21 ms·

The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

88 points by zonotope 8y ago

gok 8y ago
Well the West Coast may be beating on getting voters to agree to dump money into long term transit projects. Actually getting them built in our lifetimes and then getting people to use them is a very different problem.
xrd 8y ago
Can anyone in other west coast cities speak about the crime on the new transit systems? I'm in Portland, and for the first time in my life, I'm worried about crime on mass transit. Maybe it is just the automated news feeds that are circulating stories of stabbings and attacks that have heightened my internalized hysteria. At the same time, I've felt a larger presence of people on mass transit who seem to be dealing with a mental health crisis of some kind. And, it makes me feel less excited to bring my kids with me when I ride. This article does not touch on that.
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- Gibbon1 8y ago
  When I listen to my friends that ride buses and BART the major complaint is people doing utterly foul things like pissing or shitting. Or being harassed. Being harrased depends a lot on sex age etc. My GF's who looks like she lives in Walnut Creek gets harassed. Me who looks like an old skinny biker does not. Got to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year.
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    > Got to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year. Seems like the issue is lack of security/policing, not the number of passengers. There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent.
    - pishpash 8y ago
      CA doesn't do policing. It's all about the feel-good.
      - nicoburns 8y ago
        Clearly people aren't feeling that good about the public transport!
      - dmode 8y ago
        Is that why we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world ?
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        pishpash 8y ago
        It's like a low-grade fever: the fact that you stay sick while others are well is a sign that you didn't take your meds, not that you took too many.
    - Symbiote 8y ago
      > There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent. I think you can go a lot further: almost all public transport networks, regardless of type or usage, don't have this problem to any extent. Some people in large European or Asian cities don't like using public transport because of overcrowding, slow journey times, cost, inflexibility, infrequency, strikes, "terrorism" or whatever. I know people who would cite each of these reasons. I don't know anyone who would say there is excrement or urine in the vehicles or stations, or even unwashed people. It's that rare. Bay area residents needs to pressure their politicians into fixing the problem. That means some combination of - extra policing - extra cleaning - extra public toilets and maybe working out some long-term solution to the mentally ill homeless people.
  - wastedhours 8y ago
    > people doing utterly foul things like pissing or shitting Based on my (very limited) experience of SF, that seems like an area-wide issue. I've travelled reasonably extensively and SF is the only place I've been where I've suspected more of the shit on the path (inside and out) was human than canine.
  - pcr0 8y ago
    Beijing's subway carries over 10m passengers a day and definitely has less harassment and human excrement.
    - tokyodude 8y ago
      Tokyo's rail transit is at 40m passengers a day. We don't have the poo. We do have occasional vomit from drunk salary men. Fortunately it gets cleaned up relatively quickly. The cars are clean unlike SF.
      - crimsonalucard 8y ago
        This has everything to do with the attitude of people who ride the transit. You don't have poo because nobody does that in tokyo.
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  I take the BART in the SF Bay Area daily, and if you take it before 10 PM it feels safe, though can be annoying because it's not always the cleanest. Then again, I feel safer than on the road (where there's at least a handful of massive accidents each way, everyday) and I've definitely been in friends' cars that are not to the same cleanliness standard I hold my own things to.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  When I was in Atlanta, I regularly took MARTA, which travels through some rather slummy areas. Beyond the faregates, you're going to be rather safe. I personally felt safer riding the train in Atlanta than I did driving around in a car in Southeast DC. I don't think crime is any worse on mass transit than it is in the surrounding areas. I suspect that most of your fears are driven by media bias: crimes that happen in the crime-ridden section of town are inherently less newsworthy than crimes that happen outside of it.
swebs 8y ago
Weird that they don't mention New York's awful inefficiency, especially since it was reported by the same paper. NYC tax payers are already spending billions and not getting much to show for it. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?module=inline https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
- jdhn 8y ago
  If they did, it would undercut the argument that the NYC subway needs more money on top of what it already has.
dangwu 8y ago
I’m surprised by this article. Most people seem to agree that the the metro systems of NYC, Philadelphia, and DC are much better than those of the west coast. LA’s is unusable for most people because there aren’t enough stops. Seattle’s light rail is definitely gaining steam as it adds more stops.
- ummonk 8y ago
  Right. I'd like the West Coast transit systems to match those available in NYC, DC or Boston. It could be done 20 years from now if we started laying down more subway now. Scooters and self-driving cars is not a transit system.
- kenhwang 8y ago
  I think LA's is only really usable to get to/from DTLA. The nice part is DTLA is becoming more eventful, so you actually want to go there sometimes for non-work reasons. Getting anywhere else is a bit of a crapshoot for the last-mile. I don't think LA's train system is ready for primetime until it can reasonably get into LAX; preferably with a more direct route from the westside that doesn't detour through DTLA.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    The Crenshaw/LAX line that does just that is scheduled to open in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crenshaw/LAX_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crenshaw/LAX_Line ...although its utility will be limited until they connect it to the Red/Purple lines, and that's still on the drawing board.
