Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

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I moved to NYC a year ago and have the same basic feeling as you. Could the subway be improved? Obviously! But New Yorkers don't realize how good they have it compared to the rest of the U.S. [0] If a train takes 10 minutes, they're annoyed. Meanwhile, scheduled headways of 20 minutes are the norm where I'm from -- on the one light rail line that goes through the center of town.

My daily experience on the NYC Subway is that it's an incredible marvel. [1]

[0] There was even an article on r/nyc earlier this year about how New York shouldn't get Amazon's HQ2 based on the access to transit requirement. The article argued that the transit is too bad here. That's -- that's so absurd as to be almost beyond belief.

[1] An enormous caveat here: I can walk or bike to work. I do use the subway at peak hours fairly frequently, but I'm not reliant on it or held hostage by it, as many others are.

I think many New Yorkers realize how bad it is in the rest of the US. HOWEVER! In NYC, the subway is essential, and many people don't realistically have any other option. Especially if you're in the outer boroughs. Even worse, there you also don't have the luxury of walking over to another line if yours is heavily delayed. Walking is too far, and biking is only recently slowly becoming a reasonable alternative.

There are people in every city who don’t have any other option. What those people do in places like St. Louis is transfer between multiple buses on much worse commutes than the ones you’re imagining on a packed 7-train.

I think what’s actually different, if we’re honest, is that middle class people have arranged their lives to rely on the train in NYC, and they’re a more vocal (or at least more likely to be heard) constituency.

Sure, but that's another way of saying the same thing. Because by "no realistic option" GP means, in effect, "no option that middle class people would stand for".

If you build a transportation infrastructure that's good enough for middle class people to rely on then middle class people will come to rely on it, and if you don't then they won't.

No argument with that. It’s good that the residents of New York are holding their representatives to account. It’s also simultaneously true that wild hyperbole about NYC not having adequate transit to support HQ2 is just that.

I’m making the pretty boring argument that we shouldn’t get carried away.

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