How about beating Europe or Asia?
The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
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Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#12Can anyone in other west coast cities speak about the crime on the new transit systems? I'm in Portland, and for the first time in my life, I'm worried about crime on mass transit. Maybe it is just the automated news feeds that are circulating stories of stabbings and attacks that have heightened my internalized hysteria. At the same time, I've felt a larger presence of people on mass transit who seem to be dealing w…
When I listen to my friends that ride buses and BART the major complaint is people doing utterly foul things like pissing or shitting. Or being harassed. Being harrased depends a lot on sex age etc. My GF's who looks like she lives in Walnut Creek gets harassed. Me who looks like an old skinny biker does not.
Got to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#13Hahaha.
I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on Long Island, spent a summer in Seattle, and I live in San Jose now.
One can't speak for the entirety of the either coast, but no city in CA comes close to what NYC offers in terms of public transportation.
And what NYC offers is a true car-free lifestyle which carries you to work, leisure, and back home via public transport.
E-scooters aren't a reliable way to get anywhere yet, and who knows if they'll ever be, not to mention that they are not for everyone. My grandmother is not going to ride one -- nor my wife, for that matter, nor should the kids. But the Subway is a common denominator.
This reflects in the daily ridership. MTA carries an order of magnitude more passengers than, say, BART. The same can be said about overall transit ridership[1].
East Coast vs. West Coast is a silly comparison when NYC Metro alone has more ridership than nearly all other major metro areas combined (including both Coasts, the Midwest, and the South).
So it's really NYC vs. Anywhere Else, and Anywhere Else still sucks when it comes to public transport because, in practical terms, most people aren't commuting by public transport in Anywhere Else, but they do in NYC.
You can't slap a Lime scooter on a suburban development and call that "public transport". And a self-driving car is still a car, a glorified jitney cab if and when it arrives. And it's not going to solve the problems of the car-centric (sub)urbanism[2] anyhow.
The mistake the article makes here is a classic one: percentage growth vs. absolute value. Doubling from, say, 500K in a metro area with 7M population is going to be a bit easier than doubling the 14M ridership in a 20M metro.
As for the problems - people on HN of all places should be the ones who understand scale and that some problems simply don't exist when the scale is insignificant.
I want every city to be a public transit success story, but as it currently stands - the rest of the country will be playing catch-up for a long time.
[1]http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/transit-ridership
[2]https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611557/self-dr...
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TL;DR: NYC mass transit carries more people than systems in all other major metros combined[1]. Any comparison - including this article - is silly.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#14The article doesn't really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed). If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college. What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices a…
Of course there will be changes. But the subways and light rails will still be required for a certain level of throughput. The New York City subway, for example, carries 60K people per hour per direction on a pair of tracks, while a car lane carries somewhere in the range of 2K per hour per direction. Self driving cars may improve lane utilization, but not by up to 30x. Shoving people into cattle cars hurtling down a track is just more space-efficient than dedicating an engine and seats for at most four people at a time.
Scooters and bikes have an effective range, particularly in places like LA that can have quite long commute distances.
Motive power source doesn't really change much.
Intra-urban flight would increase required energy for transport a lot and also move the crapshoot that is today's roads and traffic above our heads, ready to hurtle down at us.
Boring tunnels being cheaper has yet to be proven, since the main issues with tunneling are that tunnels have to be tailored to ground conditions.
Shuttles to Mars doesn't change how I get to and from work across town, the same way that airplanes did not.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#15The article doesn't really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed). If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college. What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices a…
> 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed)
For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#16Hahaha. I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on Long Island, spent a summer in Seattle, and I live in San Jose now. One can't speak for the entirety of the either coast, but no city in CA comes close to what NYC offers in terms of public transportation. And what NYC offers is a true car-free lifestyle which carries you to work, leisure, and back home via public transport. E-scooters aren't a reliable way to get anywhere yet,…
Seattle actually has extremely high transit ridership and walk commmute share, which is pretty impressive considering how the transit system is mostly buses right now. And by 2024, major centers in the region will be connected by rail transit that is faster than road travel. Anecdotally, I live pretty well without a car here; I use Uber and Lyft when transit don't work out, and if I want to hike usually one of my friends will have a ride. So it feels just like back home in New York, except the trains and buses have a better chance of showing up on time.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#17The article doesn't really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed). If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college. What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices a…
> 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed) For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.
It was also built when nobody who the government cared about owned land in the West, before pesky environmental regulations, and when 20MPH was an acceptable speed for a train.
Today California High Speed Rail and Texas Central and Florida's Brightline have to deal with angry suburban neighbors, angry farmers, and legal and environmental review processes that are the result of a century and a half's worth of hindsight.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#18The article doesn't really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed). If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college. What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices a…
One of the things I don't really see mentioned about scooters is they're less ideal in cold/wet weather. So I'm not sure if the east coast can really capture the benefits as well as California.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#19Electric scooters aren't public.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#20The article doesn't really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed). If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college. What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices a…
The economies of scale is what will matter: new transportation technologies may appear in a blink, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be mass-affordable.
Personally, I’m fine with any large transit project as long as it goes faster than a car and cheaper as well.