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> “It was a huge loss not to build it,” Koenig says, of the subway. “When you compare almost any city in Europe to a Midwestern car-centric city there is no com
by jgwil2 6y ago
> “It was a huge loss not to build it,” Koenig says, of the subway. “When you compare almost any city in Europe to a Midwestern car-centric city there is no comparison in the quality of life.”
Ain't that the truth. It's very depressing to read about the history of transit in the States.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoMeh, depends what your priorities are. While the opportunities for insane white collar income are much fewer cities in the Midwest are pretty great for quality of life.
- Retric 6y agoHaving commuted by car, rail, walking, and working from home, I personally think a quick walk to work is by far the best option. You generally give that up in car centric cities and it’s a huge loss.
- danlugo92 6y ago20 minutes walk from office, never going back to 1~2 hour commutes.
- mohaine 6y agoIn the Midwest a 1-2 hour commute is normally 70 - 120 miles.
- tomjakubowski 6y agoYou (and the other commenter) need to be a lot more specific than "The Midwest", a large and diverse part of this country. That figure isn't close to true in Chicagoland at least, unless you're commuting suburbs to the boonies (and even then, you'd need to be lucky and have a tollway route). A 30 mile commute into the city, with traffic, takes like 50-70 minutes, a large reason why Metra commuter rail is so popular.
- Touche 6y agoChicago isn't a car centric city, probably the only in the Midwest.
- Retric 6y agoThat really depends on where you’re drawing the borders of Chicago. The Chicago metropolitan area is car centric, but looking at Chicago as a city unto it’s self and things look very different.
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- 1123581321 6y ago5-20 minute commutes are more normal. If this sounds surprising to you, take a look at the Census Bureau's commute data. Keep in mind that this data includes commutes that cannot be walked that are in areas of low unemployment and high income relative to cost of living. https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/data/commute_times_us_zipcode_2011.csv https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/data/commute_times...
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- wankeler 6y ago3 minute walk to ferry pier 5 minute ferry ride across Sydney harbour to circular quay 6 minute walk to office Excellent 4g so able to hold video conference all the way That was my favourite commute.
- bigger_cheese 6y agoSydney depends a lot on where you are commuting from/to. Trying to get to Circular Quay from western suburbs for instance is not all that nice.
- dls2016 6y agoLived in Renens and had three or four options for getting to my office depending on the weather. Could walk the whole way, walk two different ways to the light rail, or if raining hop on the bus next to my apartment. Good times.
- irrational 6y agoI used to ride my bike to work. I really miss that ever since the pandemic started.
- wolco2 6y agoYou give up the walk in bigger cities unless you pay top dollar for a downtown condo so you end up on transit (bus/subway), bike or even uber commuting
- Retric 6y agoIt’s a function of the relative amounts of housing and jobs in the inner city. People talk about building more houses as the solution to high prices, however escalating demand and long commutes are driven by increasing office space.
- graeme 6y agoWhat makes you think building a subway system lowers quality of life? Plenty of low cost of living cities worldwide have them. In the US only high COL cities do so this makes it seem like a subway raises real estate costs. But there’s no logical connection.
- mikem170 6y agoAren't buses better then subways for most places, given their lower costs and greater flexibility? Isn't this true for most of Europe, also? Or does the typical mid-sized city in Europe have subways like London, Paris, and NYC?
- xxpor 6y ago>greater flexibility This is actually a negative. Build a train, and it's really hard to move. This actually spurs investment. A bus line can be taken away with the stroke of a pen.
- kube-system 6y agoTrain lines can be discontinued quite easily as well. And it's more wasteful when it happens.
- howlgarnish 6y agoAbandoning subway lines is virtually unheard of, which is why this article exists in the first place.
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- kube-system 6y agoMany light rail systems discontinue or change portions of their system. It doesn't happen often in underground sections because those are usually built only in the densest portions of a city which would tend to have high ridership. I think it's more the tunnel that makes these lines less likely to be discontinued, rather than the train. Tunnels are just expensive to move whether they're for trains or for busses. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_New_York_City_Subway_lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_New_York_City...
