> “It was a huge loss not to build it,” Koenig says, of the subway. “When you compare almost any city in Europe to a Midwestern car-centric city there is no comparison in the quality of life.”
Ain't that the truth. It's very depressing to read about the history of transit in the States.
Meh, depends what your priorities are. While the opportunities for insane white collar income are much fewer cities in the Midwest are pretty great for quality of life.
Having commuted by car, rail, walking, and working from home, I personally think a quick walk to work is by far the best option. You generally give that up in car centric cities and it’s a huge loss.
You (and the other commenter) need to be a lot more specific than "The Midwest", a large and diverse part of this country. That figure isn't close to true in Chicagoland at least, unless you're commuting suburbs to the boonies (and even then, you'd need to be lucky and have a tollway route). A 30 mile commute into the city, with traffic, takes like 50-70 minutes, a large reason why Metra commuter rail is so popular.
That really depends on where you’re drawing the borders of Chicago. The Chicago metropolitan area is car centric, but looking at Chicago as a city unto it’s self and things look very different.
5-20 minute commutes are more normal. If this sounds surprising to you, take a look at the Census Bureau's commute data. Keep in mind that this data includes commutes that cannot be walked that are in areas of low unemployment and high income relative to cost of living. https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/data/commute_times...
3 minute walk to ferry pier
5 minute ferry ride across Sydney harbour to circular quay
6 minute walk to office
Excellent 4g so able to hold video conference all the way
That was my favourite commute.
Lived in Renens and had three or four options for getting to my office depending on the weather. Could walk the whole way, walk two different ways to the light rail, or if raining hop on the bus next to my apartment.
You give up the walk in bigger cities unless you pay top dollar for a downtown condo so you end up on transit (bus/subway), bike or even uber commuting
It’s a function of the relative amounts of housing and jobs in the inner city. People talk about building more houses as the solution to high prices, however escalating demand and long commutes are driven by increasing office space.
Aren't buses better then subways for most places, given their lower costs and greater flexibility? Isn't this true for most of Europe, also? Or does the typical mid-sized city in Europe have subways like London, Paris, and NYC?
They often have above ground trams that go down the middle of the street and/or share space with cars.
Buses too but they’re not as dominant as in north america. Trams are generally quieter, prettier and less obtrusive. And with quite frequent service. Also easy to know your way around without knowing the routes as they’ll have lines on a map.
This is actually a negative. Build a train, and it's really hard to move. This actually spurs investment. A bus line can be taken away with the stroke of a pen.
Many light rail systems discontinue or change portions of their system. It doesn't happen often in underground sections because those are usually built only in the densest portions of a city which would tend to have high ridership.
I think it's more the tunnel that makes these lines less likely to be discontinued, rather than the train. Tunnels are just expensive to move whether they're for trains or for busses.
Most subways are heavy rail, not light rail. And, as you note, underground subways rarely go away--particularly after the age of multiple competing lines, often redundant.
All save one of the defunct lines in NYC went defunct because they were demolished for other stuff--because they were elevated or at-grade lines. (The one underground line that went defunct was split into three lines in active use today.) Putting it underground definitely increases political and budget survivability.
Lower upfront capital costs. At a higher level of passengers per hour labor costs of needing one driver per bus start to dominate. 70% of mass transit operating cost in developed countries is staff. A train can have many cars but only one operator. Buses use existing roads and the increased wear of a 35,000 lb vehicle on roads is part of another organization's budget (notice bus stops use concrete instead of asphalt). Methods of improving bus service like more drivers and buses to reduce wait time, and dedicated lanes bring up the cost.
> Maybe driver-less buses would be a new sweet spot? Maintain detailed road maps for the driving software instead of tracks?
Would be a political nightmare. One of these autonomous busses hit a passenger and it becomes a policy nightmare. Public control center gets hacked, its a technical nightmare.
To problems like this, sometimes the solution isn't tech.
Busses are very slow compared to any subway. Even with dedicated lanes (which is costly and unpopular) they still need to go around obstacles like buildings, follow the roads, yield to pedestrians, pull into stops, etc. Speed limits need to be obeyed as well.
Compare that to a subway that just goes below most obstacles in a straight line, travels at >80km/h and usually has no places to yield whatsoever. Fast travel in a predictable way, independent of traffic, weather, whatever. Maybe rush hour will make getting into the subway a little slower, but that's about it.
Subway is far superior to everything, including trams and trains for urban environments. It is expensive to build however, which is why in Europe it is usually supplemented with trams and busses for outlying routes or to fill the gaps between tunnels. Flexibility is rather a minus actually, because it leads to bus routes being subject to "snaking" through neighborhoods to satisfy the occasional political whim. Planted 5 trees and a bench? Call it "Mayour Mueller Park", add a bus stop with a 5min detour. Lather, rinse, repeat. Subways are somewhat immune to that.
An interesting in-between is a transitway (bus only road). Very nearly as fast as a subway due also only stopping at stations and only being delayed by other mass transit vehicles. Obviously cheaper than tunneling or elevated railways if the land is available.
That would be a no-go in most of Europe. Cities are too dense, so there is just no land available for that. And even if it were, land prices are high enough that tunneling costs start to look cheap.
One of the densest cities in the world is Jakarta, Indonesia. (They actually don't build new roads, just widen them basically, or add expensive toll roads between cities.)
They built a central busway several years ago by taking away one lane of pavement from existing traffic.
That sounds terrible, but when I say dense, I mean ant-colony dense. Any method to increase to more than 1 or 2 occupants per vehicle was a huge win.
It didn't work very well at first since the busway lane wasn't separated from other lanes, so car drivers would "poach" that lane too.
But after it was fenced off, it works ok now.
They're also completing some type of rail system, but it wasn't yet open when I was there last year, though the stations existed. Again, because anything that can be done for mass transit with that density is a win. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried helicopters next. :)
> Even with dedicated lanes (which is costly and unpopular) they still need to go around obstacles like buildings, follow the roads, yield to pedestrians, pull into stops, etc. Speed limits need to be obeyed as well.
In this case, Buses can drive in the underground tunnels that were built for this subway, can't they?
Seattle did it for many years until they replaced it with trains: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=etT_wVuKy_I
In that case, the only thing slowing down the bus is speed limits, which are probably a bit lower than a train, since train would be safe on rails, but still I wonder why they didn't use that given that the tunnels are here and in good condition
I'm a bit confused what benefits buses have at that point - you would need to dig a dedicated subway tunnel (and maybe spend additional to widen the tunnel so that buses can navigate it more easily) so you're out all the construction costs - you're just using a vehicle that has the ability (which you've now restricted) to more freely change routes... one that probably suffers higher maintenance costs over subway cars... and one that might be more difficult to electrify.
I think running buses in subway tunnels is just someone's creative idea to attempt to sabotage having reliable mass transit so that ridership doesn't get too high and they can argue that the whole program should be cut a few years down the line.
The tunnels and their exits next to interstate highway already exist per the article, so at this point the construction costs are assumed to be negligible (compared to a
"$2.6 billion and take thirty years to build" system quoted in [1])
it would be used exactly like it was in Seattle: as a shortcut through the city for some routes. The bus retains all its advantages outside the tunnel, it's basically an underground dedicated bus lane.
If really popular then it can get upgraded to a real train, like it was done in Seattle.
Honestly? At least in Poland, I get the feeling that most cities would jump on having a subway, the problem is getting it started (as for various reasons Poland isn't exactly flush with investment capacity)
Some built other alternatives to buses or shared-grade trams, for example by putting fast local trains under same ticket system (train-based local transit was very popular in UK till Beeching Axe, too), others experiment with things like separate-grade trams - cheaper than proper train-line, but still achieve separation from car traffic.
Because the same thing that gives buses flexibility and cheap start, is the thing that makes the biggest problem - sharing space with car traffic.
If there's a traffic jam, buses stop too. If something takes out part of car infrastructure, the dedicated lanes might be lost for a time, too. When Lazienkowski Bridge burned down in 2015 in Warsaw, figuring a connection that allowed one to take train or subway became crucial, as previously very fast buses (bus/taxi lanes!) would give me a commute longer than commuting from Amsterdam to London by train.
No - bus routes are ephemeral. People won't build businesses and apartment buildings near them, or arrange their lives around them unless the city is blanketed in frequent bus lines (which is a huge investment itself). Because a bus route can be changed in a day, they don't have the attraction of a subway station that is going to be there no matter what the budget looks like.
The transport capacity of busses isn't even in the same ballpark as the capacity of a subway. Subways (and surface rail) are the most capable mass transport system we have by a very wide margin. Busses only make sense to close gaps in the train network.
A lot of people are disagreeing with you, but subways are extremely expensive compared buses and only make sense for capitols or very large cities. Public transit must match the city. Mid-sized cities like Nice or Denver will have light rail systems. Smaller cities like Boulder will have buses. Buses get a stigma in North America but they are good because the initial cost is low so it's easy to get routes with the magical <= 15 minutes between buses which is needed to attract "casual" riders.
Something no one brought up is the recent-ish idea of bus rapid transit (BRT), which solves the problem of not having exact change, because who does these days? BRT gives some of the advantages of rail like fare machines and dedicated right-of-ways. Albuquerque (which is far too small for a subway) just put in its first line.
I grew up in a midwest rust-belt city, and traffic wasn't crazy, and still isn't, even in the suburbs. Probably because the population is still rebounding.
