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The best time to build a rail system is kind of like the best time to plant a tree. 20 years ago. It's sad but it seems to me contemporary Americans don't want

The best time to build a rail system is kind of like the best time to plant a tree. 20 years ago. It's sad but it seems to me contemporary Americans don't want to pay for something that they will only reap the benefits of in later decades There's so much in that style of thinking. The irony of depending on roads built decades ago. The debt system conditioning people to expect to "get it now, pay it later". The hypocrisy in "investing" 10k-100k in an education but not a few measly percent in taxes

rayiner 8y ago
The problem is not that the benefits will come in decades, but that they won’t come at all to most taxpayers. Here in DC we built a subway 40 years ago. It’s a huge boondoggle that is usable for a single digit percent of the taxpayers who pay for it. Folks in Richmond who might ride Metro a few times in their lifetime or lower income folks who work in the suburbs subsidize the commutes of lawyers and federal government workers who work downtown.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  The D.C. Metro has a daily ridership of 612,652 and an annual ridership of 179,693,126. Farebox recovery is 62%, which exceeds that of Vienna and is almost as high as that of Munich. If you look at how people use transit, it skews toward lower-income people [1]. High-income people like the lawyers and government officials you mention use it a lot too, but not as often. If you want to pick on a failing transit system, pick on VTA in Silicon Valley, not the D.C. Metro. [1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-on-public-transit-in-the-u-s/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-o...
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    That still means it is 38% subsidized by the taxpayer, right? Farebox recovery is important but you need to also take into account in absolute terms the cost minus recovery.
    - melling 8y ago
      Don’t we spend a lot of federal dollars on roads, bridges, etc? https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-government-spending-highway-infrastructure-en.jsp https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-govern...
    - function_seven 8y ago
      It might be partially funded by taxpayer money. Is that benefiting the taxpayer by reducing road congestion or having cleaner air? (I don’t know the answer to this for any given metro, but it’s the question that needs answering)
    - wolco 8y ago
      subtract the additional taxes gained by new business / housing along the line.
    - kiba 8y ago
      Just because we couldn't recover it based on accounting doesn't mean it is not a net benefit.
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      We don't even do that for roads. If you required transportation infrastructure to all make profit nothing would ever get built.
      - nojvek 8y ago
        That’s probably the wrong way to think about things. Good roads or any transport system allows frictionless trade of goods and services. This means more money moving in the economy and hopefully a boost for the country. This means more taxes back to the govt. Taxes is how the govt makes money so it’s in their interest to make its citizens wealthier by making it easy for them to move around and do businessy and worky tings.
        bobthepanda 8y ago
        I agree. Which is why I pointed out the silly hypocrisy of fixating on farebox recovery.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    The DC Metro area has 3.3 million non farm jobs, which means WMATA is serving just 20% of taxpayers in the area (even less if you consider that many riders are tourists). Moreover, each ride is subsized by MD, VA, and DC. There are 8 million non farm jobs among those taxpayers, but virtually none can use Metro. Finally, the average income of Metro riders is north of $100k: https://public.tableau.com/profile/planitmetro#!/vizhome/RailSurveyIncomebyStation/IncomeofMetrorailRidershipbyStationofEntry https://public.tableau.com/profile/planitmetro#!/vizhome/Rai.... That means rides for well-off Metro riders are being subsidized by less well off taxpayers. Its wealth transfer from poor to rich (especially considering that the state and local taxes that fund Metro are regressive).
    - justinpombrio 8y ago
      > Finally, the average income of Metro riders is north of $100k: https://public.tableau.com/profile/planitmetro#!/vizhome/Rai... https://public.tableau.com/profile/planitmetro#!/vizhome/Rai.... That's got to be talking about mean personal income of riders, right? I just looked up some stats for DC. I started with the numbers from here: https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US1150000-washington-dc/ https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US1150000-washingto... And also made some conversions between personal&household stats, by estimating that 16% of people in DC are under 15 and thus not counted in per-capita income, together with the average household size being 2.3. Altogether, in DC: Median per-capita income: $42k Mean per-capita income: $52k Median household income: $82k Mean household income: $100k I'm really surpised that the average income of riders is around $100k. That hasn't been my perception with other public transport.
      - pcwalton 8y ago
        Yeah, it's rather odd. BART's equivalent data (though not as nicely plotted) is here: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/StationProfile2015_HomeOriginOnePagers_rev0629.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/StationProfile... Pulling up some random stations shows that the median income at most BART stations is $50k-$75k, which is right what I would expect. Even at the downtown/FiDi ones like Embarcadero and Montgomery, it's just a bit above $75k. Median income in SF is about $95k, so BART ridership skews less wealthy than the area as a whole.
  - reap_and_sow 8y ago
    Your farebox recovery ratio is way off - the DOT statistics I see show 42% [1], significantly lower than both Vienna and Munich. [1]:https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit_agency_profile_doc/2016/30030.pdf https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit_...
    - tptacek 8y ago
