11 ms·

I think the biggest problem is attitude; in the US, transit is largely viewed as a welfare program for poor people who are not (yet) able to afford cars. To put

I think the biggest problem is attitude; in the US, transit is largely viewed as a welfare program for poor people who are not (yet) able to afford cars. To put it in HN terms, Americans see it like a deprecated API; something you're obligated to support somewhat, but only until your users migrate off of it. If you look at the Honolulu transit project (Formerly HART, now called Skyline), I think it shows everything wrong with US transit projects: 1. It goes nowhere useful, only going to a bunch of random places on the west side of Oahu where no one really goes. 2. It was pitched as an economic uplift project, not a transit project. "If we build a train in these largely-ignored areas, it will help the people there!" 3. It took years and years to build, full of cost overruns, because it was also pitched mainly as a job creation project. You can't sell a transit project based on that alone, so instead they're pitched as welfare or job-creation programs, which creates the wrong set of incentives. After all, if the project takes longer, that's more jobs!

pylua 2y ago
There’s an argument in Atlanta that mass transit hasn’t expanded more outwards because it tends to bring in more problems in terms of people. I think people are starting to change on this, but the cost would now be massive,
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  Atlanta's one huge success with transit that it doesn't get enough credit for is that it connects directly to the airport. So many other cities with "better" transit have complex schemes of switching between different buses operated by the airport authority and the city before you can get to the main system. In Atlanta you simply go over to baggage claim and the train is right there. Too bad they screwed this up when they built the International Terminal, which is connected with a bus on surface streets that gets stuck in traffic and at lights. If you're flying an airline with a presence in the domestic terminal, you can use the internal transit system to get to the International Terminal but otherwise you're stuck switching from the train to the bus or vice versa. It's an annoying bit of extra friction that shouldn't exist.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Atlanta’s huge success is that the trains run on time and they have been able to maintain the automated train control. Atlanta doesn’t get enough credit for being a blue city that actually does some basic stuff right.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Portland, Salt Lake City have pretty good connections. Seattle also if you don't mind walking through the parking garage (often security will snake back to the lightrail station, you know you are in for a bad day). SFO has Bart to the airport, Caltrain is also possible but you have to connect to Bart for one station. I admit that I've been to SFO a few times and have never bothered taking Bart (in contrast, I always take Max from PDX).
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Chicago is like that. Both O'Hare and Midway have CTA trains directly into the terminal.
dado3212 2y ago
Why is this unique to America? Why doesn’t this apply to the UK?
- lmm 2y ago
  In the UK anyone who matters lives or at least works in London, which has always had decent transit and has been gradually, incrementally nudging cars out of the centre for about two decades now (congestion charge, ULEZ, gradual pedestrianization of very central parts) as well as improving the alternatives (crossrail, actually decent cycle routes). Part of it is probably simply that London never completely stopped building new transit for too long; as much as UK people complain about transit development happening in fits and starts, there's always been a sufficiently new and shiny line to point to as a success and an example of how transit should be (Victoria, JLE, DLR, crossrail). But I suspect it's mostly just not having your expectations set by a largely LA-based media.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  It does apply to the UK. Very little new public transit gets built, what's there is permanently overloaded. Whenever I visit I regularly end up on trains where you have to stand for the entire 1hr journey. Many lines are full and can't be easily upgraded short of massive signalling reworks (moving block etc). Reliability is poor because there's no slack in the system. Root cause is more people + little/no new capacity.
  - apexalpha 2y ago
    HS2? New Crossrail thing? Seems like a bit of a stretch to say the UK isn't at least trying.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      I didn't say it doesn't try, I said relatively little gets built. Crossrail is a great project, notable for its uniqueness, and the fact that so much is underground (the only place you can build nowadays, and even then just barely). HS2 has to go above ground and doesn't seem to really be happening.
afavour 2y ago
While attitude plays a part I can’t help but feel like ineptitude and broad corruption play a huge role as well. In NYC transit isn’t viewed the way you’re describing it, pretty much everyone takes it. And yet NYC’s system expands at a glacial pace. A good part of the reason is because everything costs so damn much. Part of that is everyone wanting a piece of the pie so the simplest, cheapest option is very rarely the one chosen.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  NYC used to have Robert Moses backstopping builds. Like him or hate him, he got things built on a scale nobody has managed to achieve since. In fact a lot of the infrastructure and parks people take for granted today were Moses’ handiwork. I’m not suggesting that we need another Bob Moses, but he does prove there is some way to cut through the glacial movement of politics and bureaucracy
  - onecommentman 2y ago
    If the only person in 100 years to get things done in infrastructure in NYC was Bob Moses, then I think it’s time to admit that NYC needs another Bob Moses.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      Or needs fixing so that there's more than one person in 100 years who can build things.
qwerpy 2y ago
Seattle-area commuter here. I have to agree, transit seems mostly designed for people who don't value their time. Which don't tend to be the highly paid tech workers with families. I tried so many times to give transit "one more try". The straw that broke my back was when they silently canceled 2 buses in a row for my route, on the coldest day of the year, for a route that has 20 minutes between buses. And my suburb commuter route doesn't even have the big city problems that plague the Seattle buses. Now I drive my single occupant 6603 lb truck to work once or twice a week, and WFH the rest of the time.
- mrtesthah 2y ago
  You could choose to ride an e-bike instead.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    E-bikes are great in Seattle until they are stolen. Bike theft is the one single issue that is driving down bike ridership in the city, since police and the city government don't really care about it.
    - Empact 2y ago
      There are various ways to hide an airtag on a bike. Consequences are the way to deter thieves.
      - SoftTalker 2y ago
