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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

There's another factor that's not mentioned here: the US has some bonkers expensive station design.

Take the newish Hudson Yards station. Its platform is about twice as wide as the original subway station platforms, and it's far longer than it needs to be too. On top of that, it has a full-length underground mezzanine above the platform, which is unnecessary. Overall, the effect when I first used it was "why is this so unnecessarily massive?"

Oversized stations are even more problematic when you consider that the MTA wants to build all of these by mining rather than using cut-and-cover, because cut-and-cover has too much disruption to surface tenants. And mining is far more expensive than cut-and-cover, so the extra volume you need to dig out for excessive station sizes hits your purse even faster. For as high as the actual tunneling costs are, it's the station costs that truly make the subway extensions stratospherically expensive.

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Hi there! I started and ran Seattle Subway - I’m a bit of a transit nerd, and would love to chat about this.

The MTA is planning on a 100 year horizon. It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later, even inflation adjusted. If you’d like to challenge their methodology, first go read the planning report!

Is a mezzanine considered capacity?

Absolutely. Mezzanines are critical in flow management during peak. You know how if you go to a Disney ride, most of the line is inside the structure? Same concept. Get people out of the rain/snow/heat and normalize flow.

But a mezzanine is sort of silly considering no one lines up for an hour for a train like they do on a disneyland ride. All the stations in LA have these massive mezzanines too and they are just dead space. They are absolutely empty during rush hour aside from people charging through them to get to the actual platform, because it might take you several minutes to go from above ground, down the escalators, through the mezzanine, down a second set of escalators, and to the platform, at which point the train might be gone and you will sit there twiddling your thumbs for another 10 minutes, clogging up the platform for the next train since you should have made that first one. It's a huge problem at stations like 7th street in downtown LA, where the light rail platform is below a mezzanine but above the heavy rail platform, which bottlenecks transfers due to a lack of thought put into how many stairs and escalators should be made. Probably 1/5 days a week commuting in the before times would I actually make that transfer, the other times you are jammed up by people bottlenecked by the limited stairs and escalators and you watch the train go away without you.

Take out the elaborate mezzanine and make it a simple single level multitrack platform directly under the surface, and you might make the first train and be out of the station in less time, lowering the needed capacity of the station structure in the first place.

Can the mezzanine be used to divert foot traffic during multi-day repairs

In London, it's absolutely the opposite.

London Bridge Station has recently been rebuilt to have a mezzanine style area. It's the 4th busiest in the UK with 61 million entries and exits.

St Pancras and Kings Cross were similarly rebuilt.

It is a bit complex to describe London Bridge to non-Londoners, but simply put, it was 15 or so platforms that were about 20ft wide and 12 carriages long, with nowhere to queue and trains every few minutes, on every platform (and it's a terminus, not a through-station).

A mezzanine in a central city for passengers to wait is an absolute necessity. Doubly so if the station is a terminus, which all of the major stations in London are (I'm not counting Blackfriars or St Pancras).

For the non-English readers, there is only one North-South through railway line in London (Thameslink), and only one East-West (-ish) (Crossrail) and that hasn't opened. All mainline stations in London terminate, and then you have to use the tube to connect to another.

That’s a bit different though, as at London Bridge one is generally waiting for timetabled rail services whereas the New York City subway is turn up and go. A mezzanine is rather pointless if the same service is showing up every 2-5 minutes.

London Bridge tube station had to be rebuilt as well (not too add a mezannine per se but just to have enough space to hold the passengers waiting for trains), in the late 90s to house Jubilee Line but also to expand the Northern Line platforms. Even this 20 years later looks too small. Both these lines operate every 2 minutes (Jubilee slightly more than every 2 mins in peak).

To add to what the other commenter said - Bank station (the busiest on the London tube network) is getting rebuilt too, to add a "mezzanine" type area for the Northern line. Through-trains, all to the same destinations, are every 2 minutes and the platform is frequently closed due to overcrowding. To the point, in fact, where there's often a one-way system enforced in the station, or people are kept at street level.

Ultimately it's usage levels and capacity. UK stations don't have the capacity for the passengers, and often the capacity on the trains either.

I know this station and don't believe the mezzanine is the problem. There are two trains running perpendicularly. The "mezzanine" is the first floor with the blue line platform. Yes, additional stairs/elevators could help, as well as timing changes.

It's simply one of the busiest stations due to its location.

The huge mezzanine in the other stations such as at Pershing is mostly wasted space however.

I've heard people mention fire egress requirements as more or less dictating mezzanines in the US: https://www.nfpa.org/codes-and-standards/all-codes-and-stand...

In LA, you're going to be happy about those mezzanines once Measure R construction fills in your network. In infrastructure projects, what you see today is a small part of the plan.

What are the costs involved in "retrofitting via cut-and-cover" as opposed to "building more capacity by mining" that makes the second option more palatable for the 100-year timeline?

I don't understand. That's not the tradeoff MTA is making. They're building more capacity now rather than having to try to do it later.

Later would be nigh-impossible because of the skyscrapers going up on every side, and the railyard above. Hudson Yards is a massively complex project.

The parent comment that you responded to:

"... Oversized stations are even more problematic when you consider that the MTA wants to build all of these by mining rather than using cut-and-cover, because cut-and-cover has too much disruption to surface tenants. And mining is far more expensive than cut-and-cover..."

Your response:

"... It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later, even inflation adjusted. ..."

The implication of your response is that on a 100-year timeline, the way that the modern stations are apparently being built (by mining) is cheaper than building them by the way the parent commenter says (cut-and-cover).

I was just curious why it's "always" cheaper. Is "mine and build big" the cheaper method only when there's a ton of density on top like Hudson Yards, or is it also the case in places with less surface density?

I think that you’re probably always better off building bigger if you expect growth in the next 100 years. How big you should build is just a matter of how much current and future traffic you expect to have.

