The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation we have to do one or both of those things. Otherwise we can build all we like and no one will ride. Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car and you’re not going to get reasonable walkability until you de-prioritize the car.
Why does it have to be a competition? I'd like to see both coasts have great systems for transportation!
(And before I get called out: Yes, I realize NASA got people killed for the same reason but the difference is seriously orders of magnitude. NASA's failures were publicized while the USSR's were covered up. Many cosmonauts perished and all records of them were removed, they were airbrushed out of photos, erased from official documents, etc. The world will never know their names.)
There are parts of Phoenix that are more bikable than much of New York.
LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle have started pouring money into their new transit systems, while MTA and NJ Transit and Port Authority keep having their budgets cut, leading to reliability so low that it's driving people into cars.
The East Coast used to be the star of American transportation, not much anymore.
~$2.0 Billion into caltrain electrification: http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/Caltrain+Modernization+Progra... (page 13)
- $0.5B: https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/ecc
- $3.1B (thus far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_BART_extension
- $2M (each): https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/cars
- $1.2B: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-Muni-s-new-light-r...
- $1.9B: https://calmod.org/
So stuff happens, and I'm grateful when it does -- the new BART cars are nice -- but generally at a snail's pace. It's hard to tell whether NIMBY obstruction (https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2018/03/01/caltrain-and-ath...) or contractor incompetence and mismanagement (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-subway-stalle...) is more to blame.
As far as LA goes the results are not exactly convincing. I wonder if 't seven possible to have decent public transportation in an area that's as spread out.
LA's bus system is the largest in the world on the basis of coverage, and is the most-heavily used bus network in the Western world.
The problem is that they waste money profligately. What takes other cities millions of dollars and tens of weeks takes New York billions and decades.
The reason no one wishes to add billions to the MTA’s already large capital budget is that 99% of the money disappears into a black hole
The only real difference would be that the comparison in funding/cost between equivalent US and EU work would be more fair (also achieved by de-nationalizing healthcare and pensions in the EU).
Unless of course you’re also suggesting that nationalization would reduce global costs, but nothing about this particular thread supports/suggests that
Why would you have the same problem? The project gets cheaper because the labor to do it (and administrative overhead to make sure the benefits are given) are cheaper. In a world where dollar values and sticker shock aren't significant determinants of transit policy your point might make sense, but we don't live in that world.
Also, transit funds are usually raised locally while nationalized social services are funded nationally. So the costs would actually fall on different entities and a broader tax-base if you did it this way.
As I've said said so many times before, every nation gets the government it deserves. Americans don't want bikeable or walkable cities, so we don't have them. Europeans do want them, so they have them.
>In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
Yep, I was in Germany recently, and the large cities I visited all had excellent subway/train systems, as well as bike paths on all the major roads. And unlike bike lanes in US cities, the bike lanes were on the same level as the sidewalk, physically separated from the cars. The cities themselves were far more dense too: not as dense as Manhattan, but still far more dense than your typical American suburban "city", so it was very feasible to get around by bike and subway and also tram (electric streetcar).
We're not going to de-prioritize the car because Americans just can't think that way; they can't stand the thought of having to share space with strangers. So we're going to continue building more roads, and getting worse and worse congestion. It's not ever going to get better, because generally, when you look at the history of human societies, things rarely get fixed before there's a total collapse or disaster of some kind. Humans in groups just aren't smart enough to avoid disasters even when they're plainly obvious.
If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college.
What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?
I am not saying the subways shouldn't be built or that planning decades ahead is bad. I love subways. But in the area of transportation we will see huge changes in the coming decades.
Scooters and bikes have an effective range, particularly in places like LA that can have quite long commute distances.
Motive power source doesn't really change much.
Intra-urban flight would increase required energy for transport a lot and also move the crapshoot that is today's roads and traffic above our heads, ready to hurtle down at us.
Boring tunnels being cheaper has yet to be proven, since the main issues with tunneling are that tunnels have to be tailored to ground conditions.
Shuttles to Mars doesn't change how I get to and from work across town, the same way that airplanes did not.
https://ny.curbed.com/2018/12/19/18146933/mta-new-york-subwa...
