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Comment by jeremyvisser | Hacker News Reader

This is a lengthy article, yet the author fails to address any of the concerns he claims to be countering.

He claims only the rich use light rail. But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them? It simply doesn't make sense. Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it.

He then shows an infographic of a hypothetical city covered in bus routes, alongside the same city covered by one LRT route through a gentrified area. This is unfair. How about comparing equivalent LRT routes with bus routes?

Money sunk into buses is money no longer spendable on LRT.

There's an infographic that shows bus route ridership compared to LRT route ridership but we learn only the what, not the why.

Also, the article makes no mention whatsoever of Melbourne, an example of LRT working very well for over a century.

I'm disappointed to say that I learned exactly nothing reading the article.

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Whatever the reason, I can say that, for example, in my home town of Austin, Texas, the actual money spent to get urban rail up and running has turned out in practice to be enormously more than for new buslines. Maybe it doesn't have to be that way, but it empirically is, and I don't think Austin is alone in this experience.

Perhaps in part because of the cost, the people riding urban rail in Austin are definitely more often professional class, and the people on buses are more often not. I can't say for sure why, but the rail tickets are a little more expensive, and that is the most obvious reason. I have to think that at least part of why the tickets are more, is that the rail lines cost more to get up and running.

I was under the impression that the initial cost of rail is almost always higher than buses or other non-track transit. The long term cost is supposed to be lower, though.

Austin has repeatedly chosen stunted transit and no usable non-car infrastructure.

When I went to visit a friend at Apple in Austin, there was no bus that could take me anywhere near Apple's campus or any of the 4+ story residental complexes that permeate the area, yet there are a crapton of potential riders there!

TxTag is also a really poorly designed system, lacking any usage based pricing with TxTag highways often being paralleled by massive 50mph streets on either side.

The modus opeandi seems to be subsudize the living daylight out of cars, build no alternatives to it, and act surprised that Austin's traffic is worsening rapidly.

I moved from Austin Downtown to Minneapolis for almost this reason. I didn't want to buy a car either and many if not most of the jobs are up in Round Rock or too far to bike or walk.

I now live downtown Minneapolis and it's been great, I even bought a condo and rent out my parking space for extra money ($200/month). My mortgage is less than my rent was in Austin (after my downpayment of course).

I think it's because most U.S. cities are suburban sprawl. They lack the density for effective light rail transportation. Austin is a case in point. The best a city could do to promote public transit is to lift zoning restrictions that limit density in the urban core of a city. The more density you get, the more cost effective public transit is.

Meanwhile, yeah, the bus isn't as sexy as the train. Can we make the local bus a bit more sexy though? Could we add leather seats, tables for laptops, excellent Wi-Fi, clean floors, coffee vending, etc and make the bus experience better?

I also wonder about automation and how driverless buses might improve bus routes by making them 24/7, for example, due to lower labor cost?

He explains it quite well. Light rail (and heavy rail too) is luxury public transit. Lower income people can’t afford to live near the stops. (The median income of DC Metro riders on most stations is well into the six figures.) Moreover, because rail is so expensive, you can’t build enough of it where it’s not going to rapidly increase surrounding property values, or really provide great coverage into low income neighborhoods. Bus service doesn’t have any of those downsides.

At the same time, rail sucks up huge amounts of money that could be spent on better and more frequent bus service instead.

> Also, the article makes no mention whatsoever of Melbourne, an example of LRT working very well for over a century.

For those curious about Melbourne's system - this is a train/tram map (there are plenty of buses too): https://www.railmaps.com.au/melbourn.htm

Ubiquity and scale are important drivers of the success of the network.

Melbourne is also an example of the split between wealthy gentrified tram-serviced inner suburbs and car-dependant outer suburbia.

I think this is true today - but historically many of those suburbs (and the tram network) were very working-class.

I'd agree with this, though I'd argue the main reason this split exists today is because as Melbourne has grown outwards in the last 40 years, there has been little serious investment in developing rail capacity to support those outer suburbs. Instead, the government chose to build freeways.

