4 ms·

To be a little contrarian: what would New York City look like today if they had dismissed the Subway as a "gadgetbahn" back in 1894?

adrianN 8y ago
Less room for cars on the roads and a lot more surface trains.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
It isn't though; it's a conventional rail system, nothing too fancy there. And it solved an actual problem, unlike e.g. the monorail vs conventional high speed rails.
- tempestn 8y ago
  It's conventional now, but initially the idea of putting trains underground beneath a city must have sounded a lot like a Hyperloop or whatever does today. (Which isn't to say that I think these current gadgetbahns are good ideas.)
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    You're mistaken. Decades before the New York Subway (opened 1904), you had the Cobble Hill Tunnel running three quarters of a kilometer under the streets of Brooklyn (1844). And the New York Subway was preceded in an much more substantial way by the Metropolitan Railway in London (proposed in the 1830s, began construction in the 1850s), that would eventually become the London Underground. The Metropolitian Railway took a conservative incremental approach to existing technology. The locomotives were steam and the tunnels were cut and cover. Subway systems as we know them to day are the product of nearly two centuries of incrementing on already proven technology. If you want a real example of a 19th century Gadgetbahn in New York, the obvious example is the Beach Pneumatic Transit (which was a total flop and was remarkably similar to Elon's "hyperloop" in numerous other ways as well.)
bewo001 8y ago
The difference is that as of today most public transport concepts have been tried and evaluated. None of them offered enough advantages to justify the cost of building a new network. Of course, it happens that new technology makes older concepts suddenly viable. But in public transport, the cost of the track is one of the major factors. The high cost for Maglev tracks killed the technology (yes, it may work in Japan where the geography leads to lines with insane capacity demands). Hyperloop will suffer from the same problem. The New York subway started with a revolutionary pneumatic railway and some other lines using standard gauge railway tracks. The pneumatic railway was quickly abandoned.

adrianN 8y ago

Less room for cars on the roads and a lot more surface trains.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

It isn't though; it's a conventional rail system, nothing too fancy there. And it solved an actual problem, unlike e.g. the monorail vs conventional high speed rails.

tempestn 8y ago
It's conventional now, but initially the idea of putting trains underground beneath a city must have sounded a lot like a Hyperloop or whatever does today. (Which isn't to say that I think these current gadgetbahns are good ideas.)
- darkpuma 8y ago
  You're mistaken. Decades before the New York Subway (opened 1904), you had the Cobble Hill Tunnel running three quarters of a kilometer under the streets of Brooklyn (1844). And the New York Subway was preceded in an much more substantial way by the Metropolitan Railway in London (proposed in the 1830s, began construction in the 1850s), that would eventually become the London Underground. The Metropolitian Railway took a conservative incremental approach to existing technology. The locomotives were steam and the tunnels were cut and cover. Subway systems as we know them to day are the product of nearly two centuries of incrementing on already proven technology. If you want a real example of a 19th century Gadgetbahn in New York, the obvious example is the Beach Pneumatic Transit (which was a total flop and was remarkably similar to Elon's "hyperloop" in numerous other ways as well.)

bewo001 8y ago

The difference is that as of today most public transport concepts have been tried and evaluated. None of them offered enough advantages to justify the cost of building a new network. Of course, it happens that new technology makes older concepts suddenly viable. But in public transport, the cost of the track is one of the major factors. The high cost for Maglev tracks killed the technology (yes, it may work in Japan where the geography leads to lines with insane capacity demands). Hyperloop will suffer from the same problem. The New York subway started with a revolutionary pneumatic railway and some other lines using standard gauge railway tracks. The pneumatic railway was quickly abandoned.