8 ms·

The concept of a 'big investment' takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to public transportation in the United States, especially considering the vast geog

The concept of a 'big investment' takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to public transportation in the United States, especially considering the vast geographical expanse of many metropolitan areas. In most cases, unless one resides in the heart of a city, public transportation isn't a practical option. This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently.

slaymaker1907 4y ago
I think that’s part of the point. This vast sprawl is somewhat caused by our over reliance on private vehicles. Also, a factor of more than 2 for travel times is VERY bad for public transit, even in the US.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I’ve previously written up “what would it take to make a 9 AM meeting at my office?” It’s a factor of 4 or 5 worse via public transit and I live in a probably top 5 (definitely top 10) US city as it pertains to our public transit system (Boston). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
  - htag 4y ago
    At 8.5 miles a commute by bicycle or e-bike would be cheaper and close to thirty minutes. It would be healthier. It wouldn't require a parking spot.
    - quesera 4y ago
      > At 8.5 miles a commute by bicycle or e-bike GP said Boston.
      - htag 4y ago
        I've never been. Are bicycles illegal there?
        quesera 4y ago
        Yes.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        One of the first search results for Boston bicycle declares it the fourth best biking city in the US, so you're going to need to be more specific about whatever criticism you're exaggerating.
        jen20 4y ago
        Boston sometimes gets 2 feet of snow in a single day, and often has sub-freezing temperatures. People just get on with life (but not really on e-bikes).
        htag 4y ago
        Do people in Boston drive in 2 feet of snow?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        sokoloff 4y ago
        After a 2 foot snowfall ends, secondary roads are usually passable within ~3-12 hours, depending on how much snow was removed during the storm. Major roads will almost always remain passable during the entire snow event. Essential stores and services almost never close as people can move around despite the weather (and except for a few hours immediately after, are expected to). Sidewalks and bike paths will take days to be down to pavement and some bike paths aren’t salted or plowed at all so become safe to use again when the snow naturally melts.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Buying an e-bike to accomplish this commute would not be cheaper as it would not be a full replacement for the car, so I’d be paying for a car and an e-bike. There is oodles of parking at the office (was built for commuters) and I already have to park the car near home. Eliminating a parking space on either end won’t move any of the existing buildings closer.
      - htag 4y ago
        The GSA usage rate is $0.585/mile. That is $9.945/day in car usage from a 8.5 mile commute to the office. I understand you can drive for less than this rate, but it would be hard to reach $0.35/mile and doing so would sacrifice dependability of the motor vehicle. My e-bike is significantly cheaper to maintain than my car. It uses something like .7KWH for a full charge which handles over 30 miles. Thats less than 10 cents for a full charge at my rate. Other consumable goods like tires, chains, tubes, break pads are all similarly 10x-100x cheaper than their car counterpart. The only expensive wear item is the battery pack, which admittedly cost $550. I'd estimate my personal usage of the device to be around $0.05/mile. It's cheaper to own both and maintain both if you are going to use both. Using simple linear math, the ebike will save you over $2000 in ongoing costs (initial price) within 3850 miles or 235 commutes. A pretty good ROI.
