The Future of New York City Transportation: Goodbye Cars, Hello Rails
inverse.com
inverse.com
They should also close 1/2 of the avenues and turn them into parks. It would greatly increase foot traffic to the businesses on the street, and would make Manhattan much more livable.
(Like these: http://gothamist.com/2011/07/14/post_blames_bike_lanes_for_b... http://www.villagevoice.com/news/new-east-village-bike-lanes...).
In the case of the bike lanes, this is the furthest from the truth (have a Google for lots of arguments about the merit of increased bike traffic).
I'm not sure what the solution is, but there certainly is one that would support a few car/truck free avenues.
As another commenter said, this setup is totally normal in most old European cities. Not a big deal at all.
I've always thought this too. The city has made attempts to make up / down town bike routes on most avenues but it's still a dicey proposition to ride through midtown. At least close 2 of them allocating half of each for uptown and downtown bike traffic. The other half could be pedestrian / public park space.
I happily live without a car in Manhattan, and have for the past 20 years, but I realize that my walk/public transport lifestyle is facilitated by trucks which bring things to my local stores.
It's not like you must choose between allowing all vehicles and allowing none of them. There are reasonable middle grounds.
Let's look at one possible way in which bikes could be a path forward.
Replace 9 out of 10 miles of road currently utilized by motorized ground transit with lanes split half for pedestrians, half for bikes, with two directions of bike lanes being nested inside the two pedestrian walkways.
Ped Walkway =============
Bike Lane >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Bike Lane <<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Ped Walkway =============
Both walking and biking are orders of magnitude lighter and the infrastructure outlay and maintenance costs will be orders of magnitude lower. Additionally, as a city evolves, it doesn't require massive planning and public work projects to introduce new routes/lines or modify existing ones. You simply take a left instead of a right. Because, bikes are cooler than trains like that. You can choose which way you turn. The remaining 1 out of 10 miles could be utilized for hub style (think how airlines organize their routes) public transit (busses, trains, etc.) routes. This is just one proposal. I’m sure there are other ways to make bikes a bigger part of our commute infrastructure.
Pollution; down. Car wrecks; down. Public health; up. Cost of living; improved. Community; improved.
If you've never been to "Bike Party" and your city has one, I implore you to go. The sense of community is astounding. Riding with a group of cars has never been so social, and never will, because you're enclosing yourself in this box and cutting off most contact with anything outside that box.
Also, as someone that lived and worked in Manhattan for 5 years and is now a daily bike commuter in Baltimore, it's my opinion that riding a bike is fun, elegant, exciting, but riding the subway, most of the time, is just not humane. It's just, not fun, most of the time stressful, sometime it’s running on time but almost never on your schedule, and sometimes it’s an absolute nightmare. But, riding a bike, most of the time, it's an absolute pleasure.
“Basically at the current pace, there isn’t a foreseeable future in which all the subway stations are in a state of good repair,”
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/09/03/mta-subway-repair-rep...
I'm a bit of a curmudgeon, and I know the trends won't reverse entirely (there are many millennials already committed to the urban lifestyle) but i suspect we'll see some weak deurbanizing trends occurring again pin about 7-10 years as the center of the echo boom start families of their own.
We’re beginning to see traffic volumes of people we haven’t seen on our subways since the late 1940s. That’s before the big surge in car traffic.
sounded very odd to me; it just went against my bias that "everything increases". Certainly the population of NYC must have grown significantly in the past 65 years, and it sounds just weird that all newcomers became drivers.
I tried to find statistics, but the best I got was from Wikipedia which says:
Ridership continues to increase, and on September 23, 2014, more than 6.1 million people rode the subway system, establishing the highest single-day ridership since ridership was regularly monitored in 1985..
Which seems to support my thinking but misses out on ~35 years. Am I missing something?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_Cit...
Economic stagnation in the 70s meant that the population of NYC has not always been growing.
And it definitely hasn't always been the city it is today - the subway had a terrible reputation in the 80s as a place of crime, so many didn't take it.
