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Comment by amanda99 | Hacker News Reader

No, it seems to assume changing trains is instantaneous and trains are waiting for you.

Which is why people prefer personal cars whenever possible. Mass transit has to operate at 5 minute intervals (so that you are waiting at most 10 to 15 minutes in the event of a missed connection).

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.

> Mass transit has to operate at 5 minute intervals (so that you are waiting at most 10 to 15 minutes in the event of a missed connection).

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.

I'm not convinced it'd pay for itself since maintenance still needs to be done so it's not really 6 minutes 24/7. The 7 train in theory runs on weekends and in theory runs fairly often. In practice it's down every other weekend for I think 5+ years now. The MTA does not have a good track record of timely maintenance and also seems to not care much about long term downtime (ie: like their original proposal for a 15 month closure of the L line).

> The MTA does not have a good track record of timely maintenance

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.

Sure. My point is that cannot magically assume all of that will go away in the future when making forecasts on the impact of changes.

You're conveniently forgetting out the nuance of the MTA. You do recall that the top person in the world for Transit quit because of the bureaucracy there, right?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43561378

> You're conveniently forgetting out the nuance of the MTA. You do recall that the top person in the world for Transit quit because of the bureaucracy there, right?

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...

I live in Budapest and would definitely not prefer a personal car. Public transport is super convenient, cheap and fast here, and I don't need to worry about parking, fuel, congestion or maintenance.

Mass transit and personal cars aren't necessarily mutually exclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

They are mutually exclusive in the US because space for cars (current US sized cars) means everything is farther apart, which means the public transit is not economical, or lots of walking. And walking is more dangerous for pedestrians due to inattentive drivers and large arterial roads with wide crossings.

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.

Plenty of metros run at 5 minute frequencies or less. Some _trams_ do, at peak times.

The highest frequency subway lines do 3 mins at peak, which is amazing.

The Victoria Line in London has a 100 second interval, although apparently in practise it's more frequent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ0zk4MWCQY

From a quick search, there are also lines in Paris and Moscow with similar frequency.

There’s a tram line in Dublin which hits every three minutes at peak times, which is just bonkers (it’s not fully segregated, so if there’s any traffic problem at all then about four of them end up piled up one behind the other). Its most busy section was meant to be converted to metro, but due to planning permission nonsense it will just continue to be one of the world’s busiest tram lines until at least 2040 (it is actually higher peak time capacity than many metro lines at this point).

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.

Trams running every two to three minutes on a few central sections is nothing out of the ordinary in a number of tram systems.

In a car, you still need to park, which in NYC might take 20 mins and still leave you blocks from your destination. The other difference is what you can do with your travel time. While driving, you're limited to passive activities. Cabs and ride share solve this, for a price.

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.

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