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Hi there! I started and ran Seattle Subway - I’m a bit of a transit nerd, and would love to chat about this. The MTA is planning on a 100 year horizon. It is A

Hi there! I started and ran Seattle Subway - I’m a bit of a transit nerd, and would love to chat about this. The MTA is planning on a 100 year horizon. It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later, even inflation adjusted. If you’d like to challenge their methodology, first go read the planning report!

aplummer 6y ago
Is a mezzanine considered capacity?
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  Absolutely. Mezzanines are critical in flow management during peak. You know how if you go to a Disney ride, most of the line is inside the structure? Same concept. Get people out of the rain/snow/heat and normalize flow.
  - asdff 6y ago
    But a mezzanine is sort of silly considering no one lines up for an hour for a train like they do on a disneyland ride. All the stations in LA have these massive mezzanines too and they are just dead space. They are absolutely empty during rush hour aside from people charging through them to get to the actual platform, because it might take you several minutes to go from above ground, down the escalators, through the mezzanine, down a second set of escalators, and to the platform, at which point the train might be gone and you will sit there twiddling your thumbs for another 10 minutes, clogging up the platform for the next train since you should have made that first one. It's a huge problem at stations like 7th street in downtown LA, where the light rail platform is below a mezzanine but above the heavy rail platform, which bottlenecks transfers due to a lack of thought put into how many stairs and escalators should be made. Probably 1/5 days a week commuting in the before times would I actually make that transfer, the other times you are jammed up by people bottlenecked by the limited stairs and escalators and you watch the train go away without you. Take out the elaborate mezzanine and make it a simple single level multitrack platform directly under the surface, and you might make the first train and be out of the station in less time, lowering the needed capacity of the station structure in the first place.
    - hadlock 6y ago
      Can the mezzanine be used to divert foot traffic during multi-day repairs
    - DrBazza 6y ago
      In London, it's absolutely the opposite. London Bridge Station has recently been rebuilt to have a mezzanine style area. It's the 4th busiest in the UK with 61 million entries and exits. St Pancras and Kings Cross were similarly rebuilt. It is a bit complex to describe London Bridge to non-Londoners, but simply put, it was 15 or so platforms that were about 20ft wide and 12 carriages long, with nowhere to queue and trains every few minutes, on every platform (and it's a terminus, not a through-station). A mezzanine in a central city for passengers to wait is an absolute necessity. Doubly so if the station is a terminus, which all of the major stations in London are (I'm not counting Blackfriars or St Pancras). For the non-English readers, there is only one North-South through railway line in London (Thameslink), and only one East-West (-ish) (Crossrail) and that hasn't opened. All mainline stations in London terminate, and then you have to use the tube to connect to another.
      - bobthepanda 6y ago
        That’s a bit different though, as at London Bridge one is generally waiting for timetabled rail services whereas the New York City subway is turn up and go. A mezzanine is rather pointless if the same service is showing up every 2-5 minutes.
        martinald 6y ago
        London Bridge tube station had to be rebuilt as well (not too add a mezannine per se but just to have enough space to hold the passengers waiting for trains), in the late 90s to house Jubilee Line but also to expand the Northern Line platforms. Even this 20 years later looks too small. Both these lines operate every 2 minutes (Jubilee slightly more than every 2 mins in peak).
        DrBazza 6y ago
        To add to what the other commenter said - Bank station (the busiest on the London tube network) is getting rebuilt too, to add a "mezzanine" type area for the Northern line. Through-trains, all to the same destinations, are every 2 minutes and the platform is frequently closed due to overcrowding. To the point, in fact, where there's often a one-way system enforced in the station, or people are kept at street level. Ultimately it's usage levels and capacity. UK stations don't have the capacity for the passengers, and often the capacity on the trains either.
quacked 6y ago
What are the costs involved in "retrofitting via cut-and-cover" as opposed to "building more capacity by mining" that makes the second option more palatable for the 100-year timeline?
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  I don't understand. That's not the tradeoff MTA is making. They're building more capacity now rather than having to try to do it later. Later would be nigh-impossible because of the skyscrapers going up on every side, and the railyard above. Hudson Yards is a massively complex project.
  - quacked 6y ago
    The parent comment that you responded to: "... Oversized stations are even more problematic when you consider that the MTA wants to build all of these by mining rather than using cut-and-cover, because cut-and-cover has too much disruption to surface tenants. And mining is far more expensive than cut-and-cover..." Your response: "... It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later, even inflation adjusted. ..." The implication of your response is that on a 100-year timeline, the way that the modern stations are apparently being built (by mining) is cheaper than building them by the way the parent commenter says (cut-and-cover). I was just curious why it's "always" cheaper. Is "mine and build big" the cheaper method only when there's a ton of density on top like Hudson Yards, or is it also the case in places with less surface density?
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      I think that you’re probably always better off building bigger if you expect growth in the next 100 years. How big you should build is just a matter of how much current and future traffic you expect to have.
    - soneil 6y ago
      I think what they're looking at is over-sizing rather than right-sizing. Think of it as cost=size*method. Future-proofing increases the size, not the method.
Etheryte 6y ago
This sounds fairly similar to "Why Many Cities Have No Money" [0]. In short, building massive infrastructure for the future is worth very little when the promised future never comes and you're stuck paying the maintenance cost. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13370310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13370310
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  That article is from Strong Towns. Strong Towns' entire premise is that growing outward is inefficient. They would make the same argument I am about planning for the future in a place like Hudson Yards, where millions of square feet are under construction.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  It intuitively feels more likely to me that that future may come to New York than to other cities.
