To give you a perspective, one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. One mile of new light rail in Seattle will be enough to maintain all roads in Washington state for half a year.
The same story for water, sewer, and electricity. Dense cities are _incredibly_ expensive to maintain because projects become extremely complicated, with lots of project management overhead (more people-hours). And people are EXPENSIVE, compared to raw materials.
The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties.
(This is true even when the subway is obscenely expensive to construct, as the 2nd Avenue line is. But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.)
It's not.
> The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties.
Nope. Roads in sparse cities are cheaper on per-commute and the building cost.
> But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.
Why? Ever-rising costs is the inevitable result of densification.
Roads are cheap on paper, and expensive per commuter-mile. Mass transit is expensive on paper, and cheap per commuter-mile, especially in dense cities.
Well, Houston carries about the same number of commuters. At a fraction of the cost.
I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that.
1.8 billion rides per year for a 8-million city works out to less than 0.7 rides per day per capita. I can guarantee that Houston has more road trips.
> Scale matters, and mass transit is the definition of scale.
Yes, and multi-dozen billion dollar corruption on public projects is also the definition of scale.
> I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that.
I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston".
That's just the subway. Add another 100 million for MNRR and LIRR, plus another 100 million for PATH and NJT. And those are all post-COVID numbers; you can roughly double each to get an actual picture for the volume of mass transit needed to run NYC.
> I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston".
The NYC Combined Statistical area has 23 million people in it[1]. Nearly as many people commute into just Manhattan as live in the actual city of Houston[2]. You simply do not get those numbers with road-based transit.
It doesn't matter how you cut this: Houston is operating at a fractional scale, and will continue to do so as long as roads dominate its development patterns. Houston's government appears to be aware of this[3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
[2]: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/dynamic_pop_manhatt...
Is that freeway going through the middle of the city? I think not. Any construction in a dense city becomes expensive. But you need to divide that by the number of people using it as well. Everyone in the city can use a subway. Only that one house on top of the hill is using this pretty expensive road that goes to the top of the hill in the middle of nowhere.
Dude, that's literally the point I'm trying to make. Thank you.
Dense cities are common around the world. In most of them, the infrastructure is not particularly expensive.
Finland is tiny. Even Helsinki is a bit less dense than Seattle, and almost 10 times less dense than Manhattan.
So yep, sparse cities are much cheaper and efficient than dense cities. That's exactly my point. The sparser, the better.
Typical Helsinki consists of medium-density residential areas separated by large parks and forested areas. The urban core is dense but not particularly tall. The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing.
"Urban areas" are poorly defined in many cases. In some cases (e.g. "Greater Houston Area") they match what people think about "Houston", Seattle metro area does not.
> The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing.
Yes, and? Helsinki is still sparsely populated, so new infrastructure is cheap enough. The costs go up, once the density increases.
Population density figures should be reported as averages over people rather than averages over land. They are usually not, because it's difficult to calculate them that way. If you have a residential area with 20k people in a square mile next to an undeveloped square mile, the population density is usually reported as 10k people / square mile. But from the perspective of the people living there, as well as for the purposes of infrastructure construction, the actual population density is closer to 20k people / square mile.
At some scale we aggregate processing and trade latency for bandwidth (busy poll versus hardware interrupts). We trade the ability for everyone to start their journey _right now_ for the ability for lots more of us to get to our destination via a common carriage (be this packets or people the pattern is the same).
Where land is cheap and commuter traffic isn't an issue maybe roads make sense but that doesn't mean sprawl is cheap in time-spent.