    - kenhwang 8y ago
      Then there's the people mover for inner-LAX travel between the train station and the terminals scheduled for 2023. But once that and the connection to red/purple is done, I'd say LA's public transit would be in a reasonably usable state.
- tallanvor 8y ago
  The difference is that places like Seattle and LA are expanding their systems. In New York, Boston, and DC it's rather stagnant.
flexie 8y ago
The article doesn't really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed). If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college. What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars? I am not saying the subways shouldn't be built or that planning decades ahead is bad. I love subways. But in the area of transportation we will see huge changes in the coming decades.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Of course there will be changes. But the subways and light rails will still be required for a certain level of throughput. The New York City subway, for example, carries 60K people per hour per direction on a pair of tracks, while a car lane carries somewhere in the range of 2K per hour per direction. Self driving cars may improve lane utilization, but not by up to 30x. Shoving people into cattle cars hurtling down a track is just more space-efficient than dedicating an engine and seats for at most four people at a time. Scooters and bikes have an effective range, particularly in places like LA that can have quite long commute distances. Motive power source doesn't really change much. Intra-urban flight would increase required energy for transport a lot and also move the crapshoot that is today's roads and traffic above our heads, ready to hurtle down at us. Boring tunnels being cheaper has yet to be proven, since the main issues with tunneling are that tunnels have to be tailored to ground conditions. Shuttles to Mars doesn't change how I get to and from work across town, the same way that airplanes did not.
  - foota 8y ago
    Shouldn't a bus have similar throughput to a subway though, with no traffic?
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
StreamBright 8y ago
How about beating Europe or Asia?
- pishpash 8y ago
  In another 500 years.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > How about beating Europe or Asia? London is the only city in Europe that even comes close to offering what NYC alone does in terms of public transit. Even Berlin, the second largest city in the EU, has pitiful public transit in comparison.
  - bbojan 8y ago
    Berlin has 26 subway lines. Some of them (S-Bahn) interconnect with intercity rail, so there are times when you can transfer from a subway to a train on the same platform. I would really like to know what makes you think Berlin public transit is "pitiful"...
  - lclarkmichalek 8y ago
    I think London has a greater ridership (5m tube, 6m bus) than NY (5m subway, 3m bus - http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/ http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/). Buses really are the secret to how London gets around.
  - cribbles 8y ago
    There's a subjective side to this argument, I suppose, but having lived in both cities I'd argue that Berlin's public transportation is _at least_ a couple orders of magnitude better than NYC's. The U-Bahn / S-Bahn / Deutsche Bahn / Autobus / Tram inter-connectivity are at least on par with what NYC has to offer (adjusted for geographic factors and population density), and that's before getting into KPIs like on-time arrival percentages, individual line uptime, and peak hour commuter congestion. And then there's the more intangible differences, which are nevertheless important to humans - like vehicle cleanliness, station upkeep... the list goes on and on. Compare the Berlin Hauptbahnhof to Penn Station. Or the U1 to the L, or the J/M/Z. Or peak-hour Alexanderplatz to Union Square. Or the M29 to... I don't know... the NYC bus of your choosing. My god. Throw whatever numbers you want out there as a counterargument, but I know which I'd prefer in just about any scenario.
romwell 8y ago
Hahaha. I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on Long Island, spent a summer in Seattle, and I live in San Jose now. One can't speak for the entirety of the either coast, but no city in CA comes close to what NYC offers in terms of public transportation. And what NYC offers is a true car-free lifestyle which carries you to work, leisure, and back home via public transport. E-scooters aren't a reliable way to get anywhere yet, and who knows if they'll ever be, not to mention that they are not for everyone. My grandmother is not going to ride one -- nor my wife, for that matter, nor should the kids. But the Subway is a common denominator. This reflects in the daily ridership. MTA carries an order of magnitude more passengers than, say, BART. The same can be said about overall transit ridership[1]. East Coast vs. West Coast is a silly comparison when NYC Metro alone has more ridership than nearly all other major metro areas combined (including both Coasts, the Midwest, and the South). So it's really NYC vs. Anywhere Else, and Anywhere Else still sucks when it comes to public transport because, in practical terms, most people aren't commuting by public transport in Anywhere Else, but they do in NYC. You can't slap a Lime scooter on a suburban development and call that "public transport". And a self-driving car is still a car, a glorified jitney cab if and when it arrives. And it's not going to solve the problems of the car-centric (sub)urbanism[2] anyhow. The mistake the article makes here is a classic one: percentage growth vs. absolute value. Doubling from, say, 500K in a metro area with 7M population is going to be a bit easier than doubling the 14M ridership in a 20M metro. As for the problems - people on HN of all places should be the ones who understand scale and that some problems simply don't exist when the scale is insignificant. I want every city to be a public transit success story, but as it currently stands - the rest of the country will be playing catch-up for a long time. [1]http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/transit-ridership http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/transit-ridership [2]https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611557/self-driving-cars-could-make-urban-traffic-jams-worse/ https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611557/self-dr... -------- TL;DR: NYC mass transit carries more people than systems in all other major metros combined[1]. Any comparison - including this article - is silly.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Seattle actually has extremely high transit ridership and walk commmute share, which is pretty impressive considering how the transit system is mostly buses right now. And by 2024, major centers in the region will be connected by rail transit that is faster than road travel. Anecdotally, I live pretty well without a car here; I use Uber and Lyft when transit don't work out, and if I want to hike usually one of my friends will have a ride. So it feels just like back home in New York, except the trains and buses have a better chance of showing up on time.