I'm in Florida now, and most of Florida is horrible. Sprawl on top of swamp. Everything is so spread out, the roads have so much traffic, and there's too many people driving agressively or not paying attention. Every hour on the road is a roll of the dice in my $30,000 vehicle versus some asshole swerving through traffic because he was raised on Fast and Furious or something.
Houston is the same, just so many cars and everything so spread out. Atlanta leaves that impression, also. And much of Charlotte. Two-thirds of Austin is jam packed with traffic and nowhere to park. These places were all mostly built in an era of car-centric urban planning.
My impression of Indianapolis, and some of it's suburbs, a booming midwest city, is that they are on their way to the same situation - Driving miles back and forth from housing developments to box stores for every need with only hundreds of cars for company. It's inhumane.
Yuck. This is a fail for so many people. I have working poor friends and it sucks that they have to spend several hundreds of dollars per month each for a non-shit car, insurance, and gas. It keeps them in the hole. I blame zoning and selfish property owners who won't allow more density.
Yes, but it's a failure of zoning. It's totally absurd that anyone that wants a job in a low density city NEEDS to spend thousands of dollar just to get to their job. This is poverty trap. Tons of places don't have that issue.
Tokyo is cheap, because they build enough housing. This happens even though Japanese landlords are discriminatory and abusive (eg requiring you pay them an extra month's rent as "key money" when you move in for no apparent reason.)
I've read that Japanese zoning regulations are federal laws, and based on population density. As the population in an area increases the building heights are allowed to increase. Also it is allowable to convert industrial to commercial, and commercial to residential, etc.
You lumped all of Florida into one awful description. There is sprawl, spread, and desolation in every state. Crazy drivers exist everywhere, and to think they don't is naive. Sure, they have a weird thing in FL about breaking before signaling a turn, but I'd take the roads in FL over the interstates in Chicago or Atlanta. It just sounds like you're bitter about where you live now. I live in one of the large cities in Florida, and while the transit isn't world-class, the quality of life certainly is.
You'll get mixed answers because people don't like the same stuff.
I like the Melbourne area. I'm to the east, out on the barrier island. I have a coworker out to the west, with canal access to a lake so he can go shoot alligators from his airboat. There was a coworker who got 11 acres. He got sheep, chickens, and goats. He can shoot in his yard. Somebody got a low-rise condo right on the Atlantic Ocean beach. Somebody bought a McMansion.
People who want to walk to work can do that, but road traffic is insignificant. The public transportation here is called SCAT. (supposedly the Space Coast Area Transit) The word "scat" fits it very well. I don't think anybody cares.
I live half way between Melbourne and Boca, which are the places with the most "HN type" work. It has been pretty glorious here for quite a while, but development is finally moving in big time.
I can't speak for the HN crowd, I imagine opinions vary, but I can say what has caught my eye. I pay attention to what I can walk to in a neighbourhood (beer? live music? park? supermarket?), location in the city (near other things), and cost (not crazy expensive)
I've been mostly around Jacksonville, and there are spots that I like. The three blocks along the beaches if you can swing it! Or on the beach side of the ditch (inter-coastal). Or the hipster neighborhoods near downtown (Riverside, San Marco, Springfield, Murray Hill, maybe uptown proper). I would be impractical to live on the beach and work downtown. Cost of living is a good deal. It's got everything, you just might need to look for it a bit!
I've been through St. Pete, and some spots, including some of the small towns on the coast of the peninsula, left a good impression (Tarpon Springs, for example). As long as you avoid the sprawl on 19 and don't have a killer commute off the peninsula.
I thought St. Augustine was interesting, I've been there multiple times. It's a small city, and has a lot of tourists - and a lot of the things that tourists like to do. I lived in a similar tourist town, and you find the good stuff and learn you way around. I haven't lived here but know people that do.
I've been to Gainesville. It's a college town. The unique and interesting stuff is tied to that. But I do like small cities, it's easy to be close to everything and not have the hassles of a bigger/busier place.
I've been around Orlando. Nothing I saw caught my eye. Avoid I4 during rush hour, during the day if you can! I've been though some of the suburbs south of Miami, didn't like the traffic, nothing I saw caught my eye.
I've visited Key West and South Beach Miami. Both were interesting and unique in their own way. I'd spend more time in Key West if I had the chance. (and money!) My visit to South Beach was a while ago. Neat place to visit. I stayed at a hostel that had valet parking :-)
I live in the Flagler Beach/Palm Coast area (between St Augustine and Daytona). Do remote "HN-type" work. Few tourists here. Traffic is non existent. Live on a salt-water canal and can take my boat out to the Intercostal for fishing or cruising. Great weather, low cost of living, plenty of beach bars with live music. Paradise.
I didn't mean to disparage the people in Florida, or the quality of life in general. But I do think it would be a lot better if so many people didn't have to deal with so much traffic.
I think it's a problem the way that cities have grown via sprawl over the past few decades, and a lot of southern cities have grown a lot during that time. Apparently it's more profitable to build further out instead of infilling, and build housing developments instead of integrated neighbourhoods. It's depressing to see apartment complexes with sidewalks to nowhere and nothing to do but drive a couple/few miles to the nearest applebees or whatever.
I think the problem with crazy drivers comes with the amount and density of traffic, the long commutes, the divided highways with people driving well over the already fast speed limits while people are pulling in and out of plazas, etc. This can be brutal for the people who need to deal with that every day.
The neighborhoods in older cities, or older parts of cities, tend to be grids of various sized roads dispersing traffic as opposed to cul-de-sacs funnelling everyone in and out of their complexes and developments onto a couple of congested main roads.
I've lived in a northern city, much of it built before the automobile, but not anywhere as crowded as Chicago or NYC.
I'm not personally bitter, except for maybe zoning laws that don't allow for more density. I've had a work form home job for quite a while, and haven't had to deal much with bad traffic. I do feel sad for the people I know who have to commute more than an hour in bad traffic, I feel sad for the working poor who struggle to keep a car on the road, I feel sad for the kids in some of these places who need a ride to see any of their friends, the teenagers with nowhere to hang out besides the Waffle House parking lot, etc.
Houston actually famously doesn't have zoning, but they do have minimum parking requirements and an infinite amount of land, so they still ended up with sprawl. I believe they're improving their laws now.
Parking spots are Americans' religion. Essentially the only things most middle-aged voters seem to care about are their property taxes not going up and that they need to never ever have to wait or pay for a parking spot any place they ever go to, ever.
I've heard that. What you say about that parking minimum rings a bell, too.
Also, I'm sure that the HOAs so many people live in wouldn't allow anyone to convert their single into a double, or build an auxiliary dwelling in the backyard.
I wonder if areas of the city not under an HOA regime would allow stuff like that?
What do you mean by quality of life? For me a big part of that is the environment. No beaches/coast? No mountains, forests, waterfalls, etc? That doesn’t sound like a great quality of life to me.
>No beaches/coast? No mountains, forests, waterfalls
I think maybe you make too many assumptions. Michigan, for example, has any of these within driving distance (albeit their definition of ‘mountain’ is a bit different than out West)
The quality of life would be better with the public transit is the point of the quote though, not that you have to live somewhere else for good quality of life.
I think people are usually pretty happy with living in those areas. They like being able to drive and park at things easily. It’s just the kids who are less thrilled with needing the mom and dad taxi.
I wonder if this has been studied by researchers. Is this a genuine preference or rather something akin to Stockholm syndrome?
Something tells me the average American who moves to a mass-transit friendly city is happier than someone from a mass-transit city that moves to a car-centric city.
I'm a definite small town country person. I think even my town of 5300 people is getting too big for me these days, and I couldn't imagine being happy living in the city or even a bigger suburb. But if I had to live in a city, good public transit would be a must. I spent a week in Paris a few years ago getting around everywhere on the subway and enjoyed it immensely. On a later trip I spent one day driving in Paris and was ready to shoot myself.
Even the buses in Paris are pretty great. About halfway through my last visit, I switched almost entirely from subway to buses. They aren't necessarily the fastest way to get across town, but I found them clean and convenient, and just a great way to take everything in.
But that is not a fair comparison. You need to compare moving from NY, Amsterdam,Berlin, Madrid, Shanghai, Singapore, big cities with good public transportation to any big America city https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZDZtBRTyeI
Something tells me the average American who moves from a mass-transit city to a car-centric city is happier than someone from a car-centric city that moves to a mass-transit city.
People are allowed to like different lifestyles than you without being victims of Stockholm syndrome.
The US government subsidizes houses in suburbs by guaranteeing mortgages and building toll free highways. Apartments are literally illegal to build in many areas (restrictive zoning). Property developers are mandated to include ample free parking. So in many places you are not allowed to have a different lifestyle than drive everywhere.
First off, you get all the same mortgage benefits with a condo or townhouse; those benefits are not just for single family houses [1]. The Seattle area has an urban growth boundary [2, see the red line] that effectively bans construction of new single family housing. The Seattle government also makes it impossible to get a project approved if it has "too many" parking spots and the the vast majority of the transit system is not paid for by its riders: Sound Transit, Seattle's train and express buses, has around 30-40% farebox recovery of operating costs, and capital costs are fully subsidized [3, Page 8]. King County Metro, the bus system, has a farebox recovery of around 25%, again with capital costs being fully subsidized [4, last graph]. User fees (tolls, car registration, gas taxes, etc.) pay a far larger percentage of roads than this: Washington collects 63.5% of road spending from user fees, which is a figure that includes both capital (new roads) and operational (maintenance on existing roads) costs [5]. So someone living in the Seattle area who wants to have a "different lifestyle" has to pay to subsidize the government's preferred lifestyle. Seattle isn't the only region with a strong bias towards transit (especially with new development), so generalizing across the entire country isn't helpful as different areas have very different urban planning cultures.
