Why It's So Hard to Get From Brooklyn to Queens
m.theatlanticcities.com
m.theatlanticcities.com
On the contrary, Hoboken - where I now live - has a wealth of options to commute into both midtown and downtown NYC. Within a few blocks of my apartment: a subway trip of less than 20 mins to either Wall Street or 32nd (Midtown); ferry (a very pleasant 40 min trip to my office in the 40s); bus about 30 mins to midtown depending upon traffic. I love the ferry - it is the least efficient and most expensive option. I take it about 30% of the time to enjoy the river in the morning or evening.
This kind of access to NYC has made Hoboken (and downtown Jersey City) a much more desirable location than other small cities in the area. And I have more options than many of my colleagues in Brooklyn or Queens - and a quicker commute than some colleagues in the Upper West side of Manhattan.
Go a few miles further into NJ and commuting becomes a mess. The first time I googlemapped our new datacenter in the Meadowlands of NJ - I was pleasantly surprised that it was ~5 miles from NYC office and roughly the same from my Hoboken apartment. And ~1 mile from a transit stop.
Thought I could ride my bike but the trip is through MadMax NJ wasteland, unmaintained roads on which semis rule and on which there are no sidewalks. I am not brave enough. Even the wildlife is scary - a giant groundhog grumpily rules the front gate area of the datacenter. And those 8 foot tall reeds are everywhere - I can just imagine full of rats and albino sewer alligators of immense size. I take a $15 cab from the nearest light rail stop.
Too bad really because Hoboken and JC and e.g. Boruem Hill or Astoria have a lot in common.
I used to live in Greenpoint too! I lived close to the Bedford Ave station. From there, it only took 10 minutes (5 stops on the L) to get to the 14 St station.
I guess you lived closer to the Greenpoint Ave station?
It's ironic because now all the rich people want to bury his highways underground.
Robert Moses is a great example of the problems of unchecked power and hubris, even if ostensibly well-intentioned. But he absolutely democratized Long Island, which was an idyllic enclave of gigantic estates and private beaches before he built the LIE, Northern and Southern State Parkways, Jones Beach, etc.
He pissed off a lot of rich people in doing this.
http://m.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2013/06/be-careful-ho...
That said, the changes in transit almost definitely had an impact, and i would guess that the two phenomena had a sympathetic effect on each other.
(a) GM is not in the business of owning street car lines; (b) GM spent considerable money to buy out the street car lines, nevertheless.
If the street car lines were on their way out anyways why did GM spend so much money on something very much out of their usual line business? It may not be true that GM was the sole reason streetcars went away there may have been other factors, but it is hard to deny that GM played a role and a very significant role as they were the party that did the actual physical destruction.
And, by the way, the only reason buses seemed cheaper at the time was subsidies. Street cars had to pay for the building and upkeep of their rails, while buses used the streets, and the city paid for upkeep of the streets. One usually does not consider the damage buses do on the streets, but it is pretty significant because heavy vehicles do disproportionate amount of damage to asphalt. When all costs are added up, light rail is usually much more efficient than buses and that is before you even consider environmental costs.
It is quite possible that as citizens started worrying over their tax bills they would require bus companies to pay for the use of city streets. Interstate truckers, for example, are taxed for use of the highways. In that case, street cars would again become cheaper to operate than buses.
It was also one of the first movies to combine significant CGI with real-world interaction.
The was no CGI in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It was all traditional animation, hand-drawn on celluloid sheets.
It wouldn't be until Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park that CGI really broke through as a technique that could be used in conjunction with live-action.
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-r...
Also, there is a certain segment of the population that fights denser development that would encourage transit improvements. I don't really understand why such a person would live in Hollywood, for example.
Walkscore.com gives Hollywood a Walk Score of 97, which is described as a "Walker's Paradise" which means that daily errands do not require a car, or it gives it an 87, which means most daily errands do not require a car. (It gives different scores depending on how you search for it--I think the 97 is if it centers the map on Santa Monica Boulevard, and the 87 if it centers it farther north).
So maybe you find people living in Hollywood who are not worried about transit improvements because their neighborhood is fine without transit?
I'm not familiar with Walkscore.com, but somehow I wonder if they base any of the score on ease of commuting to work.
While Hollywood does have the metro and is largely walkable, other vast areas of it are used solely as surface parking lots that look like urban blight to most folks. Expanding to the rest of LA, I see the same complaints over and over, as if turning asphalt jungle into homes and businesses were a bad thing.
The point of that paragraph was that if a person wants to live in suburbia they should not reside in the center of a mega-city.
Also worth mentioning is the J, which is mostly a Brooklyn/Queens train.
This issue is near and dear to my heart, I live in Woodside but I have close friends in Park Slope. By car it's a straight shot down the BQE -- 20 - 30 minutes depending on traffic. When all the subways are running, I can take the 7 to the G and it's an hour and fifteen minute trip. But both the 7 and the G have terrible weekend schedules so if I wanted to go right now, I'd have to take the 7 to the Q and go through all of Manhattan and it'd take more like an hour and a half. Or I could take three buses and hope that scheduled connections actually happen.
