6 ms·

Assuming the 500k people all commute between 6am-9am and 3pm-8pm, that means this interchange moves 160k people per hour. That's 1½-2½ commuter rail lines or a

Assuming the 500k people all commute between 6am-9am and 3pm-8pm, that means this interchange moves 160k people per hour. That's 1½-2½ commuter rail lines or about 3-4 subway lines. Such interchanges are truly a monument to stupidity.

pixl97 2y ago
You mean hundreds if commuter rail lines because the population isn't centered around dense points that make rail useful. We're in a catch 22 trap that will cost trillions and likely a century to get out of.
- kuschku 2y ago
  What I'd do is identify existing locations of denser development. That can be old downtown areas, universities, airports, old business parks, etc. Even Texas has those. We've actually had similar issues in many post-war suburbs in Germany when trying to convert them to transit in recent years. The solution isn't to remove all driving, just driving in areas with too much traffic. So park & ride concepts were created. You build train stations at major hubs and at locations at the edge of town and connect them. e.g. my mum's commute changed from "drive for 45min in traffic" to "drive 5min to the neighborhood train station that shares its parking lot with the hypermarket next door, wait 10min, ride the train for 5min, arrive at the train station next to her office". Her commute was cut in half, the business can collect revenue from their mostly unused parking lot during the week (it's sized for saturday shopping traffic), the train station doesn't have to build their own parking lot (the operator pays a few cents per train ticket to the business), and every person using this line is one less car on the road. This model is already profitable (!), but you can expand further. You can set up bus or tram routes that offer cross-connections between train stations to further connect schools, university dorms, malls, etc. You can then improve connectivity within of suburbs. Introduce cross-connections between cul-de-sacs for pedestrians and cyclists, connecting suburbs, apartment complexes, local businesses and train stations. The density won't be high enough to make walking to the train station viable, but cycling to the station certainly will be. That's not a solution for everyone, but it increases freedom of movement for teenagers and retirees. So far, all of this is possible in the US today. But we can dream beyond that: You'd really want to change the zoning around these hubs over time. Ideally you'd want to build 5-over-1s with an underground parking garage, shops and stores on the bottom floor, and apartments on the higher floors. For businesses that need more space you can give the bottom floor a larger footprint and add a green roof which provides something of a community backyard for the occupants of the apartments. Bonus points if you build it as a courtyard in the middle with balconies facing the courtyard. You'd really want to avoid high rises to ensure you get a growing circle of mid-density development around these hubs, somewhat reminescent of what main streets used to look like (or Disney's Main Street USA with two more floors ontop). A few cities in the US have actually gotten this far already! European cities, which suffered more destruction from post-war car-centric city planners than from the war itself, have been using these steps to slowly recover. These steps are also how cities around the world grew during the industrialization, and how the US got the main streets of old in the first place. Getting this far will take a whole generation, but where do we go from here? While this would be the end for solving local commuters, it'd only be the beginning for inter-city journeys. HSR is 2×-3× faster than cars and can be faster than flying for journeys below 1500-2000km, but it only works if you've already got local hubs with a dense transit network connecting them to the rest of the city.
  - oremolten 2y ago
    "This model is already profitable (!), but you can expand further." How many years is the break even point before profit is generated charging riders even 100$ per trip? Some of these highspeed rail projects proposed across the USA have a 1-2000 year break-even excluding maintenance over 2000 years @ 100$/rider/trip
WheatMillington 2y ago
>That's 1½-2½ commuter rail lines or about 3-4 subway lines. Assuming every single commuter is coming from and going to the same place, sure.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Tell me you don't understand how rail network work without telling me you don't understand how rail networks work.