      I believe you're looking at the average of the MTA bus system and the DC Metro. This thread is exclusively about the latter.
    - pcwalton 8y ago
      I got the number from here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metro#Financing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metro#Financing
  - msla 8y ago
    It hasn't gone zero fare yet? Even Missoula has zero fare! Great way to take the mass transit system out of the reach of the poor.
    - msla 8y ago
      Wow. A lot of people are threatened by poor people riding mass transit. Quelle surprise.
- mcbutterbunz 8y ago
  Just because someone doesn't ride the subway doesn't mean they don't benefit from it. More people on the subway means fewer cars on the road, cleaner air and water, less maintenance on roads, safer streets.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Only for people commuting in the same general pattern as the rail routes. The problem in DC is that most jobs in the metro area are actually in the suburbs. Reduced congestion going from Arlington to DC helps road commuters going from Arlington to DC, but does nothing for the folks commuting from Ashburn to Reston or Bowie to Bethesda. I live in Anne Arundel. Folks here are now footing the bill for WMATA thanks to the Maryland funding commitment. Metro is doing nothing to reduce congestion anywhere around here (there is no Metro station in the county).
    - jacobwil 8y ago
      Are you saying that there are zero people that take the MARC commuter rail out of Odenton and transfer to Metro? People that would (without Metro) have no way of getting from MARC to their DC jobs would disagree with you that Metro it doesn't reduce congestion on 295 and other congested roads that pass through Anne Arundel.
      - rayiner 8y ago
        Anne Arundel’s share of the Metro commitment is about $13 million (probably more because the county has higher median income than Maryland as a whole). Just 3,000 daily riders board at Odenton. Let’s say 2,000 are going to DC and 1,000 to Baltimore. That means the county is paying $6,500 per year to facilitate Metro connnections for each rider. 295 moreover carries over 100,000 cars per day (more than double the entire MARC system). Another 2,000 would be a rounding error.
        Anechoic 8y ago
        Another 2,000 would be a rounding error. 2,000 would be 2%. That's in the range of a traffic change (1% - 5%) that would degrade the Level of Service of a highway from D (design goal) to E or F. It doesn't take much of a reduction in traffic to significantly improve free-flow. Or, conversely, it doesn't take much an increase in numbers to make traffic suck more than it already does.
- saosebastiao 8y ago
  The sentiment you express will likely be down voted by mass transit advocates, but it should be understood better by them. Cause it sucks to pay massive taxes and see other people get all the benefit. The priorities are often out of balance. Surface light rail can be a massive improvement over buses on shared roads, a huge increase in transportation capacity over buses, and can be built for a fraction of the cost of subways, allowing us to serve more people with the same amount of investment. Meaning instead of serving 10% of the population with the best quality transit, we could be serving 50% of the population with slightly slower service. And when the time comes that a tunnel would improve capacity and service, you have 50% of the population voting yes because it's in their best interest instead of hoping and praying that enough people are willing to benevolently pay huge increases in taxes for something they'll rarely use.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    Lots of us transit advocates were glad to see BART vote down the proposed Livermore extension because of exactly the effect you mention: it's spending a lot of money to enhance services for rich people, when bus service would be more practical. Transit advocacy doesn't mean "all rail all the time".
    - saosebastiao 8y ago
      Of course not. I'm a transit advocate myself, but I'd rather see 200 miles of at grade light rail than 50 miles of subway. But it's extremely common in discussions about alternatives to find attitudes like "we might as well not build it at all if it's going to be at grade". It's a deliberate ignorance of opportunity costs, often advocated by those who primarily benefit from an alternative. For example, I can predict whether someone prefers a tall bridge or subterranean crossing versus a much cheaper drawbridge over the ship canal in Ballard, merely by knowing if they live in Ballard or not.
    - jhbadger 8y ago
      Yes, but in practice as a transit user (not in the bay area), rail generally ends up being more practical. Typically trains come every 3 to 10 minutes. In theory, buses could be this common, but more typically they run every 30 minutes or so. And taking into account a typical trip involves a transfer or two, this can make even short commutes over an hour, not acceptable to most people. The goal of transit isn't just to provide an option to the destitute (although it is nice if it does), but to make a serious impact on congestion by making a better alternative to driving for people who otherwise would have done that.
- yongjik 8y ago
  > ... that is usable for a single digit percent of the taxpayers who pay for it. You could probably say the same thing for >90% of all public roads in, say, California. Why would I need CA route 253, to pick a random example? I've been to Northern California exactly once, and I didn't need the road then.
  - oftenwrong 8y ago
    relevant: https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subsidies/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs...
- matchbok 8y ago
  Metro cost a small, small fraction of what highways cost. It transformed a dying, dangerous city into the one we have now. There is no subsidy that isn't comparable to roads or bridges. I don't own a car, yet my taxes go to highways, because they are essential infrastructure.
  - dashundchen 8y ago
    Yes, and even the most conservative of auto drivers won't even blink at a dropping a billion dollars on one additional lane in an interchange, doing nothing to alleve congestion. But if you even speak of spending that on transit, everyone starts screaming. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/10/12/heres-what-a-billion-dollar-interchange-expansion-looks-like/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/10/12/heres-what-a-billion-...