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  Honestly travel times on transit are bad everywhere. Its hard to beat the car, which is essentially a bus that goes express door to door to your destination, and can leave when you want. People take the alternative only when they can’t afford to take the car in regularly (e.g. bridge tolls and high parking costs in nyc ensure mainly high income people enjoy the convenience of a car). Even if you lived just 15 mins walking from a train station, thats a half hour added to every trip just getting back home, to say nothing of the walking on the other end. Imagine if you were not in walking shape on top of this. Its for the greater good of course to take collective transportation over resource intensive individual transportation, but you sure do pay for it with your free time in most places, not just in the U.S.
  - macNchz 4y ago
    I think one of the issues is that once you start designing places around driving, cars become non-optional for day to day living, whereas many places designed around transit generally do not expect people to use transit for every single outing. For example: most car oriented American suburbs simply require a car for anything other than visiting a neighbor, whereas in a transit oriented city you might use transit to commute to work, but be able to walk to some local shops and services. I think many people who are familiar only with car dependent lifestyles make the mistake of imagining a car-free lifestyle that involves replacing all of the car trips they make one-to-one with bus or train trips, which would indeed be really cumbersome, but isn’t really how things work (at least in my experience growing up in a rural small town in the US and having lived in a couple of European cities and NYC).
    - kjkjadksj 4y ago
      Even if you lived out in the kanto plain where the trains came before the highways, its not like people are taking the bullet train to the grocery store thats a 5 min drive with the car you already own. Few places on earth are so dense where the car is actually a consistently losing bet when you account for all your trips. I’m not even sure what building for transit rather than car would look like for a semi urban or rural area, considering the transit with the lowest capital investment, the bus, is also benefited by car oriented development like a road network with more connections between nodes. Even in the times before a car, some people had a horse or mule to essentially play the role of a car today, of an instant express bus.
- rahimnathwani 4y ago
  Most of my journeys here in SF would take 2.5x to 4x by public transport.
kjkjadksj 4y ago
Because the US insists transit need to look like a big sexy expensive two mezzanine underground platform, when a decidedly unsexy painted bus lane on the already existing wide arterial would offer most of the same utility for orders of magnitude less money.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  All of the commenters are missing a huge point. US commuter rail projects are hugely corrupt enterprises. Just look at Honolulu for a blatant example of corruption in infrastructure spending (their train NO-ONE wanted)
  - kjkjadksj 4y ago
    I’ve heard sometimes metros are forced to contract with certain contractors in particular because they have headhunted all the talent qualified to interpret the metros own requirements. You can imagine how much abuse this situation can lead to. The US needs to drop the contractor model and just directly staff labor for public works. If there is enough work going around to maintain a contracting company, then there’s therefore enough work to staff a public rail building division, and build out some standardized and therefore cheaper designs for this infrastructure.
magicalist 4y ago
> This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently It's not like it's the natural state of things that 25% of the Atlanta city center is dedicated to parking so we just have to accept the downsides. There's a reason everything is so spread out and so it's difficult to walk places or design efficient public transit, and it's the same reason driving and parking your car is the most efficient transportation method.

