Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpc59 | Hacker News Reader

>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor

That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to get where you want to) and it's operating past maximum capacity during rush hour. I haven't even gotten started on when service is interrupted and you show up over an hour late to work or class. Anybody who can afford a bit more for reliability and comfort will spend it without looking back.

View on HN

I can't speak for Montreal, but there are countless counterexamples of cities in wealthy countries (not as wealthy as the US) where metro users are drawn from more or less every income level. Turns out you can actually make riding a metro into a good experience with a bit of effort.

New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Berlin, Munich come immediately to mind.

And as sibling commenters have pointed out, in some places even smaller cities and towns have excellent public transit networks that pretty much everyone uses (maybe not always, but when convenient). Freiburg, Germany is one example I've seen.

Don't know if I'd go so far as to say riding the subway in NYC is "good" experience, but I'll certainly agree that it's one shared by people across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Paris public transit is stellar, fast, easy, relatively clean, and reasonably priced. I never once wished I had a car at my disposal in the city.

Hongkong as well! My god that was some unreal efficiency in subway systems. NYC is a poor mans system in comparison.

In St. Petersburg or Moscow, it feels as natural as walking.

Taipei... yes, absolutely. That was a great experience and easy to use.

NYC... altright, better than 15 years ago but still not great at all. Not as good as Germany or DC.

Tokyo... lol, no! While clean and efficient, it’s a joke that you have different rail stations owned by different companies, different cards that may work on each other but probably not. The ticket machines are almost all cash only. And instructions in other languages might have well used Google translate. Tokyo was one of the more difficult public transport systems I’ve used and I’ve been around the world a bit.

Suica cards work practically everywhere. You can poke a button to use english, usually clearly labeled. You need cash everywhere in Japan so not sure why that surprised you. My experience with Tokyo metro was pretty good. I've never seen a metro as well-organized despite 15 private rail companies splitting the system. The only problem is the operating hours, the last train rush is insane some nights.

The English button does work great... But doesn't tell you a DAMN THING about which line to transfer to get to some location just how much it costs. And when you need to transfer green to blue, good luck, because you better know that this one blue arrow pointing left means you need to go upstairs, cross the street, go into an entirely different station and then go down two flights of stairs with basically no more directions in English.

I was surprised that the machines only took cash, but it was annoying as hell that we were 10yen short and the nearest ATM was 2 blocks away under the street then back up again.

The rush for the 11-11:30pm trains are nuts. I've never seen so many black suits filled by unsmiling faces than the last train out near Tsukiji.

Have you tried using google maps? In my experience, it works great for Tokyo transit options.

Next time I'm in Japan I'll definitely try that!

Not as good as Germany or DC.

Did you just claim DC public transit is good? Wow. Coherent bus lines are few and far between. Light rail is non-existent. And the Metro is falling apart at the seems... Prone to excessive delays. Entire lines are brought down for extended periods to perform decades of deferred maintenance. There's no ring routes - to get from Dulles to Rockville, you have to go all the way downtown and back out again. The system was built without consideration for express lines. And neither of the DC airports are on the same line as Union Station.

A ring route from Bethesda to Largo is under construction and it's called the Purple Line. Metrorail could be better and has it's own shortcomings but it is one of the best in the US and far from nonexistent.

I said light rail (trams, streetcars) is non-existent. There is a test line in South DC, but nothing that’s actually useful for commuting or getting across the city.

My wife tried to use Metro for her Reston->downtown commute. It was a disaster - rail delays made it completely untenable. Then she tried the bus. It was more consistent, but overcrowded. She ended up driving 4/5 days because it was faster, cheaper, and more consistent.

It's easy to buy a card, and get on the right track. Your day to day minutia is of little concern to people that just need to get on and get somewhere.

Except when the train isn’t running at all. Or the rail catches on fire. Both of which are shockingly common.

> The ticket machines are almost all cash only. And instructions in other languages might have well used Google translate.

That's probably only hold true for (Western) tourists. And I don't think it is fair to compare on that. Tokyo (and Japan in general) rail system can be really intimidating but that's just because its sheer size, but once you know your way around it, it's gotta be among the best rail system in the world.

My wife & I live in San Francisco. SF Muni fares are a flat $2.50.

So for the two of us, a Muni trip is

  - total cost: $5
  - usually takes 30-60 min to get wherever we want to go in the city. 
  - we need to to figure out the optimal route, schedule, and entry & exit stops. 
  - we need to make sure we will arrive at the stop on-time.
  - we need to walk 5-10 min to closest stop on either end

This process is familiar to anyone who's taken public transportation. In general, I think it's a great system. Muni network coverage is pretty good in SF.

However... a low-cost Uber or Lyfts pool ride for two is

  - total cost: $5-12 (same serice area as Muni)
  - duration: 15-45 min
  - we don't have to plan the route or schedule
  - we don't have to worry about going to a remote pick-up stop on-time
  - we get dropped off directly at our destination

So, in the best case scenario, a lyft line ride is the same cost as Muni but so so much better in terms of value to us. Even when it is 2x as expensive, for us, the extra $5 is totally worth it. I know that's not true for everyone, but I personally am amazed that the cost of using the cheapest ride share option is often only 1x-2x the cost of using the billion-dollar municipal public transportation system.

Of course, here in SF ride share vehicles are definitely not allowed to use the special public-transportation-only lanes of some of the major roads, which remain reserved for the exclusive use of Muni buses and taxis to improve their transit times.

(edited to fix indentation)

The muni system is one of the worst functional bus system that I have ever encountered.

Sure there are worse systems that don’t have any coverage (El Paso for example) but they are not functioning so I don’t count those.

