7 ms·

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

by 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
    Embarking and disembarking passengers takes much longer on a bus.
    - sempron64 8y ago
      On the Select Bus Service (certain express routes) in NYC, passengers buy tickets outside the bus and ticket inspectors spot check them during the ride, similar to trains. Passengers can get on through the back door as well. This significantly improves embarkation time, making it similar to a train.
  - jimktrains2 8y ago
    Subways have multiple cars per train, anywhere from 1 to 10, most places falling into 4-6. A bus has one; even articulated buses usual have a smaller capacity than a single subway car.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    No - subway trains can travel 50 mph or more - a bus can’t do that on city centre roads.
    - shhehebehdh 8y ago
      In theory, but NYCs rarely go that fast. This is changing though. I saw a news article recently about how they are lifting the speed limits on some sections of track as repaired signals come online.
      - michaelper22 8y ago
        Though this probably counts as rarely, least some of the trunk line I've been on give the illusion of high-ish speeds. Examples: - Queens Blvd express (Forest Hills to Roosevelt Ave, Roosevelt to 36 St) - 7 Ave IRT express (from far downtown to 96th St) - Lexington express (City Hall to 125th, save for going through the switches south of 42nd St)
      - 8y ago
skookumchuck 8y ago
> 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed) For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  It was also built when nobody who the government cared about owned land in the West, before pesky environmental regulations, and when 20MPH was an acceptable speed for a train. Today California High Speed Rail and Texas Central and Florida's Brightline have to deal with angry suburban neighbors, angry farmers, and legal and environmental review processes that are the result of a century and a half's worth of hindsight.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    Seattle is taking 30 years or so to build a handful of miles of track. There really isn't any "environmental impact" for construction within the city (the environment there is already destroyed). But that sure does provide fodder for endless delays and expense. > 20MPH Travel from Omaha to San Francisco was 4 days at the opening, including stops. The distance was 1,912 miles. So the average was indeed 20, but to achieve that average (including stops) it must have been going at least 40 on much of the route. Quite a difference from the alternative, months of walking. If you like, the first Boston subway was completed in 1897, it took 2 years, and it was all done with muscle, too.
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      The Boston subway was built by tearing up a street from building wall to building wall, and several people died during the process. Seattle's light rail construction is far less disruptive and deadly. Seattle is a bit of an odd case when talking about construction timelines, because the projects are drawn out mostly due to a state law that limits how much Sound Transit can bond out at any given time. Anything more aggressive than that would require passing a 60% vote threshold, which would be quite the landslide election. (It's also how the first Seattle subway attempt died.) Environmental impact doesn't just concern spoilage of a pristine environment; among other things, it can consider impacts on drainage and runoff, noise pollution, construction impacts, efficacy at diverting car trips and CO2 emissions, etc.
Eridrus 8y ago
One of the things I don't really see mentioned about scooters is they're less ideal in cold/wet weather. So I'm not sure if the east coast can really capture the benefits as well as California.
QML 8y ago
The economies of scale is what will matter: new transportation technologies may appear in a blink, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be mass-affordable. Personally, I’m fine with any large transit project as long as it goes faster than a car and cheaper as well.
LeanderK 8y ago
> 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed) that seems to be unreasonably long. In germany, both the city I am studying at and the city I was born are undertaking big changes in their transportation infrastructure, and both don't take that long. In munich, building just started and is expected to last unit 2026 [1]. And we always complain that it's taking too long to plan and build! 40 years seems to be crazy! You would have to start repairing the old stuff when the whole project is finished. Or are you talking about the whole process, including the financing? Then it's more understandable, many big project here also stall for 20 years until everyone has enough money and the political will to follow through. But I thought the financing is covered due to the sales-tax increase. While it's easy to complain about projects not moving for 20 years, the sums are often quite enourmus and i am not sure whether inefficiencies are to blame, or whether gathering enough money just takes a long time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_line_2_(Munich_S-Bahn) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_line_2_(Munich_S-Bahn)
- flexie 8y ago