inamberclad 8y ago
Electric scooters aren't public.
DubiousPusher 8y ago
Kind of funny they don't mention Portland at all. It actually has a well functioning system already built.
- ppseafield 8y ago
  Portland's transit system is OK. The MAX works well, but it has been neutered by NIMBYism: the new orange line has only a few stops in Milwaukee and goes no further. (And for that they hired three full time cops when it opened). The green line was supposed to be a loop, but it simply goes out to the Clackamas Town Center (just a few miles south of the border with Portland proper). The yellow line stops short of Vancouver, WA across the river, and we spent $4.5 million on coming up with several failed plans for a new bridge. The new line headed SW has to be voted on by the city of Tigard. It'll go up to the bottom of the OHSU hill, but they chose to simply increase the number of shuttles. The buses are mostly reliable and can get you downtown. But several areas feel underserved, especially if you live outside Multnomah county.
  - ppseafield 8y ago
    Also the MAX slows to a crawl downtown, where it shares the street with cars and busses and stops every 2-4 blocks.
    - edaemon 8y ago
      They're closing a few downtown stops that saw low usage to speed things up, but it will still be sluggish. I think the only real solution would be to move the Red/Blue lines to the transit mall and put all the downtown track underground with a cut-and-cover tunnel. Also, the attempts to get the Yellow line into Vancouver fell through because the Washington legislature voted against it. There are renewed efforts to build it, though.
      - ppseafield 8y ago
        Yeah, not much we can do about WA. But that bridge is so old and has no shoulder. Any car accident means a huge slowdown. It'd be nice if we had elevated trains that didn't have to share with busses, cars, bikes, and pedestrians.
huffmsa 8y ago
Of course it is easier to build out new infrastucture to exacting specifications than it is to update 100+ year old infrastructure to meet modern demands.
helen___keller 8y ago
The west coast epitomizes postwar American culture - car infatuation, suburban sprawl, and so on. Transit is growing in the west coast, sure, but transit needs a critical mass of convenience for people to actually live without depending on their car (or choosing to own one at all) We're not going to see cities go all-in on transit while self driving cars are on the horizon. Maybe after cars drive themselves, when people learn traffic is still not getting better, more cities will get serious about transit infrastructure.
samfisher83 8y ago
Compare NYC public transportport to silicon valley transport and it's no contest. Give me NYC. It connects way more places.
francisofascii 8y ago
For the West Coast, the simplest solution is electric buses with dedicated lanes. Buses better serve the existing low density sprawl than trains. Lack of infrastructure is not the problem, the roads are already built. The real problem of course is lack of political will. Every road with two lanes gets at least one dedicated bus lane. Single occupant traffic would slow to a crawl making the buses faster. Buses would run on time because they have an empty lane. Additional bus routes would be added everywhere, paid for by significant increases to gas taxes. It would certainly work and be more efficient than our current mess, but of course would never be politically viable.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  Dedicated lanes don't do much to help; the capacity of virtually all city streets is limited by the capacity of the intersections, not the streets themselves. Give buses priority at intersections, or even better build them dedicated overpasses if you want to see buses really move.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >Give buses priority at intersections, Or just give them the IR transponders that emergency services use to trigger the light in some places and have it go green for the bus rather than red for everyone. You'd accomplish almost the same result with less trade-offs. Giving one vehicle priority tends to increase complexity and causes a distraction which increases risk of accidents (which clog up the road making the bus late). This is why the modern doctrine for EMTs is to drive in traffic like everyone else and use lights/sirens only in the most time critical cases and when doing so will substantially affect travel time.
    - donarb 8y ago
      Seattle has bus priority at multiple intersections and it does not cause problems. At those intersections busses arrive at the curb lane to pickup/dropoff. Then a special light tells the bus driver that it is ok to proceed into the intersection, while all other cars have a red signal. The bus pulls out and leapfrogs traffic.
porpoisely 8y ago
The post's title different from the article's title : "Why the West Coast Is Suddenly Beating the East Coast on Transportation". Anyone else seeing different titles? Also, the article is nothing but PR for the NYC transportation commissioner. Of course the NYC commissioner is going to say X is beating NYC because she wants more funding. She could have gone to Boise, Idaho and came back with similar story. Electric scooters and a couple of test rides in self driving cars means the west coast is beating the east coast on transportation. Really? NYC metro area by itself outshines the entire west coast when it comes to public transportation. I couldn't take this article seriously. There is certainly room for improvement and investment in the NYC metro area, but what's the point of "east coast vs west coast" comparison that is simply not true.
