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How America Killed Transit
- RickJWagner 8y agoI'd think safety (or lack of the same) might be a factor too.
- IIAOPSW 8y agocars kill ~3x as many people per year as gun crime. Public transit is orders of magnitude safer than personal transit. crime excludes suicide. total gun deaths per year is about the same as vehicle deaths per year.
- WalterBright 8y agoIn the Seattle area, the local government insists on ripping up the tracks to create urban "trails".
- techsupporter 8y agoMy armchair perspective of this is that rails-to-trails is a federally-sanctioned move and adding transit use to those rails is both difficult and politically hard. It is difficult because leaving the rails as-is means small rail operators like Ballard Terminal will insist on still being able to run one freight train a week so that means transit has to compete for time slots and the operating agency has to buy FRA mixed-use compatible train sets (expensive, slow, noisy) or plead for a waiver like Denton’s DCTA got (not gonna happen in this administration). It is politically hard because, to pick on Kirkland, people get very cranky about rail near neighborhoods and they insist that it brings “the wrong people” and the idyllic pictures of fit people walking and jogging and cycling with their kids along a leafy path...not that “terrible” transit that will “destroy” quality of life. So trails move on and transit has to fight some other time.
- ant6n 8y agoFRA compliance should get easier soon, see 'alternative compliance'.
- tropo 8y agoIf you don't want to buy FRA mixed-use compatible train sets, simply cut the connection to our nationwide rail system. You don't need to rip up the whole track. It probably makes the most sense to remove the switch tracks, but I guess you could blow up some tracks or dump a load of concrete on top.
- WalterBright 8y ago> adding transit use to those rails is both difficult I can't imagine how boring tunnels under Bellevue is easier.
- nine_k 8y agoTunnels are invisible, so NIMBYism is less triggered? It may be technically more involved, but politically much more palatable.
- ihaveNOidea 8y agoIn the Seattle area, you have no clue what you're talking about.
- peavenicken 8y agoWhy the heck is trails in quotes? Do you not understand what a trail is? Or are you pissed that you can't drive your car down the "trail" and it enrages you're entitled persona?
- 8bitsrule 8y agoThe OP's article links to another on how Seattle (the City, not 'the area') improved its transit ridership and got voters to invest in transit bigtime. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/10/how-seattle-bucked-a-national-trend-and-got-more-people-to-ride-the-bus/542958/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/10/how-seattle-b...
- WalterBright 8y agoSound Transit never mentions the eastside rail corridor, which runs from Renton to Bothell. It could form the core of an eastside transit system. The corridor could be used to complete a loop around Lake Washington, making the entire rail system far more useful. But no. Instead they bore tunnels under Bellevue. https://www.soundtransit.org/blog/platform/bellevue-light-rail-tunnel-progress-update https://www.soundtransit.org/blog/platform/bellevue-light-ra... A few years back, they ripped up the tracks from Renton to Black Diamond, and paved it all over.
- lalallaladumb 8y agoLook at me! I'm an armchair expert on everything. So "much" so that I put "random" words in quotes "be"cause I don't understand their multiple "meanings" #fakenews #maga
- seattle_spring 8y agoThe urban trails are one of the best public amenities in Seattle. The problem is that there's not enough of them.
- CamperBob2 8y agoIt's 2018. If fixed rail is the answer, we're asking the wrong questions.
- laurencerowe 8y agoWhat alternatives come close to the carrying capacity of fixed rail?
- burfog 8y agoRoads do. Compare the size of the gap between vehicles. Fixed rail is a really inefficient use of land. Most of the time, the rail is just sitting there without a train anywhere in sight. It is normal for the rail to be idle for long periods of time. The density of a packed-full train does not make up for this. Of course, many systems are running trains that are far from being packed full.
- shirakawasuna 8y agoRoads, which is the default everywhere, have literally the least capacity. Single-occupancy vehicles have the worst, followed by normal buses, followed by rapid transit buses, followed by rail.
