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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

You forgot one important point: Anyone can take rail. In order to drive, you already have to own a car (and be able to drive). Many people, especially those who live in cities, don't have cars, so taking a train just costs the price of the ticket, whereas driving requires renting or buying a car. Unless you're traveling very frequently, it's cheaper to not own a car.

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Aren't most cities more expensive to live in than the cost of owning a car in the suburbs?

There are other costs associated with living in the suburbs than just the cost of a car. There is also commute time, which - if your time isn't valuable to you - need not be a problem but for many people this wasted time is a real issue.

And the same time spent in a train can be productive. In a car, it's just a complete waste.

On which systems is it the norm for train commuters to get seats? Or can they be productive in standing room somehow?

I'm in the Netherlands, where I spend some extra money to get a 1st class ticket (because that has the room to work on a laptop), and I nearly always have a seat in that. I guess during rush hour about a fifth of the rest has to stand, true.

Even if you have to stand now and then, you can use an ereader.

I think there'd be riots if any US city proposed class-segregated seats on its public transit system. Though I would love it.

I'd pay almost as much for a guaranteed seat on BART as I would for a car.

Some of the commuter rail systems in the US do have class-based systems. Heavy rail (rapid transit aka "the subway") does not, but that's more about the particularities of how heavy rail works.

We tolerate different pricing for various classes of seats in concerts, trains, buses, airplanes, pretty much everything imaginable. I don't see why commuter rail would be any different.

Heavy rail is a taxpayer-funded government service, provided by governments with particularly liberal electorates (large dense cities). One of its key selling points, among certain constituents, is as an equalizer: getting the rich out their Audis and into the same miserable conditions as everyone else.

I think most people who can't afford first class on airlines do resent it, but since airlines aren't state-owned and, more importantly, it's always been there (not a new proposal), there's not much they can do.

Look at the popular outrage about scalping. People absolutely feel that you shouldn't be able to buy your way into a good seat, and instead ought to be lucky/first.

> provided by governments with particularly liberal electorates [...] One of its key selling points, among certain constituents, is as an equalizer: getting the rich out their Audis and into the same miserable conditions as everyone else.

It's hard to take what you're saying seriously when you're so clearly biased towards one end of the political spectrum.

The actual truth is much less political. Cities like New York City are way too dense for everyone to drive a personal vehicle, full stop, your non sequitur about Audis notwithstanding. Mass transit is the only transportation method that scales to handle a population the size of a large, dense city. Individual vehicle transportation does not. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, whether you're driving an Audi or a beater; if you're trying to drive to your job in the heart of Manhattan from the suburbs it's going to take you hours. Mass transit is the better choice for almost everyone.

I guess it depends on what you mean by productivity, but I can read a book while standing, I can read and respond to emails, and I can actually zone out and relax.

In a car, I have to be on moderately high alert the entire time I'm driving, especially in traffic.

Every commuter rail system I can think of provides seats for passengers.

Every commuter rail system I can think of has at least a 2:1 ratio of passengers to seats during commute hours.

What systems are you thinking of? Because every commuter rail system I can think of has seats for almost everyone.

Even the mediocre VTA light rail in Silicon Valley has people standing during rush hour. although that is exacerbated by the California reluctance to sit right next to someone. Here when half the seats are sat in the rest of the people stand unless it is a big group like a field trip.

You can't complain about standing if there are still seats available though ...

Also, you don't see that here in NYC. People are gonna sit down if there's space available. Unless it's next to a crazy homeless person, but I've only ever experienced that on heavy rail, not commuter rail.

Look at anywhere around London or Paris, for example; plenty of routes are crush loaded at rush hour. Heck, Tokyo is famous for some lines having people to push people further into each car.

Those are intra-city subways not commuter rail systems that are largely discussed above.

The delineations at play here for those who don't know, in order of scale, are light rail (typically at-grade), heavy rail/rapid transit/subway/metro (all the same thing), commuter rail, then regional/long-distance rail.

MTA, CTA, Muni, BART, Caltrain.

Every time I've ever taken MTA Metro-North there's been more than enough seats available. It's one of the systems I was going to mention as having seats for passengers. There isn't even enough room in those trains for twice as many people to stand as have seats; it's basically an all-seating arrangement with an aisle for reaching the seats down the middle. Are you sure about your examples?

Edit: And it's the exact same for the Long Island Railroad, which is the other major commuter rail system run by the MTA. They have a third system, the Staten Island Railway, but I've never taken it and thus can't comment.

I guess I'm talking about connectivity for outlying urban and inner suburban neighborhoods ("the subway") more than regional rail systems like LIRR or, in Chicago's case, Metra.

It may actually be a good strategy to live even further from the city if it lets you switch from a crowded urban transit system to a more spacious suburban one.

Commuter rail tends to be more expensive than heavy rail too.

It's a good question though (let's put aside costs for now): How much more time would you be willing to spend on commuter rail over heavy rail if it means getting a seat? I'm not sure. I think I'd rather be seated for 40 minutes than standing for thirty, but at an hour, I might just prefer the shorter trip. You can still easily listen to podcasts on crowded heavy rail, or get good at holding a Kindle in one hand.