Then sell them.

This. People are stupidly allergic to splitting municipalities but the fact of the matter is that the poorer municipalities in many cases would be better served spending their tax dollars on themselves rather than throwing it into some bigger pot and mostly getting told by the richer portion of the city exactly where/how it gets spent.

The trams are a part what made the inner city areas attractive to the wealthy and drove gentrification, but that's only a recent trend, when the lines were first built and for most of their lifetime the areas serviced by the tram network were working class suburbs.

Even now many of these areas contain a lot of less wealthy people, jump on any tram and you'll see just about every demographic represented.

Some trams go further than the distance that anyone I know would call "inner suburbs".

Bundoora, Preston, and Box Hill to the north, Surrey Hills to the East, Carnegie to the South. (I don't think anything goes West further than Maribyrnong?)

All suburbs, more than 10km from the city, full of people who work 9 to 5 in unglamorous jobs.

Sure, it's cheaper further out, in places that will take over 45 minutes to commute from... but that's the case everywhere in the world, as far as I know. And it's not like Melbourne doesn't have a bus system to rival Sydney's.

The point being made is that these areas become more expensive after the rail is built, so even if the rail passed though a lower income neighbourhood, it will gentrify in the long term.

I don't know if this is actually true, but intuitively it seems plausible.

>But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them? It simply doesn't make sense. Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it.

It's generalization based on access. In order to be viable, LRT almost always runs through affluent areas where influential people live, and the areas that aren't affluent near the path are likely to gentrify. It's not that people from lower income neighborhoods won't ever use LRT, it's that they are less likely to based on their communities' geography.

The author answers that quite clearly.

1 - LRT is much more expensive than buses, but stations have the same catchment area.

2 - Because LRT is desirable, housing prices in the catchment, ie those walkable and bikable to the station, increase rapidly.

3 - Therefore, the majority of the gains are captured by the people who bought or buy housing in the catchment area. This also precludes use of the LRT by poor people, because they can't afford the housing that makes the LRT station usable.

4 - Buses can be used to increase the catchment area and provide essentially last-mile transit, but they generally aren't. Also, the increase of expense of LRT over bus lines often precludes this.

The subtext to all of the above is not only is LRT much more expensive, but it's also much less flexible. Moving bus routes is (my guessing?) 5-7 orders of magnitude less expensive than moving LRT.

Last year I drove alongside the Phoenix LRT every single day on my way to work. (I don't live anywhere near a stop). His take on who uses it; based on my daily observations of watching people at the stops (and walking through that neighborhood from my parking garage to my workplace) - is totally wrong.

Yes, the developers were trying very hard to gentrify that neighborhood. But they were far from succeeding. It'll take many more years. In the meantime, the people who are there now, need it desperately. And as a car-commuter, the LRT was way less disruptive to traffic than busses.

> But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them?

This is very clear in the article: poor transportation from where they can afford to live to the expensive area around the station.

> This is very clear in the article: poor transportation from where they can afford to live to the expensive area around the station.

This is precisely why I'm saying the article doesn't make sense: how about exploring the idea of building the LRT in the non-gentrified areas, i.e. where you would supposedly put your bus routes.

But then that area would gentrify and those residents would be priced out. To prevent that effect you need to build enough light rail to counteract the gentrification effect. And you can’t do that because rail coasts so much to build.

Whereas road for buses costs nothing, because it's already there, because we can't imagine a country in which we cannot trace an uninterrupted asphalt path from the driveway of a house in one city, to the driveway of another house in another city.

Roads cost practically nothing compared to rail. We have two to three million miles of paved roads in this country, and we spend around $200 billion a year maintaining it and building more. People drive 3 trillion miles on highways alone, adding up to a per passenger mile subsidy of $0.01-0.02. Rail subsidies (for local transit) add up to $0.50 per passenger mile.

It's ironic to me because one scandal in Calgary, as I remember it, was extending the LRT to an otherwise rich, secluded area. The residents objected on the grounds they'd be overrun with hooligans.

