Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

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> Commuters in the Philadelphia area are now set to lose access to 50 bus routes, 66 rail stations, five regional rail lines and Sports Express trains. Service will be cut by 20% starting August 24, with a further 25% reduction on January 1, 2026. In September, a full hiring freeze will go into effect and fares will rise to $2.90 from $2.50.

> The downsizing is a stark illustration of the fiscal reckoning that mass transit systems in some of the nation’s major cities are facing as they deal with a collective $6 billion funding shortfall. Agencies in Chicago, Boston and San Francisco have been scrambling to raise funds for their operations before the start of the next fiscal year on July 1.

It does seem right that the article refers to a "death spiral" here. Once transit becomes insufficient to get from place to place you stop using it and pivot to cars, and then there's even less justification for funding the transit system.

I wonder if American society will ever come up with a solution for this since the problem is so widespread. More cars on the road doesn't seem sustainable, traffic is already really bad in many places.

Living without a car is much easier when the places that are lived are less car-focused. Walkability would also improve overall health because people would be burning 500-1000 more calories a day just from moving about more regularly, and it could help the obesity epidemic.

That requires transitioning from the suburb layout style we use to increase places that can be gone that are walkable, and that requires more car-hostile, human-safe places… the transitional stages are very, very unpleasant for all involved, like growing one’s hair out and struggling until you can get your hair in a ponytail or braids.

    That requires transitioning from the suburb layout style we use

That sounds good in the abstract, but this is a major metro area. You physically cannot cram all of the population and economic activity from the suburbs (major pharma companies, etc) into the city limits.

Even if you could -- like if you could just fire up a time machine and move stuff around like a Sim City hacked save game editor -- you'd have a very large condensed urban area (comparable to NYC proper) that would still require robust public transport.

You want to link adjacent population/economic centers with affordable transportation.

A "pivot to cars" might be feasible in a small city but in a larger city there are just so many cars you can handle. Robert Moses's plans to make it easy to drive from Queens to New Jersey would have required bulldozing a lot of midtown.

In a place like Tompkins County which has good bus service threatened by management problems you could have a "death spiral" that only affects transit but for Philly, NYC or Washington it would be a "death spiral" for the whole city.

I strongly support public transportation (specifically, rail), but:

> I wonder if American society will ever come up with a solution for this since the problem is so widespread.

I think the answer will be something having to do with self-driving cars.

If you look at companies like Glydways, they're starting to provide transit-like services to governments.

The reason I think self-driving cars will perform better in the USA is that it is high in OpEx, but low in CapEx, which I think translates better to how Americans fund things (immediate results, no big investment that can unravel)

The "self driving cars" are the future prediction is probably correct, but it makes me so very sad. A self driving centric city is still a car centric city, and it's not really a city. It's just a sprawling space with moving adult strollers.

The optimist in me says there will be less parking which opens up land for housing and 3rd spaces. I also think that the self driving cars will eventually create self driving private bus lanes. And then cities will probably realize they can just build a permanent line there.

One interesting thought experiment to do: what happens if private car ownership went away tomorrow and everyone took Waymos instead? Let's assume there's enough waymos to handle the load. It would be mayhem. There would be waymo depots everywhere and there would be an outbound traffic spike from the depots on their way to pick people up in the morning. It's simply not scalable unless you shared routes. So I don't think car ownership is going away. I think people will own waymos. At that point you might as well buy 5 waymos so that each kid can be "independent."

I'm optimistic, but the future of the American city is grim (with some outliers who are embracing urbanism)

I agree, but based on my daily encounters with Waymos in San Francisco, they leave me far more optimistic than human drivers. They yield to people in crosswalks, they don't honk and create unnecessary noise because they're having an emotional reaction to something they can't control (like a person jaywalking). They don't get drunk and smash into things.

And biggest of all, they don't take up a ton of public space for parking. Yes, they do require depots, but they don't require the continued existence of things like minimum parking ratio laws.

Self-driving cars only look like high OpEx/low CapEx because there are a trivial number of them on the roads. At scale, they require vast investment in road infrastructure to manage congestion. Adding many more vehicles to roads that are already congested will not work.

So in practice, they will be high OpEx/high CapEx. Which makes sense in a country fully captured by Capital.

Unless autonomous cars are accompanied by step-function changes in the ability to build new roads cheaply, they are not the answer.

America has and likes roads, so the marginal capex here is low.

Half of the country lives in suburbs and that's not going to change overnight. So roads are an unfortunate reality of keeping America functional.

Self-driving cars should enable higher throughput on existing roads, though, because they don't gawk at accidents and potentially could drive in denser formations with less separation.

This isn't about the suburbs, where by and large people don't take transit today. Shutting down transit entirely wouldn't affect most suburbanites directly. But when folks talk about transit, they generally are not trying to tell suburbanites or rural residents to live differently. They should keep their cars and drive or let self-driving get them around.

But places where people take transit are a different animal. These places are characterized by higher density and higher levels of road congestion.

> Self-driving cars should enable higher throughput on existing roads

Yes, in the suburbs and exurbs. A gridlocked highway in a city does not have a much higher throughput possible; cars are generally tightly packed and/or stopped.

