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Comment by gandreani | Hacker News Reader

The best time to build a rail system is kind of like the best time to plant a tree. 20 years ago.

It's sad but it seems to me contemporary Americans don't want to pay for something that they will only reap the benefits of in later decades

There's so much in that style of thinking. The irony of depending on roads built decades ago. The debt system conditioning people to expect to "get it now, pay it later". The hypocrisy in "investing" 10k-100k in an education but not a few measly percent in taxes

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Hah, the "20 years" ago comment made me think that is Austin to a T. In 2000 a bond proposal failed (just barely) that would have been a great starter line down the main corridor in central Austin ( http://www.kut.org/post/why-austins-rail-fail-2000-still-res... ).

Now, though, I really feel it's almost too late for rail in Austin, with our enormous growth from that time making any sort of land acquisition crazy expensive. The $1 billion+ plus proposal from 2014 mentioned in that linked article was also voted down, but it was phenomenally expensive and didn't actually go where it would do much good - a lot of people saw it as a giveaway for investors who had purchased land along the route.

So yeah, I feel we blew our chance, too, and now I feel our main hope is, if not fully self-driving cars, at least networkable cars that could make much better use of the available road space.

I had a discussion with a buddy about the California high speed rail and similar land prices issue. Surprisingly, eminent domain allows the gov to acquire land fairly cheaply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States

Eminent domain doesn't make lane acquisition cheap. The government has to pay market price.

And furthermore, eminent domain is (for the most part rightly) very politically fraught these days. Clearly it's sometimes needed but I'm perfectly happy with it being difficult, expensive, unpopular, and requiring a lot of justification.

It wouldn't be so fraught if local politicians stopped trying to use it for "economic development" projects backed by people they owe favors too.

If eminent domain weren't an expensive PITA then it would be abused.

It does make it somewhat cheaper by preventing them from getting gouged by a few holdouts trying to get a better price.

In 2001, Louisville (KY) transit agency TARC was working to acquire land for a light-rail line down the city's central corridor (basically paralleling the existing I-65 corridor) connecting Downtown, the Airport, the Fairgrounds, the University, Churchill Downs. Basically, a giant chunk of tourist destinations and core business needs.

The project got stomped by NIMBY complaints by Old Louisville residents (neighborhood between Downtown and most of those other destinations; and dumb because that OG suburb was built on the backs of once important trolley lines to/from Downtown), and internecine battles with the Commonwealth legislature and KIPDA the "regional transit oversight authority".

(KIPDA seems to have no real authority other than conservatively shutting down TARC projects because it's too much work to actually collaborate with Southern Indiana and neither state understands the benefits of actually enhancing transit in the region because of a sort of cold war between the two, despite the shared interests in the region. But I'm ranting…)

Anyway, fast forward 15 years after the project was cancelled and the region is losing a battle with Nashville and Indianopolis for major regional business conventions (which is probably the biggest money fight between the cities). Louisville has the conference space and hotel inventory space to stay extremely competitive, _except_ that it's spread out across the central corridor: the Downtown Convention Center is "small", but well appointed and surrounded by hotel space; the Fairgrounds is huge with tons of space, and some more hotels, and relatively convenient to the airport. Getting between the two takes about 15/20 minutes in light traffic. The proposed LRT could probably have done it in about the same with proposed stops, if not faster.

The kicker is, though, that the one convention actually trying to utilize all that space in the same convention, manages to nearly grid lock the entire core corridor for the entirety of the convention. What's a 15/20 minute drive most days becomes an hour and a half crawl.

The foresight was there to build LRT before it was needed. It's just stupid that project was killed for political reasons. Now it's incredibly needed and even tougher to get political traction to actually build it.

Riding the Link Light Rail is super depressing when it stops at all the streets on Rainier Ave, just waiting to T-bone another left-turning car that isn't paying attention to how things work...

The appetite for large-scale transit outside highway lanes in America is downright depressing. I'm still under the influence of a recent trip to Japan, and a trip before that to Germany, while reading about high-speed trains in China, and essentially the rest of the world is not only willing to fully invest in smart rail tech for their cities, but they are willing to go the whole way with high-speed rail, too. Cargo trains and the car industry controls too much!

At the time, businesses along Rainier Ave pushed for a surface alignment instead of a tunnel to get more stops along Rainier, to avoid disruption to business access from cut-and-cover tunneling, and because they thought having people above ground would make their area more visible. (There were also people who raised the idea that building a light rail system from the northern, and more white, part of Seattle down to the airport while "hiding" the more non-white part of Seattle from those riders by putting them in a tunnel was socially unfair.)

It isn't always construction concerns that dictate why we make the decisions we do.

