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Comment by codekansas | Hacker News Reader

I moved to NYC a year ago and I really don't like using the MTA. It's dirty, chronically delayed, and randomly alternates between swelteringly hot and freezing cold. Getting anywhere here takes half an hour. Outside of a few choice streets, bike infrastructure is abysmal. Riding the train feels like you're schedule is at the mercy of the whims of some random MTA employee or a weirdo who pull the emergency brake and it makes me wish I had a car again.

I used to be much more sympathetic to these types of articles when I lived in Seattle. Buses in Seattle were generally quite nice and more predictable (Google maps would usually give you a good estimate on your arrival time). Biking was a much nicer experience.

I think cities looking to make better public transit should copy the Seattle model rather than the NYC model.

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> I think cities looking to make better public transit should copy the Seattle model rather than the NYC model

What is the “Seattle model” vs. “NYC model”?

They are vastly different places. For one, NYC has over 3x—and Manhattan over 8x—the population density of Seattle.

Many times in NYC, the subway is as fast or faster than a car. Folks often complain their “schedule is at the mercy” of a train, but forget that the same is true of car travel with traffic, road closures, etc. Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of things about NYCT that suck, but being worse than car travel in NYC (for areas with subway service) is not one of them.

And yes, NYC needs a better bike experience. Still, Citi Bike had 114,000 rides per day last month (a far cry from ~3 million weekday subway rides).

Creating a robust bus network with dedicated bus lanes vs an extensive rail system.

I've also lived in both cities and Seattle's buses are timely and clean. MTA buses are much, much worse.

In general, for a big city, you need _both_; there is only so far you can push the capacity of a bus lane (even the most ambitious BRT lanes are really only comparable to trams, not heavy metro rail, capacity wise), but it’s not feasible to serve everywhere with rail. You also ideally want simple interchange between them.

One thing we did in Dublin that greatly improved intermodal journeys was a travel card that works across everything. You tap it on rail/bus/tram, you’re debited 2 eur, and anything else you get on in the next 90 minutes, you’re charged nothing. This replaced a baroquely complex staging system, and it’s amazing how much simpler it has made things.

If everyone riding the NYC subway every day took a bus instead, it would need over 3x the bus capacity (2022 subway ridership was 1B, buses were 425M). Personally, I don’t think that’s going to make bus timeliness any better, even with more dedicated bus lanes. The answer is likely that we just need way fewer cars in the way even now. Have a look at 14th St. as an example.

Everyone should really be copying Hong Kong, where subways are the main method of transportation for most people, not just poor people and they’re phenomenal.

Honk Kong, Taipei, Beijing or Tokyo have top notch subways, but people there are very respectful and organised, which is quite different than Europe or the US, for instance . Also, they built their network very late, and weren't constrained by the existing infra.

Respect isn’t the issue, having the proper finding to offer a high quality service is.

The "schedule at the mercy" issue has more to do with really bad estimates of commute times. The bus rapid transit in Seattle has good estimates so even though it might be slower it is at least predictable. My understanding is that MTA's ancient switching system can't be effectively computerized, hence the poor estimates.

Citi Bike ridership indicates a lot of pent up demand for missing-middle transit, but the execution is pretty bad compared to on-demand bikes in Seattle (although I haven't been back there in a few years and I've heard it's gotten worse there too, so, grain of salt). The electric Citi Bikes are chronically unavailable, meaning you're stuck with huge clunkers that make you work up a sweat at the first hill. Also it can cost 2-3x as much as the bus or metro for a single trip. It makes way more sense to own your own bike, but that still doesn't fix the fact that half your trips invariably contain some section of "cross this four lane road without a marked bike lane".

Shocked you’d say that. Where did you live? Brooklyn and queens are underserved and car brained, but manhattan’s train service is a dream. Yes the MTA needs more budget for infrastructure and renovations but could you imagine if every person who took transit were driving, and needed a place to park in Manhattan? The upcoming congestion charge is a great way to make private the public costs of cars, and I hope that we manage to fully internalize driving’s externalities with tolls taxes and congestion charges, which can provide enough general funds for robust public transportation.

MTA's issues aren't really funding issues, it's just not done very well in comparison to other large cities. For example, for legacy reasons MTA cars can't be automated like the cars in subways in most other places that have them, so you end up with a lot more humans being in the loop, which results in more delays due to human fallibility. It's a very old system that has been largely reluctant to upgrade and is falling behind the rest of the world in many ways (admittedly no where else in the US though).

Aside from walking, getting around Manhattan is probably somewhat painful generally. It's a city that it would take a lot to get me to live there full-time although that's true to a lesser degree of most cities.

Cities like Seattle and Boston have generally OK public transit. But pretty much everyone I know personally (tends towards older) in Boston still owns a car because they do frequent weekend activities and regularly visit friends outside the city.

