How about beating Europe or Asia?
In another 500 years.
The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
41–50 of 205 posts
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Got to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year. Seems like the issue is lack of security/policing, not the number of passengers. There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent.
CA doesn't do policing. It's all about the feel-good.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#43Kind of funny they don't mention Portland at all. It actually has a well functioning system already built.
Portland's transit system is OK. The MAX works well, but it has been neutered by NIMBYism: the new orange line has only a few stops in Milwaukee and goes no further. (And for that they hired three full time cops when it opened). The green line was supposed to be a loop, but it simply goes out to the Clackamas Town Center (just a few miles south of the border with Portland proper). The yellow line stops short of Vancouver, WA across the river, and we spent $4.5 million on coming up with several failed plans for a new bridge. The new line headed SW has to be voted on by the city of Tigard. It'll go up to the bottom of the OHSU hill, but they chose to simply increase the number of shuttles.
The buses are mostly reliable and can get you downtown. But several areas feel underserved, especially if you live outside Multnomah county.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#44Kind of funny they don't mention Portland at all. It actually has a well functioning system already built.
Portland's transit system is OK. The MAX works well, but it has been neutered by NIMBYism: the new orange line has only a few stops in Milwaukee and goes no further. (And for that they hired three full time cops when it opened). The green line was supposed to be a loop, but it simply goes out to the Clackamas Town Center (just a few miles south of the border with Portland proper). The yellow line stops short of Vanco…
Also the MAX slows to a crawl downtown, where it shares the street with cars and busses and stops every 2-4 blocks.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Shouldn't a bus have similar throughput to a subway though, with no traffic?
No - subway trains can travel 50 mph or more - a bus can’t do that on city centre roads.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shouldn't a bus have similar throughput to a subway though, with no traffic?
No - subway trains can travel 50 mph or more - a bus can’t do that on city centre roads.
In theory, but NYCs rarely go that fast. This is changing though. I saw a news article recently about how they are lifting the speed limits on some sections of track as repaired signals come online.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#47Hahaha. 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,…
I wish I could upvote you more. Sadly, scale is the one thing most of us tend to completely forget when it comes to public transportation. We think of a peice of hardware, wire it up with an app and a saas platform and call it transport. It might be just that - transport, but it's nowhere near public transportation
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#48Hahaha. 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 fri…
Seattle is okay for US standards, but still a disaster and embarrassment compared to other first world cities. And everything that can be done to make biking or walking more awful is being done.
Many cross-walks have a very short walk timer, so even able-bodied people like myself struggle to cross in time. Police don't ticket drivers blocking intersections and crossings [0], so almost every crossing is blocked in the morning and afternoon. Divers regularly run red lights. I'm sure it will take a few people to die first, as right now the police's mandate seems to be to get the rich people in their fancy vehicles home quicker than any kind of safety. Not to mention the construction that means you're going to have to switch street sides a few times during every journey.
Buses are okay for north-south trips, but non-trivial trips can be as slow as walking, because a lot of routes only intersect downtown. The only use for light rail I've found is getting to SeaTac, but even then you need to live on the right side of the city. The streetcar is pathetic, and has never helped me get to work to to a friends house due to the route.
I guess with a programmer's salary, it's okay since just getting an Uber and Lyft is no big deal, but for everybody else, it sucks. And sometimes, I feel like the only reason a token effort is being done about public transport is so people can feel smug and claim Seattle is progressive, left-leaning. Meanwhile, everybody still drives everywhere.
[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/vid...
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#49Hahaha. 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,…
I think the point is that west coast cities are willing to invest in their systems, not just live off of what past generations built. Here in NYC we've been living off the investments of past generations for a long time, not even maintaining it adequately. It's shameful. I don't know what happened to the can-do attitude that New Yorkers were once famous for.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#50I’m surprised by this article. Most people seem to agree that the the metro systems of NYC, Philadelphia, and DC are much better than those of the west coast. LA’s is unusable for most people because there aren’t enough stops. Seattle’s light rail is definitely gaining steam as it adds more stops.
Its also almost uselessly infrequent.
As a poor sod needing to go to the Aussie consulate between Beverly hills and Santa Monica from Irvine, I'm incredibly lucky that the train was 5 mins late, because there wasn't much else to do that day: last train for the morning left 9:02am, next train 4:30pm!
And I thought Perth's public transport was shit in comparison to Singapore/Hong Kong/London/Berlin, boy have I got new found respect for it!