lambdasquirrel 8y ago
The thing that makes mass transit work is walkability. There are 3 million people in NYC who use the subway every day. They can do that because the walkability of the neighborhoods complements the mass transit. In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities. If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation we have to do one or both of those things. Otherwise we can build all we like and no one will ride. Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car and you’re not going to get reasonable walkability until you de-prioritize the car.
- cmiller1 8y ago
  >If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation Why does it have to be a competition? I'd like to see both coasts have great systems for transportation!
  - staplers 8y ago
    Competition is the easiest path to refinement. See the space race.
    - naravara 8y ago
      Competition also drove the Soviets to get lots of their people killed because they cared more about hitting arbitrary deadlines to win the geopolitical dick-measuring contest than they did about safety or even accomplishing their goals. (And before I get called out: Yes, I realize NASA got people killed for the same reason but the difference is seriously orders of magnitude. NASA's failures were publicized while the USSR's were covered up. Many cosmonauts perished and all records of them were removed, they were airbrushed out of photos, erased from official documents, etc. The world will never know their names.)
      - staplers 8y ago
        I wouldn't attribute bad practices to "competition"
Ericson2314 8y ago
Ugh classic hype machine bullshit confusing the derivative with the function itself. West coast is still total shit in land use, other than parkland allocation sometimes, and until they make the hard choices to undo a century of mistakes, can they catch up with the east coast's century of stagnation.
- ummonk 8y ago
  Not just derivative, but relative change (derivative normalized by current value). There are transit systems on the east coast growing faster in absolute terms - they just have large existing systems so the relative growth is lower.
gamehendge 8y ago
It's worth noting that Boston has been investing quite a bit in improving the T. New rail cars are being added to all lines over the next 4 years. As another poster mentioned, a new North/South link project is likely to start soon. The Green Line is being extended into neighboring Somerville. The article seemed to focus solely on NYC.
exabrial 8y ago
NYC's subway's are at a halt unfortunately. The MTA unions have paralyzed innovation and development. The West coast has an opportunity to one up them, but a lot of money gets appropriated and given to contractors without a lot of actual results a lot of the time.
- oppositelock 8y ago
  It's so sad to see how the NYC's subway is falling into ruin. I spent my adolescent years living in Brooklyn in the 1980's, and used the subways a lot. Pre-Giuliani, they were filthy and covered with a lot of urban camouflage, but they could be trusted to be there roughly on schedule. When they replaced them with the shiny stainless steel cars, it was even nicer. I moved away from NYC, but whenever I visit, it's sad to see the network, which worked really well in the past, be in such a sad shape. It's like the system got built, and then never maintained. What kind of idiots run such a large system in a world class city?
Tiktaalik 8y ago
For years and years Seattle and LA doubled down on a automobile oriented infrastructure system that clearly wasn't working, but voters finally gave up and got tired of it. Given that referendums are so difficult to win, especially ones that impose higher taxes, this is a commendable achievement. Not mentioned is the other west coast success story, Vancouver, which has lead North America transit growth, with ridership up 5.7% in 2017. This has been driven by major government investments to drive expansion and improve services across the board. Additionally the system has not been hindered by ride share competition. https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/translink-ridership-growth-leads-canada-u-s https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/translink-ridership...
crimsonalucard 8y ago
West coast public transportation will absolutely never beat East Coast transportation and I say this as a person who has lived on the West coast my entire life. In fact West coast public transportation will always be significantly worse than the east coast. It doesn't matter what initiatives or policies are being implemented on the West coast. It is literally financially and physically unrealistic to have any transportation system even remotely close to what they have in NYC on the West Coast. The reason is the layout of cities. West Coast cities are mostly suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl does not lend well to public transportation. For public transportation to work, you need a high density city. Los Angeles will never be walkable and will never have a subway system that all people use regularly simply because the city is too spread out. Lets put it to numbers: L.A. County has 4,084 square miles. New York City has 304.8 square miles. For LA county to build a network of rails with the same effectiveness of NYC, the size of the NYC subway needs to be replicated approximately 13.4 times. The NYC subway system has about 236.2 mi of rail. AN equivalent system for the same coverage in LA will be 3165 mi. The current longest subway system in the world is the Shanghai Metro at 420 mi. Effective Public transportation will not work on the west coast due to physical limits and impossibilities. If you want to live in a city with great public transportation you need to live in a city of apartments. Any city where you can have your own backyard is a city that is not dense enough.
jeromebaek 8y ago
> There is at least one bright spot: Citi Bike has become an essential part of the city’s fabric. The bike-share system has 12,000 bikes across Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens and recently announced plans to expand under new ownership by the ride-hail company Lyft, which will triple the number of bikes. Almost a non-sequitur to mention Citi Bikes in particular when there are far more notable examples like Lime. This must be a paid advertisement.