New York's system is designed around walking to stations. All the way to the end of the lines, stations tend to be about a half mile apart. There are express lines but even those become locals on at least one end, with half-mile stop spacing.
DC's is an auto-oriented system, where you're expected to drive to the stop and then take the train in from the suburbs. As a result, while there is dense stop spacing in the center, distances between stations in the suburbs get progressively longer and longer. It's over these long stretches in the suburbs that DC is able to attain much higher speeds.
If you have really comprehensive coverage in a densely built area you'd be stopping too often for those top speeds to matter.
This is the problem with the Acela. It can technically go up to 150mph, but it has to stop so often that it averages 60mph for the journey.
For longer distances with limited stops, the speed and shigh capacity of a train are good. But to really fill out coverage in a dense area, short wait times and short distances between stops and destinations should be your chief considerations. Buses and streetcars just do that better. Though really, once you get past a certain level of density you need all of the above.
This is why developed subway systems with high usage end up with large trains, that's the best way to speed up the system, reducing the delay caused by trains waiting for other trains that are stopped in the station.
An articulated bus might be able to move closer to 100 people comfortably.
For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.
Today California High Speed Rail and Texas Central and Florida's Brightline have to deal with angry suburban neighbors, angry farmers, and legal and environmental review processes that are the result of a century and a half's worth of hindsight.
There really isn't any "environmental impact" for construction within the city (the environment there is already destroyed). But that sure does provide fodder for endless delays and expense.
> 20MPH
Travel from Omaha to San Francisco was 4 days at the opening, including stops. The distance was 1,912 miles. So the average was indeed 20, but to achieve that average (including stops) it must have been going at least 40 on much of the route.
Quite a difference from the alternative, months of walking.
If you like, the first Boston subway was completed in 1897, it took 2 years, and it was all done with muscle, too.
Seattle is a bit of an odd case when talking about construction timelines, because the projects are drawn out mostly due to a state law that limits how much Sound Transit can bond out at any given time. Anything more aggressive than that would require passing a 60% vote threshold, which would be quite the landslide election. (It's also how the first Seattle subway attempt died.)
Environmental impact doesn't just concern spoilage of a pristine environment; among other things, it can consider impacts on drainage and runoff, noise pollution, construction impacts, efficacy at diverting car trips and CO2 emissions, etc.
Actual construction, even nowadays, is pretty fast. What takes 20-40 years is the long-term planning. By comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was advocated first in 1832 (before most of the American West was even American), and serious planning first started in the late 1840s and early 1850s, which led to the Gadsden Purchase in 1853.
Personally, I’m fine with any large transit project as long as it goes faster than a car and cheaper as well.
that seems to be unreasonably long. In germany, both the city I am studying at and the city I was born are undertaking big changes in their transportation infrastructure, and both don't take that long. In munich, building just started and is expected to last unit 2026 [1]. And we always complain that it's taking too long to plan and build!
40 years seems to be crazy! You would have to start repairing the old stuff when the whole project is finished.
Or are you talking about the whole process, including the financing? Then it's more understandable, many big project here also stall for 20 years until everyone has enough money and the political will to follow through. But I thought the financing is covered due to the sales-tax increase.
While it's easy to complain about projects not moving for 20 years, the sums are often quite enourmus and i am not sure whether inefficiencies are to blame, or whether gathering enough money just takes a long time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_line_2_(Munich_S-Bahn)
Admittedly, I'm a bit torn on this. Since infrastructure is so important to the liveability and growth of a city, and any sort of long-term thinking is a good thing. But predicting the future is hard, and having a 40 year plan survive (short-term) politics is also unlikely.
There are also project on hold for 30 years in munich.
Another reason why they are building in stages is that some of the new transit projects aren't as useful until other ones are finished. For example, there's plans for a big tunnel (a few miles longer than the one you linked) that they're trying to finish in time for the 2028 Olympics (although construction hasn't started yet). A lot of the projects on the other side of the tunnel are being done with the purpose of getting people to the tunnel,
> Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets.