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Preface: I don't like this architecture. I think things need to change. I'm just describing what is. These are people coming from several dozen square miles and dispersing into several dozen square miles, flowing through these chokepoints. They're commuting 40, 50, or more miles. You'd need these people to change several bus lines and several train lines. Those busses would be snaking through messy suburbs for them to be actually useful. Those neighborhoods to pick them up are sprawling with poor walkability and a 15 minute+ walk just to the major road bus stop for a lot of those people. And when they get off the train, they're probably going to need a bus to navigate the sparse fields of giant empty parking lots to their actual workplaces. In fact, for a certain group of people this path practically already has a train service. US-75 runs parallel to the Red/Orange line. Assuming the person starts from Plano to go to their office job in Las Colinas/Irving (a massive assumption here, but practically best case), they won't even need to change trains. Let's ignore how they get to Parker Road station for now (Park and Ride? 15 minute walk through their neighborhood + same time as the park and ride?) and start the clock from there. They're going to commute to the Microsoft offices. They need to get in by 9:00 AM. So they instantly warp to the Parker Road Station, hop on the orange line at 6:46 AM. They get to North Lake College station at 8:07 AM. They then wait for the 229 bus at 8:21, take that 8 stops, hop off, walk a half a mile (~11min), and get there at 8:40. Nearly two hours and they only had to change once. And once again, that's instantly warping to Parker Road Station. Add another several minutes of drive or even more for a bus to connect to the train. Next, they're going to take the highways, including toll ways. They leave from Parker Road Station, head down US-75, hop on Bush Turnpike, and it is an ~30min trip on average. Or they want to avoid tolls. They take US-75 to 635 (taking this High Five talked about here), and it takes 30 minutes to an hour. Now, theoretically this should get a little bit better. There will be a new train line with more of an East-West path that would be useful here. But it'll be a train change at Bush Turnpike Station, and service on this new Silver Line won't be great at first. Potentially a 30 minute wait for the next train at peak times. And it'll still take 50ish minutes after that transfer. So you'd look at maybe a 5 minute train ride from Parker Road to Bush Turnpike, wait 15 minutes for the next train, then still 50 minutes. Plus the 30 minutes for the bus ride and walk. Over an hour and a half, magically warping to Parker Road immediately when the train was about to leave and hopefully only waiting 15 minutes for the Silver Line train. We'll see that it is really like when it opens in late 2025 (hopefully). I'm still excited for it, I'm looking forward to not needing to drive and park all the way out to the airport for travel and having another way to Addison Circle for things like Oktoberfest and other events there will be great. But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving. This is assuming someone lives close to the train lines in Plano. Their office is one bus line away from the station. Tons of people live even further out from there. Lots of people work at places which would require multiple bus transfers. The train doesn't even go halfway out into the sprawl, and the surrounding cities don't want to join DART. But honestly, it makes little sense to me to have people living in Fairview, McKinney, Prosper, and Melissa trying to commute to an office job in Dallas/Irving/Grapevine/Westlake/etc. It's insane to me, but people choose it. But a lot of people here just have a big aversion to taking transit. You're seen as an oddball to many for acknowledging it exists. We live right next to a bus stop that goes to a nice train station. My wife was looking at taking a job that would be immediately outside a train station. She looked at me like I was insane for suggesting she think about taking the train. I usually take it when I go into Dallas and people think it is incredible I survive. I take the bus to the city park with my kids and people wonder what happened to my car.
kube-system 2y ago
That's 500k vehicles not 500k people. While the plurality of vehicles could be single-occupant passenger vehicles, a good chunk of those vehicles are freight, multiple-occupant passenger vehicles, and some are even busses.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  The overwhelming majority of vehicles are single-occupant, specially during commute.
- msisk6 2y ago
  Being someone that has sat in a lot of traffic in Texas on these interchanges, the number of vehicles with more than one person is a rounding error. There's a few trucks hauling freight, but they try to miss the cities during rush hour.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    > There's a few trucks hauling freight There's a lot of trucks hauling freight. The US has the largest train network in the world, it notoriously handles primarily freight, and still, more than 70% of freight in the US goes by truck. If these roads are the average urban interstate highways, then about 10%ish of the traffic is heavy truck traffic. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/vm1.cfm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/v...
    - msisk6 2y ago
      I meant there's few trucks during rush hour. Overnight it's a different story. Last month I was going down south I-35 around midnight and got stuck in construction traffic in Waco and it was about 80% trucks.
      - kube-system 2y ago
        Ah, I see. That's really just another reason why a 500k vehicles/day problem shouldn't be approximated as a problem of moving 500k people only during rush hour.
massysett 2y ago
Heh, I read the numbers before your last statement and drew the opposite conclusion: if the interchange is moving as many cars as 4 subway lines, seems a bargain, especially as subways are expensive and have much more limited networks than roads.

