Comment by b9a2cab5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by b9a2cab5 | Hacker News Reader

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US cities I've been to:

East Coast city 1: no light rail, buses come every 45min

East Coast city 2: no light rail, buses come every 30-45min, but at least they were free

West Coast city 1: no light rail, buses come every 45min and cost $$$ if you want to take an express route

SF Bay Area: BART is a disaster, CalTrain only works well during peak hours and only if you live in the Peninsula. I literally watched a group of 2 teenagers hop the fare gates, get on, then get off the station before the fare checkers got on. Every station smells like piss and most of the ones in SF proper have shit in them too. BART East Bay -> Fremont/SJ is easily a 2 hour ride because the train moves at sub-30mph in residential areas.

Chicago: Trains still move pretty slowly but don't have piss and shit all over them at least. From what I can tell, buses are also not viable for reasonable transportation. Boston: Decent trains in most of the downtown/Cambridge area, but suburbs were pretty much a non-starter.

In comparison:

Shanghai/Beijing: security checkpoints at subway entrances, getting on/off trains is orderly and trains are clean. Trains run fast because authorities don't care about making too much noise, so you aren't better off driving because the train was running at 25mph. Trains come every 5mins or more often. You can get across the city in under an hour.

For the US cities that had light rail, the issues were clearly not due to lack of funding but due to NIMBYism limiting speeds and a refusal to enforce any level of security (in the case of SF). I bet you can get BART to come every 5 mins instead of every 20mins with the same number of trains if you 4x'd the speed to 80-100 mph. BART already does over that speed in long stretches like the Bay tunnel or the long stretches in Fremont so it's not like this requires any sort of re-engineering.

How do any of these complaints support the need for "security checkpoints"? A city lacking a subway system altogether does not support your statement that transit systems need security checkpoints to keep out the "riff raff." The two things aren't even related to each other. Furthermore there are many clean and efficient systems in Europe that don't even have turnstiles, let alone security checkpoints.

Aside from your complaints about the BART, everything you've catalogued here either reflects a lack of investment, or the old age of US subway systems as compared to the newer transit systems in Asia. Chicago and Boston's subway systems are among the very oldest subway systems in the world. They both began operation in the 1890s. Shanghai's subway system opened in the 1990s. It's also convenient that NYC, home to one of the world's very largest subway systems, didn't make your list, but Shanghai and Beijing did. Finally, it's not necessarily a good thing that authorities in China "don't care about making too much noise." NIMBYism may be a problem, but so is a government that is unresponsive to the petitions of its people.

The US needs more investment in public transit. There's no arguing that. But your suggestion that "security checkpoints" are necessary to have good transit just isn't true.

EDIT: The Boston suburbs are served by an extensive rail system. You may have missed it because it runs as a separate line from the main subway. Here's a map: https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/2020-07/2020-02-com...

I've not been to NYC, so it obviously didn't make my list.

> clean and efficient systems in Europe that don't even have turnstiles

Europe also doesn't have a rampant property crime and homelessness issue on the scale of the Bay Area. We can argue about whether this is because of the lack of safety net, but SF spends over $50k per homeless person on aid and is _the_ worst in the nation in homelessness so clearly there are multiple factors at work here.

> NIMBYism may be a problem, but so is a government that is unresponsive to the petitions of its people

At some point the needs of millions of commuters outweigh the desires of the few thousand residents living along a train route. A high speed electric light rail is no louder than a freeway and we already have lots of those. The issue with the current American system is that local citizens have _too_ much power in comparison to slightly less local people who may live a 20min drive away. For example, constructing new housing is obviously going to lower the price of rent, which would benefit everyone currently renting or in the market for a house. But it would screw over existing homeowners, so it's blocked even though it causes rampant inequality and homelessness.

You know commuters who don't live next to you are also part of the people that live in your city? Just because they vote in a different district doesn't mean their lives aren't hugely impacted by your NIMBYism.

> Shanghai/Beijing: security checkpoints at subway entrances, getting on/off trains is orderly and trains are clean.

But the lines to get on can be a PITA. Eg. waiting in line for 45 minutes to get on the subway in Beijing at Liangmaqiao is a horrible experience. I'll take the piss smell in the USA to that. Actually, the security check waits in Beijing subway was the main reason I transitioned quickly to taking a taxi to and from work. (see https://www.thatsmags.com/beijing/post/20938/photos-increase..., not my personal experience, but I've experienced similar in the interchange at Dongzhimen).

> I literally watched a group of 2 teenagers hop the fare gates, get on, then get off the station before the fare checkers got on

Wow… what a dystopia!

More seriously, is this really a huge issue? You can see that all day long in Paris, it doesn’t stop the transport system from being OK

Replace 2 teenagers with "homeless guy that shit himself" or "criminals" [1] and you have a different story. If you have proper security this sort of class of behavior is entirely prevented.

[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-5...

Just a thought, but maybe a social safety net would be more effective in preventing the homeless from getting into the kind of state where they do that? Rather than more security. Just thinking laterally about the problem here..

We can do both at the same time. We can help the homeless and also prevent people from shitting or littering in public transportation vehicles and on boarding platforms.

Teens are relevant here mostly as a test of the system’s ability to exclude. A system excluding people sounds a little mean, but it is important if you want to have a transit system that is actually fit for transit.

When there’s a homeless man shooting up with some drugs on the narrow platform at Bleecker St while a crowd of people try to get off the train and get out of there without tripping or provoking a confrontation, and that’s “normal” for the city subway, the people may decide the system is no longer fit for transit. Fortunately that’s still “slightly extraordinary” for NYC and not quite “normal” (I only saw him once) but it’s all very unfortunate.

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