didn't have to share with busses, cars, bikes, and pedestrians.
We're not going to see cities go all-in on transit while self driving cars are on the horizon.
Maybe after cars drive themselves, when people learn traffic is still not getting better, more cities will get serious about transit infrastructure.
Give buses priority at intersections, or even better build them dedicated overpasses if you want to see buses really move.
Or just give them the IR transponders that emergency services use to trigger the light in some places and have it go green for the bus rather than red for everyone. You'd accomplish almost the same result with less trade-offs.
Giving one vehicle priority tends to increase complexity and causes a distraction which increases risk of accidents (which clog up the road making the bus late). This is why the modern doctrine for EMTs is to drive in traffic like everyone else and use lights/sirens only in the most time critical cases and when doing so will substantially affect travel time.
At those intersections busses arrive at the curb lane to pickup/dropoff. Then a special light tells the bus driver that it is ok to proceed into the intersection, while all other cars have a red signal. The bus pulls out and leapfrogs traffic.
Actually, they do. Take a look at the MetroBus infrastructure in Mexico City[0] for example. Buses run on time, on an extensive, dedicated lane network.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs
With dedicated bus lanes, you skip the backlog and cross on the next light, so intersections do not undo the advantage of dedicated lanes.
You don't have to take my word for it - just ride any good dedicated lane system at a high traffic time and note your relatve speed of progression versus car traffic.
Do you mean it is slow compared to the portion with no overpasses, or slow compared to vehicles w/o dedicated lanes passing through the same intersections?
Passing through intersections is never particularly fast (except perhaps at night on empty reads with sensors far enough away to turn the light green before you even get there) - but at peak times dedicated lanes help a lot even when intersections are involved because you skip the queue.
The benefits of a transit system accrue to people who aren't using it as much as to people who are. A bus that transports 60 people means you just took at least 30 vehicles off the road (and that's a super conservative estimate). That extra capacity is a benefit to people riding bikes, walking, and driving. So why would you expect only the bus rider expected to pay into the system while everyone else benefits?
The only issue is traffic, which dedicated lanes and automatic right of way takes care of. There is also the issue of having to wait outside in bad weather for it, but if you keep headways low that's not so bad if you're already committed to having to walk to the bus shelter.
Huh? What kind of trains have you been riding? Buses are noisy and have herky-jerky motion because they drive in traffic and have noisy diesel engines and are constantly accelerating and braking and turning. Trains ride on metal rails with no traffic in their way.
Of course, the shitty subways in America's east coast cities somehow manage to be extremely noisy and bumpy; I'm not sure how they manage that. Subways in better places don't have this problem in my experience.
Subway trains roll on tracks in concrete tunnels that reverberate sound. They're extremely loud. It's metal on metal with grinding disc brakes.
>Buses are noisy and have herky-jerky motion because they drive in traffic
Buses are huge. They're generally too huge to accelerate or decelerate rapidly, so I have no experienced this herky-jerky motion you're talking about. That's much more likely in a car.
>and have noisy diesel engines
At this point most big cities I've been in the buses run on CNG, which is still super loud but burns much cleaner. Eventually they'll be all electric fleets though, and should be predictably quiet.
The German subways I've ridden manage to be reasonably smooth and quiet.
>Buses are huge. They're generally too huge to accelerate or decelerate rapidly, so I have no experienced this herky-jerky motion you're talking about. That's much more likely in a car.
I guess you've never ridden a bus in a city. Buses can brake very effectively, like most vehicles with air brakes, and lots of riders have to stand on them, so you get thrown around a lot more than a rider in a car who's belted into a bucket seat.
That's probably more about good soundproofing for inside the train. But even in Tokyo I found the trains to be rather loud.
>I guess you've never ridden a bus in a city.
I ride one every morning, usually standing. It hasn't been a problem and I actually find our subway trains to be more prone to hard stops and starts. Intra-city buses rarely exceed 30 miles an hour anyway. I usually feel bad for the elderly, the injured, and the pregnant because it actually can be hard for them if they're stuck standing. But my ire is usually reserved for people who fail to give up their seats rather than the concept of riding a bus.
Both BRT and LRT don't necessarily solve the first- and last-mile problems, though. Many US cities are using park-and-ride stations, but that can just spread traffic out instead of eliminating it. It's important to create networks for short trips to and from transit stations with things like bikes and scooters.
[1] https://www.stage2lrt.ca/
Also, the article is nothing but PR for the NYC transportation commissioner. Of course the NYC commissioner is going to say X is beating NYC because she wants more funding. She could have gone to Boise, Idaho and came back with similar story.
Electric scooters and a couple of test rides in self driving cars means the west coast is beating the east coast on transportation. Really? NYC metro area by itself outshines the entire west coast when it comes to public transportation. I couldn't take this article seriously. There is certainly room for improvement and investment in the NYC metro area, but what's the point of "east coast vs west coast" comparison that is simply not true.
In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation we have to do one or both of those things. Otherwise we can build all we like and no one will ride. Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car and you’re not going to get reasonable walkability until you de-prioritize the car.
Why does it have to be a competition? I'd like to see both coasts have great systems for transportation!