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  DC Metro is awesome and what a world-class city deserves, a train from the airport to downtown. (Except for those fare machines from the 80s.)
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  > Folks in Richmond who might ride Metro a few times in their lifetime or lower income folks who work in the suburbs subsidize the commutes of lawyers and federal government workers who work downtown. What a ridiculous assertion. Northern Virginia subsidizes transportation spending for the entire rest of the state, not the other way around.
- dionidium 8y ago
  A small percentage of residents use any particular road, too, but that doesn't make roads useless. The way to get to a large percentage of residents using any road is by building roads literally everywhere that people are. If the subway went more places, then more people would use it, too. Almost any specific route for any type of transit is going to be used by a small percentage of the overall population. That's pretty obviously true, because most people live somewhere else for any given route.
- smileysteve 8y ago
  >but that they won’t come at all to most taxpayers. Directly at least; Which is sad that we can have such short sighted vision. As a poster posts above; public transit in a lot of way makes your city more viable; 1) Less Traffic, a single digit % of cars off of the road decreases traffic much more significantly (for the remaining 95%) 2) Better equality in housing, jobs. People to actually make your food and clean your wares can actually get to their jobs 3) Better for the disabled 4) Better for liabilities, death, and stress.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Hah, the "20 years" ago comment made me think that is Austin to a T. In 2000 a bond proposal failed (just barely) that would have been a great starter line down the main corridor in central Austin ( http://www.kut.org/post/why-austins-rail-fail-2000-still-resonates-today http://www.kut.org/post/why-austins-rail-fail-2000-still-res... ). Now, though, I really feel it's almost too late for rail in Austin, with our enormous growth from that time making any sort of land acquisition crazy expensive. The $1 billion+ plus proposal from 2014 mentioned in that linked article was also voted down, but it was phenomenally expensive and didn't actually go where it would do much good - a lot of people saw it as a giveaway for investors who had purchased land along the route. So yeah, I feel we blew our chance, too, and now I feel our main hope is, if not fully self-driving cars, at least networkable cars that could make much better use of the available road space.
- yonkshi 8y ago
  I had a discussion with a buddy about the California high speed rail and similar land prices issue. Surprisingly, eminent domain allows the gov to acquire land fairly cheaply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States
  - nradov 8y ago
    Eminent domain doesn't make lane acquisition cheap. The government has to pay market price.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      And furthermore, eminent domain is (for the most part rightly) very politically fraught these days. Clearly it's sometimes needed but I'm perfectly happy with it being difficult, expensive, unpopular, and requiring a lot of justification.
      - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        It wouldn't be so fraught if local politicians stopped trying to use it for "economic development" projects backed by people they owe favors too. If eminent domain weren't an expensive PITA then it would be abused.
jeffwilcox 8y ago
Riding the Link Light Rail is super depressing when it stops at all the streets on Rainier Ave, just waiting to T-bone another left-turning car that isn't paying attention to how things work... The appetite for large-scale transit outside highway lanes in America is downright depressing. I'm still under the influence of a recent trip to Japan, and a trip before that to Germany, while reading about high-speed trains in China, and essentially the rest of the world is not only willing to fully invest in smart rail tech for their cities, but they are willing to go the whole way with high-speed rail, too. Cargo trains and the car industry controls too much!
- techsupporter 8y ago
  At the time, businesses along Rainier Ave pushed for a surface alignment instead of a tunnel to get more stops along Rainier, to avoid disruption to business access from cut-and-cover tunneling, and because they thought having people above ground would make their area more visible. (There were also people who raised the idea that building a light rail system from the northern, and more white, part of Seattle down to the airport while "hiding" the more non-white part of Seattle from those riders by putting them in a tunnel was socially unfair.) It isn't always construction concerns that dictate why we make the decisions we do. That said, I have been on the HSR systems in Germany and eastern China and, yes, they are beautiful and I wish we had one in Puget Sound.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    At the time, I remember many citizen groups complaining that Ranier should have a tunnel or st least some more grade separation. Light rail and HSR are completely different things though. Also, the area lacks much density on its outside for HSR to go anywhere, maybe Portland with a stop in Vancouver and Tacoma?
    - tjr225 8y ago
      Olympia would be a good stop too. When Worked down there for the State there were people that commuted all the way from Renton and even Portland(Seriously). Not to mention I reckon there is a lot of traffic from Seattle <-> Olympia. Now that you mention it add it Bellingham too. The only issues with this is I can see a lot of complaints about rising property values in the more rural parts of the Sound, but you've got to start making adaptations for the influx of people at some point, right?
droopybuns 8y ago
Part of the problem is that King County and the Seattle city council have all alienated a major chunk of constituents. It’s bad enough to endure a tax increase- but the leaders end up fucking over the landowners so much that even if they know it would be for the best, nobody trusts them to spend the cash the way they promised.
