22 ms·

The Immobile Masses: Why Traffic Is Awful and Public Transit Is Worse

169 points by sageabilly 11y ago

dkopi 11y ago
The best method of transit is walking. A lot of the problems with traffic and public transport are solved when we invest in walk-able cities. Cities where you can live close enough to work to walk there, close enough to your friends, close enough to the grocery store, your neighborhood bar or your kid's school. No discussion of Mass transit or "giving up your car" is completely without discussing the walk-ability of cities.
- api 11y ago
  Tangent but: I live in SoCal, and I can't get my head around the car culture mentality. Of all the places that should be walkable, one that is 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the entire year should rank very high on the list. But nooo.... the walkable cities are in places that get run over by a glacier every six months. Go figure.
  - supergeek133 11y ago
    Live in downtown Minneapolis, can confirm walk-ability and presence of seasonal glacier.
  - sologoub 11y ago
    Coastal areas are becoming more and more walkable... Minus the lack of density - Santa Monica is the prime example, ask people about walkability and everyone is excited, then talk about making it happen for more people and you get crucified. In the valleys, walkability runs into the heat problems in the summer. Walking in 100F+ is no fun and can be dangerous to some.
    - maxxxxx 11y ago
      Even in inland CA you have perfect walking weather for around 9 months a year. It's more of a cultural thing in my opnion.
      - sologoub 11y ago
        I think you are right. There definitely is a very strong desire still for wider spaces, bigger yards, etc. As the result, walking in most of inland sprawl take a lot more time and effort.
  - greggman 11y ago
    Because it's large? I'm all for public transportation and LA used to have the best in the world 80 years ago. But, a large city as large as LA is never really going to be completely walkable unless everyone always moves close to their job. That would mean moving away from friends and family because of a job change rather than just commuting a little further. I suspect most people would chose to stay near their friends and family rather than move closer to their job. You can compare Tokyo which is large like LA but which has excellent mass transit and yet the average commute is 80 minutes each way. Why? People can't or won't uproot their families for new jobs. Also housing close to a job is probably also often either too expensive (downtown) or undesirable (industrial area).
    - jdmichal 11y ago
      Also, the popularization of two-income households complicates this quite a bit. How often do you see partners that work near each other?
    - api 11y ago
      New York is larger than LA and has very good transit.
  - justizin 11y ago
    I grew up in South Texas. Ain't nobody got time for walkin' more than a block in 100+F heat and people end up spending more than their mortgage payment on electricity and A/C repair because the heat will literally kill you.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    A winter ice blanket makes driving less desirable. Pleasant weather makes walking more desirable. This implies that walking has a hard limit on desirability, which is easily topped by driving, even with the worst traffic. You have to make driving worse to tip the preference toward walking, even if the conditions simultaneously make walking less desirable. If driving 5 miles is likely to put your car in a ditch, you may opt for a 200m walk, which may only plant your ass on the concrete once or twice. If you have to shovel snow for 20 minutes to drive anywhere at all, you may prefer to just pull on some wellies and hoof it through the drifts. If every mile you drive is rusting away your vehicle's underbody due to road salt, you may prefer to wear away your boot soles instead. If you could wave a magic wand to install a roof over ever road and highway, the residents would squeal with glee, toss out their tire chains, shovels, and boots, and get right back into their cars.
    - dsfyu404ed 11y ago
      In places where there's actual winter people adjust to it. Snow in Atlanta is something people perceive as a PITA whereas in Augusta (Maine) it's perceived as no more inconvenient than rain.
      - logfromblammo 11y ago
        Never did I ever adjust enough to stop bitching about shoveling driveways or scraping windshields or hitting patches of black ice or having the plow throw snow back onto your driveway so you have to shovel it again. Snow always has been, and always will be, more inconvenient than rain. Except freezing rain. That stuff is the worst.
      - douche 11y ago
        In Maine, people bitch when it isn't cold and snowy enough. This winter was brutal for the ice fishers, snowmobilers, and skiers.
        auntienomen 11y ago
        "In Maine, people bitch when it isn't cold and snowy enough." That's Stockholm Syndrome, is what that is.
  - mooreds 11y ago
    Because it is new. Maybe not new in age, but new in being a big city. Founded in 1800s, became second biggest city in 1980, third biggest in 1960, fourth in 1950: http://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles http://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-l... Big cities on the east coast are older, so didn't develop in the age of the automobile and have to conform to its needs. Except cities in the SE, which again, grew due to modern appliances like the air conditioner.
  - cylinder 11y ago
    LA was built by people who were escaping the stressful dense urban life of the east coast. Not hard to understand why, when they arrived at empty land by the ocean with perfect weather, they didn't resolve to build a bunch of apartment towers.
    - refurb 11y ago
      This is a great point. Why do so many people in the US live on large lots with huge houses in the suburbs? Because we can.
  - Aloha 11y ago
    SoCal was never walkable beyond a local neighborhood - if you look at population density and where the freeways are, they all parallel former lines of the Pacific Electric Interurban system. [1][2] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric [2] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Los_Angeles_Pacific_Electric_Railways_%28Red_Cars%29.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Los_Ange...
- whorleater 11y ago
  There's a fairly low ceiling in terms of walkability within cities though. Once you exceed a certain distance, no amount of walkability is going to convince people to walk, and rent/housing prices within the walking distance tend to be much higher than those outside, thus exacerbating the issue of public transportation.
  - dkopi 11y ago
    If you're able to walk for 95% of your needs, public transit, taxis, uber and zipcars solve the other 5%. If you're only able to walk for 5% of your needs, public transit isn't going to help you much. Rent/Housing does indeed cost more in walk-able areas. That's a great signal telling us that there's a lot of demand for walk-able neighborhoods, and urban planning should allow a lot more of them.
    - thatfrenchguy 11y ago
      Well going to work is probably 90% of your moving needs. So if you live 45 minutes by train from where you're working and there is an actual train there, public transit helps you a lot.
      - nostrebored 11y ago
        That's a woefully inaccurate representation of my life and the life of my friends. Do more things.
- pc86 11y ago
  Not everyone wants to live downtown, though. In fact, most people don't. More often than not schools in suburbs and rural areas are head and shoulders above their urban counterparts. I used to live in a downtown area and it was nice being able to walk 6 blocks to work. But I would never want to raise a family in an apartment or with those terrible schools.
  - wnevets 11y ago
    >More often than not schools in suburbs and rural areas are head and shoulders above their urban counterparts. a school in a rural area isn't automatically better than a school in an urban area because its rural.
    - afutd 11y ago
      What you are missing is that "good schools" doesn't actually mean good schools. It's a dog whistle.
      - pc86 11y ago
        When I say "good schools" I mean "good schools." If you want to call me a racist why not just come out and say it? Or better yet, say something constructive.
        mfringel 11y ago
        Okay. One constructive remark coming up... What's your definition of "good schools"?
        AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        Actually teaching the kids some things. What other definition is there?
        gohrt 11y ago
        "Good schools" mostly means "wealthy students". If rich people move into the cities, and form little neighborhood clusters to exclude poor families, the schools will become more attractive by all standard measures. Now, the trick is that it's much easier to build out segregated wealthy communities in the suburbs, than it is in cities, since tight geography works against the informal segregation of suburban development projects.
- justizin 11y ago
  Unless all cities concurrently advance in this area, this simply becomes a factor that drives home purchase / rental prices up. San Francisco has neighborhoods with a WalkScore of 100, but the baristas and cooks and other laborers in those neighborhoods, including construction workers who build the homes, largely drive and transit in. IMO it basically carries that you worsen the Effective WalkScore of other people's lives, even if they live in neighborhoods that are walkable to desk-sitting professionals, because the wage-paying jobs in those areas (e.g. Oakland / East Bay) doesn't pay as well as the wage-paying jobs in neighboring cities with stronger economies (e.g. SF). This is absolutely happening right now and the reverse impact is that SF's cost of living is creeping over Oakland's and driving the folks who live in Oakland and work in SF to further reaches of the bay as people, giving up on walkable life in SF, try it out in Oakland. Bicycles help this, but I'm here to tell you that nobody has any fucking sympathy that you've chosen a car-free life and it's El Nino and why are you late because your coworker who drives an SUV 100 miles is already here and how is your life possibly harder? Anyway .. it's complex AF. Believing another world is possible is for sure a great first step.
- anexprogrammer 11y ago
  Being a Brit, who walks to the corner shop, or even supermarket if I just need a few bits, I tried walking a few times while in the US. The US makes it hilariously impractical. Pavements (sidewalks) will just randomly stop. Crossing the road is sometimes a crime, depending on state! Even convenience stores are inconveniently far away. You've spread your infrastructure out so wide in some places that walking becomes more like a hike. It's little wonder that you end up driving for anything beyond going next door. :)
  - liveoneggs 11y ago
    going next door will probably get you shot. Just drive.
    - ssully 11y ago
