New York's Incredible Subway
newgeography.com
newgeography.com
Surprisingly, China's new subways are not generally being built as four-track systems. Nor does Japan have much four-track subway trackage. London Underground is cramped in every dimension - the system is two-track, the tunnel diameter is small, and the platforms are short. London cannot fit any more rolling stock onto their tracks on some lines.
Trains on the Northern, Victoria, Central and Jubilee lines run automatically, except a driver pressing a button to close the doors.
It'll be a huge project to update that and give them GPS-level accuracy on the trains.
Totally. I'm always surprised at the amount of planning that went into the NYC subway as far as capacity and redundancy goes. Not only in the IRT and BMT lines, which were private companies at the time, but also the IND system which was built and owned by the City. For example, the first time I took the F train to Coney Island I was socked to see it's four-track all the way to the end.
It's a huge disappointment that the Second Ave subway is going to be two-tracked.
But more generally, I don't think that 4-track is quite the pancaea you suggest. In fact, they've been moving towards "FastTrack" repairs which involve a total shutdown of a line overnight or over a weekend. The MTA likes it. It's faster and cheaper and less dangerous for the crews involved. The thing that makes it not-so-disruptive, though, is that the NYC subway is massively redundant: if the Second Avenue Subway is closed you can take the Lexington Avenue Line which is a block and a half away (Lexington = 3.5th Avenue). Four-track service has nothing on this.
Of course, building it as 4 tracks should have been eminently feasible on the budget and timeline the city has , but the ways that NYC finds to waste money and not-make-stuff-happen are legion and run the gamut from transit to education and beyond...
It's funny that you picked this as an example, because the 2nd ave subway has yet to open even it's very short initial segment, and the 4-5-6 (Lexington Ave line) is the least redundant part of the whole NYC subway system. It's the only north-south line on the East side, and it carries more people per day than the entire subway system of any other North American city.
Once they build out the 2nd ave subway to the bottom of the island things will be redundant...but that's decades away. (They won't even start construction on the second phase, which only takes it up to 125th st, until 2020.)
You point generally applies to the rest of the system, though.
But as far as making the second-avenue 4-track, it isn't the sort of thing that's going to make the subway open sooner to achieve that redundancy. Indeed, it was planned as 4-track and this abbreviated over-budget late 2-track stub is what we got instead.
It's shameful, but that's basically the story of NYC transit, dating back to when the city first drove the IRT and BMT subways into bankruptcy and then followed headlong after them.
The real MTR strategy, though, is that they get to choose where stations go. That allows them to buy up land in the area, before they announce a train is going there. The land next to the train station suddenly skyrockets in value... and the MTR make out like bandits.
Fast-forward 5 decades. Inflation is real but fares are still a nickel. The city is quite happy with this contractual arrangement, quite happy to make the railways stick to it, and quite happy to take over their operations once they fail. Then they started their big "IND Second System" plan to build a kajillion subways out into all the different stretches of the boroughs (including the Second Avenue Subway up to Throgs Neck): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/1939_IND...
... and by 1975 the city was on the brink of bankruptcy too.
As for mass transit in the modern era, it's certainly not surprising that it's unprofitable given who's operating it. Profitable mass transit is surely impossible today... politically, anyway. :b
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/30817/metro-doesnt-...
I thought that was quite funny: Paris has this awesome ridesharing service, that is even mostly driverless, called the Subway. Everyone there uses it; only a US tourist would use a taxi there. Still that poor idea led to a great company.
On a more serious note, this made me think: private companies and startups doing self driving cars and other transport innovations gain nothing when public transport gets more popular. They compete with it. I now wonder if that has something to do with the decrease in rides in US cities outside NY.
Gridlocked Manhattan is an exception. But for most trips in most places a car will be faster. Especially if public transportation requires switching one or more lines.
Of course autonomous vehicles are going to render fixed-rail systems irrelevant... or at least, they will if they're implemented properly. "Gridlocked Manhattan" is only gridlocked because the vehicles doing the gridlocking aren't talking to a central authority, or to each other.