        The cops don't do much about bike theft. The perpetrators are the homeless, and they're basically untouchable. They have no assets, they can't pay any fines, and it's too expensive to keep them in jail. Edit to add: It would be nice if they at least recovered the bikes and returned them to their owners but it seems like if they can't collect fines or put someone in prison they aren't interested. It woudn't be hard. Go to the local homeless hangouts. Any bikes nicer than what you could buy at Walmart are stolen, and most of the other ones are too. Run the serial numbers against theft reports and load them out.
thayne 2y ago
It's kind of a reinforcing cycle. Since public transit is terrible, everyone wants cars. Since everyone wants cars, there isn't a lot of interest in public transit.
- conductr 2y ago
  Yep. It's chicken and egg problem. You have to invest so heavily before reaching a tipping point of it being a realistic alternative to cars for most American's. Only at that point does it make sense. Where as with cars, we've already made much of that investment. I know it has a high maintenance, economic, and ecologic burden but that's not what we've optimized for. We've optimized for complete freedom and autonomy of movement. We have a number of light rail lines in my city. They mean nothing to the vast majority of our citizens because they either live too far or work too far. And by too far, I mean that proverbial last mile. The other problem is they're not always direct. Just like air travel, this adds time to your trip. People are willing to accept it on air travel because it's rather uncommon, but when your daily commute could be 20 minutes by car or 45 minutes by rail most people will drive. Not to mention, the run times are commonly every 20-30 minutes and are not always consistently running on time. This means even if you plan your day perfectly, a single round trip could leave you sitting for up to an hour at the rail stops just waiting on top of your 45 minute travel time. We have auto traffic, but nothing that severe. We also have sprawled significantly. The implication of which being people drive long distances to work as the status quo. With transportation, long distances means more stops and longer travel time. When driving, most people's commutes see an extra 10-30% of time than non-rush times. But it's fairly predictable and much quicker than trying to get to rail. All that is also ignoring the other big items: weather & culture. I'm in Dallas, although this applies to many southern cities, where people most people are not used to the weather. Going to speak broadly, this applies to a vast majority of folks. They leave their HVAC home to their HVAC car to their HVAC offices and so on. The women especially get dressed up and do their make-up and hair daily before ever being seen my a non-housemate. Men are often still dressing in clothing that they'd like to keep clean. We don't carry changes of clothes around with us or have a natural style (like I see in European cities where biking is normal). Sweating and being rained on and such is completely foreign to us. We generally wouldn't show up to work after having walked a mile outside. This is why we don't even ride bikes for transportation even when going short distances. It would require a huge shift in perspective and culture around these things.
earthboundkid 2y ago
For Skyline, I don’t think you can discount all of the years of political effort to try to cancel it. All that work did was just to slow it down and make it more expensive and risky for the companies involved. In theory, starting in West Oahu made sense because it’s cheaper to build out there, and TOD will grow the tax base to support the urban stations, but you have to actually build something for that to work.
- infotainment 2y ago
  Oh definitely, we can't discount the effects of lobbying efforts. It very clearly should have gone from the airport to Waikiki Beach (or at the very least Ala Monana center), which would have actually taken tourist traffic off the roads. But if it did that, those tourists might not rent cars or take taxis! The rental car lobby and taxi lobby don't like that one bit.
giantg2 2y ago
When I was out there The Bus was great. By far one of the best public transit I've seen in the US (clean, mostly on time, seemed pretty safe, fairly priced). I believe I took some sort of light rail for a few trips as well. I suspect a lot of the tourist money helps.
nox101 2y ago
Repeating myself, I believe that many countries find a good way to make train stations destinations in and of themsevles Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop. That's clearly not the only way to do it but it might be a way in the USA? because treating it as a public service just makes it a political tax burden. Something to be cut, under funded, etc.... Los Angeles used to have one of the largest public transit systems. Over 1000 miles of track (compare to NYC 650 miles?) and tons of stations. Most of it was built commercially to sell housing. According to this documentary it worked, until the deals they'd made with the cities to maintain the roads the trains went down ended up costing too much money. https://www.amazon.com/This-Pacific-Electric-Stephanie-Edwards/dp/B01KBFJHFC https://www.amazon.com/This-Pacific-Electric-Stephanie-Edwar... This video also shows two extensive train systems from past L.A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQfUFhchIlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQfUFhchIlM It feels like in Japan, they kind of solved that issue by letting the train companies run their stations as retail/office spaces and all the other stuff mentioned above. I think Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong probably have government based public transportation but it feels like they've managed to turned many stations into commerce hubs at least.
- acchow 2y ago
  Hong Kong’s MTR is actually a publicly listed company. They are actually a real estate developer that happens to run and expand a subway system
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop.' Yes, many of the transit companies in Japan are really more accurately described as real estate companies that own and operate train lines. Most of their profits come from the real estate, not the trains, and the trains are mainly a way to get people to go to the properties. One big difference you can see between the US and Japan along these lines is the stations: in the US (and Canada from what I've seen), there's absolutely nothing inside the stations, just fare gates and a platform and train tracks. In Japan, the station has vending machines, shops, underground connections to nearby buildings, spaces for vendors to set up temporary stalls, etc. In the high-traffic stations, it's easy to stop in a convenience store, or in a Starbucks, before getting on your next train, and of course the train company is getting money from that in the form of rent. Some really big stations have larger shopping areas attached. But the US seems allergic to renting out commercial space in stations for some reason, and wants transit systems to get all their funding from fares and taxes.
acchow 2y ago
> transit is largely viewed as a welfare program for poor people who are not (yet) able to afford cars. In most of the US, transit riders can’t wait to be able to afford a car and get out of transit. For good reason: the transit experience for them is terrible

