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Comment by hannob | Hacker News Reader

I can see how such services are helpful in sparsely populated areas.

I don't know Seattle personally, but in any larger city something like this begs the question: Why not improve the normal public transport service and also provide light-rail or busses to the areas that have "little east-west bus service" according to the article?

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Seattle is improving the normal transport service, too. They are tearing up streets and putting in trains, they are eliminating parking(!) in favor of places to hang out. Seattle is becoming fantastically more car-hostile by the day. Seriously, the last time I visited one street had eliminated street parking in favor of a protected bike lane, potted plants and some chairs.

There are 27 distinct, voter-approved transit projects in progress:

https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion

Is that a bad thing, though? I mean, it is for people who like to drive, but I think the benefits to everyone else outweigh the preferences of car owners.

I read "fantastically car-hostile" as a pro car-hostility statement.

I had the opposite take. Usually when I read opinions colored by "car-hostile," it's from authors who advocate for car-maximized infrastructure.

I used to term car-hostile as a step beyond "pro-transit," because cities can be pro-transit while still not doing enough to actively reduce the number of people getting into cars.

Seattle is not just making riding transit more convenient. They are making driving more inconvenient.

As someone living in the suburbs near Seattle... You're half right. Mostly about the making driving (and parking) more inconvenient.

In programming terms they're ripping out a deprecated interface without having first provided a replacement to transition to. Yes there are park and ride facilities outside of the core city, but they're specced for local capacity. The gateway interface would be much more like replacing several warehouses near the tram line and freeway with GIANT, actively police monitored, parking garages. On the north end something similar probably needs to happen near the northgate mall, and if the extension up through the U doesn't go there it needs to.

THEN after the pre-requisite work is done, they should just ban all cars from the city outright.

The Rainier Valley where this service is being tested is a long north-south residential corridor, bordered by Lake Washington on the east and a steep ridge on the west. It's a few miles wide, just wide enough that it's not reasonable to expect people to walk from the edge to the center to catch the train. Because it's relatively sparsely populated and most trips would be short last mile trips, there's no way running full bus lines would be cost effective.

What I don’t get is why routes need to make money. This is a public service, sure it’s a good thing to have it pay for itself but the focus shouldn’t be on that.

"Cost effective" does not mean "profitable." This is a straw man that transit advocates like to throw up. No transit system in the entire U.S. is held to the standard of "mak[ing] money." All transit in the U.S. loses money on an operating basis, even excluding capital costs: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/06/how-much-mone.... (Contrast many other countries, where transit often at least breaks even on operating costs, if not capital costs.) The issue is the magnitude of the public subsidy on a per-trip or per-mile basis.

Right now in D.C., transit advocates are fighting battles for service that costs $20-30+ per trip (late night Metro service and the streetcar). That's just a waste of taxpayer money when subsidizing Uber/Lyft could allow those same trips to happen for lower cost. Even more generally, rail service is subsidized, on a per-passanger-mile basis, about an order of magnitude more than automobiles. (While roads receive several much more funding than transit, they comprise about 50x more passenger miles of travel.) https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=15144

> Even more generally, rail service is subsidized, on a per-passanger-mile basis, about an order of magnitude more than automobiles.

Only if you completely ignore carbon emissions and other externalities.

No. Congestion, pollution, accident, and climate change externalities add up to about $0.10 per passenger mile: https://media.rff.org/archive/files/sharepoint/WorkImages/Do... (p. 14). That's vastly more than the $0.01-0.02 direct subsidy for cars from road construction/maintenance, but much lower than the $0.87-0.90 per mile subsidy for transit: https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=15144; https://www.newgeography.com/content/005596-reason-1-end-tra....

And of course--those pollution externalities can be greatly reduced by switching to electric cars.

EDIT: I don't really understand the downvotes. Nobody seriously disputes that, on a per-passenger mile basis, transit is more heavily subsidized than driving.

The $0.10-0.20 per mile calculation of externalities from driving is well supported. For example, the Freakonomics authors calculate $0.10 per mile for externalities: https://www.treehugger.com/cars/pay-as-you-drive-payd-insura...

> With roughly three trillion miles driven each year producing more than $300 billion in externality costs, drivers should probably be taxed at least an extra 10 cents per mile if we want them to pay the full societal cost of their driving.

Meanwhile, the subsidies of public transit systems are easy to calculate from public sources: https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/docs/300...

In 2014 the D.C. Metro spent about $1.35 billion on rail and collected about $600 million, leaving a net subsidy of $750 million. WMATA customers travelled 1.5 billion passenger miles on rail, resulting in a net subsidy of $0.50 per passenger mile. Even without accounting for the pollution externalities of Metro (which are significant, most electricity on the east coast still comes from coal and natural gas), that's a much higher subsidy than for cars.

Do these calculations also include things like mandatory parking minimums, parking lots, etc? IMO the big problem with cars is how they ruin city layout and are generally poor for land use

You can include lots of things but then you’re getting into pretty subjective territory. There are advantages to nice walkable streets, for sure. But there are also advantages to being able to pull right up to your destination and park, instead of schlepping half a mile from a subway to hour final destination in heat, humidity, rain, etc. The study I cited above puts parking costs at 3-10 cents per vehicle mile, which still doesn’t being the driving subsidy near the transit subsidy.

Sure, but saying "it's not cost effective" isn't the same as saying "it's not profitable".

If a low-use bus route ends up costing the city $25 per ride that's not cost effective to the point that a different transit option would be a better use of resources and still meet the communities needs.

If you want anything to last and not become subject to the whims of the next idiot in charge then its in your best interest to make it break even or make profit. Then no one would oppose it.

East west travel in Rainer valley is hard because of hills and freeways. The north south bus routes are fine but the east west one doesn’t work well

That east-west problem is not just Rainier Valley. That’s the whole county.

The light rail system needs to be shaped more like a ladder, so you have some options to go cross-town. It’s coming, very slowly, but it won’t be enough.

Unfortunately there isn’t that enough demand to go east west to justify building light rail. Light rail going up those steep hills is even more expensive so I don’t think a “ladder” approach would work well.

More RapidRide buses are expected to cover the east west gap though

Anecdotally density seems to follow light rail placement long term. Not sure if this is backed by data

People live where they can get housing.

When the route was finalized a bunch of housing speculators bought up a strip of land all along that corridor and build apartments and townhomes. There's something on the order of a mile of route down near the Central District that is virtually all new construction.

I was curious about the progress of the LR project so I drove the at-grade sections a couple of times during construction and a lot of those properties were for sale/lease about the time they were still stringing wires (and then the city allocated like 8 months for system testing to follow construction prior to launch). So there must have been people buying houses a year before the rail was there.

Yeah light rail's scale east-west is a bit wider than that.[0] But it seems like the area might be served well by east-west bus routes instead? I mean, whatever, I don't care. If this is the most cost effective way to get people to transit, I'm all for it. It seems to have a convenience aspect that bus lines certainly don't have.

[0]: http://soundtransit3.org/map#map

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