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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 coa

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.
- pishpash 8y ago
  I think there is an objective measure here. Just plot a 30-minute transit radius around the centers of various cities and you'll get a sense of the transit size of the city vs. covered population. Some cities are notoriously "small," like SF, despite it being on some best-to-live-without-car lists. You can't go very far before practically needing a car: so what if you can get there by transit if it takes 1-2 hours and inconsistently? NYC, Boston are "large." Seattle is even worse than SF in this regard. Transit is all about density. There is no way the west coast can beat the east coast in transit practicality for another 100 years.
  - gpapilion 8y ago
    Boston and San Francisco have realitively equivalent population densities and population. So this makes a very good comparison of the two regions. For example my 4.5 mi commute in sf takes around 25 min. That’s similar to what I remember from Harvard square to Boylston street which is an equivalent distance.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Yes. Apartments.com has a nice visualization where you specify a mode, destination, and time limit, and it lights up all the listings in range. It’s really shocking how small SF is for sane commute times (20–45 minutes).
- guitarbill 8y ago
  Seattle is okay for US standards, but still a disaster and embarrassment compared to other first world cities. And everything that can be done to make biking or walking more awful is being done. Many cross-walks have a very short walk timer, so even able-bodied people like myself struggle to cross in time. Police don't ticket drivers blocking intersections and crossings [0], so almost every crossing is blocked in the morning and afternoon. Divers regularly run red lights. I'm sure it will take a few people to die first, as right now the police's mandate seems to be to get the rich people in their fancy vehicles home quicker than any kind of safety. Not to mention the construction that means you're going to have to switch street sides a few times during every journey. Buses are okay for north-south trips, but non-trivial trips can be as slow as walking, because a lot of routes only intersect downtown. The only use for light rail I've found is getting to SeaTac, but even then you need to live on the right side of the city. The streetcar is pathetic, and has never helped me get to work to to a friends house due to the route. I guess with a programmer's salary, it's okay since just getting an Uber and Lyft is no big deal, but for everybody else, it sucks. And sometimes, I feel like the only reason a token effort is being done about public transport is so people can feel smug and claim Seattle is progressive, left-leaning. Meanwhile, everybody still drives everywhere. [0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/video-pedestrians-dodge-gridlocked-cars-while-crossing-seattles-mercer-street-at-rush-hour/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/vid...
pishpash 8y ago
Yes, NYC is pretty much the only "city" in the US when viewed at global scale, that much is well known. Every other city may as well be podunk.
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? Especially flamebaity ones. We've asked you many times already. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
thunderbong 8y ago
I wish I could upvote you more. Sadly, scale is the one thing most of us tend to completely forget when it comes to public transportation. We think of a peice of hardware, wire it up with an app and a saas platform and call it transport. It might be just that - transport, but it's nowhere near public transportation
jacobmoe 8y ago
I think the point is that west coast cities are willing to invest in their systems, not just live off of what past generations built. Here in NYC we've been living off the investments of past generations for a long time, not even maintaining it adequately. It's shameful. I don't know what happened to the can-do attitude that New Yorkers were once famous for.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > Here in NYC we've been living off the investments of past generations for a long time, not even maintaining it adequately. That's a recent development. The MTA hit its peak of reliability and performance about a decade ago. Since 2010, which coincidentally is the exact time that Cuomo took office, things have plummeted.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    It actually was a coincidence, as the practices leading inevitably to the current situation have been going on for decades.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > It actually was a coincidence, as the practices leading inevitably to the current situation have been going on for decades. It's true that the corruption within the MTA and TWU have been around for decades, but it's not true at all that it's a coincidence that everything started to go downhill as soon as Cuomo took office. Cuomo literally does not believe that it is his job to oversee a statewide agency, despite the fact that every other governor - including his own father, when his father was governor - have taken on this responsibility. Unsurprisingly, when the public official in charge absolves themselves of responsibility for holding the MTA and TWU accountable, things fall apart pretty quickly.
      - stochastic_monk 8y ago
        There’s a reason Cynthia Nixon’s campaign emphasized the subway: Cuomo was uninterested in maintaining it, aside from scant, hollow PR moments.
cdoxsey 8y ago