I think what they're looking at is over-sizing rather than right-sizing. Think of it as cost=size*method. Future-proofing increases the size, not the method.

Apologies - I may have skipped over something when reading. I was responding to the implication that a smaller station now is an appropriate cost savings.

Capacity for what? The line could theoretically be extended by a tunnel to Secaucus but even then only a fraction of the ridership will take that branch and get off at the first stop. The West side is already serviced by two lines so where else can the 7 go?

This sounds fairly similar to "Why Many Cities Have No Money" [0]. In short, building massive infrastructure for the future is worth very little when the promised future never comes and you're stuck paying the maintenance cost.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13370310

That article is from Strong Towns. Strong Towns' entire premise is that growing outward is inefficient. They would make the same argument I am about planning for the future in a place like Hudson Yards, where millions of square feet are under construction.

It intuitively feels more likely to me that that future may come to New York than to other cities.

It's already there. Hudson Yards is the largest development currently in progress in NYC (maybe the US), and phase 2 will build another million-ish square feet next to it. That is the closest subway station to all of it.

Does that future include >2” of water rise and more floods to fill tunnels?

Yes, NYC is planning for at least two meters of sea level rise. Much of the subway works going on now are to handle more frequent and larger storm surges.

You can actually see how it will look like by watching The Expanse - it takes place in ~2350 and there is a huge wall all around Manhattan including in front of the still standing original UN building, as most terrestrial glaciers are long gone.

But this is actually a much less pressing issue than the couple gigaton nukes the Mars Congressional Republic has targeted on Earth, the ever more emancipated belters and some very shady deals by secretive yet very dangerous corporations.

RIP earth

I think you meant 2', not 2".

But this is simply not true. Maintenance costs are rarely significant part of city budgets, they are almost always below 10-15%. I don't want to say that Strongtowns is lying, because that presumes intent, but what they claim simply has little bearing with reality.

Their premise is that governments build infrastructure during their growth phase, but don't budget for maintaining or replacing it at the end of its lifecycle, 30-50 years later when their growth phase is past.

Sure but Seattle is a mess today because nobody built the capacity we need.

Bookmarking this thread. I’m interested in getting involved in transit advocacy in NYC. I think Seattle Subway might be a good place for me to start my homework

Reach out anytime! bensch@gmail.com

Thank you! I will.

I knew we had light rail in a few places, one monorail and lots of buses, but after living here for 1.5 years now, this is the first I've heard of Seattle Subway. I don't think I've ever heard anyone make reference to it in conversation.

The Seattle has 79% more area than San Francisco and San Francisco has 17% more people. How does it make economic sense to have a Subway when so much of the city is zoned for detached single family homes and there is acknowledged seismic and flooding risk?

In 2020, wouldn't it be far more future proof and likely cheaper to plan on smart streets with self-driving pods like Dubai is doing with its Next platform? The moment autonomous on-demand P2P system is viable, it's going to turn subways in less densely populated cities into albatrosses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlQaCIUHTI

I think they're describing it as the "Seattle Subway" for the benefit of non-local audiences.

The subway they're referring to is almost certainly the Link light rail, which runs through the bus tunnels, and has other extended stretches underground. It's probably the same light-rail that you're referring to.

Yes. And we called it Seattle Subway for the local audience, to get attention to the fact that we could significantly accelerate construction of the system with an additional ballot measure. Most of what Sound Transit calls "light rail" counts a a subway anyway.

And increasing the construction speed is the major thing we need to do here! Otherwise many of us working in seattle from outside will be retired or dead by the time it gets to us. I'm very eager to spend more of my own tax money to construct the system faster. Plus we should do it before Tim Eyman eventually takes away our ability to tax ourselves.

That’s what we did in 2016. Instead of plodding along with one line at a time, we funded an entire generation to get started at once.

In the US you can’t really make each line’s development faster, but you can start earlier. We cut at least a decade off Ballard, West Seattle, Everett, and Tacoma extensions.

I think he's referring to the Seattle area pro-transit volunteer organization "Seattle Subway" https://www.seattlesubway.org/

You have $50 billion in mostly grade separated transit coming, largely due to the work of a lot of volunteers from 2011-2012 setting Sound transit up for the ST3 vote in 2016.

What Sound Transit calls "light rail" is as high capacity as some subway systems. I named the nonprofit that led a lot of this organizing Seattle Subway because it got attention when we needed it, and it's true anyway. :)

I think your other questions are interesting, but it seems like you have an opinion and you're looking for a way to defend it. If you're actually curious about why we're building a subway network and aren't just looking for a way to disagree, let me know!

I'm not particularly married to an idea here but it is 2020 and I remember exactly what happened with the Coliseum–Oakland International Airport line. It was planned and designed pre-ridesharing and instead of making $2 million in the first two years, it cost $860 million to operate.

https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/11/27/barts-oakland-airpor...

Now if technological progress in transportation were to completely stall, I'd agree that it likely would make sense, but the last thing I want as a taxpayer is a very expensive project that is eventually outcompeted by advances in ridesharing in the time it takes to build out the network. Given that there is no lack of public transportation boondoggles that have left taxpayers holding the bag, it's not unreasonable to ask questions and exhibit some skepticism, especially when the population density is below 8000 people per square mile.

In places like NYC, I would be in complete agreement with you as the population density would dictates that only a subway would ever make sense because you simply don't have the road system relative to population density for a ridesharing solution to ever make sense.

Lastly, I commented in good faith, but this condescension, "but it seems like you have an opinion and you're looking for a way to defend it", doesn't exactly help you garner support for what you're trying to achieve. That's also the kind of accusation that comes from someone accusing others of doing something they are guilty of. Perhaps it's you that has an opinion that you're looking for a way to defend?

You can't expect a human to level with you on the internet if they've hitched their online persona to being an expert with an opinion on the topic.

Generally the people who bring up pod transit will argue you to death. If those systems ever exist (and they’ve been used as anti-transit hobby horses for almost 50 years now) they can’t scale to serve urban environments.