Correspondingly, the cultural legacy of New York as it started the 80's was one of a city in disarray with trashed streets and little public order or prospects for a future - great material for gritty films about crime and societal breakdown. The economic situation and mood started changing over the course of the decade, and the image of "Disneyfied New York" finally emerged in the 90's under Guliani's mayorship.
So, going back to the original question, New York went through a rough period following WWII, and that combined with a broad switch to cars accounts for changes in ridership.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/2bk7f5/new...
Manhattan's population for example peaked at 2.2m between 1910-1920 and still has never been that high since. Current estimates are around 1.6m.
Population density in Manhattan has decreased dramatically, largely owing to suburban flight and an increased demand for quality of life - it was 21 people per 5,000 sq ft in 1910[1], it is 12 people now.
One funny thing about all of this is that the old brick buildings that are such prized real estate nowadays used to be low-rent tenements, considered blights on the city, and where a million dollar bachelor pad now sits multiple families used to fit in the same space.
The pattern extends to other parts of the city also - Brooklyn peaked at 2.7m between 1940-1950 and rapidly depopulated afterwards, even now the borough only has ~2.5m people.
The depopulation is a large part of NYC's reputation in the 60s, 70s, and 80s as a dangerous place - abandoned buildings and depopulated neighborhoods contributed to crime and general decay, though of course cheap rent also contributed to a dramatic surge of artistic achievement.
tl;dr: NYC depopulated heavily after 1950, and didn't really start recovering until the 1990s, and even then NYC's population didn't start growing rapidly until the early 2000s when the combination of shifting preference towards urban lifestyles and lowering crime made a large influx of population possible.
The resurgence of American cities is, in the grand scheme of things, an extremely recent phenomenon.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/01/realestate/man...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn#Demographics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor...
When you go rail you immediately restrict yourself to that route. There is little to not flexibility. Let alone rails on the roads in snowy climates just cause additional issues. As for simulating with buses, you can embed in the roadway or even on light poles or similar along the route where you want the bus to go when automated. Hence its "on rails" without physical rails.
So even if it's more expensive upfront after X years you get continuous savings every year from increased efficiency.
There's a positive feedback loop involved in any transit investment and how it affects the neighborhood, but especially so with rail - unquestionably so as you think at bigger scales. One of the touted benefits of California High Speed Rail, for example, is that it would bring the Central Valley cities into the commuting sphere of the other urban centers.
(The worst thing you could do with a rail stop, from a land-use perspective, is put a big surface parking lot around it. That turns it into a transfer point for a car commute, not a prestigious destination that other transit will naturally run toward. One of the problems with the CHSR plan, the last time I looked, is that the Central Valley alignments are a pretty dodgy package.)
That said, providing better transit at lower cost is always an upside, since the first-order question for trip planning by transit is always the overall level of service - frequency and coverage, as well as speed. I would expect robobuses to usher in a new era for system planners.
http://giphy.com/gifs/speed-maglev-a8HzaGEoLYvLi
A fast smooth ride. Probably only need a low-speed maglev like what's being built in Beijing:
http://english.cri.cn/12394/2015/04/21/3381s875320.htm
At 60-80 mph you could be whisked to Giants Stadium or one of the local airports is 10 minutes, for example.
Anyway, a low-speed maglev doesn't travel that fast; only around 60-70mph. It'll also be quiet and smooth, as I already mentioned. The length of Manhattan is only about 14 miles so at that speed it's a 15 minute trip. Commuting from far into Brooklyn or Queens can take over an hour to get into Manhattan.
You could also build the bus station 10 miles outside of the city, near the stadium, for example, and quickly get everyone into Manhattan. 230,000 people take a bus into Manhattan daily.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/03/could_the_new_port_...
Btw, Beijing's low-speed maglev is only 11 miles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR
Well, sure. Taking a Maglev, then a bus, then a street car would also be a longer trip. And let's face it, it would be a lot easier to set up multiple bus routes than multiple Maglev routes.
My suggestion simply increases the commutable distance from your job, thus offering more affordable places to live.