It won't be so nice in Brooklyn when the l-train shuts down this year. Commute times will double and overcrowding will be a nightmare. NYC public transportation is great, but its incredibly expensive and falling apart. (NJTransit + Amtrak have had major problems in the last few years) There doesn't appear to be any fixes in the works. It seems like they're just hoping the problem goes away or that the federal government will spend billions on new infrastructure. What will it look like in a decade?
sandworm101 8y ago
This is the NYT. They approach everything from an investment mindset. For investors, growth matters more than turnover, more than profits. So it is no shock that the NYT evaluates public transport in terms of percentage increases and the number of new market players. Thier target readers are people looking for places to park thier money, not plebs looking for comparative city commute options.
nimbius 8y ago
Disclosure: former Los Angeles native here. Beats? no, the california metro systems are dwarfed by NYC. Beating a hundred year old system? absolutely. "Ford to City: Drop Dead" in 1975 was an omen for the NYC systems. local, state, and national politicians have all chosen to just ignore NYC metro in the hopes it magically gets better or starts running on time. Having visited NYC to visit my sister, I can say that what LA lacks in ridership it makes up for in overall investment. New railcars for the NYC system are slated for 2023, whereas Metro LA sees new cars on a yearly basis. The LA high speed project, for whatever political boondoggle it might be, was approved and is in construction. our single tap NFC metro cards are good not just for the LA system, but for most if not all surrounding city systems. I can use an LA TAP card on Santa monica, Culver city, and LA city buses with no penalty. I also get the equivalent of groupon deals with my tap card. Half price bulgogi or even a free coffee, just for having a metrocard. Its surely no coffin nail for the iron juggernaut of NYC, but its a perk. Most LA buses and subways all have free Wifi, with the exception of some larger express lines. LA also has sixteen new transit projects, all green-lit, some of them individually over a billion dollars. This is just the city of los angeles, not the state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail#Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail#Future TL;DR: When compared to an entire state, and factoring in current and future investment, the west coast is crushing NYC.
Ologn 8y ago
Also, Caltrain stops going south from San Francisco five minutes after midnight. BART stops going north 25 minutes after midnight. At 25 after midnight all rail service out of San Francisco stops - which is 90 minutes before last call. In New York City you have the LIRR, PATH, NJ Transit, Metro North, Amtrak and subway trains running all night. It's true NYC subways started having problems in the past few years as ridership has grown and long-needed maintenance has been underfunded, but the politicians are (supposedly) fixing that.
someguy101010 8y ago
What's funny is that they mention that NYC is reluctant to use scooters but don't mention how dangerous those things are in the snow. NYC has wayyy different weather than LA, Austin etc.
- plants 8y ago
  or even how insanely crowded NYC is in general. It might make sense to have scooters in a less crowded neighborhood in Brooklyn, but try driving through lower Manhattan on a scooter...
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    Why would it be worse than a bike?
    - ummonk 8y ago
      It's too crowded for bikes too. People take the subway and then walk the last few blocks.
  - zachkatz 8y ago
    Lower Manhattan needs to be pedestrianized immediately, with wide bike/scooter lanes throughout.
- tomtheelder 8y ago
  I don't think this would be much of problem, as there is only snow on the streets of NYC for a few hours of a few days a year. The plowing/salting/traffic volume means that the roads are almost always clear, even on the mere ~21 days where there is snow accumulation in unused areas (like the parks). Most people in NYC don't even drive snow-capable cars, and on the very few days we have snow on the streets the roads are absolute chaos. You'd just mandate that the scooter companies disable the scooters when the city tells them to. The robust public transit system would mean that those who normally ride scooters would have no problem getting to their destination.
superfx 8y ago
"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." I used to think so, but some European cities really do offer counterexamples. I'm thinking of places like Munich, Vienna, and Copenhagen. It's not uncommon to see people there who, by American stereotypes, wouldn't be expected to ride scooters: moms with kids, men in suits, etc. Perhaps the urban cultural gap is so vast that what you're saying is indeed true of the US, but I wouldn't take it as a given.
granshaw 8y ago
I think Chicago's L also allows a true car-free lifestyle, as long as you don't live in the burbs
- ams6110 8y ago
  The El is ok if you live near a stop and are going downtown (Loop) or to the airport. But there are huge areas that are not practical to get to via the El. You need to then use buses, which are slow and don't seem to follow much of a timetable.
jandrewrogers 8y ago
West coast cities have one key advantage that reduces their requirements for public transportation given appropriate city planning: 12 months of weather suitable for biking/walking/etc. That 3% of Seattle routinely commutes from the suburbs on a bicycle is impressive but only practical because the weather supports it.
paulcole 8y ago
Yes, obviously NYC has the best transportation in the US. But the point of the article isn’t to compare NYC vs. everywhere. But ignore NYC for a second (I acknowledge that many people who have lived there find this impossible) and look at the rest of the East Coast. Only the DMV area and Boston have any sort of large-scale public transit.