Engaging with them generally just creates visibility for people who can’t tell what’s bullshit.

I cited one very high profile example of ridesharing making a public transport project completely unviable within a few short years leaving taxpayers stuck with the bill and you call such skepticism bullshit even when there is clear evidence for voicing concern? If there is any bullshit here it's more likely to be the person who "hitched their online persona to being an expert with an opinion on the topic" than the person who was raising legitimate concerns supported by evidence.

You've just lost any chance at my support and gained someone who is now more extra dubious of this Seattle Subway project than I was previously all because I now believe it is you that isn't engaging in good faith. It's going to take someone knowledgeable and acting in extra good faith to undo the animosity you're directly responsible for creating.

Whenever Seattle Subway comes up in any discussions, I'll be sure to reference how Ben Schiendelman responded when someone raised legitimate concerns. Good job.

> and they’ve been used as anti-transit hobby horses for almost 50 years now

Because there is so much in common with 1970 vs 2020. Ridesharing only became a thing 10 short years ago. Waymo has been providing autonomous rides in Arizona for a few years now. Companies like Segway and LIT motors have pioneered the use of gyroscopes in transportation such that a completely enclosed motorcycle sized vehicle is nearly viable. The possibility of autonomous pods has never been more viable than is is now. It may have been a bullshit argument 20 to 50 years ago, but it's certainly not a bullshit concern in 2020. Sorry if the future is finally catching up with a career you're heavily invested in, but that's not an excuse to behave as you have here.

Seattle Subway won its war four years ago. Good luck out there.

The problem with Seattle is that while it isn’t that high population of a city, the geographic chokepoints are rather extreme.

There is, quite frankly, not enough capacity north-south or across Lake Washington for people to be in vehicles at the low density of a comfortable car, which is what light rail is for. Already much of the commuting mode share in the Seattle area is people using buses to get downtown, in some cases driving to a park and ride lot to catch a bus there. Seattle has mostly exhausted the limits of this approach, so now there is a huge light rail construction project.

North/South can be pretty painful, but across Lake Washington isn't nearly as bad. I have a view of the entirety of the I-90 bridge which I see every day all day and it doesn't get nearly as bad as coming into Seattle via I-5 or Aurora.

Whether you go with roads or rail, you still have the problem of building across those geographic chokepoints. Either way, you've got the cost of building bridges/tunnels regardless of the mode of transportation.

The issue at hand is capacity. Free-flowing highway lanes move people at ~2000 people per hour per direction per lane, and the Seattle light rail has a capacity closer to ~30000 pphd. So light rail is 15x more space efficient than car travel; you might need to build a bridge, but you will generally need to build less bridge. Autonomous cars may improve road capacity but not 15x. More importantly, roads have a very noticeable capacity curve as they become congested and become less efficient; trains don't really get slower with crowding, they mostly just get more crowded inside.

And I don't know, I-90 is kind of a crapshoot (especially on weekdays) when it comes to congestion. Even worse, it's bad both ways, because you have both heavy inflows to jobs in Seattle and jobs at the various Eastside centers like Redmond and Bellevue. 520 is much better, but it's also tolled, which is also why I-90 is so much worse.

pphd was a new metric for me so I did some googling because I wanted to know more.

From that searching I came across the following article. Now this article has a clear bias (but so do the people advocating for rail), but bias doesn't mean that there aren't valid points being made even if exaggerated. Curious what your response is to their counter claims:

https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/sound-t...

One thing that stands out is that ST3 is saying it is a theoretical limit of 16,000 pphd not 30,000. Where did you get the 30,000 figure from?

I can respond to some of the statistics used in this article.

> The problem is that Sound Transit officials are comparing 16,000 humans to 2,000 vehicles.

This is actually not that bad of a comparison; most Americans drive alone. The FHA, hardly some anti-car agency, estimates car occupancy at 1.54 persons a vehicle, and overally light-vehicle occupancy at 1.67 persons a vehicle. Unless American social mores are going to change significantly, I don't see why self driving cars would really change the fact that people like being in a car alone.

> Light rail is, by definition, light capacity transit. The theoretical 16,000 people per hour requires a “target max load” of 200 people per car on four-car light rail trains at three-minute headways for a full hour, a concept unheard of in the United States.

This is not unheard of at all. We have bigger light rail systems running smaller headways, to say nothing of very large traditional rail systems. New York City is running 600 foot trains every 2 minutes with an ultimate capacity of >60000 pphd.

Also, this article is a bit dated; we now know that Sound Transit is purchasing the Siemens S70. The identical Portland model carries 240 people per car. And while the current service plan calls for trains every four minutes in the busiest segments, the signaling system actually supports trains every 2 minutes so long as you have the vehicles. (This is not the lower limit for rail signaling systems; trains every 90s are run on many systems around the world.) Buying new trains is cheap compared to building more tracks or lanes.

> Sound Transit officials also claim that they will carry 561,000 to 695,000 unlinked daily trips by 2040 if ST3 passes. Let’s assume Sound Transit carries its highest projection of 695,000 daily trips with their estimate that most (91%) will be trips taken by existing transit riders. This means that only 62,550 will be trips taken by new transit riders.

This assumes the only utility of a transit project is new trips or new riders. This isn't true; there is also value in speeding up existing commutes. The bus gets caught up in the same highway traffic and has very high labor costs per trip; moving bus passengers to a light rail train free from traffic will increase reliability and reduce commute times. And every person on a light rail train is a person not taking up space on a road. Which isn't to say that it relieves congestion, but rather it frees up space and provides an alternative to congested roads.

It's also worth noting that Sound Transit's recent record shows that it is most likely underestimating ridership: in 2016, the brand new University Link extension had already doubled initial estimates of its first year ridership, and the line well exceeded its 2020 ridership goals in 2018. https://www.historylink.org/File/20720

> This means that under ST3, each new transit rider will cost over $1 million dollars.