- Latteland 8y ago
  I've lived in King County for 20 years. Yes, taxes have been going up a crazy amount, so have our needs, so have our home values. But what did they do to screw us over?
  - droopybuns 8y ago
    https://m.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/King-County-Council-passes-Safeco-Field-13206484.php https://m.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/King-County-Coun... https://crosscut.com/2018/04/salmon-tribes-should-beat-washington-supreme-court https://crosscut.com/2018/04/salmon-tribes-should-beat-washi... And just try getting a building permit in unincorporated king county. King county apparently exists for either Seattle, or anyone but King County citizens.
    - Latteland 8y ago
      I don't live in Seattle, I feel reasonably well treated. I do hate that they are spending so much public money on the baseball stadium, but that's not making me feel that terrible. I used to live in unincorporated king county - did you know that there are tons of places that have septic tanks, even well settled neighborhoods have them, because they didn't extend the county sewer lines that far. On your second article, I'm not sure what your point is about the tribes vs Washington state.
- fungi 8y ago
  Blaming politicians when you only have 42% voter turnout is a pretty weak argument. https://results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/king/ https://results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/king/ Its a democracy, vote for better ppl.
cpeterso 8y ago
The Caldecott Tunnel's fourth bore is an SF Bay Area example of how long it infrastructure investment takes before tax payers can enjoy the benefits. The Caldecott Tunnel in the East Bay had three "bores". The center bore would switch directions at noon to accommodate morning and afternoon rush hour, causing painful merges from four to two lanes for people driving the other direction. Plans for adding a fourth bore, so there would be two eastbound and two westbound bores, started in 2000. Funding wasn't approved until 2007. Construction began in 2009 and the fourth bore opened to the public in 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel#Fourth_bore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel#Fourth_bore
- gok 8y ago
  An even more egregious example would be the East span of the Bay Bridge, which was known to be structurally unsafe since the 1950s, collapsed in 1989, and wasn't actually replaced until 2013. So 24 years and $6.5 billion to build (really fix) a 2 mile bridge. The entire original bridge (both spans, plus the Yerba Buena tunnel) cost less than $1.4 billion in 2013 dollars, and was built in around 3.5 years.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    And the first phase of New York's Second Avenue subway just opened about a year ago. It was first proposed in... 1919.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
It isn’t like the system is free to run after it is built, otherwise Seattle had a rail/trolley system 100 years ago that could just have still been in use. I think it is really fallacious thinking when saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago. Ya, the right aways would have been easier, but the cheaper tech would have needed to be upgraded and/or maintained. Investing heavily in a rail system right before the huge Boeing bust of the seventies could have ended up pretty badly for Seattle.
- close04 8y ago
  > saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago I don't think that's what it means. Don't think about the actual costs, think about when you pay the costs and when you reap the benefit. People want to enjoy the benefits with as little effort or sacrifice from their side. - Most people aren't willing to be the ones to have to pay any cost, they'd rather have others do it. - Most people would like to enjoy a benefit as soon as possible, so they'd rather have others put that in place in advance. Combine these 2 and you get the picture: a person today doesn't want to pay for something and even worse, only get it in a decade or more. Any other discomfort just gets piled on an already unfavorable situation.
- guitarbill 8y ago
  > I think it is really fallacious thinking when saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago Respectfully, could not disagree more. The more urban development there is, the harder these things get to build. It's probably impossible to do nowadays, and Seattle is a cesspit of traffic, even compared to other US cities. As far as maintenance or upgrades, please. Why do you brush your teeth? Finally, can you measure quality of life, and if so, how much money is it worth? It's shameful that it's always an economic argument, usually by people who are already well-off. The list of benefits for mass rapid transit is endless, and at the end of the day, it's Americans who suffer for not having it, nobody else (except with environmental concerns, i.e. global warming).
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    There is a cost to having the infrastructure, just like there is a cost to maintaining a tree. The tree analogy is actually very apt, well, except in that case planting the tree is cheap but keeping it watered is very expensive. Don’t get me wrong, I think this would be a great ideal for Seattle today. But back then? Or even from what I remember in the late 70s and 80s? The system would have been very difficult to justify and might have rotted before it was actually needed. And I say this as someone who had to commute from Bothell to UW by bus in the early 90s.
shados 8y ago
Proper public transit, especially subways, are really the answer to everything... "Can't find jobs!". Well, often it's more "Can't get to the jobs you could do". Public transit! "Need to do more for disabled people!". Public transit! (assuming its built with accessibility in mind). "Need more affordable housing!". Public transit! Further apartments are now viable again (need a lot of public transit though, otherwise all you did is massively gentrify an area and kick the poors out). "Too much traffic!". Ok, you get the drift. Yeah, it's expensive as hell to build...except for the benefits, its probably cheaper than everything else you can do. And even if its not...the benefits are just that significant.