slaymaker1907 4y ago

I think that’s part of the point. This vast sprawl is somewhat caused by our over reliance on private vehicles. Also, a factor of more than 2 for travel times is VERY bad for public transit, even in the US.

sokoloff 4y ago
I’ve previously written up “what would it take to make a 9 AM meeting at my office?” It’s a factor of 4 or 5 worse via public transit and I live in a probably top 5 (definitely top 10) US city as it pertains to our public transit system (Boston). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
- htag 4y ago
  At 8.5 miles a commute by bicycle or e-bike would be cheaper and close to thirty minutes. It would be healthier. It wouldn't require a parking spot.
  - quesera 4y ago
    > At 8.5 miles a commute by bicycle or e-bike GP said Boston.
    - htag 4y ago
      I've never been. Are bicycles illegal there?
      - quesera 4y ago
        Yes.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        One of the first search results for Boston bicycle declares it the fourth best biking city in the US, so you're going to need to be more specific about whatever criticism you're exaggerating.
        jen20 4y ago
        Boston sometimes gets 2 feet of snow in a single day, and often has sub-freezing temperatures. People just get on with life (but not really on e-bikes).
        htag 4y ago
        Do people in Boston drive in 2 feet of snow?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        sokoloff 4y ago
        After a 2 foot snowfall ends, secondary roads are usually passable within ~3-12 hours, depending on how much snow was removed during the storm. Major roads will almost always remain passable during the entire snow event. Essential stores and services almost never close as people can move around despite the weather (and except for a few hours immediately after, are expected to). Sidewalks and bike paths will take days to be down to pavement and some bike paths aren’t salted or plowed at all so become safe to use again when the snow naturally melts.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Buying an e-bike to accomplish this commute would not be cheaper as it would not be a full replacement for the car, so I’d be paying for a car and an e-bike. There is oodles of parking at the office (was built for commuters) and I already have to park the car near home. Eliminating a parking space on either end won’t move any of the existing buildings closer.
    - htag 4y ago
      The GSA usage rate is $0.585/mile. That is $9.945/day in car usage from a 8.5 mile commute to the office. I understand you can drive for less than this rate, but it would be hard to reach $0.35/mile and doing so would sacrifice dependability of the motor vehicle. My e-bike is significantly cheaper to maintain than my car. It uses something like .7KWH for a full charge which handles over 30 miles. Thats less than 10 cents for a full charge at my rate. Other consumable goods like tires, chains, tubes, break pads are all similarly 10x-100x cheaper than their car counterpart. The only expensive wear item is the battery pack, which admittedly cost $550. I'd estimate my personal usage of the device to be around $0.05/mile. It's cheaper to own both and maintain both if you are going to use both. Using simple linear math, the ebike will save you over $2000 in ongoing costs (initial price) within 3850 miles or 235 commutes. A pretty good ROI.
kjkjadksj 4y ago
Honestly travel times on transit are bad everywhere. Its hard to beat the car, which is essentially a bus that goes express door to door to your destination, and can leave when you want. People take the alternative only when they can’t afford to take the car in regularly (e.g. bridge tolls and high parking costs in nyc ensure mainly high income people enjoy the convenience of a car). Even if you lived just 15 mins walking from a train station, thats a half hour added to every trip just getting back home, to say nothing of the walking on the other end. Imagine if you were not in walking shape on top of this. Its for the greater good of course to take collective transportation over resource intensive individual transportation, but you sure do pay for it with your free time in most places, not just in the U.S.
- macNchz 4y ago
  I think one of the issues is that once you start designing places around driving, cars become non-optional for day to day living, whereas many places designed around transit generally do not expect people to use transit for every single outing. For example: most car oriented American suburbs simply require a car for anything other than visiting a neighbor, whereas in a transit oriented city you might use transit to commute to work, but be able to walk to some local shops and services. I think many people who are familiar only with car dependent lifestyles make the mistake of imagining a car-free lifestyle that involves replacing all of the car trips they make one-to-one with bus or train trips, which would indeed be really cumbersome, but isn’t really how things work (at least in my experience growing up in a rural small town in the US and having lived in a couple of European cities and NYC).
  - kjkjadksj 4y ago
    Even if you lived out in the kanto plain where the trains came before the highways, its not like people are taking the bullet train to the grocery store thats a 5 min drive with the car you already own. Few places on earth are so dense where the car is actually a consistently losing bet when you account for all your trips. I’m not even sure what building for transit rather than car would look like for a semi urban or rural area, considering the transit with the lowest capital investment, the bus, is also benefited by car oriented development like a road network with more connections between nodes. Even in the times before a car, some people had a horse or mule to essentially play the role of a car today, of an instant express bus.
rahimnathwani 4y ago
Most of my journeys here in SF would take 2.5x to 4x by public transport.

kjkjadksj 4y ago

Because the US insists transit need to look like a big sexy expensive two mezzanine underground platform, when a decidedly unsexy painted bus lane on the already existing wide arterial would offer most of the same utility for orders of magnitude less money.

orangepurple 4y ago
All of the commenters are missing a huge point. US commuter rail projects are hugely corrupt enterprises. Just look at Honolulu for a blatant example of corruption in infrastructure spending (their train NO-ONE wanted)
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  I’ve heard sometimes metros are forced to contract with certain contractors in particular because they have headhunted all the talent qualified to interpret the metros own requirements. You can imagine how much abuse this situation can lead to. The US needs to drop the contractor model and just directly staff labor for public works. If there is enough work going around to maintain a contracting company, then there’s therefore enough work to staff a public rail building division, and build out some standardized and therefore cheaper designs for this infrastructure.

magicalist 4y ago

> This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently It's not like it's the natural state of things that 25% of the Atlanta city center is dedicated to parking so we just have to accept the downsides. There's a reason everything is so spread out and so it's difficult to walk places or design efficient public transit, and it's the same reason driving and parking your car is the most efficient transportation method.