I have never had to stand on MetroNorth, even during the morning rush.

In cities with the worst traffic problems, sure.

In smaller cities, it takes less time to get downtown from the suburbs than it does to get across downtown on foot or even a bike. (Buses there move at walking speed in the average case, or bicycle speed in the best case, but only come every half hour or so).

The differential in costs between living in the city core versus in the suburbs is much different for such cities, however. It may well be reversed entirely, as in many small cities that don't suffer from bad traffic, living in newer suburbs is more desirable than living in a potentially decaying urban core.

Not really, you just get more space outside of the cities.

I have some friends that have moved to upstate New York from Brooklyn and rent is the same, just with a lot more space. However, you then have to add on $400/month for the commuter rail along with an extra hour per day of commuting, plus owning a car and needing to drive everywhere instead of walking. It actually ends up being more expensive, but the trade off is getting more space (if you care about that for some reason).

You can pretty easily convert "the rent is the same, just with a lot more space" to "the rent is cheaper" by having roommates.

Or to "the rent is the same, but I don't have to have roommates" by not having them.

I'd be spending 2-3x as much on parking alone as I'm currently spending on my rail commute.

Cost of car ownership = cost of car + insurance + fuel + storage + maintenance + misc tickets and administrative fees.

There are only a couple cities in the US where it is realistic for a normal (i.e. able to afford a car) person to live without a car, and most of those cities are already served by Acela.

There are way more than two cities in the US where it's reasonable to not own a car. What makes you say it's only two?! Just because you can't imagine doing it doesn't mean that other people aren't perfectly content to do so. Here are some cities that I happen to know of offhand where people I know live perfectly "normal" (to use your word) lives without cars, and this is just in the northeast of the US: Boston, NYC, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Alexandria, Bethesda, and Arlington.

I can easily afford a car, but I don't own one because I don't have need for one very frequently, so it's simply cheaper to rent when I need one rather than have to worry about owning one 24/7.

I think this is the Acela corridor he was talking about. He probably misspoke when saying "a couple" - some people interpret that strictly as "two", while others interpret it loosely as "a handful" - but "most of these" implies that he meant the second meaning.

That interpretation doesn't make sense to me though. The Acela corridor is used for longer distance transportation -- anywhere else you'd simply fly. Neither has much to do with owning or not owning a car. I live in NYC, don't have a car, and I take any of bus/train/plane depending on where I'm going and if it's on the Northeast Corridor. If I lived in, say, Austin, I'd simply just always take a plane to any of those places, but my car ownership situation wouldn't necessarily change.

It's true that, along the Acela corridor, there are normal people who can't use the freeways to travel between cities for lack of car ownership. So the Acela is helpful.

Almost everywhere else that isn't the Acela corridor, people will have cars by default, so rail doesn't meaningfully increase access to inter-city travel over existing freeways.

This is where we still disagree. There are plenty of big cities that are not along the Acela corridor where people do not own cars by default (e.g. people living in downtown Chicago).

I don't understand your argument anyway. People own cars because they need them frequently for daily activities like commuting or errands. Infrequent longer distance trips are not the primary drivers of car ownership at all. If you don't own a car for your daily life then you certainly aren't going to own one just for the occasional road trip; no, you'll take a train/bus/plane in that case, or even just rent one.

Also, I live in NYC, and most of the places I go to are too far to drive to anyway. So having a car wouldn't be helpful. I'm renting a car in Las Vegas next month for DEF CON, but if I owned a car here I certainly wouldn't drive all the way there. I go to DC regularly, but even if I had a car I wouldn't want to use it for that trip as I find long drives unpleasant and would much rather read a book on a bus for four hours.

> people living in downtown Chicago

You can get to every significant Midwestern city on Amtrak from downtown Chicago. In fact, one of Amtrak's main weaknesses is that you often have to transfer through Chicago when it doesn't make geographic sense. That doesn't apply to Chicagoans. The Amtrak map is enlightening [0].

You can even do some train trips from downtown Chicago that make absolutely no sense in the era of flight (the rail tickets cost more than airfare and take 10x as long). I'd argue that anywhere you can't easily get on a train from Chicago is either too small to support rail service, or too far to be convenient by any mode except air.

There are a couple other places where people tend to live without cars, like the Bay Area. We already have good passenger rail service to Sacramento/Davis, and the SF/LA corridor is being developed.

>People own cars because they need them frequently for daily activities like commuting or errands

Correct, and when they already own cars, they already have easy access to inter-city travel (within distances that would be convenient by rail) via the interstates. Building HSR on these routes could provide a more convenient alternative, but the improvement is minor and incremental.

We need a massive investment in rail in this country, but we need it on urban and commuter systems. Inter-city travel already works almost as well as we could reasonably expect it to.

[0] https://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/948/674/System0211_101web,0.pdf

I don't think high speed rail would help here. We already have normal speed trains that are affordable, and I'd imagine high speed rails would just be more expensive.

Unless you're talking about the highly possible near future where even the middle class doesn't has cars, but would pay more for a train ticket that's faster.

Ah good one, totally missed that point. Thank you.

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