3 ms·

> and retrofitting all 30+ deep underground stations to be larger would be an insanely expensive and disruptive exercise. But before this you had no idea that

• decimalenough 1y ago
  It's an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to dig out a 6-car platform the first time around than to expand from 3 to 6 when the system is already operational. And it's a one-off price too: if the platform is built but not used, it incurs essentially no operating costs to have it sit there waiting for the day it's needed.
  • bsder 1y ago
    Everything you said is completely orthogonal to my statement: "It's quite a lot easier to sell a huge monetary upgrade on something oversubscribed rather than a huge monetary outlay that may be a complete white elephant." A better solution that no one has the political will to implement is inferior to every solution that can actually be implemented.
    • c22 1y ago
      Or rather politics often results in the implementation of technically inferior solutions. Sometimes the best solution is to do nothing and wait until the political will catches up to reality. Then you will be lambasted for not having acted sooner, but at least it will be done.
      • yellowapple 1y ago
        The political will catches up a lot faster (if at all) when there's a practical demonstration of the thing to be achieved.
        • zdragnar 1y ago
          Unforced errors will continue to happen, not for want of existing examples of a thing well done, but because politics lives on perverse incentives.
    • cloudbonsai 1y ago
      I think one solution is to embed a self-adjusting feedback mechanism into the transit fee. - If the rush hour contines to get more crowded, the transit fee would raise until people avoid commuting on peak hours. - If the rush hour disappears, the extra premium fee would fall to zero. It is not unrealistic as it sounds; JR East (the biggest railway operator in Japan) recently introduced "Off-peak Commuter Pass", which is 1) 15% cheaper than a normal pass 2) and cannot be used between 7:30 - 9:00 AM. So they are beginning to implement a dynamic policy based on how crowded their trains are.
      • dxdm 1y ago
        I don't think that public transportation should strive to price out people of lesser means to fix demand vs supply problems. That's what Uber is for. Of course it's fine to give people an incentive to ride outside of peak hours if they can, but demand is not that elastic, because of daily rhythms and how interconnected they are. Raising prices until you have removed the last option a lot of people have to get around, just so that others can enjoy their ride more, will remove a lot of opportunities from the economy. I'd also be interested to know if the slack introduced by people moving their travel to off-peak times is not immediately taken up by others again, in the way that widening a congested road often just allows more cars to be congested at the same time. (Edit: Which can still be a good thing, especially for public transportation, because I'd argue that giving more utility to more people is its mission.)
        • bobthepanda 1y ago
          I mean Japan is a obvious extreme what with the subway pushers and all. Commuting times used to be rigid until COVID and the resulting WFH and hybrid policies showed corporate the world would not burn down if some people showed up at 800 vs 830 vs 930 vs 1000. Being in at 9am sharp it turns out is not a hard requirement for many jobs.
    • numpad0 1y ago
      It's not. These things become single point of failure for a city by the time these problems arise, and just can't be upgraded or replaced no matter the cost because they can't afford to take it offline for extended periods. "Too expensive" in these cases are just euphemism and technical disclaimer for something impossible.
• cowsandmilk 1y ago
  But that’s not what history shows us. The subway with the second most ridership in the US is WMATA. How did they get there? By going big with their plans in the 1960s. All the systems that thought small in that era (MARTA, BART, LA Metro) have much lower ridership to this day. There is a good basis to this. Every new mile and station you add to a system compounds on the size of the system. The 11th station connects you to 10 places. The 51st station connects you to 50 places. Build small and you never get the critical mass needed to see widespread adoption.
  • jeffbee 1y ago
    What is the small aspect of BART? They have ten-car platforms and all that. ETA: the Internet thinks DC Metro platforms are 100 feet shorter than BART platforms.
    • bobthepanda 1y ago
      BART has substantially less urban trackage than DC and cities have much higher transit ridership. A more DC-like BART probably would have prioritized the second Transbay Tube and Geary Subway over the line to San Jose. BART did throw out the Geary baby with the bathwater when Marin County left.