It's worth noting that this figure is not qualified by how much road projects cost per road user, because this is not meant to be a comparative talking point. Roading projects are just as expensive, if not more due to higher land requirements; yet they are not scrutinized to the same degree.

If you were to even try and match half of the capacity in a road expansion, it would be prohibitively expensive. The SR 99 tunnel we just built cost $3.2B for two lanes in each direction with no exits. This is double the cost of the aforementioned University Link, which is nearly a mile longer than the road tunnel to boot. The reality of the situation is any additional capacity in the transport system is going to cost a lot of money now that the city is rapidly growing and densifying, and roads cost more because they require more land.

Thanks for the response. Lots of really good points.

In a vacuum, I'm actually totally fine with either option (public transportation or cars) and not particularly married to see either one built or against either one being built and both have their utility. Personally, I think both need to be built. My main concern is really about who is going to pay for it.

Such projects really disproportionately benefits those that will be commuting into and out of Seattle and those people in Seattle that live in parts of the city where they don't have parking and are likely to live near a station.

I'm a huge proponent of people paying for those services they use and for services to be financially self sustaining.

People who take the train should fund the train. People who drive cars should fund the roads and the DMV.

Furthermore, the same argument for greater throughput of a system should also support the argument that such a system should generate greater revenue and be naturally self sustaining. But for this to be true, all calculations shouldn't be based on theoretical limits but actual predictions of how many more people will be moved per hour per direction and that needs to be compared to the revenues and the costs to figure out if the current design of the system is sustainable (a lesser more modest design might be warranted once faced with the reality of how many riders are actually expected).

> It's worth noting that this figure is not qualified by how much road projects cost per road user, because this is not meant to be a comparative talking point. Roading projects are just as expensive, if not more due to higher land requirements; yet they are not scrutinized to the same degree.

They should get the same scrutiny. One proposed system getting this scrutiny isn't an argument that neither should get the same scrutiny.

> The SR 99 tunnel we just built cost $3.2B for two lanes in each direction with no exits.

And it has tolls, but the tolls should probably be 3x higher than they currently are. Every system, roads or rail, should pay for itself. Any system that isn't priced appropriately is distorting the market and making it harder to figure out the true cost and plan effectively.

One thing I would love to see adopted in the US is a public transportation tolling system like they have in Japan where you pay for distance traveled and the cost of your commute in general.

In the interest of stating my biases, personally, I purchased a home in a part of Seattle that is unlikely to ever see much if any benefit from a subway system. I'm familiar with the geotechnical concerns where I live and the only public transportation which will ever serve my home and my neighborhood is likely to be a bus (this is not too dissimilar to the reason why Beacon Hill will also not benefit). I am, however, in favor of buses and would also like to see investment long term in smart streets that provide a foundation of an autonomous vehicle system.

Lastly, thanks for engaging in good faith discussion unlike other commenters here.

> They should get the same scrutiny. One proposed system getting this scrutiny isn't an argument that neither should get the same scrutiny.

It is a statement about the bias of the linked piece though, which is quite clearly right-wing.

> One thing I would love to see adopted in the US is a public transportation tolling system like they have in Japan where you pay for distance traveled and the cost of your commute in general.

Roads also work like this in Japan. But I wouldn't call the Japanese system much better; Japan allows companies to subsidize 1000USD per month for each employee, in a manner similar to how American employers subsidize healthcare. This has the effect of making travel relatively pricey in general (because people with subsidy can afford to pay more), and also the effect of concentrating employment in major urban areas, because if you live in a small city with low transportation costs you are essentially leaving most of that 1000USD off the table.

In the West we treat travel as a public good, but it's really only an American thing that we tilt so much funding in favor of just the car.

> the only public transportation which will ever serve my home and my neighborhood is likely to be a bus (this is not too dissimilar to the reason why Beacon Hill will also not benefit).

There's nothing wrong with buses. The major problem is that Seattle has relied too much on buses; pre-COVID, public transit funds were being unspent because the ability to allocate money to transit has exceeded the capability to actually spend it for such a purpose. They literally could not find enough drivers to run the service already being funded because of how tight the employment market was.

One major reason why light rail is being pushed so heavily is because it is both more labor efficient in general (a driver can either operate a 40/60 foot bus or a 380 foot train), and because the major speed and reliability increases of the rail system will allow less vehicles to serve the same frequency. The long-term plan (at least before COVID took a sledgehammer to public finances) was to redirect bus resources from long, infrequent commuter routes to short, frequent feeder routes to Link.

Also your comment about Beacon Hill is strange, because Beacon Hill does have a light rail stop, today. Even if you're not next to it, the 36 bus runs straight through Beacon Ave every ten minutes throughout the day.

What 100 year horizon? Manhattan has a 30% smaller lower population today than it did in 1920. Even pre-Covid, Manhattan was one of the slowest growing major counties in America.

Population is not very relevant metric here. What matters is not so much how many people actually live in Manhattan, but rather how many people are commuting into it every day. In fact, commuters double the island population every day, and exceed the number of residents in 1920 by 50%.

What happened with Manhattan was that tenements were replaced with office buildings, and these use more, not less commuting.

Manhattan commuters peaked in 1946. The train system was able handle that level of demand without falling apart. All of the messaging from MTA about increasing ridership causing delays is a disingenuous lie.

Considering the fact that much of the same infrastructure they used in 1946 is still in use today (with 74 more years of wear and tear) its not surprising that its falling apart. This would be true even if the MTA wasn't staffed by dishonest, incompetent political cronies. When you regularly do things like spend $600 million dollars on trains that don't work, its not hard to see how you end up billions in debt very quickly.

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-l-train-normal-servi...

Man, you’re really taking a few numbers from decades ago and using that to claim something’s a lie? You ok?

" It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later" As Washington, DC has come to learn with their subway. Decided to cut the third track to save cost and now any minor maintenance causes all kinds of issues and has made the system basically unsustainable without continual bailouts from the taxpayers.