Most Americans don't really have a choice. Even the most transit-friendly American cities like Seattle were created with job sites that lie in isolated hovels outside of denser areas. And changing this requires planning across multiple industries, not just the efforts of a couple companies.
Funny you should mention Seattle as it is possible the worst city I have ever lived in with regards to infrastructure, both in terms of amount per capita and maintenance. Most of its white collar jobs are concentrated in one small area (in contrast to other regions which are more distributed) and it has the infrastructure of a much smaller city. The local government believes in only expanding transit infrastructure while leaving roads and bridges to rot, and so far their actions haven't improved travel times at all but they do certainly cost an enormous amount: the most recent ballot proposition allocated almost a billion dollars per mile of rail.
I've found this urban design has created isolated neighborhoods where people without cars refuse to travel more than a mile away from home. An example that comes to mind is friends living in Capitol Hill refusing to visit any restaurant in Fremont, a distance of around 3.5 miles with both locations being located directly on highly trafficked bus lines, but if offered a ride (in a car) they would come. For comparison, when in the car-centric cities I lived in, people were willing to travel anywhere in the metro area. Now this is just a few pieces of anecdotal evidence, and you may reply with examples of people who behave completely differently, but it's no better to assume that everyone hates driving and living less dense areas just because you personally dislike them. I prefer living in an area that doesn't hate cars with a passion, and I'm far from the only one who thinks so.
The bus network in Seattle is completely busted. Try riding a bus from Bellevue to the International District on a game night before covid. There is simply not room for more people on the busses, nor is there room for more busses on the Third. Seattle needed this extra rail like 20 years ago.
But I think you are wrong about the focus here. They just opened the downtown tunnel recently, and they are opting to fix the West Seattle bridge even though they won’t be able to fit a train to it. They are also fixing the 520 bridge to Kirkland without a train line. And all the roro ferries have significantly more frequency then the walk on ferries (except for West Seattle). So cars definitely still weigh heavily for the city planners
Even in cities with mass transit in the US, there's a substantial wealthy population that chooses car (or helicopter!) commutes (they might not be commuting daily, though, or driving themselves when they do) over transit ones, so with people for the means for either, it's definitely not a 100% preference for mass transit.
It's weird though since in the US people actively fight against mass transit. Even if you're not personally riding on mass transit it's a public service that helps the local economy thrive - people just get silly minded and all the NIMBY arguments start coming out.
> It's weird though since in the US people actively fight against mass transit.
It's kind of understandable that people protest against having their money stolen and used to build things they don't like. Why do you think it's weird?
No, it's completely illogical from every aspect. Even if the person is going to drive no matter what, and only wants to improve their own experience for least cost, the dollar for transit improves their road experience more than a dollar for more road infrastructure. And even those roads are mostly funded by general funds, not through gas taxes. Gas taxes and user fares fund roughly equivalent amounts of roads and public transit, respectively. And 80% of federal transportation money goes to roads.
The only explanation that's possible is extremely short-sighted and self-defeating selfishness: seeing something that's not for them and instinctively opposing it, without thinking of the bigger picture. It's just childish.
It's not weird, it's just extremely short sighted.
It's exactly like socialized healthcare: somehow the US system manages to be more expensive than anywhere else in the world, ranks among developing nations, yet people will fight fang and teeth against "communism".
A proven track record of local government incompetence and private-public fleecing makes large civil projects much less popular than they would be in a perfect world.
Mostly it's because they think black people will ride the subway to their house and rob them. This is why Atlanta suburbs vote down every MARTA extension and fare change.
I'd take a look at how often crime statistics come up during discussions of expanding public transit options - up here in BC and when I lived in Boston that was the primary argument against expansion... Public transit stations "cause" a raise in crime rate and lower (detached) home values.
Cities with mass transit are still lacking compared to cities across the world. The NYC subway is a very different (and inferior IMO) experience than the London subway.
On Manhattan, a taxi is very often slower than subway (especially compared to the express trains), but it gives you more privacy, and more room to put your baggage.
It's a balancing act.
A helicopter is theoretically great, but in practice helipads on Manhattan were removed in 1980s because of several spectacular crashes, so it's only practical between e.g. the financial district and the airports, which is probably where all the customers are anyway.
Helicopter commuting is so wasteful and awful it ought to be illegal. Why should I have to suffer the noise pollution of some rich asshole riding a marginally quicker commute? In fact while they are allowing helicopter commute, they should pay everyone in on the commute path $100 in compensation, and then another $1000 to the state for the air pollution and the carbon emission.
Maybe this is why helicopter "commute" in NYC mostly happens above water, where a car or a train is not such a good option.
The cheapest I know is $400 from Manhattan to JFK; I could probably use it in a pinch (say, a transatlantic flight with a connection), if split between four passengers.
Police helicopters and fire trucks are much more bothersome sources of noise.
I’m fine with the noise pollution if it means potentially saving someones live. However some rich asshole wanting do depart 20 min later then otherwise, to the airport is unacceptable.
Yup. I spent some time in Singapore which has one of the most extensive mass transit systems in the world. Yet the demand for cars is still very high, even with a massive ($70k USD) licensing fee and 100% import duty (Corolla costs $70k USD).
People have a genuine preference for good mass transit, and they also have a genuine preference for large private homes. Those two preferences are in direct conflict.
This is kind of what I was trying to get at. People have made a choice, because they were forced to make one, and they chose detached suburban living. It has good and bad points, for sure.
Huh, I came back and found my comment to be more polarizing than expected...
I am unsure where the preference lies. I don't always think there's a preference, but you can get forced into it by other economic factors. Young people move into a city, getting adapted a mass transit lifestyle, but they move to a more car-centric area when they inevitably get priced out of car-free living downtown or on a popular rail/bus line because they want to start a family. Personally I don't really want to give up being able to walk outside and down the street to go to restaurants and shop or connect to transit easily, but it would be short-sighted to say that everyone has the same preferences as me.
There's benefits to living in a detached house with a yard. The price is usually being tethered to a car in the US. If you pick a low density area you're probably not going to have an oppressive commute and running errands will be easy (if predictably lengthy, but knowing it'll always be a 20 minute drive and not 20-60 minutes based on traffic is valuable) because there's large roads and every business was mandated to build a large parking lot.
The problem comes when inevitably other people make the same decision and development happens and more people move in. A Californian pattern of development (and in the many areas of the country that have since copied this pattern) is incredibly hostile to good public transit, but due to the geometry of cars, you inevitably have to do _something_... it's just probably going to suck and get underused. So, an alternative strategy emerges: fight tooth and nail against growth.
I grew up in Cincinnati. You are correct, however traffic is bad enough now that a subway or light rail would make a big difference. Unfortunately it is unlikely the voters would approve a tax increase to support that.
It's not that people wouldn't approve a tax increase to support it. The issue is that every politician in the state would attack a light rail project for the city.
The city managed to complete a street car after ten years, but it faced opposition from the mayor, the governor, and federal congressman. The congressman in question even pushed a law that would prohibit any federal funding from going to the operation of the project. How fucked up is that? A congressman who prevents federal funding from flowing into their district.
But is it fair to compare light rail with subways? Seems to me light rail is the worst of all worlds: Slow, low carrying capacity, subject to the same traffic as cars and probably expensive.
The political opposition to the project had nothing to do with preferring a technically superior form of public transportation. Instead, it was opposition to public transportation in general.
Light rail works great downtown. In particular, slowness is a good thing for local businesses. Fast travel like cars does not encourage people to go to your store, it encourages people to drive past it. This is why e.g. Melbourne has a free transit zone in the CBD.
Cincinnati in particular also suffers from a hodgepodge of local government entities that don't really get along. The bus system is run at the county level, but the city limits end before that. Anecdotally, a friend of mine claims that his family voted against the early-2000s light-rail plan on the basis that it would have resulted in the City of Deer Park being downgraded to a village.
I agree. If you wait until traffic is bad enough, then transit might end up getting pushed -- but it's just to appease people who want to maintain their car-driven lifestyle. Everyone currently sitting in their car on the freeway doesn't think they're the "other" person who should be taking the bus or train. The next step is outright fighting any growth, if they already haven't been.
> I think people are usually pretty happy with living in those areas. They like being able to drive and park at things easily.
yeah people probably are pretty happy with their situation. it probably works pretty well for them. they probably respond extremely negatively to any other possibilities. they'd tell you they wouldn't want to use public transit or bikes or whatever else. they couldn't imagine how inconvenient that would be. that sounds terrible to them.
but like, people across broad parts of Europe don't think of biking as inconvenient. people with good public transit don't think of it as inconvenient. i far prefer getting on the bus to taking my car, negotiating traffic & parking. at my last job, it took a couple months of trying it, but eventually i started to far prefer a bike commute to the bus, even though it was pretty long & hilly.
so much of our preferences is comfortability with the known, familiarity. the expressed preference of society, often, it turns out, matter for very little, reflect primarily bias, not intelligence or wisdom or what makes us (individually or collectively) happiest. and all too often these things we imagine serve us, they hold back society. they feed our id, they feed our ego, and the deny a greater super-ego, a better way, that we could better enjoy.