> Few, if any, combustion engine cars
> Truly self driving cars
If history has taught us anything, it's that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. The infrastructure of NYC, LA, Seattle, San Francisco, etc will not look much different in 2059 than it does today.
We'll probably still be using JavaScript, too. :/
The world 20-40 years ago was far more primitive than it is today.
That is not true. Here's the list: "cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?"
How cheap does a cheap electric scooter need to be? Because we had electric scooters 10 years ago. Definitely so if you include "nascent" forms. More specifically, the electric scooter dates from around 1920 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped . The Segway PT came out in 2001.
Bikes of course are 19th century technology.
Airbag helmets are new.
Electric cars were popular in the early 1900s.
CMU was working on self-driving cars in the 1980s; the Navlab drove across the US in the 1995, and was autonomous 98% of the time. Surely that counts as "nascent", yes?
Drone taxis sound like the proposed helicopter taxis of the 1950s, or flying cars, or jet packs, though without a driver. Drones have been around for more than 10 year. Passenger-carrying drones? That is indeed new.
"Boring tunnels in multiple levels"; many subway systems have multiple levels. What has been new about that in the last 10 years which wasn't deployed earlier, not even in nascent form?
"Shuttles to Mars". I don't know how to judge that one. In 1989 when Bush Sr. announced the Space Exploration Initiative, would you have said that it was a nascent project? You didn't know that that it wouldn't pan out, just like we don't know now if SpaceX's plans will pan out.
The world 20-40 years ago was far more sophisticated than you seem to think.
I think there is a Bill Gates quote about how most people overestimate how much things will change in one year and underestimate how much they will change in ten.
Of course, when you find yourself 10 years in the future you'll probably just forget how different your city used to be because the changes unfolded too slowly for you to notice they were changing. In most of these cities, for example, the infrastructure might look the same but the way people are using it is very very different.
LA metro is dropping track like crazy and way more usable than it used to be. And it’s cheap. $1.75 each way or monthly pass.
Tl;dr it’s awesome now and getting better!
None of those are mass transit. Personal vehicles are fine and dandy, but they can only move one person at a time and will always, by definition, take up more space and resources per person than a solution that can ferry tens or hundreds of people at a time.
And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway.
Scooters and bikes are great supplements to a system, but they won't actually do much good without a mass transit system to be the backbone for getting around.
If 20 minutes is "practically an entire commute" then you're already in a dense enough area to where transit coverage should minimize the number of people who are a mile away. At that point, proximity to transit just becomes part of what you pay for in your house. If the transit is there, development patterns will tend to build up around it.
Firstly, that's more like exurbia than suburbia. Suburbia is characterized by low density sprawl surrounding a denser, urban core that acts as the economic anchor. This is also where the nightmarishly long commute times tend to be: (https://www.caliper.com/featured-maps/xus-commute-time-mapti...).
Secondly, people decide where to live and work based on commute times. In other words, people consciously choose to live in places that are within a 30 minute commute from work, and they structure their days (when they wake up, when they leave the office, etc) around minimizing it. This same mechanic works if the transit is available. People will consciously choose to live closer to the transit hubs that minimize the lengths of their commutes, promoting density around the bus or train routes.
This is why the "last mile" problem is not as relevant of a consideration as people think once you get past the "windshield bias" a bit. Firstly because if everyone is within a mile of a transit option then that means the [i]worst case scenario[/i] is that someone has to walk a mile, and most people will choose to live within a space that's even less than that.
And secondly, because a mile isn't actually that terrible of a walk, especially if you make the walk a pleasant one. I live 2 and a half miles from my office. If I ride the bus it takes me about 20 minutes door to door with maybe 5 of those minutes involving walking to/from the bus-stop. If I walk the whole way it takes me about 45 minutes. Despite the walk being more than twice of long, though, I'm honestly indifferent between the two options. My only real consideration is whether I'm in a hurry or not, and usually if I'm in a REAL hurry I'll take a cab.
