How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?
subwaysheds.com
subwaysheds.com
I grew up in a city with one (just one for the majority of my 20 years there) and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating, especially at 2am on a Friday night after a couple of beers with the guys.
The other thing I noticed when I was visiting my family there during the recent holidays is that there are so few cars in places close to the subway lines - roughly half the usual concentration. The incentive to have one is just not strong enough.
Now there are surely people living there who would argue that this zoning has protected the shape and nature of the town they that they prefer, but the flip side of that coin is that, at $1.4m, a median home in Concord costs more than 3x that of the country overall.
Just imagine if the public could capture the (financial) upside it produces, then it could apply that money to do the same thing down the road, then do the same thing again down the road further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem?wprov=sft...
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ipd/value_capture/defined/tax_incre...
If anything, TIF increases rewards for landowners who do nothing or otherwise underutilize land. Taxing the product of work to make a piece of land beneficial for society is amazingly backwards.
The proper direction to go in is marginal land value tax rates, with increasing penalties the longer a spaces remains unused.
In fact, the rail plus property model allows the rail operate to better capture their added value, so it applies even in "private" scenarios. The most famous example would be Tokyo.
The goal shouldn't be for the public to be able to reap direct financial benefits from the induced activity around transit hubs, the goal should be to firstly to incentivize and maintain affordable, high quality, sustainable transit, secondly to provide more and better economic opportunities.
There are malls and neighborhoods built entirely around the subway station
Like through taxes on the sale of the property or the increased business income it produces? The public will.
As a silly dystopia, imagine that a transit agency could grab revenue as you suggest it might. Then everything becomes a transit land grab.
That just encourages corporate ownership of property (unless you mitigate that), but overall I don’t know why we’d disincentivize moving closer to a new workplace or into a smaller home once it will do for you.
Density goes to number 1 (more traffic = better reason to use the subway) and 2 (more likely to be able to serve people’s desired trip)
A small city in a straight line along the coast is going to get a lot more mileage out of a single line than something spread out across a plain.
Doing it after the fact is much, much harder.
Do we have examples of this working? (Genuine question.)
In the US, I don't know specific examples, but you can definitely use a combination of policies (building public transit, zoning laws to encourage high density, making parts of the city more pedestrian-friendly - and generally less car-friendly) to encourage high density.
https://youtu.be/MnyeRlMsTgI?t=667&si=g-xwXEjLPPobUkzy
There’s photos of subway stops in random fields in china that sometimes get laughs but in actuality china is just smart enough to build the subway and THEN the buildings.
Meanwhile Japanese rail companies own land where they build rail and can make more money on the land than on the trains
Building a subway is the solution to inducing density, not responding to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Monorail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs
What others have I missed?
(btw I never noticed before that HN can't handle UTF-8 chars in urls)
Of course this would require that the 3-4 lane stroads give up 2 of their carlanes so instead of doing the reasonable thing, building infrastructure costing 10x is almost universally preferred.
Heck, it doesn't even need to be a tram. BRTs are good enough for a lot of cases.
When I was commuting by bus, the inbound morning trip (with XBL) was 20-30 minutes, and the outbound evening trip (without XBL) was 30-45 minutes.
https://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/en/lincoln-tunnel/xbl...
A hop on, hop off tram system is much quicker and efficient than going into a subway station, then back up, etc. At least if you aren’t going entirely across town.
In towns with trams I've found Ubers almost always faster. That said, most American trams are at grade, so you get a bus that can't change lanes.
In the city I grew up in during rush hour subway trains leave less than every two and a half minutes and pack well over a thousand commuters each. That is an impossible feat for even the best tram system, as they're limited both in vehicle and station length, not to mention speed, as you can't have 40 tonnes of metal hurtling at 80km/h through intersections.
Whereas it is possible to have a subway where it’s completely impossible to get on the tracks without heavy equipment or the right keys.
There exist implementations of this, but it's essentially a train with extra steps.
[1] In my experience, at least in the cities where I have lived
I'd argue there are some limited places where classical trams on the road make sense, like some down town district. But you get almost the same utility with busses, passenger flow per lane is lower with busses, for a lot less money.
[1] Otherwise I have to check the Transit app on my phone and do some math factoring in the wait time and the time it takes me to get to the platform. The subway usually wins this contest too.
The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas but then again my city put a subway station in such a location and it serves a whopping fifteen hundred people daily - that's one subway car, but at the same time appropriately a thousand fewer cars on the road. Still worth it in my book.
I went to U. of A. and have absolutely never even heard of any student ever needing to go to the Amtrak station, for any reason. Not trying to be rude, but that smells like unthinkingly-applied urbanist ideology — thinking “trains are cool” and working backwards from there.
