5 ms·

Whilst, I'm always pro on anything that can ameliorate our transportation network, I'd much rather see them connect areas where people work with areas where peo

Whilst, I'm always pro on anything that can ameliorate our transportation network, I'd much rather see them connect areas where people work with areas where people can live - I think this is the biggest problem of our times. Optimize for the trips that are made the most frequently - people's commute to work.

mtalantikite 9y ago
If someone can get from Baltimore to NYC in about 20 minutes you're changing the scale of where people can live and commute from. I have plenty of friends that spend 45 minutes commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan and I'd guess a not insignificant number of them would be willing to live in Baltimore where housing is cheap if they could get to the city in 20-30 minutes.
- uptown 9y ago
  "I'd guess a not insignificant number of them would be willing to live in Baltimore where housing is cheap if they could get to the city in 20-30 minutes." And I'd bet the cost of Baltimore housing would no longer be cheap when commuting options are expanded.
- gk1 9y ago
  It won't stay cheap for long in that scenario. (I moved from Brooklyn to Baltimore, in part because of the >30% difference in housing prices.)
  - mtalantikite 9y ago
    Yeah, prices would certainly move and rebalance in this scenario. Not just in Baltimore, but in Philadelphia and D.C. as well. My point is mainly that we'd start thinking about commuting distance differently if we had a system like the hyperloop (assuming the cost isn't prohibitively high). We could conceivably even build other dense cities somewhere in the radius of 225 miles outside of places like NYC, LA, or SF to offload people if commute times are around 30 min. It can take me an hour to go see friends in Harlem or The Bronx, so you'd even open up the possibility of going to see friends or family for the evening 200 miles away for the same door to door travel time. Of course this is all futurist speculation, who knows what the numbers would actually add up to until a pilot program happens.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    That's pretty much going to be the story of Hyperloop if it succeeds. Sprawl will move to a nodal form with the cost of housing being greater next to each node (station in this case). I am hoping that consideration is being taken at the station-level to insure that more modes of transportation are available to reduce the commute time further and extend the new sweet spot of housing.
- colanderman 9y ago
  You'll never be able to get from Baltimore to NYC in 20 minutes. You'll be able to get from the Hyperloop station in Baltimore to the Hyperloop station in NYC in 20 minutes. To get to/from the station from/to your place of residence/work will take most people another half hour on each side. So… more like an hour and 20 minutes. Yes, it makes living in Baltimore and working in NYC reasonable, but not easy as "20 minutes" implies. Not to mention the difference in housing cost would have to support the cost of travel. Who knows what a single Hyperloop ticket will cost but a 3-digit figure wouldn't surprise me, especially during rush hour. You could be looking at $3-$4k/month for a daily commute (which granted, is not too far from the difference in housing costs between parts of NYC and parts of Baltimore).
  - Retric 9y ago
    40min each way is a common commute. Living 5min from Baltimore hyperloop station would give you 15mim on the other side for a 40min overall commute each way. If you are saving 2k/month on rent you could pay up to 50$ each way and break even. Though, I don't know what tickets would actually cost, that not ridiculous.
    - mcguire 9y ago
      5 min from the Baltimore station is a very small real estate market.
      - Retric 9y ago
        The limit on the number of hyperloop riders is probably a larger limitation. 0.6 miles radius = 1 square mile which could have 50,000+ people.
  - teej 9y ago
    The thing is, the exact customer you are describing already exists and takes the Accela. And that trip takes 2 hours one way! Cutting that by 5x would be transformative. Plus, lots and lots of commuters in the del-mar-va area are already used to 120min+ round trip commutes and I imagine NYC/NJ commuters are similar.
adrianN 9y ago
As I understand it, this could be solved much better by having people live closer to where they work. Better zoning laws are a better solution than more transportation capacity.
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  And better schools, better policing &c. The American way of dealing with crime is to move away from it to a shoebox in the exurbs.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - gorkonsine 9y ago
    >The American way of dealing with crime is to move away from it to a shoebox in the exurbs. The other way of dealing with it is to gentrify an area so the inner-city housing prices are so absurd that the poorer people can't afford to live there any more. In a nutshell, the American way to is establish a lot of space between poorer people and everyone else. Honestly, I'm not sure what else can be done; all kinds of social programs have been tried.
- iraphael 9y ago
  100% this. The transportation problem began when cars were seen as the one true solution for everything, and the zone policy makers could assume that any pair of points A and B can simply be connected by a highway. Let to the rise of suburbs and decline of city life.
heydenberk 9y ago
The cities in this list all have fairly good regional public transit.
epa 9y ago
I find it fascinating that human society can spend so much time and money trying to optimize the current state (highway, roads, public transport, etc) when the root cause of the issue (having to work on-site, or in a city) seems like such an easier issue to solve. SF Bay area is a leader in this work-from-home/remote revolution, but what external factors will tip the masses to be able to migrate?
- adventured 9y ago
  > when the root cause of the issue (having to work on-site, or in a city) seems like such an easier issue to solve. That's not actually easier to solve. Only theoretically and only if your theory involves only robots and is specific to a dozen cities. Study after study keeps proving most people like working physically with other people. The majority would prefer to not telecommute. It also keeps getting proven that most people perform their jobs much better on location rather than telecommuting. Amazing things happen from physical human interaction that do not happen telecommuting. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC would never happen via telecommuting. These things are not true for everyone, they're simply true for most. Beyond that, it's a small minority in the US that has a housing cost problem. Overwhelmingly the US is the land of inexpensive housing compared to other nations with comparable median incomes.
  - gorkonsine 9y ago
    > Bell Labs and Xerox PARC would never happen via telecommuting. I'll bet Bell Labs and Xerox PARC didn't have modern open-plan office spaces. When the choices are telecommuting or open-plan offices, telecommuting is clearly the better option.
  - MarkMc 9y ago
    You are right to say that working on location is generally much more productive than working remotely. And it will likely stay that way for the next decade or two, so it makes sense to continue developing commute-to-work infrastructure for now. But I wonder about the longer term. In 30 or 40 years we will have virtual reality systems that can almost perfectly fool our senses into believing a remote colleague is in fact sitting in the same room. Will most people still commute to work?
mtotheizhphenom 9y ago
It's not an either or - investment in more traditional transportation infrastructure doesn't all of a sudden shut down based on an Elon Musk tweet. The problem you touch on is massive and billions of public and private dollars are invested in this space every year. Specifically ride sharing now and autonomous vehicles down the line will do wonders for commute congestion.