That said, I have been on the HSR systems in Germany and eastern China and, yes, they are beautiful and I wish we had one in Puget Sound.

At the time, I remember many citizen groups complaining that Ranier should have a tunnel or st least some more grade separation.

Light rail and HSR are completely different things though. Also, the area lacks much density on its outside for HSR to go anywhere, maybe Portland with a stop in Vancouver and Tacoma?

Olympia would be a good stop too. When Worked down there for the State there were people that commuted all the way from Renton and even Portland(Seriously). Not to mention I reckon there is a lot of traffic from Seattle <-> Olympia. Now that you mention it add it Bellingham too.

The only issues with this is I can see a lot of complaints about rising property values in the more rural parts of the Sound, but you've got to start making adaptations for the influx of people at some point, right?

There isn’t a lot of density, and how many people would be willing to pay $100 to commute daily from Bellingham to Seattle? HSR isn’t cheap to run, many can’t afford it for daily commutes even in Japan.

>Riding the Link Light Rail is super depressing when it stops at all the streets on Rainier Ave, just waiting to T-bone another left-turning car that isn't paying attention to how things work...

I rarely have it stop anywhere on Rainier, but when it does it takes so long for something that already takes forever. I live south of Seattle and it takes me 45 minutes to get home on the light rail where a bus will take 20 -- unfortunately the bus I need doesn't run on weekends so I have to take the light rail.

Proper public transit, especially subways, are really the answer to everything...

"Can't find jobs!". Well, often it's more "Can't get to the jobs you could do". Public transit!

"Need to do more for disabled people!". Public transit! (assuming its built with accessibility in mind).

"Need more affordable housing!". Public transit! Further apartments are now viable again (need a lot of public transit though, otherwise all you did is massively gentrify an area and kick the poors out).

"Too much traffic!". Ok, you get the drift.

Yeah, it's expensive as hell to build...except for the benefits, its probably cheaper than everything else you can do. And even if its not...the benefits are just that significant.

The problem is not that the benefits will come in decades, but that they won’t come at all to most taxpayers. Here in DC we built a subway 40 years ago. It’s a huge boondoggle that is usable for a single digit percent of the taxpayers who pay for it. Folks in Richmond who might ride Metro a few times in their lifetime or lower income folks who work in the suburbs subsidize the commutes of lawyers and federal government workers who work downtown.

The D.C. Metro has a daily ridership of 612,652 and an annual ridership of 179,693,126. Farebox recovery is 62%, which exceeds that of Vienna and is almost as high as that of Munich.

If you look at how people use transit, it skews toward lower-income people [1]. High-income people like the lawyers and government officials you mention use it a lot too, but not as often.

If you want to pick on a failing transit system, pick on VTA in Silicon Valley, not the D.C. Metro.

[1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-o...

That still means it is 38% subsidized by the taxpayer, right? Farebox recovery is important but you need to also take into account in absolute terms the cost minus recovery.

Don’t we spend a lot of federal dollars on roads, bridges, etc?

https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-govern...

It might be partially funded by taxpayer money. Is that benefiting the taxpayer by reducing road congestion or having cleaner air? (I don’t know the answer to this for any given metro, but it’s the question that needs answering)

subtract the additional taxes gained by new business / housing along the line.

Just because we couldn't recover it based on accounting doesn't mean it is not a net benefit.

We don't even do that for roads.

If you required transportation infrastructure to all make profit nothing would ever get built.

That’s probably the wrong way to think about things. Good roads or any transport system allows frictionless trade of goods and services. This means more money moving in the economy and hopefully a boost for the country. This means more taxes back to the govt.

Taxes is how the govt makes money so it’s in their interest to make its citizens wealthier by making it easy for them to move around and do businessy and worky tings.

I agree. Which is why I pointed out the silly hypocrisy of fixating on farebox recovery.

Other people have pointed out that roads are subsidized heavily through taxes, but just to be blunt: nobody is asking you to specially subsidize public transit. We are just asking taxpayers to treat public transit with the same deference they treat the road system. The people who use our public transit system in Washington are taxpayers too as we all pay sales tax equally. And if they rent they pay property tax indirectly via their landlord.

Nobody is getting a free ride except if we continue to disproportionately fund the road system at the expense of denser forms of transportation.

"same deference they treat the road system"

Well that's not saying much. The US highways aren't in optimal condition.

State and local governments spend about $170 billion a year on highways and roads, for the 115 million or so people who commute by car each day: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/blog/the-aven...

That’s about $1,500 per commuter. Note that is an overestimate, because it ignores the commercial uses of roads (package delivery, ambulances, etc). Also it ignores bus riders, who make up most of the 7 million or so transit riders.