rayiner 8y ago

The problem is not that the benefits will come in decades, but that they won’t come at all to most taxpayers. Here in DC we built a subway 40 years ago. It’s a huge boondoggle that is usable for a single digit percent of the taxpayers who pay for it. Folks in Richmond who might ride Metro a few times in their lifetime or lower income folks who work in the suburbs subsidize the commutes of lawyers and federal government workers who work downtown.

pcwalton 8y ago
The D.C. Metro has a daily ridership of 612,652 and an annual ridership of 179,693,126. Farebox recovery is 62%, which exceeds that of Vienna and is almost as high as that of Munich. If you look at how people use transit, it skews toward lower-income people [1]. High-income people like the lawyers and government officials you mention use it a lot too, but not as often. If you want to pick on a failing transit system, pick on VTA in Silicon Valley, not the D.C. Metro. [1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-on-public-transit-in-the-u-s/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-o...
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  That still means it is 38% subsidized by the taxpayer, right? Farebox recovery is important but you need to also take into account in absolute terms the cost minus recovery.
  - melling 8y ago
    Don’t we spend a lot of federal dollars on roads, bridges, etc? https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-government-spending-highway-infrastructure-en.jsp https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-govern...
  - function_seven 8y ago
    It might be partially funded by taxpayer money. Is that benefiting the taxpayer by reducing road congestion or having cleaner air? (I don’t know the answer to this for any given metro, but it’s the question that needs answering)
  - wolco 8y ago
    subtract the additional taxes gained by new business / housing along the line.
  - kiba 8y ago
    Just because we couldn't recover it based on accounting doesn't mean it is not a net benefit.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    We don't even do that for roads. If you required transportation infrastructure to all make profit nothing would ever get built.
    - nojvek 8y ago
      That’s probably the wrong way to think about things. Good roads or any transport system allows frictionless trade of goods and services. This means more money moving in the economy and hopefully a boost for the country. This means more taxes back to the govt. Taxes is how the govt makes money so it’s in their interest to make its citizens wealthier by making it easy for them to move around and do businessy and worky tings.
      - bobthepanda 8y ago
        I agree. Which is why I pointed out the silly hypocrisy of fixating on farebox recovery.
- rayiner 8y ago
  The DC Metro area has 3.3 million non farm jobs, which means WMATA is serving just 20% of taxpayers in the area (even less if you consider that many riders are tourists). Moreover, each ride is subsized by MD, VA, and DC. There are 8 million non farm jobs among those taxpayers, but virtually none can use Metro. Finally, the average income of Metro riders is north of $100k: https://public.tableau.com/profile/planitmetro#!/vizhome/RailSurveyIncomebyStation/IncomeofMetrorailRidershipbyStationofEntry https://public.tableau.com/profile/planitmetro#!/vizhome/Rai.... That means rides for well-off Metro riders are being subsidized by less well off taxpayers. Its wealth transfer from poor to rich (especially considering that the state and local taxes that fund Metro are regressive).
  - justinpombrio 8y ago
    > Finally, the average income of Metro riders is north of $100k: https://public.tableau.com/profile/planitmetro#!/vizhome/Rai... https://public.tableau.com/profile/planitmetro#!/vizhome/Rai.... That's got to be talking about mean personal income of riders, right? I just looked up some stats for DC. I started with the numbers from here: https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US1150000-washington-dc/ https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US1150000-washingto... And also made some conversions between personal&household stats, by estimating that 16% of people in DC are under 15 and thus not counted in per-capita income, together with the average household size being 2.3. Altogether, in DC: Median per-capita income: $42k Mean per-capita income: $52k Median household income: $82k Mean household income: $100k I'm really surpised that the average income of riders is around $100k. That hasn't been my perception with other public transport.
    - pcwalton 8y ago
      Yeah, it's rather odd. BART's equivalent data (though not as nicely plotted) is here: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/StationProfile2015_HomeOriginOnePagers_rev0629.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/StationProfile... Pulling up some random stations shows that the median income at most BART stations is $50k-$75k, which is right what I would expect. Even at the downtown/FiDi ones like Embarcadero and Montgomery, it's just a bit above $75k. Median income in SF is about $95k, so BART ridership skews less wealthy than the area as a whole.
- reap_and_sow 8y ago
  Your farebox recovery ratio is way off - the DOT statistics I see show 42% [1], significantly lower than both Vienna and Munich. [1]:https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit_agency_profile_doc/2016/30030.pdf https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit_...
  - tptacek 8y ago
    I believe you're looking at the average of the MTA bus system and the DC Metro. This thread is exclusively about the latter.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    I got the number from here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metro#Financing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metro#Financing
- msla 8y ago
  It hasn't gone zero fare yet? Even Missoula has zero fare! Great way to take the mass transit system out of the reach of the poor.
  - msla 8y ago
    Wow. A lot of people are threatened by poor people riding mass transit. Quelle surprise.
mcbutterbunz 8y ago
Just because someone doesn't ride the subway doesn't mean they don't benefit from it. More people on the subway means fewer cars on the road, cleaner air and water, less maintenance on roads, safer streets.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Only for people commuting in the same general pattern as the rail routes. The problem in DC is that most jobs in the metro area are actually in the suburbs. Reduced congestion going from Arlington to DC helps road commuters going from Arlington to DC, but does nothing for the folks commuting from Ashburn to Reston or Bowie to Bethesda. I live in Anne Arundel. Folks here are now footing the bill for WMATA thanks to the Maryland funding commitment. Metro is doing nothing to reduce congestion anywhere around here (there is no Metro station in the county).