  It's simply the planning of it. A lot of the 100 mile expansion is not planned to start until 10-20-30 years from now. I guess that's due to financing.
- guitarbill 8y ago
  Let's not get too smug with things like Stuttgart 21, Transrapid München, or cities like Aachen getting rid of their tram network (and regretting it now AFAIK). And having a public that values and prioritises mass transport is not a given. Admittedly, I'm a bit torn on this. Since infrastructure is so important to the liveability and growth of a city, and any sort of long-term thinking is a good thing. But predicting the future is hard, and having a 40 year plan survive (short-term) politics is also unlikely.
  - LeanderK 8y ago
    I agree, i think I was more confused. I thought he meant the time to realize the projects, not the complete cycle from estimating whether it's doable to financing to building. There are also project on hold for 30 years in munich.
pc86 8y ago
> 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 > Truly self driving cars If history has taught us anything, it's that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. The infrastructure of NYC, LA, Seattle, San Francisco, etc will not look much different in 2059 than it does today. We'll probably still be using JavaScript, too. :/
- malvosenior 8y ago
  I don't think history has taught us that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. Every technology the OP mentioned exists in nascent form today and didn't 10 years ago. It's totally believable that all of them will be widely deployed in 20-40 years. The world 20-40 years ago was far more primitive than it is today.
  - eesmith 8y ago
    You wrote: "Every technology the OP mentioned exists in nascent form today and didn't 10 years ago." That is not true. Here's the list: "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?" How cheap does a cheap electric scooter need to be? Because we had electric scooters 10 years ago. Definitely so if you include "nascent" forms. More specifically, the electric scooter dates from around 1920 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped . The Segway PT came out in 2001. Bikes of course are 19th century technology. Airbag helmets are new. Electric cars were popular in the early 1900s. CMU was working on self-driving cars in the 1980s; the Navlab drove across the US in the 1995, and was autonomous 98% of the time. Surely that counts as "nascent", yes? Drone taxis sound like the proposed helicopter taxis of the 1950s, or flying cars, or jet packs, though without a driver. Drones have been around for more than 10 year. Passenger-carrying drones? That is indeed new. "Boring tunnels in multiple levels"; many subway systems have multiple levels. What has been new about that in the last 10 years which wasn't deployed earlier, not even in nascent form? "Shuttles to Mars". I don't know how to judge that one. In 1989 when Bush Sr. announced the Space Exploration Initiative, would you have said that it was a nascent project? You didn't know that that it wouldn't pan out, just like we don't know now if SpaceX's plans will pan out. The world 20-40 years ago was far more sophisticated than you seem to think.
masayune 8y ago
I’m from an LA suburb. I’m able to get to Santa Monica/Culver City, LAX, and J-Town just with light rail and a free transfer depending on where I need to go. In terms of time efficiency, it’s comparable to driving (faster than driving/parking in rush hour but not as fast during off hours). LA metro is dropping track like crazy and way more usable than it used to be. And it’s cheap. $1.75 each way or monthly pass. Tl;dr it’s awesome now and getting better!
naravara 8y ago
>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. None of those are mass transit. Personal vehicles are fine and dandy, but they can only move one person at a time and will always, by definition, take up more space and resources per person than a solution that can ferry tens or hundreds of people at a time.
- floatrock 8y ago
  Scooters and bikes are not exclusive of mass transit -- they complement mass transit by working on the "last mile" problem that no mass transit system has ever really found a good solution to.
  - naravara 8y ago
    In a walkable area there is no "last mile" problem for able bodied people. A mile is a perfectly reasonable 20 minute walk provided the streets are safe. And if the streets are built safely, scooters and bikes will be usable as a natural consequence. And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway. Scooters and bikes are great supplements to a system, but they won't actually do much good without a mass transit system to be the backbone for getting around.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      20 minutes is practically an entire commute. It’s not at all reasonable to burn that much time on the last mile alone.
      - naravara 8y ago
        >20 minutes is practically an entire commute. It’s not at all reasonable to burn that much time on the last mile alone. If 20 minutes is "practically an entire commute" then you're already in a dense enough area to where transit coverage should minimize the number of people who are a mile away. At that point, proximity to transit just becomes part of what you pay for in your house. If the transit is there, development patterns will tend to build up around it.