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    It's already there. Hudson Yards is the largest development currently in progress in NYC (maybe the US), and phase 2 will build another million-ish square feet next to it. That is the closest subway station to all of it.
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    Does that future include >2” of water rise and more floods to fill tunnels?
    - Schiendelman 6y ago
      Yes, NYC is planning for at least two meters of sea level rise. Much of the subway works going on now are to handle more frequent and larger storm surges.
      - m4rtink 6y ago
pratik661 6y ago
Bookmarking this thread. I’m interested in getting involved in transit advocacy in NYC. I think Seattle Subway might be a good place for me to start my homework
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  Reach out anytime! bensch@gmail.com
  - pratik661 6y ago
    Thank you! I will.
malandrew 6y ago
I knew we had light rail in a few places, one monorail and lots of buses, but after living here for 1.5 years now, this is the first I've heard of Seattle Subway. I don't think I've ever heard anyone make reference to it in conversation. The Seattle has 79% more area than San Francisco and San Francisco has 17% more people. How does it make economic sense to have a Subway when so much of the city is zoned for detached single family homes and there is acknowledged seismic and flooding risk? In 2020, wouldn't it be far more future proof and likely cheaper to plan on smart streets with self-driving pods like Dubai is doing with its Next platform? The moment autonomous on-demand P2P system is viable, it's going to turn subways in less densely populated cities into albatrosses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlQaCIUHTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlQaCIUHTI
- ncallaway 6y ago
  I think they're describing it as the "Seattle Subway" for the benefit of non-local audiences. The subway they're referring to is almost certainly the Link light rail, which runs through the bus tunnels, and has other extended stretches underground. It's probably the same light-rail that you're referring to.
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    Yes. And we called it Seattle Subway for the local audience, to get attention to the fact that we could significantly accelerate construction of the system with an additional ballot measure. Most of what Sound Transit calls "light rail" counts a a subway anyway.
    - nick_kline 6y ago
      And increasing the construction speed is the major thing we need to do here! Otherwise many of us working in seattle from outside will be retired or dead by the time it gets to us. I'm very eager to spend more of my own tax money to construct the system faster. Plus we should do it before Tim Eyman eventually takes away our ability to tax ourselves.
dcolkitt 6y ago
What 100 year horizon? Manhattan has a 30% smaller lower population today than it did in 1920. Even pre-Covid, Manhattan was one of the slowest growing major counties in America.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  Population is not very relevant metric here. What matters is not so much how many people actually live in Manhattan, but rather how many people are commuting into it every day. In fact, commuters double the island population every day, and exceed the number of residents in 1920 by 50%. What happened with Manhattan was that tenements were replaced with office buildings, and these use more, not less commuting.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Manhattan commuters peaked in 1946. The train system was able handle that level of demand without falling apart. All of the messaging from MTA about increasing ridership causing delays is a disingenuous lie.
    - StanislavPetrov 6y ago
      Considering the fact that much of the same infrastructure they used in 1946 is still in use today (with 74 more years of wear and tear) its not surprising that its falling apart. This would be true even if the MTA wasn't staffed by dishonest, incompetent political cronies. When you regularly do things like spend $600 million dollars on trains that don't work, its not hard to see how you end up billions in debt very quickly. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-l-train-normal-service-covid-19-20200628-lntxyjbwdbhizky4sw5i6dbjgq-story.html https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-l-train-normal-servi...
    - Schiendelman 6y ago
      Man, you’re really taking a few numbers from decades ago and using that to claim something’s a lie? You ok?
EricE 6y ago
" It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later" As Washington, DC has come to learn with their subway. Decided to cut the third track to save cost and now any minor maintenance causes all kinds of issues and has made the system basically unsustainable without continual bailouts from the taxpayers. The ultimate pennywise/pound foolish.
- mcny 6y ago
  I don't mind building extra capacity. I do mind politicians sticking their nose where it doesn't belong. I can't believe more people are not angry about the World Trade Center Path station. They managed to spend twice the original budget at four billion dollars and all this time there were signal problems between Newark and Harrison because Path didn't have money to fix it. How do we do huge infrastructure projects when we can't trust the bureaucrats and the politians who are supposed to oversee these things?
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Part of the problem here is misaligned incentives. In the aftermath of 9/11, a lot of federal money was made available for the reconstruction of all the stuff that was destroyed. However, it was only usable for things in the Ground Zero area. So to maximize the utility of all this money, the Port Authority created an insane train station dressed up to the nines to soak up $4B of free federal cash. They also lumped a bunch of other unrelated things into the station that raised the sticker price but would still be covered by the feds. For what it's worth, this station was also at one point supposed to serve a LIRR extension from Atlantic Terminal to WTC, but kind of died after Pataki could not convince the feds that this was a reconstruction project and he left office. The project was never downsized in scope to match the new reality.
ReptileMan 6y ago
And how does the Mezzanine helps? Traveled a lot in the developing parts of asia and their subway stations even when massive are very plain and utilitarian. They deal with much bigger crowds than anything we could reasonably face in the west.
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  Comparing US infrastructure to infrastructure in the developing world requires a pile of caveats. The biggest reason for the difference you’re pointing out is safety. A mezzanine creates safety in two directions. First, as a gathering area with likely positive pressure ventilation in case of a train fire. Second, a refuge for incidents on the surface. The developing world generally isn’t planning for either in their infrastructure.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    I should point out that many of the systems you're discarding in comparison have better actual safety records than the US.
    - Drunk_Engineer 6y ago
      Indeed. Japan, S Korea, China, Hong Kong, and the rest of Asia operate world class rail systems. The idea that they don't care about safety is ignorant and racist.