The ultimate pennywise/pound foolish.

I don't mind building extra capacity. I do mind politicians sticking their nose where it doesn't belong.

I can't believe more people are not angry about the World Trade Center Path station. They managed to spend twice the original budget at four billion dollars and all this time there were signal problems between Newark and Harrison because Path didn't have money to fix it.

How do we do huge infrastructure projects when we can't trust the bureaucrats and the politians who are supposed to oversee these things?

Part of the problem here is misaligned incentives.

In the aftermath of 9/11, a lot of federal money was made available for the reconstruction of all the stuff that was destroyed. However, it was only usable for things in the Ground Zero area. So to maximize the utility of all this money, the Port Authority created an insane train station dressed up to the nines to soak up $4B of free federal cash. They also lumped a bunch of other unrelated things into the station that raised the sticker price but would still be covered by the feds.

For what it's worth, this station was also at one point supposed to serve a LIRR extension from Atlantic Terminal to WTC, but kind of died after Pataki could not convince the feds that this was a reconstruction project and he left office. The project was never downsized in scope to match the new reality.

And how does the Mezzanine helps?

Traveled a lot in the developing parts of asia and their subway stations even when massive are very plain and utilitarian. They deal with much bigger crowds than anything we could reasonably face in the west.

Comparing US infrastructure to infrastructure in the developing world requires a pile of caveats.

The biggest reason for the difference you’re pointing out is safety. A mezzanine creates safety in two directions. First, as a gathering area with likely positive pressure ventilation in case of a train fire. Second, a refuge for incidents on the surface.

The developing world generally isn’t planning for either in their infrastructure.

I should point out that many of the systems you're discarding in comparison have better actual safety records than the US.

Indeed.

Japan, S Korea, China, Hong Kong, and the rest of Asia operate world class rail systems. The idea that they don't care about safety is ignorant and racist.

You should see the plans for the BART station in San Jose. There will be pointless mezzanine, of course. The excavation will be the size of an airport. It's completely ridiculous.

There are S-Bahn stations in Switzerland with 10 times the daily riders of BART that are nothing more than a signpost and a place to stand. The American obsession with gargantuan stations serving a couple thousand daily riders costs a lot of money.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/29/barts-san-jose-extens...

The obsession is not just with stations;everything is bigger over there. My first visit to the US, I was traveling from Japan. The difference in size of things in the two countries is uncanny. From people to cars to food;my impression was Americans like it bigger.

Isn't that because of the obvious - Americans generally are bigger than Japanese people and America is bigger than Japan? I'm not sure it's a preference as much as an adjustment.

I suppose I'm destined to wander around my small(er than most other places in the world) Japanese flat, with fittings made for someone much shorter than I am even though I'm average height in my own country, and ponder on the existence of downvotes for a fairly innocuous musing.

Perhaps I should leave comments like "Japanese people just like things smaller because when I was there everything was so small" and not notice that they have a lack of space and are on average, smaller, hence the need for space saving measures and smaller fittings, or is that just one more, in my opinion, fairly innocuous musing that must not be stated… maybe it's just me? Maybe.[1][2]

しょうがない

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezwox3YfyoU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5glLhvj4yd4

People living in Japan are used proper train boarding and exiting - they stand on the correct entry markers and the train doors will be on these markers once it stops. In the same manner no one blocks the exit markers and people stand in the queue behind the train door ready to disembark quickly.

Only this makes the 90 second Shinkansen stops possible as well as the 3 minute cadence between trains we saw in Hiroshima station possible. Not only is the platform used very efficiently, there is even a small Soba restaurant in the middle of the platform! :)

In comparison here in Europe (CZ) the trains are usually late and you migh only lern the platform couple minutes before the train arrives - and it might even change at the last minute! There are no door markers and trains stop preatty much at random somewhere at the platform. Most traincars still have stairs and people are not used to proper queueing, so they form a fan around every door that blocks people from quickly getting eiter in or out.

The trains are also slow (160 km/h max on parts of track and on a good day) and mostly not EMUs, so you have platform space used up by the locomotive. Oh well.

Please don't generalise all of Europe based on circumstances in a single country.

In the three European countries I'm most familiar with, at least some types of train stop in a consistent position, with platform markings and queuing.

I really hope so - one gets very used to it while traveling in Japan becase it's so convenient! And then one misses it a lot when getting back.

> There are S-Bahn stations in Switzerland with 10 times the daily riders of BART that are nothing more than a signpost and a place to stand.

Do you mean a specific BART station? The average total BART daily ridership (400k weekday, 100k weekend) is roughly comparable to the total daily Zürich S-Bahn network ridership (400k-450k in one figure I found).

I'm not sure that Zürich has the most popular network in the country but I would assume it's up there. Bigger stations here are definitely smaller than that SJ monstrosity, and I really like how efficiently they're laid out, but which popular stations are you thinking of that are just a signpost and a place to stand? Even the most popular space-constrained ones in the city (Hardbrücke, Stadelhofen) are way more than that, and the only I can think of in the city that are basically just a signpost are those with relatively infrequent service (Seebach, Friesenberg, etc.).

In any case, I think Caltrain feels a lot more like the S-Bahn equivalent, and most of the stations aren't much bigger either. This seems to hold for several other commuter train services in the US, such as NJ Transit.

I was admittedly thinking of a place like Friesenberg, but also stations along the Sihltal like Manegg. There's literally nothing to Manegg beyond a sidewalk[1]. Compare and contrast the monstrosity of the Warm Springs BART[2], which is one of the least-used stations.

1: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.337124,8.5196172,3a,75y,4.85...

2: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.502989,-121.939301,3a,75y,19...

Switzerland benefits from having POP ticketing, whereas US planners insist on faregates. The only reason the US builds mezzanines is to manage the faregate queues.

Interestingly, Caltrain uses POP, and indeed it has some stations that amount to a sidewalk next to the train tracks. So this isn't quite a "US planners" issue; Caltrain and BART serve different halves of the Bay Area.

