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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 a

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.
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    Frequency of service is entirely orthogonal to the type of service. London has a bus route that runs one bus per minute in peak times. Because London's streets are busy this means you will usually be able to see _several_ of the buses on that route on a street you're on that's served by that bus, and choose whether you'd prefer to walk to the closest stop, or walk in the direction of your bus and catch an "earlier" bus that is further in that direction already. One per minute is actually a _higher_ rate than is achievable by London's automated and semi-automated underground railways, none of which even aim for more than 38 trains per hour in peak. Now, of course S-series underground trains carry about a thousand people, whereas a London double decker bus maybe carries 150 (both would be crammed in this scenario but that's not an infrequent occurrence for peak hours), so the trains on a core route are moving about 35-40 thousand people per hour while these buses move less than 10 thousand, but for you as an individual the buses are more frequent, not to mention they're right there in the street, not at the bottom of a shaft somewhere.
int_19h 8y ago
I'm not a mass transit advocate, not by a long shot. But I've lived in large cities that mostly do light rail, and those that mostly do subway. Subway is much better all around when it's done right. It's really impressive just how many people and how reliably (time-wise) a well-designed subway system can move around. I happen to live in Seattle suburbs, about as far away east from it as possible actually while still technically being in Seattle metro area. So all this stuff is not going to be of any immediate benefit... but I still think that it should be done. The area keeps growing rapidly, and I don't see that stopping anytime soon. Unfair taxes? Well, people in Seattle pay taxes that ultimately pay for the road to my house. I pay for their roads too, sure - but one road in Seattle services a great deal more people than one road out here in unincorporated King County, so all in all, I still get more out of that arrangement than they do. But I don't hear them complaining. In a polity, common good doesn't have to mean that everyone derives equal value from it, or even that everyone derives non-zero value. Sometimes you help your neighbors, sometimes they help you. In the end, long-term, you're both better off.
- saosebastiao 8y ago
  > But I've lived in large cities that mostly do light rail, and those that mostly do subway. Subway is much better all around when it's done right. It's really impressive just how many people and how reliably (time-wise) a well-designed subway system can move around. You can't move people around if your subway doesn't go anywhere because it costs too much to build it out completely. Take the Calgary CTrain vs Seattle's Link. Link was monumentally more expensive than the CTrain (we built a 2 mile tunnel for about the same cost as their entire system). Calgary built more miles, but at grade. Seattle built fewer miles, mostly subway. Calgary has 314k daily riders, Seattle has 80k. Seattle's system has a higher average speed, but services a fraction of the population because the system is so short. Calgary, on the other hand, has ridership so high that building a tunnel to increase capacity in downtown corridors has an ROI so obvious that they didn't even have to ask taxpayers for more taxes because it payed for itself. I too voted for ST3 despite not getting any direct benefit from it. But by building a system that prioritizes speed over coverage, ST3 relied on the benevolence of taxpayers to get it passed. Luckily there are enough people willing to shoulder that burden in Seattle, but not every city has the liberal culture of Seattle, and even then it undoubtedly would have been much easier for it to pass if it had a much higher proportion of the population covered. Let's just imagine that I'm a (entirely too common) taxpayer who only votes to pay for things that I directly benefit from. Would it be easier to persuade me to vote for a system where I save 20 minutes on my commute, or a system where someone else saves 25 minutes on their commute?

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.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  Frequency of service is entirely orthogonal to the type of service. London has a bus route that runs one bus per minute in peak times. Because London's streets are busy this means you will usually be able to see _several_ of the buses on that route on a street you're on that's served by that bus, and choose whether you'd prefer to walk to the closest stop, or walk in the direction of your bus and catch an "earlier" bus that is further in that direction already. One per minute is actually a _higher_ rate than is achievable by London's automated and semi-automated underground railways, none of which even aim for more than 38 trains per hour in peak. Now, of course S-series underground trains carry about a thousand people, whereas a London double decker bus maybe carries 150 (both would be crammed in this scenario but that's not an infrequent occurrence for peak hours), so the trains on a core route are moving about 35-40 thousand people per hour while these buses move less than 10 thousand, but for you as an individual the buses are more frequent, not to mention they're right there in the street, not at the bottom of a shaft somewhere.

int_19h 8y ago

I'm not a mass transit advocate, not by a long shot. But I've lived in large cities that mostly do light rail, and those that mostly do subway. Subway is much better all around when it's done right. It's really impressive just how many people and how reliably (time-wise) a well-designed subway system can move around. I happen to live in Seattle suburbs, about as far away east from it as possible actually while still technically being in Seattle metro area. So all this stuff is not going to be of any immediate benefit... but I still think that it should be done. The area keeps growing rapidly, and I don't see that stopping anytime soon. Unfair taxes? Well, people in Seattle pay taxes that ultimately pay for the road to my house. I pay for their roads too, sure - but one road in Seattle services a great deal more people than one road out here in unincorporated King County, so all in all, I still get more out of that arrangement than they do. But I don't hear them complaining. In a polity, common good doesn't have to mean that everyone derives equal value from it, or even that everyone derives non-zero value. Sometimes you help your neighbors, sometimes they help you. In the end, long-term, you're both better off.

saosebastiao 8y ago
> But I've lived in large cities that mostly do light rail, and those that mostly do subway. Subway is much better all around when it's done right. It's really impressive just how many people and how reliably (time-wise) a well-designed subway system can move around. You can't move people around if your subway doesn't go anywhere because it costs too much to build it out completely. Take the Calgary CTrain vs Seattle's Link. Link was monumentally more expensive than the CTrain (we built a 2 mile tunnel for about the same cost as their entire system). Calgary built more miles, but at grade. Seattle built fewer miles, mostly subway. Calgary has 314k daily riders, Seattle has 80k. Seattle's system has a higher average speed, but services a fraction of the population because the system is so short. Calgary, on the other hand, has ridership so high that building a tunnel to increase capacity in downtown corridors has an ROI so obvious that they didn't even have to ask taxpayers for more taxes because it payed for itself. I too voted for ST3 despite not getting any direct benefit from it. But by building a system that prioritizes speed over coverage, ST3 relied on the benevolence of taxpayers to get it passed. Luckily there are enough people willing to shoulder that burden in Seattle, but not every city has the liberal culture of Seattle, and even then it undoubtedly would have been much easier for it to pass if it had a much higher proportion of the population covered. Let's just imagine that I'm a (entirely too common) taxpayer who only votes to pay for things that I directly benefit from. Would it be easier to persuade me to vote for a system where I save 20 minutes on my commute, or a system where someone else saves 25 minutes on their commute?