88 points by zonotope 8y ago

gok 8y ago

Well the West Coast may be beating on getting voters to agree to dump money into long term transit projects. Actually getting them built in our lifetimes and then getting people to use them is a very different problem.

xrd 8y ago

Can anyone in other west coast cities speak about the crime on the new transit systems? I'm in Portland, and for the first time in my life, I'm worried about crime on mass transit. Maybe it is just the automated news feeds that are circulating stories of stabbings and attacks that have heightened my internalized hysteria. At the same time, I've felt a larger presence of people on mass transit who seem to be dealing with a mental health crisis of some kind. And, it makes me feel less excited to bring my kids with me when I ride. This article does not touch on that.

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Gibbon1 8y ago
When I listen to my friends that ride buses and BART the major complaint is people doing utterly foul things like pissing or shitting. Or being harassed. Being harrased depends a lot on sex age etc. My GF's who looks like she lives in Walnut Creek gets harassed. Me who looks like an old skinny biker does not. Got to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  > Got to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year. Seems like the issue is lack of security/policing, not the number of passengers. There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent.
  - pishpash 8y ago
    CA doesn't do policing. It's all about the feel-good.
    - nicoburns 8y ago
      Clearly people aren't feeling that good about the public transport!
    - dmode 8y ago
      Is that why we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world ?
      - deleted 8y ago
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      - pishpash 8y ago
        It's like a low-grade fever: the fact that you stay sick while others are well is a sign that you didn't take your meds, not that you took too many.
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    > There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent. I think you can go a lot further: almost all public transport networks, regardless of type or usage, don't have this problem to any extent. Some people in large European or Asian cities don't like using public transport because of overcrowding, slow journey times, cost, inflexibility, infrequency, strikes, "terrorism" or whatever. I know people who would cite each of these reasons. I don't know anyone who would say there is excrement or urine in the vehicles or stations, or even unwashed people. It's that rare. Bay area residents needs to pressure their politicians into fixing the problem. That means some combination of - extra policing - extra cleaning - extra public toilets and maybe working out some long-term solution to the mentally ill homeless people.
- wastedhours 8y ago
  > people doing utterly foul things like pissing or shitting Based on my (very limited) experience of SF, that seems like an area-wide issue. I've travelled reasonably extensively and SF is the only place I've been where I've suspected more of the shit on the path (inside and out) was human than canine.
- pcr0 8y ago
  Beijing's subway carries over 10m passengers a day and definitely has less harassment and human excrement.
  - tokyodude 8y ago
    Tokyo's rail transit is at 40m passengers a day. We don't have the poo. We do have occasional vomit from drunk salary men. Fortunately it gets cleaned up relatively quickly. The cars are clean unlike SF.
    - crimsonalucard 8y ago
      This has everything to do with the attitude of people who ride the transit. You don't have poo because nobody does that in tokyo.
Karrot_Kream 8y ago
I take the BART in the SF Bay Area daily, and if you take it before 10 PM it feels safe, though can be annoying because it's not always the cleanest. Then again, I feel safer than on the road (where there's at least a handful of massive accidents each way, everyday) and I've definitely been in friends' cars that are not to the same cleanliness standard I hold my own things to.
jcranmer 8y ago
When I was in Atlanta, I regularly took MARTA, which travels through some rather slummy areas. Beyond the faregates, you're going to be rather safe. I personally felt safer riding the train in Atlanta than I did driving around in a car in Southeast DC. I don't think crime is any worse on mass transit than it is in the surrounding areas. I suspect that most of your fears are driven by media bias: crimes that happen in the crime-ridden section of town are inherently less newsworthy than crimes that happen outside of it.

swebs 8y ago

Weird that they don't mention New York's awful inefficiency, especially since it was reported by the same paper. NYC tax payers are already spending billions and not getting much to show for it. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?module=inline https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

jdhn 8y ago
If they did, it would undercut the argument that the NYC subway needs more money on top of what it already has.

dangwu 8y ago

I’m surprised by this article. Most people seem to agree that the the metro systems of NYC, Philadelphia, and DC are much better than those of the west coast. LA’s is unusable for most people because there aren’t enough stops. Seattle’s light rail is definitely gaining steam as it adds more stops.

ummonk 8y ago
Right. I'd like the West Coast transit systems to match those available in NYC, DC or Boston. It could be done 20 years from now if we started laying down more subway now. Scooters and self-driving cars is not a transit system.
kenhwang 8y ago
I think LA's is only really usable to get to/from DTLA. The nice part is DTLA is becoming more eventful, so you actually want to go there sometimes for non-work reasons. Getting anywhere else is a bit of a crapshoot for the last-mile. I don't think LA's train system is ready for primetime until it can reasonably get into LAX; preferably with a more direct route from the westside that doesn't detour through DTLA.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  The Crenshaw/LAX line that does just that is scheduled to open in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crenshaw/LAX_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crenshaw/LAX_Line ...although its utility will be limited until they connect it to the Red/Purple lines, and that's still on the drawing board.
  - kenhwang 8y ago
    Then there's the people mover for inner-LAX travel between the train station and the terminals scheduled for 2023. But once that and the connection to red/purple is done, I'd say LA's public transit would be in a reasonably usable state.
tallanvor 8y ago
The difference is that places like Seattle and LA are expanding their systems. In New York, Boston, and DC it's rather stagnant.