Caltrain manages to be much more dysfunctional than BART, sadly.

No offense, but this sounds like the reaction of someone who doesn't actually use the subway to get around. The older stations in NYC are cramped and _dangerous_ because they're too small to handle the foot traffic heading through on a good day without delays. The new 2nd avenue subway stations are similarly large, and I can personally attest that this scale, which seems frivolous to you, makes life tangibly better for the commuters who rely on this infrastructure every day.

It really goes either way. The IND stations are great with their trademark full-length mezzanines. Sometimes, the mezzanine wasn't needed, though; a lot of them are just flat-out abandoned on the G.

My takeaway from this is that careful planning and analysis is necessary to decide what sort of station design is required. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, as many replies suggest there is, so it's not obvious to me that the MTA screwed this up.

Hudson Yards is Manhattan's newest office submarket and probably best-in-class modern office space in town. There were estimates that Hudson Yards would become the largest station by entries and exits. (MTA's station usage stats do not count transfers within a station's paid area.)

You have to include transfer density to account for platform load factors, and Times Square's situation of having 5 of the 7 Midtown Manhattan lines transferring there, all of them having both express and local platforms, on top of the massive local draws for boarding, and the location of the Port Authority's bus terminal virtually guarantees that it's going to the busiest station complex in perpetuity.

By contrast, the Hudson Yards station is a terminus station of a single line. That means traffic is largely going to be directly from the single platform entrance (there's only one bank of escalators to the surface) to the waiting train, or vice versa. Even if it's potentially going to be busy, there is very little need for platform loitering, and certainly not for the massive overbuild of platform and mezzanine that exists today.

It’s only going to be a terminus station for a few decades. That line will end up in Chelsea.

What a waste. If anything it should end up in New Jersey.

Every fantasy subway map I've seen has extended the 7 into New Jersey. Extending the 7 down into Chelsea makes no sense, because you already have 4-track subway trunks on 8th and 7th, and the island is narrowing as you head downtown. If you need another Midtown N-S trunk, the logical choice is the 2nd Ave, as the east side is underserved (and that side of the island bulges out as you head downtown instead of disappearing). Even then, the return on investment for the southern portions of the 2nd Ave Subway is kind of shaky.

Let me know when New Jersey is willing to have the line come to them. You recall what happened...

Yeah, I'm aware that ARC was cancelled. The fact that a trans-Hudson subway extension is not really viable anytime in the next few decades doesn't mean that the extension to Chelsea is an alternative worth building, though; it just means that the reality is going to be that Hudson Yards will be a terminus for quite some time.

They have to dig two new tunnels in the next 20 years. Just sweeten the deal and make it three. The new guy could make it happen sooner. The bigger deal is that MTA will have to implement zoned fares to keep from undercutting NJT. That is the unspoken feature that OMNY will be bringing to the city.

That’s a great point and one I hadn’t considered!

I’m certainly hopeful for a NJ extension too, just not optimistic.

The other big deal is that the MTA is not fully funded by fares, and getting bi-state coordination on dedicated taxes is a fool's errand (see: WMATA in DC)

If New Jersey needs a subway tunnel across the Hudson, PATH would probably be a better place to start.

The Chelsea plan is mostly to link up 7+L, though preferably you'd bring the L up and through the Far West Side. The L's higher capacity and it could use a new, higher throughput terminal.

Either way. But the 7 already points south now!

Linking the 7 and L is an even more ??? idea, because the 7 and L are different loading gauges, and the fact that both originate on the east side of the East River means anything that now becomes a 1-seat ride takes too long to be worth actually sitting in 1 seat for that long.

I think he's suggesting linking them for a transfer. Which doesn't actually make sense either, because the only new destination this opens up that saves a transfer is Hudson Yards.

Hudson Yards is the second or third largest office submarket in Manhattan, the one with the newest spec towers, and on top of that is bigger than most American downtowns are.

Long term the L should be extended north, at least to Columbus Circle if not beyond; the Far West Side lacks subway service, and currently the 7th Avenue Express (2/3) is also considered to be above capacity. Or it was in a pre-COVID world, anyways.

I completely agree.

The argument for Hudson Yards (I don't actually agree) is that while Times Square is certainly a very busy station, most of the movement that happens there is transferring. And Times Square has nearby stations that other people also use for exiting and entering; Hudson Yards is a long hike from the next closest subway station, and 34th St is not a particularly great walk, with all the Lincoln tunnel traffic and whatnot.

Hudson Yards is also the only station next to the Javits Center, so it has the massive traffic from large convention events like the Auto Show and NYCC.

> You have to include transfer density to account for platform load factors, and Times Square's situation of having 5 of the 7 Midtown Manhattan lines transferring there, all of them having both express and local platforms, on top of the massive local draws for boarding, and the location of the Port Authority's bus terminal virtually guarantees that it's going to the busiest station complex in perpetuity.

Don't forget the shuttle to/from Grand Central Station. Times Square St has to be the most trafficked station.

> and certainly not for the massive overbuild of platform and mezzanine that exists today.

Better that than an oversized Jets Stadium where subpar football gets played 8 times a year.

I always assumed that Hudson Yards would serve as a terminus for future lines to new jersey. But I guess political will and federal funding is required for that.

Building for the future, rather than the now.

Re-evaluate the future you're building for if it's unreasonably expensive to build for it. Sometimes it's cheaper to destroy demand or otherwise not build for density you don't need. This is way different (massively over budget and/or behind schedule public projects) then dropping extra fiber in a trench because you're there already ("Dig Once").

For example, Strong Towns [1] seems to champion the whole "the suburbs are unsustainable" perspective, but never the "public works projects in HCOL metros are too expensive for the resulting density" thesis. Market forces will likely work it out in this case though (people leaving HCOL locations for lower density locations where per dollar quality of life is higher, with major cities having to do more with less, or do less with less [tax revenue] [2]).