      As a Chicago native who has had a gun flashed at me while walking my dog a block from my house, I wish you were joking.
  - Tepix 11y ago
    Some americans even get in the car to fetch their mail from the mailbox at the road...
    - HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
      Some Americans have driveways 1/2 mile long. And longer...
      - legulere 11y ago
        That's like 800 m, still very walkable
        buckbova 11y ago
        You still have to walk back.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
FreedomToCreate 11y ago
Cities need to prioritize walking, biking and transit. What this means is that, these modes of transportation need to be made safer and faster. Currently walking through a major city is bogged down by the number of intersections you have to wait at. One idea would be to make intersection movement faster for pedestrians and transit during all hours except the morning and evening rush hour, during which vehicle movement should be prioritized to get cars off the roads as quickly as possible.
- pc86 11y ago
  With the exception of areas where it's impossible (NYC) IME the majority of pedestrians and cyclists simply do not care about the crosswalks/laws/etc. Jaywalking is constant as is crossing in the crosswalk against the signal. What I'm saying is outside of structural changes to the roads themselves (like you mention, eliminating some intersections) I don't see much change happening.
  - dublinben 11y ago
    The very concept of jaywalking or dedicated crosswalks is a symptom of the car-first mentality.[0] If pedestrians and cyclists had the right of way as they should, this wouldn't be an issue. [0] http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/1837/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/...
    - douche 11y ago
      Crosswalks are awful. Outside of the ones where there is an actual traffic light, they are always placed in terrible locations. Moreover, they are just about the worst place possible to try to cross a street. I've been doing a lot of walking around the medium sized town I live in the past year, and I've had to get very good at looking away from the road when I want to cross, otherwise vehicles that have a quarter-mile of empty space behind them will come to a stop, and make me feel like I have to rush across, when they could have just kept going, and we would have both been able to go about our business at our leisure.
- 11y ago
pdq 11y ago
The solution in the future will be driverless cars, shared driverless vans, etc. These should improve overall commute times, since there will be fewer accidents and denser transportation. Also people will be able to spend their commute time reading books/news, doing work, watching videos, or other recreation, rather than driving the car.
- darkr 11y ago
  Sure, I mean if you want a WALL-E vision of the future. Personally I'd prefer a Netherlands/Denmark present day kind of future, where people live within 5-10 miles of their place of work and cycle or walk. Less apathetic fat people and psychotic auto-pilots.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    where people live within 5-10 miles of their place of work and cycle or walk. Problem with that idea is if you change jobs, you need to buy a new house. And moving that often can get lame.
    - darkr 11y ago
      Depends on the city I suppose. In London, most tech jobs tend to be clustered within Hammersmith-ish, Soho, and City/Shoreditch, all of which are in cycling distance of East London.
  - continuational 11y ago
    I go by bike from west to east Copenhagen every day, a 25 minute ride, and it's awesome. I wouldn't trade it for any perk.
    - ams6110 11y ago
      What do you do when it's raining or snowing? What do you do when it's hot, can you shower at work?
mrfijal 11y ago
article is written in absolutes (talking about public transit and traffic in general) but happily ignores the fact that there is a world outside of america. maybe looking at places that are better commute-wise than sf despite being a lot poorer would be a start?
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  Of course. Because no one likes to mention that there are countries with far better infrastructure, free education and health care, better quality of life thanks to higher taxes. Anything that suggests higher taxes are necessary seems to get ignored in the US.
massysett 11y ago
This is not at all illuminating and is just a typical advocacy piece for more transit funding. Like most of these pieces, it compares road spending and transit spending as though this is somehow a useful comparison. It isn't. For rail transit systems, spending includes all labor and capital expenses--train operators, cars, electricity, etc. Road spending does not include the enormous capital investment that citizens and businesses spend for motor vehicles. Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road. Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point. To top it off the piece says nothing about "why traffic is awful".
- supergeek133 11y ago
  To your last point, I noticed that too... including that in the title was total clickbait.
- nostromo 11y ago
  Yeah, the article points out that only 20% of our federal and state transit budgets go to transit, implying that it's underfunded. But it lacks the context that only 5% of Americans use transit...
  - goodcanadian 11y ago
    It is a chicken and egg problem: Transit sucks, so no one uses transit. No one uses transit, so funding is sub-optimal. Funding is sub-optimal, so transit sucks. This cycle can be broken by funding transit properly. I have been to plenty of cities where transit was cheap, convenient, and useful. And before someone trots out the density problem, I have been to plenty of places that are far less dense than LA and have far better transit.
    - jim-greer 11y ago
supergeek133 11y ago
I live in Minneapolis, we have the light rail in the downtown area that runs all the way down to the Mall of America and the airport. It also runs to St. Paul. We subsidize it heavily, but it is also an honor system for paying for it (no turnstiles). We also have a pretty decent bus system. Problem is the further away you get from the city center the worse it gets. They've talked about putting in a light rail line to the southwest suburbs at a cost of billions of dollars, meanwhile the core roads don't get additional help and are perpetually bad because of the winter. It's a balancing act, and at some point everyone needs to decide who's lifestyle is more important from a priority perspective IMO. If I decide to live in the suburbs, and commute an hour a day, is a dollar more important for that person? Or the person closer to the city core that wants more mass transit options? Honestly I can go both directions. I currently have a 10 minute commute (by car). But I've also had the 60+ minute commutes for jobs. I also use the light rail to get to the airport pretty frequently. However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work.
- kuschku 11y ago
  > However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work. But that’s possible in cities with working transit. Take Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Tokyo. You can get a bus/train/tram to anywhere from anywhere at any time.
  - supergeek133 11y ago
    I haven't been to any of those cities, so you might be right. Just working in my own frame of reference.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      I worked in Tokyo for a while. If you don't take cabs, you end up doing a fair amount of walking. There are a lot of trains and subways, so there is a limit to how much walking you have to do. Even if your origin and destination were both right next to a subway station, however, you could expect to do a lot of walking underground, since there is a lot of stuff underground in Tokyo around which subways have to be routed. I think walking is great, and frequently I would figure ways to skip a subway line by walking a bit more, but I thought I'd mention this just to give a more accurate impression.
greggman 11y ago
I'd really like to know what the true costs are. Are Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore all massively subsidizing their mass transit? Do they have enough riders that they're profitable? Are they more or less efficient in how the manage them? How about Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Antwerp, Koln, Barcelona, etc... which are all an order of magnitude smaller than the previously mentioned cities but all have pretty good public transportation. These last cities are all on the same order of size as SF. About 1 million people each and yet they have vastly better public transportation than SF
- supergeek133 11y ago
  In some of those areas you're talking about huge population density as well, so it becomes more effective. I live in Minnesota, where suburb living is very popular. We don't have very dense areas of population that a typical transit system would cover.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mike_hearn 11y ago
  London Underground funding info is here: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-are-funded https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-ar... About 40% comes from fares. About 25% is government subsidies. The rest is a mixture of borrowing, advertising/rental income, a central London road tax, and 8% is funding for Crossrail (but this represents pure infrastructure investment so does not affect the steady state). I have to admit, having reviewed the figures, I am a bit surprised and concerned at the level of borrowing involved.
- amit_m 11y ago
  Hong Kong's subway is profitable and is the best subway I've ever ridden. (fast, clean, easy to navigate)
- kalleboo 11y ago
  In Sweden, most public transit agencies cover somewhere around 50% of costs through ticket sales, with the rest being paid by local governments. AFAIK aside from perhaps planning considerations, there aren't really any other hidden subsidies (e.g. while the rail they run trains on may be owned by the public rail agency, they still have to pay usage fees)
pklausler 11y ago
Nearly perfect for me are (1) a city with great light rail, and (2) a Brompton folding bicycle for the first & last miles. I realize that this combination isn't available to all, but it's awesome.
- pnut 11y ago
  Counting the days until my b-spoke Brompton arrives. Folding bicycle is a life changer.
  - CalRobert 11y ago
    Congratulations on a whole new world of convenient transport!
- CalRobert 11y ago
  Bromptons are delightful. For those who aren't able (or keen) to pedal as much they can be made electric as well. I adore mine, and get a smile any time I see another Brompton rider.
louprado 11y ago
To expand upon the specific discussion of the OP, I feel we are witnessing a historical pattern: urban-flight -> under-valued urban real-estate -> then urban renewal and economic opportunity -> influx of homeless and criminals since high-population density is good for both -> then public criticism that the cops are too heavy handed -> cops less likely to enforce + strain on infrastructure and services (like mass transit) + urban unrest due to economic disparity -> urban-flight -> ... If the problem is that the BART is operating beyond capacity, adding capacity might not matter if the population is set to decline for the other reasons stated.