pylua 2y ago

There’s an argument in Atlanta that mass transit hasn’t expanded more outwards because it tends to bring in more problems in terms of people. I think people are starting to change on this, but the cost would now be massive,

Mountain_Skies 2y ago
Atlanta's one huge success with transit that it doesn't get enough credit for is that it connects directly to the airport. So many other cities with "better" transit have complex schemes of switching between different buses operated by the airport authority and the city before you can get to the main system. In Atlanta you simply go over to baggage claim and the train is right there. Too bad they screwed this up when they built the International Terminal, which is connected with a bus on surface streets that gets stuck in traffic and at lights. If you're flying an airline with a presence in the domestic terminal, you can use the internal transit system to get to the International Terminal but otherwise you're stuck switching from the train to the bus or vice versa. It's an annoying bit of extra friction that shouldn't exist.
- rayiner 2y ago
  Atlanta’s huge success is that the trains run on time and they have been able to maintain the automated train control. Atlanta doesn’t get enough credit for being a blue city that actually does some basic stuff right.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Portland, Salt Lake City have pretty good connections. Seattle also if you don't mind walking through the parking garage (often security will snake back to the lightrail station, you know you are in for a bad day). SFO has Bart to the airport, Caltrain is also possible but you have to connect to Bart for one station. I admit that I've been to SFO a few times and have never bothered taking Bart (in contrast, I always take Max from PDX).
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Chicago is like that. Both O'Hare and Midway have CTA trains directly into the terminal.

dado3212 2y ago

Why is this unique to America? Why doesn’t this apply to the UK?