The problem is that the huge suburban "exclusion zone" around cities means that central parts of the metro are very far from open green space. Compare e.g. the development pattern around Cologne-Essen:
In the one case you are never more than five miles from green space, in the other you may be 20+ in the middle. It's a tragedy of the commons -- no one driveway thinks it caused the flood (literally, in some cases!). Even Paris is more compact than Houston despite having 2x the population!
This can affect air quality, urban heat islands, mental health, etc.
Yeah, I understand it's not a good pattern of development for huge metro areas. But someone managed to get the laws on the books to basically require the US to develop in this way, and people aren't fighting _too_ hard to change it. It's not hard to imagine, then, that there might be some competitive advantages to a car-centric lifestyle for individuals to live in that situation even if it's worse for the collective.
Oh, also imagine a neighborhood known variously as "The Harlem of the South" and "Black Wall Street", and try to guess where they decided to carve out the new freeway a few years before that?
Hah. Sounds familiar. My neighborhood was originally created to give successful Italian and Jewish folks a place to live since the toniest neighborhood named River Oaks had explicit bylaws that prevented sales to those races. This was the 1930s well before the Civil Rights Act.
Then one very successful black cattleman had his white secretary buy him a house and sell it to him. Within a few years white flight emptied the area (to the point there's a documentary about it) and suddenly TXDOT decided it was a great place for a freeway.
Relatedly, another fun fact is that Cincinnati also had a street car system that was a regional envy and compared favorably to San Francisco's. One hill climb especially was remarked upon at the time as being as scenic if not more so than the scenic cable car lines that have become preserved and enshrined as such tourist destinations in San Francisco. (Some of the historic cars that have been restored and put back into use by San Francisco even originated on that Cincinnati line.)
Possibly more so than just about any other city in the midwest (though they all made mistakes), Cincinnati has possibly the craziest history of paved over and unfinished projects.
I find taking the subway in Paris or NYC a terrible experience. The smell, the crowds, the stress... after a ride I need to take a shower. As an alternative, I prefer the South East Asia "motorbike centric" cities, if only they could switch to eletric it would be perfect.
If you actually live and commute in these motorbike centric cities rather than visit as a tourist, you will change your tune very quick. They are orders of magnitude more dangerous, streets are narrow, traffic is chaotic and rules are non-existent, summers are hell (and good luck finding a workplace with a shower), you have to dodge aggressive cars/pedestrians/animals on a daily basis. I'd take a London/Paris/NYC style subway system over it in a heartbeat.
Cycling and good metro/subway systems aren't mutually exclusive, of course. Cities with good public transit are often good cycling cities, too, due to being able to maintain a good level of density without excessive levels of car traffic, modest traffic speeds, etc.
(As for motorbikes in cities, I'm not a fan due all the noise and pollution. But electric bikes are great!)
I have been living in Saigon for the past 10 months. I'd say on the contrary, the first few days (what a tourist would experience) are the most stressful, but after a while you get used to it and it's alright.
Saigon and the great experience of crossing the street... among the highest rate in the world of car accidents. Come on, let's be serious, this is better than the Paris subway? Under what metric?
Vietnam isn't even in the Top 30 for traffic accidents. It isn't "among the highest rate".
Vietnam's traffic fatality rate is 26 per 100,000. About the same was America's traffic fatality rate in early 1970s before Ralph Nader convinced people to care about safety. But Americans had no problem driving on roads in 1970s. Virtually no one thought it was too dangerous to drive in America at those fatality rates.
(Today fatality rates are down ~50% from those numbers thanks to Ralph Nader.)
And the Vietnam numbers continue to decrease as the country develops. The WHO numbers are based on 2016 numbers. There were a reported 8,417 fatalities in 2016 but the WHO assumes that's a lie and adjusts upwards to 24,970 fatalities. In any case, fatalities have been dropping by about 5% a year. In 2019 there were 7,624 fatalities, for instance.
Yes everyone says Saigon. (I've lived in Saigon for 7+ years.)
In official stuff they'll say Ho Chi Minh City but in casual conversation, I'd guesstimate 80%+ of the time people say Saigon. But if someone drops in a Ho Chi Minh City instead it isn't especially noteworthy.
Saying "Saigon" doesn't have any particular connotation. Like, it doesn't mean "we refuse to accept the North won" or "we refuse to accept the renaming". (Some Viet Kieu in America are crazy about that kind of thing, though.) It is mostly just that Saigon is two syllables and Ho City Minh City is five syllables.
That said: "Saigon" tends to refer to the inner metro area. "Ho Chi Minh City" actually covers a massive area -- it is the size of a province. It is divided into 24 districts and I don't think anyone from the outer 5 rural districts would say they live in "Saigon".
Also note that the airport in Saigon still has the code SGN.
Yeah, but if you live there it's actually awesome. It's midnight and you're drunk after seeing your friends and you need to go home ? No issue, no cost to get home. It's Sunday and you want to go to the museum ? No issue, no cost to get home.
And if we aren't gonna talk about crime, let's talk about that beautifully sludge smelling runoff from the subway tracks whenever it rains. Quick way to a nice putrid hair conditioning!
And let's not talk about the condition of the tracks and how much electricity is being wasted by the poorly lubricated trains and tracks. Those thunderous sounds when the subway passes? That is the sound of energy being wasted, being converted to sound energy instead of locomotion.
I hate everything about NYC except the melting pot of intellectual diversity that it is.
P.S. I still live here, so don't tell me that my perspective is an outsider's one.
I haven't been on any train after 6pm that wasn't loaded with drunks, in either direction. It gets especially bad going back out around 1am. I wish they didn't allow drinking on the trains.
It’s probably safer, I don’t know the stats though. However, I myself have witnessed a young kid getting stabbed at a Paris subway station and a box fight at a Berlin subway station. So it’s not like things don’t happen in Europe.
The driver stopped short, causing a cyclist behind him to crash. That's a crime. He can play victim all he wants in his BMW SUV, he got off lucky, both legally and extralegally.
Of course the video's edited to only show the pissed of cyclists.
Having done a lot of this kind of riding, let me tell you what likely happened: The kids were riding as a group, acting stupid (running reds, popping wheelies, etc.). BMW driver either said something to them, or drove aggressively near the group. The group rides, surrounding his car to fuck with him a little. BMW driver hits his brakes rather than slow down, cyclist crashes into the SUV (this part is confirmed). Kids are livid, and the pedestrian camera rolls.
The alternative to that sequence is that these kids are beating the shit out of an SUV with their bicycles unprovoked. Not buying it.
They wouldn't realistically get into the car (they didn't), but if they did, they'd trash the interior too. If the driver got out to fight, they'd beat him up obviously. If he just got out to "clear things up", they'd insult him and maybe slap him around a bit.
The driver's problem is he's in his own little bubble and was infuriated by bicyclists inconveniencing his drive (oh dear). I bet he'll tell people how scary NYC is, like commenter `goldenkey` above, and hopefully won't return to be so inconvenienced by kids on bicycles. His conundrum was 100% avoidable by not being a tool.
Anyway I hate selectively edited videos like that, making the driver look like some victim. It's Andy Ngo-quality material.
I saw the biggest rat of my life waiting for a train in NYC. At first I though it was a racoon or beaver or something. I spent some time in the city (East Village) during the late 70's and again off and on through out the 80's. Good Lord people who experienced NYC after Giuliani have no idea what it was like.
If you were there during that era, you can wear it like a badge of honor...like yeah fuck, I survived that fucking place, yeah man I can survive anywhere....
Well it's nice you can't handle it. But in an actual practical sense public transit makes large cities possible. It's more efficient and for people who are used to it not a stressful endeavor if it's actually managed properly.
I think you have cherry-picked the roughest and oldest subway systems in cities with relatively high crime rates. While the Paris Metro can be scary, the Singapore MRT system is clean, quiet and boring.
I believe this is hell. Hours of your life wasted in traffic because the rest of the population believes the same.
I ran out of battery power on camera in Barcelona. I got off the tour bus and was at my hotel room within 10 minutes to plug it in. Then back on the tour of the city really quickly due to the awesome transport systems.
My city, Cape Town, where public transport is really bad it would have taken me an hour or more depending on the traffic.
If you want large private spaces and drive your own car, move to a rural town.
That sounds violently American. Anyway, according to that statement either you hate dense cities or you just love wasting your time in them.
Maybe try a top public transit network, like Vienna (overall), Moscow or Madrid (subway), Tokyo (train) or even Paris (when there's no strike) to see things done right, because in the US cities with barely functional public transit can be counted with a single hand.
It really doesn't. There are people all over the world who feel the same as the person you're replying to. The feeling has nothing to do whether the city has a "top public transit network" as you put it or a third world always broke transit network.
Still it's mostly an opinion shaped by the environment and mostly prevalent in the US, and to lesser extent, other sparsely populated countries with significant sprawl.
The fact that the sprawl makes it ineffective and expensive to lay an effective public transit is what makes it seem undesirable.
The fact that it's ineffective makes it relegated to what poor people use, deepening the issue.
And this goes as just personal experience, but my US friends in the EU insist on driving through city traffic and spending 3-4 as much time in commuting, and it takes a while until they give up.
Some of them aren't even used to do groceries by foot, for a large chunk of the US population that involves driving to a Walmart.
>> Sure, everyone can have any opinion anywhere.
Still it's mostly an opinion shaped by the environment and mostly prevalent in the US, and to lesser extent, other sparsely populated countries with significant sprawl.
Do you also think that introversion and extraversion are opinions shaped by the environment? Does really bother you so much if so many people intrinsically prefer a different lifestyle than what you believe it to be the best, that you are basically willing to call them brainwashed by the environment?