Tiktaalik 11y ago
The declining gas tax problem is going to get worse as electric cars increase in popularity. The solution is comprehensive road pricing, where a larger share of the real costs of road infrastructure and parking infrastructure are borne by the users. The added benefit of correctly pricing driving is that people will make more informed decisions about where they live and how they get to work, that will result in more compact communities and less urban sprawl.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Another option would be pricing by weight. Big trucks currently get giant subsidies from the rest of us, just measuring by how much they damage the roads. Fixing that would probably drive up the costs of many goods that are transported by truck, although it would also probably cause a redistribution of which goods are sold, to favor lighter or more local goods. In any case, it would keep the roads in better condition. On the interstate near where I live, it's often a 10:1 ratio between trucks and cars.
  - douche 11y ago
    This might become more tenable if long-haul trucking gets automated, as it almost certainly will. Take the expense of hiring a human driver out of the equation, and registration costs for semis could be an order of magnitude higher, and still cost less.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    Big trucks do pay a substantial road use tax. I don't know the specifics, but they don't get to drive for the same cost as the passenger cars. On toll roads the trucks pay a lot more too.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      They don't pay 40 times what passenger vehicles pay.
soyiuz 11y ago
Two footnotes on this article: 1. The problems it highlights can be reduced to low tax revenues. Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it. Things like roads and trains cannot (and should not) pay for themselves---they are a public good. The train might be empty at night, but the ability to take a train home prevents drunk driving, for example. One cannot put a monitory value on services like that, they speak to our collective quality of life. The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth. 2. Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is density. We need to value density as it allows for more compact living. Instead, municipalities in places like the Bay Area consistently vote against new construction and against zoning laws that would allow for taller, more densely populated buildings/neighborhoods. The law of supply and demand says increase the supply of housing to make something affordable. This is not some mysterious process: there's simply no political will on the part of existing inhabitants to "devalue" their residences by increasing the supply in the housing market.
- petewailes 11y ago
  I'm assuming you're from the US... The problem isn't a lack of taxes, it's where you guys spend it all.
  - DigitalJack 11y ago
    fully agree with this (US native)
  - cylinder 11y ago
    And when it is spent on infrastructure, the US leads most of the world in being the most expensive place to build public transportation, with projects often taking far longer. I blame corruption, poor governance and deep cultural disdain for organization and order. Don't even get me started on the California decision to build HSR between SF and LA. What a joke that one is.
    - 11y ago
BurningFrog 11y ago
Traffic is awful because road owners aren't charging for access. From an Economics standpoint, congested traffic is the same phenomenon as the old Soviet bread lines. A underpriced good is inaccessible in practice, since supply is way lower than demand at that price. The solution is "Road Pricing", where drivers pay to drive. The price varies depending on what road, time of day etc. Maximum revenue should coincide with maximum throughput, giving everyone (ready to pay) a smooth and fast commute. It also provides incentives to build more roads where they are mostly needed.
- tribe 11y ago
  Isn't this the point of the gas tax? For every mile you drive, you use more gas. The more gas you use, the more you pay. Tracking which roads people are driving on would also require massive infrastructure investment, and have significant privacy implications.
  - choward 11y ago
    The gas tax doesn't take time (or supply and demand) into account. Driving during rush hour should cost a lot more than driving at 3AM on an empty street. Sure, you use more gas sitting in traffic, but it doesn't make that much of a difference.
    - ams6110 11y ago
      Tesla can solve this. They know when and where the car was driven, and each time it's charged, the charging station can interrogate the car and compute the appropriate congestion surcharge.
      - kalleboo 11y ago
        Singapore is now developing a new congestion charge system based on GPS that will have high granularity. We'll see how that works... http://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/default.aspx?scr=yes&keyword=ERP2 http://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/default.aspx?scr=yes&keyword...
trhway 11y ago
Beside everything else, i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here. Thus i have to have a car. In Russia, when i wasn't able to afford car, my cat rode bus, train, subway with me when we had to get him somewhere. Of course, i'd get a car there too the moment i could afford it, yet public transit was a feasible alternative when i didn't have a car.
- rsync 11y ago
  "i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here." Thank God.
  - trhway 11y ago
    it is hard to understand that knee-jerk reaction to animals in US ( personally i think it is rooted in basic Puritan habit of blaming somebody else [government, immigrants, regulations, dogs, ...] for your own problems). I understand that Russia isn't a good example of civilized society. Well, in France you can take your dog or cat into any restaurant, cafe, bar, etc ... pretty much everywhere. The public and personal health situation in France is among the best in the world. Sanitary rules in US prohibiting dogs is just red-herring.
    - Armisael16 11y ago
      I look at it as choosing to ban animals over choosing to ban humans with allergies.
      - trhway 11y ago
        Do you seriously mean that France thus banned humans with allergies? It is false dichotomy. Completely fits pattern of blaming somebody else. To the comment below: "but allowing animals that spread dander everywhere makes the environment hazardous to anyone with serious pet allergies." unfounded BS (sounds very similar to industrial bread producers propaganda 100 years ago about those dirty immigrants touching your bread with their dirty hands in their dirty bakeries). Until it is a sterile OR, the surrounding environment is full of living matter. Dog or cat in a cafe doesn't change the situation. Or do you seriously mean that France doesn't care about such dangerous hazard to people's health?
thatfrenchguy 11y ago
Let's not forget that BART also made bad engineering choices, like non-standard tracks and trains that probably cost a lot of taxpayer money...
- samtho 11y ago
  BART is the only transit system in North America that uses the Indian gauge. The wider gauge also contributes to the noise it generates and the wear on the track around turns.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    Why should the wider gauge do either? Noise: It's just steel wheels rolling on steel rails. Why should the distance between the rails change the amount of noise it generates? Wear on the track: Presuming that the turns aren't too tight a radius (which may be larger for the larger gauge), and the superelevation is correct (which probably has to be larger for the larger gauge), why should wider track mean greater wear on curves?
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  That wasn't an engineering choice, that was a political choice. It went something like this (my memory is a bit vague, some details may be wrong): Southern Pacific Railway had a line up the San Francisco peninsula, and didn't want BART to use it. They were politically somewhat powerful, and opposed BART. BART went with a different track gauge so that their trains could never run on Southern Pacific's tracks, and Southern Pacific withdrew their opposition.
rsync 11y ago
Can we just come out and admit something ? Buses are terrible. They are terrible functionally, they are terrible aesthetically, and they are terrible logistically. In fact, I would go so far as to say that across a broad spectrum of preferences, you would be very hard pressed to find anything worse in the urban, built environment than some big, loud, lumbering, clumsy (and usually) sooty bus bungling about the place. I love good public transit. I love light rail. I love the subway. I will do anything not to ride a bus. I am reminded of that quote from steve jobs about the touchscreen phones and the stylus: "if you see a (bus), they blew it."
- nulltype 11y ago
  Well the reason light rail and subways are so good isn't because they're on rails, but because they get their own track. If you put a bus on its own street, suddenly they're not as bad anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit
  - rsync 11y ago
    I agree that BRT (which I have a lot of experience with)[1][2][3] does make things a bit better. However, the successful BRT I have seen is always in very specialized circumstances, while the proposals I have seen for BRT in (for instance) San Francisco have been so full of weird compromises and bizarre edge cases that I am not optimistic they will make anything better. [1] Hop/Skip/Jump buses in Boulder [2] 16th street mall shuttle in Denver [3] "VelociRFTA" BRT in Aspen/Basalt/Glenwood
    - nulltype 11y ago
      Did they change the Skip? I used to take that and it was just a normal bus in the normal street as far as I recall.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    They're also good because of the commitment involved. You can build around a light rail or a subway stop, safe in the knowledge that it will still be there in ten or twenty years. You can't build around a bus route like that. Ironically, the high expense and lack of flexibility are features, not problems.
merraksh 11y ago
The money that funds mass transit [...] comes from a mix of four sources: [...] On the federal side, most of that money comes from the federal gas tax: 18.4 cents on a gallon of regular gas 24.3 cents on the gallon for diesel, [...] 19 percent going to mass transit. That’s right—mass transit depends on people driving cars for a significant portion of its federal funding. I don't find this counterintuitive: the more people use their car, the more the mass transit system is strengthened and more capable to ease car traffic. Maybe it's far fetched, but it's like tax on cigarettes to finance lung cancer research.
verg 11y ago