State and local sources spend $1.8 billion on WMATA each year. There are about 600,000 linked trips per day, so at most 300,000 commuters. That’s $6,000 per commuter.

(Note both numbers above exclude federal spending, but Metro is heavily subsidized by federal dollars.)

How much of the WMATA spending is on buses? Seems like you attributed all spending to the subway.

If the 600k daily rides weren’t taken on the train, how much more would we have to spend maintaining roads due to the higher traffic levels?

Not only that, 600K more trips on the roads would utterly choke traffic. It would be impossible, I think, to accommodate many more cars let alone the increased maintenance required to sustain it.

The capacity issue is relevant, but roads require maintenance due to large trucks and weather, not cars. Asphalt damage increases with the cube of the vehicle weight.

Worse, it's to the fourth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating

Road damage rises steeply with axle weight, and is estimated "as a rule of thumb... for reasonably strong pavement surfaces" to be proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. This means that doubling the axle weight will increase road damage (2x2x2x2)=16 times. For this reason trucks with a high axle weight are heavily taxed in most countries.

For a more concrete example, compare a Honda Civic (about 3000 lbs including passengers) and a bike + rider (call it 250 lbs). The ratio of road damage is 3000^4 / 250^4.

The car does over 20,000x as much damage to the road. And heavy trucks are much much worse, hence the taxes that wikipedia mentions.

I've heard people complain that bikes don't pay gas taxes to fund road work. While that may be true of new construction, nobody's ever repaved a road because too many bikes rode on it. And if we're talking about taxing bike riders to pay for new construction, how about we spend it on separated bike paths instead of dumping it into more roads for cars? No bike rider wants to be sharing the road with you, it's just the only option in most places.

Rods have finite lifespans independent of usage. You will need to repair bike lanes that only see bike traffic.

Remove semi trucks from the road and total budget for road repairs drops slightly but far less than your analysis suggests.

I don't think I've ever seen a sidewalk being replaced because of age (or any other reason for that matter). Bike paths don't suffer much more wear. I think you underestimate the life span of asphalt.

>I don't think I've ever seen a sidewalk being replaced because of age

Walking over uneven surfaces is much more comfortable than using a wheeled vehicle, so long as those surfaces are flat. Everyone will bitch and moan about a road that's in rough shape. Nobody really cares if it's a sidewalk (sucks for the disabled though).

I've seen sidewalks get replaced due to age but I don't live in CA where it's 70 degrees year round.

They do wear out eventually. Most sidewalks that I've seen destroyed were from tree root upheave though.

Many places have relatively new construction, so it's not yet been an issue. It's rather common for older cities like DC, or places with a lot of freeze cycles and or trees. https://ddot.dc.gov/service/sidewalk-repair

The $170B figure does not account for pollution, environmental, health, and other societal costs of sprawled out life.

Another thing to consider, for cars, is that these things need PARKING SPACES. For an already dense city that means large, multilevel parking garages dotted all over the city. How many more garages are we talking about for a half million more cars? A lot... enough to impact the nature and function of the city itself.

If you're going to make a case for private cars vs WMATA, there is a wider scope of things to evaluate than just operating cost.

You wouldn't need more parking spots. For people commuting from outside the downtown core, Metro is already car-oriented, and operates 60,000 parking spots at stations (not including lots run privately or by VA/MD). For people traveling inside the downtown core, they could just take the bus--as lower income folks in D.C. already have to do because Metro doesn't go where they live.

Of course you would need vast increases of parking spots. But it doesn't matter, this is all hypothetical. WMATA isn't going anywhere.

DC would not be DC without the WMATA. And those WMATA trips from the burbs into DC can't be replaced with car trips or bus trips.

DC busses appear to be more heavily subsidized than the trains are. Am I misreading the stat, or misunderstanding your argument?

According to the FY 2019 budget [1], operating expenses of busses are much more heavily subsidized than rail (recovery ratio of 23% for the former if you look at page 35).

[1]: https://www.wmata.com/about/records/public_docs/upload/FY201...

The operating subsidy for rail is slightly less than for the bus, but that's dwarfed by the difference in annual capital expenditures (about $1 billion for rail versus $200 million for bus). Metro's fare recovery is a bit misleading, because most of its "capital budget" is actually for maintenance and repair, which is an operating cost.

Also, the bus serves much lower income people than rail--I'm okay with it receiving subsidies.

>Another thing to consider, for cars, is that these things need PARKING SPACES.

Every single parking spot at any transit center in and around Seattle is full by 7AM. There was a new one built south of the airport at Angle Lake Station with something like 1000-1500 parking spots and you can't find anything past 7-8AM.