But sure, people do go to that area for nightlife, so let’s assume you said something like “Hotel Congress” instead of “the Amtrak station”. Still, that’s less than 3km from campus — even if there were no transit options, you could bike, walk, take a rental scooter or an uber.
But if none of those options work, fear not, there is already a streetcar that basically covers exactly your proposed route: https://www.suntran.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Sun-Link-... . So why would it make sense to spend a giant sum on a subway to replicate the streetcar over this tiny area?
> The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas
That’s my point. Your claim that any 500k city could benefit from a subway is wildly over-general. It entirely depends on the type of city.
Main reason why I think subway is superior to anything, including trains riding on the surface, is that it doesn't get in the way of anything.
My current city is subject to a double whammy of a train and river system. The result is of course gridlock, as bridges have limited capacity and not all train crossings could be made into viaducts. Having a single subway line would greatly improve things, but alas - the city is in debt due to having built a football stadium which went way over budget.
That being said to me American cities stretch the definition of cities. If there's no functional difference between a district within city limits and a suburb, why bother with having a distinction? I mean, we have districts of detached houses in my corner of the world, but they're former villages absorbed by cities and are gradually being densified.
Subways are so expensive that we don’t see existing rail/tram lines being buried to reclaim land in some of the most valuable cities in the world.
A "train underground" my or may not have passengers .. the majority tonnage of trains in mine systems is ore transport, many such systems never carry passengers although, of course, some do at shift changes.
For what it’s worth, Tucson does have suburbs, which are even less dense than Tucson (e.g. Oro Valley).
I take it your book isn't an economics book?
eDIT Looks like you are right for the US. In other countries it's apparently much cheaper.
https://www.hsrail.org/blog/why-transit-projects-cost-more-i...
> For example, the Purple Line in Los Angeles cost $800 million per mile. By international standards, the New York price tag is stratospheric: A project in Madrid cost $320 million per mile, and one in Paris cost just $160 million per mile.
[0] Taken for a Ride - The U.S. History of the Assault on Public Transport in the Last Century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4&t=1590s
I think ours could go up to 50 or 60km/h, but the density of stations (can’t leave any blocks behind!), station dwell times and time for one transfer puts it at equal time to cycling for me in Toronto.
And my cycling route isn’t a more direct route (cuz our surface routes are largely a grid and we just replicated it underground instead of something more synergizing like a giant X).
A fun hobby of mine is to open up Paris on google maps and compare the cycling and transit times in their daytime between arbitrary points and cycling often wins. Theyre drunk on station density so you’re always close to one, but it means a lot of stopping.
Moreover, with self driving electric cars, cities will see many of the benefits at far lower cost.
This is the same information visually expressed in a grid chart from 1983 by Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information). While the method can't scale the same way it feels like a more creative approach :
https://www.edwardtufte.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/VDQI-...
This doesn't detract from my enjoyment the site, but for trip planning I'm a little skeptical of the results around the edges, especially when I'm assuming multiple transfers would be required (e.g., Local -> Express -> Express -> Local).
With a caveat this was over 10 years ago (~2012-2013), and train frequencies may have changed:
I used to live pretty far up on the upper west side, and took the 1 train from the 103rd street station daily. My weekday route was 1 -> 2/3 -> 7 into midtown. The 20 minute radius is accurate at peak times, when it only takes 2-3 minutes to catch a transfer. However, the website "about" makes an assumption this is for noon on a weekday. I don't think I ever made it to Brooklyn in under 40 minutes.
But anyone knows that 14th street is much more convenient because it's triply serviced by the 1,2,3 with 2,3 being express trains. 18th street is serviced by one train the runs locally. This ignores that you could easily switch to the L, A/C/E, F/M with a short walk.
Still, a cool visualization to show the power of mass transit, and even compare relatively between lines.
I couldn't figure that out. I remember when I was in NY those trains really moved.
That's likely why 18th and 14th street are so similar: It only takes a minute or two to get from 18th st -> 14th st.
I got screwed yesterday waiting 23 minutes for an F when normally I'd 5 mins or less.
Photos pose a huge challenge because my friends (fellow theme park nuts) can pick out the smallest details in every park -- even the color of pavement and themed lighting fixtures! I'm having fun thinking of what adaptations to make.
Agreed that this product would be better as a game design framework rather than a ready-to-play game in any geo (and tbh, would be a better fit for what Jet Lag is all about: people designing games for themselves to play!)
I'm not a theme park nut but that seemed like a fun way to play the game (actually I was thinking Universal might work better but I wasn't sure).
Definitely share if come up with something good.
https://stewartmader.com/wp-content/uploads/Subway-NY-NJ-sca...
There was also once a proposal to have the 7 train go out to Seacaucus Junction, which would be huge for accessing the East Side for NJers.
It takes 27 rather than 15 minutes to Paddington, but it's also half the price of the Heathrow Express.