Even if it's raining, I often just take my umbrella and walk the commute because the walk is, in itself, enjoyable. It's not just a means of conveyance, it's a stroll and a source of exercise. There are plenty of murals to look at, a park to stroll through, flowers and landscaping to see, shop windows to look in on, sidewalk cafes to people watch people on awkward first-dates, etc.
Lots of disabled Americans ride around on scooters (4-wheeled motorized carts). They would do much better on the streets of Europe where there's bike lanes and nice sidewalks than in suburban America, though they'd have problems navigating the shops.
I believed we were talking about the razor scooters/scoot-share services, which are too finicky for people with mobility issues to be able to use on bumpy streets.
The types of scooters you're talking about basically use the same infrastructure as wheelchairs. So if you're pedestrian friendly and have inclusive urban design (like curb-cuts) that won't really be a big deal.
Give buses priority at intersections, or even better build them dedicated overpasses if you want to see buses really move.
Or just give them the IR transponders that emergency services use to trigger the light in some places and have it go green for the bus rather than red for everyone. You'd accomplish almost the same result with less trade-offs.
Giving one vehicle priority tends to increase complexity and causes a distraction which increases risk of accidents (which clog up the road making the bus late). This is why the modern doctrine for EMTs is to drive in traffic like everyone else and use lights/sirens only in the most time critical cases and when doing so will substantially affect travel time.
At those intersections busses arrive at the curb lane to pickup/dropoff. Then a special light tells the bus driver that it is ok to proceed into the intersection, while all other cars have a red signal. The bus pulls out and leapfrogs traffic.
Actually, they do. Take a look at the MetroBus infrastructure in Mexico City[0] for example. Buses run on time, on an extensive, dedicated lane network.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs
With dedicated bus lanes, you skip the backlog and cross on the next light, so intersections do not undo the advantage of dedicated lanes.
You don't have to take my word for it - just ride any good dedicated lane system at a high traffic time and note your relatve speed of progression versus car traffic.
Do you mean it is slow compared to the portion with no overpasses, or slow compared to vehicles w/o dedicated lanes passing through the same intersections?
Passing through intersections is never particularly fast (except perhaps at night on empty reads with sensors far enough away to turn the light green before you even get there) - but at peak times dedicated lanes help a lot even when intersections are involved because you skip the queue.
The benefits of a transit system accrue to people who aren't using it as much as to people who are. A bus that transports 60 people means you just took at least 30 vehicles off the road (and that's a super conservative estimate). That extra capacity is a benefit to people riding bikes, walking, and driving. So why would you expect only the bus rider expected to pay into the system while everyone else benefits?
The only issue is traffic, which dedicated lanes and automatic right of way takes care of. There is also the issue of having to wait outside in bad weather for it, but if you keep headways low that's not so bad if you're already committed to having to walk to the bus shelter.
Huh? What kind of trains have you been riding? Buses are noisy and have herky-jerky motion because they drive in traffic and have noisy diesel engines and are constantly accelerating and braking and turning. Trains ride on metal rails with no traffic in their way.
Of course, the shitty subways in America's east coast cities somehow manage to be extremely noisy and bumpy; I'm not sure how they manage that. Subways in better places don't have this problem in my experience.
Subway trains roll on tracks in concrete tunnels that reverberate sound. They're extremely loud. It's metal on metal with grinding disc brakes.
>Buses are noisy and have herky-jerky motion because they drive in traffic
Buses are huge. They're generally too huge to accelerate or decelerate rapidly, so I have no experienced this herky-jerky motion you're talking about. That's much more likely in a car.
>and have noisy diesel engines
At this point most big cities I've been in the buses run on CNG, which is still super loud but burns much cleaner. Eventually they'll be all electric fleets though, and should be predictably quiet.
The German subways I've ridden manage to be reasonably smooth and quiet.
>Buses are huge. They're generally too huge to accelerate or decelerate rapidly, so I have no experienced this herky-jerky motion you're talking about. That's much more likely in a car.
I guess you've never ridden a bus in a city. Buses can brake very effectively, like most vehicles with air brakes, and lots of riders have to stand on them, so you get thrown around a lot more than a rider in a car who's belted into a bucket seat.