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/nyregion/mta-virus-budget...

Have you been at the current Penn Station, in NYC? That's how a 'build for now' station looks like. It is a total shitshow during rush hour, and especially during holidays.

Everyone in NYC hates it and we are currently building an extension at the old post office, as it is not fit for usage anymore.

The old one (the one that got demolished in the 60s) was miles ahead in both space and aesthetics. Also, almost nobody hates the Grand Central Station, even though it gets overran with tourists as it is a beautiful peace of work.

Best comment about the new now old Penn Station.

'One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat'

That's not why Penn Station is a shitshow. Penn Station basically has three main problems:

1. Amtrak insists on trying to do an airplane-like boarding situation for trains, rather than the traditional practice of telling people what track their train will be on several minutes in advance and letting them wait on the platform. This means you have boarding lines and expectant crowds in places that aren't designed to handle that kind of capacity.

2. Each of the services that call at Penn Station has its own segregated platforms, mezzanine, and ticketing areas, and the connectivity between these is poor and confusing. Although, this is probably driven in large part by...

3. Madison Square Garden was built on top of Penn Station, and a substantial portion of the above-ground infrastructure is dedicated to supporting that tenant rather than the transportation infrastructure.

Penn Station used to have a more normal major-station layout when it was still part of the Pennsylvania Railroad, but that was ruined by the building of Madison Square Garden on top of it.

Everything below ground level is original, save for the relatively newer Central and Western corridors.

Penn Station's major issue was that when it was designed and built, intercity traffic was a big deal and commuter traffic was not, and it was designed accordingly. Today the central platforms Amtrak uses are massively oversized and the commuter-rail only platforms to the side take 3-5 full minutes to clear a train.

The platforms by the tracks in Penn Station are narrow, dank, and poorly lit. I think that's why you see the boarding method there. Better platforms would make a huge difference.

Station overcrowding can be fixed. Stuff that never gets built because it's too expensive can't. It's important to not let perfect be the enemy of the good, no more so than public infrastructure.

> Station overcrowding can be fixed

Yeah, usually by totally rebuilding the station. Easier said than done when you already have a skyscraper built over top of you. NYC is trying to revamp a lot of its current stations that see magnitudes of traffic more than they were designed to on a daily basis, and that's a massive undertaking.

What about digging more parallel tunnels and keeping with smaller stations?

That's good for track maintenance too.

Have you seen the location this is in? That should help answer, you would be trying to dig under skyscrapers.

What way of fixing station overcrowding are you thinking of?

Running more trains, mostly.

The 7 is already projected to run at peak frequencies in the existing plan; signal upgrades help a bit but not a lot at a terminal station. The rest of the 7 isn't capable of running trains much more often.

the 7 train only runs at 24 trains per hour. Other systems, even ones in the US, run upwards of 30 trains per hour. For example, the Red Line in Chicago runs every two minutes during rush hour and that is capped due to the Belmont junction. It has the same terminal station layout at 95th street as Hudson Yards.

For 2.5 billion dollars, I bet they could have extended the system, not built some insane labyrinth 150 feet underground and improved signaling to run 30 trains per hour and maybe even built that 2nd station they had to cut due to cost.

They could not have both built a station and extended the system for their budget, no.

The new signaling for the 7 will already get them to 30 trains an hour, and that will not be enough in 30 years, much less 100.

The NYC Subway had a yearly ridership of over 2 billion in 1946, higher than it is today (pre-covid). One could say that we should be building a subway that can transport 5 billion riders per year and have six tracks on every line but that would be silly and there's no legitimate reason why that would be the case.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. NYC is growing steadily, especially around that station.

Except for the train tunnels themselves which are only double tracked instead of quad tracked

In Sydney, Australia's original underground rail system, the "City Circle", which began construction in the 1920s, they built "stub tunnels" at one of the stations, St James. St James station is actually built with two island platforms, to support being an interchange between two lines. However, only one of those lines was actually built. The other line, they covered it over to turn the two platforms into one big platform, and that line's tunnels go off some distance and then they abruptly end. The idea was, when the second line (Eastern Suburbs line) was later built, they could do it with minimal disruption to the operations of the station.

Great thinking ahead, except plans changed and when (decades later) they eventually decided to build the Eastern Suburbs line, they chose a completely different alignment. So they just had these stub tunnels sitting underground, disused. During World War II they were converted to being an air raid shelter. They've seen some other random uses over the years, such as being used to film TV shows, part of them is used as a maintenance train siding, etc. Now the government is seeking proposals for the private sector to redevelop them into something useful.

When the Eastern Suburbs line was finally built on a different alignment in the 1970s, they did something similar – it has two underground platforms at Central Station, but they actually built four underground platforms. Two of them active, the other two with stub tunnels not going anywhere. Once again, this was to support another planned railway line, the Southern Suburbs line, which has never built either. For many years, the never-used platforms were used as archival document storage for the government rail authority. Now, Sydney is building a new metro line. The Metro line is not going to use these platforms, it is using newly constructed underground platforms. But these never-used platforms are going to be converted into utility rooms for the Metro line.

Similarly, at Redfern station, there is a big pit in the ground which holds half-constructed platforms for the Southern Suburbs line. I doubt those platforms will ever be used for that purpose.

So anyway, planning ahead is a great idea, but often it just turns into a waste.

A mezzanine level is expensive and only serves to delay people. It doesn't get more people into more trains. Only more frequent and longer trains can do that, and that is dependent on the length of the platform and how many trains can move through a given tunnel an hour, the mezzanine is extraneous. It makes people not want to take the train by introducing bottlenecks by making you go through another set of stairs or escalator. But I'm sure the expenses associated with the mezzanine lines a bunch of people's pockets, so I wouldn't expect sensible design to come into fold anytime soon in our contractor-graft based country.