flexie 8y ago

The article doesn't really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed). If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college. What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars? I am not saying the subways shouldn't be built or that planning decades ahead is bad. I love subways. But in the area of transportation we will see huge changes in the coming decades.

bobthepanda 8y ago
Of course there will be changes. But the subways and light rails will still be required for a certain level of throughput. The New York City subway, for example, carries 60K people per hour per direction on a pair of tracks, while a car lane carries somewhere in the range of 2K per hour per direction. Self driving cars may improve lane utilization, but not by up to 30x. Shoving people into cattle cars hurtling down a track is just more space-efficient than dedicating an engine and seats for at most four people at a time. Scooters and bikes have an effective range, particularly in places like LA that can have quite long commute distances. Motive power source doesn't really change much. Intra-urban flight would increase required energy for transport a lot and also move the crapshoot that is today's roads and traffic above our heads, ready to hurtle down at us. Boring tunnels being cheaper has yet to be proven, since the main issues with tunneling are that tunnels have to be tailored to ground conditions. Shuttles to Mars doesn't change how I get to and from work across town, the same way that airplanes did not.
- foota 8y ago
  Shouldn't a bus have similar throughput to a subway though, with no traffic?
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago

StreamBright 8y ago

How about beating Europe or Asia?

pishpash 8y ago
In another 500 years.
chimeracoder 8y ago
> How about beating Europe or Asia? London is the only city in Europe that even comes close to offering what NYC alone does in terms of public transit. Even Berlin, the second largest city in the EU, has pitiful public transit in comparison.
- bbojan 8y ago
  Berlin has 26 subway lines. Some of them (S-Bahn) interconnect with intercity rail, so there are times when you can transfer from a subway to a train on the same platform. I would really like to know what makes you think Berlin public transit is "pitiful"...
- lclarkmichalek 8y ago
  I think London has a greater ridership (5m tube, 6m bus) than NY (5m subway, 3m bus - http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/ http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/). Buses really are the secret to how London gets around.
- cribbles 8y ago
  There's a subjective side to this argument, I suppose, but having lived in both cities I'd argue that Berlin's public transportation is _at least_ a couple orders of magnitude better than NYC's. The U-Bahn / S-Bahn / Deutsche Bahn / Autobus / Tram inter-connectivity are at least on par with what NYC has to offer (adjusted for geographic factors and population density), and that's before getting into KPIs like on-time arrival percentages, individual line uptime, and peak hour commuter congestion. And then there's the more intangible differences, which are nevertheless important to humans - like vehicle cleanliness, station upkeep... the list goes on and on. Compare the Berlin Hauptbahnhof to Penn Station. Or the U1 to the L, or the J/M/Z. Or peak-hour Alexanderplatz to Union Square. Or the M29 to... I don't know... the NYC bus of your choosing. My god. Throw whatever numbers you want out there as a counterargument, but I know which I'd prefer in just about any scenario.

romwell 8y ago

Hahaha. I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on Long Island, spent a summer in Seattle, and I live in San Jose now. One can't speak for the entirety of the either coast, but no city in CA comes close to what NYC offers in terms of public transportation. And what NYC offers is a true car-free lifestyle which carries you to work, leisure, and back home via public transport. E-scooters aren't a reliable way to get anywhere yet, and who knows if they'll ever be, not to mention that they are not for everyone. My grandmother is not going to ride one -- nor my wife, for that matter, nor should the kids. But the Subway is a common denominator. This reflects in the daily ridership. MTA carries an order of magnitude more passengers than, say, BART. The same can be said about overall transit ridership[1]. East Coast vs. West Coast is a silly comparison when NYC Metro alone has more ridership than nearly all other major metro areas combined (including both Coasts, the Midwest, and the South). So it's really NYC vs. Anywhere Else, and Anywhere Else still sucks when it comes to public transport because, in practical terms, most people aren't commuting by public transport in Anywhere Else, but they do in NYC. You can't slap a Lime scooter on a suburban development and call that "public transport". And a self-driving car is still a car, a glorified jitney cab if and when it arrives. And it's not going to solve the problems of the car-centric (sub)urbanism[2] anyhow. The mistake the article makes here is a classic one: percentage growth vs. absolute value. Doubling from, say, 500K in a metro area with 7M population is going to be a bit easier than doubling the 14M ridership in a 20M metro. As for the problems - people on HN of all places should be the ones who understand scale and that some problems simply don't exist when the scale is insignificant. I want every city to be a public transit success story, but as it currently stands - the rest of the country will be playing catch-up for a long time. [1]http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/transit-ridership http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/transit-ridership [2]https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611557/self-driving-cars-could-make-urban-traffic-jams-worse/ https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611557/self-dr... -------- TL;DR: NYC mass transit carries more people than systems in all other major metros combined[1]. Any comparison - including this article - is silly.

bobthepanda 8y ago
Seattle actually has extremely high transit ridership and walk commmute share, which is pretty impressive considering how the transit system is mostly buses right now. And by 2024, major centers in the region will be connected by rail transit that is faster than road travel. Anecdotally, I live pretty well without a car here; I use Uber and Lyft when transit don't work out, and if I want to hike usually one of my friends will have a ride. So it feels just like back home in New York, except the trains and buses have a better chance of showing up on time.

inamberclad 8y ago

Electric scooters aren't public.