If the timing works out it can sometimes make sense to take commuter rail from Woodside-Jamaica-Atlantic Terminal though that's more expensive and you have to buy a ticket at the counter because the machines can't figure it out.
As an interim measure they should put a couple of express buses going north south -- one could go from the 74th Jackson Heights station down the BQE to the Lorimer stop on the L and then continue on to the Atlantic Terminal. Another could link the Middle village terminus of the M to the M (and R, F, E) at Queens Blvd with a second stop along the 7. The long term solution is more lines. We should be doing that instead of spending billions on silly prestige projects like the new Penn Station they want to build.
Kramer: Ok, you can take the B or the F and switch for the N at Broadway Lafayette, or you can go over the bridge to DeKalb and catch the Q to Atlantic Avenue, then switch to the IRT 2, 3, 4 or 5.
But don't get on the G. See, that's very tempting, but you'll wind up on Smith and 9th, then you've got to get on the R.
Elaine: ... Couldn't he just take the D straight to Coney Island?
Kramer: Well. Yeah.
1. Why were privately owned mass transit systems the norm in the first half of the 20th century, and why is that now considered "impossible" today?
2. Why is it OK for government to "monopolize mass transit", which they have done almost everywhere, but a criminal "conspiracy" when four private entities try to do it?
It always puzzles me when people presume that governments or public offices act more virtuously, free from vested interests, agendas, prejudices, etc. I would understand it if governments imported their staff from angels. In reality, they have to hire the same human beings that private corporations hire.
If you're in a situation where you believe a natural monopoly to be inevitable, it's not necessarily flawed reasoning.
I've heard that NY has enough private buses that some areas effectively do have a private mass transit system, but I've no firsthand knowledge.
They're also slightly or definitely illegal.
After the consolidation, it took a major project to provide the modest amount of interconnection we have today, via the Chrystie Street Connection [1], and that only united 2 of the 3 legacy systems. We're still left with bizarre redundancies in some parts of the system and lack of service in others, and two entirely separate systems (known as the A-divsion and B-division) that will likely never be fully consolidated.
Today, as much as I can find plenty to criticize about the system, after many decades of public stewardship, NYC's mass transit system is by far the best of any city I've ever been to.
They call them 'the metro' usually to sound more modern.
I use one twice a week, but it only runs on actual roads for a small part of the journey (Birmingham to Wolverhampton) so it is more of a light railway really. The extension at the Birmingham end will bring the trams back onto main city streets.
When buses get dedicated right-of-way, as in Curitiba they provide similar service levels to subways.
Taking the F train through Manhattan takes over an hour.
This could be wrong, but the stated reason is that drivers don't want fares to Brooklyn (typically lower, and harder to get another fare who wants to go Brooklyn to someplace else for the return trip), and so will refuse the fare if told the destination before you get in the taxi (and apparently they're not allowed to refuse you based on destination once you're inside).
They're not allowed to refuse a destination in the 5 boroughs full stop but if you're not inside the cost of refusing is trivial (just driving away).
http://www.streetsblog.org/2013/10/02/with-no-charges-from-c...
I don't take cabs anymore.
(I live around 145th and Broadway; sometimes I take a cab after going out drinking, which probably means one of the villages, or thereabouts.
However, I've had plenty of cabs mysteriously go "off duty" as they approach me. That's probably a much less risky way to avoid a trip that presumably leads to a less profitable/more dangerous destination statistically, due to my ethnicity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IND_Second_System
While we are at it, let's actually make use of this:
Have you ever wondered why we can't have nice things? :P
Not that that should give us any hope for an expanded subway system.
The tolls on the new Tappen Zee bridge are expected to be $15, and even that might not be enough to fund it after the hole Coumo blew in the transportation budget after deciding to pillage a general fund instead of raising tolls for commercial vehicles last year.
In my earlier comment I mentioned the Rockaway Beach Branch. That right-of-way would require only a bit of cleanup, some maintenance on a few bridges, and switches to connect to the A line and hundred feet of tunnel in Rego Park, and we would have a new subway line in Queens with access to JFK. We are talking maybe a hundred million dollars, assuming competent engineers and contractors are hired -- a fraction of what the MTA has been spending trying to get the Rail Control Center online.
I must be misunderstanding something. Aren't big public works projects a pretty reliable method for achieving this goal?
Could someone explain this to those of us who have never been to New York and whose only knowledge of its subways comes from TV and movies?
The impression I get from subway travel as depicted on TV and in movies is that trains run frequently enough that trips requiring changing trains aren't a big deal. So what's the problem is you have to go to Manhattan then change trains to go to Queens?
https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d83509!2...
30 minutes by car, 1:18 by public transit.
As someone who had no idea how huge New York really is until I visited for my first time, Google Maps shows the center of Queens and center of Brooklyn being a 12.7 mile drive apart. If you have to loop through Manhattan that turns into a nearly 30 mile loop.