aplummer 6y ago

Is a mezzanine considered capacity?

Schiendelman 6y ago
Absolutely. Mezzanines are critical in flow management during peak. You know how if you go to a Disney ride, most of the line is inside the structure? Same concept. Get people out of the rain/snow/heat and normalize flow.
- asdff 6y ago
  But a mezzanine is sort of silly considering no one lines up for an hour for a train like they do on a disneyland ride. All the stations in LA have these massive mezzanines too and they are just dead space. They are absolutely empty during rush hour aside from people charging through them to get to the actual platform, because it might take you several minutes to go from above ground, down the escalators, through the mezzanine, down a second set of escalators, and to the platform, at which point the train might be gone and you will sit there twiddling your thumbs for another 10 minutes, clogging up the platform for the next train since you should have made that first one. It's a huge problem at stations like 7th street in downtown LA, where the light rail platform is below a mezzanine but above the heavy rail platform, which bottlenecks transfers due to a lack of thought put into how many stairs and escalators should be made. Probably 1/5 days a week commuting in the before times would I actually make that transfer, the other times you are jammed up by people bottlenecked by the limited stairs and escalators and you watch the train go away without you. Take out the elaborate mezzanine and make it a simple single level multitrack platform directly under the surface, and you might make the first train and be out of the station in less time, lowering the needed capacity of the station structure in the first place.
  - hadlock 6y ago
    Can the mezzanine be used to divert foot traffic during multi-day repairs
  - DrBazza 6y ago
    In London, it's absolutely the opposite. London Bridge Station has recently been rebuilt to have a mezzanine style area. It's the 4th busiest in the UK with 61 million entries and exits. St Pancras and Kings Cross were similarly rebuilt. It is a bit complex to describe London Bridge to non-Londoners, but simply put, it was 15 or so platforms that were about 20ft wide and 12 carriages long, with nowhere to queue and trains every few minutes, on every platform (and it's a terminus, not a through-station). A mezzanine in a central city for passengers to wait is an absolute necessity. Doubly so if the station is a terminus, which all of the major stations in London are (I'm not counting Blackfriars or St Pancras). For the non-English readers, there is only one North-South through railway line in London (Thameslink), and only one East-West (-ish) (Crossrail) and that hasn't opened. All mainline stations in London terminate, and then you have to use the tube to connect to another.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      That’s a bit different though, as at London Bridge one is generally waiting for timetabled rail services whereas the New York City subway is turn up and go. A mezzanine is rather pointless if the same service is showing up every 2-5 minutes.
      - martinald 6y ago
        London Bridge tube station had to be rebuilt as well (not too add a mezannine per se but just to have enough space to hold the passengers waiting for trains), in the late 90s to house Jubilee Line but also to expand the Northern Line platforms. Even this 20 years later looks too small. Both these lines operate every 2 minutes (Jubilee slightly more than every 2 mins in peak).
      - DrBazza 6y ago
        To add to what the other commenter said - Bank station (the busiest on the London tube network) is getting rebuilt too, to add a "mezzanine" type area for the Northern line. Through-trains, all to the same destinations, are every 2 minutes and the platform is frequently closed due to overcrowding. To the point, in fact, where there's often a one-way system enforced in the station, or people are kept at street level. Ultimately it's usage levels and capacity. UK stations don't have the capacity for the passengers, and often the capacity on the trains either.

