Comment by hankcharles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hankcharles | Hacker News Reader

NYC's subway may be much older, but I find it much more effective. Something Beijing lacks are express lines. If you need to travel the length of Manhattan in the middle of a workday, you can easily jump on 2,3,A, or D and get there quite quick. It is not the same in Beijing. Traffic gets terrible and trains are no faster because there are no express lines. traveling to different parts of the city during the day is a major undertaking no matter who you are.

Where Jing-Jin-Ji really excels (and the New York Area really struggles) is in regional train travel. The regional high speed rail connecting Beijing to Tianjin; Shanghai to Hangzhou, or Suzhou is affordable, frequent, and quick. Affordable: last time I was there a one way ride was about $6 Frequent: they run at least every hour, typically every 1/2 hour. Quick: Trips between Cities like Beijing and Tianjin or Shanghai and Suzhou are about 30-40 minutes, and more important use stations in downtown locations.

I don't know if there are any economic impact studies done on this, but the effect to me seems pretty profound. Not long ago, It would be a full day trip to visit Beijing from Tianjin if you are fortunate enough to have a car, and almost impossible to do in a day otherwise. Now it is almost thoughtless to go between the two.

The express lines are a known problem and Beijing is starting to build them (the first two will be line 17 and 19). The difference is in NYC the express lines and the regular lines run side by side, while the future express lines in Beijing will be individually build and won't necessarily run parallel to any existing lines.

The reason of the difference I think is the method of building tunnels. The NYC subway system is build long time ago, when cut and cover is acceptable. The width of the tunnel thus can be very wide, especially considering cost. Make the tunnel twice as wide may only cost less than 50% more (I'm guessing the number). Modern tunnels are mostly built using TBM, in which case the cost of making the tunnel twice wider may cost more than 100% because of the affects of multiple TBM working side by side may be hard to predict and hard to coordinate. So in this case it may be better to just build a regular line first, and than build a express line in a different route.

I'm not a civil engineer, so my reasoning may be completely wrong.

That's really interesting to know the reason effecting size of tunnels.

And for those who don't know TBM - tunnel boring machine

> "Something Beijing lacks are express lines."

Honestly, if I had to come up with just one innovation that has shaped NYC the most, it has to be the 4-track subway. It not only gets you around faster but makes the system enormously more resilient to outages and anomalies. The fact that the subways are 4-track has shaped Manhattan and the outer boroughs in amazing ways.

All the more disappointing all the new construction will be traditional 2-track :(

I think it's also what the article wants to say in the end. Speed overcomes distance, and reasonably structured public transport solves most connection problems. I'd agree, also having the experience of how connected Hangzhou and Shanghai are thanks to the fast trains (and busses, if the train is full)

How much do you actually take NY area commuter rail or Bos-NY-Wash corridor trains? It sounds comparable to what you describe.

I just did a quick search on Amtrak - NYC-BOS is at least $100, and takes around 4 hours. It's a similar story going to DC ($80-$250, 3-4h).

Boston is almost 3 times as far from NY as Beijing is from Tianjin. Trenton, on the other hand, can be gotten to in under an hour and for $40. I just did a quick search and found that the Beijing-Tianjin fare is actually about $15, not $6.

So it does seem on paper that China has Amtrak beat by an economic factor of 2-3x, but this is also before you factor in local purchasing parity and so on.

Let's at least compare apples to apples, though.

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