I can believe it! Now imagine _ALL_ of those cars having to find parking in the central business district of Seattle.

There are no negatives to dense transportation. Discussing the economics of it simply ignores the future damages that will be sustained by the continued use of any individual transportation solutions, but particularly those that use fossil fuels.

Once you include those in your calculations, then $6000 per commuter is a drop in the bucket, and probably saved money rather than spent.

That's a significant underestimate, it ignores police costs and debt on past highway spending etc. Federal spending is also a much larger subsidy for the highway system than Metro.

Subway system looks expensive largely because it pays for everything under one umbrella.

It's a bit disingenuous to compare these modes of transport solely based on cost per commuter.

Think about how much space along the route is reserved for the typical train commuter versus the amount of space reserved for car commuters. The train commuter has the rail corridor, train stations, bus, bus lanes, etc. all reserved for their use. But the car commuter has the entirety of the roadway, all parking spaces, parking garages, etc. reserved for their use. Drivers are cheaper because they are way more spread out, and if you required the same density for both forms of transit driving would be far more expensive than train travel.

Edit: Additionally, the road right-of-way was purchased and built at the time all of the structures were built. This lead to dramatically cheaper land values than when trains are being retrofitted into existing cities.

The real question is whether you value density or whether you're willing to require that the people in your city sprawl all over the countryside. I don't have a pat answer for that because it's a matter of values, but I do believe that we've gone too far in the direction of sprawl and that a sizeable portion of my home city wants to live closer together with easier access to commercial districts, and we would like to do that without needing a car to get around.

I think that letting us do that benefits everyone because we're basically asking you if we can take up less space in exchange for some taxes. And I don't think it's an unreasonable trade for most people.

You dont have to use public transit to benefit from it. You will see reduced traffic and a healthier economy (low income people can get to jobs at all, everyone can get to more jobs in a shorter time span, reducing friction in the basic capitalism of the job market, heck, even things as simple as "can a one car family drop off their car for repair?" (Meaning fewer on-the-road incidents, less stressed people, etc)

It is possible for a transit system to not be worthwhile, but "Do I user it? and "Does it pay for itself?" are inadequate to determine that.

Traffic is a great point. Every time someone chooses to take the subway or a bus over driving, traffic becomes slightly more tolerable for people in cars.

"Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others"

"Expanding mass transit isn't just a good idea, it's a necessity," Holland said. "My drive to work is unbelievable. I spend more than two hours stuck in 12 lanes of traffic. It's about time somebody did something to get some of these other cars off the road."

https://www.theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-...

Except it won't because there's so much pent up demand for transit. A little extra capacity will be instantly used up by the people who were formerly inconveniencing themselves by leaving late/early.

Increasing throughput doesn't prevent you from being able to max out the system at peak usage times (rush hour), it just means that the rush hour traffic doesn't last as long.

Right, but then you also have to account for the value created by the transit system that isn’t captured in fares. A lot of property has higher value because it’s near a transit stop, and a lot of economic activity is created by the ease of access it facilitates.

Imagine if you were the government of NYC (also sub-100% farebox recovery) and someone offered to remove the subway system for free. No more losing money to subsidize it! Would you take that offer? No, that would be insane.

The DC Metro area has 3.3 million non farm jobs, which means WMATA is serving just 20% of taxpayers in the area (even less if you consider that many riders are tourists). Moreover, each ride is subsized by MD, VA, and DC. There are 8 million non farm jobs among those taxpayers, but virtually none can use Metro. Finally, the average income of Metro riders is north of $100k: https://public.tableau.com/profile/planitmetro#!/vizhome/Rai.... That means rides for well-off Metro riders are being subsidized by less well off taxpayers. Its wealth transfer from poor to rich (especially considering that the state and local taxes that fund Metro are regressive).

> Finally, the average income of Metro riders is north of $100k: https://public.tableau.com/profile/planitmetro#!/vizhome/Rai....

That's got to be talking about mean personal income of riders, right?

I just looked up some stats for DC. I started with the numbers from here:

https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US1150000-washingto...

And also made some conversions between personal&household stats, by estimating that 16% of people in DC are under 15 and thus not counted in per-capita income, together with the average household size being 2.3. Altogether, in DC:

    Median per-capita income: $42k
    Mean per-capita income: $52k
    Median household income: $82k
    Mean household income: $100k

I'm really surpised that the average income of riders is around $100k. That hasn't been my perception with other public transport.

Yeah, it's rather odd. BART's equivalent data (though not as nicely plotted) is here: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/StationProfile...

Pulling up some random stations shows that the median income at most BART stations is $50k-$75k, which is right what I would expect. Even at the downtown/FiDi ones like Embarcadero and Montgomery, it's just a bit above $75k. Median income in SF is about $95k, so BART ridership skews less wealthy than the area as a whole.