But what seems like common sense to me has proven to be a surprisingly hard sell among technologically-literate people who I'd expect to understand it intuitively. People on HN really, really like trains.
I'm not sure everyone is willing to take that as a statement of fact. I'm sure not.
Can you point to a single transportation expert who believes that centrally orchestrated single-occupancy vehicles are a solution for transportation capacity problems?
The difference in lane throughput between single occupancy vehicles and mass transit is staggering. Part of the benefit of rail is that it can use dedicated facilities that are deconflicted. Autonomous vehicles still need to deal with red lights, pedestrians, cyclists, and limits on safe acceleration/deceleration.
Here in Seattle our light rail system is hobbled because of non-grade-separated parts of the line - which despite having signal priority is restricted in its operation (station dwell times, # of trains in operation, train separation) because of conflicting cross streets. A central authority is NOT a panacea.
With human drivers, lane density tops out at somewhere around ~900 vehicles per hour. Let's say automatic cars can somehow double that - to 1800 vehicles per hour. Even dedicated bus lanes can move 6000 people per hour.
Forget Manhattan which is a beast of its own scale - look at Chicago mass transit which moves over a million people a day. You're sure you could replace the capacity of rush-hour Red Line trains at crush capacity with the surface streets? Really? Where would you park these cars? Where would everyone get in and out of the cars? (On/off boarding is the scaling limit for bus lanes - that alone is enough to sink your plan.)
You do realize the irony in having faith that centralized coordination between autonomous vehicles will lead to these improvements?
But not where and when they want. Passengers-per-hour figures are simply measuring the wrong thing.
Forget Manhattan which is a beast of its own scale - look at Chicago mass transit which moves over a million people a day. You're sure you could replace the capacity of rush-hour Red Line trains at crush capacity with the surface streets? Really? Where would you park these cars?
Considering that there won't need to be as many cars, parking won't be a huge issue. Cars that spend most of the day and all night sitting in parking spaces are a waste of both resources and real estate. In an optimal scenario there wouldn't be a need for any parking spaces at all.
Here's a thought experiment for you: take all the taxicabs off the streets of NYC, and replace them with privately-owned cars. Hell of a mess, isn't it? Nowhere to park between Boston and Philly. Now go the other direction, and imagine that every single passenger car that isn't a taxicab simply isn't there at all. It should be obvious that there would be plenty of room in that scenario, both on the streets and in the parking garages.
Every single objection you raise is an example of "fighting the last war." You're pitting the worst aspects of the status quo against the best aspects of your favored solution. This happens time and again when these threads come up.
Can you point to a single transportation expert who believes that centrally orchestrated single-occupancy vehicles are a solution for transportation capacity problems?
No, but I'm less than impressed with the "transportation experts" I've encountered around here (Seattle area as well.) It seems self-evident that planners who devise fixed-rail systems with 25-35 year construction horizons while not even considering the arrival of autonomous vehicles are not competent at their jobs.
No! It's absolutely not obvious. My biggest problem with your argument is that you're taking it for granted that streets can move as many cars as you think they can. They can't. For the sake of argument, I'm willing to entertain the idea that you can double throughput through automation, and that simply isn't enough for such a low-density form of transportation.
Again - picture your system in Chicago where it moves 300,000 people into the downtown loop during the commuting rush-hour.
Nobody owns any of these cars, so there isn't any parking to worry about. Fine.
Where do these 300,000 people get in and out of their cars? Remember - bus lanes can't even scale past 6,000 people an hour per lane because of the need to get people on and off.
Don't forget that these throughput numbers are under best-case scenarios, for smooth flowing traffic. We haven't even discussed intersections...
Hint: An ensemble of coordinated autonomous vehicles is a train. (And no, there's no contradiction there -- you behave in a locally-autonomous manner when you drive your car, but your actions are still centrally coordinated by the traffic laws you have to obey, locally coordinated by the network of traffic control devices that your city maintains, and ultimately constrained by the other vehicles and pedestrians around you.)
