Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

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I totally concur with the OP and the solution is NOT public transit. Public transit is designed to maximize the service to cover majority of the population but NOT 100% of the use cases and population due to the limited funding and resources governments are allowed to allocate to public transit.

I've been to 20 out of 30 world's mega cities. None that I've seen has a "reliable public transportation" that covers all the edge cases like what OP raised and yet have more than decent availability and punctuation. NYC's the closest and best of the bunch with 24/7 MTA subway/bus services together with LIRR/Metro North rail services. However, there are tons of pockets of places where public transit doesn't reach or VERY inconvenient to get to. This is true for tourists and visitors as well as regular commuters.

I've been a commuter riding America's third largest public transit system NJ Transit bus/rail for almost 14 years. And I have many many stories to tell you that public transit is far from perfect and it NEVER WILL BE. But for the 80% of the time when it functions well and punctuate it gets the job done. When it doesn't, I picked the lowest fair of ride for hail service, be it Uber or Lyft or anyone else who can help me get my commute's last-mile problem done. That's the consumer's perspective.

For all of your mega city visits, have you been to Tokyo? If so what did you find unreliable about it? The one criticism I can see is when transport is slowed/halted due to typhoons.

I found that the public transportation in most of Japan was well enough, such that I never thought to myself "If only I had a car/rental right now..."

Not to mention how punctual the transportation is. Compared to where I live, where delays of 10-45+ minutes are expected, the trains in Japan would apologize for being even a single minute late. The three weeks I took the JP Rail I never had a single train be late.

On the Yamanote Line, the longest I had to wait to catch a train to another part of town was 4 minutes. To me, that's absurd. My local station only runs a train once every few hours and if you miss your train you're waiting 3-4 hours for the next one to arrive. Missing a train in Tokyo is a mild inconvenience instead of a waste of most of your day.

It should be noted that Tokyo's subways do not operate between midnight and 5am. Having 4-5 hours of downtime every night dramatically reduces the complexity of infrastructure upkeep and cleanliness, and taxis pick up the slack for the night shift and bar/club crowd.

There are myriad reasons why Tokyo's metro outpaces (for one example) NYC in reliability and sanitation, but not having a 24/7 schedule is a big one.

How can these trains possibly be profitable with that kind of schedule? In fact I remember reading somewhere that they lose money...

Which made me wonder whether that kind of loss is OK and can be waived off as a govt. benefit in lieu of private car ownership. I don't know how the economics would work out, but it would be interesting to see how they compare.

Some lines lose money, but other lines make more money than is lost. The losing lines are still important because if the system doesn't have enough coverage, people won't trust it.

It also happens to be the case that the lines with "that kind of schedule" are the most profitable lines. That's why they run so often.

JR East (All of Japan above Kanto) finances: http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/investor/ar/2016/pdf/ar_2016-02.pd...

According to Wikipedia Tokyo Metro made ¥63 billion in 2009.

Tokyo also has the biggest Taxi economy in the world, but as a parent said, they're more for special occasions, and cost about as much as you'd expect to pay someone to be your personal driver.

Public transit doesn't need to be profitable. It's a public good. It's one of the things we all pay a little for to have access to as part of living in a city or community.

They shouldn't lose too much money or be too expensive to run, but that's the conversation to have, not how much profit they generate.

It is exactly this attitude that leads to cost disease. If the government absolutely must handle some need, I still expect them to be efficient and constantly improve productivity:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

You can be as efficient as possible and work towards improving productivity and still lose money. That's exactly why those sorts of things are supported by taxes.

And with how much Japan has innovated and improved their railways over the years I don't think this really applies to them. Maybe more of an American thing where we've spent $400,000,000,000 (and expected to spend $1,500,000,000,000) on a "one size fits all" fighter jet for our military that's been a complete failure in nearly every regard.

It's public transit, it should be a reliable service for the public primarily supported by taxes so that we all benefit.

That's only because America is shitty at implementing public transportation. Tokyo and Seoul are fucking amazing.

NYC subway is actually amazingly convenient despite being run down and disgusting. There's no reason to take an Uber in NYC unless you're drunk late at night, want to feel fancy, or are going to the airport.

So not true. Try going east <-> west.

Not true. I've been to Tokyo and stayed in an airline operated hotel 10 miles from NRT. The cloest rail station is like 4 miles away and you can't get to downtown Tokyo without hailing for a Uber/Lyft or taxi to transfer to the rail station. (Hotel shuttle doesn't runs to rail station unfortunately. And forget about taxi-ing directly to downtown Tokyo due to the traffic congestion and exorbitant taxi fare.)

Narita isn't anywhere near Tokyo (it's an hour away by express train). It's like complaining about the NY subway in Newark.

The Airport is the Train Station so you catch the airport shuttle to there!

Also, Uber is a just a taxi hailing app in Tokyo... so what are you trying to say? They are $4/min, which is an outrageous $300 to Tokyo...

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