That figure is household income. The bulk of the ridership is for commuting. DC has high salaried people, higher than people realize.

Of the Top 10 Richest Counties in the US, five (5) of them are DC suburbs (far flung burbs in the case of Stafford Co, VA. Median household income in Fairfax and Loudoun is north of $110k. Source: from Fairfax, work in Loudoun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/richest-counties-in-the-...

Each person riding on the metro is one less car. It serves everybody.

Your farebox recovery ratio is way off - the DOT statistics I see show 42% [1], significantly lower than both Vienna and Munich.

[1]:https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit_...

I believe you're looking at the average of the MTA bus system and the DC Metro. This thread is exclusively about the latter.

I got the number from here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metro#Financing

It hasn't gone zero fare yet? Even Missoula has zero fare!

Great way to take the mass transit system out of the reach of the poor.

Wow. A lot of people are threatened by poor people riding mass transit. Quelle surprise.

Just because someone doesn't ride the subway doesn't mean they don't benefit from it. More people on the subway means fewer cars on the road, cleaner air and water, less maintenance on roads, safer streets.

Only for people commuting in the same general pattern as the rail routes. The problem in DC is that most jobs in the metro area are actually in the suburbs. Reduced congestion going from Arlington to DC helps road commuters going from Arlington to DC, but does nothing for the folks commuting from Ashburn to Reston or Bowie to Bethesda.

I live in Anne Arundel. Folks here are now footing the bill for WMATA thanks to the Maryland funding commitment. Metro is doing nothing to reduce congestion anywhere around here (there is no Metro station in the county).

Are you saying that there are zero people that take the MARC commuter rail out of Odenton and transfer to Metro?

People that would (without Metro) have no way of getting from MARC to their DC jobs would disagree with you that Metro it doesn't reduce congestion on 295 and other congested roads that pass through Anne Arundel.

Anne Arundel’s share of the Metro commitment is about $13 million (probably more because the county has higher median income than Maryland as a whole). Just 3,000 daily riders board at Odenton. Let’s say 2,000 are going to DC and 1,000 to Baltimore. That means the county is paying $6,500 per year to facilitate Metro connnections for each rider. 295 moreover carries over 100,000 cars per day (more than double the entire MARC system). Another 2,000 would be a rounding error.

Another 2,000 would be a rounding error.

2,000 would be 2%. That's in the range of a traffic change (1% - 5%) that would degrade the Level of Service of a highway from D (design goal) to E or F.

It doesn't take much of a reduction in traffic to significantly improve free-flow. Or, conversely, it doesn't take much an increase in numbers to make traffic suck more than it already does.

I can't tell if you're arguing that the Metro should be expanded, or that is a waste of resources.

The sentiment you express will likely be down voted by mass transit advocates, but it should be understood better by them. Cause it sucks to pay massive taxes and see other people get all the benefit.

The priorities are often out of balance. Surface light rail can be a massive improvement over buses on shared roads, a huge increase in transportation capacity over buses, and can be built for a fraction of the cost of subways, allowing us to serve more people with the same amount of investment. Meaning instead of serving 10% of the population with the best quality transit, we could be serving 50% of the population with slightly slower service. And when the time comes that a tunnel would improve capacity and service, you have 50% of the population voting yes because it's in their best interest instead of hoping and praying that enough people are willing to benevolently pay huge increases in taxes for something they'll rarely use.

Lots of us transit advocates were glad to see BART vote down the proposed Livermore extension because of exactly the effect you mention: it's spending a lot of money to enhance services for rich people, when bus service would be more practical. Transit advocacy doesn't mean "all rail all the time".

Of course not. I'm a transit advocate myself, but I'd rather see 200 miles of at grade light rail than 50 miles of subway. But it's extremely common in discussions about alternatives to find attitudes like "we might as well not build it at all if it's going to be at grade".

It's a deliberate ignorance of opportunity costs, often advocated by those who primarily benefit from an alternative. For example, I can predict whether someone prefers a tall bridge or subterranean crossing versus a much cheaper drawbridge over the ship canal in Ballard, merely by knowing if they live in Ballard or not.

Yes, but in practice as a transit user (not in the bay area), rail generally ends up being more practical. Typically trains come every 3 to 10 minutes. In theory, buses could be this common, but more typically they run every 30 minutes or so. And taking into account a typical trip involves a transfer or two, this can make even short commutes over an hour, not acceptable to most people. The goal of transit isn't just to provide an option to the destitute (although it is nice if it does), but to make a serious impact on congestion by making a better alternative to driving for people who otherwise would have done that.

