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The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

nytimes.com

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Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#91

Post by jandrewrogers »

romwell wrote: post #13

Hahaha. 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,…

West coast cities have one key advantage that reduces their requirements for public transportation given appropriate city planning: 12 months of weather suitable for biking/walking/etc. That 3% of Seattle routinely commutes from the suburbs on a bicycle is impressive but only practical because the weather supports it.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#92

Post by influx »

guitarbill wrote: post #48
bobthepanda wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One simple fix Seattle could do downtown would be to make all the crosswalks all way, and increase the walk times. At the same time, make it illegal for cars to turn right on red and you’d dramatically increase pedestrian safety and increase car throughput.

However it won’t happen with our current city council.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#93

Post by raiflip »

chimeracoder wrote: post #53
jacobmoe wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Here in NYC we've been living off the investments of past generations for a long time, not even maintaining it adequately. That's a recent development. The MTA hit its peak of reliability and performance about a decade ago. Since 2010, which coincidentally is the exact time that Cuomo took office, things have plummeted.

eh it's flashier and more fun to build something new than maintain something old. Not to mention people forget that building new stuff means needing to allocate budget to maintain it...

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#94

Post by chimeracoder »

raiflip wrote: post #93
chimeracoder wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in NYC we've been living off the investments of past generations for a long time, not even maintaining it adequately. That's a recent development. The MTA hit its peak of reliability and performance about a decade ago. Since 2010, which coincidentally is the exact time that Cuomo took office, things have plummeted.

eh it's flashier and more fun to build something new than maintain something old. Not to mention people forget that building new stuff means needing to allocate budget to maintain it...

> eh it's flashier and more fun to build something new than maintain something old. Not to mention people forget that building new stuff means needing to allocate budget to maintain it...

This statement may be true, but it's completely irrelevant to the specific problems facing the NYC transit system at the moment.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#95

Post by paulcole »

romwell wrote: post #13

Hahaha. 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,…

Yes, obviously NYC has the best transportation in the US. But the point of the article isn’t to compare NYC vs. everywhere.

But ignore NYC for a second (I acknowledge that many people who have lived there find this impossible) and look at the rest of the East Coast. Only the DMV area and Boston have any sort of large-scale public transit.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#96

Post by Symbiote »

nicoburns wrote: post #24
Gibbon1 wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

> There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent.

I think you can go a lot further: almost all public transport networks, regardless of type or usage, don't have this problem to any extent.

Some people in large European or Asian cities don't like using public transport because of overcrowding, slow journey times, cost, inflexibility, infrequency, strikes, "terrorism" or whatever. I know people who would cite each of these reasons.

I don't know anyone who would say there is excrement or urine in the vehicles or stations, or even unwashed people. It's that rare.

Bay area residents needs to pressure their politicians into fixing the problem. That means some combination of

- extra policing

- extra cleaning

- extra public toilets

and maybe working out some long-term solution to the mentally ill homeless people.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#97

Post by chimeracoder »

stochastic_monk wrote: post #80
chimeracoder wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It actually was a coincidence, as the practices leading inevitably to the current situation have been going on for decades. It's true that the corruption within the MTA and TWU have been around for decades, but it's not true at all that it's a coincidence that everything started to go downhill as soon as Cuomo took office. Cuomo literally does not believe that it is his job to oversee a statewide agency, despite th…

There’s a reason Cynthia Nixon’s campaign emphasized the subway: Cuomo was uninterested in maintaining it, aside from scant, hollow PR moments.

> Cuomo was uninterested in maintaining it, aside from scant, hollow PR moments.

Cuomo even deigned to make hollow PR statements about the subway to the press? I must have missed those.

I'm being flippant, but not without reason: Cuomo has taken the subway exactly twice in the last decade, went out of his way not to take public transit when running for re-election (lest it be interpreted as him admitting responsibility for the system), and undermined Andy Byford at the one job he ostensibly hired him to do in the first place.

It's not that Cuomo is all talk and no action. When it comes to public transit, he isn't even "talk". He's just completely absentee, and downright proud of it.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#98

Post by bryanlarsen »

BeeOnRope wrote: post #85
bryanlarsen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dedicated lanes don't do much to help; the capacity of virtually all city streets is limited by the capacity of the intersections, not the streets themselves. Give buses priority at intersections, or even better build them dedicated overpasses if you want to see buses really move.

Of course it would help, since an overloaded intersection causes a large backlog and waiting in line (for multiple light changes) is how each vehicle pays the cost of the backlog. With dedicated bus lanes, you skip the backlog and cross on the next light, so intersections do not undo the advantage of dedicated lanes. You don't have to take my word for it - just ride any good dedicated lane system at a high traffic ti…

I ride a dedicated BRT lane system every day. Part of the way they have overpasses and it's super fast. Then they hit downtown and have dedicated lanes but have to deal with normal intersections. It's dog slow.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#99

Post by bryanlarsen »

callmeal wrote: post #84
bryanlarsen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dedicated lanes don't do much to help; the capacity of virtually all city streets is limited by the capacity of the intersections, not the streets themselves. Give buses priority at intersections, or even better build them dedicated overpasses if you want to see buses really move.

>Dedicated lanes don't do much to help; Actually, they do. Take a look at the MetroBus infrastructure in Mexico City[0] for example. Buses run on time, on an extensive, dedicated lane network. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs

Good example, they have dedicated and priority intersections.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#100

Post by jacobmoe »

raiflip wrote: post #93
chimeracoder wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in NYC we've been living off the investments of past generations for a long time, not even maintaining it adequately. That's a recent development. The MTA hit its peak of reliability and performance about a decade ago. Since 2010, which coincidentally is the exact time that Cuomo took office, things have plummeted.

eh it's flashier and more fun to build something new than maintain something old. Not to mention people forget that building new stuff means needing to allocate budget to maintain it...

True, but people also forget that new infrastructure, when well timed, can accelerate growth and expand the base. New York should know that more than any place. How do we know when to invest in infrastructure? I'd say that the affordable housing and transportation crises we're facing in US cities is the economy screaming at us to build.
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