6 ms·

Does public transportation always work better outside the US? Metra in Chicago is a heck of a lot more reliable than the likes of South West Trains and Govia in

Does public transportation always work better outside the US? Metra in Chicago is a heck of a lot more reliable than the likes of South West Trains and Govia in the UK. Metra even works in the snow! And in the 15 years I've been using it has not had one strike. Whereas London suffers rail and tube strikes every few weeks. Add to that commuting from the Chicago Burbs costs about 1/3rd of what commuting from the London suburbs does.

astrodust 8y ago
Some American cities get it, but even those are struggling because their systems are full of legacy problems that are expensive to fix yet don't provide any visible benefits. Changing the wiring on your subway so it doesn't catch on fire is really expensive, but nobody's going to notice if the subway doesn't catch on fire. London and New York have subway systems that are extremely complex and on the verge of self-destruction most of the time due to budget constraints. Other, newer systems have decades to go before they face the same crunch.
- osdiab 8y ago
  Except it's on fire really frequently—track fires caused by garbage are a fairly common cause of NYC subway delays. NYC is also riddled with inefficiency and corruption that bloats the price of everything they build, which create and exacerbate those budget constraints. Costs per mile of new track and maintenance are consistently an order of magnitude or more higher in NYC than in other parts of the world, with higher rates of encountering problems; this may be partially due to the complexity of building there, but given that fantastically busy and complex cities throughout the world don't have these same problems, I'm much quicker to blame it on the political and economic system (which, tangentially, is why I think stuff like Musk's Boring Company are targeting the wrong issue when it comes to urban development, unless he's just trying to use that as a trojan horse for municipal influence). It's odd to see that such an extravagantly lucrative city can't seem to put together the money to maintain a core part of its infrastructure, that much much much poorer cities are able to achieve in other parts of the world.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    It's about motivation. NYC already has a subway and while it desperately needs upgrades, fixes, and expansion, doing anything is unbelievably complex. You've got to be really, really motivated to cut through all that. In "poorer cities" they can just get things done because they don't have the same layers of process. Building a subway line in Nigeria is trivial compared to dealing with the multitude of parties, all of which have significant political clout, that is Manhattan.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > It's about motivation. NYC already has a subway and while it desperately needs upgrades, fixes, and expansion, doing anything is unbelievably complex. You've got to be really, really motivated to cut through all that. It's not that it's "complex"; it's that you would literally have to take on the entire political machine of both political parties in New York, along with the TWU itself[0], in order to push for the meaningful investments that the transit system needs. [0] The MTA and TWU literally spent the last several months actively campaigning for politicians who would block the plans for upgrading the transit infrastructure. Welcome to New York!
      - astrodust 8y ago
        > ...it's that you would literally have to take on the entire political machine of both political parties in New York... That sounds pretty complex to me. There's a considerable number of moving parts there all of which inter-relate in intractably complicated ways.
        chimeracoder 8y ago
        > There's a considerable number of moving parts there all of which inter-relate in intractably complicated ways. I guess by that view, all (stable) corruption is inherently complex. Which I guess isn't wrong, but I'd prefer to call a spade a spade: the problem is rampant corruption that is essentially impossible to address.
ams6110 8y ago
Yes, a few American cities have good public transit, probably rivaling Europe. Chicago and NYC are at least two, there may be others. But once you get outside of those kinds of major metropolis areas, it's pretty bleak. My town (pop. about 80,000) has a bus system. It's a college town, and a few routes that run between campus and student apartment neighborhoods are heavily used. But otherwise most of the buses drive around empty especially mid-day and at night. It's not anywhere close to self-sufficient. It contributes to a lot of people who don't use the bus themselves to think the whole system is a waste of money. Especially when you see a large diesel bus driving around with zero, one, or two people on board. We'd keep 90% of the benefit and cut a huge amount of cost if we just killed off all the routes that the students don't use. But the system is more political than pragmatic so it doesn't happen.
- francisofascii 8y ago
  Empty buses do create a wasteful perception. However I would argue that most cars you see on the road are single occupant, i.e. mostly empty, and thus hugely wasteful as well.
- some-guy 8y ago
  You just perfectly described my hometown, Davis CA. The busses are nice but besides the heavy student traffic in the morning and afternoon they are pretty empty.
micv 8y ago
UK public transport is a disaster in its own right. It turns out that privatisation doesn't really help that much, especially when it's done in a way that basically gives you the worst parts of state ownership combined with the worst parts of private ownership. If you look to the continent you'll find systems that work a whole hell of a lot better.
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  I rode the Virgin East Cost Line a few times and it was only OK. When they lost it to LNER, though, it turned into a complete nightmare. I've done 4 round trips now between London and Edinburgh on LNER and have had air conditioning in my car a total of 0 times, and the already long 4.5 hour ride delayed by an hour or more each time. Maybe I've just had terrible luck, but 8 separate legs and 0 comfortable rides leads me to believe it is completely mismanaged, and that regular maintenance isn't occurring.
  - micv 8y ago
    The east coast mainline has been a mess for years. Virgin were the second franchise to collapse and the only one that seems to have worked was the nationalised franchise that came between them.