- mikem170 6y agoI grew up in a midwest rust-belt city, and traffic wasn't crazy, and still isn't, even in the suburbs. Probably because the population is still rebounding. I'm in Florida now, and most of Florida is horrible. Sprawl on top of swamp. Everything is so spread out, the roads have so much traffic, and there's too many people driving agressively or not paying attention. Every hour on the road is a roll of the dice in my $30,000 vehicle versus some asshole swerving through traffic because he was raised on Fast and Furious or something. Houston is the same, just so many cars and everything so spread out. Atlanta leaves that impression, also. And much of Charlotte. Two-thirds of Austin is jam packed with traffic and nowhere to park. These places were all mostly built in an era of car-centric urban planning. My impression of Indianapolis, and some of it's suburbs, a booming midwest city, is that they are on their way to the same situation - Driving miles back and forth from housing developments to box stores for every need with only hundreds of cars for company. It's inhumane. Yuck. This is a fail for so many people. I have working poor friends and it sucks that they have to spend several hundreds of dollars per month each for a non-shit car, insurance, and gas. It keeps them in the hole. I blame zoning and selfish property owners who won't allow more density.
- godzillabrennus 6y agoThe costs of living in a high density city probably eat up more Capital than the costs of transit in one of these suburban cities.
- jeromegv 6y agoYes, but it's a failure of zoning. It's totally absurd that anyone that wants a job in a low density city NEEDS to spend thousands of dollar just to get to their job. This is poverty trap. Tons of places don't have that issue.
- astrange 6y agoTokyo is cheap, because they build enough housing. This happens even though Japanese landlords are discriminatory and abusive (eg requiring you pay them an extra month's rent as "key money" when you move in for no apparent reason.)
- irrational 6y agoWhat do you mean by quality of life? For me a big part of that is the environment. No beaches/coast? No mountains, forests, waterfalls, etc? That doesn’t sound like a great quality of life to me.
- bumby 6y ago>No beaches/coast? No mountains, forests, waterfalls I think maybe you make too many assumptions. Michigan, for example, has any of these within driving distance (albeit their definition of ‘mountain’ is a bit different than out West)
- zdragnar 6y agoLakes, rivers, waterfalls and forest are pretty ubiquitous in my part of the midwest. There are some places with mountains, though not nearby. It isn't all corn and wheat out here.
- skrowl 6y agoCost of living in the midwest is amongst the lowest in the country
- dyeje 6y agoThe quality of life would be better with the public transit is the point of the quote though, not that you have to live somewhere else for good quality of life.
- zten 6y agoI think people are usually pretty happy with living in those areas. They like being able to drive and park at things easily. It’s just the kids who are less thrilled with needing the mom and dad taxi.
- tolbish 6y agoI wonder if this has been studied by researchers. Is this a genuine preference or rather something akin to Stockholm syndrome? Something tells me the average American who moves to a mass-transit friendly city is happier than someone from a mass-transit city that moves to a car-centric city.
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- throwaway201103 6y agoI think it's subjective, and maybe related to what you grew up with. I moved to Chicago in the 1990s, lived there for about 10 years. The mass-transit was very good, but I wasn't happy living there. Move to a smaller town with basically no useful public transit, but am vastly happier.
- technothrasher 6y agoI'm a definite small town country person. I think even my town of 5300 people is getting too big for me these days, and I couldn't imagine being happy living in the city or even a bigger suburb. But if I had to live in a city, good public transit would be a must. I spent a week in Paris a few years ago getting around everywhere on the subway and enjoyed it immensely. On a later trip I spent one day driving in Paris and was ready to shoot myself.
- mypalmike 6y agoEven the buses in Paris are pretty great. About halfway through my last visit, I switched almost entirely from subway to buses. They aren't necessarily the fastest way to get across town, but I found them clean and convenient, and just a great way to take everything in.
- jberryman 6y agoMy city had one of the first electric streetcar systems in the world. In 1949 they were sort of ceremoniously burned: https://rvamag.com/politics/local-politics/artists-map-of-richmonds-streetcar-system-reminds-us-what-might-have-been.html https://rvamag.com/politics/local-politics/artists-map-of-ri... Oh, also imagine a neighborhood known variously as "The Harlem of the South" and "Black Wall Street", and try to guess where they decided to carve out the new freeway a few years before that?