by flexie 8y ago

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
  Embarking and disembarking passengers takes much longer on a bus.
  - sempron64 8y ago
    On the Select Bus Service (certain express routes) in NYC, passengers buy tickets outside the bus and ticket inspectors spot check them during the ride, similar to trains. Passengers can get on through the back door as well. This significantly improves embarkation time, making it similar to a train.
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  Subways have multiple cars per train, anywhere from 1 to 10, most places falling into 4-6. A bus has one; even articulated buses usual have a smaller capacity than a single subway car.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  No - subway trains can travel 50 mph or more - a bus can’t do that on city centre roads.
  - shhehebehdh 8y ago
    In theory, but NYCs rarely go that fast. This is changing though. I saw a news article recently about how they are lifting the speed limits on some sections of track as repaired signals come online.
    - michaelper22 8y ago
      Though this probably counts as rarely, least some of the trunk line I've been on give the illusion of high-ish speeds. Examples: - Queens Blvd express (Forest Hills to Roosevelt Ave, Roosevelt to 36 St) - 7 Ave IRT express (from far downtown to 96th St) - Lexington express (City Hall to 125th, save for going through the switches south of 42nd St)
    - 8y ago

skookumchuck 8y ago

> 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed) For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.

bobthepanda 8y ago
It was also built when nobody who the government cared about owned land in the West, before pesky environmental regulations, and when 20MPH was an acceptable speed for a train. Today California High Speed Rail and Texas Central and Florida's Brightline have to deal with angry suburban neighbors, angry farmers, and legal and environmental review processes that are the result of a century and a half's worth of hindsight.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  Seattle is taking 30 years or so to build a handful of miles of track. There really isn't any "environmental impact" for construction within the city (the environment there is already destroyed). But that sure does provide fodder for endless delays and expense. > 20MPH Travel from Omaha to San Francisco was 4 days at the opening, including stops. The distance was 1,912 miles. So the average was indeed 20, but to achieve that average (including stops) it must have been going at least 40 on much of the route. Quite a difference from the alternative, months of walking. If you like, the first Boston subway was completed in 1897, it took 2 years, and it was all done with muscle, too.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    The Boston subway was built by tearing up a street from building wall to building wall, and several people died during the process. Seattle's light rail construction is far less disruptive and deadly. Seattle is a bit of an odd case when talking about construction timelines, because the projects are drawn out mostly due to a state law that limits how much Sound Transit can bond out at any given time. Anything more aggressive than that would require passing a 60% vote threshold, which would be quite the landslide election. (It's also how the first Seattle subway attempt died.) Environmental impact doesn't just concern spoilage of a pristine environment; among other things, it can consider impacts on drainage and runoff, noise pollution, construction impacts, efficacy at diverting car trips and CO2 emissions, etc.

Eridrus 8y ago

One of the things I don't really see mentioned about scooters is they're less ideal in cold/wet weather. So I'm not sure if the east coast can really capture the benefits as well as California.

QML 8y ago

The economies of scale is what will matter: new transportation technologies may appear in a blink, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be mass-affordable. Personally, I’m fine with any large transit project as long as it goes faster than a car and cheaper as well.

LeanderK 8y ago

> 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed) that seems to be unreasonably long. In germany, both the city I am studying at and the city I was born are undertaking big changes in their transportation infrastructure, and both don't take that long. In munich, building just started and is expected to last unit 2026 [1]. And we always complain that it's taking too long to plan and build! 40 years seems to be crazy! You would have to start repairing the old stuff when the whole project is finished. Or are you talking about the whole process, including the financing? Then it's more understandable, many big project here also stall for 20 years until everyone has enough money and the political will to follow through. But I thought the financing is covered due to the sales-tax increase. While it's easy to complain about projects not moving for 20 years, the sums are often quite enourmus and i am not sure whether inefficiencies are to blame, or whether gathering enough money just takes a long time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_line_2_(Munich_S-Bahn) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_line_2_(Munich_S-Bahn)