astrodust 8y ago

Some American cities get it, but even those are struggling because their systems are full of legacy problems that are expensive to fix yet don't provide any visible benefits. Changing the wiring on your subway so it doesn't catch on fire is really expensive, but nobody's going to notice if the subway doesn't catch on fire. London and New York have subway systems that are extremely complex and on the verge of self-destruction most of the time due to budget constraints. Other, newer systems have decades to go before they face the same crunch.

osdiab 8y ago
Except it's on fire really frequently—track fires caused by garbage are a fairly common cause of NYC subway delays. NYC is also riddled with inefficiency and corruption that bloats the price of everything they build, which create and exacerbate those budget constraints. Costs per mile of new track and maintenance are consistently an order of magnitude or more higher in NYC than in other parts of the world, with higher rates of encountering problems; this may be partially due to the complexity of building there, but given that fantastically busy and complex cities throughout the world don't have these same problems, I'm much quicker to blame it on the political and economic system (which, tangentially, is why I think stuff like Musk's Boring Company are targeting the wrong issue when it comes to urban development, unless he's just trying to use that as a trojan horse for municipal influence). It's odd to see that such an extravagantly lucrative city can't seem to put together the money to maintain a core part of its infrastructure, that much much much poorer cities are able to achieve in other parts of the world.
- astrodust 8y ago
  It's about motivation. NYC already has a subway and while it desperately needs upgrades, fixes, and expansion, doing anything is unbelievably complex. You've got to be really, really motivated to cut through all that. In "poorer cities" they can just get things done because they don't have the same layers of process. Building a subway line in Nigeria is trivial compared to dealing with the multitude of parties, all of which have significant political clout, that is Manhattan.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > It's about motivation. NYC already has a subway and while it desperately needs upgrades, fixes, and expansion, doing anything is unbelievably complex. You've got to be really, really motivated to cut through all that. It's not that it's "complex"; it's that you would literally have to take on the entire political machine of both political parties in New York, along with the TWU itself[0], in order to push for the meaningful investments that the transit system needs. [0] The MTA and TWU literally spent the last several months actively campaigning for politicians who would block the plans for upgrading the transit infrastructure. Welcome to New York!
    - astrodust 8y ago
      > ...it's that you would literally have to take on the entire political machine of both political parties in New York... That sounds pretty complex to me. There's a considerable number of moving parts there all of which inter-relate in intractably complicated ways.
      - chimeracoder 8y ago
        > There's a considerable number of moving parts there all of which inter-relate in intractably complicated ways. I guess by that view, all (stable) corruption is inherently complex. Which I guess isn't wrong, but I'd prefer to call a spade a spade: the problem is rampant corruption that is essentially impossible to address.

ams6110 8y ago

Yes, a few American cities have good public transit, probably rivaling Europe. Chicago and NYC are at least two, there may be others. But once you get outside of those kinds of major metropolis areas, it's pretty bleak. My town (pop. about 80,000) has a bus system. It's a college town, and a few routes that run between campus and student apartment neighborhoods are heavily used. But otherwise most of the buses drive around empty especially mid-day and at night. It's not anywhere close to self-sufficient. It contributes to a lot of people who don't use the bus themselves to think the whole system is a waste of money. Especially when you see a large diesel bus driving around with zero, one, or two people on board. We'd keep 90% of the benefit and cut a huge amount of cost if we just killed off all the routes that the students don't use. But the system is more political than pragmatic so it doesn't happen.

francisofascii 8y ago
Empty buses do create a wasteful perception. However I would argue that most cars you see on the road are single occupant, i.e. mostly empty, and thus hugely wasteful as well.
some-guy 8y ago
You just perfectly described my hometown, Davis CA. The busses are nice but besides the heavy student traffic in the morning and afternoon they are pretty empty.

micv 8y ago

UK public transport is a disaster in its own right. It turns out that privatisation doesn't really help that much, especially when it's done in a way that basically gives you the worst parts of state ownership combined with the worst parts of private ownership. If you look to the continent you'll find systems that work a whole hell of a lot better.

jermaustin1 8y ago
I rode the Virgin East Cost Line a few times and it was only OK. When they lost it to LNER, though, it turned into a complete nightmare. I've done 4 round trips now between London and Edinburgh on LNER and have had air conditioning in my car a total of 0 times, and the already long 4.5 hour ride delayed by an hour or more each time. Maybe I've just had terrible luck, but 8 separate legs and 0 comfortable rides leads me to believe it is completely mismanaged, and that regular maintenance isn't occurring.
- micv 8y ago
  The east coast mainline has been a mess for years. Virgin were the second franchise to collapse and the only one that seems to have worked was the nationalised franchise that came between them.