A maglev train is of pretty marginal benefit here - it'd be a smoother ride, but there is simply no way with the station spacing you can get up to the kinds of speeds where maglev shines. Not to mention having to account for standing passengers means stricter bounds on permissible acceleration, which further knocks down your speed gains.
So sure, hypothetically a maglev train line from Inwood to the Financial District would get you there in 15 minutes... without stopping, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that's not a particularly useful mass transit system ;)
> "You could also build the bus station 10 miles outside of the city, near the stadium, for example, and quickly get everyone into Manhattan."
Right, and this is also why maglev, while being an interesting thought exercise, ignores practically all other constraints.
The bottleneck getting people from NJ into Manhattan isn't the speed of the trains, it's the fact that all rail traffic must pass through Amtrak's aging tunnels that suffer from poor signaling and deteriorating conditions - both of which cause frequent delays. The fact that you're squeezing all this traffic into two tubes itself puts a pretty hard cap on the amount of capacity you have.
NJ-Manhattan rail links are constrained not by speed but by overall capacity. Faster moving trains present an extremely marginal gain on overall capacity, especially when they have to share space/schedules/speeds with non-maglev (is that even possible?) traffic.
There have frequently been thoughts of moving the PABT out to Secaucus where commuters can catch a frequent, fast train to transfer to Penn (or in the future, GCT), but the reality is that the Amtrak tunnels are already operating at capacity so adding a frequent shuttle service is really just a pipe dream at this point.
If NYC/NJ suddenly got a big truckload of cash to invest in infrastructure, "maglev trains" are very, very, very far down the list. Much higher on the list (if not the very top item) would be "build the damn Gateway tunnel", which will double rail capacity under the Hudson and into NJ, and make adding new NJ-Manhattan train service even a possibility.
If you are going to build a maglev then you'd probably have express trains. That does without saying, right?
The A train covers 31 miles. That's a long ride.
http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ffsubway.htm#stations
I'm sure there are plenty of places where we'd benefit by greatly reducing commute times.
As for the Gateway tunnel, yeah, that should have been done.
It's a common idea, but it won't work for the same reasons stated already - there isn't any capacity left in the tunnels.
> "If you are going to build a maglev then you'd probably have express trains. That does without saying, right?"
You'd need very wide station spacing for the speed gains to really matter, which makes the tech more appropriate for suburban commuter rail, not metros. So think LIRR/Metro North/NJT instead of the subway.
The main problem there is that all commuter rail routes converge onto a single set of tracks coming into Manhattan - via the Hudson tunnels on the NJ side, or along Park Ave on the Metro North side, or via the East River tunnels on the LIRR side, and all the commuter routes are rather long, so there's no convenient 11-mile stretch to try this out like the Beijing S1.
Sharing track is also going to be an impossibility I think - you're not going to be able to have standard gauge heavy rail sharing the exact same track as a maglev, so you can't, say, replace one branch of the LIRR with maglev. It's an all or nothing affair.
I mean yeah, in a hypothetical world where we had infinite resources, maglev would be pretty f'ing cool, but in the actual world it's so far down the list of priorities for our money that it might as well not be on the list.
Still, I think it's fair to view the dismantlement of NYC's above-ground rail system as having been a mistake in many ways. It was replaced by fleets of yellow cabs, and while living conditions in buildings are better, and more light gets to the streets, the road system has become more difficult to deal with.
Perhaps the better solution is to force all non-taxibot traffic (except for delivery trucks) to park in peripheral garages in New Jersey or somewhere and force everybody to taxibot where they want to go?
hmm...on second thought, I guess this is a hard problem without a single solution?
To replace a single rush-hour NYC subway train with all single-occupancy vehicles, based on the average length of car in the US, would occupy every lane in a single direction on Market St in San Francisco from the waterfront all the way to Van Ness.
In other words, in order to get a subway train full of people into the city, but in cars instead, the lineup of cars (spread over multiple lanes!) would stretch the entirety of downtown SF. And this assumes perfect packing - i.e., bumper to bumper.