Costs are a major part of the problem. US rail construction costs are by far the most expensive in the world [1]. Other countries are able to build rail at costs in the $100-250 million per km range (even in dense cities). The East Side access project in NYC has costs around $4 billion per km. Los Angeles has much better costs in the $400-500 million per km range [2]. Its hard to imagine the US will be able to build much transit at those costs. From 2012[3]: "When asked by transit blogger Benjamin Kabak about its high construction costs, Michael Horodniceanu, president of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital construction division, gave a two-word answer: “work rules.” Citing the example of the city’s revered sandhogs, he said the MTA employs 25 for tunnel-boring machine work that Spain does with nine." [1] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-rail-construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r... [2] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transportation/construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp... [3] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-27/labor-rules-snarl-u-s-commuter-trains http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-27/labor-rules...
- verg 11y ago
  Another good overview from Matthew Yglesias: http://www.vox.com/2014/6/2/5771880/us-mass-transit-construction-costs-are-insanely-high http://www.vox.com/2014/6/2/5771880/us-mass-transit-construc...
- bradleyjg 11y ago
  There's problems on the operations side too. The same agency that is building that East Side Access (LIRR) still does fare collection by sending well compensated employees walking up and down every train to punch paper tickets twice per ride. I don't know if it's an urban legend or not, but I've been told that one of those conductors punching tickets on every train is technically designated and paid as a "fireman" i.e. person responsible for shoveling coal into a boiler because the collective bargaining agreement forbids them from eliminating the position.
CalRobert 11y ago
One of the biggest issues is that we force businesses and housing to have ridiculous amounts of free parking, which means that instead of dense areas where buildings can be next to each other we have a sea of asphalt with a building sprinkled here and there. In central areas these minimums amount to parking welfare for suburbanites. People say to me "but it takes 90 minutes to go 15 miles on transit!!" - the problem isn't that transit should be faster, it's that you shouldn't have to go through 15 miles of primarily asphalt hellscape to get to basic amenities! The core of Dublin is less than two miles across. I used to live in the middle of it and never missed a car. The core of San Diego.. well it's not really a core, and even then it's routine to have to travel several miles for basic errands, even if you live fairly close to downtown. A downtown that is prevernted from growing by parking minimums. Of course, if you ask a potential employer about transit access they look at you like you're from Mars (and, of course, choose to move on to a less hippie-ish applicant)
- cle 11y ago
  Interesting observation, is there some data showing this?
  - bradleyjg 11y ago
    There's a book called "The high cost of free parking" by Donald Shoup that's the bible for this subject, but it is more than 700 pages. One of his popular journalism articles might be a better place to start: http://www.shoupdogg.com/journalism/ http://www.shoupdogg.com/journalism/
  - verg 11y ago
    RE parking minimums: http://graphingparking.com/2013/01/25/residential-parking-requirements/ http://graphingparking.com/2013/01/25/residential-parking-re... A similar issue is street sizes in the US are much larger than in countries with good transit and walkability. Anecdotal, but compare image searches for "American Street" and "Japanese Street". Not only is the driving area of the streets much narrower, on street parking doesn't really exists in Japanese cities. This contributes alot to the walking experience. "japan street" https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+street&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=801&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjgrLPzj9rLAhXGs4MKHeNxBKwQ_AUIBigB https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+street&espv=2&biw=1440... "american street" https://www.google.com/search?q=american+street&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=801&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwicu__4j9rLAhXmloMKHbQBDqgQ_AUIBygC https://www.google.com/search?q=american+street&espv=2&biw=1...
stevewilhelm 11y ago
> In fact, planners and economists call road building “induced demand” because it encourages people to hop into their cars instead of walking or taking mass transit. In the Bay Area, building transit infrastructure is expensive and time consuming. Case in point: a five mile extension including one new train station of an existing BART line costs $890 million and took seven years to build. [1] The resulting extension is expected to increase in ridership by 5000 to 7000 daily trips in the next decade. [2] There are currently 400,000 daily automobile trips from East Bay to and from Santa Clara County. [2] [1] http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx [2] http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx/chronology http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx/chronology
sna1l 11y ago
The fact that we don't have a couple operators instead of a driver for each individual train on BART is beyond me. Look at all the private companies (Magic Bus, etc) that are sprouting up because of how terrible our public transportation is. BART essentially holds a monopoly on our transport. I believe their contract states even during a strike, new drivers have to be trained for 6 months before they are allowed to drive BART trains. There is absolutely no way that it takes 6 months to learn how to drive an AUTOMATED train. There should be public bids submitted from private companies to run on these railways, which would lead to better service and lower costs.
marknutter 11y ago
We created this wonderful thing called the Internet that allows us to work and collaborate with each other from anywhere in the world, yet we all still cling to the silly idea that we need to continue to expand and repair our physical transit infrastructure so we can all travel two ways every day to sit next to somebody in some office to... stare at a computer connected to the Internet for 8 hours. It becomes even more absurd in areas like San Francisco where there literally isn't even enough housing to fit everyone. We could solve our transit infrastructure woes overnight with policy. Give a tax break to companies who have remote workers. Either that or charge people to use public transportation infrastructure on a supply/demand basis. If more people use a freeway to get to work, the cost to use it goes up, and if you don't use it at all, you don't pay a dime. This would force companies who require their workforce to be physically present to pay higher salaries to cover the cost of commuting, which may cause them to re-evaluate remote work. Commuting to and from work really only makes sense if you are interacting with things you can't take home with you. And before you jump in and start spreading FUD about remote work, consider this: if it suddenly became illegal to require employees who could do their work remotely to come into a physical office every day, would businesses simply shut down? Or would they figure out a way to make it work? I'm guessing they would figure out a way to make it work.
- mike_hearn 11y ago
  It's going that way anyway. I work for a company in London, but I work remotely from Switzerland. Many of the people who live in the UK but work in the London office only come in a few days a week because their commute takes a long time, and if there's any kind of transit disruption at all that automatically means a WFH day. It's not a big deal. Modern comms tech is really good.
blizkreeg 11y ago
I read someplace that a large part of the budget that is allocated to local government agencies in SF goes to pay pensions and very generous benefits of its employees. How true is that?
cowardlydragon 11y ago
Power assisted bicycles that take minimum effort to go 20mph would be amazing
Spooky23 11y ago
Public transit sucks because the quality of governance has corkscrewed down as the media gets weaker and dumber. This is literally the best time in history to be an inept and/or corrupt politician -- nobody is watching. Roads suck because capital is easy to come by, so real estate squatters control central business districts. It's cheaper/easier/more convenient to build commercial space in he burbs.
pdonis 11y ago
I find it interesting that the article points out that neither mass transit riders nor automobile drivers pay the full cost of their trips. Yet it never asks the obvious question: couldn't that be the main reason why both forms of transportation are inefficient?
- twoodfin 11y ago
  There's a difference though: If it were politically feasible, a marginally higher gas tax could fund all road construction & maintenance. People might drive a little less, but the system wouldn't go into a death spiral. If mass transit riders had to fund the system purely through user fees, the result for most systems would be a collapse, as fewer riders would require higher prices leading to fewer riders...
  - CalRobert 11y ago
    At least in the US, the gas tax would need to be substantially higher. If we accounted for the externalities (dead people hit by cars, mostly, and perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable) the gas tax would rise even more. If anyone asks I'll dig up the math because citation is important (and I'm not sure I did it right years ago), but I remember doing some calculation a while back that we could pay to remove the carbon emitted by gasoline with a tax that made it around $15 a gallon. That doesn't seem bad, really. Perfectly happy societies function with $8-$11 a gallon gas, and not destroying civilization seems worth it. Edit - though I realize that by the latter argument, reducing the population is, in a horribly macabre way, a positive externality. It's not one I support, though.
    - pdonis 11y ago
      > perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable The problem with trying to base taxes on something like this is that you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable. I certainly am not convinced that climate science is accurate enough to support such a claim (or economics, for that matter, since part of the claim is really about the economics of adaptation to climate change vs. mitigation of climate change).
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known 11y ago
Provide free public transportation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Hermel 11y ago
More human life-years get wasted every day in Europe's traffic jams than we lost in the Brussels attacks. Maybe we should rethink our priorities.
coldtea 11y ago
>Public Transit Is Worse Depends on the country. In some places it is excellent.