DubiousPusher 8y ago

Kind of funny they don't mention Portland at all. It actually has a well functioning system already built.

ppseafield 8y ago
Portland's transit system is OK. The MAX works well, but it has been neutered by NIMBYism: the new orange line has only a few stops in Milwaukee and goes no further. (And for that they hired three full time cops when it opened). The green line was supposed to be a loop, but it simply goes out to the Clackamas Town Center (just a few miles south of the border with Portland proper). The yellow line stops short of Vancouver, WA across the river, and we spent $4.5 million on coming up with several failed plans for a new bridge. The new line headed SW has to be voted on by the city of Tigard. It'll go up to the bottom of the OHSU hill, but they chose to simply increase the number of shuttles. The buses are mostly reliable and can get you downtown. But several areas feel underserved, especially if you live outside Multnomah county.
- ppseafield 8y ago
  Also the MAX slows to a crawl downtown, where it shares the street with cars and busses and stops every 2-4 blocks.
  - edaemon 8y ago
    They're closing a few downtown stops that saw low usage to speed things up, but it will still be sluggish. I think the only real solution would be to move the Red/Blue lines to the transit mall and put all the downtown track underground with a cut-and-cover tunnel. Also, the attempts to get the Yellow line into Vancouver fell through because the Washington legislature voted against it. There are renewed efforts to build it, though.
    - ppseafield 8y ago
      Yeah, not much we can do about WA. But that bridge is so old and has no shoulder. Any car accident means a huge slowdown. It'd be nice if we had elevated trains that didn't have to share with busses, cars, bikes, and pedestrians.

huffmsa 8y ago

Of course it is easier to build out new infrastucture to exacting specifications than it is to update 100+ year old infrastructure to meet modern demands.

helen___keller 8y ago

The west coast epitomizes postwar American culture - car infatuation, suburban sprawl, and so on. Transit is growing in the west coast, sure, but transit needs a critical mass of convenience for people to actually live without depending on their car (or choosing to own one at all) We're not going to see cities go all-in on transit while self driving cars are on the horizon. Maybe after cars drive themselves, when people learn traffic is still not getting better, more cities will get serious about transit infrastructure.

samfisher83 8y ago

Compare NYC public transportport to silicon valley transport and it's no contest. Give me NYC. It connects way more places.

francisofascii 8y ago

For the West Coast, the simplest solution is electric buses with dedicated lanes. Buses better serve the existing low density sprawl than trains. Lack of infrastructure is not the problem, the roads are already built. The real problem of course is lack of political will. Every road with two lanes gets at least one dedicated bus lane. Single occupant traffic would slow to a crawl making the buses faster. Buses would run on time because they have an empty lane. Additional bus routes would be added everywhere, paid for by significant increases to gas taxes. It would certainly work and be more efficient than our current mess, but of course would never be politically viable.

bryanlarsen 8y ago
Dedicated lanes don't do much to help; the capacity of virtually all city streets is limited by the capacity of the intersections, not the streets themselves. Give buses priority at intersections, or even better build them dedicated overpasses if you want to see buses really move.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Give buses priority at intersections, Or just give them the IR transponders that emergency services use to trigger the light in some places and have it go green for the bus rather than red for everyone. You'd accomplish almost the same result with less trade-offs. Giving one vehicle priority tends to increase complexity and causes a distraction which increases risk of accidents (which clog up the road making the bus late). This is why the modern doctrine for EMTs is to drive in traffic like everyone else and use lights/sirens only in the most time critical cases and when doing so will substantially affect travel time.
  - donarb 8y ago
    Seattle has bus priority at multiple intersections and it does not cause problems. At those intersections busses arrive at the curb lane to pickup/dropoff. Then a special light tells the bus driver that it is ok to proceed into the intersection, while all other cars have a red signal. The bus pulls out and leapfrogs traffic.

porpoisely 8y ago

The post's title different from the article's title : "Why the West Coast Is Suddenly Beating the East Coast on Transportation". Anyone else seeing different titles? Also, the article is nothing but PR for the NYC transportation commissioner. Of course the NYC commissioner is going to say X is beating NYC because she wants more funding. She could have gone to Boise, Idaho and came back with similar story. Electric scooters and a couple of test rides in self driving cars means the west coast is beating the east coast on transportation. Really? NYC metro area by itself outshines the entire west coast when it comes to public transportation. I couldn't take this article seriously. There is certainly room for improvement and investment in the NYC metro area, but what's the point of "east coast vs west coast" comparison that is simply not true.