quacked 6y ago

What are the costs involved in "retrofitting via cut-and-cover" as opposed to "building more capacity by mining" that makes the second option more palatable for the 100-year timeline?

Schiendelman 6y ago
I don't understand. That's not the tradeoff MTA is making. They're building more capacity now rather than having to try to do it later. Later would be nigh-impossible because of the skyscrapers going up on every side, and the railyard above. Hudson Yards is a massively complex project.
- quacked 6y ago
  The parent comment that you responded to: "... Oversized stations are even more problematic when you consider that the MTA wants to build all of these by mining rather than using cut-and-cover, because cut-and-cover has too much disruption to surface tenants. And mining is far more expensive than cut-and-cover..." Your response: "... It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later, even inflation adjusted. ..." The implication of your response is that on a 100-year timeline, the way that the modern stations are apparently being built (by mining) is cheaper than building them by the way the parent commenter says (cut-and-cover). I was just curious why it's "always" cheaper. Is "mine and build big" the cheaper method only when there's a ton of density on top like Hudson Yards, or is it also the case in places with less surface density?
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I think that you’re probably always better off building bigger if you expect growth in the next 100 years. How big you should build is just a matter of how much current and future traffic you expect to have.
  - soneil 6y ago
    I think what they're looking at is over-sizing rather than right-sizing. Think of it as cost=size*method. Future-proofing increases the size, not the method.

Etheryte 6y ago

This sounds fairly similar to "Why Many Cities Have No Money" [0]. In short, building massive infrastructure for the future is worth very little when the promised future never comes and you're stuck paying the maintenance cost. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13370310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13370310

Schiendelman 6y ago
That article is from Strong Towns. Strong Towns' entire premise is that growing outward is inefficient. They would make the same argument I am about planning for the future in a place like Hudson Yards, where millions of square feet are under construction.
dan-robertson 6y ago
It intuitively feels more likely to me that that future may come to New York than to other cities.
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  It's already there. Hudson Yards is the largest development currently in progress in NYC (maybe the US), and phase 2 will build another million-ish square feet next to it. That is the closest subway station to all of it.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Does that future include >2” of water rise and more floods to fill tunnels?
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    Yes, NYC is planning for at least two meters of sea level rise. Much of the subway works going on now are to handle more frequent and larger storm surges.
    - m4rtink 6y ago

pratik661 6y ago

Bookmarking this thread. I’m interested in getting involved in transit advocacy in NYC. I think Seattle Subway might be a good place for me to start my homework

Schiendelman 6y ago
Reach out anytime! bensch@gmail.com
- pratik661 6y ago
  Thank you! I will.