169 points by sageabilly 11y ago

dkopi 11y ago

The best method of transit is walking. A lot of the problems with traffic and public transport are solved when we invest in walk-able cities. Cities where you can live close enough to work to walk there, close enough to your friends, close enough to the grocery store, your neighborhood bar or your kid's school. No discussion of Mass transit or "giving up your car" is completely without discussing the walk-ability of cities.

api 11y ago
Tangent but: I live in SoCal, and I can't get my head around the car culture mentality. Of all the places that should be walkable, one that is 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the entire year should rank very high on the list. But nooo.... the walkable cities are in places that get run over by a glacier every six months. Go figure.
- supergeek133 11y ago
  Live in downtown Minneapolis, can confirm walk-ability and presence of seasonal glacier.
- sologoub 11y ago
  Coastal areas are becoming more and more walkable... Minus the lack of density - Santa Monica is the prime example, ask people about walkability and everyone is excited, then talk about making it happen for more people and you get crucified. In the valleys, walkability runs into the heat problems in the summer. Walking in 100F+ is no fun and can be dangerous to some.
  - maxxxxx 11y ago
    Even in inland CA you have perfect walking weather for around 9 months a year. It's more of a cultural thing in my opnion.
    - sologoub 11y ago
      I think you are right. There definitely is a very strong desire still for wider spaces, bigger yards, etc. As the result, walking in most of inland sprawl take a lot more time and effort.
- greggman 11y ago
  Because it's large? I'm all for public transportation and LA used to have the best in the world 80 years ago. But, a large city as large as LA is never really going to be completely walkable unless everyone always moves close to their job. That would mean moving away from friends and family because of a job change rather than just commuting a little further. I suspect most people would chose to stay near their friends and family rather than move closer to their job. You can compare Tokyo which is large like LA but which has excellent mass transit and yet the average commute is 80 minutes each way. Why? People can't or won't uproot their families for new jobs. Also housing close to a job is probably also often either too expensive (downtown) or undesirable (industrial area).
  - jdmichal 11y ago
    Also, the popularization of two-income households complicates this quite a bit. How often do you see partners that work near each other?
  - api 11y ago
    New York is larger than LA and has very good transit.
- justizin 11y ago
  I grew up in South Texas. Ain't nobody got time for walkin' more than a block in 100+F heat and people end up spending more than their mortgage payment on electricity and A/C repair because the heat will literally kill you.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  A winter ice blanket makes driving less desirable. Pleasant weather makes walking more desirable. This implies that walking has a hard limit on desirability, which is easily topped by driving, even with the worst traffic. You have to make driving worse to tip the preference toward walking, even if the conditions simultaneously make walking less desirable. If driving 5 miles is likely to put your car in a ditch, you may opt for a 200m walk, which may only plant your ass on the concrete once or twice. If you have to shovel snow for 20 minutes to drive anywhere at all, you may prefer to just pull on some wellies and hoof it through the drifts. If every mile you drive is rusting away your vehicle's underbody due to road salt, you may prefer to wear away your boot soles instead. If you could wave a magic wand to install a roof over ever road and highway, the residents would squeal with glee, toss out their tire chains, shovels, and boots, and get right back into their cars.
  - dsfyu404ed 11y ago
    In places where there's actual winter people adjust to it. Snow in Atlanta is something people perceive as a PITA whereas in Augusta (Maine) it's perceived as no more inconvenient than rain.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      Never did I ever adjust enough to stop bitching about shoveling driveways or scraping windshields or hitting patches of black ice or having the plow throw snow back onto your driveway so you have to shovel it again. Snow always has been, and always will be, more inconvenient than rain. Except freezing rain. That stuff is the worst.
    - douche 11y ago
      In Maine, people bitch when it isn't cold and snowy enough. This winter was brutal for the ice fishers, snowmobilers, and skiers.
      - auntienomen 11y ago
        "In Maine, people bitch when it isn't cold and snowy enough." That's Stockholm Syndrome, is what that is.
- mooreds 11y ago
  Because it is new. Maybe not new in age, but new in being a big city. Founded in 1800s, became second biggest city in 1980, third biggest in 1960, fourth in 1950: http://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles http://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-l... Big cities on the east coast are older, so didn't develop in the age of the automobile and have to conform to its needs. Except cities in the SE, which again, grew due to modern appliances like the air conditioner.
- cylinder 11y ago
  LA was built by people who were escaping the stressful dense urban life of the east coast. Not hard to understand why, when they arrived at empty land by the ocean with perfect weather, they didn't resolve to build a bunch of apartment towers.
  - refurb 11y ago
    This is a great point. Why do so many people in the US live on large lots with huge houses in the suburbs? Because we can.
- Aloha 11y ago
  SoCal was never walkable beyond a local neighborhood - if you look at population density and where the freeways are, they all parallel former lines of the Pacific Electric Interurban system. [1][2] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric [2] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Los_Angeles_Pacific_Electric_Railways_%28Red_Cars%29.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Los_Ange...
whorleater 11y ago
There's a fairly low ceiling in terms of walkability within cities though. Once you exceed a certain distance, no amount of walkability is going to convince people to walk, and rent/housing prices within the walking distance tend to be much higher than those outside, thus exacerbating the issue of public transportation.
- dkopi 11y ago
  If you're able to walk for 95% of your needs, public transit, taxis, uber and zipcars solve the other 5%. If you're only able to walk for 5% of your needs, public transit isn't going to help you much. Rent/Housing does indeed cost more in walk-able areas. That's a great signal telling us that there's a lot of demand for walk-able neighborhoods, and urban planning should allow a lot more of them.
  - thatfrenchguy 11y ago
    Well going to work is probably 90% of your moving needs. So if you live 45 minutes by train from where you're working and there is an actual train there, public transit helps you a lot.
    - nostrebored 11y ago
      That's a woefully inaccurate representation of my life and the life of my friends. Do more things.
pc86 11y ago
Not everyone wants to live downtown, though. In fact, most people don't. More often than not schools in suburbs and rural areas are head and shoulders above their urban counterparts. I used to live in a downtown area and it was nice being able to walk 6 blocks to work. But I would never want to raise a family in an apartment or with those terrible schools.
- wnevets 11y ago
  >More often than not schools in suburbs and rural areas are head and shoulders above their urban counterparts. a school in a rural area isn't automatically better than a school in an urban area because its rural.
  - afutd 11y ago
    What you are missing is that "good schools" doesn't actually mean good schools. It's a dog whistle.
    - pc86 11y ago
      When I say "good schools" I mean "good schools." If you want to call me a racist why not just come out and say it? Or better yet, say something constructive.
      - mfringel 11y ago
        Okay. One constructive remark coming up... What's your definition of "good schools"?
        AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        Actually teaching the kids some things. What other definition is there?
      - gohrt 11y ago
        "Good schools" mostly means "wealthy students". If rich people move into the cities, and form little neighborhood clusters to exclude poor families, the schools will become more attractive by all standard measures. Now, the trick is that it's much easier to build out segregated wealthy communities in the suburbs, than it is in cities, since tight geography works against the informal segregation of suburban development projects.
justizin 11y ago
Unless all cities concurrently advance in this area, this simply becomes a factor that drives home purchase / rental prices up. San Francisco has neighborhoods with a WalkScore of 100, but the baristas and cooks and other laborers in those neighborhoods, including construction workers who build the homes, largely drive and transit in. IMO it basically carries that you worsen the Effective WalkScore of other people's lives, even if they live in neighborhoods that are walkable to desk-sitting professionals, because the wage-paying jobs in those areas (e.g. Oakland / East Bay) doesn't pay as well as the wage-paying jobs in neighboring cities with stronger economies (e.g. SF). This is absolutely happening right now and the reverse impact is that SF's cost of living is creeping over Oakland's and driving the folks who live in Oakland and work in SF to further reaches of the bay as people, giving up on walkable life in SF, try it out in Oakland. Bicycles help this, but I'm here to tell you that nobody has any fucking sympathy that you've chosen a car-free life and it's El Nino and why are you late because your coworker who drives an SUV 100 miles is already here and how is your life possibly harder? Anyway .. it's complex AF. Believing another world is possible is for sure a great first step.
anexprogrammer 11y ago
Being a Brit, who walks to the corner shop, or even supermarket if I just need a few bits, I tried walking a few times while in the US. The US makes it hilariously impractical. Pavements (sidewalks) will just randomly stop. Crossing the road is sometimes a crime, depending on state! Even convenience stores are inconveniently far away. You've spread your infrastructure out so wide in some places that walking becomes more like a hike. It's little wonder that you end up driving for anything beyond going next door. :)
- liveoneggs 11y ago
  going next door will probably get you shot. Just drive.
  - ssully 11y ago
    As a Chicago native who has had a gun flashed at me while walking my dog a block from my house, I wish you were joking.
- Tepix 11y ago
  Some americans even get in the car to fetch their mail from the mailbox at the road...
  - HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
    Some Americans have driveways 1/2 mile long. And longer...
    - legulere 11y ago
      That's like 800 m, still very walkable
      - buckbova 11y ago
        You still have to walk back.
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FreedomToCreate 11y ago

