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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

The stats are sort of misleading. Of COURSE 97% of people drove to an office park in an Illinois suburb, because that was the only way to get there.

OF COURSE almost every commutes to downtown Chicago by transit, because parking costs are insane.

I'm not saying I'm not pro-transit; I am. Very much so. But these stats don't capture how many of the 97% hated commuting by car but had to, and how many of the 90% "non-automobile" commutes are being done by people grudgingly (or AFTER driving a car to a train station, paying for parking, waiting for a train, and wishing they had a nice big free parking lot at their destination).

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As a human living on earth, I don't actually much care what the 97% or 90% actually think about their commutes. Using transit instead of single-occupant cars is a huge improvement from an environmental and economic standpoint.

You should care because the real way to get people to use transit is by making it better than the alternative.

Raising the price of gas helps too.

Or from the other direction: not subsidizing automobile transportation.

If we funneled as much money to mass transit as we do to vehicle infrastructure, there'd be no competition.

Not really, no.

Raising the price of gas negatively affects the working poor more than helps the environment. That subset of society may not live in an area accessible by transit, or their employment requires them to be in a different location than is feasible to travel to by transit.

> Raising the price of gas negatively affects the working poor more than helps the environment

In the short run. In the long run, the proceeds could be used to encourage the working poor to move to cities where they don't need a car. Given how financially terrible car ownership is for America's poor--between traffic tickets, civil forfeiture, police violence, predatory lending and collection practices, insurance practices, et cetera--I think it would be a net boon.

This is a horribly naive statement which disregards the existence many different jobs other than office and retail.

> disregards the existence many different jobs other than office and retail

Gas taxes can be raised in a way that is neutral to our working poor. It's a minor adjustment to the lowest tax bracket.

So what? Should the environment be subsidizing a benefit to the poor? We have better ways to help the poor than to let them trash our planet.

You can raise the Federal gas tax, and simultaneously lower the bottom tax rate from 10% to 0%.

Not everyone works in an office.

Not if we want to achieve aggressive climate goals.

Or, you know, charging for the true externalities of owning a car like Denmark does.

And the way to do that without discharging a loaded 12ga into the foot of the economy and everyone's quality of life is to make public transit better and more plentiful, not artificially raise the cost of private transit (which raises the cost of everything that depends on it). While the HN crowd had the economic stability to absorb an increased cost of private transit a huge chunk of the population would be negatively impacted in a way large enough to be worth avoiding. Carrots > sticks.

I agree except that often means to make car driving worse so transit seems better. Making transit actually better would be the key.

Converting single occupant lanes to dedicated bus lanes would help, too. Prioritize vehicles carrying the most people.

The thing to remember whenever “better than the alternative” comes up is that transit is good where cars are bad and cars are good everywhere else. Transit is never going to beat out cars in environments where traffic is light, density is low, and parking is cheap. But traffic isn’t light and parking isn’t cheap where density is high.

This is about deciding which kind of city you want and building the transportation options that fit that environment. Cities built for cars are very different from cities built for density and walkability. You can’t compare the two modes devoid of that context.

That doesn’t address the point about people driving to the transit station. If someone is willing to tolerate driving their car one hour, adding a transit leg will just allow them to drive one hour while living slightly further from their office, which in isolation doesn’t help the environment.

As a human living on Earth, I don't actually care much what you think.

See how that feels?

When done right, subway commuting is amazing. I live in Manhattan, and my commute is 15 minutes.

> When done right

> live in Manhattan

You and I have had very different experiences with the subway over the last year.

When it works, it's great, and in spite of so-called "statistics" to the contrary, it works pretty reliably for me during rush hour.

I think the parent was referring to how it feels like a dystopia for the time you are in it.

I'd take NYC's dystopia over any other U.S. city's transit options.

Which is not responsive to the commenter's skepticism of characterizing it as "amazing".

OP probably has a US-centric view, and in that frame of reference it is amazing in comparison. Everything is relative.