malandrew 6y ago

I knew we had light rail in a few places, one monorail and lots of buses, but after living here for 1.5 years now, this is the first I've heard of Seattle Subway. I don't think I've ever heard anyone make reference to it in conversation. The Seattle has 79% more area than San Francisco and San Francisco has 17% more people. How does it make economic sense to have a Subway when so much of the city is zoned for detached single family homes and there is acknowledged seismic and flooding risk? In 2020, wouldn't it be far more future proof and likely cheaper to plan on smart streets with self-driving pods like Dubai is doing with its Next platform? The moment autonomous on-demand P2P system is viable, it's going to turn subways in less densely populated cities into albatrosses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlQaCIUHTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlQaCIUHTI

ncallaway 6y ago
I think they're describing it as the "Seattle Subway" for the benefit of non-local audiences. The subway they're referring to is almost certainly the Link light rail, which runs through the bus tunnels, and has other extended stretches underground. It's probably the same light-rail that you're referring to.
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  Yes. And we called it Seattle Subway for the local audience, to get attention to the fact that we could significantly accelerate construction of the system with an additional ballot measure. Most of what Sound Transit calls "light rail" counts a a subway anyway.
  - nick_kline 6y ago
    And increasing the construction speed is the major thing we need to do here! Otherwise many of us working in seattle from outside will be retired or dead by the time it gets to us. I'm very eager to spend more of my own tax money to construct the system faster. Plus we should do it before Tim Eyman eventually takes away our ability to tax ourselves.

dcolkitt 6y ago

What 100 year horizon? Manhattan has a 30% smaller lower population today than it did in 1920. Even pre-Covid, Manhattan was one of the slowest growing major counties in America.

xyzzyz 6y ago
Population is not very relevant metric here. What matters is not so much how many people actually live in Manhattan, but rather how many people are commuting into it every day. In fact, commuters double the island population every day, and exceed the number of residents in 1920 by 50%. What happened with Manhattan was that tenements were replaced with office buildings, and these use more, not less commuting.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Manhattan commuters peaked in 1946. The train system was able handle that level of demand without falling apart. All of the messaging from MTA about increasing ridership causing delays is a disingenuous lie.
  - StanislavPetrov 6y ago
    Considering the fact that much of the same infrastructure they used in 1946 is still in use today (with 74 more years of wear and tear) its not surprising that its falling apart. This would be true even if the MTA wasn't staffed by dishonest, incompetent political cronies. When you regularly do things like spend $600 million dollars on trains that don't work, its not hard to see how you end up billions in debt very quickly. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-l-train-normal-service-covid-19-20200628-lntxyjbwdbhizky4sw5i6dbjgq-story.html https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-l-train-normal-servi...
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    Man, you’re really taking a few numbers from decades ago and using that to claim something’s a lie? You ok?

EricE 6y ago

" It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later" As Washington, DC has come to learn with their subway. Decided to cut the third track to save cost and now any minor maintenance causes all kinds of issues and has made the system basically unsustainable without continual bailouts from the taxpayers. The ultimate pennywise/pound foolish.

mcny 6y ago
I don't mind building extra capacity. I do mind politicians sticking their nose where it doesn't belong. I can't believe more people are not angry about the World Trade Center Path station. They managed to spend twice the original budget at four billion dollars and all this time there were signal problems between Newark and Harrison because Path didn't have money to fix it. How do we do huge infrastructure projects when we can't trust the bureaucrats and the politians who are supposed to oversee these things?
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Part of the problem here is misaligned incentives. In the aftermath of 9/11, a lot of federal money was made available for the reconstruction of all the stuff that was destroyed. However, it was only usable for things in the Ground Zero area. So to maximize the utility of all this money, the Port Authority created an insane train station dressed up to the nines to soak up $4B of free federal cash. They also lumped a bunch of other unrelated things into the station that raised the sticker price but would still be covered by the feds. For what it's worth, this station was also at one point supposed to serve a LIRR extension from Atlantic Terminal to WTC, but kind of died after Pataki could not convince the feds that this was a reconstruction project and he left office. The project was never downsized in scope to match the new reality.

ReptileMan 6y ago

And how does the Mezzanine helps? Traveled a lot in the developing parts of asia and their subway stations even when massive are very plain and utilitarian. They deal with much bigger crowds than anything we could reasonably face in the west.

Schiendelman 6y ago
Comparing US infrastructure to infrastructure in the developing world requires a pile of caveats. The biggest reason for the difference you’re pointing out is safety. A mezzanine creates safety in two directions. First, as a gathering area with likely positive pressure ventilation in case of a train fire. Second, a refuge for incidents on the surface. The developing world generally isn’t planning for either in their infrastructure.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  I should point out that many of the systems you're discarding in comparison have better actual safety records than the US.
  - Drunk_Engineer 6y ago
    Indeed. Japan, S Korea, China, Hong Kong, and the rest of Asia operate world class rail systems. The idea that they don't care about safety is ignorant and racist.