It's the purple edged line: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-rail-and-tube-services-map...
From Newark I think it's a bus to a train station, then a train to NY Penn.
The "default" way to get from Heathrow/Gatwick/Stansted to London is a train from the terminal to the centre, typically multiple options.
The default way in the US is taxi. Massively inefficient, but a lot of people make a lot of money from it. Why have a plane load of people on a single train costing $5k, when you can have 200 taxis costing $20k, generating 4 times the GDP.
They share multiple exchanges.
Crossing state lines causes regulations to triple (new state, and federal), so this is what we have.
There are trains that go to New Jersey - the PATH trains, as well as NJtransit commuter trains that leave from Penn Station.
Ie. a route with 4 stops and a travel speed of 100 mph.
The finances of railways actually get better with faster trains - because the sooner you can get the person to their destination, the quicker you can get that train serving another passenger.
It's definitely under capacity by that metric.
https://www.wnyc.org/story/subway-ridership-hits-65-year-hig...
The only issue is that then it arguably had a much larger tax base than it does now to fund it.
I mean when were these built, a 100 years ago? Surely there's room for improvement.
Because building a subway in New York City costs $4 billion per mile.
"The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down"
https://www.villagevoice.com/the-trains-are-slower-because-t...
Similarly there's a top speed of 79mph on the rest of the country on most passenger rail since the Naperville Train Disaster of 1946
It's the blue+yellow line which goes off the east side: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-rail-and-tube-services-map...
I don't think that's unusual for very large cities with high speed trains. The longest-distance trains probably only stop at one station in each city, but medium-distance trains can stop at multiple.
I've never come across a metro train travelling that fast though. The cost of building the line to support those speeds would be tremendous for a small difference in journey time.
[1] https://www.bart.gov/news/fun/speedrun
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o9JGsamQF0
We really need the Interborough Express (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express) 50 years ago.
I particularly liked the multimodal comparison feature. It lets you answer questions like "where does the bus help me get to faster than the subway?" (Answer: basically nowhere.)
This is super cool, and I don't want the following statement to be taken as a criticism, because it's an unrealistic expectation: I do not rely on estimates like this until they are ground-truthed.
From any subway station, you can reach, in forty minutes, a large swath of the subway system and its small vicinity.
Does this only visualize NYC, or does it also work elsewhere?
Ex: The A in general goes express from 125th to 59th st without any stops. Therefore, one would think those stations should be sort of disconnected from each other (sort of islands in the the graph), but the data as presented shows them with a simple gradual extension of time.
makes me wonder about its accuracy in general.
Click on Howard beach (JFK Airport), then on Broad Channel. The times are not updated.
If it isn’t that frequent, then I am going to opt for a personal car every chance I can. Using only the subway in Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn is convenient, but as you stray further, it starts getting tedious.
Which is not only possible, but quite feasible. Upgrading to provide six-minute service 24/7 would only require a one-time investment of $300M, because it is projected to raise enough revenue to pay for itself in the long term.
Unfortunately the current governor is trying to cut transit funding again with her most recent budget proposal, so that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.
A big part of that is because the MTA has been starved of funding for fifteen years now, to the point where they've had to substitute capital funds for operating funds in an effort to keep the lights on. Maintenance becomes more expensive when it's perpetually deferred - and it just became even more expensive because Hochul's inexplicable last-minute flop in June caused S&P to downgrade the MTA's credit rating, which means all future bonded capital projects will have to waste even more money on higher interest payments.
> (ie: like their original proposal for a 15 month closure of the L line).
That closure was intended to fix damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, and to bolster the tunnels against future climate disasters. The decision to forego the full maintenance (made unilaterally by then-Governor Cuomo as a political move) just kicked the can down the road.
Byford quit because of Andrew Cuomo, the then-governor, not because of bureaucracy within the MTA. This was widely reported even before his resignation was official, but was confirmed explicitly later on[0].
> To use a transit analogy, Byford fled the MTA because he felt like he had been tied to the tracks while a train driven by Andrew Cuomo cut his legs off, Kramer reported
Which is my point: the governing authorities make political decisions to starve the MTA of funding or cancel capital projects at the last minute, which harms the MTA in the long run and creates many of the problems that people end up blaming the MTA for.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/exclusive-andy-byford-m...
The constraints lead to completely opposite designs, which is why only very few, very dense cities in the world have convenient public transit, and they also happen to be inconvenient for personal cars.
From a quick search, there are also lines in Paris and Moscow with similar frequency.
They just got permission to go from 22 to 26 trams per hour at peak times. I’m thinking that by the time it gets metro-ified it’ll just be a continuous procession.
But people do love car travel, regardless of the problems. I have a buddy who would nearly always opt for Uber, even at times when traffic made it slower than the subway.
Unless we're also considering Staten Island, which few do :)