Frequency of service is entirely orthogonal to the type of service.

London has a bus route that runs one bus per minute in peak times. Because London's streets are busy this means you will usually be able to see _several_ of the buses on that route on a street you're on that's served by that bus, and choose whether you'd prefer to walk to the closest stop, or walk in the direction of your bus and catch an "earlier" bus that is further in that direction already.

One per minute is actually a _higher_ rate than is achievable by London's automated and semi-automated underground railways, none of which even aim for more than 38 trains per hour in peak.

Now, of course S-series underground trains carry about a thousand people, whereas a London double decker bus maybe carries 150 (both would be crammed in this scenario but that's not an infrequent occurrence for peak hours), so the trains on a core route are moving about 35-40 thousand people per hour while these buses move less than 10 thousand, but for you as an individual the buses are more frequent, not to mention they're right there in the street, not at the bottom of a shaft somewhere.

I'm not a mass transit advocate, not by a long shot. But I've lived in large cities that mostly do light rail, and those that mostly do subway. Subway is much better all around when it's done right. It's really impressive just how many people and how reliably (time-wise) a well-designed subway system can move around.

I happen to live in Seattle suburbs, about as far away east from it as possible actually while still technically being in Seattle metro area. So all this stuff is not going to be of any immediate benefit... but I still think that it should be done. The area keeps growing rapidly, and I don't see that stopping anytime soon.

Unfair taxes? Well, people in Seattle pay taxes that ultimately pay for the road to my house. I pay for their roads too, sure - but one road in Seattle services a great deal more people than one road out here in unincorporated King County, so all in all, I still get more out of that arrangement than they do. But I don't hear them complaining. In a polity, common good doesn't have to mean that everyone derives equal value from it, or even that everyone derives non-zero value. Sometimes you help your neighbors, sometimes they help you. In the end, long-term, you're both better off.

> But I've lived in large cities that mostly do light rail, and those that mostly do subway. Subway is much better all around when it's done right. It's really impressive just how many people and how reliably (time-wise) a well-designed subway system can move around.

You can't move people around if your subway doesn't go anywhere because it costs too much to build it out completely.

Take the Calgary CTrain vs Seattle's Link. Link was monumentally more expensive than the CTrain (we built a 2 mile tunnel for about the same cost as their entire system). Calgary built more miles, but at grade. Seattle built fewer miles, mostly subway. Calgary has 314k daily riders, Seattle has 80k. Seattle's system has a higher average speed, but services a fraction of the population because the system is so short. Calgary, on the other hand, has ridership so high that building a tunnel to increase capacity in downtown corridors has an ROI so obvious that they didn't even have to ask taxpayers for more taxes because it payed for itself.

I too voted for ST3 despite not getting any direct benefit from it. But by building a system that prioritizes speed over coverage, ST3 relied on the benevolence of taxpayers to get it passed. Luckily there are enough people willing to shoulder that burden in Seattle, but not every city has the liberal culture of Seattle, and even then it undoubtedly would have been much easier for it to pass if it had a much higher proportion of the population covered.

Let's just imagine that I'm a (entirely too common) taxpayer who only votes to pay for things that I directly benefit from. Would it be easier to persuade me to vote for a system where I save 20 minutes on my commute, or a system where someone else saves 25 minutes on their commute?

Yes, it would. But it shouldn't be this way! Investing into infrastructure, including mass transit, isn't supposed to be a liberal thing. Understanding that not every cent of your taxes ought to benefit you directly isn't supposed to be a liberal thing. This country has a history of massive public infrastructure investment, that often benefited specific communities, but were funded more broadly. If we always not-from-my-wallet'ed everything, we wouldn't have the economic powerhouse of a country that we have today, and enjoy its benefits. That we're doing it now more often than not just means that the future is that much more bleak.

Lots of cities without good transit have booming economies (Atlanta, Houston, LA, Seattle). That’s a red herring.

L.A. is about the worst example you could come up with as to why we should not invest in transit. Quick, name the first thing that comes to mind when you think of "the worst thing about L.A." You probably thought of either traffic or smog from car pollution.

Angelenos have realized this for some time now, and the region is correspondingly investing more in transit than anywhere else in the country by a significant margin. They literally have no other options: the 405, for example, is the most congested freeway in the country, and there is no room to widen it anymore. It's an easy sell to taxpayers when congestion has that much of an impact on quality of life.

The layout of development in LA was driven by the pacific eletric railway anyhow.

> ... that is usable for a single digit percent of the taxpayers who pay for it.

You could probably say the same thing for >90% of all public roads in, say, California. Why would I need CA route 253, to pick a random example? I've been to Northern California exactly once, and I didn't need the road then.

relevant: https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs...