Cities need to prioritize walking, biking and transit. What this means is that, these modes of transportation need to be made safer and faster. Currently walking through a major city is bogged down by the number of intersections you have to wait at. One idea would be to make intersection movement faster for pedestrians and transit during all hours except the morning and evening rush hour, during which vehicle movement should be prioritized to get cars off the roads as quickly as possible.

pc86 11y ago
With the exception of areas where it's impossible (NYC) IME the majority of pedestrians and cyclists simply do not care about the crosswalks/laws/etc. Jaywalking is constant as is crossing in the crosswalk against the signal. What I'm saying is outside of structural changes to the roads themselves (like you mention, eliminating some intersections) I don't see much change happening.
- dublinben 11y ago
  The very concept of jaywalking or dedicated crosswalks is a symptom of the car-first mentality.[0] If pedestrians and cyclists had the right of way as they should, this wouldn't be an issue. [0] http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/1837/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/...
  - douche 11y ago
    Crosswalks are awful. Outside of the ones where there is an actual traffic light, they are always placed in terrible locations. Moreover, they are just about the worst place possible to try to cross a street. I've been doing a lot of walking around the medium sized town I live in the past year, and I've had to get very good at looking away from the road when I want to cross, otherwise vehicles that have a quarter-mile of empty space behind them will come to a stop, and make me feel like I have to rush across, when they could have just kept going, and we would have both been able to go about our business at our leisure.
11y ago

pdq 11y ago

The solution in the future will be driverless cars, shared driverless vans, etc. These should improve overall commute times, since there will be fewer accidents and denser transportation. Also people will be able to spend their commute time reading books/news, doing work, watching videos, or other recreation, rather than driving the car.

darkr 11y ago
Sure, I mean if you want a WALL-E vision of the future. Personally I'd prefer a Netherlands/Denmark present day kind of future, where people live within 5-10 miles of their place of work and cycle or walk. Less apathetic fat people and psychotic auto-pilots.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  where people live within 5-10 miles of their place of work and cycle or walk. Problem with that idea is if you change jobs, you need to buy a new house. And moving that often can get lame.
  - darkr 11y ago
    Depends on the city I suppose. In London, most tech jobs tend to be clustered within Hammersmith-ish, Soho, and City/Shoreditch, all of which are in cycling distance of East London.
- continuational 11y ago
  I go by bike from west to east Copenhagen every day, a 25 minute ride, and it's awesome. I wouldn't trade it for any perk.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    What do you do when it's raining or snowing? What do you do when it's hot, can you shower at work?

mrfijal 11y ago

article is written in absolutes (talking about public transit and traffic in general) but happily ignores the fact that there is a world outside of america. maybe looking at places that are better commute-wise than sf despite being a lot poorer would be a start?

Mikeb85 11y ago
Of course. Because no one likes to mention that there are countries with far better infrastructure, free education and health care, better quality of life thanks to higher taxes. Anything that suggests higher taxes are necessary seems to get ignored in the US.

massysett 11y ago

This is not at all illuminating and is just a typical advocacy piece for more transit funding. Like most of these pieces, it compares road spending and transit spending as though this is somehow a useful comparison. It isn't. For rail transit systems, spending includes all labor and capital expenses--train operators, cars, electricity, etc. Road spending does not include the enormous capital investment that citizens and businesses spend for motor vehicles. Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road. Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point. To top it off the piece says nothing about "why traffic is awful".

supergeek133 11y ago
To your last point, I noticed that too... including that in the title was total clickbait.
nostromo 11y ago
Yeah, the article points out that only 20% of our federal and state transit budgets go to transit, implying that it's underfunded. But it lacks the context that only 5% of Americans use transit...
- goodcanadian 11y ago
  It is a chicken and egg problem: Transit sucks, so no one uses transit. No one uses transit, so funding is sub-optimal. Funding is sub-optimal, so transit sucks. This cycle can be broken by funding transit properly. I have been to plenty of cities where transit was cheap, convenient, and useful. And before someone trots out the density problem, I have been to plenty of places that are far less dense than LA and have far better transit.
  - jim-greer 11y ago

supergeek133 11y ago

I live in Minneapolis, we have the light rail in the downtown area that runs all the way down to the Mall of America and the airport. It also runs to St. Paul. We subsidize it heavily, but it is also an honor system for paying for it (no turnstiles). We also have a pretty decent bus system. Problem is the further away you get from the city center the worse it gets. They've talked about putting in a light rail line to the southwest suburbs at a cost of billions of dollars, meanwhile the core roads don't get additional help and are perpetually bad because of the winter. It's a balancing act, and at some point everyone needs to decide who's lifestyle is more important from a priority perspective IMO. If I decide to live in the suburbs, and commute an hour a day, is a dollar more important for that person? Or the person closer to the city core that wants more mass transit options? Honestly I can go both directions. I currently have a 10 minute commute (by car). But I've also had the 60+ minute commutes for jobs. I also use the light rail to get to the airport pretty frequently. However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work.

kuschku 11y ago
> However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work. But that’s possible in cities with working transit. Take Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Tokyo. You can get a bus/train/tram to anywhere from anywhere at any time.
- supergeek133 11y ago
  I haven't been to any of those cities, so you might be right. Just working in my own frame of reference.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    I worked in Tokyo for a while. If you don't take cabs, you end up doing a fair amount of walking. There are a lot of trains and subways, so there is a limit to how much walking you have to do. Even if your origin and destination were both right next to a subway station, however, you could expect to do a lot of walking underground, since there is a lot of stuff underground in Tokyo around which subways have to be routed. I think walking is great, and frequently I would figure ways to skip a subway line by walking a bit more, but I thought I'd mention this just to give a more accurate impression.

greggman 11y ago

I'd really like to know what the true costs are. Are Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore all massively subsidizing their mass transit? Do they have enough riders that they're profitable? Are they more or less efficient in how the manage them? How about Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Antwerp, Koln, Barcelona, etc... which are all an order of magnitude smaller than the previously mentioned cities but all have pretty good public transportation. These last cities are all on the same order of size as SF. About 1 million people each and yet they have vastly better public transportation than SF

supergeek133 11y ago
In some of those areas you're talking about huge population density as well, so it becomes more effective. I live in Minnesota, where suburb living is very popular. We don't have very dense areas of population that a typical transit system would cover.
deleted 11y ago
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mike_hearn 11y ago
London Underground funding info is here: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-are-funded https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-ar... About 40% comes from fares. About 25% is government subsidies. The rest is a mixture of borrowing, advertising/rental income, a central London road tax, and 8% is funding for Crossrail (but this represents pure infrastructure investment so does not affect the steady state). I have to admit, having reviewed the figures, I am a bit surprised and concerned at the level of borrowing involved.
amit_m 11y ago
Hong Kong's subway is profitable and is the best subway I've ever ridden. (fast, clean, easy to navigate)
kalleboo 11y ago
In Sweden, most public transit agencies cover somewhere around 50% of costs through ticket sales, with the rest being paid by local governments. AFAIK aside from perhaps planning considerations, there aren't really any other hidden subsidies (e.g. while the rail they run trains on may be owned by the public rail agency, they still have to pay usage fees)

pklausler 11y ago

Nearly perfect for me are (1) a city with great light rail, and (2) a Brompton folding bicycle for the first & last miles. I realize that this combination isn't available to all, but it's awesome.

pnut 11y ago
Counting the days until my b-spoke Brompton arrives. Folding bicycle is a life changer.
- CalRobert 11y ago
  Congratulations on a whole new world of convenient transport!
CalRobert 11y ago
Bromptons are delightful. For those who aren't able (or keen) to pedal as much they can be made electric as well. I adore mine, and get a smile any time I see another Brompton rider.

louprado 11y ago

To expand upon the specific discussion of the OP, I feel we are witnessing a historical pattern: urban-flight -> under-valued urban real-estate -> then urban renewal and economic opportunity -> influx of homeless and criminals since high-population density is good for both -> then public criticism that the cops are too heavy handed -> cops less likely to enforce + strain on infrastructure and services (like mass transit) + urban unrest due to economic disparity -> urban-flight -> ... If the problem is that the BART is operating beyond capacity, adding capacity might not matter if the population is set to decline for the other reasons stated.

