Hacker News Reader

Comment by infotainment | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest problem is attitude; in the US, transit is largely viewed as a welfare program for poor people who are not (yet) able to afford cars. To put it in HN terms, Americans see it like a deprecated API; something you're obligated to support somewhat, but only until your users migrate off of it.

If you look at the Honolulu transit project (Formerly HART, now called Skyline), I think it shows everything wrong with US transit projects:

1. It goes nowhere useful, only going to a bunch of random places on the west side of Oahu where no one really goes.

2. It was pitched as an economic uplift project, not a transit project. "If we build a train in these largely-ignored areas, it will help the people there!"

3. It took years and years to build, full of cost overruns, because it was also pitched mainly as a job creation project. You can't sell a transit project based on that alone, so instead they're pitched as welfare or job-creation programs, which creates the wrong set of incentives. After all, if the project takes longer, that's more jobs!

View on HN

Seattle-area commuter here. I have to agree, transit seems mostly designed for people who don't value their time. Which don't tend to be the highly paid tech workers with families. I tried so many times to give transit "one more try". The straw that broke my back was when they silently canceled 2 buses in a row for my route, on the coldest day of the year, for a route that has 20 minutes between buses. And my suburb commuter route doesn't even have the big city problems that plague the Seattle buses.

Now I drive my single occupant 6603 lb truck to work once or twice a week, and WFH the rest of the time.

You could choose to ride an e-bike instead.

E-bikes are great in Seattle until they are stolen. Bike theft is the one single issue that is driving down bike ridership in the city, since police and the city government don't really care about it.

There are various ways to hide an airtag on a bike. Consequences are the way to deter thieves.

The cops don't do much about bike theft. The perpetrators are the homeless, and they're basically untouchable. They have no assets, they can't pay any fines, and it's too expensive to keep them in jail.

Edit to add: It would be nice if they at least recovered the bikes and returned them to their owners but it seems like if they can't collect fines or put someone in prison they aren't interested. It woudn't be hard. Go to the local homeless hangouts. Any bikes nicer than what you could buy at Walmart are stolen, and most of the other ones are too. Run the serial numbers against theft reports and load them out.

Cops here in Chicago will not do anything about bike thefts. Multiple cases of vigilantes getting arrested after they took the law into their own hands when cops wouldnt retrieve their airtagged bike.

The trick is for the vigilante to also appear homeless so it just looks like another unenforceable bike theft.

This may surprise you, but not every ebike is guaranteed to be stolen. Get a heavy chain or angle-grinder-resistant U-lock, don't leave it out overnight, and you'll greatly reduce probability of theft.

Seattle making the Link a chore to take to and from the airport is a perennial disappointment — painfully slow.

And then them making to along I-90 instead of 520 also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'd LOVE a fast line from the east side to U-district. But I don't understand the logic behind the current scheme.

It's for a few reasons, let's see if I remember them all from the run-up to the Sound Transit 2 vote in 2008:

Mercer Island exists and has political clout (even though they tried to use that clout to force Sound Transit to not use the express lanes on I-90) and would demand a station no matter what.

Running across a floating bridge is hard enough and the Governor Albert Rosellini Bridge (SR 520 Floating Bridge to the Yanks) is the longest in the world. Going across the dual-named bridge that carries I-90 would be shorter and was seen as easier back then.

You don't have to turn around to serve Bellevue and then Redmond. Coming up from I-90 you hit the big part of Bellevue then you turn right and keep going northeast to Redmond. Coming from SR 520 you'd go south into Bellevue then have to U-turn to go back to meet BelRed and Overlake.

At the time, we didn't know when, if ever, the SR 520 bridge would be replaced. The previous span was a nightmare. It had a movable bit in the middle, the road deck sat at roughly water level, and would routinely sway so hard in strong winds that the bridge would have to be blocked off so the midspan section could be opened to relieve stress and prevent the thing from sinking. The I-90 bridges have no such issue (considering the damn thing had already sunk once in the 90s). There was no way to use the previous SR 520 bridge for light rail, though the new one is built to support it.

You also catch a lot more potential riders in station areas around I-90 and South Bellevue. The Points cities are basically HOAs with delusions of grandeur. There's no hope they'll gain more people in any of our lifetimes, meanwhile the areas the 2 Line passes through are already fairly populated by Eastside standards and have room to grow (also by Eastside standards).

Meanwhile, the 542 and 545 are comparatively very fast.