> Cities like Seattle and Boston have generally OK public transit. But pretty much everyone I know personally (tends towards older) in Boston still owns a car because they do weekend activities and regularly visit friends outside the city.

I (French) lived in Boston for 9 months and I was pleasantly surprised how good the city is for cycling, there was not that many dedicated infrastructures (except along the Charles river, which still help a lot) but the reasonable density of the left bank means there's lots of small streets with very few cars and you can go pretty easily from one place to another: I was commuting from center Somerville to Chinatown and except during the few months with 2 meters of snow everywhere, cycling was much more pleasant and faster than public transport, and I would never have considered driving a car there given the cost and traffic.

I've never heard Cambridge called the Rive Gauche :-) But, yes, I don't bike personally (and don't live in the city) but Cambridge has done quite a bit to improve cycling infrastructure and there are also the bike paths on the Esplanade and in the Emerald Necklace. I won't say a lot of people cycle but a fair number of people do, probably in part because there are a lot of students.

> I've never heard Cambridge called the Rive Gauche :-)

Oh I didn't know it was a only French thing to name places this way. TIL

I don't know if it's only a French thing, but I've never (in decades) heard the term used here. What you do get is Cambridge people who take (very mild) umbrage at being lumped in with Boston :-)

Boston and Cambridge’s transit is deteriorating rapidly. I used to live in East Cambridge and regularly visited Harvard and Kenmore. I watched as both trips ballooned in time due to longer headways and speed restrictions on the train. The buses also never seem to be on time during 8-10AM and 5-7PM. I soon came to the realization it’s significantly quicker, and more predictable, for me to bike than to take the bus or train for most trips nowadays.

To add to that, the rate of car ownership has actually been increasing here, although I should acknowledge Boston’s percentage of young professionals is greater than in previous decades. Also, our MBTA ridership is still below pre-pandemic levels

I'm in the city quite seldom and take the T even less so I'm admittedly not very plugged into the day to day experience.

You're probably right about young professionals. I'd guess that relatively few mid-career+ professionals don't own a car. But I know a number of recent hires at my company who were typically interns at a university in the city and quite a few are basically continuing their college lifestyle for now (including leaning on their friends who do own cars).

I think last time I looked, both T and commuter rail ridership were still way down. Maybe a bit over 50%. I know when I take the train in a train that would be packed standing room only starting at at least Waltham there are almost always empty seats today.

I was in Seattle recently. Just visiting briefly and didn’t use the bus; everything I needed was in walking distance. I did, however, use the light rail to and from the airport, and… maybe it was just unlucky timing (I think there was some maintenance) but the complete disregard for schedules was surprising (and I’m coming from Dublin, where the transport operators are pretty lax about schedules by European standards).

Also, the stations were very… urine-y. Noticed this in San Francisco as well; both cities’ public transport infra could greatly benefit from more public toilets. (I’m being semi-serious here; I expect it puts users off and it seems to mostly be an American thing).

Generally liked Seattle, but worst rail journeys I’ve had in a while.

NYC does a far better job at moving its citizens via transit than Seattle. As a result, NYC commuters are the least dependent on cars in the nation. For all of its inefficiencies, NYC is the gold standard of density here in the US.

During my trip to Seattle recently, I was really unimpressed with transit. It looked robust where I stayed in SLU, but it’s not really extensive. As far as anecdotes go, the one time I took the train, to get to SeaTac, some crazy guy tried to fight me.

Seattle's growth in public transit ridership is the best in the nation (or at least was up to 2017) [0]. I remember one year Seattle and Minneapolis were the only two cities in the nation to have a drop in car commuters. NYC has way more density but it's a decaying system. NYC could start backing bus rapid transit to make it time-competitive with the subway and it would probably be both a better experience and save the city a lot of money.

[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattle-area-transit-ridership...

I don't understand your comment, the point of those article is to make more visible that roads are expensive and that some of it might be better used to improve transit or alternative transportation (it's in the subtitle).

So all your complaints on NYC transit and bike lanes illustrate that money should be redirected to improve those ...

Well the article includes things like lost productivity due to sitting in traffic, so I think it's fair to point out that there's lost productivity due to train delays.

The MTA creates a lot of its own issues though. The bare minimum for a public transit system, in my opinion, should be reliable estimates of how long it will take you to get somewhere, but for non-rush hour trips estimates on the MTA are pretty hit or miss. I've heard this is because the switch operators are all running on some ancient system which is impossible to computerize, but for a system that has tens of billions of dollars in funding I find it hard to buy that they've exhausted every possible option.

MTA? Mail transport agent is the only thing I can think of!

Metropolitan Transit Authority. Runs subways and busses in NYC--probably some other transit modes too.

Ah I see, understood, thank you.

In the context of NYC, it's the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the entity in charge of most of NYC's public transit (subway, buses, etc).

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