(And before I get called out: Yes, I realize NASA got people killed for the same reason but the difference is seriously orders of magnitude. NASA's failures were publicized while the USSR's were covered up. Many cosmonauts perished and all records of them were removed, they were airbrushed out of photos, erased from official documents, etc. The world will never know their names.)
There are parts of Phoenix that are more bikable than much of New York.
LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle have started pouring money into their new transit systems, while MTA and NJ Transit and Port Authority keep having their budgets cut, leading to reliability so low that it's driving people into cars.
The East Coast used to be the star of American transportation, not much anymore.
~$2.0 Billion into caltrain electrification: http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/Caltrain+Modernization+Progra... (page 13)
- $0.5B: https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/ecc
- $3.1B (thus far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_BART_extension
- $2M (each): https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/cars
- $1.2B: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-Muni-s-new-light-r...
- $1.9B: https://calmod.org/
So stuff happens, and I'm grateful when it does -- the new BART cars are nice -- but generally at a snail's pace. It's hard to tell whether NIMBY obstruction (https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2018/03/01/caltrain-and-ath...) or contractor incompetence and mismanagement (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-subway-stalle...) is more to blame.
As far as LA goes the results are not exactly convincing. I wonder if 't seven possible to have decent public transportation in an area that's as spread out.
LA's bus system is the largest in the world on the basis of coverage, and is the most-heavily used bus network in the Western world.
The problem is that they waste money profligately. What takes other cities millions of dollars and tens of weeks takes New York billions and decades.
The reason no one wishes to add billions to the MTA’s already large capital budget is that 99% of the money disappears into a black hole
http://interactive.nydailynews.com/project/mta-spending/
The only real difference would be that the comparison in funding/cost between equivalent US and EU work would be more fair (also achieved by de-nationalizing healthcare and pensions in the EU).
Unless of course you’re also suggesting that nationalization would reduce global costs, but nothing about this particular thread supports/suggests that
Why would you have the same problem? The project gets cheaper because the labor to do it (and administrative overhead to make sure the benefits are given) are cheaper. In a world where dollar values and sticker shock aren't significant determinants of transit policy your point might make sense, but we don't live in that world.
Also, transit funds are usually raised locally while nationalized social services are funded nationally. So the costs would actually fall on different entities and a broader tax-base if you did it this way.
As I've said said so many times before, every nation gets the government it deserves. Americans don't want bikeable or walkable cities, so we don't have them. Europeans do want them, so they have them.
>In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
Yep, I was in Germany recently, and the large cities I visited all had excellent subway/train systems, as well as bike paths on all the major roads. And unlike bike lanes in US cities, the bike lanes were on the same level as the sidewalk, physically separated from the cars. The cities themselves were far more dense too: not as dense as Manhattan, but still far more dense than your typical American suburban "city", so it was very feasible to get around by bike and subway and also tram (electric streetcar).
We're not going to de-prioritize the car because Americans just can't think that way; they can't stand the thought of having to share space with strangers. So we're going to continue building more roads, and getting worse and worse congestion. It's not ever going to get better, because generally, when you look at the history of human societies, things rarely get fixed before there's a total collapse or disaster of some kind. Humans in groups just aren't smart enough to avoid disasters even when they're plainly obvious.
West coast is still total shit in land use, other than parkland allocation sometimes, and until they make the hard choices to undo a century of mistakes, can they catch up with the east coast's century of stagnation.
New rail cars are being added to all lines over the next 4 years. As another poster mentioned, a new North/South link project is likely to start soon. The Green Line is being extended into neighboring Somerville. The article seemed to focus solely on NYC.
The West coast has an opportunity to one up them, but a lot of money gets appropriated and given to contractors without a lot of actual results a lot of the time.
Not mentioned is the other west coast success story, Vancouver, which has lead North America transit growth, with ridership up 5.7% in 2017. This has been driven by major government investments to drive expansion and improve services across the board. Additionally the system has not been hindered by ride share competition.
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/translink-ridership...
It doesn't matter what initiatives or policies are being implemented on the West coast. It is literally financially and physically unrealistic to have any transportation system even remotely close to what they have in NYC on the West Coast.
The reason is the layout of cities. West Coast cities are mostly suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl does not lend well to public transportation. For public transportation to work, you need a high density city. Los Angeles will never be walkable and will never have a subway system that all people use regularly simply because the city is too spread out.
Lets put it to numbers:
L.A. County has 4,084 square miles. New York City has 304.8 square miles.
For LA county to build a network of rails with the same effectiveness of NYC, the size of the NYC subway needs to be replicated approximately 13.4 times.
The NYC subway system has about 236.2 mi of rail. AN equivalent system for the same coverage in LA will be 3165 mi. The current longest subway system in the world is the Shanghai Metro at 420 mi.
Effective Public transportation will not work on the west coast due to physical limits and impossibilities. If you want to live in a city with great public transportation you need to live in a city of apartments. Any city where you can have your own backyard is a city that is not dense enough.
Almost a non-sequitur to mention Citi Bikes in particular when there are far more notable examples like Lime. This must be a paid advertisement.