mtalantikite 9y ago

If someone can get from Baltimore to NYC in about 20 minutes you're changing the scale of where people can live and commute from. I have plenty of friends that spend 45 minutes commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan and I'd guess a not insignificant number of them would be willing to live in Baltimore where housing is cheap if they could get to the city in 20-30 minutes.

uptown 9y ago
"I'd guess a not insignificant number of them would be willing to live in Baltimore where housing is cheap if they could get to the city in 20-30 minutes." And I'd bet the cost of Baltimore housing would no longer be cheap when commuting options are expanded.
gk1 9y ago
It won't stay cheap for long in that scenario. (I moved from Brooklyn to Baltimore, in part because of the >30% difference in housing prices.)
- mtalantikite 9y ago
  Yeah, prices would certainly move and rebalance in this scenario. Not just in Baltimore, but in Philadelphia and D.C. as well. My point is mainly that we'd start thinking about commuting distance differently if we had a system like the hyperloop (assuming the cost isn't prohibitively high). We could conceivably even build other dense cities somewhere in the radius of 225 miles outside of places like NYC, LA, or SF to offload people if commute times are around 30 min. It can take me an hour to go see friends in Harlem or The Bronx, so you'd even open up the possibility of going to see friends or family for the evening 200 miles away for the same door to door travel time. Of course this is all futurist speculation, who knows what the numbers would actually add up to until a pilot program happens.
- protomyth 9y ago
  That's pretty much going to be the story of Hyperloop if it succeeds. Sprawl will move to a nodal form with the cost of housing being greater next to each node (station in this case). I am hoping that consideration is being taken at the station-level to insure that more modes of transportation are available to reduce the commute time further and extend the new sweet spot of housing.
colanderman 9y ago
You'll never be able to get from Baltimore to NYC in 20 minutes. You'll be able to get from the Hyperloop station in Baltimore to the Hyperloop station in NYC in 20 minutes. To get to/from the station from/to your place of residence/work will take most people another half hour on each side. So… more like an hour and 20 minutes. Yes, it makes living in Baltimore and working in NYC reasonable, but not easy as "20 minutes" implies. Not to mention the difference in housing cost would have to support the cost of travel. Who knows what a single Hyperloop ticket will cost but a 3-digit figure wouldn't surprise me, especially during rush hour. You could be looking at $3-$4k/month for a daily commute (which granted, is not too far from the difference in housing costs between parts of NYC and parts of Baltimore).
- Retric 9y ago
  40min each way is a common commute. Living 5min from Baltimore hyperloop station would give you 15mim on the other side for a 40min overall commute each way. If you are saving 2k/month on rent you could pay up to 50$ each way and break even. Though, I don't know what tickets would actually cost, that not ridiculous.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    5 min from the Baltimore station is a very small real estate market.
    - Retric 9y ago
      The limit on the number of hyperloop riders is probably a larger limitation. 0.6 miles radius = 1 square mile which could have 50,000+ people.
- teej 9y ago
  The thing is, the exact customer you are describing already exists and takes the Accela. And that trip takes 2 hours one way! Cutting that by 5x would be transformative. Plus, lots and lots of commuters in the del-mar-va area are already used to 120min+ round trip commutes and I imagine NYC/NJ commuters are similar.