That's probably more about good soundproofing for inside the train. But even in Tokyo I found the trains to be rather loud.
>I guess you've never ridden a bus in a city.
I ride one every morning, usually standing. It hasn't been a problem and I actually find our subway trains to be more prone to hard stops and starts. Intra-city buses rarely exceed 30 miles an hour anyway. I usually feel bad for the elderly, the injured, and the pregnant because it actually can be hard for them if they're stuck standing. But my ire is usually reserved for people who fail to give up their seats rather than the concept of riding a bus.
Both BRT and LRT don't necessarily solve the first- and last-mile problems, though. Many US cities are using park-and-ride stations, but that can just spread traffic out instead of eliminating it. It's important to create networks for short trips to and from transit stations with things like bikes and scooters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on Long Island, spent a summer in Seattle, and I live in San Jose now.
One can't speak for the entirety of the either coast, but no city in CA comes close to what NYC offers in terms of public transportation.
And what NYC offers is a true car-free lifestyle which carries you to work, leisure, and back home via public transport.
E-scooters aren't a reliable way to get anywhere yet, and who knows if they'll ever be, not to mention that they are not for everyone. My grandmother is not going to ride one -- nor my wife, for that matter, nor should the kids. But the Subway is a common denominator.
This reflects in the daily ridership. MTA carries an order of magnitude more passengers than, say, BART. The same can be said about overall transit ridership[1].
East Coast vs. West Coast is a silly comparison when NYC Metro alone has more ridership than nearly all other major metro areas combined (including both Coasts, the Midwest, and the South).
So it's really NYC vs. Anywhere Else, and Anywhere Else still sucks when it comes to public transport because, in practical terms, most people aren't commuting by public transport in Anywhere Else, but they do in NYC.
You can't slap a Lime scooter on a suburban development and call that "public transport". And a self-driving car is still a car, a glorified jitney cab if and when it arrives. And it's not going to solve the problems of the car-centric (sub)urbanism[2] anyhow.
The mistake the article makes here is a classic one: percentage growth vs. absolute value. Doubling from, say, 500K in a metro area with 7M population is going to be a bit easier than doubling the 14M ridership in a 20M metro.
As for the problems - people on HN of all places should be the ones who understand scale and that some problems simply don't exist when the scale is insignificant.
I want every city to be a public transit success story, but as it currently stands - the rest of the country will be playing catch-up for a long time.
[1]http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/transit-ridership
[2]https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611557/self-dr...
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TL;DR: NYC mass transit carries more people than systems in all other major metros combined[1]. Any comparison - including this article - is silly.
Transit is all about density. There is no way the west coast can beat the east coast in transit practicality for another 100 years.
For example my 4.5 mi commute in sf takes around 25 min. That’s similar to what I remember from Harvard square to Boylston street which is an equivalent distance.
Many cross-walks have a very short walk timer, so even able-bodied people like myself struggle to cross in time. Police don't ticket drivers blocking intersections and crossings [0], so almost every crossing is blocked in the morning and afternoon. Divers regularly run red lights. I'm sure it will take a few people to die first, as right now the police's mandate seems to be to get the rich people in their fancy vehicles home quicker than any kind of safety. Not to mention the construction that means you're going to have to switch street sides a few times during every journey.
Buses are okay for north-south trips, but non-trivial trips can be as slow as walking, because a lot of routes only intersect downtown. The only use for light rail I've found is getting to SeaTac, but even then you need to live on the right side of the city. The streetcar is pathetic, and has never helped me get to work to to a friends house due to the route.
I guess with a programmer's salary, it's okay since just getting an Uber and Lyft is no big deal, but for everybody else, it sucks. And sometimes, I feel like the only reason a token effort is being done about public transport is so people can feel smug and claim Seattle is progressive, left-leaning. Meanwhile, everybody still drives everywhere.
[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/vid...
However it won’t happen with our current city council.
I have nearly been run over multiple times by some jackass who doesn't look where he's going making a right turn when I have a walk signal.
That's a recent development. The MTA hit its peak of reliability and performance about a decade ago. Since 2010, which coincidentally is the exact time that Cuomo took office, things have plummeted.