Wow I didn’t know the old bridge was such a nightmare. This also makes me wonder why this line only opened now, if it was voted on all the way back in 2008.

I do usually take the 542 now, and it works well-enough, but it only comes every 30 minutes which is annoying.

I completely agree that the 542 needs more frequency. Sound Transit likely saw the dip from Microsoft wholeheartedly embracing work-from-home and figured they could reuse the service hours. Remember that Metro has been suffering from a bad shortage of workers (drivers, maintenance, and operations) that they've only just started to recover from. This is important because Sound Transit contracts out operation of most of its transit service to the local agencies so Metro operates the 542, 545, 550, and others.

Hopefully now that Metro hiring and training is on the upswing Sound Transit will be able to get more bus service hours.

ST put priority to going north through Cap hill and up to Northgate (where there used to be a mall). Prepping the I90 bridge took a long time (8 years ago they shut down the express lanes, after adding an HOV to the main bridge) so far from my recall.

It was scheduled to open a few months ago but early this year they found a fault with the rail supports on the bridge that was missed as they were put in during early COVID and didn't have the ability to get them inspected as well as normal. So for the next year you've got Redmond to Bellevue with a missing link across the lake.

On the other side. I think that this month the main line from Northgate to Lynhood is going to open with several more stops so the system is expanding in a couple directions.

Vancouver, BC's airport Skytrain does this really well, Amsterdam is ok too. Having a train straight to/from international/domestic long distance travel is such a huge deal. I wish Van and Seattle had a fast and more accommodating rail link; as it stands I have to rent a car to get down there for a long winters show. Not really have to I guess, but otherwise I'd have to spend the night in a hotel or hostel. Your new elevated strain that extends 40 miles into the northern suburbs (if I have that right) is pretty wild though. We're lacking om that front for now.

Public transit people don't value their time? I wonder about the people stuck on I-76 as I pass over them on the regional rail here in Philly. Sure I deal with a late train now and then. But those people deal with center city traffic every day twice a day.

Yeah in dense urban areas in the US we have transit. Maybe it could be better but we have it. Other places are too spread out. There are not enough people going to the same places at the same times for a really useful transit system to exist.

Many city buses just use the same roads as cars so if the cars are stuck in traffic so are the transit passengers.

Some cities do have bus-only lanes, and others have full on subway systems which is great but most do not.

Yeah this is true in my city, Phoenix. We don’t have commuter rail just commuter buses. They take the car pool lane but so does every Tesla so that isn’t as big of an advantage as it sounds. We have light rail but it is a specific route in surface streets and much slower than driving on the freeway.

> Some cities do have bus-only lanes, and others have full on subway systems which is great but most do not.

So, er, maybe a first step is installing more bus lanes? They really can make a tremendous difference, and they can transport far more people in a given amount of space than cars can. For instance, look at the picture on this article: https://www.independent.ie/regionals/dublin/dublin-news/priv...

That’s transport for 360 people in the four visible buses, plus 400 in the tram. And, er, four in the taxi, I suppose.

I'm happy for you that your public transit is faster than traffic but mine isn't.

Via the DC Metro, I have an 8 minute walk + 2 minutes wait for train + 35 minute train ride + 8 minute walk.

Compare that to a 15-35 minute drive, depending on traffic. It's just not close.

If the transit is faster that driving for you, then pretty sure you in the minority.

You have to get all the conditions just right for this to be the case

- You have to live next to the train (or next to a frequent bus which takes you to the train)

- You have to have a train going to the approximate right direction

- You have to work in place next to the train (or next to a frequent bus)

- Your work place is OK with you coming in late every once in a while, and your home life is OK with you coming back late every once in a while.

As long as you have a high-demand profession, plenty of potential workplaces and you are not on the fixed schedule, you can be picky and and choose next to transit - but many people don't.

Same goes with place to live - in my region you choose 2 of (inexpensive, next to transit, good public schools). If you have no kids, trains maybe faster for you, but if you want good public school your public transit commute turns super long.

In comparison: my commuter train in Germany comes every 30 minutes (even a bit more often at peak), but travels at 160km/h. Door-to-door, it's about 20% quicker than driving, with no parking stress, no unpredictable highway conditions and I can even get some work done on the WiFi.

Sure, there are issues with those trains sometimes, but it is really an easy decision.

I also experienced the same thing when traveling in Europe. When you're on the line and traveling from one stop to another, it's fast and easy. However, we discovered that most of the things we wanted to visit were nowhere near the transit line for medium distances; it was faster to take a bike and, for long distances, to drive.