Tiktaalik 11y ago

The declining gas tax problem is going to get worse as electric cars increase in popularity. The solution is comprehensive road pricing, where a larger share of the real costs of road infrastructure and parking infrastructure are borne by the users. The added benefit of correctly pricing driving is that people will make more informed decisions about where they live and how they get to work, that will result in more compact communities and less urban sprawl.

jessaustin 11y ago
Another option would be pricing by weight. Big trucks currently get giant subsidies from the rest of us, just measuring by how much they damage the roads. Fixing that would probably drive up the costs of many goods that are transported by truck, although it would also probably cause a redistribution of which goods are sold, to favor lighter or more local goods. In any case, it would keep the roads in better condition. On the interstate near where I live, it's often a 10:1 ratio between trucks and cars.
- douche 11y ago
  This might become more tenable if long-haul trucking gets automated, as it almost certainly will. Take the expense of hiring a human driver out of the equation, and registration costs for semis could be an order of magnitude higher, and still cost less.
- ams6110 11y ago
  Big trucks do pay a substantial road use tax. I don't know the specifics, but they don't get to drive for the same cost as the passenger cars. On toll roads the trucks pay a lot more too.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    They don't pay 40 times what passenger vehicles pay.

soyiuz 11y ago

Two footnotes on this article: 1. The problems it highlights can be reduced to low tax revenues. Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it. Things like roads and trains cannot (and should not) pay for themselves---they are a public good. The train might be empty at night, but the ability to take a train home prevents drunk driving, for example. One cannot put a monitory value on services like that, they speak to our collective quality of life. The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth. 2. Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is density. We need to value density as it allows for more compact living. Instead, municipalities in places like the Bay Area consistently vote against new construction and against zoning laws that would allow for taller, more densely populated buildings/neighborhoods. The law of supply and demand says increase the supply of housing to make something affordable. This is not some mysterious process: there's simply no political will on the part of existing inhabitants to "devalue" their residences by increasing the supply in the housing market.

petewailes 11y ago
I'm assuming you're from the US... The problem isn't a lack of taxes, it's where you guys spend it all.
- DigitalJack 11y ago
  fully agree with this (US native)
- cylinder 11y ago
  And when it is spent on infrastructure, the US leads most of the world in being the most expensive place to build public transportation, with projects often taking far longer. I blame corruption, poor governance and deep cultural disdain for organization and order. Don't even get me started on the California decision to build HSR between SF and LA. What a joke that one is.
  - 11y ago

BurningFrog 11y ago

Traffic is awful because road owners aren't charging for access. From an Economics standpoint, congested traffic is the same phenomenon as the old Soviet bread lines. A underpriced good is inaccessible in practice, since supply is way lower than demand at that price. The solution is "Road Pricing", where drivers pay to drive. The price varies depending on what road, time of day etc. Maximum revenue should coincide with maximum throughput, giving everyone (ready to pay) a smooth and fast commute. It also provides incentives to build more roads where they are mostly needed.

tribe 11y ago
Isn't this the point of the gas tax? For every mile you drive, you use more gas. The more gas you use, the more you pay. Tracking which roads people are driving on would also require massive infrastructure investment, and have significant privacy implications.
- choward 11y ago
  The gas tax doesn't take time (or supply and demand) into account. Driving during rush hour should cost a lot more than driving at 3AM on an empty street. Sure, you use more gas sitting in traffic, but it doesn't make that much of a difference.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    Tesla can solve this. They know when and where the car was driven, and each time it's charged, the charging station can interrogate the car and compute the appropriate congestion surcharge.
    - kalleboo 11y ago
      Singapore is now developing a new congestion charge system based on GPS that will have high granularity. We'll see how that works... http://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/default.aspx?scr=yes&keyword=ERP2 http://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/default.aspx?scr=yes&keyword...

trhway 11y ago

Beside everything else, i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here. Thus i have to have a car. In Russia, when i wasn't able to afford car, my cat rode bus, train, subway with me when we had to get him somewhere. Of course, i'd get a car there too the moment i could afford it, yet public transit was a feasible alternative when i didn't have a car.

rsync 11y ago
"i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here." Thank God.
- trhway 11y ago
  it is hard to understand that knee-jerk reaction to animals in US ( personally i think it is rooted in basic Puritan habit of blaming somebody else [government, immigrants, regulations, dogs, ...] for your own problems). I understand that Russia isn't a good example of civilized society. Well, in France you can take your dog or cat into any restaurant, cafe, bar, etc ... pretty much everywhere. The public and personal health situation in France is among the best in the world. Sanitary rules in US prohibiting dogs is just red-herring.
  - Armisael16 11y ago
    I look at it as choosing to ban animals over choosing to ban humans with allergies.
    - trhway 11y ago
      Do you seriously mean that France thus banned humans with allergies? It is false dichotomy. Completely fits pattern of blaming somebody else. To the comment below: "but allowing animals that spread dander everywhere makes the environment hazardous to anyone with serious pet allergies." unfounded BS (sounds very similar to industrial bread producers propaganda 100 years ago about those dirty immigrants touching your bread with their dirty hands in their dirty bakeries). Until it is a sterile OR, the surrounding environment is full of living matter. Dog or cat in a cafe doesn't change the situation. Or do you seriously mean that France doesn't care about such dangerous hazard to people's health?

thatfrenchguy 11y ago

Let's not forget that BART also made bad engineering choices, like non-standard tracks and trains that probably cost a lot of taxpayer money...

samtho 11y ago
BART is the only transit system in North America that uses the Indian gauge. The wider gauge also contributes to the noise it generates and the wear on the track around turns.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Why should the wider gauge do either? Noise: It's just steel wheels rolling on steel rails. Why should the distance between the rails change the amount of noise it generates? Wear on the track: Presuming that the turns aren't too tight a radius (which may be larger for the larger gauge), and the superelevation is correct (which probably has to be larger for the larger gauge), why should wider track mean greater wear on curves?
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
That wasn't an engineering choice, that was a political choice. It went something like this (my memory is a bit vague, some details may be wrong): Southern Pacific Railway had a line up the San Francisco peninsula, and didn't want BART to use it. They were politically somewhat powerful, and opposed BART. BART went with a different track gauge so that their trains could never run on Southern Pacific's tracks, and Southern Pacific withdrew their opposition.

rsync 11y ago

Can we just come out and admit something ? Buses are terrible. They are terrible functionally, they are terrible aesthetically, and they are terrible logistically. In fact, I would go so far as to say that across a broad spectrum of preferences, you would be very hard pressed to find anything worse in the urban, built environment than some big, loud, lumbering, clumsy (and usually) sooty bus bungling about the place. I love good public transit. I love light rail. I love the subway. I will do anything not to ride a bus. I am reminded of that quote from steve jobs about the touchscreen phones and the stylus: "if you see a (bus), they blew it."

nulltype 11y ago
Well the reason light rail and subways are so good isn't because they're on rails, but because they get their own track. If you put a bus on its own street, suddenly they're not as bad anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit
- rsync 11y ago
  I agree that BRT (which I have a lot of experience with)[1][2][3] does make things a bit better. However, the successful BRT I have seen is always in very specialized circumstances, while the proposals I have seen for BRT in (for instance) San Francisco have been so full of weird compromises and bizarre edge cases that I am not optimistic they will make anything better. [1] Hop/Skip/Jump buses in Boulder [2] 16th street mall shuttle in Denver [3] "VelociRFTA" BRT in Aspen/Basalt/Glenwood
  - nulltype 11y ago
    Did they change the Skip? I used to take that and it was just a normal bus in the normal street as far as I recall.
- mikeash 11y ago
  They're also good because of the commitment involved. You can build around a light rail or a subway stop, safe in the knowledge that it will still be there in ten or twenty years. You can't build around a bus route like that. Ironically, the high expense and lack of flexibility are features, not problems.

merraksh 11y ago

The money that funds mass transit [...] comes from a mix of four sources: [...] On the federal side, most of that money comes from the federal gas tax: 18.4 cents on a gallon of regular gas 24.3 cents on the gallon for diesel, [...] 19 percent going to mass transit. That’s right—mass transit depends on people driving cars for a significant portion of its federal funding. I don't find this counterintuitive: the more people use their car, the more the mass transit system is strengthened and more capable to ease car traffic. Maybe it's far fetched, but it's like tax on cigarettes to finance lung cancer research.

