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Comment by kindatrue | Hacker News Reader

"Let's build a new shiny station" (that would make everyone walk even further to transfer to the subways to get them to work) - tons of interest! tons of excitement!

"Let's rebuild 2 tunnels. And maybe build 2 more." (Before they collapse and destroy the economy.) - Boring. Not sexy. No photo-ops.

And that's the problem with humans. :(

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It's a problem with American politics. While Penn Station falls apart, London and Paris have seen nothing but infrastructure improvements and upgrades.

There are of course many reasons for this, but I assure you not all human societies are clearly hostile to public infrastructure spending and anything that isn't private and for-profit.

In the years I lived in London I observed the Tube going from constant outages and weekend shutdowns, to later trains, more frequent trains, and new infrastructure projects like Crossrail. DLR, a conductorless system I rode daily,was only a few decades old.

As a NYer I'm deeply embarrassed by having seen first hand over 20 years the slow decline of the transportation system here. It's embarrassing when family and friends visit from overseas and display disgust and shock. NY comes off as wealthy and clean in popular media there, but the reality is closer to a Third World one.

London does prove that it can be turned around. So there's that, at least.

It's more centralized in the UK, while an old-fashioned American belief in small, local government lives on. If you read the article, the ARC tunnel project needed (or initially thought it would obtain) collaboration between governors of New York, New Jersey, Transit Authority, and the Fed government. If you work in systems, that's like a disk array striped across several disks, the failure of any one causing the array to fail.

First Corzine proposed it (the second or so in as many decades), then Christie replaces him and uses its cancellation for political gain (a fact with such frustration that I can't express it politely), then the project comes alive again at higher cost and with Obama Federal funding promises overturned by Trump.

Whoever said that decentralized control of infrastructure in a short-term-minded political environment was a good idea needs to wake up and visit countries in Europe or Asia with vastly superior infrastructure and ponder the idea that 18th century ideas could perhaps be wrong in 2018.

The difference in centralization is striking. When I lived in Wales, the "no smoking in bars" law went into effect nationwide. Such a concept is nearly unthinkable in the USA.

Chicago's infrastructure is falling apart as well. The L hasn't been extended in decades, and there are no plans to electrify the rest of the suburban rail lines. The city is corrupt and constantly out of money. Every time they raise revenue, it disappears, with the streets full of potholes and non-existent lines between car lanes.

The only city that's truly expanding their rail in a significant way is Seattle. With the ST3 project and the Redmond Transit corridor, hopefully they'll see some relief from the insane housing prices. But they needed that expansion two decades ago.

Don't even get me started on Caltrain.

Everybody is going crazy over self driving vehicles, but if we do get them, they won't be a reality for at least 10 ~ 15 years. It's a more difficult problem than people think, and all that money could be put into fixing and expanding our crumbling rail.

I don't understand why America hates rail so much.

> I don't understand why America hates rail so much.

Because in America, transit is welfare for poor people, and acts like it. Busses in small cities in Germany coordinate schedules to optimize transfers. Busses in secondary US cities just don’t shown up sometimes because the driver decided to clock out early. There is no accountability, due to the potent combination of the fact that the primary constituency is politically marginalized to begin with and also are not paying the taxes that fund the systems.

Re: Seattle: 15 years for two rail lines is a joke. Assuming they actually build it.

It is taking way too long. But there are reasons. (1) There is a limit on the amount of bonds that they can have bid out at a time. (2) they had to do a lot of tunneling. (3) the next segment involves building over a floating bridge. Light rail over a floating bridge is non-trivial. I do wish they'd increase their ability to do simultaneous work though, I'll be dead before it gets near my house.

For 3), there was recently an article, that highest cost in US rail projects is buying land. 3 kinda offsets this.

