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Both kinds of layouts exist. Hub and spoke systems seem to be best suited to moving commuters from residential areas to commercial/employment areas and back, bu
by apendleton 7y ago
Both kinds of layouts exist. Hub and spoke systems seem to be best suited to moving commuters from residential areas to commercial/employment areas and back, but aren't as good for city dwellers who want to get from one part of the city to another. Washington, DC has this problem in a pretty serious way: the Metro was built for suburban commuters, and lots of common origin/destination pairs within the city that are pretty inconvenient by metro because they involve circuitously passing through downtown. The system just wasn't designed with this use in mind.
Contrast with Manhattan, which has multiple north/south and east/west lines and could reasonably be described as a grid. This is a system that's designed for people who will mostly get around by transit, rather than just doing so at rush hour when their car would get stuck in traffic.
- benj111 7y agoI suspect there's somewhat of a chicken and egg situation going on. If your city grew up around the car, there was never a need to centralise, so now you need a grid to service that. Manhattan may well be a special case where the density and numbers would allow anything to work, if you were designing from scratch for mass transit I don't think grid would be the way to go though.
- apendleton 7y agoNeither DC nor Manhattan grew up around the car. What was different was the role of the car at the time the transit system was built; DC's was built later, during a period when the car had become dominant and the assumption was that it would remain that way, and now as that role of the car is being questioned, the transit system we have is poorly suited to the transit modeshares we'd like to see.