adrianN 9y ago

As I understand it, this could be solved much better by having people live closer to where they work. Better zoning laws are a better solution than more transportation capacity.

HarryHirsch 9y ago
And better schools, better policing &c. The American way of dealing with crime is to move away from it to a shoebox in the exurbs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gorkonsine 9y ago
  >The American way of dealing with crime is to move away from it to a shoebox in the exurbs. The other way of dealing with it is to gentrify an area so the inner-city housing prices are so absurd that the poorer people can't afford to live there any more. In a nutshell, the American way to is establish a lot of space between poorer people and everyone else. Honestly, I'm not sure what else can be done; all kinds of social programs have been tried.
iraphael 9y ago
100% this. The transportation problem began when cars were seen as the one true solution for everything, and the zone policy makers could assume that any pair of points A and B can simply be connected by a highway. Let to the rise of suburbs and decline of city life.

heydenberk 9y ago

The cities in this list all have fairly good regional public transit.

epa 9y ago

I find it fascinating that human society can spend so much time and money trying to optimize the current state (highway, roads, public transport, etc) when the root cause of the issue (having to work on-site, or in a city) seems like such an easier issue to solve. SF Bay area is a leader in this work-from-home/remote revolution, but what external factors will tip the masses to be able to migrate?

adventured 9y ago
> when the root cause of the issue (having to work on-site, or in a city) seems like such an easier issue to solve. That's not actually easier to solve. Only theoretically and only if your theory involves only robots and is specific to a dozen cities. Study after study keeps proving most people like working physically with other people. The majority would prefer to not telecommute. It also keeps getting proven that most people perform their jobs much better on location rather than telecommuting. Amazing things happen from physical human interaction that do not happen telecommuting. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC would never happen via telecommuting. These things are not true for everyone, they're simply true for most. Beyond that, it's a small minority in the US that has a housing cost problem. Overwhelmingly the US is the land of inexpensive housing compared to other nations with comparable median incomes.
- gorkonsine 9y ago
  > Bell Labs and Xerox PARC would never happen via telecommuting. I'll bet Bell Labs and Xerox PARC didn't have modern open-plan office spaces. When the choices are telecommuting or open-plan offices, telecommuting is clearly the better option.
- MarkMc 9y ago
  You are right to say that working on location is generally much more productive than working remotely. And it will likely stay that way for the next decade or two, so it makes sense to continue developing commute-to-work infrastructure for now. But I wonder about the longer term. In 30 or 40 years we will have virtual reality systems that can almost perfectly fool our senses into believing a remote colleague is in fact sitting in the same room. Will most people still commute to work?

mtotheizhphenom 9y ago

It's not an either or - investment in more traditional transportation infrastructure doesn't all of a sudden shut down based on an Elon Musk tweet. The problem you touch on is massive and billions of public and private dollars are invested in this space every year. Specifically ride sharing now and autonomous vehicles down the line will do wonders for commute congestion.