While attitude plays a part I can’t help but feel like ineptitude and broad corruption play a huge role as well.

In NYC transit isn’t viewed the way you’re describing it, pretty much everyone takes it. And yet NYC’s system expands at a glacial pace. A good part of the reason is because everything costs so damn much. Part of that is everyone wanting a piece of the pie so the simplest, cheapest option is very rarely the one chosen.

NYC used to have Robert Moses backstopping builds. Like him or hate him, he got things built on a scale nobody has managed to achieve since. In fact a lot of the infrastructure and parks people take for granted today were Moses’ handiwork.

I’m not suggesting that we need another Bob Moses, but he does prove there is some way to cut through the glacial movement of politics and bureaucracy

If the only person in 100 years to get things done in infrastructure in NYC was Bob Moses, then I think it’s time to admit that NYC needs another Bob Moses.

Or needs fixing so that there's more than one person in 100 years who can build things.

Repeating myself, I believe that many countries find a good way to make train stations destinations in and of themsevles

Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop.

That's clearly not the only way to do it but it might be a way in the USA? because treating it as a public service just makes it a political tax burden. Something to be cut, under funded, etc....

Los Angeles used to have one of the largest public transit systems. Over 1000 miles of track (compare to NYC 650 miles?) and tons of stations. Most of it was built commercially to sell housing. According to this documentary it worked, until the deals they'd made with the cities to maintain the roads the trains went down ended up costing too much money.

https://www.amazon.com/This-Pacific-Electric-Stephanie-Edwar...

This video also shows two extensive train systems from past L.A.

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

It feels like in Japan, they kind of solved that issue by letting the train companies run their stations as retail/office spaces and all the other stuff mentioned above.

I think Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong probably have government based public transportation but it feels like they've managed to turned many stations into commerce hubs at least.

Hong Kong’s MTR is actually a publicly listed company. They are actually a real estate developer that happens to run and expand a subway system

>Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop.'

Yes, many of the transit companies in Japan are really more accurately described as real estate companies that own and operate train lines. Most of their profits come from the real estate, not the trains, and the trains are mainly a way to get people to go to the properties.

One big difference you can see between the US and Japan along these lines is the stations: in the US (and Canada from what I've seen), there's absolutely nothing inside the stations, just fare gates and a platform and train tracks. In Japan, the station has vending machines, shops, underground connections to nearby buildings, spaces for vendors to set up temporary stalls, etc. In the high-traffic stations, it's easy to stop in a convenience store, or in a Starbucks, before getting on your next train, and of course the train company is getting money from that in the form of rent. Some really big stations have larger shopping areas attached. But the US seems allergic to renting out commercial space in stations for some reason, and wants transit systems to get all their funding from fares and taxes.

How does Japan deal with the convenience tax, that is, stores within a train station charging more for the same product than stores half a mile away? I remember passing through Portland Airport a few years ago and seeing signs saying the stores in the airport were legally prohibited from charging more than the retail prices found elsewhere in the city.

Every time I go through a retail development in conjunction with transit of any sort, prices are higher, and I make a conscious decision not to spend any money there but instead go to more wallet-friendly places near where I live.

AFAIK, there's nothing legally preventing stores from charging more at more-convenient locations. However, in practice I don't normally see it. I believe (not sure) that major convenience store chains, for instance, have fixed prices for the same reason Walmart does: it's too much trouble to track different prices at different locations. As for restaurants and stuff like that, there's usually a lot of competition, so I just don't normally see obviously-higher prices at locations in stations or airports. Of course, some things are obviously more expensive than alternatives: milk at a convenience store is more expensive than almost any grocery store, for instance, though usually not by much. But for whatever reason, I just don't see such obviously and ridiculously jacked-up prices as I see, for instance, in American airports.

I don't know how much more retail rental prices are but I haven't seen prices of products be higher at station stores. I can only guess, part of it might be culture and part of it might be there's so much competition. If you won't sell at a good prices the stand next to you will or the store just outside?

As for culture, maybe this is also competition but I've always been surprised that vending machines in Japanese hotels cost the same or not more than say 10 cents more than the convenience stores outside. A soda 500ml soda at the vending machine in the hotel is say $1.30 which is the same price at 7/11 or the vending machines outside. Where as in the USA, that same vending machine in the hotel would sell the same soda for $5-$8

I can only guess it's because there's a convenience store usually within a 2 minute walk of most hotels, open 24/7, and they're usually a relatively pleasant walk (vs walking across a huge stroad and giant parking lots like much of the USA). Still, the vending machine is more convenient so I'd expect a price hike but given I don't see one I suspect culture has something to do with it too?