It's true that the corruption within the MTA and TWU have been around for decades, but it's not true at all that it's a coincidence that everything started to go downhill as soon as Cuomo took office.
Cuomo literally does not believe that it is his job to oversee a statewide agency, despite the fact that every other governor - including his own father, when his father was governor - have taken on this responsibility.
Unsurprisingly, when the public official in charge absolves themselves of responsibility for holding the MTA and TWU accountable, things fall apart pretty quickly.
Cuomo even deigned to make hollow PR statements about the subway to the press? I must have missed those.
I'm being flippant, but not without reason: Cuomo has taken the subway exactly twice in the last decade, went out of his way not to take public transit when running for re-election (lest it be interpreted as him admitting responsibility for the system), and undermined Andy Byford at the one job he ostensibly hired him to do in the first place.
It's not that Cuomo is all talk and no action. When it comes to public transit, he isn't even "talk". He's just completely absentee, and downright proud of it.
This statement may be true, but it's completely irrelevant to the specific problems facing the NYC transit system at the moment.
Since 2010, Cuomo has raided the coffers in order to fund his own personal projects (like an upstate ski resort), yes. But it's not just a matter of funding: due to corruption and a complete lack of oversight, costs are out of control because the MTA and TWU, as well as private contractors, are able to siphon off absurd amounts of money by inflating costs or even committing outright fraud: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
NYC public transportation is great, but its incredibly expensive and falling apart. (NJTransit + Amtrak have had major problems in the last few years)
There doesn't appear to be any fixes in the works. It seems like they're just hoping the problem goes away or that the federal government will spend billions on new infrastructure.
What will it look like in a decade?
"Ford to City: Drop Dead" in 1975 was an omen for the NYC systems. local, state, and national politicians have all chosen to just ignore NYC metro in the hopes it magically gets better or starts running on time.
Having visited NYC to visit my sister, I can say that what LA lacks in ridership it makes up for in overall investment. New railcars for the NYC system are slated for 2023, whereas Metro LA sees new cars on a yearly basis. The LA high speed project, for whatever political boondoggle it might be, was approved and is in construction. our single tap NFC metro cards are good not just for the LA system, but for most if not all surrounding city systems. I can use an LA TAP card on Santa monica, Culver city, and LA city buses with no penalty.
I also get the equivalent of groupon deals with my tap card. Half price bulgogi or even a free coffee, just for having a metrocard. Its surely no coffin nail for the iron juggernaut of NYC, but its a perk.
Most LA buses and subways all have free Wifi, with the exception of some larger express lines.
LA also has sixteen new transit projects, all green-lit, some of them individually over a billion dollars. This is just the city of los angeles, not the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail#Future
TL;DR: When compared to an entire state, and factoring in current and future investment, the west coast is crushing NYC.
In New York City you have the LIRR, PATH, NJ Transit, Metro North, Amtrak and subway trains running all night.
It's true NYC subways started having problems in the past few years as ridership has grown and long-needed maintenance has been underfunded, but the politicians are (supposedly) fixing that.
Most people in NYC don't even drive snow-capable cars, and on the very few days we have snow on the streets the roads are absolute chaos.
You'd just mandate that the scooter companies disable the scooters when the city tells them to. The robust public transit system would mean that those who normally ride scooters would have no problem getting to their destination.
I used to think so, but some European cities really do offer counterexamples. I'm thinking of places like Munich, Vienna, and Copenhagen. It's not uncommon to see people there who, by American stereotypes, wouldn't be expected to ride scooters: moms with kids, men in suits, etc. Perhaps the urban cultural gap is so vast that what you're saying is indeed true of the US, but I wouldn't take it as a given.
But ignore NYC for a second (I acknowledge that many people who have lived there find this impossible) and look at the rest of the East Coast. Only the DMV area and Boston have any sort of large-scale public transit.
Scooters and self-driving cars is not a transit system.