Metro cost a small, small fraction of what highways cost.

It transformed a dying, dangerous city into the one we have now.

There is no subsidy that isn't comparable to roads or bridges.

I don't own a car, yet my taxes go to highways, because they are essential infrastructure.

Yes, and even the most conservative of auto drivers won't even blink at a dropping a billion dollars on one additional lane in an interchange, doing nothing to alleve congestion. But if you even speak of spending that on transit, everyone starts screaming.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/10/12/heres-what-a-billion-...

DC Metro is awesome and what a world-class city deserves, a train from the airport to downtown. (Except for those fare machines from the 80s.)

> Folks in Richmond who might ride Metro a few times in their lifetime or lower income folks who work in the suburbs subsidize the commutes of lawyers and federal government workers who work downtown.

What a ridiculous assertion. Northern Virginia subsidizes transportation spending for the entire rest of the state, not the other way around.

A small percentage of residents use any particular road, too, but that doesn't make roads useless. The way to get to a large percentage of residents using any road is by building roads literally everywhere that people are. If the subway went more places, then more people would use it, too.

Almost any specific route for any type of transit is going to be used by a small percentage of the overall population. That's pretty obviously true, because most people live somewhere else for any given route.

>but that they won’t come at all to most taxpayers.

Directly at least; Which is sad that we can have such short sighted vision.

As a poster posts above; public transit in a lot of way makes your city more viable;

1) Less Traffic, a single digit % of cars off of the road decreases traffic much more significantly (for the remaining 95%)

2) Better equality in housing, jobs. People to actually make your food and clean your wares can actually get to their jobs

3) Better for the disabled

4) Better for liabilities, death, and stress.

It isn’t like the system is free to run after it is built, otherwise Seattle had a rail/trolley system 100 years ago that could just have still been in use.

I think it is really fallacious thinking when saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago. Ya, the right aways would have been easier, but the cheaper tech would have needed to be upgraded and/or maintained. Investing heavily in a rail system right before the huge Boeing bust of the seventies could have ended up pretty badly for Seattle.

> saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago

I don't think that's what it means. Don't think about the actual costs, think about when you pay the costs and when you reap the benefit. People want to enjoy the benefits with as little effort or sacrifice from their side.

- Most people aren't willing to be the ones to have to pay any cost, they'd rather have others do it.

- Most people would like to enjoy a benefit as soon as possible, so they'd rather have others put that in place in advance.

Combine these 2 and you get the picture: a person today doesn't want to pay for something and even worse, only get it in a decade or more. Any other discomfort just gets piled on an already unfavorable situation.

> I think it is really fallacious thinking when saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago

Respectfully, could not disagree more. The more urban development there is, the harder these things get to build. It's probably impossible to do nowadays, and Seattle is a cesspit of traffic, even compared to other US cities. As far as maintenance or upgrades, please. Why do you brush your teeth?

Finally, can you measure quality of life, and if so, how much money is it worth? It's shameful that it's always an economic argument, usually by people who are already well-off. The list of benefits for mass rapid transit is endless, and at the end of the day, it's Americans who suffer for not having it, nobody else (except with environmental concerns, i.e. global warming).

There is a cost to having the infrastructure, just like there is a cost to maintaining a tree. The tree analogy is actually very apt, well, except in that case planting the tree is cheap but keeping it watered is very expensive.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this would be a great ideal for Seattle today. But back then? Or even from what I remember in the late 70s and 80s? The system would have been very difficult to justify and might have rotted before it was actually needed. And I say this as someone who had to commute from Bothell to UW by bus in the early 90s.

The right of way is expensive. The land costs more, and the political cost is even greater. And the compromising that ensues ends up creating an even more disjointed an non-viable system. Look at L.A.'s subway. It's not generally useful in that there is so much sprawl compared to the system that overwhelmingly people find alternatives more generally available. And it's seeing its lowest ridership in a decade, which is the opposite of what you'd expect in a successful system in a growing city.

It has nothing to do with the technology -- it's all about the land. Dunno how long you've been here, but my brother-in-law grew up in Eastlake when the I-5 corridor and ship canal bridge were under construction. There was a several block wide zone stretching miles right through the middle of the city most of which had been eminent-domained by the government for the project. Give that a try in 2018.

Yea, when I hear people complain about traffic in Seattle and that we need more freeways, my first question to them is, will you offer your house up for the right-of-way?

The Caldecott Tunnel's fourth bore is an SF Bay Area example of how long it infrastructure investment takes before tax payers can enjoy the benefits.