lmm 2y ago
In the UK anyone who matters lives or at least works in London, which has always had decent transit and has been gradually, incrementally nudging cars out of the centre for about two decades now (congestion charge, ULEZ, gradual pedestrianization of very central parts) as well as improving the alternatives (crossrail, actually decent cycle routes). Part of it is probably simply that London never completely stopped building new transit for too long; as much as UK people complain about transit development happening in fits and starts, there's always been a sufficiently new and shiny line to point to as a success and an example of how transit should be (Victoria, JLE, DLR, crossrail). But I suspect it's mostly just not having your expectations set by a largely LA-based media.
mike_hearn 2y ago
It does apply to the UK. Very little new public transit gets built, what's there is permanently overloaded. Whenever I visit I regularly end up on trains where you have to stand for the entire 1hr journey. Many lines are full and can't be easily upgraded short of massive signalling reworks (moving block etc). Reliability is poor because there's no slack in the system. Root cause is more people + little/no new capacity.
- apexalpha 2y ago
  HS2? New Crossrail thing? Seems like a bit of a stretch to say the UK isn't at least trying.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    I didn't say it doesn't try, I said relatively little gets built. Crossrail is a great project, notable for its uniqueness, and the fact that so much is underground (the only place you can build nowadays, and even then just barely). HS2 has to go above ground and doesn't seem to really be happening.

afavour 2y ago

While attitude plays a part I can’t help but feel like ineptitude and broad corruption play a huge role as well. In NYC transit isn’t viewed the way you’re describing it, pretty much everyone takes it. And yet NYC’s system expands at a glacial pace. A good part of the reason is because everything costs so damn much. Part of that is everyone wanting a piece of the pie so the simplest, cheapest option is very rarely the one chosen.

no_wizard 2y ago
NYC used to have Robert Moses backstopping builds. Like him or hate him, he got things built on a scale nobody has managed to achieve since. In fact a lot of the infrastructure and parks people take for granted today were Moses’ handiwork. I’m not suggesting that we need another Bob Moses, but he does prove there is some way to cut through the glacial movement of politics and bureaucracy
- onecommentman 2y ago
  If the only person in 100 years to get things done in infrastructure in NYC was Bob Moses, then I think it’s time to admit that NYC needs another Bob Moses.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Or needs fixing so that there's more than one person in 100 years who can build things.

qwerpy 2y ago

Seattle-area commuter here. I have to agree, transit seems mostly designed for people who don't value their time. Which don't tend to be the highly paid tech workers with families. I tried so many times to give transit "one more try". The straw that broke my back was when they silently canceled 2 buses in a row for my route, on the coldest day of the year, for a route that has 20 minutes between buses. And my suburb commuter route doesn't even have the big city problems that plague the Seattle buses. Now I drive my single occupant 6603 lb truck to work once or twice a week, and WFH the rest of the time.

mrtesthah 2y ago
You could choose to ride an e-bike instead.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  E-bikes are great in Seattle until they are stolen. Bike theft is the one single issue that is driving down bike ridership in the city, since police and the city government don't really care about it.
  - Empact 2y ago
    There are various ways to hide an airtag on a bike. Consequences are the way to deter thieves.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      The cops don't do much about bike theft. The perpetrators are the homeless, and they're basically untouchable. They have no assets, they can't pay any fines, and it's too expensive to keep them in jail. Edit to add: It would be nice if they at least recovered the bikes and returned them to their owners but it seems like if they can't collect fines or put someone in prison they aren't interested. It woudn't be hard. Go to the local homeless hangouts. Any bikes nicer than what you could buy at Walmart are stolen, and most of the other ones are too. Run the serial numbers against theft reports and load them out.

thayne 2y ago

It's kind of a reinforcing cycle. Since public transit is terrible, everyone wants cars. Since everyone wants cars, there isn't a lot of interest in public transit.