Getting anywhere else is a bit of a crapshoot for the last-mile. I don't think LA's train system is ready for primetime until it can reasonably get into LAX; preferably with a more direct route from the westside that doesn't detour through DTLA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crenshaw/LAX_Line
...although its utility will be limited until they connect it to the Red/Purple lines, and that's still on the drawing board.
But once that and the connection to red/purple is done, I'd say LA's public transit would be in a reasonably usable state.
A common misconception people have about the DC metro is that it belongs to DC, but the abbreviation WMATA has nothing to do with DC for a reason. Maryland, Virginia, and I believe even the Federal Govt have to be a part of any changes that happen there. Given that, it's an absolute wonder that anything works.
Although there does seem to be some political support for getting it done this time.
Plus none of these systems brings in enough in fares to cover a majority of their expenses let alone put a dent in their deferred backlogs. Instead the new angle is to go after rider sharing services with new fees and you can bet the scooter invasion is ripe for taxation.
I do find it interesting they talk about the recent surge in EV scooters as being a benefit. I wonder who led that charge. I was amazed that just one company has twelve thousand scooters in the NYC area! Public planners cannot easily factor those in and given NYC weather where to these end up in winter?
If you want to see the statistics as reported to the Federal Government on ridership numbers and cost per mile check out the spreadsheets at [1] the FTA
California transit numbers show a decline and that two thirds and more are by bus in a 2018 June report. Plus the percentage [2]. A large share of the systems need replacement and this is not factored into new taxes. Throw in the transit only reduces emissions per mile when compared to solo drivers but worse those numbers are moving close to parity as cars become more efficient
Mass transit is a good idea but technology is rapidly displacing it and it only appears cheap because riders don't pay but a fraction of the cost. In fact most are paid by people who cannot even make use of it
[1] https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd/data-product/monthly-module-...
none of these systems brings in
enough in fares to cover a majority
of their expenses
For example, if trains to the financial district save each rider 1 hour per day, and the riders are 70% stockbrokers on $150/hour and 30% janitors on $15/hour, a fare of $40/day might maximise revenue but be unpopular with voters as it excludes all the janitors.
Or if a new public transport system means for the same commute time I can travel further, and that means I can buy a family home for $300,000 instead of $450,000 it's going to be difficult for the public transport to capture much of the value created in fares.
As a poor sod needing to go to the Aussie consulate between Beverly hills and Santa Monica from Irvine, I'm incredibly lucky that the train was 5 mins late, because there wasn't much else to do that day: last train for the morning left 9:02am, next train 4:30pm!
And I thought Perth's public transport was shit in comparison to Singapore/Hong Kong/London/Berlin, boy have I got new found respect for it!
And in the case of London and Berlin, you're comparing national rail systems to that of a single city that could easily fit the 4 cities you mentioned within its borders and still have room for Paris and Tokyo. And let's not even get started on the LA metropolitan area, which is geographically the largest in the Western world.
New rail cars are being added to all lines over the next 4 years. As another poster mentioned, a new North/South link project is likely to start soon. The Green Line is being extended into neighboring Somerville. The article seemed to focus solely on NYC.
London is the only city in Europe that even comes close to offering what NYC alone does in terms of public transit.
Even Berlin, the second largest city in the EU, has pitiful public transit in comparison.
I would really like to know what makes you think Berlin public transit is "pitiful"...
The U-Bahn / S-Bahn / Deutsche Bahn / Autobus / Tram inter-connectivity are at least on par with what NYC has to offer (adjusted for geographic factors and population density), and that's before getting into KPIs like on-time arrival percentages, individual line uptime, and peak hour commuter congestion. And then there's the more intangible differences, which are nevertheless important to humans - like vehicle cleanliness, station upkeep... the list goes on and on.
Compare the Berlin Hauptbahnhof to Penn Station. Or the U1 to the L, or the J/M/Z. Or peak-hour Alexanderplatz to Union Square. Or the M29 to... I don't know... the NYC bus of your choosing. My god. Throw whatever numbers you want out there as a counterargument, but I know which I'd prefer in just about any scenario.
I have. As of 2010 (before Cuomo's tenure began), New York had unambiguously better public transit overall than Paris, in addition to serving a city with four times the population of Paris.