pixl97 2y ago

You mean hundreds if commuter rail lines because the population isn't centered around dense points that make rail useful. We're in a catch 22 trap that will cost trillions and likely a century to get out of.

kuschku 2y ago
What I'd do is identify existing locations of denser development. That can be old downtown areas, universities, airports, old business parks, etc. Even Texas has those. We've actually had similar issues in many post-war suburbs in Germany when trying to convert them to transit in recent years. The solution isn't to remove all driving, just driving in areas with too much traffic. So park & ride concepts were created. You build train stations at major hubs and at locations at the edge of town and connect them. e.g. my mum's commute changed from "drive for 45min in traffic" to "drive 5min to the neighborhood train station that shares its parking lot with the hypermarket next door, wait 10min, ride the train for 5min, arrive at the train station next to her office". Her commute was cut in half, the business can collect revenue from their mostly unused parking lot during the week (it's sized for saturday shopping traffic), the train station doesn't have to build their own parking lot (the operator pays a few cents per train ticket to the business), and every person using this line is one less car on the road. This model is already profitable (!), but you can expand further. You can set up bus or tram routes that offer cross-connections between train stations to further connect schools, university dorms, malls, etc. You can then improve connectivity within of suburbs. Introduce cross-connections between cul-de-sacs for pedestrians and cyclists, connecting suburbs, apartment complexes, local businesses and train stations. The density won't be high enough to make walking to the train station viable, but cycling to the station certainly will be. That's not a solution for everyone, but it increases freedom of movement for teenagers and retirees. So far, all of this is possible in the US today. But we can dream beyond that: You'd really want to change the zoning around these hubs over time. Ideally you'd want to build 5-over-1s with an underground parking garage, shops and stores on the bottom floor, and apartments on the higher floors. For businesses that need more space you can give the bottom floor a larger footprint and add a green roof which provides something of a community backyard for the occupants of the apartments. Bonus points if you build it as a courtyard in the middle with balconies facing the courtyard. You'd really want to avoid high rises to ensure you get a growing circle of mid-density development around these hubs, somewhat reminescent of what main streets used to look like (or Disney's Main Street USA with two more floors ontop). A few cities in the US have actually gotten this far already! European cities, which suffered more destruction from post-war car-centric city planners than from the war itself, have been using these steps to slowly recover. These steps are also how cities around the world grew during the industrialization, and how the US got the main streets of old in the first place. Getting this far will take a whole generation, but where do we go from here? While this would be the end for solving local commuters, it'd only be the beginning for inter-city journeys. HSR is 2×-3× faster than cars and can be faster than flying for journeys below 1500-2000km, but it only works if you've already got local hubs with a dense transit network connecting them to the rest of the city.
- oremolten 2y ago
  "This model is already profitable (!), but you can expand further." How many years is the break even point before profit is generated charging riders even 100$ per trip? Some of these highspeed rail projects proposed across the USA have a 1-2000 year break-even excluding maintenance over 2000 years @ 100$/rider/trip

WheatMillington 2y ago

>That's 1½-2½ commuter rail lines or about 3-4 subway lines. Assuming every single commuter is coming from and going to the same place, sure.