  - jacobwil 8y ago
    Are you saying that there are zero people that take the MARC commuter rail out of Odenton and transfer to Metro? People that would (without Metro) have no way of getting from MARC to their DC jobs would disagree with you that Metro it doesn't reduce congestion on 295 and other congested roads that pass through Anne Arundel.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      Anne Arundel’s share of the Metro commitment is about $13 million (probably more because the county has higher median income than Maryland as a whole). Just 3,000 daily riders board at Odenton. Let’s say 2,000 are going to DC and 1,000 to Baltimore. That means the county is paying $6,500 per year to facilitate Metro connnections for each rider. 295 moreover carries over 100,000 cars per day (more than double the entire MARC system). Another 2,000 would be a rounding error.
      - Anechoic 8y ago
        Another 2,000 would be a rounding error. 2,000 would be 2%. That's in the range of a traffic change (1% - 5%) that would degrade the Level of Service of a highway from D (design goal) to E or F. It doesn't take much of a reduction in traffic to significantly improve free-flow. Or, conversely, it doesn't take much an increase in numbers to make traffic suck more than it already does.
saosebastiao 8y ago
The sentiment you express will likely be down voted by mass transit advocates, but it should be understood better by them. Cause it sucks to pay massive taxes and see other people get all the benefit. The priorities are often out of balance. Surface light rail can be a massive improvement over buses on shared roads, a huge increase in transportation capacity over buses, and can be built for a fraction of the cost of subways, allowing us to serve more people with the same amount of investment. Meaning instead of serving 10% of the population with the best quality transit, we could be serving 50% of the population with slightly slower service. And when the time comes that a tunnel would improve capacity and service, you have 50% of the population voting yes because it's in their best interest instead of hoping and praying that enough people are willing to benevolently pay huge increases in taxes for something they'll rarely use.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  Lots of us transit advocates were glad to see BART vote down the proposed Livermore extension because of exactly the effect you mention: it's spending a lot of money to enhance services for rich people, when bus service would be more practical. Transit advocacy doesn't mean "all rail all the time".
  - saosebastiao 8y ago
    Of course not. I'm a transit advocate myself, but I'd rather see 200 miles of at grade light rail than 50 miles of subway. But it's extremely common in discussions about alternatives to find attitudes like "we might as well not build it at all if it's going to be at grade". It's a deliberate ignorance of opportunity costs, often advocated by those who primarily benefit from an alternative. For example, I can predict whether someone prefers a tall bridge or subterranean crossing versus a much cheaper drawbridge over the ship canal in Ballard, merely by knowing if they live in Ballard or not.
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    Yes, but in practice as a transit user (not in the bay area), rail generally ends up being more practical. Typically trains come every 3 to 10 minutes. In theory, buses could be this common, but more typically they run every 30 minutes or so. And taking into account a typical trip involves a transfer or two, this can make even short commutes over an hour, not acceptable to most people. The goal of transit isn't just to provide an option to the destitute (although it is nice if it does), but to make a serious impact on congestion by making a better alternative to driving for people who otherwise would have done that.
yongjik 8y ago
> ... that is usable for a single digit percent of the taxpayers who pay for it. You could probably say the same thing for >90% of all public roads in, say, California. Why would I need CA route 253, to pick a random example? I've been to Northern California exactly once, and I didn't need the road then.
- oftenwrong 8y ago
  relevant: https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subsidies/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs...
matchbok 8y ago
Metro cost a small, small fraction of what highways cost. It transformed a dying, dangerous city into the one we have now. There is no subsidy that isn't comparable to roads or bridges. I don't own a car, yet my taxes go to highways, because they are essential infrastructure.
- dashundchen 8y ago
  Yes, and even the most conservative of auto drivers won't even blink at a dropping a billion dollars on one additional lane in an interchange, doing nothing to alleve congestion. But if you even speak of spending that on transit, everyone starts screaming. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/10/12/heres-what-a-billion-dollar-interchange-expansion-looks-like/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/10/12/heres-what-a-billion-...
mixmastamyk 8y ago
DC Metro is awesome and what a world-class city deserves, a train from the airport to downtown. (Except for those fare machines from the 80s.)
TheCoelacanth 8y ago
> Folks in Richmond who might ride Metro a few times in their lifetime or lower income folks who work in the suburbs subsidize the commutes of lawyers and federal government workers who work downtown. What a ridiculous assertion. Northern Virginia subsidizes transportation spending for the entire rest of the state, not the other way around.
dionidium 8y ago
A small percentage of residents use any particular road, too, but that doesn't make roads useless. The way to get to a large percentage of residents using any road is by building roads literally everywhere that people are. If the subway went more places, then more people would use it, too. Almost any specific route for any type of transit is going to be used by a small percentage of the overall population. That's pretty obviously true, because most people live somewhere else for any given route.
smileysteve 8y ago
>but that they won’t come at all to most taxpayers. Directly at least; Which is sad that we can have such short sighted vision. As a poster posts above; public transit in a lot of way makes your city more viable; 1) Less Traffic, a single digit % of cars off of the road decreases traffic much more significantly (for the remaining 95%) 2) Better equality in housing, jobs. People to actually make your food and clean your wares can actually get to their jobs 3) Better for the disabled 4) Better for liabilities, death, and stress.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