It's kind of a reinforcing cycle. Since public transit is terrible, everyone wants cars. Since everyone wants cars, there isn't a lot of interest in public transit.

Yep. It's chicken and egg problem. You have to invest so heavily before reaching a tipping point of it being a realistic alternative to cars for most American's. Only at that point does it make sense. Where as with cars, we've already made much of that investment. I know it has a high maintenance, economic, and ecologic burden but that's not what we've optimized for. We've optimized for complete freedom and autonomy of movement. We have a number of light rail lines in my city. They mean nothing to the vast majority of our citizens because they either live too far or work too far. And by too far, I mean that proverbial last mile. The other problem is they're not always direct. Just like air travel, this adds time to your trip. People are willing to accept it on air travel because it's rather uncommon, but when your daily commute could be 20 minutes by car or 45 minutes by rail most people will drive. Not to mention, the run times are commonly every 20-30 minutes and are not always consistently running on time. This means even if you plan your day perfectly, a single round trip could leave you sitting for up to an hour at the rail stops just waiting on top of your 45 minute travel time. We have auto traffic, but nothing that severe. We also have sprawled significantly. The implication of which being people drive long distances to work as the status quo. With transportation, long distances means more stops and longer travel time. When driving, most people's commutes see an extra 10-30% of time than non-rush times. But it's fairly predictable and much quicker than trying to get to rail.

All that is also ignoring the other big items: weather & culture. I'm in Dallas, although this applies to many southern cities, where people most people are not used to the weather. Going to speak broadly, this applies to a vast majority of folks. They leave their HVAC home to their HVAC car to their HVAC offices and so on. The women especially get dressed up and do their make-up and hair daily before ever being seen my a non-housemate. Men are often still dressing in clothing that they'd like to keep clean. We don't carry changes of clothes around with us or have a natural style (like I see in European cities where biking is normal). Sweating and being rained on and such is completely foreign to us. We generally wouldn't show up to work after having walked a mile outside. This is why we don't even ride bikes for transportation even when going short distances. It would require a huge shift in perspective and culture around these things.

Weather is even more of a problem in places that are colder. Walking and waiting outside is a tough proposition when it is well below freezing, and the sidewalks are covered in slippery ice or multiple feet of snow, and transit is likely to be cancelled or delayed.

It’s also a matter of politics. No amount of investment in public rail is going to make it so that disruptive elements are effectively removed to the same degree as in my car.

That’s before we talk availability, comfort, etc.

Other than subways, public transportation is always going to be subpar.

In public transit you can sit down and read something during the ride, but not in a car. So the further you go the more public transits advantage grows as the total effort doesn't go up with distance, it is much nicer to sit in public transit for an hour than drive for an hour.

> it is much nicer to sit in public transit for an hour than drive for an hour.

Maybe to you but certainly not to me. I’ll gladly take a considerably longer car ride in the comfort of my vehicle with my music blasting over sitting next to strangers on a train. I have no problem with public transportation existing but it isn’t something I enjoy.

For a adults, sure. As long as there aren't a lot of transfers, and it isn't significantly slower.

If you are traveling with young children though, public transit is terrible. Even if you ignore the hastle of getting the kids on the train or bus on time, and probably having to bring a stroller with you, keeping those children entertained while moderately quiet without disturbing the other riders too much is no small feat.

> it is much nicer to sit in public transit for an hour than drive for an hour.

I agree but the vast majority of people i speak to do not. They would much rather listen to a podcast or music than deal with the crazy people on public transit.

> deal with the crazy people on public transit

I've never dealt with crazy people on public transit and have used it daily for decades, everyone else just wants to mind their own business, although I live in Europe. So that problem is something that isn't inherent to public transit.

In the end public transit doesn't have more crazy people than a grocery store where I live, and I don't see why there would be in USA either except if public transit is grossly mismanaged encouraging vagrants or criminals to live in them. If you throw those out just like grocery stores does then the issue is solved immediately.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-deploy-750-nationa...

>"Saying things are getting better doesn't make you feel better," Hochul said, "especially when you've just heard about someone being stabbed in the throat or thrown onto the subway tracks. There's a psychological impact."

Maybe the balance will change as drivers also get crazier. The roads have been like Mad Max ever since the pandemic. At some point your odds of encountering insanity might be become lower on public transport.