>>Some of them aren't even used to do groceries by foot, for a large chunk of the US population that involves driving to a Walmart.
It's the same everywhere across Europe outside of strict city centers, just replace Walmart with a local shopping center (Spar, Aldi, Leclerc,...). If you'll ever visit one, you're guaranteed to find them packed with people.
> Do you also think that introversion and extraversion are opinions shaped by the environment?
I don't know how intro/extroversion might be shaped or not by the environment, never gave that a thought.
> Does really bother you so much if so many people intrinsically prefer a different lifestyle than what you believe it to be the best, that you are basically willing to call them brainwashed by the environment?
I don't get bothered by the comment, but rather by the implications. I just describe it: car over anything else, as an opinion, is largely a side effect of cheap-gas + city-sprawl approach to development, which is the archetype of urban unsustainability [0]. It's no surprise that the US leads (along with Australia, guilty of the same sin) per capita fossil fuel consumption, close to an order of magnitude higher than the European average, and doubling Germany, the industrial powerhouse of the continent.
People in the US are car centric not unlike in North Korea they're Juche-centric: it's often (or always) the only option.
> It's the same everywhere across Europe outside of strict city centers, just replace Walmart with a local shopping center (Spar, Aldi, Leclerc,...). If you'll ever visit one, you're guaranteed to find them packed with people.
Maybe we've lived in different parts of Europe? There's like 2-4 levels of proximity in all major conglomerates (e.g. Carrefour > Carrefour Market > Carrefour Express, Monoprix > Monop', etc).
Even though the smaller the more expensive, they're invariably cheaper than even just starting the car, and a no-brainer if you value your time at minimum wage.
Spar is largely just proximity shopping so I doubt you'll see it crowded, Aldi is hard discount so they tend to just build big where it's cheap (causing the problems you describe), and Leclerc has no proximity to my knowledge but has more central and bigger locations than Aldi.
Check locations of AhorraMás/DIA in Spain, Carrefour in France, or Фора and Сильпо in Ukraine (or at least Kyiv), to name a few I'm familiar with. Every neighborhood has them, even residential ones, and you only need to go to a mall or a big hypermarket in exceptional cases.
The closest thing I can compare Walmart to, in Europe, is Auchan, with roughly the same ratio of supercenters/hypermarkets to neighborhood stores (3:1). Interestingly, Auchan is losing money because as Europe becomes denser, people shop less and less at hypermarkets.
>>I don't know how intro/extroversion might be shaped or not by the environment, never gave that a thought.
I asked you that because I assumed that you would not try to force introverts to be more outgoing even though outgoing people are supposed to be happier.
>>People in the US are car centric not unlike in North Korea they're Juche-centric: it's often (or always) the only option.
The comparison is rather bad but yes I agree the USA as a whole is pretty car centric. I just don't see anything bad about it. It is like that for historical reasons (USA is pretty big place compared to Germany you mentioned, lots of space, lots of wealth) and personal reasons (people like to live like that). I think the USA actually for its size has very good transit options. Ships and trains for cargo, cars for small to medium distances and planes for medium to large distances. Europe is also pretty car centric, the roads all always full inside and outside of the cities and Europeans love their cars as much as Americans do. There are a lot of car manufacturers in Europe.
>> Maybe we've lived in different parts of Europe? There's like 2-4 levels of proximity in all major conglomerates (e.g. Carrefour > Carrefour Market > Carrefour Express, Monoprix > Monop', etc). Even though the smaller the more expensive, they're invariably cheaper than even just starting the car, and a no-brainer if you value your time at minimum wage.
I know Germany, Austria, Italy and some other smaller countries in the Balkans. In my experience people rather take a car to the shopping mall weekly, bi-weekly or monthly to make a big purchase (cheaper, more choice) than to go to small inner city shops for that. The smaller markets are used for buying things you ran out and urgently need or to buy launch or snacks on your way to work.
Sadly, tours are no longer available. There are some videos out there from "urban explorers" heading down into the tunnels. I got to tour the unfinished platform and part of the tunnel under Central Parkway back in the late 2000's. The water main running thru one of the tunnels is eerily imposing. There's a fair amount of fiber down there, too.
1) exploring
2) a new place
2a) which also happens to be dark
2b) with potential safety hazards
3) whilst your buddy is filming the potentially interesting things you point at
As someone who somewhat regularly walks two miles, and has personal metrics on such, I know it would still take me most of an hour even at my fastest pace to walk two miles. Cars give a weird sense of geography and people both drastically under- ("It takes only five minutes to drive, it must be 'close'") and over-estimate ("I always drive between these places, they must be too far apart to walk") walking time of even just a couple miles.
Cool to see a weird piece of history from the hometown on HN. Many of those tunnels were used to run utilities and fiber so they still have usefulness, but it is sad to think about "what could have been" if many American cities had gone further with these kinds of projects.
Also got excited to see Cincinnati on the front page. I love it here, but the public transit is lacking. People from out of town are also often surprised when I tell them that it's very hilly here, and it makes cycling tough. Good for exercise, hard for commuting.
When I went to UC, I had an appartment down the big hill from the main campus on MLK drive. I tried to schedule classes for the morning so that I could bike in (or give up and walk the bike) while the weather was still cool, and then ride/coast all the way home later on when it was warmer.
I'm assuming you mean the streetcar, and I'm a proponent of it. People get hung up on the fact that the loop is so small right now, so they claim it as useless. I understand that sentiment, but it is nice for spending an entire day in the city and getting from the stadiums to OTR. More importantly, to me I see it as a great first step to incremental improvement. If it can be expanded to Clifton (where UC is), or over the bridge to Covington, it would be an absolute game changer.
In Seattle, underground tunnels were shared by trains and buses until March 2019[1], here's an video showing it in action, a bit older, (possibly before there were any trains?): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=etT_wVuKy_I
Why not use buses in those tunnels as well? Maybe there is no traffic jams above ground?
The seattle shared use was always temporary iirc. The buses were a reliability problem for the trains, impacting on time performance. But what led to the exclusive use was going to shorter inter train timing where there’s simply not enough time to wait for buses to clear the train platforms between arrivals.
It’s a bold assumption that, had it been finished, the subway would have been successful. This is the city that cannot run a simple street car successfully and has had multiple city council members charged with corruption in the last year. The main bridge connecting Cincinnati and NKY has been in need of replacement for a long time, and yet the can continues to be kicked down the road. We do not have a strong track record of building and maintaining infrastructure.
The streetcar is, indeed, a disaster. I think that is largely because they built it essentially as an amusement park ride for the weekends rather than a serious commute option. A subway that had the ability to actually move people across town (like the planned 16 mile loop) would have been great. The subway suffered not so much from local incompetence as inflation.
The Brent-Spence bridge does need repair but that’s not a city issue. It’s a mix of state and federal. It doesn’t help that Ohio thinks that Kentucky should pay for it and vice versa.
> most of what stalled the progress of the subway happened above ground, in offices, where politicians made backroom deals and bold promises that rarely came to fruition . . . By the time the 1920s were in full swing, cost overruns, construction errors, property damage, and political finagling had shut down the Cincinnati subway for good.
American exceptionalism!
> in 2002 a proposal was put before voters for a half-cent tax increase that would fund a regional light rail system, which have used parts of the already-constructed tunnel system. Voters defeated the issue
> Several midwestern cities, including Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Detroit, passed bond issues so that construction could begin on subway systems that emulated the successful New York City one, which began running trains underground in 1904.
> “Cincinnati was unique in that they were the only [Midwestern] city to actually begin working on the subway,”
Good point, but most of it is light rail above ground, with only a small portion underground downtown.
I’ve ridden on it, they are nice trains. And a nice option for suburb commuters. Rush hour gets pretty crazy there also, with everyone trying to get in and out of Fort Pitt tunnel.
This is something Cincinnati has painfully missed out on. I liked the read, never knew about this.
Are those Red Line stations between the airport and downtown as abandoned as they look to the casual visitor? I got a weird rust-belt vibe of "thousands of factory workers used to get off at this station".
While the subway would have been a nice addition to Cincinnati, it shouldn’t be forgotten that at the time, Cincinnati already had a working (and popular) above-ground streetcar. Some of these lines were originally cable car! So, it isn’t that the city completely neglected public transportation, but just didn’t complete the subway portion (in 1925).
Sadly, the streetcar was eventually dismantled (1952), so you can still lament the lack of public transportation.
I live near one of the old streetcar stops, and it would be great to still have that kind of access to downtown.
It's interesting to see them aspire to "subway systems that emulated the successful New York City one, which began running trains underground in 1904" considering all the transit opposition you see these days using "Manhattanization" as a scare word.
Actually Detroit did start building its own subway in 1929, right before the great depression. There is no record of it on the Internet. No one in current city government knows a thing about it.
My father remembers it being built, he would have been 13. A short stretch of tunnel and the beginnings of what would have been two stations.
When I was in college in the seventies some urban explorers found an entrance. But the city managed to get it closed. The only story on it was an alt weekly, long since gone.
One of these days I am going to spend some time in the Detroit library system and dig up proof and publish it on the web.
Oh I know all about the trolley network. My dad took me on the trolley on its last day. I was too young to have any memory of it but I've got the picture ;<).
For sixty years my father insisted that the auto company's were behind its demise. Shortly before he passed away it all came out that he had been correct all along. Although some Detroit media still dispute the proof.