verg 11y ago

Costs are a major part of the problem. US rail construction costs are by far the most expensive in the world [1]. Other countries are able to build rail at costs in the $100-250 million per km range (even in dense cities). The East Side access project in NYC has costs around $4 billion per km. Los Angeles has much better costs in the $400-500 million per km range [2]. Its hard to imagine the US will be able to build much transit at those costs. From 2012[3]: "When asked by transit blogger Benjamin Kabak about its high construction costs, Michael Horodniceanu, president of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital construction division, gave a two-word answer: “work rules.” Citing the example of the city’s revered sandhogs, he said the MTA employs 25 for tunnel-boring machine work that Spain does with nine." [1] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-rail-construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r... [2] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transportation/construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp... [3] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-27/labor-rules-snarl-u-s-commuter-trains http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-27/labor-rules...

verg 11y ago
Another good overview from Matthew Yglesias: http://www.vox.com/2014/6/2/5771880/us-mass-transit-construction-costs-are-insanely-high http://www.vox.com/2014/6/2/5771880/us-mass-transit-construc...
bradleyjg 11y ago
There's problems on the operations side too. The same agency that is building that East Side Access (LIRR) still does fare collection by sending well compensated employees walking up and down every train to punch paper tickets twice per ride. I don't know if it's an urban legend or not, but I've been told that one of those conductors punching tickets on every train is technically designated and paid as a "fireman" i.e. person responsible for shoveling coal into a boiler because the collective bargaining agreement forbids them from eliminating the position.

CalRobert 11y ago

One of the biggest issues is that we force businesses and housing to have ridiculous amounts of free parking, which means that instead of dense areas where buildings can be next to each other we have a sea of asphalt with a building sprinkled here and there. In central areas these minimums amount to parking welfare for suburbanites. People say to me "but it takes 90 minutes to go 15 miles on transit!!" - the problem isn't that transit should be faster, it's that you shouldn't have to go through 15 miles of primarily asphalt hellscape to get to basic amenities! The core of Dublin is less than two miles across. I used to live in the middle of it and never missed a car. The core of San Diego.. well it's not really a core, and even then it's routine to have to travel several miles for basic errands, even if you live fairly close to downtown. A downtown that is prevernted from growing by parking minimums. Of course, if you ask a potential employer about transit access they look at you like you're from Mars (and, of course, choose to move on to a less hippie-ish applicant)

cle 11y ago
Interesting observation, is there some data showing this?
- bradleyjg 11y ago
  There's a book called "The high cost of free parking" by Donald Shoup that's the bible for this subject, but it is more than 700 pages. One of his popular journalism articles might be a better place to start: http://www.shoupdogg.com/journalism/ http://www.shoupdogg.com/journalism/
- verg 11y ago
  RE parking minimums: http://graphingparking.com/2013/01/25/residential-parking-requirements/ http://graphingparking.com/2013/01/25/residential-parking-re... A similar issue is street sizes in the US are much larger than in countries with good transit and walkability. Anecdotal, but compare image searches for "American Street" and "Japanese Street". Not only is the driving area of the streets much narrower, on street parking doesn't really exists in Japanese cities. This contributes alot to the walking experience. "japan street" https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+street&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=801&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjgrLPzj9rLAhXGs4MKHeNxBKwQ_AUIBigB https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+street&espv=2&biw=1440... "american street" https://www.google.com/search?q=american+street&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=801&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwicu__4j9rLAhXmloMKHbQBDqgQ_AUIBygC https://www.google.com/search?q=american+street&espv=2&biw=1...

stevewilhelm 11y ago

> In fact, planners and economists call road building “induced demand” because it encourages people to hop into their cars instead of walking or taking mass transit. In the Bay Area, building transit infrastructure is expensive and time consuming. Case in point: a five mile extension including one new train station of an existing BART line costs $890 million and took seven years to build. [1] The resulting extension is expected to increase in ridership by 5000 to 7000 daily trips in the next decade. [2] There are currently 400,000 daily automobile trips from East Bay to and from Santa Clara County. [2] [1] http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx [2] http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx/chronology http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx/chronology

sna1l 11y ago

The fact that we don't have a couple operators instead of a driver for each individual train on BART is beyond me. Look at all the private companies (Magic Bus, etc) that are sprouting up because of how terrible our public transportation is. BART essentially holds a monopoly on our transport. I believe their contract states even during a strike, new drivers have to be trained for 6 months before they are allowed to drive BART trains. There is absolutely no way that it takes 6 months to learn how to drive an AUTOMATED train. There should be public bids submitted from private companies to run on these railways, which would lead to better service and lower costs.

marknutter 11y ago

We created this wonderful thing called the Internet that allows us to work and collaborate with each other from anywhere in the world, yet we all still cling to the silly idea that we need to continue to expand and repair our physical transit infrastructure so we can all travel two ways every day to sit next to somebody in some office to... stare at a computer connected to the Internet for 8 hours. It becomes even more absurd in areas like San Francisco where there literally isn't even enough housing to fit everyone. We could solve our transit infrastructure woes overnight with policy. Give a tax break to companies who have remote workers. Either that or charge people to use public transportation infrastructure on a supply/demand basis. If more people use a freeway to get to work, the cost to use it goes up, and if you don't use it at all, you don't pay a dime. This would force companies who require their workforce to be physically present to pay higher salaries to cover the cost of commuting, which may cause them to re-evaluate remote work. Commuting to and from work really only makes sense if you are interacting with things you can't take home with you. And before you jump in and start spreading FUD about remote work, consider this: if it suddenly became illegal to require employees who could do their work remotely to come into a physical office every day, would businesses simply shut down? Or would they figure out a way to make it work? I'm guessing they would figure out a way to make it work.

mike_hearn 11y ago
It's going that way anyway. I work for a company in London, but I work remotely from Switzerland. Many of the people who live in the UK but work in the London office only come in a few days a week because their commute takes a long time, and if there's any kind of transit disruption at all that automatically means a WFH day. It's not a big deal. Modern comms tech is really good.

blizkreeg 11y ago

I read someplace that a large part of the budget that is allocated to local government agencies in SF goes to pay pensions and very generous benefits of its employees. How true is that?

cowardlydragon 11y ago

Power assisted bicycles that take minimum effort to go 20mph would be amazing

Spooky23 11y ago

Public transit sucks because the quality of governance has corkscrewed down as the media gets weaker and dumber. This is literally the best time in history to be an inept and/or corrupt politician -- nobody is watching. Roads suck because capital is easy to come by, so real estate squatters control central business districts. It's cheaper/easier/more convenient to build commercial space in he burbs.

pdonis 11y ago

I find it interesting that the article points out that neither mass transit riders nor automobile drivers pay the full cost of their trips. Yet it never asks the obvious question: couldn't that be the main reason why both forms of transportation are inefficient?

twoodfin 11y ago
There's a difference though: If it were politically feasible, a marginally higher gas tax could fund all road construction & maintenance. People might drive a little less, but the system wouldn't go into a death spiral. If mass transit riders had to fund the system purely through user fees, the result for most systems would be a collapse, as fewer riders would require higher prices leading to fewer riders...
- CalRobert 11y ago
  At least in the US, the gas tax would need to be substantially higher. If we accounted for the externalities (dead people hit by cars, mostly, and perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable) the gas tax would rise even more. If anyone asks I'll dig up the math because citation is important (and I'm not sure I did it right years ago), but I remember doing some calculation a while back that we could pay to remove the carbon emitted by gasoline with a tax that made it around $15 a gallon. That doesn't seem bad, really. Perfectly happy societies function with $8-$11 a gallon gas, and not destroying civilization seems worth it. Edit - though I realize that by the latter argument, reducing the population is, in a horribly macabre way, a positive externality. It's not one I support, though.
  - pdonis 11y ago
    > perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable The problem with trying to base taxes on something like this is that you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable. I certainly am not convinced that climate science is accurate enough to support such a claim (or economics, for that matter, since part of the claim is really about the economics of adaptation to climate change vs. mitigation of climate change).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

known 11y ago

Provide free public transportation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Hermel 11y ago

More human life-years get wasted every day in Europe's traffic jams than we lost in the Brussels attacks. Maybe we should rethink our priorities.

coldtea 11y ago

>Public Transit Is Worse Depends on the country. In some places it is excellent.