- technofiend 6y agoHah. Sounds familiar. My neighborhood was originally created to give successful Italian and Jewish folks a place to live since the toniest neighborhood named River Oaks had explicit bylaws that prevented sales to those races. This was the 1930s well before the Civil Rights Act. Then one very successful black cattleman had his white secretary buy him a house and sell it to him. Within a few years white flight emptied the area (to the point there's a documentary about it) and suddenly TXDOT decided it was a great place for a freeway.
- WorldMaker 6y agoRelatedly, another fun fact is that Cincinnati also had a street car system that was a regional envy and compared favorably to San Francisco's. One hill climb especially was remarked upon at the time as being as scenic if not more so than the scenic cable car lines that have become preserved and enshrined as such tourist destinations in San Francisco. (Some of the historic cars that have been restored and put back into use by San Francisco even originated on that Cincinnati line.) Possibly more so than just about any other city in the midwest (though they all made mistakes), Cincinnati has possibly the craziest history of paved over and unfinished projects.
- bandana 6y agoI find taking the subway in Paris or NYC a terrible experience. The smell, the crowds, the stress... after a ride I need to take a shower. As an alternative, I prefer the South East Asia "motorbike centric" cities, if only they could switch to eletric it would be perfect.
- paxys 6y agoIf you actually live and commute in these motorbike centric cities rather than visit as a tourist, you will change your tune very quick. They are orders of magnitude more dangerous, streets are narrow, traffic is chaotic and rules are non-existent, summers are hell (and good luck finding a workplace with a shower), you have to dodge aggressive cars/pedestrians/animals on a daily basis. I'd take a London/Paris/NYC style subway system over it in a heartbeat.
- Reason077 6y agoCycling and good metro/subway systems aren't mutually exclusive, of course. Cities with good public transit are often good cycling cities, too, due to being able to maintain a good level of density without excessive levels of car traffic, modest traffic speeds, etc. (As for motorbikes in cities, I'm not a fan due all the noise and pollution. But electric bikes are great!)
- bandana 6y agoI have been living in Saigon for the past 10 months. I'd say on the contrary, the first few days (what a tourist would experience) are the most stressful, but after a while you get used to it and it's alright.
- jeromegv 6y agoSaigon and the great experience of crossing the street... among the highest rate in the world of car accidents. Come on, let's be serious, this is better than the Paris subway? Under what metric?
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- trianglem 6y agoSpeak for yourself. I hate public transportation and sharing commodities. I’d much rather have my own car and large private spaces.
- wesleywt 6y agoI believe this is hell. Hours of your life wasted in traffic because the rest of the population believes the same. I ran out of battery power on camera in Barcelona. I got off the tour bus and was at my hotel room within 10 minutes to plug it in. Then back on the tour of the city really quickly due to the awesome transport systems. My city, Cape Town, where public transport is really bad it would have taken me an hour or more depending on the traffic. If you want large private spaces and drive your own car, move to a rural town.
- Uberphallus 6y agoThat sounds violently American. Anyway, according to that statement either you hate dense cities or you just love wasting your time in them. Maybe try a top public transit network, like Vienna (overall), Moscow or Madrid (subway), Tokyo (train) or even Paris (when there's no strike) to see things done right, because in the US cities with barely functional public transit can be counted with a single hand.
- nec4b 6y ago>>That sounds violently American. It really doesn't. There are people all over the world who feel the same as the person you're replying to. The feeling has nothing to do whether the city has a "top public transit network" as you put it or a third world always broke transit network.
- Uberphallus 6y agoSure, everyone can have any opinion anywhere. Still it's mostly an opinion shaped by the environment and mostly prevalent in the US, and to lesser extent, other sparsely populated countries with significant sprawl. The fact that the sprawl makes it ineffective and expensive to lay an effective public transit is what makes it seem undesirable. The fact that it's ineffective makes it relegated to what poor people use, deepening the issue. And this goes as just personal experience, but my US friends in the EU insist on driving through city traffic and spending 3-4 as much time in commuting, and it takes a while until they give up. Some of them aren't even used to do groceries by foot, for a large chunk of the US population that involves driving to a Walmart.