I get that its super fashionable to hate on the NYC subway system, but its easily the best transit system in the US. No other city is remotely close.

Sure, if you want to add the "in the US" qualifier that limits the comparison to areas that would have had to create a public transit system in spite of US policies favoring automobiles, then sure it's impressive. But compared to almost any reasonably-large city in Europe or many places in Asia, it's still an embarrassment.

If you want to see transit done right, go to Tokyo. People have sub-hour commutes of over 100 miles there. Everything is comfortable, clean and on-time. If we honestly want to make public transport succeed, we have to stop letting those in charge compare themselves to other failures and, instead, hold them accountable to operating at a level we know is being achieved elsewhere.

> You and I have had very different experiences with the subway over the last year

"The average American commute crept up to 26.4 minutes in 2015" [1]. In New York City, the "average one-way commute [is] almost 36 minutes" [2], with "a major gap" being in the realm of "12 minutes of delay" [3]. Compared to mean American traffic delays, New York at its worst is many other cities on a good day.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/22/the-a...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/realestate/commuting-best...

[3] https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/we-are-being-held-momentari...

A bad commute in NYC can be pretty awful. Recently the first snow storm of the year led to catastrophic delays for NJ residents who had to drive. (I know someone who had to sit in their car for 13 hours for a normally 15 minute drive)

Many people commute by car to a park and ride and then by train and then by subway. Any delay anywhere in the system causes major downstream problems.

> the first snow storm of the year led to catastrophic delays for NJ residents who had to drive

Sorry, I was contrasting non-driving commute outside New York to New York City mass transit commuting. Originally, density--à la NYC--was suggested as a solution. Someone responded by trashing the MTA's history of delays. Hence my comment. Driving in and around New York City is frustrating, unreliable and expensive.

On the flip side, the previous office in the suburbs with 90% car ridership probably forced everyone to own a car and drive in. The other stat didn't show how many people wanted to drive in, either. This seems like an apples to apples comparison to me.

From my comment:

> But these stats don't capture how many of the 97% hated commuting by car but had to

The important part of that stat:

> 97 percent of our folks were arriving by themselves in a car

Emphasis mine. Cars carrying just one person to and from work every day is a waste.

You seem to be very anxious. Is that so bad in Chicago?

How big is the percent of population in Chicago live so far from the downtown that they need a transport to commute?

The population of the City of Chicago is 2.7 million.

The population of the Chicago metropolitan area i.e. "Chicagoland" is 9.5 million (almost the size of Michigan). So 6.7 million people are technically not in the city.

A significant fraction of them commute to downtown Chicago for work.

6.7 / 9.5 = 0.7.

That's really a lot, 70%! How big of a portion of them are commuting to downtown?

Might be hard to find that, but based on the info I can find, a good many do commute in to the city. You could dig down more into station level numbers to get a more accurate count. For example, if you wanted to exclude stations on the line that are within city limits, but not downtown.

Anecdotally, as someone whose walk to work (from other transit) takes them against the flow of people coming from Union Station: it's a lot of people indeed.

September 2018 Metra ridership report: https://metrarail.com/sites/default/files/assets/planning/ri...

All reports: https://metrarail.com/about-metra/reports-documents/operatio...

I can't find the source now, but I think it's about 600-700k commuters into the city center (Loop, River North, West Loop) every weekday.

That's unexpectedly low, I'd say. In SZ, the daily commuter count approaches at least 2.5-3 million for people living on municipality's border.

Shenzhen has twice as many people as Chicago. So, if we extrapolate, the amount of people commuting will double for Chicago if Chicago were to be turned into Shenzhen.

That tells that much, much, more people in Chicago work outside of urban centre, or the portion of population who is working is simply less.

China is also the largest country in the world by population as well as hyper-urban. That makes the comparison difficult.

The U.S. has 1/4 of China's populations, Chicago is the 3rd largest metro area in the U.S. It has a population comparable to Qingdao, but it's relative influence in the country is similar to Chongqing or Hangzhou.

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