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.

pishpash 8y ago
I think there is an objective measure here. Just plot a 30-minute transit radius around the centers of various cities and you'll get a sense of the transit size of the city vs. covered population. Some cities are notoriously "small," like SF, despite it being on some best-to-live-without-car lists. You can't go very far before practically needing a car: so what if you can get there by transit if it takes 1-2 hours and inconsistently? NYC, Boston are "large." Seattle is even worse than SF in this regard. Transit is all about density. There is no way the west coast can beat the east coast in transit practicality for another 100 years.
- gpapilion 8y ago
  Boston and San Francisco have realitively equivalent population densities and population. So this makes a very good comparison of the two regions. For example my 4.5 mi commute in sf takes around 25 min. That’s similar to what I remember from Harvard square to Boylston street which is an equivalent distance.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Yes. Apartments.com has a nice visualization where you specify a mode, destination, and time limit, and it lights up all the listings in range. It’s really shocking how small SF is for sane commute times (20–45 minutes).
guitarbill 8y ago
Seattle is okay for US standards, but still a disaster and embarrassment compared to other first world cities. And everything that can be done to make biking or walking more awful is being done. Many cross-walks have a very short walk timer, so even able-bodied people like myself struggle to cross in time. Police don't ticket drivers blocking intersections and crossings [0], so almost every crossing is blocked in the morning and afternoon. Divers regularly run red lights. I'm sure it will take a few people to die first, as right now the police's mandate seems to be to get the rich people in their fancy vehicles home quicker than any kind of safety. Not to mention the construction that means you're going to have to switch street sides a few times during every journey. Buses are okay for north-south trips, but non-trivial trips can be as slow as walking, because a lot of routes only intersect downtown. The only use for light rail I've found is getting to SeaTac, but even then you need to live on the right side of the city. The streetcar is pathetic, and has never helped me get to work to to a friends house due to the route. I guess with a programmer's salary, it's okay since just getting an Uber and Lyft is no big deal, but for everybody else, it sucks. And sometimes, I feel like the only reason a token effort is being done about public transport is so people can feel smug and claim Seattle is progressive, left-leaning. Meanwhile, everybody still drives everywhere. [0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/video-pedestrians-dodge-gridlocked-cars-while-crossing-seattles-mercer-street-at-rush-hour/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/vid...

pishpash 8y ago

Yes, NYC is pretty much the only "city" in the US when viewed at global scale, that much is well known. Every other city may as well be podunk.

dang 8y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? Especially flamebaity ones. We've asked you many times already. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

thunderbong 8y ago

I wish I could upvote you more. Sadly, scale is the one thing most of us tend to completely forget when it comes to public transportation. We think of a peice of hardware, wire it up with an app and a saas platform and call it transport. It might be just that - transport, but it's nowhere near public transportation

jacobmoe 8y ago

I think the point is that west coast cities are willing to invest in their systems, not just live off of what past generations built. Here in NYC we've been living off the investments of past generations for a long time, not even maintaining it adequately. It's shameful. I don't know what happened to the can-do attitude that New Yorkers were once famous for.

chimeracoder 8y ago
> Here in NYC we've been living off the investments of past generations for a long time, not even maintaining it adequately. That's a recent development. The MTA hit its peak of reliability and performance about a decade ago. Since 2010, which coincidentally is the exact time that Cuomo took office, things have plummeted.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  It actually was a coincidence, as the practices leading inevitably to the current situation have been going on for decades.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > It actually was a coincidence, as the practices leading inevitably to the current situation have been going on for decades. It's true that the corruption within the MTA and TWU have been around for decades, but it's not true at all that it's a coincidence that everything started to go downhill as soon as Cuomo took office. Cuomo literally does not believe that it is his job to oversee a statewide agency, despite the fact that every other governor - including his own father, when his father was governor - have taken on this responsibility. Unsurprisingly, when the public official in charge absolves themselves of responsibility for holding the MTA and TWU accountable, things fall apart pretty quickly.
    - stochastic_monk 8y ago
      There’s a reason Cynthia Nixon’s campaign emphasized the subway: Cuomo was uninterested in maintaining it, aside from scant, hollow PR moments.

cdoxsey 8y ago

It won't be so nice in Brooklyn when the l-train shuts down this year. Commute times will double and overcrowding will be a nightmare. NYC public transportation is great, but its incredibly expensive and falling apart. (NJTransit + Amtrak have had major problems in the last few years) There doesn't appear to be any fixes in the works. It seems like they're just hoping the problem goes away or that the federal government will spend billions on new infrastructure. What will it look like in a decade?