I think the main point was that LRT doesnt move more people than an equivalent bus route, yet costs more. Given that, less LRT is built than bus as the scarcity makes it used by only the rich.

> Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it.

I thought one of the major issues with light rail was how much it costs vs. just using buses? If a last-mile transport option is nice but very expensive then it'll only be installed in richer neighbourhoods and therefore largely be used by richer people.

Sub-area equity and ridership analysis are used to counter this, hence Seattle building its light rail network through one of the poorest & highest transit ridership parts of town, and continuing it north through U-District (where cheap studios can still be had) up to Northgate and eventually Everett.

Would be gentrifiers are in for a rude awakening: http://theneedling.com/2019/08/12/thousands-of-engineers-fle...

> He claims only the rich use light rail. But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them? It simply doesn't make sense. Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it.

Are you sure you read the article…?

> The area around the LRT lines definitely attract investment, but if you look at who actually uses the line a few years in, it’s mostly rich people. Why? Because they’re the only people who can afford to take it – not because the fares are too high, but because real estate in the immediate walking area around stations becomes too expensive…Unless you have bus routes or other last-mile ways of getting to the LRT, then it’s going to be a public transit option that’s only available to people who can afford to live nearby. And the nicer you make the line, the higher an income threshold that’s going to require. (Unless you do the hard work of actually integrating the LRT line via last-mile bus routes into all of the other neighbourhoods that aren’t gentrifying.) LRT investment on its own doesn’t expand public transit; it gentrifies it.

So the claim is more or less: «the only way to keep a poor neighborhood poor while providing public transit is to build public transit that rich people are unwilling to use, because if you build transit that rich people enjoy, they will move in and gentrify the neighborhood»?

Seems like a good argument for building a whole lot more light rail, since it’s apparently quite desirable...

Maybe if we had more human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere, there would be enough of them to meet the high demand and more such neighborhoods could support mixed-income residents.

Wrong—the claim has nothing to do with what rich or poor people like to use.

The claim is that the only way to provide affordable public transit that's sustainably accessible to people who aren't rich (that is, even when gentrification occurs in the city core) is to provide surface transit (buses), which can serve a much larger area than light rail.

> Maybe if we had more human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere, there would be enough of them to meet the high demand and more such neighborhoods could support mixed-income residents.

Sure—let me know when you find the funding required to build all those "human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere." In the meantime, let's provide affordable transit that's accessible regardless of which neighborhood you live in: high-frequency, reliable buses.

The problem is largely not about lack of “funding” per se, but more about zoning laws, urban planning more generally, and a whole society organized around driving and inefficient sprawl housing with large-scale short-term subsidies but long-term unsupportable infrastructure.

(More funding for transit certainly wouldn’t hurt. Also, buses are great, especially BRT with dedicated lanes. Buses, light rail, subways, commuter trains, long-distance trains seem like complementary parts of a transit system more than competitors.)

There are plenty of cities in the world with effective subways, light rail, and BRT serving working-class neighborhoods.

Great—let me know when you've changed the zoning laws, fixed urban planning more generally, and how the whole society is organized around massive subsidies for driving and inefficient sprawl housing with long-term unsupportable infrastructure. In the meantime, let's provide affordable transit that's accessible regardless of which neighborhood you live in: high-frequency, reliable buses.

JIt would be great if every place in DC was within a 10 minute walk of a subway station. The costs make that completely impossible.

https://images.app.goo.gl/Z2h71ZhmkmEAPAEo9

DC is a triangle ten miles on a side. Look how much area is without subway service. (Most is those are lower income parts too, on the eastern side of the city.)

By 2040, DC is studying the possibility of building maybe one new subway line within city limits. One. Maybe. New York is working on Phase II of the Second Avenue subway, a 1.5 mile segment. It’s currently stuck in environmental review hell, and if they get through that this year and start construction, they project being done by 2027-2029. It will take decades to build the whole 8.5 mile segment, and probably $20 billion plus.