Problems with muni include:

    - To many stops (like every two blocks).
    - Hardly any dedicated bus lanes, bus gets stuck
      in traffic too many times.
    - Slow and un-intuitive routes.
    - Small and overcrowded busses.
    - No transfer to BART or ferries.

I recently came across a muni map from the mid 80s and it was almost identical to an up to date one. That might give an idea of how stagnant the system is. The few good things I find about the muni system is that it has good coverage, frequent busses[1] and is cheap.

[1]: Sometimes too frequent, I sometimes see the 14 being stuck in congestion of other 14s

This is cherry-picking. It always makes more sense to take a car service when multiple people start and end at the same places and can easily coordinate (e.g. a married couple). But this tells us nothing about the average outcome. The _average_ car contains only 1 person.

Does anyone have back-of-the-napkin estimates of total passenger throughput for central public transportation vs ride share transportation for any metropolitan area?

If public transit i.e. Muni serves 10x or 100x riders each day vs ride sharing than I see your point... I think.

Wait. Maybe you could spell it out?

Don't bother with napkins. The data is open. TNC trips average about 150k / weekday [1], BART carries about 415k trips / weekday [2], and Muni carries about 750k [3]. Thus, public transportation carries about 8x more people, with the caveat that not all BART journeys start or end in SF.

On the other hand, 99% of vehicle trips in SF are either private cars or TNCs.

Neither of these was my point, though. My point was that comparing cost between a per-trip price and a per-person price will always favor the former when there are multiple people. But most trips don't involve multiple people, which is why such an analysis is besides the point.

1: http://tncstoday.sfcta.org/ 2: https://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership 3: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/ridership

If we’re comparing a bus or train to a Lyft or Uber carpool or line of some sort, wouldn’t you expect it to be more cost effective to drive people around in buses rather than cars, even if the app coordinates things so that there are two people in the car? It sounds like buses are not very cost effective.

I think what’s actually happening is Uber drivers are paid peanuts and provide and maintain their own vehicles. There’s a technology innovation (eg the efficiency of knowing if and where someone needs a ride) coupled with a labor innovation in paying drivers less than minimum wage.

Data! Awesome!

Huh. This is interesting. The "Learn More About TNCs" button on the page you linked to leads to some more facts, including:

> "On a typical weekday, TNCs make more than 170,000 vehicle trips within San Francisco, approximately 12 times the number of taxi trips, representing 15% of all intra-San Francisco vehicle trips." - https://www.sfcta.org/tncstoday

So: 1,333,333 intra-San Francisco vehicle trips each day, including Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), and from your other links, 1,165,000 MUNI+BART trips per day, for a total of 2,498,333 rides per day

The population of the city during business hours is ~1,100,000... Oh of course, most people make round trips so it makes sense for the total number of rides to be >2x the city population.

The reason I brought this up was to wonder how insane (just a little? or totally impossible?!) it would be if 100% of public transportation was serviced by "TNCs" in the city.

> "On an average weekday, more than 5,700 TNC vehicles operate on San Francisco streets during the peak period"[sfcta.org/tncstoday]

So if TNCs provide ~30 trips a day, and all 1,165,000 MUNI+BART passengers switched to TNCs, there would have to be an additional ~40k TNC vehicles in the city :).

Maybe it would work if they were really, really small.

Mass transit will always be viewed as the lesser option where it is the lesser option.

In cities that were designed or entirely remade to support the automobile, the automobile works better than everything else. This is almost a tautology, but it's remarkable how often it's overlooked in this discussion. If cities were re-designed around transit (with more density, smaller roads, and more space for alternative transportation modes), then transit would work better and cars would be worse. †

In summary, yes, obviously cars work better in cities designed for cars! But cities that work well for cars aren't a natural feature of the universe. It took a lot of work to get them to look like that.

† An important implication of this is that transit will never overtake the automobile in low-density, sprawl-heavy cities. Transit use is high where the transit infrastructure is good and driving is painful. Both things have to be true. ††

And the tension here is direct. Sprawl-heavy areas can't support good transit infrastructure and high-density, pedestrian-friendly areas are awful to drive in. A choice for one is a vote against the other.

†† This is why arguments about the superiority of cars based on revealed preference are usually spurious. If you put a light rail system in a town built for cars, then people will keep using the thing the town was built for. But those people are revealing their preference for cars in an environment built for cars. Where the built environment is different, people behave differently.

My experience in my multiple Montreal soujourns has been so different that I consider the Metro to be a jewel. I admit that some stations are grungier than others (once I had to duck an errant basketball at Cote-des-Neiges) but that was once out of around 100 trips. I do agree that the air conditioning is marginal.

> That's because it is

It largely depends on the country or even city. Me and my gf went to Switzerland by car a couple of years ago (we live in Eastern Europe) and I’d had expected that we’d visit different parts of the country by car. What happened once we got there is that we “forgot” the car in the hotel’s parking lot for a week and we did all our travel by train, it was wonderful. Even traveling inside the city itself (we were based in Lausanne) was a very nice thing, I’ve started building a soft spot in my heart for the city’s trolley-buses (electric public transport rocks, btw, always has, alwsys will).

American living in Switzerland. From what I understand, access to public transportation seems to be considered a basic human right here. No one is expected to have to buy and upkeep car maintenance.

While the electrification of the mass transit systems is super nice, unfortunately it came about because of the World Wars. Switzerland was hit really hard, and no one wanted to trade their precious coal away (Switzerland had no coal mines). Thus out of sheer necessity they began electrifying all the trains. So unfortunately there's not replicable policies other countries can use to achieve what Switzerland has achieved in terms of electrification, so it'd take some creativity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com