Remember that for all the gawkers at an accident on one side of the highway, there are also drivers on the other side of the road who are physically blocked by the accident. Autonomy does not help this either, for medium-term penetration levels of autonomous vehicles. (Making the great assumption that at near 100% penetration, accidents could be nearly eliminated.)

I think the suburban angle does matter because the general life cycle of a suburb is that they start rich because they have 0 maintenance costs, but after 20-30 years require money to pay for road + sewer + water maintenance.

So they start with a massive budget surplus which creates well-funded schools that attract rich people. But after 30 years, they cannibalize education to fix potholes. And the socio-economic landscape changes to reflect this.

We're starting to hit a lot of suburbs in the USA around that 30 year mark, and they're attracting progressively lower income residents for whom transportation costs become an increasingly important factor in their home buying decisions.

Just thinking out loud here, but the Third World also works like that. (High OpEx, low CapEx.)

America makes more sense if you think of it as a developing country that happens to be rich.

Doesn't that get balanced by the fact that it will take forever to get places in cars, if everyone starts using them instead of public transit?

Maybe in New York City, during rush hour, it takes longer to get somewhere by car than it does using public transportation (I don't know); but, that's usually not the case. When I lived in Arlington, VA with regional and county buses, as well as a subway, waling and public transportation took over an hour to get to work in Washington, D.C. By car, it was maybe 20 minutes.(I biked to work, which took longer than driving, since I had to take a less direct route.)

Now, I work from home and I'm a 20 minute drive from the office; but, public transportation is a two-hour trip, one way. (Either 1:55 or 2:05, depending on the bus.)

I honestly do not think I've ever heard someone say that taking mass transpo is faster. Even if it does take "forever" in a car, people do not mind sitting in their car "forever" compared to sitting with strangers "forever"

Obviously a very different view, but public transport in London (UK) is very much seen as faster than driving. The only reason someone would choose to drive is if they needed to transport something difficult to take on public transport.

Do other cities not consider buses as part of public transport? Are we limiting our discussion to trains/subway?

It's called "rapid transit". That's exactly what the "rapid" part means - faster than a car.

There are very few of these in the US. Chicago El, BART, but I'm unsure if there are any others.

Maybe I'm conflating my town's DART--Dallas Area Rapid Transit--with other cities' rapid transit, as DART includes buses which use the same city streets as cars, only the cars don't have to make stops at the bus stops like the "rapid transit" buses (which is their entire point of being).

The DART train stations are few and far apart that they are really only useful for getting to/from the outskirts into town. For me to drive to my local rail station is roughly the same distance/time as to just drive downtown.

Boston MBTA, NYC subway, LA metro, DC metro. Atlanta MARTA.

You definitely hear this regularly discussed in NYC, where for many corridors transit is dramatically faster than driving.

Almost all.

In Seattle proper and anywhere its transit is good, transit and walking are definitely preferable to cars.

The solution is to stop subsidizing cars. We build roads for cars without a strong link to usage to charges outside of some minor gas taxes.

Link the cost of driving on a road to usage based on the weight of vehicle (proxy for the damage it causes) and this would be an entirely different equation.

And what a proxy it is. The damage caused to pavement by a vehicle's axle load is proportional to the quartic of its axle load. A 2 ton car actually causes roughly 2^4 = 16 times more damage than a 1 ton car of equivalent make does.

The savage exponential here really puts into light one reason why freight trains continue to be such important logistical infrastructure.

The history of the american road infrastructure was really pushed early on as a military requirement, to be able to move troops, equipment everywhere, even land planes on roads if necessary. Military purposes can be the 'undeniable' justification for almost anything.

Death spiral is unfortunately a very correct term for this. I really can't express how different the conditions of public transit in SF and Philly are. Riding the L in Philly is unbelievably sketchy at night (passes through K&A) and I would not ride it alone if I were a woman. This is one of the main intra-city commuter rail lines in Philly. At this point, there are so few viable options that I can't really recommend public transit in Philly to anyone. Compare that to SF, where I literally take public transit everywhere, every day.

The only solution to traffic I can see happening here realistically is a sudden dramatic increase to gas prices.

As for public transit I can't imagine a solution. It probably won't ever be solved and thinking about such things will probably be very far from everyone's minds if the gas thing happens.

I know it's not as futuristic as self driving cars or VR living but that's my honest assessment.

The solution is to get past the idea that public transit needs to be profitable, along with any other public or government service. The idea is just asinine.

Especially since we don't make any assumption that roads are profitable. It is just insane. Cars can lose as much money as it takes but god forbid a train lose 5%.

Yes. Very few profitable roads.

Not true. In the early 20th century, the American automobile industry fought aggressively to divert public funding away from public transit and towards building roads, precisely because it increased their profit margins.

That’s a profitable middleman due to roads, not a profitable road.

The US's obsession with profit via public service -and everything else- is asinine and embarrassing.

The solution is obvious as it is practiced in the rest of the world. Motorcycles.

I love motorcycles. Alas, winter is a thing in Pennsylvania. And it frequently rains in the prime riding season.

True.

The person who downvoted me has obviously never visited the continent of Asia

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