Hah, the "20 years" ago comment made me think that is Austin to a T. In 2000 a bond proposal failed (just barely) that would have been a great starter line down the main corridor in central Austin ( http://www.kut.org/post/why-austins-rail-fail-2000-still-resonates-today http://www.kut.org/post/why-austins-rail-fail-2000-still-res... ). Now, though, I really feel it's almost too late for rail in Austin, with our enormous growth from that time making any sort of land acquisition crazy expensive. The $1 billion+ plus proposal from 2014 mentioned in that linked article was also voted down, but it was phenomenally expensive and didn't actually go where it would do much good - a lot of people saw it as a giveaway for investors who had purchased land along the route. So yeah, I feel we blew our chance, too, and now I feel our main hope is, if not fully self-driving cars, at least networkable cars that could make much better use of the available road space.

yonkshi 8y ago
I had a discussion with a buddy about the California high speed rail and similar land prices issue. Surprisingly, eminent domain allows the gov to acquire land fairly cheaply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States
- nradov 8y ago
  Eminent domain doesn't make lane acquisition cheap. The government has to pay market price.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    And furthermore, eminent domain is (for the most part rightly) very politically fraught these days. Clearly it's sometimes needed but I'm perfectly happy with it being difficult, expensive, unpopular, and requiring a lot of justification.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      It wouldn't be so fraught if local politicians stopped trying to use it for "economic development" projects backed by people they owe favors too. If eminent domain weren't an expensive PITA then it would be abused.

jeffwilcox 8y ago

Riding the Link Light Rail is super depressing when it stops at all the streets on Rainier Ave, just waiting to T-bone another left-turning car that isn't paying attention to how things work... The appetite for large-scale transit outside highway lanes in America is downright depressing. I'm still under the influence of a recent trip to Japan, and a trip before that to Germany, while reading about high-speed trains in China, and essentially the rest of the world is not only willing to fully invest in smart rail tech for their cities, but they are willing to go the whole way with high-speed rail, too. Cargo trains and the car industry controls too much!

techsupporter 8y ago
At the time, businesses along Rainier Ave pushed for a surface alignment instead of a tunnel to get more stops along Rainier, to avoid disruption to business access from cut-and-cover tunneling, and because they thought having people above ground would make their area more visible. (There were also people who raised the idea that building a light rail system from the northern, and more white, part of Seattle down to the airport while "hiding" the more non-white part of Seattle from those riders by putting them in a tunnel was socially unfair.) It isn't always construction concerns that dictate why we make the decisions we do. That said, I have been on the HSR systems in Germany and eastern China and, yes, they are beautiful and I wish we had one in Puget Sound.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  At the time, I remember many citizen groups complaining that Ranier should have a tunnel or st least some more grade separation. Light rail and HSR are completely different things though. Also, the area lacks much density on its outside for HSR to go anywhere, maybe Portland with a stop in Vancouver and Tacoma?
  - tjr225 8y ago
    Olympia would be a good stop too. When Worked down there for the State there were people that commuted all the way from Renton and even Portland(Seriously). Not to mention I reckon there is a lot of traffic from Seattle <-> Olympia. Now that you mention it add it Bellingham too. The only issues with this is I can see a lot of complaints about rising property values in the more rural parts of the Sound, but you've got to start making adaptations for the influx of people at some point, right?

droopybuns 8y ago

Part of the problem is that King County and the Seattle city council have all alienated a major chunk of constituents. It’s bad enough to endure a tax increase- but the leaders end up fucking over the landowners so much that even if they know it would be for the best, nobody trusts them to spend the cash the way they promised.

