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Comment by elijaht | Hacker News Reader

Have you been to New York? The subway is the mode of transportation for nearly everyone and it works great. I wouldn’t say cars are the successful mode of transportation in New York at all

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In terms of paying enough taxes to sustain further use, is how I should have phrased it. Why can't the subway fund its own improvements?

Road user fees don't even cover half of the cost of roads let alone make up for all the negative externalities.

If we're complaining about the costs of negative externalities, are we also considering the value of the positive externalities?

The benefits are why people would pay the price of the negative externalities. If not deemed to be worthwhile, there are other means of transportation that have less negative externalities.

Describing the NYC subway as "working great" is an amazing twisting of the truth. The only thing good about it is that it isn't as bad as public transport in Long Island. Otherwise, good luck going anywhere on time without having to add 30 minutes - an hour of waste just standing around.

The discomfort and cost of public transportation would be at least somewhat tolerable if there was anywhere near as much of an emphasis on timeliness as there is in, say, Japan. As it stands though, the public transport is the one thing I miss least and hate most about the city.

> Describing the NYC subway as "working great" is an amazing twisting of the truth. The only thing good about it is that it isn't as bad as public transport in Long Island. Otherwise, good luck going anywhere on time without having to add 30 minutes - an hour of waste just standing around.

just to add some real numbers, we can look at the actual NYC subway data from MTA's march 2023 report[0] page 12:

* ~3.7m subway riders in march 2023

* 84.7% of riders arrived at their destinations within 5min of schedule

* 83.3% weekday on-time performance

* 85.6% weekend on-time performance

[0] https://new.mta.info/document/109346

Give me p90, p95, etc. While less frequent those are the events people remember not the other 3 days it worked.

Let's say you travel every week day once on each direction (480 trips). The average person will be off their expected arrival time by more than 5 minutes on 72 trips. Of those 72, how many are over, let's say, half an hour? In Buenos Aires I could say that those kind of delays are something that I would experience maybe 12 times a year. They happen, they stand out, they are annoying, but I've also been stuck in traffic for that long, about as often.

I highly doubt the accuracy of that, the ~one time per month during weekends that I have to travel to the city, the subway and busses were so unreliable with timing that it's easier to just take the LIRR to the nearest place to my destination, ignore the busses and walk the remaining miles.

This all might be true - but despite that, it takes half an hour to drive to the airport, and an hour and a half by subway + train.

And for family groups the public transport is more expensive, even when including parking (or paying an Uber).

In other words, if you rely on public transit to get to work, you can expect to be late about 4 times per month.

If you rely on driving through manhattan you’re going to be late much more than that! Or just leave a bit earlier. Same thing people do with transit.

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