sandworm101 8y ago

This is the NYT. They approach everything from an investment mindset. For investors, growth matters more than turnover, more than profits. So it is no shock that the NYT evaluates public transport in terms of percentage increases and the number of new market players. Thier target readers are people looking for places to park thier money, not plebs looking for comparative city commute options.

nimbius 8y ago

Disclosure: former Los Angeles native here. Beats? no, the california metro systems are dwarfed by NYC. Beating a hundred year old system? absolutely. "Ford to City: Drop Dead" in 1975 was an omen for the NYC systems. local, state, and national politicians have all chosen to just ignore NYC metro in the hopes it magically gets better or starts running on time. Having visited NYC to visit my sister, I can say that what LA lacks in ridership it makes up for in overall investment. New railcars for the NYC system are slated for 2023, whereas Metro LA sees new cars on a yearly basis. The LA high speed project, for whatever political boondoggle it might be, was approved and is in construction. our single tap NFC metro cards are good not just for the LA system, but for most if not all surrounding city systems. I can use an LA TAP card on Santa monica, Culver city, and LA city buses with no penalty. I also get the equivalent of groupon deals with my tap card. Half price bulgogi or even a free coffee, just for having a metrocard. Its surely no coffin nail for the iron juggernaut of NYC, but its a perk. Most LA buses and subways all have free Wifi, with the exception of some larger express lines. LA also has sixteen new transit projects, all green-lit, some of them individually over a billion dollars. This is just the city of los angeles, not the state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail#Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail#Future TL;DR: When compared to an entire state, and factoring in current and future investment, the west coast is crushing NYC.

Ologn 8y ago

Also, Caltrain stops going south from San Francisco five minutes after midnight. BART stops going north 25 minutes after midnight. At 25 after midnight all rail service out of San Francisco stops - which is 90 minutes before last call. In New York City you have the LIRR, PATH, NJ Transit, Metro North, Amtrak and subway trains running all night. It's true NYC subways started having problems in the past few years as ridership has grown and long-needed maintenance has been underfunded, but the politicians are (supposedly) fixing that.

someguy101010 8y ago

What's funny is that they mention that NYC is reluctant to use scooters but don't mention how dangerous those things are in the snow. NYC has wayyy different weather than LA, Austin etc.

plants 8y ago
or even how insanely crowded NYC is in general. It might make sense to have scooters in a less crowded neighborhood in Brooklyn, but try driving through lower Manhattan on a scooter...
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  Why would it be worse than a bike?
  - ummonk 8y ago
    It's too crowded for bikes too. People take the subway and then walk the last few blocks.
- zachkatz 8y ago
  Lower Manhattan needs to be pedestrianized immediately, with wide bike/scooter lanes throughout.
tomtheelder 8y ago
I don't think this would be much of problem, as there is only snow on the streets of NYC for a few hours of a few days a year. The plowing/salting/traffic volume means that the roads are almost always clear, even on the mere ~21 days where there is snow accumulation in unused areas (like the parks). Most people in NYC don't even drive snow-capable cars, and on the very few days we have snow on the streets the roads are absolute chaos. You'd just mandate that the scooter companies disable the scooters when the city tells them to. The robust public transit system would mean that those who normally ride scooters would have no problem getting to their destination.

superfx 8y ago

"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." I used to think so, but some European cities really do offer counterexamples. I'm thinking of places like Munich, Vienna, and Copenhagen. It's not uncommon to see people there who, by American stereotypes, wouldn't be expected to ride scooters: moms with kids, men in suits, etc. Perhaps the urban cultural gap is so vast that what you're saying is indeed true of the US, but I wouldn't take it as a given.

granshaw 8y ago

I think Chicago's L also allows a true car-free lifestyle, as long as you don't live in the burbs

ams6110 8y ago
The El is ok if you live near a stop and are going downtown (Loop) or to the airport. But there are huge areas that are not practical to get to via the El. You need to then use buses, which are slow and don't seem to follow much of a timetable.

jandrewrogers 8y ago

West coast cities have one key advantage that reduces their requirements for public transportation given appropriate city planning: 12 months of weather suitable for biking/walking/etc. That 3% of Seattle routinely commutes from the suburbs on a bicycle is impressive but only practical because the weather supports it.

paulcole 8y ago

Yes, obviously NYC has the best transportation in the US. But the point of the article isn’t to compare NYC vs. everywhere. But ignore NYC for a second (I acknowledge that many people who have lived there find this impossible) and look at the rest of the East Coast. Only the DMV area and Boston have any sort of large-scale public transit.