A few years back, I stumbled on the master transit plan for the Metro Detroit region prior to the freeway system being built. The original plan called for rail running in the median of the freeways, similar to how spots are in Chicago. The plan included artist concepts, layouts, etc. Not sure if its true or not, but I had read reports the auto industry fought the rail component of the project to its death.
It was a really fascinating document. It's somewhere on the internet; I wish I could find the link.
This is my hometown and I've been inside this system as early as 1999 and as late as 2008. Not much to look at inside there wet damp small tunnels every exit except the two or three concrete over. Huge water main down the center and huge fiber optic cables.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadAin't that the truth. It's very depressing to read about the history of transit in the States.
Trying to get to Circular Quay from western suburbs for instance is not all that nice.
Good times.
In the US only high COL cities do so this makes it seem like a subway raises real estate costs. But there’s no logical connection.
Buses too but they’re not as dominant as in north america. Trams are generally quieter, prettier and less obtrusive. And with quite frequent service. Also easy to know your way around without knowing the routes as they’ll have lines on a map.
This is actually a negative. Build a train, and it's really hard to move. This actually spurs investment. A bus line can be taken away with the stroke of a pen.
I think it's more the tunnel that makes these lines less likely to be discontinued, rather than the train. Tunnels are just expensive to move whether they're for trains or for busses.
For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_New_York_City...
All save one of the defunct lines in NYC went defunct because they were demolished for other stuff--because they were elevated or at-grade lines. (The one underground line that went defunct was split into three lines in active use today.) Putting it underground definitely increases political and budget survivability.
Maybe driver-less buses would be a new sweet spot? Maintain detailed road maps for the driving software instead of tracks?
Would be a political nightmare. One of these autonomous busses hit a passenger and it becomes a policy nightmare. Public control center gets hacked, its a technical nightmare.
To problems like this, sometimes the solution isn't tech.
Compare that to a subway that just goes below most obstacles in a straight line, travels at >80km/h and usually has no places to yield whatsoever. Fast travel in a predictable way, independent of traffic, weather, whatever. Maybe rush hour will make getting into the subway a little slower, but that's about it.
Subway is far superior to everything, including trams and trains for urban environments. It is expensive to build however, which is why in Europe it is usually supplemented with trams and busses for outlying routes or to fill the gaps between tunnels. Flexibility is rather a minus actually, because it leads to bus routes being subject to "snaking" through neighborhoods to satisfy the occasional political whim. Planted 5 trees and a bench? Call it "Mayour Mueller Park", add a bus stop with a 5min detour. Lather, rinse, repeat. Subways are somewhat immune to that.
Bus/Taxi-only lanes are pretty common actually.
They built a central busway several years ago by taking away one lane of pavement from existing traffic.
That sounds terrible, but when I say dense, I mean ant-colony dense. Any method to increase to more than 1 or 2 occupants per vehicle was a huge win.
It didn't work very well at first since the busway lane wasn't separated from other lanes, so car drivers would "poach" that lane too.
But after it was fenced off, it works ok now.
They're also completing some type of rail system, but it wasn't yet open when I was there last year, though the stations existed. Again, because anything that can be done for mass transit with that density is a win. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried helicopters next. :)
In this case, Buses can drive in the underground tunnels that were built for this subway, can't they? Seattle did it for many years until they replaced it with trains: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=etT_wVuKy_I
In that case, the only thing slowing down the bus is speed limits, which are probably a bit lower than a train, since train would be safe on rails, but still I wonder why they didn't use that given that the tunnels are here and in good condition
I think running buses in subway tunnels is just someone's creative idea to attempt to sabotage having reliable mass transit so that ridership doesn't get too high and they can argue that the whole program should be cut a few years down the line.
The tunnels and their exits next to interstate highway already exist per the article, so at this point the construction costs are assumed to be negligible (compared to a "$2.6 billion and take thirty years to build" system quoted in [1])
it would be used exactly like it was in Seattle: as a shortcut through the city for some routes. The bus retains all its advantages outside the tunnel, it's basically an underground dedicated bus lane.
If really popular then it can get upgraded to a real train, like it was done in Seattle.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Subway
Some built other alternatives to buses or shared-grade trams, for example by putting fast local trains under same ticket system (train-based local transit was very popular in UK till Beeching Axe, too), others experiment with things like separate-grade trams - cheaper than proper train-line, but still achieve separation from car traffic.
Because the same thing that gives buses flexibility and cheap start, is the thing that makes the biggest problem - sharing space with car traffic.
If there's a traffic jam, buses stop too. If something takes out part of car infrastructure, the dedicated lanes might be lost for a time, too. When Lazienkowski Bridge burned down in 2015 in Warsaw, figuring a connection that allowed one to take train or subway became crucial, as previously very fast buses (bus/taxi lanes!) would give me a commute longer than commuting from Amsterdam to London by train.
Something no one brought up is the recent-ish idea of bus rapid transit (BRT), which solves the problem of not having exact change, because who does these days? BRT gives some of the advantages of rail like fare machines and dedicated right-of-ways. Albuquerque (which is far too small for a subway) just put in its first line.
I'm in Florida now, and most of Florida is horrible. Sprawl on top of swamp. Everything is so spread out, the roads have so much traffic, and there's too many people driving agressively or not paying attention. Every hour on the road is a roll of the dice in my $30,000 vehicle versus some asshole swerving through traffic because he was raised on Fast and Furious or something.
Houston is the same, just so many cars and everything so spread out. Atlanta leaves that impression, also. And much of Charlotte. Two-thirds of Austin is jam packed with traffic and nowhere to park. These places were all mostly built in an era of car-centric urban planning.
My impression of Indianapolis, and some of it's suburbs, a booming midwest city, is that they are on their way to the same situation - Driving miles back and forth from housing developments to box stores for every need with only hundreds of cars for company. It's inhumane.
Yuck. This is a fail for so many people. I have working poor friends and it sucks that they have to spend several hundreds of dollars per month each for a non-shit car, insurance, and gas. It keeps them in the hole. I blame zoning and selfish property owners who won't allow more density.
Residents in both places pay for their housing units but share the costs for roads, sewers, etc. Denser cities have an advantage in this regard.
I like the Melbourne area. I'm to the east, out on the barrier island. I have a coworker out to the west, with canal access to a lake so he can go shoot alligators from his airboat. There was a coworker who got 11 acres. He got sheep, chickens, and goats. He can shoot in his yard. Somebody got a low-rise condo right on the Atlantic Ocean beach. Somebody bought a McMansion.
The last time this came up I described the culture a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17271199
People who want to walk to work can do that, but road traffic is insignificant. The public transportation here is called SCAT. (supposedly the Space Coast Area Transit) The word "scat" fits it very well. I don't think anybody cares.
I've been mostly around Jacksonville, and there are spots that I like. The three blocks along the beaches if you can swing it! Or on the beach side of the ditch (inter-coastal). Or the hipster neighborhoods near downtown (Riverside, San Marco, Springfield, Murray Hill, maybe uptown proper). I would be impractical to live on the beach and work downtown. Cost of living is a good deal. It's got everything, you just might need to look for it a bit!
I've been through St. Pete, and some spots, including some of the small towns on the coast of the peninsula, left a good impression (Tarpon Springs, for example). As long as you avoid the sprawl on 19 and don't have a killer commute off the peninsula.
I thought St. Augustine was interesting, I've been there multiple times. It's a small city, and has a lot of tourists - and a lot of the things that tourists like to do. I lived in a similar tourist town, and you find the good stuff and learn you way around. I haven't lived here but know people that do.
I've been to Gainesville. It's a college town. The unique and interesting stuff is tied to that. But I do like small cities, it's easy to be close to everything and not have the hassles of a bigger/busier place.
I've been around Orlando. Nothing I saw caught my eye. Avoid I4 during rush hour, during the day if you can! I've been though some of the suburbs south of Miami, didn't like the traffic, nothing I saw caught my eye.
I've visited Key West and South Beach Miami. Both were interesting and unique in their own way. I'd spend more time in Key West if I had the chance. (and money!) My visit to South Beach was a while ago. Neat place to visit. I stayed at a hostel that had valet parking :-)
I think it's a problem the way that cities have grown via sprawl over the past few decades, and a lot of southern cities have grown a lot during that time. Apparently it's more profitable to build further out instead of infilling, and build housing developments instead of integrated neighbourhoods. It's depressing to see apartment complexes with sidewalks to nowhere and nothing to do but drive a couple/few miles to the nearest applebees or whatever.
I think the problem with crazy drivers comes with the amount and density of traffic, the long commutes, the divided highways with people driving well over the already fast speed limits while people are pulling in and out of plazas, etc. This can be brutal for the people who need to deal with that every day.
The neighborhoods in older cities, or older parts of cities, tend to be grids of various sized roads dispersing traffic as opposed to cul-de-sacs funnelling everyone in and out of their complexes and developments onto a couple of congested main roads.
I've lived in a northern city, much of it built before the automobile, but not anywhere as crowded as Chicago or NYC.
I'm not personally bitter, except for maybe zoning laws that don't allow for more density. I've had a work form home job for quite a while, and haven't had to deal much with bad traffic. I do feel sad for the people I know who have to commute more than an hour in bad traffic, I feel sad for the working poor who struggle to keep a car on the road, I feel sad for the kids in some of these places who need a ride to see any of their friends, the teenagers with nowhere to hang out besides the Waffle House parking lot, etc.
Also, I'm sure that the HOAs so many people live in wouldn't allow anyone to convert their single into a double, or build an auxiliary dwelling in the backyard.