These are two of the most transit oriented cities in the country (not to mention, immensely progressive politically). The idea of having numerous transit oriented neighborhoods, such that transit isn’t a scarce amenity that causes property values to skyrocket, is completely unrealistic. At least with any sort of rail.

It’s too expensive (relative to expected ridership) because almost all of the area not near subway stations is zoned as low-density residential and I believe mostly consists of single-family detached houses (didn’t help that the city was shrinking in population for 50 years from 1950–2000).

Not having enough 1- and 2-bedroom apartments in low-to-mid-rise buildings for all the people who now want to live in them is not some law of nature though.

https://statisticalatlas.com/school-district/District-of-Col... (This isn’t a great map; maybe someone can do better than my 3 min web search.)

No, it’s too expensive full stop. There’s plenty of density in many of the neighborhoods not currently covered by rail. But it’s costing $3.8 billion per mile to build subway in New York now. DC would be less, but at these prices new subway is pretty much a non-starter.

And yet it works for Tokyo, London and Copenhagen to pick three random cities.

Those cities do not spend anywhere near as much as the US does per mile of rail. (Whether surface, elevated or underground)

Rail requires an investment. There is an upfront cost followed by at least a century of return. These cities have been investing in their networks over time.

Look at Crossrail's per mile cost (for the new sections of track)...

The problem is that our required investment is multiples more for the same result. To use one of the examples above, Copenhagen is building a fully automated circle line subway underneath downtown for the same price it's costing Maryland to build 13 miles of non-grade-separated light rail through the suburbs.

Crossrail's per mile costs are still a fraction of New York's. Crossrail upgraded 40+ miles of above-ground track, redeveloped dozens of stations, renewed 20 bridges, and built a 15-mile segment of new track (13 of them in subways) for about $20 billion. And in just a decade of construction. Phase II of the Second Avenue subway, meanwhile, is costing $3.8 billion per mile. And just the first 4.5 miles of the 8.5 mile line will have taken 20 years to construct, not including the significant prior work that was done since the 1970s.

So how are you guys able to build freeways and even homes if your construction costs are so high?

(If you've ever tried to get a builder in Copenhagen or London you won't start talking about construction worker wages as being lower in Europe!)

> So how are you guys able to build freeways and even homes if your construction costs are so high?

I mean, the US... Mostly doesn't, in the kind of city large enough for subways. Have you seen all the articles on how bad the housing situation is in places like LA, SF or NYC?

The housing situation in London has been comparably bad.

We can’t build things, which is why our infrastructure is shit pretty much across the board. My daughter’s school bought a failing golf course and turned it into athletic fields for students. It’s taken 8 years since the school first purchased the property to build a baseball field, a track, and some tennis courts. There was three separate law suits and it took almost 7 years just to start construction.

Public projects are even worse because of a law called NEPA. The law requires a detailed environmental study of pretty much every significant project, including new rail projects. Just putting together the environmental impact statement can take years. The median is 3.6 years and a quarter of projects take more than 6 years: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/CEQ-EI.... Because these are all administrative decisions, there are numerous opportunities to file lawsuits, take appeals, etc., over pretty much any decision made in an EIS.

Any significant transit project can expect to spend at least a decade in planning, permitting, and litigation, with litigation continuing through construction. The environmental and administrative laws are so broadly worded, pretty much anyone can hold up a project for years using various pretextual reasons (water runoff, wetland management, threatened species, traffic management, etc.).

Contrast how France does things. In France, the government is a single organ—local governments are mere administrative subdivisions of the national government. Decisions get made, and whatever environmental review is needed is done, and once that is done, the legislature passes a law that preempts any other law, allowing the project to proceed without further legal challenges.

Also, I think Europeans for the most part aren’t antisocial tools. People in Chicago sued Ronald McDonald House Charities to stop building of housing for families of cancer patients being treated at Northwestern Hospital.

I went looking for the Ronald McDonald House thing and couldn't find it. When did this happen?

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