- CamperBob2 8y agoTrains already work as well as they possibly can. There is no room for improvement in fixed rail, no space for progress. Fixed rail is, well, fixed. If it doesn't exist where you are at the moment, or go where you want to go, that's too bad. And if everyone achieves their dream of living next to a fixed rail station, as advocated so enthusiastically in this thread, this is what their homes will look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdzJpM-EMNg&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdzJpM-EMNg&feature=youtu.be Or does everyone on here just naturally assume the penthouse with the tennis court and helipad will be theirs? Conversely, if you can look at a crowded, congested city full of automotive traffic and think, "This is as well as this system can possibly work," I have to wonder what you're doing on a site called Hacker News. What a single road lacks in capacity, it makes up by being part of a larger network. In every other context on HN, that's considered a good thing. When it comes to transportation, not so much. I will never understand that.
- InclinedPlane 8y agoAlso in the Seattle area the local government insists on building huge amounts of rail based mass transit (just because an abandoned rail line exists doesn't mean it's in a suitable location or condition for integrating into a transit system).
- WalterBright 8y agoA line running the entire eastside, Renton to Bothell, connecting them to downtown Bellevue and downtown Kirkland, paralleling I405, could hardly be in a more suitable location.
- gok 8y agoThat comparison to Toronto is absurd. It’s a metro area with many times the population and density of the other cities listed. And what the hell is this? “Below is a set of maps that show the present-day network rail and bus lines operating at least every 30 minutes, all day to midnight, seven days a week” This effectively excludes every bus line, because there is no reason for bus lines to run the same route all day long. This is one of the major advantages of buses.
- mapt 8y ago"Being able to rely on buses as a piece of infrastructure" is the reason. Because you don't want to buy a car for two parties a year that run late. Just as you wouldn't want a disused sidewalk or a country road or a bridge to close completely during periods when they're not being worked to capacity. This isn't a major advantage of buses, it's a major cost: They're so expensive to run that you only get to deploy them for peak periods. If you _do_ have to buy a car for two parties a year that run late, well then why not use the car for the daily commute? If everyone made that choice, it would destroy the city. The availability of Uber et al is a massive public good for a city, because it can patch over failures like this in our public transportation system in a demand-responsive way without inducing a lot of additional traffic.
- kgermino 8y ago>This effectively excludes every bus line, because there is no reason for bus lines to run the same route all day long. This is one of the major advantages of buses. I can't think of a single bus line in my city that actually changes it's route throughout the day. Sure there's some that don't go as far into the suburbs after a certain time, but the part in the city would still qualify as "all day" by that definition. And as a rider, I would hate to use a bus that goes by one neighborhood in the morning and another in the afternoon. That's what different route numbers are for, there's no reason to have the confusion.
- edaemon 8y agoGP doesn't mean that some bus lines change routes. In American cities most bus routes stop running or run less frequently as it gets later in the day. This article is excluding any that stop or become less frequent before midnight.
- ebikelaw 8y agoAuthor doesn't put enough blame on the built environment. If you have urban planning codes that require 2 parking spaces per dwelling and detached single-family homes, the area will not be economically serviceable by transit (nor will it be walkable). In much of America, car transportation is legally mandatory.
- tropo 8y agoYou can reach the "serviceable by transit" population density with that requirement for "2 parking spaces per dwelling and detached single-family homes". Let's allow for a road that is legally 50 feet wide. Each house's share of that is half, so 25 feet. (it is 12.5 feet pavement and 12.5 feet curb/swale/sidewalk/etc.) We need a 20x20 space for a normal cheap (no elevator) double garage. We want this home legitimately "detached", so let's allow enough room for scaffolding to stay within the property on both sides and the rear. That makes the lot 28 feet wide, and adding room for a staircase takes it to 32 feet wide. Including the half-street, the lot is 49 feet deep. That means 1568 square feet for the house. At this size, there are 17780 homes per square mile. For comparison, we can fit 841953 homes in San Francisco. We can't just have homes of course, but on the other hand there will be more than 1 person per home. It happens that San Francisco contains almost exactly that many people, 884363 as of 2017. San Francisco also happens to be the second most densely populated large US city, behind only New York. It thus works fine, or at least as well as the second most dense large city in the USA.