I wonder if areas of the city not under an HOA regime would allow stuff like that?
I think maybe you make too many assumptions. Michigan, for example, has any of these within driving distance (albeit their definition of ‘mountain’ is a bit different than out West)
It isn't all corn and wheat out here.
Something tells me the average American who moves to a mass-transit friendly city is happier than someone from a mass-transit city that moves to a car-centric city.
I moved to Chicago in the 1990s, lived there for about 10 years. The mass-transit was very good, but I wasn't happy living there.
Move to a smaller town with basically no useful public transit, but am vastly happier.
People are allowed to like different lifestyles than you without being victims of Stockholm syndrome.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p530
[2] https://www.kingcounty.gov/property/permits/codes/growth/GMP...
[3] https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2...
[4] https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/about/acco...
[5] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/
I've found this urban design has created isolated neighborhoods where people without cars refuse to travel more than a mile away from home. An example that comes to mind is friends living in Capitol Hill refusing to visit any restaurant in Fremont, a distance of around 3.5 miles with both locations being located directly on highly trafficked bus lines, but if offered a ride (in a car) they would come. For comparison, when in the car-centric cities I lived in, people were willing to travel anywhere in the metro area. Now this is just a few pieces of anecdotal evidence, and you may reply with examples of people who behave completely differently, but it's no better to assume that everyone hates driving and living less dense areas just because you personally dislike them. I prefer living in an area that doesn't hate cars with a passion, and I'm far from the only one who thinks so.
But I think you are wrong about the focus here. They just opened the downtown tunnel recently, and they are opting to fix the West Seattle bridge even though they won’t be able to fit a train to it. They are also fixing the 520 bridge to Kirkland without a train line. And all the roro ferries have significantly more frequency then the walk on ferries (except for West Seattle). So cars definitely still weigh heavily for the city planners
It's kind of understandable that people protest against having their money stolen and used to build things they don't like. Why do you think it's weird?
The only explanation that's possible is extremely short-sighted and self-defeating selfishness: seeing something that's not for them and instinctively opposing it, without thinking of the bigger picture. It's just childish.
It's exactly like socialized healthcare: somehow the US system manages to be more expensive than anywhere else in the world, ranks among developing nations, yet people will fight fang and teeth against "communism".
It's a balancing act.
A helicopter is theoretically great, but in practice helipads on Manhattan were removed in 1980s because of several spectacular crashes, so it's only practical between e.g. the financial district and the airports, which is probably where all the customers are anyway.
The cheapest I know is $400 from Manhattan to JFK; I could probably use it in a pinch (say, a transatlantic flight with a connection), if split between four passengers.
Police helicopters and fire trucks are much more bothersome sources of noise.
I am unsure where the preference lies. I don't always think there's a preference, but you can get forced into it by other economic factors. Young people move into a city, getting adapted a mass transit lifestyle, but they move to a more car-centric area when they inevitably get priced out of car-free living downtown or on a popular rail/bus line because they want to start a family. Personally I don't really want to give up being able to walk outside and down the street to go to restaurants and shop or connect to transit easily, but it would be short-sighted to say that everyone has the same preferences as me.
There's benefits to living in a detached house with a yard. The price is usually being tethered to a car in the US. If you pick a low density area you're probably not going to have an oppressive commute and running errands will be easy (if predictably lengthy, but knowing it'll always be a 20 minute drive and not 20-60 minutes based on traffic is valuable) because there's large roads and every business was mandated to build a large parking lot.
The problem comes when inevitably other people make the same decision and development happens and more people move in. A Californian pattern of development (and in the many areas of the country that have since copied this pattern) is incredibly hostile to good public transit, but due to the geometry of cars, you inevitably have to do _something_... it's just probably going to suck and get underused. So, an alternative strategy emerges: fight tooth and nail against growth.
You basically said "people who disagree are mostly children".
The city managed to complete a street car after ten years, but it faced opposition from the mayor, the governor, and federal congressman. The congressman in question even pushed a law that would prohibit any federal funding from going to the operation of the project. How fucked up is that? A congressman who prevents federal funding from flowing into their district.
On a political level: yes.
The political opposition to the project had nothing to do with preferring a technically superior form of public transportation. Instead, it was opposition to public transportation in general.
yeah people probably are pretty happy with their situation. it probably works pretty well for them. they probably respond extremely negatively to any other possibilities. they'd tell you they wouldn't want to use public transit or bikes or whatever else. they couldn't imagine how inconvenient that would be. that sounds terrible to them.
but like, people across broad parts of Europe don't think of biking as inconvenient. people with good public transit don't think of it as inconvenient. i far prefer getting on the bus to taking my car, negotiating traffic & parking. at my last job, it took a couple months of trying it, but eventually i started to far prefer a bike commute to the bus, even though it was pretty long & hilly.
so much of our preferences is comfortability with the known, familiarity. the expressed preference of society, often, it turns out, matter for very little, reflect primarily bias, not intelligence or wisdom or what makes us (individually or collectively) happiest. and all too often these things we imagine serve us, they hold back society. they feed our id, they feed our ego, and the deny a greater super-ego, a better way, that we could better enjoy.
Well that, and weather. Only die-hards like to bike in the Pacific Northwest winter. Frigid, wet, windy. I'd rather bike in snow.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cologne,+Germany/@51.20163...
to Houston:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houston,+TX/@29.759369,-95...
In the one case you are never more than five miles from green space, in the other you may be 20+ in the middle. It's a tragedy of the commons -- no one driveway thinks it caused the flood (literally, in some cases!). Even Paris is more compact than Houston despite having 2x the population!
This can affect air quality, urban heat islands, mental health, etc.
https://rvamag.com/politics/local-politics/artists-map-of-ri...
Oh, also imagine a neighborhood known variously as "The Harlem of the South" and "Black Wall Street", and try to guess where they decided to carve out the new freeway a few years before that?
Then one very successful black cattleman had his white secretary buy him a house and sell it to him. Within a few years white flight emptied the area (to the point there's a documentary about it) and suddenly TXDOT decided it was a great place for a freeway.
Possibly more so than just about any other city in the midwest (though they all made mistakes), Cincinnati has possibly the craziest history of paved over and unfinished projects.
(As for motorbikes in cities, I'm not a fan due all the noise and pollution. But electric bikes are great!)
Vietnam's traffic fatality rate is 26 per 100,000. About the same was America's traffic fatality rate in early 1970s before Ralph Nader convinced people to care about safety. But Americans had no problem driving on roads in 1970s. Virtually no one thought it was too dangerous to drive in America at those fatality rates.
(Today fatality rates are down ~50% from those numbers thanks to Ralph Nader.)
And the Vietnam numbers continue to decrease as the country develops. The WHO numbers are based on 2016 numbers. There were a reported 8,417 fatalities in 2016 but the WHO assumes that's a lie and adjusts upwards to 24,970 fatalities. In any case, fatalities have been dropping by about 5% a year. In 2019 there were 7,624 fatalities, for instance.
I thought HCMC was the common nomenclature and saying Saigon would be like saying Ceylon rather than Sri Lanka.
In official stuff they'll say Ho Chi Minh City but in casual conversation, I'd guesstimate 80%+ of the time people say Saigon. But if someone drops in a Ho Chi Minh City instead it isn't especially noteworthy.
Saigon also gets used on things like, say, book titles: https://www.fahasa.com/sai-gon-ky-an-cuoc-phieu-luu-cua-nhun...
or movie titles: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12937684/
Saying "Saigon" doesn't have any particular connotation. Like, it doesn't mean "we refuse to accept the North won" or "we refuse to accept the renaming". (Some Viet Kieu in America are crazy about that kind of thing, though.) It is mostly just that Saigon is two syllables and Ho City Minh City is five syllables.
That said: "Saigon" tends to refer to the inner metro area. "Ho Chi Minh City" actually covers a massive area -- it is the size of a province. It is divided into 24 districts and I don't think anyone from the outer 5 rural districts would say they live in "Saigon".
Also note that the airport in Saigon still has the code SGN.
As someone who lived in NYC most of my life, hold on to that pepper spray and that 4" pocket knife real tight.
And make sure no cops see it, because they love collecting souvenirs and couldn't care less about the legality of your self-defense items.
Now, with the police budget cut $1B dollars, crime is skyrocketing.
Gotta love how this kind of stuff can happen in broad daylight with little no immediate security response:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaF2AdlXAus
Gotham is back baby!
And if we aren't gonna talk about crime, let's talk about that beautifully sludge smelling runoff from the subway tracks whenever it rains. Quick way to a nice putrid hair conditioning!
And let's not talk about the condition of the tracks and how much electricity is being wasted by the poorly lubricated trains and tracks. Those thunderous sounds when the subway passes? That is the sound of energy being wasted, being converted to sound energy instead of locomotion.
I hate everything about NYC except the melting pot of intellectual diversity that it is.
P.S. I still live here, so don't tell me that my perspective is an outsider's one.
I can't stand the subway. LIRR on the other hand is quite nice.
I haven't been on any train after 6pm that wasn't loaded with drunks, in either direction. It gets especially bad going back out around 1am. I wish they didn't allow drinking on the trains.
I'd rather be loaded with drunks on LIRR than take the trash chute that is the subway any day of the week.
EDIT: boxing fight
Of course the video's edited to only show the pissed of cyclists.
Having done a lot of this kind of riding, let me tell you what likely happened: The kids were riding as a group, acting stupid (running reds, popping wheelies, etc.). BMW driver either said something to them, or drove aggressively near the group. The group rides, surrounding his car to fuck with him a little. BMW driver hits his brakes rather than slow down, cyclist crashes into the SUV (this part is confirmed). Kids are livid, and the pedestrian camera rolls.