flexie 8y ago
It's simply the planning of it. A lot of the 100 mile expansion is not planned to start until 10-20-30 years from now. I guess that's due to financing.
guitarbill 8y ago
Let's not get too smug with things like Stuttgart 21, Transrapid München, or cities like Aachen getting rid of their tram network (and regretting it now AFAIK). And having a public that values and prioritises mass transport is not a given. Admittedly, I'm a bit torn on this. Since infrastructure is so important to the liveability and growth of a city, and any sort of long-term thinking is a good thing. But predicting the future is hard, and having a 40 year plan survive (short-term) politics is also unlikely.
- LeanderK 8y ago
  I agree, i think I was more confused. I thought he meant the time to realize the projects, not the complete cycle from estimating whether it's doable to financing to building. There are also project on hold for 30 years in munich.

pc86 8y ago

> 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 > Truly self driving cars If history has taught us anything, it's that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. The infrastructure of NYC, LA, Seattle, San Francisco, etc will not look much different in 2059 than it does today. We'll probably still be using JavaScript, too. :/

malvosenior 8y ago
I don't think history has taught us that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. Every technology the OP mentioned exists in nascent form today and didn't 10 years ago. It's totally believable that all of them will be widely deployed in 20-40 years. The world 20-40 years ago was far more primitive than it is today.
- eesmith 8y ago
  You wrote: "Every technology the OP mentioned exists in nascent form today and didn't 10 years ago." That is not true. Here's the list: "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?" How cheap does a cheap electric scooter need to be? Because we had electric scooters 10 years ago. Definitely so if you include "nascent" forms. More specifically, the electric scooter dates from around 1920 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped . The Segway PT came out in 2001. Bikes of course are 19th century technology. Airbag helmets are new. Electric cars were popular in the early 1900s. CMU was working on self-driving cars in the 1980s; the Navlab drove across the US in the 1995, and was autonomous 98% of the time. Surely that counts as "nascent", yes? Drone taxis sound like the proposed helicopter taxis of the 1950s, or flying cars, or jet packs, though without a driver. Drones have been around for more than 10 year. Passenger-carrying drones? That is indeed new. "Boring tunnels in multiple levels"; many subway systems have multiple levels. What has been new about that in the last 10 years which wasn't deployed earlier, not even in nascent form? "Shuttles to Mars". I don't know how to judge that one. In 1989 when Bush Sr. announced the Space Exploration Initiative, would you have said that it was a nascent project? You didn't know that that it wouldn't pan out, just like we don't know now if SpaceX's plans will pan out. The world 20-40 years ago was far more sophisticated than you seem to think.

masayune 8y ago

I’m from an LA suburb. I’m able to get to Santa Monica/Culver City, LAX, and J-Town just with light rail and a free transfer depending on where I need to go. In terms of time efficiency, it’s comparable to driving (faster than driving/parking in rush hour but not as fast during off hours). LA metro is dropping track like crazy and way more usable than it used to be. And it’s cheap. $1.75 each way or monthly pass. Tl;dr it’s awesome now and getting better!

naravara 8y ago

>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. None of those are mass transit. Personal vehicles are fine and dandy, but they can only move one person at a time and will always, by definition, take up more space and resources per person than a solution that can ferry tens or hundreds of people at a time.

floatrock 8y ago
Scooters and bikes are not exclusive of mass transit -- they complement mass transit by working on the "last mile" problem that no mass transit system has ever really found a good solution to.
- naravara 8y ago
  In a walkable area there is no "last mile" problem for able bodied people. A mile is a perfectly reasonable 20 minute walk provided the streets are safe. And if the streets are built safely, scooters and bikes will be usable as a natural consequence. And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway. Scooters and bikes are great supplements to a system, but they won't actually do much good without a mass transit system to be the backbone for getting around.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    20 minutes is practically an entire commute. It’s not at all reasonable to burn that much time on the last mile alone.
    - naravara 8y ago
      >20 minutes is practically an entire commute. It’s not at all reasonable to burn that much time on the last mile alone. If 20 minutes is "practically an entire commute" then you're already in a dense enough area to where transit coverage should minimize the number of people who are a mile away. At that point, proximity to transit just becomes part of what you pay for in your house. If the transit is there, development patterns will tend to build up around it.