conductr 2y ago
Yep. It's chicken and egg problem. You have to invest so heavily before reaching a tipping point of it being a realistic alternative to cars for most American's. Only at that point does it make sense. Where as with cars, we've already made much of that investment. I know it has a high maintenance, economic, and ecologic burden but that's not what we've optimized for. We've optimized for complete freedom and autonomy of movement. We have a number of light rail lines in my city. They mean nothing to the vast majority of our citizens because they either live too far or work too far. And by too far, I mean that proverbial last mile. The other problem is they're not always direct. Just like air travel, this adds time to your trip. People are willing to accept it on air travel because it's rather uncommon, but when your daily commute could be 20 minutes by car or 45 minutes by rail most people will drive. Not to mention, the run times are commonly every 20-30 minutes and are not always consistently running on time. This means even if you plan your day perfectly, a single round trip could leave you sitting for up to an hour at the rail stops just waiting on top of your 45 minute travel time. We have auto traffic, but nothing that severe. We also have sprawled significantly. The implication of which being people drive long distances to work as the status quo. With transportation, long distances means more stops and longer travel time. When driving, most people's commutes see an extra 10-30% of time than non-rush times. But it's fairly predictable and much quicker than trying to get to rail. All that is also ignoring the other big items: weather & culture. I'm in Dallas, although this applies to many southern cities, where people most people are not used to the weather. Going to speak broadly, this applies to a vast majority of folks. They leave their HVAC home to their HVAC car to their HVAC offices and so on. The women especially get dressed up and do their make-up and hair daily before ever being seen my a non-housemate. Men are often still dressing in clothing that they'd like to keep clean. We don't carry changes of clothes around with us or have a natural style (like I see in European cities where biking is normal). Sweating and being rained on and such is completely foreign to us. We generally wouldn't show up to work after having walked a mile outside. This is why we don't even ride bikes for transportation even when going short distances. It would require a huge shift in perspective and culture around these things.

earthboundkid 2y ago

For Skyline, I don’t think you can discount all of the years of political effort to try to cancel it. All that work did was just to slow it down and make it more expensive and risky for the companies involved. In theory, starting in West Oahu made sense because it’s cheaper to build out there, and TOD will grow the tax base to support the urban stations, but you have to actually build something for that to work.

infotainment 2y ago
Oh definitely, we can't discount the effects of lobbying efforts. It very clearly should have gone from the airport to Waikiki Beach (or at the very least Ala Monana center), which would have actually taken tourist traffic off the roads. But if it did that, those tourists might not rent cars or take taxis! The rental car lobby and taxi lobby don't like that one bit.

giantg2 2y ago

When I was out there The Bus was great. By far one of the best public transit I've seen in the US (clean, mostly on time, seemed pretty safe, fairly priced). I believe I took some sort of light rail for a few trips as well. I suspect a lot of the tourist money helps.

nox101 2y ago

Repeating myself, I believe that many countries find a good way to make train stations destinations in and of themsevles Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop. That's clearly not the only way to do it but it might be a way in the USA? because treating it as a public service just makes it a political tax burden. Something to be cut, under funded, etc.... Los Angeles used to have one of the largest public transit systems. Over 1000 miles of track (compare to NYC 650 miles?) and tons of stations. Most of it was built commercially to sell housing. According to this documentary it worked, until the deals they'd made with the cities to maintain the roads the trains went down ended up costing too much money. https://www.amazon.com/This-Pacific-Electric-Stephanie-Edwards/dp/B01KBFJHFC https://www.amazon.com/This-Pacific-Electric-Stephanie-Edwar... This video also shows two extensive train systems from past L.A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQfUFhchIlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQfUFhchIlM It feels like in Japan, they kind of solved that issue by letting the train companies run their stations as retail/office spaces and all the other stuff mentioned above. I think Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong probably have government based public transportation but it feels like they've managed to turned many stations into commerce hubs at least.

acchow 2y ago
Hong Kong’s MTR is actually a publicly listed company. They are actually a real estate developer that happens to run and expand a subway system
shiroiushi 2y ago
>Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop.' Yes, many of the transit companies in Japan are really more accurately described as real estate companies that own and operate train lines. Most of their profits come from the real estate, not the trains, and the trains are mainly a way to get people to go to the properties. One big difference you can see between the US and Japan along these lines is the stations: in the US (and Canada from what I've seen), there's absolutely nothing inside the stations, just fare gates and a platform and train tracks. In Japan, the station has vending machines, shops, underground connections to nearby buildings, spaces for vendors to set up temporary stalls, etc. In the high-traffic stations, it's easy to stop in a convenience store, or in a Starbucks, before getting on your next train, and of course the train company is getting money from that in the form of rent. Some really big stations have larger shopping areas attached. But the US seems allergic to renting out commercial space in stations for some reason, and wants transit systems to get all their funding from fares and taxes.

acchow 2y ago

> transit is largely viewed as a welfare program for poor people who are not (yet) able to afford cars. In most of the US, transit riders can’t wait to be able to afford a car and get out of transit. For good reason: the transit experience for them is terrible