Building rail on a non-fixed "floating bridge" is probably expensive too :-)

It will be the first floating bridge rail in the world. They've already built the test track, so so hopefully they have an accurate idea of how much the production segments will cost:

https://vimeo.com/163631993

Replying to my own note, the cost is controversial, and plenty of people don't want to spend money on infrastructure, or have endless arguments over we'll just use driverless cars, only spend money on roads, or only spend money on buses, etc. But somehow we managed to pass something here.

I think the hostility is reasonable: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subw.... When New York spends five times as much to do the same thing as London and Paris, why should I support it? And New York, by virtue of its sheer wealth, is at least minimally functional. When I lived in Westchester, I drove my car maybe once a month. Most other places are non-functional. I used to ride the Amtrak between DC and Baltimor every day. The question was not whether I was going to be late, but how late I was going to be. The Baltimore light rail comes kind of when it feels like it.

If US transit wasn’t so unbelievably shitty and inefficient, there might be some stomach in funding it.

Fair point, the corruption and incompetence I'm that plagues public works in places like NY is truly astonishing. However I think you and OP are talking about a different kind of support. A lot of people (almost exclusively on the political right for some reason) hate public transportation regardless of how well or poorly it actually works.

I don't know that this is true. You're suggesting a lot of people have an irrational reason to dislike public transportation, meanwhile there are legitimate and obvious reasons to dislike it.

Why not assume the obvious? The user experiences how crappy it is and sees how much it costs. He therefore balks at funding more expensive crappiness.

Have you ever been to NYC? Manhattan, specifically? During rush hour?

I'm not sure if you're starting to make a market-based Rational-Man-type argument, but I'll cut you off and say: you don't have a choice BUT take public transportation, unless you can afford to take a helicopter and live and work right near helipads. Even an Uber/taxi can be an impossible nightmare time-wise during rush-hour.

Most people who commute in on the NJT/Amtrak (the topic of the parent submission) don't have the choice to take a car or walk.

The NY Metropolitan area is not the rest of the United States. The population density is like nothing else.

> "You're suggesting a lot of people have an irrational reason to dislike public transportation"

It's not a suggestion, it's an historical fact. I'll cite no less an authority than George Will, who in one of his more unfortunate descents into conspiratorial hackery essentially equates support for public transportation with communism:

> "The real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism. To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make."

Other conservative powers oppose public transport only to protect their own money. A good example is the Koch family, who vigorously fight any technology or activity that might threaten their fossil-fuel-fueled wealth, including public transport of all kinds. Rent-seeking may constitute a "rational" motivation on the part of the rent seeker, but many conservatives appear to align themselves with Koch-branded positions for purely ideological (and I would argue irrational) reasons.

Interesting. That quote from George Will seems pretty relevant to credit / debit cards too. However I suspect most of these people have and use a payment card, which if true, leads me to believe it's a quality and convenience issue. Make public transit far more convenient and reliable and people will no doubt give up some freedom for it.

Self-driving cars are eventually just another form of public transit anyways, so maybe that'll be the winning approach.

I don't really trust our government and loathe giving them more power. On the flip-side I hate the waste we produce in the name of freedom.

> As a NYer I'm deeply embarrassed by having seen first hand over 20 years

NYer as well, for long time, and while it's (public transport) in decline for sure, I think your timeline is off. I'd say it's only been in aggressive decline for the past few years, and gradual decline for last 10. Before that was getting better every year. Unlimited Metrocard made riding the subway safe at all hours as marginal cost for riders became zero, more riders = more safety.

Fair enough, generally. The subway was pretty fine in my memories of the early 2000s to about 2010. Penn station, however, NJ Transit in particular, I feel started its decline before 2010. More and more people have been relying on these trains while the trains and system have been getting older and too big for their (ripping) britches.

While Penn Station falls apart, London and Paris have seen nothing but infrastructure improvements and upgrades.

"Lead us not into Penn Station..."

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51CJP5ZEFTL...

I should point out that Penn Station (the terminal) is awful and falling apart. Honestly the station, the tracks below it, and the tunnels, all need work.

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