Hacker News Reader

Comment by bischofs | Hacker News Reader

I recently took a trip to Bochum, Germany. They have a light rail system that goes to every small suburb, the university, and is centered at the Bochum city train station where there are cabs, bus lines and connections that get you to any surrounding city.

It is maybe 6-8 lines total and was incredibly useful because it was designed to be, I didnt need a car to get anywhere and it was clean and cheap (2 euros per trip) .

The new Q-line in Detroit is 1 line that is three miles total and is more designed as a tourist trap, most people dont work three miles away from where they live. You need to connect it to other systems like an airport or a bus station, and you need more than 1 line (duh).

If you gave everyone horses and only build a three mile road you wouldn't say that "cars are a failure, and roads lose money". For some reason in the States we build out a tiny one line system and then throw our hands up in the air when nobody rides it.

View on HN

Worse than that, in the states we often build the lines between places where nobody wants to live or get to. A low density slum that only the poor live in on one end, and a nearly dead mall on the other. The few who live near the line find that it doesn't go to where they can find a job so they never use it. Then it dies.

Building a train can make sense. There is a very simple and relatively cheap way to test your route before building rail: put an express bus route on the nearby roads, and give them the same controls emergency vehicles have to change the lights when they come. If the train makes sense this bus route will be always busy and make money. You can even adjust the bus route a few times to study alternate routes. Of course nobody wants to do this as it would kill their pet project.

>Q-line

Most American streetcar systems suffer the same fate: Shiny but slow, much like a theme park monorail; and sold first as a way to boost property values and economic development. They are designed to do everything except provide a useful way to commute.

That's probably because "doing it right" is expensive.

There should be an 'express' bypass (which actually does this) that hops only among key points (such as the airport to a downtown hub, and maybe the next hub out on the other side).

There should also be /frequent/ service - which probably means you need fully automated routes (it might be best to move the humans to supervising the actual concourses, where human interactions are highest). I also like the idea of a couple days of subservience that's automatically deleted if not expressly copied out for legal proceedings.

Finally, everything should be enclosed and on it's own isolated layer. Subways sound great, above-surface enclosures might work too.

Why enclosed? Security, noise abatement, weather isolation. The middle point lets you run the trains faster and with less disruption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com