panick21_ 2y ago
Tell me you don't understand how rail network work without telling me you don't understand how rail networks work.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Preface: I don't like this architecture. I think things need to change. I'm just describing what is. These are people coming from several dozen square miles and dispersing into several dozen square miles, flowing through these chokepoints. They're commuting 40, 50, or more miles. You'd need these people to change several bus lines and several train lines. Those busses would be snaking through messy suburbs for them to be actually useful. Those neighborhoods to pick them up are sprawling with poor walkability and a 15 minute+ walk just to the major road bus stop for a lot of those people. And when they get off the train, they're probably going to need a bus to navigate the sparse fields of giant empty parking lots to their actual workplaces. In fact, for a certain group of people this path practically already has a train service. US-75 runs parallel to the Red/Orange line. Assuming the person starts from Plano to go to their office job in Las Colinas/Irving (a massive assumption here, but practically best case), they won't even need to change trains. Let's ignore how they get to Parker Road station for now (Park and Ride? 15 minute walk through their neighborhood + same time as the park and ride?) and start the clock from there. They're going to commute to the Microsoft offices. They need to get in by 9:00 AM. So they instantly warp to the Parker Road Station, hop on the orange line at 6:46 AM. They get to North Lake College station at 8:07 AM. They then wait for the 229 bus at 8:21, take that 8 stops, hop off, walk a half a mile (~11min), and get there at 8:40. Nearly two hours and they only had to change once. And once again, that's instantly warping to Parker Road Station. Add another several minutes of drive or even more for a bus to connect to the train. Next, they're going to take the highways, including toll ways. They leave from Parker Road Station, head down US-75, hop on Bush Turnpike, and it is an ~30min trip on average. Or they want to avoid tolls. They take US-75 to 635 (taking this High Five talked about here), and it takes 30 minutes to an hour. Now, theoretically this should get a little bit better. There will be a new train line with more of an East-West path that would be useful here. But it'll be a train change at Bush Turnpike Station, and service on this new Silver Line won't be great at first. Potentially a 30 minute wait for the next train at peak times. And it'll still take 50ish minutes after that transfer. So you'd look at maybe a 5 minute train ride from Parker Road to Bush Turnpike, wait 15 minutes for the next train, then still 50 minutes. Plus the 30 minutes for the bus ride and walk. Over an hour and a half, magically warping to Parker Road immediately when the train was about to leave and hopefully only waiting 15 minutes for the Silver Line train. We'll see that it is really like when it opens in late 2025 (hopefully). I'm still excited for it, I'm looking forward to not needing to drive and park all the way out to the airport for travel and having another way to Addison Circle for things like Oktoberfest and other events there will be great. But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving. This is assuming someone lives close to the train lines in Plano. Their office is one bus line away from the station. Tons of people live even further out from there. Lots of people work at places which would require multiple bus transfers. The train doesn't even go halfway out into the sprawl, and the surrounding cities don't want to join DART. But honestly, it makes little sense to me to have people living in Fairview, McKinney, Prosper, and Melissa trying to commute to an office job in Dallas/Irving/Grapevine/Westlake/etc. It's insane to me, but people choose it. But a lot of people here just have a big aversion to taking transit. You're seen as an oddball to many for acknowledging it exists. We live right next to a bus stop that goes to a nice train station. My wife was looking at taking a job that would be immediately outside a train station. She looked at me like I was insane for suggesting she think about taking the train. I usually take it when I go into Dallas and people think it is incredible I survive. I take the bus to the city park with my kids and people wonder what happened to my car.

kube-system 2y ago

That's 500k vehicles not 500k people. While the plurality of vehicles could be single-occupant passenger vehicles, a good chunk of those vehicles are freight, multiple-occupant passenger vehicles, and some are even busses.

panick21_ 2y ago
The overwhelming majority of vehicles are single-occupant, specially during commute.
msisk6 2y ago
Being someone that has sat in a lot of traffic in Texas on these interchanges, the number of vehicles with more than one person is a rounding error. There's a few trucks hauling freight, but they try to miss the cities during rush hour.
- kube-system 2y ago
  > There's a few trucks hauling freight There's a lot of trucks hauling freight. The US has the largest train network in the world, it notoriously handles primarily freight, and still, more than 70% of freight in the US goes by truck. If these roads are the average urban interstate highways, then about 10%ish of the traffic is heavy truck traffic. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/vm1.cfm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/v...
  - msisk6 2y ago
    I meant there's few trucks during rush hour. Overnight it's a different story. Last month I was going down south I-35 around midnight and got stuck in construction traffic in Waco and it was about 80% trucks.
    - kube-system 2y ago
      Ah, I see. That's really just another reason why a 500k vehicles/day problem shouldn't be approximated as a problem of moving 500k people only during rush hour.

massysett 2y ago

Heh, I read the numbers before your last statement and drew the opposite conclusion: if the interchange is moving as many cars as 4 subway lines, seems a bargain, especially as subways are expensive and have much more limited networks than roads.