3 ms·

> Sorry train fans, but trains are not that great for commuting. Quick comparison: more people (3.6m) go through Shinjuku Station in Tokyo than the daytime pop

> Sorry train fans, but trains are not that great for commuting. Quick comparison: more people (3.6m) go through Shinjuku Station in Tokyo than the daytime population of Manhattan, at 3.1m. Only half of those travel into Manhattan, using all modes of transport. When things get extreme it’s hard to just double the road network and parking into a single location. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjuku_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjuku_Station

cyberax 4y ago
This station is served by 12 lines. So presumably that's 24 tracks. This means that one track would need to carry a bit more than 150000 people a day on average. A 6-lane freeway can carry around 100000 people a day. As a sanity check, the infamous Katy Freeway carries 350000 cars a day, for about 600000 people. It's 14 main travel lanes wide. So yep, trains are not that efficient compared to freeways.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  that's not 24 tracks. you need more tracks at the station since the trains are stopped, but you can probably do that with 4 to 6 tracks for the portions where the trains are up to speed.
- richardw 4y ago
  So you'd need 6 of those highways converging on the middle of a city to compare to Tokyo's single train station. To make it really fun to solve, no rational city would allow that disastrous use of above-ground land, the parking for another 2m cars would be an engineering feat of note and you're dragging millions of tons of steel around for no reason. We haven't begun on emissions or need for fuel stops for those 2m cars. Oh, and that's not the entirety of the Tokyo metro population, which is ~37m. The entire of Texas is ~29m-ish and that's spread out so far and wide they can afford to fuck around with 14 lane highways. The scale and solution are incomparable.

3 ms·

> Sorry train fans, but trains are not that great for commuting. Quick comparison: more people (3.6m) go through Shinjuku Station in Tokyo than the daytime pop

by richardw 4y ago

cyberax 4y ago
This station is served by 12 lines. So presumably that's 24 tracks. This means that one track would need to carry a bit more than 150000 people a day on average. A 6-lane freeway can carry around 100000 people a day. As a sanity check, the infamous Katy Freeway carries 350000 cars a day, for about 600000 people. It's 14 main travel lanes wide. So yep, trains are not that efficient compared to freeways.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  that's not 24 tracks. you need more tracks at the station since the trains are stopped, but you can probably do that with 4 to 6 tracks for the portions where the trains are up to speed.
- richardw 4y ago
  So you'd need 6 of those highways converging on the middle of a city to compare to Tokyo's single train station. To make it really fun to solve, no rational city would allow that disastrous use of above-ground land, the parking for another 2m cars would be an engineering feat of note and you're dragging millions of tons of steel around for no reason. We haven't begun on emissions or need for fuel stops for those 2m cars. Oh, and that's not the entirety of the Tokyo metro population, which is ~37m. The entire of Texas is ~29m-ish and that's spread out so far and wide they can afford to fuck around with 14 lane highways. The scale and solution are incomparable.