Cuomo is doing his best to "fix" that, but in 2018, I'd still take NYC over Paris as far as public transit is concerned.
http://www.muenchen-touristeninformation.de/MVV-Schnellbahnn...
http://www.hungarybudapestguide.com/wp-content/uploads/detai...
Not mentioned is the other west coast success story, Vancouver, which has lead North America transit growth, with ridership up 5.7% in 2017. This has been driven by major government investments to drive expansion and improve services across the board. Additionally the system has not been hindered by ride share competition.
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/translink-ridership...
The West coast has an opportunity to one up them, but a lot of money gets appropriated and given to contractors without a lot of actual results a lot of the time.
We're not going to see cities go all-in on transit while self driving cars are on the horizon.
Maybe after cars drive themselves, when people learn traffic is still not getting better, more cities will get serious about transit infrastructure.
It doesn't matter what initiatives or policies are being implemented on the West coast. It is literally financially and physically unrealistic to have any transportation system even remotely close to what they have in NYC on the West Coast.
The reason is the layout of cities. West Coast cities are mostly suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl does not lend well to public transportation. For public transportation to work, you need a high density city. Los Angeles will never be walkable and will never have a subway system that all people use regularly simply because the city is too spread out.
Lets put it to numbers:
L.A. County has 4,084 square miles. New York City has 304.8 square miles.
For LA county to build a network of rails with the same effectiveness of NYC, the size of the NYC subway needs to be replicated approximately 13.4 times.
The NYC subway system has about 236.2 mi of rail. AN equivalent system for the same coverage in LA will be 3165 mi. The current longest subway system in the world is the Shanghai Metro at 420 mi.
Effective Public transportation will not work on the west coast due to physical limits and impossibilities. If you want to live in a city with great public transportation you need to live in a city of apartments. Any city where you can have your own backyard is a city that is not dense enough.
Also, the article is nothing but PR for the NYC transportation commissioner. Of course the NYC commissioner is going to say X is beating NYC because she wants more funding. She could have gone to Boise, Idaho and came back with similar story.
Electric scooters and a couple of test rides in self driving cars means the west coast is beating the east coast on transportation. Really? NYC metro area by itself outshines the entire west coast when it comes to public transportation. I couldn't take this article seriously. There is certainly room for improvement and investment in the NYC metro area, but what's the point of "east coast vs west coast" comparison that is simply not true.
The buses are mostly reliable and can get you downtown. But several areas feel underserved, especially if you live outside Multnomah county.
Also, the attempts to get the Yellow line into Vancouver fell through because the Washington legislature voted against it. There are renewed efforts to build it, though.
It'd be nice if we had elevated trains that didn't have to share with busses, cars, bikes, and pedestrians.
Almost a non-sequitur to mention Citi Bikes in particular when there are far more notable examples like Lime. This must be a paid advertisement.
West coast is still total shit in land use, other than parkland allocation sometimes, and until they make the hard choices to undo a century of mistakes, can they catch up with the east coast's century of stagnation.
Got to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year.
Seems like the issue is lack of security/policing, not the number of passengers. There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent.
I think you can go a lot further: almost all public transport networks, regardless of type or usage, don't have this problem to any extent.
Some people in large European or Asian cities don't like using public transport because of overcrowding, slow journey times, cost, inflexibility, infrequency, strikes, "terrorism" or whatever. I know people who would cite each of these reasons.
I don't know anyone who would say there is excrement or urine in the vehicles or stations, or even unwashed people. It's that rare.
Bay area residents needs to pressure their politicians into fixing the problem. That means some combination of
- extra policing
- extra cleaning
- extra public toilets
and maybe working out some long-term solution to the mentally ill homeless people.
Based on my (very limited) experience of SF, that seems like an area-wide issue. I've travelled reasonably extensively and SF is the only place I've been where I've suspected more of the shit on the path (inside and out) was human than canine.
I don't think crime is any worse on mass transit than it is in the surrounding areas. I suspect that most of your fears are driven by media bias: crimes that happen in the crime-ridden section of town are inherently less newsworthy than crimes that happen outside of it.