Side note: I'm quite optimistic about self-driving cars, but it never ceases to amaze me how many self-driving car proponents seem to be utopian futurists who are entirely reality-resistant. No, self-driving pod cars will not produce greater capacity than a heavy rail mass transit network, are you even serious. They may very well become a key fixture of our transportation infrastructure, but there is simply no physical way fleets of taxibots will ever rival the throughput of a NYC subway train at rush hour.
I don't live in either city, but I do live in a top-10 metro with the second largest subway system in the U.S. For me to get to the train system from my house is currently a 30-45 minute drive (there's a bus, but for "reasons" it's even worse). Stop-to-stop my ride is 40 minutes. To get from the nearest station to my work is a 50 minute walk or a half hour bus ride. My commute then using the best available mass transit is a little over 2 hours or 3 hours if I assume we live in a post-surface vehicle world. Even if I move my household to one of the single bedrooms built right next to the station, it's still over an hour door to door with half of it on a surface bus or most of it walking (and now it's 2 hours again).
Ignoring all that mess, I can just drive and it's a 30-45 minute (the length of just the train leg) easy drive from my garage to my work's garage.
So I can spend 4-6 hours a day taking mass transit, or I can spend 1-1.5 hours a day in a car.
For what it's worth, I'm a huge proponent of mass transit and subways, and think the U.S. is pitifully behind in every way, I personally wish we engaged in the articles plan, and in many of the proposed mass transit and livable cities initiatives. But there are sometimes good reasons why people take cars over mass transit, even when it's as good as it gets where I live or in NYC and all of these plans are decades away from happening and changing things. The important thing is for stopgap ideas like cars not to get in the way of these kinds of improvements in they way that they have.
2. Your company's office should be closer to the train station. How can you be in the city, and still 50 minutes away from a station?
2. Not every office can be close to a train station.
3. Building more trains and more stations is a long and expensive process.
It's fine when holding nothing, now do it with a couple armfuls of groceries or whatever.
A car free city eliminates cars, which carry around big empty storage boxes in the back all day, and can go from right where you are to right where you need to go. Bikes are an "ok" solution for some segment of the population, but not for every.
A quick example, my 80+ year old father, who walks with difficulty with a cane, would not be able to live in a car free, train only city at all, and bikes are not an option for him for the same reasons. But he still insists on working every day because retirement bored him. There's lots of people like my father, old, handicapped, both, how do you design a mass transit system that can accommodate people like him?
That's why transit systems designed by healthy 20-40 something internet forum people are usually bad ideas, they optimize for these kind of best-case scenarios, but there's so many edge cases in humans that these solutions work poorly in general. Cars work well in general, but a terribly many of them in places like NYC are personal vehicles used for just a few minutes a day, adding to congestion.
There's only ~13k Taxis in NYC and ~40k other for-hire vehicles. What if we doubled those numbers, and killed off all other personal non-business vehicles entirely (the majority of vehicles in the city)? Sounds like that solves pretty much all of the problems.
Okay it doesn't solve all of the problems, you still have to deal with Taxi drivers.
Fortunately, these days, we have advanced shopping bag technology. We no longer have to carry our groceries in our arms.
Heck, I know this is out there, some people have even mastered the use of shopping carts.
> There's lots of people like my father, old, handicapped, both, how do you design a mass transit system that can accommodate people like him?
You build an ADA compliant system. Compare the NYC subway, built long before the ADA, and the DC Metro. Except when elevators are broken (a big problem given WMATA's incompetent stewardship of the system), you can use pretty much the entire DC metro system in a wheelchair. Escalators are in every station. In Japan IIRC there were markings in the walkways of train stations, airports, and sidewalks to help the blind navigate, and we could incorporate that in the States.
Right, the system can be very easy to get around in, but it's the system to destination legs that can be impossible. This is almost always bridged with some kind of handicapped-accessible bus system in addition to the normal bus system. But then we're back to surface vehicles. Trains can never provide door-to-door service, it's a classic "last mile" problem.
https://mtayloranalysis.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/an-auto-ori...
Cars are in many ways less robust than trains.
People don't seem to believe me, but we're all on the internet aren't we?