- cryptonector 8y agoThe public transit system used to be privately owned and operated. Then the cities took over and kicked out the private sector. Now we have terrible public transit. Yes, even the subways in NYC were built and operated by private companies (there were two, and they competed).
- torgian 8y agoQuite right. Japan has excellent rail systems and they’re all owned by private corporations, albeit with government oversight. However, public trans can be done right, such as the case in mainland China which is state owned. All comes down to priorities and fairness. Majority of governments and companies don’t have either
- awakeasleep 8y agoGotta be careful talking about private companies in japan. For example, last october the bank of japan owned 74% of all publicly traded companies. And it has only been buying more since. Japan is a strange failed-capitalist state sleepwalking into unintentional(?) socialism. Impossible to make a coherent point about a situation like that.
- amaccuish 8y ago> Impossible to make a coherent point about a situation like that. I don't think the situation itself is incoherent, just your comment. > Japan is a strange failed-capitalist state Is it? Who says?
- jacobolus 8y agoThere are also many countries/cities with excellent publicly owned transit, various excellent public services in the US, and many terrible privately owned services (including transit services) around the world. I don’t think this is an adequate complete explanation.
- jillesvangurp 8y agoMost european cities and countries have government run public transport or semi private monopolies running the transport. Privatization is usually singled out as the root cause of the sorry state of the rail service in e.g. the UK. Basically it leads to companies cherry picking the most lucrative routes and shutting down the rest. So, I don't think you can blame the shift from private to public for this. It's not that black and white. I think the car lobby has been a much bigger factor in driving both the construction of highways, suburbs, and destruction of local tram networks across most cities in the US. This did not happen in Europe. I was in San Francisco a few months ago. The public transport there is pretty bad compared to what I'm used to in Berlin (clean, fast, efficient, etc.). The local muni trains are tiny and infrequent and you basically have to step over hords of homeless people to get into them. I was kind of shocked to see a 1 car muni show up after waiting for that for close to 15 minutes at Powel station. It's like they're not even trying.
- njarboe 8y agoPublic roads are a public transit system. A very useful and productive one. Before paved roads and trucks, many towns and farms were only served by a single rail line. If competing water transportation was not available, the private railroads would charge extremely high rates, extracting all excess production of the area. The coming of public paved roads and trucks was blessing. Many roads are now past capacity much of the time, which makes them much less useful, and many modern cities have been designed only for people in cars (is there a word like bicyclist for a person in a car?) instead of people walking, which is definitely a mistake. But the high speed, point to point, on demand, variable cargo, transit system of public roads is a great thing. Deride and shame it at your peril. We need to improve the road system in many ways. Some possibilities are congestion pricing, lots of tunnels, and public spaces people can walk to from their homes, but to believe some externally controlled system for transit is what we should shoot for as a society, I think, is mistaken.
- adrianN 8y ago"Motorist" is commonly used for people in motor vehicles. The problem with cars is that they use so much space. Not only while in transit, but especially when parked. Look at how much prime real estate is devoted to parking in typical American cities. That reduces density and makes cars more important, a vicious circle. The most liveable cities are those where little transport is needed because most things one wants to do are within walking or cycling distance. Such city planning is at odds with car centric designs.
- njarboe 8y agoA single passenger vehicle could have a parking footprint about 1/10th of what they currently have. My hope is that we could have electric bikes that are like a mountain bike, can go in bike lanes (at slow speed) or on the street but can go fast enough to take on a freeway.
- BerislavLopac 8y agoI'm still disappointed that Segway hasn't become more popular as a concept.
- partycoder 8y agoBy having hundreds of thousands of 5+ seat vehicles with 1 person inside.
- cryptozeus 8y agoBay area public transport is the worst. Forgot about quality, it does not even reach everywhere. Bart is not even safe, I can’t believe I miss subway
- voidreaper 8y agoThe length of the high speed rail system in the US leaves a lot to be desired. Their HSR system doesn't even crack the top 10 [1]. [1] - https://geoshen.com/posts/10-longest-high-speed-rail-systems-in-the-world https://geoshen.com/posts/10-longest-high-speed-rail-systems...