Latteland 8y ago
I've lived in King County for 20 years. Yes, taxes have been going up a crazy amount, so have our needs, so have our home values. But what did they do to screw us over?
- droopybuns 8y ago
  https://m.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/King-County-Council-passes-Safeco-Field-13206484.php https://m.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/King-County-Coun... https://crosscut.com/2018/04/salmon-tribes-should-beat-washington-supreme-court https://crosscut.com/2018/04/salmon-tribes-should-beat-washi... And just try getting a building permit in unincorporated king county. King county apparently exists for either Seattle, or anyone but King County citizens.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    I don't live in Seattle, I feel reasonably well treated. I do hate that they are spending so much public money on the baseball stadium, but that's not making me feel that terrible. I used to live in unincorporated king county - did you know that there are tons of places that have septic tanks, even well settled neighborhoods have them, because they didn't extend the county sewer lines that far. On your second article, I'm not sure what your point is about the tribes vs Washington state.
fungi 8y ago
Blaming politicians when you only have 42% voter turnout is a pretty weak argument. https://results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/king/ https://results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/king/ Its a democracy, vote for better ppl.

cpeterso 8y ago

The Caldecott Tunnel's fourth bore is an SF Bay Area example of how long it infrastructure investment takes before tax payers can enjoy the benefits. The Caldecott Tunnel in the East Bay had three "bores". The center bore would switch directions at noon to accommodate morning and afternoon rush hour, causing painful merges from four to two lanes for people driving the other direction. Plans for adding a fourth bore, so there would be two eastbound and two westbound bores, started in 2000. Funding wasn't approved until 2007. Construction began in 2009 and the fourth bore opened to the public in 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel#Fourth_bore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel#Fourth_bore

gok 8y ago
An even more egregious example would be the East span of the Bay Bridge, which was known to be structurally unsafe since the 1950s, collapsed in 1989, and wasn't actually replaced until 2013. So 24 years and $6.5 billion to build (really fix) a 2 mile bridge. The entire original bridge (both spans, plus the Yerba Buena tunnel) cost less than $1.4 billion in 2013 dollars, and was built in around 3.5 years.
- ghaff 8y ago
  And the first phase of New York's Second Avenue subway just opened about a year ago. It was first proposed in... 1919.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

It isn’t like the system is free to run after it is built, otherwise Seattle had a rail/trolley system 100 years ago that could just have still been in use. I think it is really fallacious thinking when saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago. Ya, the right aways would have been easier, but the cheaper tech would have needed to be upgraded and/or maintained. Investing heavily in a rail system right before the huge Boeing bust of the seventies could have ended up pretty badly for Seattle.

close04 8y ago
> saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago I don't think that's what it means. Don't think about the actual costs, think about when you pay the costs and when you reap the benefit. People want to enjoy the benefits with as little effort or sacrifice from their side. - Most people aren't willing to be the ones to have to pay any cost, they'd rather have others do it. - Most people would like to enjoy a benefit as soon as possible, so they'd rather have others put that in place in advance. Combine these 2 and you get the picture: a person today doesn't want to pay for something and even worse, only get it in a decade or more. Any other discomfort just gets piled on an already unfavorable situation.
guitarbill 8y ago
> I think it is really fallacious thinking when saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago Respectfully, could not disagree more. The more urban development there is, the harder these things get to build. It's probably impossible to do nowadays, and Seattle is a cesspit of traffic, even compared to other US cities. As far as maintenance or upgrades, please. Why do you brush your teeth? Finally, can you measure quality of life, and if so, how much money is it worth? It's shameful that it's always an economic argument, usually by people who are already well-off. The list of benefits for mass rapid transit is endless, and at the end of the day, it's Americans who suffer for not having it, nobody else (except with environmental concerns, i.e. global warming).
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  There is a cost to having the infrastructure, just like there is a cost to maintaining a tree. The tree analogy is actually very apt, well, except in that case planting the tree is cheap but keeping it watered is very expensive. Don’t get me wrong, I think this would be a great ideal for Seattle today. But back then? Or even from what I remember in the late 70s and 80s? The system would have been very difficult to justify and might have rotted before it was actually needed. And I say this as someone who had to commute from Bothell to UW by bus in the early 90s.

shados 8y ago

Proper public transit, especially subways, are really the answer to everything... "Can't find jobs!". Well, often it's more "Can't get to the jobs you could do". Public transit! "Need to do more for disabled people!". Public transit! (assuming its built with accessibility in mind). "Need more affordable housing!". Public transit! Further apartments are now viable again (need a lot of public transit though, otherwise all you did is massively gentrify an area and kick the poors out). "Too much traffic!". Ok, you get the drift. Yeah, it's expensive as hell to build...except for the benefits, its probably cheaper than everything else you can do. And even if its not...the benefits are just that significant.