The alternative to that sequence is that these kids are beating the shit out of an SUV with their bicycles unprovoked. Not buying it.
The driver's problem is he's in his own little bubble and was infuriated by bicyclists inconveniencing his drive (oh dear). I bet he'll tell people how scary NYC is, like commenter `goldenkey` above, and hopefully won't return to be so inconvenienced by kids on bicycles. His conundrum was 100% avoidable by not being a tool.
Anyway I hate selectively edited videos like that, making the driver look like some victim. It's Andy Ngo-quality material.
If you were there during that era, you can wear it like a badge of honor...like yeah fuck, I survived that fucking place, yeah man I can survive anywhere....
NYC has been Disneyland since 9/11. Even before that it had almost a decade of cleaning up.
It might feel like the mid-80s again now, but only JUST now.
I ran out of battery power on camera in Barcelona. I got off the tour bus and was at my hotel room within 10 minutes to plug it in. Then back on the tour of the city really quickly due to the awesome transport systems.
My city, Cape Town, where public transport is really bad it would have taken me an hour or more depending on the traffic.
If you want large private spaces and drive your own car, move to a rural town.
Maybe try a top public transit network, like Vienna (overall), Moscow or Madrid (subway), Tokyo (train) or even Paris (when there's no strike) to see things done right, because in the US cities with barely functional public transit can be counted with a single hand.
It really doesn't. There are people all over the world who feel the same as the person you're replying to. The feeling has nothing to do whether the city has a "top public transit network" as you put it or a third world always broke transit network.
Still it's mostly an opinion shaped by the environment and mostly prevalent in the US, and to lesser extent, other sparsely populated countries with significant sprawl.
The fact that the sprawl makes it ineffective and expensive to lay an effective public transit is what makes it seem undesirable.
The fact that it's ineffective makes it relegated to what poor people use, deepening the issue.
And this goes as just personal experience, but my US friends in the EU insist on driving through city traffic and spending 3-4 as much time in commuting, and it takes a while until they give up.
Some of them aren't even used to do groceries by foot, for a large chunk of the US population that involves driving to a Walmart.
Do you also think that introversion and extraversion are opinions shaped by the environment? Does really bother you so much if so many people intrinsically prefer a different lifestyle than what you believe it to be the best, that you are basically willing to call them brainwashed by the environment?
>>Some of them aren't even used to do groceries by foot, for a large chunk of the US population that involves driving to a Walmart.
It's the same everywhere across Europe outside of strict city centers, just replace Walmart with a local shopping center (Spar, Aldi, Leclerc,...). If you'll ever visit one, you're guaranteed to find them packed with people.
I don't know how intro/extroversion might be shaped or not by the environment, never gave that a thought.
> Does really bother you so much if so many people intrinsically prefer a different lifestyle than what you believe it to be the best, that you are basically willing to call them brainwashed by the environment?
I don't get bothered by the comment, but rather by the implications. I just describe it: car over anything else, as an opinion, is largely a side effect of cheap-gas + city-sprawl approach to development, which is the archetype of urban unsustainability [0]. It's no surprise that the US leads (along with Australia, guilty of the same sin) per capita fossil fuel consumption, close to an order of magnitude higher than the European average, and doubling Germany, the industrial powerhouse of the continent.
People in the US are car centric not unlike in North Korea they're Juche-centric: it's often (or always) the only option.
> It's the same everywhere across Europe outside of strict city centers, just replace Walmart with a local shopping center (Spar, Aldi, Leclerc,...). If you'll ever visit one, you're guaranteed to find them packed with people.
Maybe we've lived in different parts of Europe? There's like 2-4 levels of proximity in all major conglomerates (e.g. Carrefour > Carrefour Market > Carrefour Express, Monoprix > Monop', etc).
Even though the smaller the more expensive, they're invariably cheaper than even just starting the car, and a no-brainer if you value your time at minimum wage.
Spar is largely just proximity shopping so I doubt you'll see it crowded, Aldi is hard discount so they tend to just build big where it's cheap (causing the problems you describe), and Leclerc has no proximity to my knowledge but has more central and bigger locations than Aldi.
Check locations of AhorraMás/DIA in Spain, Carrefour in France, or Фора and Сильпо in Ukraine (or at least Kyiv), to name a few I'm familiar with. Every neighborhood has them, even residential ones, and you only need to go to a mall or a big hypermarket in exceptional cases.
The closest thing I can compare Walmart to, in Europe, is Auchan, with roughly the same ratio of supercenters/hypermarkets to neighborhood stores (3:1). Interestingly, Auchan is losing money because as Europe becomes denser, people shop less and less at hypermarkets.
[0] https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-charac...
>>I don't know how intro/extroversion might be shaped or not by the environment, never gave that a thought.
I asked you that because I assumed that you would not try to force introverts to be more outgoing even though outgoing people are supposed to be happier.
>>People in the US are car centric not unlike in North Korea they're Juche-centric: it's often (or always) the only option.
The comparison is rather bad but yes I agree the USA as a whole is pretty car centric. I just don't see anything bad about it. It is like that for historical reasons (USA is pretty big place compared to Germany you mentioned, lots of space, lots of wealth) and personal reasons (people like to live like that). I think the USA actually for its size has very good transit options. Ships and trains for cargo, cars for small to medium distances and planes for medium to large distances. Europe is also pretty car centric, the roads all always full inside and outside of the cities and Europeans love their cars as much as Americans do. There are a lot of car manufacturers in Europe.
>> Maybe we've lived in different parts of Europe? There's like 2-4 levels of proximity in all major conglomerates (e.g. Carrefour > Carrefour Market > Carrefour Express, Monoprix > Monop', etc). Even though the smaller the more expensive, they're invariably cheaper than even just starting the car, and a no-brainer if you value your time at minimum wage.
I know Germany, Austria, Italy and some other smaller countries in the Balkans. In my experience people rather take a car to the shopping mall weekly, bi-weekly or monthly to make a big purchase (cheaper, more choice) than to go to small inner city shops for that. The smaller markets are used for buying things you ran out and urgently need or to buy launch or snacks on your way to work.
CJK subways are super nice because people dont smell. Still they are too crowded and usually in super huge cities where commuting is pain anyway.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nY6A0_uxyvs&t=4m32s
It's been a while since I watched this video, but IIRC, it's the one that seemed the most like they got an insider to help them.
https://www.wcpo.com/longform/cincinnatis-abandoned-subway-w...
1) exploring 2) a new place 2a) which also happens to be dark 2b) with potential safety hazards 3) whilst your buddy is filming the potentially interesting things you point at
https://www.urbex.nl/metro-leger-charleroi-ligne-chatalet/
However, it's only 1 line that's unused, some other lines are in use.
I miss Cincinnati sometimes...
[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/2013/10/goetta-the-cincinnati-ge...
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1285304,-84.533603,3a,75y,14...
Talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve!
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=scat
https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/scat
Why not use buses in those tunnels as well? Maybe there is no traffic jams above ground?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tun...
> The DSTT was used only by buses from its opening in 1990 until 2005, and shared by buses and light rail from 2009 until 2019
That's 15 years with bus only, then 10 years of shared bus/train.
The streetcar is, indeed, a disaster. I think that is largely because they built it essentially as an amusement park ride for the weekends rather than a serious commute option. A subway that had the ability to actually move people across town (like the planned 16 mile loop) would have been great. The subway suffered not so much from local incompetence as inflation.
The Brent-Spence bridge does need repair but that’s not a city issue. It’s a mix of state and federal. It doesn’t help that Ohio thinks that Kentucky should pay for it and vice versa.
American exceptionalism!
> in 2002 a proposal was put before voters for a half-cent tax increase that would fund a regional light rail system, which have used parts of the already-constructed tunnel system. Voters defeated the issue
Sigh. We never learn.
> “Cincinnati was unique in that they were the only [Midwestern] city to actually begin working on the subway,”
Not true. Pittsburgh not only started construction on theirs, but it went into service and still operates today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_Light_Rail#/media/F...
I’ve ridden on it, they are nice trains. And a nice option for suburb commuters. Rush hour gets pretty crazy there also, with everyone trying to get in and out of Fort Pitt tunnel.
This is something Cincinnati has painfully missed out on. I liked the read, never knew about this.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/10/12411632/public-transport...
Sadly, the streetcar was eventually dismantled (1952), so you can still lament the lack of public transportation.
I live near one of the old streetcar stops, and it would be great to still have that kind of access to downtown.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Street_Railway
https://www.wcpo.com/longform/a-city-built-by-streetcars-a-l...
Sad to think of the probable cause for that negative change in the way transit is perceived by many voters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_Ameri...
My father remembers it being built, he would have been 13. A short stretch of tunnel and the beginnings of what would have been two stations.
When I was in college in the seventies some urban explorers found an entrance. But the city managed to get it closed. The only story on it was an alt weekly, long since gone.
One of these days I am going to spend some time in the Detroit library system and dig up proof and publish it on the web.
For sixty years my father insisted that the auto company's were behind its demise. Shortly before he passed away it all came out that he had been correct all along. Although some Detroit media still dispute the proof.
It was a really fascinating document. It's somewhere on the internet; I wish I could find the link.
This article claims Cincinnati subway is 2.2 miles.
The Midwest, doing terribly, because they meet up at church or at the grocery store and don't open the windows.