For Skyline, I don’t think you can discount all of the years of political effort to try to cancel it. All that work did was just to slow it down and make it more expensive and risky for the companies involved.

In theory, starting in West Oahu made sense because it’s cheaper to build out there, and TOD will grow the tax base to support the urban stations, but you have to actually build something for that to work.

Oh definitely, we can't discount the effects of lobbying efforts.

It very clearly should have gone from the airport to Waikiki Beach (or at the very least Ala Monana center), which would have actually taken tourist traffic off the roads. But if it did that, those tourists might not rent cars or take taxis! The rental car lobby and taxi lobby don't like that one bit.

When I was out there The Bus was great. By far one of the best public transit I've seen in the US (clean, mostly on time, seemed pretty safe, fairly priced). I believe I took some sort of light rail for a few trips as well. I suspect a lot of the tourist money helps.

There’s an argument in Atlanta that mass transit hasn’t expanded more outwards because it tends to bring in more problems in terms of people. I think people are starting to change on this, but the cost would now be massive,

Atlanta's one huge success with transit that it doesn't get enough credit for is that it connects directly to the airport. So many other cities with "better" transit have complex schemes of switching between different buses operated by the airport authority and the city before you can get to the main system. In Atlanta you simply go over to baggage claim and the train is right there.

Too bad they screwed this up when they built the International Terminal, which is connected with a bus on surface streets that gets stuck in traffic and at lights. If you're flying an airline with a presence in the domestic terminal, you can use the internal transit system to get to the International Terminal but otherwise you're stuck switching from the train to the bus or vice versa. It's an annoying bit of extra friction that shouldn't exist.

Atlanta’s huge success is that the trains run on time and they have been able to maintain the automated train control. Atlanta doesn’t get enough credit for being a blue city that actually does some basic stuff right.

Portland, Salt Lake City have pretty good connections. Seattle also if you don't mind walking through the parking garage (often security will snake back to the lightrail station, you know you are in for a bad day). SFO has Bart to the airport, Caltrain is also possible but you have to connect to Bart for one station. I admit that I've been to SFO a few times and have never bothered taking Bart (in contrast, I always take Max from PDX).

Chicago is like that. Both O'Hare and Midway have CTA trains directly into the terminal.

Why is this unique to America? Why doesn’t this apply to the UK?

In the UK anyone who matters lives or at least works in London, which has always had decent transit and has been gradually, incrementally nudging cars out of the centre for about two decades now (congestion charge, ULEZ, gradual pedestrianization of very central parts) as well as improving the alternatives (crossrail, actually decent cycle routes). Part of it is probably simply that London never completely stopped building new transit for too long; as much as UK people complain about transit development happening in fits and starts, there's always been a sufficiently new and shiny line to point to as a success and an example of how transit should be (Victoria, JLE, DLR, crossrail). But I suspect it's mostly just not having your expectations set by a largely LA-based media.

It does apply to the UK. Very little new public transit gets built, what's there is permanently overloaded. Whenever I visit I regularly end up on trains where you have to stand for the entire 1hr journey. Many lines are full and can't be easily upgraded short of massive signalling reworks (moving block etc). Reliability is poor because there's no slack in the system. Root cause is more people + little/no new capacity.

HS2? New Crossrail thing?

Seems like a bit of a stretch to say the UK isn't at least trying.

I didn't say it doesn't try, I said relatively little gets built. Crossrail is a great project, notable for its uniqueness, and the fact that so much is underground (the only place you can build nowadays, and even then just barely). HS2 has to go above ground and doesn't seem to really be happening.

It’s all relative, of course. I live in Dublin, a city not exactly known for its amazing public transport (we are currently on attempt number three to build a proper metro - we’re currently at the planning approval stage, so it’s probably doomed). At some point a colleague from San Francisco who’d been living here a while mentioned how good the public transport was (and this was a few years back; it was worse back then than now). I was quite confused, until I visited San Francisco.

And then on the other hand, every time I’m in Germany I’m amazed at how good the public transport is. But I’m fully aware that complaining about the trains is basically a national sport in Germany.

Like, you’re complaining about the trains being full, but at least the trains _exist_.

> transit is largely viewed as a welfare program for poor people who are not (yet) able to afford cars.

In most of the US, transit riders can’t wait to be able to afford a car and get out of transit. For good reason: the transit experience for them is terrible

Reply on news.ycombinator.com