In London (where I commute), without 'mezzanine levels' or their equivalent, there's nowhere to queue and everyone would squeeze onto the platform which is a safety issue and then the police and/or the railway staff would close the station. This happens frequently when we have problems with the track or trains.

London has terminus stations - the platform the train arrives on is where the train stops, and then starts on its return journey. Trains to your destination are therefore limited by signalling and traffic, typically a 10-15 minute turn around time. On average, in London during rush hour, you have a train to your home station every 20 minutes.

Perhaps in the US all major stations are through stations, but in the UK, especially London, we just don't have that, and mezzanines are at the very minimum, a safety requirement, because the platform your train leaves from, has other passengers waiting for other trains before your one.

Platforms are not large, and trains are very, very busy, and frankly, if you've only ever caught a train in the US you are in for a huge surprise commuting in the UK.

If the US ever adopted trains like the rest of the world has, the best time for building mezzanines, and huge stations is "yesterday".

You're comparing regional rail terminal stations, which serve many lower-frequency lines, to subway platforms, which typically serve a single higher-frequency line. (2-10 minutes between trains.) That's the scenario where a mezzanine is less useful.

Don't get me wrong, people do take the train in LA. The red line before the pandemic was packed full of people during my morning commute, transporting 130,000 people a day. Standing room only for the entire subway train. That being said, you'd never have people waiting on the mezzanines at these stations. The platform is already big enough to hold like 3-4 trains worth of people, and a train comes every 10 mins (every 5 mins where the line is staggered with another subway line downtown) and it is cleared out of people waiting when the train comes (sardines squeeze well).

To expand capacity beyond that would require reengineering the tunnels themselves. They go as fast as they can turn around and vent air as it is. You'd have to bore parallel tunnels to increase capacity, which would just mean adding more platforms and still wouldn't require a mezzanine.

130k/day is not that much, Stockholm's tunnelbana has 3 main lines: red, green and blue, in total they support 1.1 million passengers/day with the current expansion of the blue line planning to add another 170k/day.

This in a city of around 2 million inhabitants for the whole metropolitan area, which is also served by busses, trams, local trains, ferries and so on.

I haven't been to the Hudson Yards stop, but many NY subway platforms are very cramped by modern transit standards (compared with even, say the DC metro). I'm sure they're not accessible and hard to make so, and some sections are so narrow as to be positively dangerous.

Building new platforms that were just "as wide as the original subway platforms" would be the bonkers thing.

Sure it's more expensive to build it big, but I bet its more expensive still (if not totally impossible) to build it small then _re_build it big a few decades later.

“bonkers expensive station design.”

Sounds a little like American healthcare. Either super expensive but shiny care or either nothing or subpar care. No reasonable middle. I always wonder why all hospitals have to be super new with new devices.

We choose which hospital to go to (barring an emergency) but aren't able to know what the cost of services will be; most human nature in that case will prefer to go to the one that looks better, as a proxy for more likely to get the right outcome.

A recent executive order by the president will force hospitals to reveal their pricing, but I'm not sure if that applies to actual negotiated prices for various insurance plans, or only to the phoney prices that they use for negotiating and noone actually pays.

Either way, a small ray of hope that things will change for the better soon.

One thing I've always wondered about was SFMTA's giant underground stations that could fit six actual Muni trains on the platforms, or the giant Caltrain+BART station at Milbrae that could fit about 2.5 times as many trains as it actually ever does.

My Dad used to like telling a story about how when BART first opened, none of the trains had overhead bars because the trains were supposed to run so often nobody was going to have to stand.

It's kind of wild that that wasted space for MUNI underground is not a bigger complaint in the main. My fantasy is that the last 20 years of tunnel computerization for MUNI was going to result in multiple trains per station, or hooking multiple lines together at the entrance of the tunnel (IIRC they did this with the Boeing trains until the Meltdown and Bredas) in order to utilize the whole station length.

Or shrink and simplify the MUNI parts, there's no (apparent to a rube like me) reason MUNI stations have to be the same length as BART stations. Make 'em a single block long with NYC style foyers: attendant, turnstiles, ticket machines. No flowers, no coffee, no Jehovah's Witness tables.

Yeah. BART was meant to be driverless so they could have many frequent trains (possibly with fewer cars) instead of infrequent 10-car trains.

in the earliest days of the BART, I believe I saw the BART train doors open on the wrong side of the train, at the Rockridge station. Also those dumb LED destination signs by DAKtronics lasted decades; some may still be in place.

Muni's very long platforms at underground stations are largely a coincidence of history. The Muni stations on the Market Street Subway are simply the same length as the BART platforms because they were built at the same time in a single cut-and-cover operation. At 710' BART operates some of the longest transit trains in the world, but due to the construction process making the Muni platforms shorter probably wouldn't have netted significant savings. The underground stations between the Market Street Subway and the Twin Peaks Tunnel, like Castro, were built similarly to the Market Street Subway stations since the length would allow for double-platforming or possibly longer trains - although they are not quite as long (Castro incidentally has an unusual curved platform just because of the practicality of squeezing it in between the older Twin Peaks tunnel and Market St).

Like many surface lightrail systems, the total length of Muni trains is limited by the intersection spacing of the surface streets it operates on, among other factors - the train needs to be able to stop without blocking adjacent intersections.

Full double-platform operation of Muni trains on the Market Street Subway has been on and off over the years with changes in station operations and controls, I believe it is currently on at least at Embarcadero. There have been technical (related to the ATC) and procedural problems (people waiting at the wrong position and having to run) that have made double-platform operation tricky. I also think the gains in efficiency by double-platforming are fairly modest since the throughput of the Market Street Subway has long been limited by signalling considerations.

I believe the Russians have some pretty amazing stations.

Moscow metro builds now with cheaper but less artistic stations, to build as much as possible as fast as possible. Nevertheless, even these new stations are practical enough since the Moscow metro can be quite cramped at times.

It seems pretty ordinary compared to metro stations in Europe or even Eastern Europe.

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