lambdasquirrel 8y ago

The thing that makes mass transit work is walkability. There are 3 million people in NYC who use the subway every day. They can do that because the walkability of the neighborhoods complements the mass transit. In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities. If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation we have to do one or both of those things. Otherwise we can build all we like and no one will ride. Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car and you’re not going to get reasonable walkability until you de-prioritize the car.

cmiller1 8y ago
>If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation Why does it have to be a competition? I'd like to see both coasts have great systems for transportation!
- staplers 8y ago
  Competition is the easiest path to refinement. See the space race.
  - naravara 8y ago
    Competition also drove the Soviets to get lots of their people killed because they cared more about hitting arbitrary deadlines to win the geopolitical dick-measuring contest than they did about safety or even accomplishing their goals. (And before I get called out: Yes, I realize NASA got people killed for the same reason but the difference is seriously orders of magnitude. NASA's failures were publicized while the USSR's were covered up. Many cosmonauts perished and all records of them were removed, they were airbrushed out of photos, erased from official documents, etc. The world will never know their names.)
    - staplers 8y ago
      I wouldn't attribute bad practices to "competition"

Ericson2314 8y ago

Ugh classic hype machine bullshit confusing the derivative with the function itself. West coast is still total shit in land use, other than parkland allocation sometimes, and until they make the hard choices to undo a century of mistakes, can they catch up with the east coast's century of stagnation.

ummonk 8y ago
Not just derivative, but relative change (derivative normalized by current value). There are transit systems on the east coast growing faster in absolute terms - they just have large existing systems so the relative growth is lower.

gamehendge 8y ago

It's worth noting that Boston has been investing quite a bit in improving the T. New rail cars are being added to all lines over the next 4 years. As another poster mentioned, a new North/South link project is likely to start soon. The Green Line is being extended into neighboring Somerville. The article seemed to focus solely on NYC.

exabrial 8y ago

NYC's subway's are at a halt unfortunately. The MTA unions have paralyzed innovation and development. The West coast has an opportunity to one up them, but a lot of money gets appropriated and given to contractors without a lot of actual results a lot of the time.

oppositelock 8y ago
It's so sad to see how the NYC's subway is falling into ruin. I spent my adolescent years living in Brooklyn in the 1980's, and used the subways a lot. Pre-Giuliani, they were filthy and covered with a lot of urban camouflage, but they could be trusted to be there roughly on schedule. When they replaced them with the shiny stainless steel cars, it was even nicer. I moved away from NYC, but whenever I visit, it's sad to see the network, which worked really well in the past, be in such a sad shape. It's like the system got built, and then never maintained. What kind of idiots run such a large system in a world class city?

Tiktaalik 8y ago

For years and years Seattle and LA doubled down on a automobile oriented infrastructure system that clearly wasn't working, but voters finally gave up and got tired of it. Given that referendums are so difficult to win, especially ones that impose higher taxes, this is a commendable achievement. Not mentioned is the other west coast success story, Vancouver, which has lead North America transit growth, with ridership up 5.7% in 2017. This has been driven by major government investments to drive expansion and improve services across the board. Additionally the system has not been hindered by ride share competition. https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/translink-ridership-growth-leads-canada-u-s https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/translink-ridership...

crimsonalucard 8y ago

West coast public transportation will absolutely never beat East Coast transportation and I say this as a person who has lived on the West coast my entire life. In fact West coast public transportation will always be significantly worse than the east coast. It doesn't matter what initiatives or policies are being implemented on the West coast. It is literally financially and physically unrealistic to have any transportation system even remotely close to what they have in NYC on the West Coast. The reason is the layout of cities. West Coast cities are mostly suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl does not lend well to public transportation. For public transportation to work, you need a high density city. Los Angeles will never be walkable and will never have a subway system that all people use regularly simply because the city is too spread out. Lets put it to numbers: L.A. County has 4,084 square miles. New York City has 304.8 square miles. For LA county to build a network of rails with the same effectiveness of NYC, the size of the NYC subway needs to be replicated approximately 13.4 times. The NYC subway system has about 236.2 mi of rail. AN equivalent system for the same coverage in LA will be 3165 mi. The current longest subway system in the world is the Shanghai Metro at 420 mi. Effective Public transportation will not work on the west coast due to physical limits and impossibilities. If you want to live in a city with great public transportation you need to live in a city of apartments. Any city where you can have your own backyard is a city that is not dense enough.

jeromebaek 8y ago

> There is at least one bright spot: Citi Bike has become an essential part of the city’s fabric. The bike-share system has 12,000 bikes across Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens and recently announced plans to expand under new ownership by the ride-hail company Lyft, which will triple the number of bikes. Almost a non-sequitur to mention Citi Bikes in particular when there are far more notable examples like Lime. This must be a paid advertisement.