What's the difference between a light rail system and a chain of buses that can drive at high speed, nose-to-tail, along any highway in the city, capable of starting and stopping like a train to let people on and off but also capable of arbitrarily diverging from and rejoining individual routes like passenger cars? The only real difference is that the latter is going to be better at meeting its users' needs, because unlike rails, roads are everywhere. How cool will it be when your city can grow and reshape itself organically, instead of being tied literally and metaphorically to some existing rail infrastructure that was installed decades ago?
The notion that there have to be some metal rails bolted to the right of way is just something some people made up 100 years ago. But damn, it's influential for some reason.
I wish I could. Because I too live in Seattle. And before we decide to spent 30 _billion_ dollars on light rail over 30 years I'd really like to know that's the best way. What if we instead spent 30 billion adjusting infrastructure to support autonomous vehicles? What would those adjustments even look like? God I wish I knew. I'm pretty sure Uber/Google would even build the study for us for free.
I live a mile and a half from a light rail station. In another 6 years I'll live 3/4 mile from a light rail station. And when that day comes it will STILL take twice as long for me to walk and rail to work than to drive. It takes three times as long by bus. And that's with me working right beside a transit center. God help me if it required a second transfer or a walk on the other end.
If I live 20 minutes outside the city, but not within close walking distance to a transit stop, I am currently forced to drive to my destination, even if it is located somewhere along the public transportation network. With a self driving car, I could be taken to the closest transit stop, and then ride the subway to my destination to avoid congestion.
Or someone wanting a ride after, say, 12:30AM ..
Shanghai (http://www.thatsmags.com/uploads/galleries/images/shanghai-m...)
Toronto (http://www.thatsmags.com/uploads/galleries/images/toronto-me...)
Beijing (http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/subwaygif2-01.gif)
Moscow (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/%D0%9C%D...)
New York (https://secondavesagas.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/subwayhis...)
Remarkably, the subway had even more ridership in the late 1920's and late 1940's, exceeding 2 billion rides per year.
The passes cost $29 for 7 days. So a family of four, visiting NYC, can ride around for a week for $116. Not a bad deal at all!
http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-yorks-subway-system-cant-kee...
Despite a growing ridership, it's still fiscally strapped and under capitalized, so it's buckling financially as well. While the latter contributes to the former it is by no means the sole cause.
For a timeline of horror:
https://twitter.com/ismetroonfire
Which, if you think is all bullshit, observe:
Underinvestment in capital projects has more to do with the ridiculous politics around the MTA. They have expensive labor contracts, duplicative administration and lots of inefficiency.
And a chart that seems to be indicating that ridership has increased by 1,000 * 100 million riders from 2005 to 2015.
Who edited this?
But it does have transit! Mostly, it has Caltrain and BART, which are essentially commuter rail systems that drop people downtown where they actually want to work. They have some issues but they fundamentally work. San Francisco also has MUNI, the Municipal Railway, which runs the streetcars (and also runs the buses) and, for the US, it's pretty good transit. But that's mostly just low expectations: there's one downtown tunnel (which shares half its route with BART) and then the rest is mostly interlined with the aforementioned traffic, and it is slow, and notoriously unreliable (even besies traffic, SFMTA has well-known issues with its relationship to its labor union which contribute substantially to no-show drivers, and in the absence of driverless buses that's a bit of a monkey wrench in normal operation.) And very few of the buses have dedicated bus lanes (although the Geary corridor might be getting some in the future as part of a bus rapid transit system some day soon).
There is an ongoing project to connect Caltrain to Market Street and Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf with a new streetcar line. We'll see how well it works out... there's already been drama and delays about moving the alignment from 3rd St to 4th St...
1.34 billion passengers (I presume 'trips') per year.
That's some pretty impressive volume considering it's not all that expansive: http://www.panynj.gov/path/maps.html
"War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life"
WUT?