The Caldecott Tunnel in the East Bay had three "bores". The center bore would switch directions at noon to accommodate morning and afternoon rush hour, causing painful merges from four to two lanes for people driving the other direction.

Plans for adding a fourth bore, so there would be two eastbound and two westbound bores, started in 2000. Funding wasn't approved until 2007. Construction began in 2009 and the fourth bore opened to the public in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel#Fourth_bore

An even more egregious example would be the East span of the Bay Bridge, which was known to be structurally unsafe since the 1950s, collapsed in 1989, and wasn't actually replaced until 2013. So 24 years and $6.5 billion to build (really fix) a 2 mile bridge. The entire original bridge (both spans, plus the Yerba Buena tunnel) cost less than $1.4 billion in 2013 dollars, and was built in around 3.5 years.

And the first phase of New York's Second Avenue subway just opened about a year ago. It was first proposed in... 1919.

Part of the problem is that King County and the Seattle city council have all alienated a major chunk of constituents.

It’s bad enough to endure a tax increase- but the leaders end up fucking over the landowners so much that even if they know it would be for the best, nobody trusts them to spend the cash the way they promised.

I've lived in King County for 20 years. Yes, taxes have been going up a crazy amount, so have our needs, so have our home values. But what did they do to screw us over?

https://m.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/King-County-Coun...

https://crosscut.com/2018/04/salmon-tribes-should-beat-washi...

And just try getting a building permit in unincorporated king county.

King county apparently exists for either Seattle, or anyone but King County citizens.

I don't live in Seattle, I feel reasonably well treated. I do hate that they are spending so much public money on the baseball stadium, but that's not making me feel that terrible. I used to live in unincorporated king county - did you know that there are tons of places that have septic tanks, even well settled neighborhoods have them, because they didn't extend the county sewer lines that far.

On your second article, I'm not sure what your point is about the tribes vs Washington state.

Blaming politicians when you only have 42% voter turnout is a pretty weak argument.

https://results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/king/

Its a democracy, vote for better ppl.

>nobody trusts them to spend the cash the way they promised.

This is local propaganda by the large corporations here and Saul Spady running around whining on 5pm TV news about having to spend more money in taxes when he's enjoyed nothing but a booming Seattle restaurant industry directly due to the laws he opposed. Everything goes on the people because the businesses here don't really pay anything and those same people who complain about their taxes going up willingly defend not taxing the corporations reaping major benefits here. The tax system is also extremely regressive. Not to mention the public shows no backlash against giving $100's of millions of dollars of public taxpayer money to dumb shit like repairing Safeco Field when the owners and Mariners could've paid for it themselves.

Seattle is a fiscally right wing city, not this 'socialist hell hole' everyone makes it out to be.

Seattle ends up spending more than 3x its per mile project cost estimates, estimates that are already much higher than what other US cities actually spent to fully build similar projects. The tunnel, the Pioneer Square streetcar failure, the bike lanes - it’s likely to turn out like Honolulu’s project. It’s a consistent record of mismanagement, and while I would love to build a subway it is not “propaganda” to not trust this council with it.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/930...

According to Seattle.gov, most of the projects are on track with spending and the ones that aren't are the projects that are now uncertain about federal funding to offset costs, higher construction costs, and due to that a few went over budget [1].

You can't blanket apply this to all projects, even the ones in Move Seattle, therefore it's nothing but propaganda from people who don't want to spend anything on public infrastructure or public transit. Jenny Durkan is also quite the liar when it comes to the missing street car link [2].

[1] http://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2018/04/23/the-latest-on-move-se...

[2] https://www.theurbanist.org/2018/07/26/mayor-durkan-claims-s...

>>This is local propaganda by ...

I promise you I am not a Russian bot. My neighbors aren't either. We sincerely don't trust these groups.

Why escalate to claiming an opinion you disagree with is propaganda?

Who claimed it was Russia? This is corporate propaganda. I legitimately don't trust that the groups opposing all of this are acting in the best interests of the city and the workers, only in the interests of already rich white NIMBY's and corporations.

During the head tax fiasco, the people collecting signatures were openly lying and pushing corporate propaganda [1], and it seems like most of Seattle's media that isn't third party are just local propaganda outlets that push serious distrust of our elected left wing officials at the expense of residents that aren't rich, unless it's something like giving public money to a sports stadium that could've been funded by private money. The hate of Sawant is unjustified and further pushed by local propaganda.

Please stop conflating propaganda with just Russia as well. Noam Chomsky clearly points out the propaganda model and how it's used by our own media & corporations, and also points out how a lot of businesses are private governments now [2].

[] https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/06/06/27190451/audio-a...

[2] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-an-interview-with-noam...

That’s just like, your propaganda, man.

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