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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?

#151

Post by raiflip »

chimeracoder wrote: post #94
raiflip wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least from what I've read, the primary problem have been a lack of financing for maintaining the current system. The subway does need to move to a more advanced signaling system, but there's no reason why the old-fashioned signaling system has to be falling apart.

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

#152

Post by raiflip »

jacobmoe wrote: post #100
raiflip wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely, agree 100%. A major problem is that economic growth has been spent on, say, propping up ski resorts in upstate new york, instead of reinvested in the subway. It's really an absolute travesty the way the system has been managed.

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

#153

Post by gamblor956 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #128
hannasanarion wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just the thing though: Western cities are increasingly de-prioritizing cars, and Eastern cities are falling behind. There are parts of Phoenix that are more bikable than much of New York. LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle have started pouring money into their new transit systems, while MTA and NJ Transit and Port Authority keep having their budgets cut, leading to reliability so low that it's driving people into c…

"LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle have started pouring money into their new transit systems, " As far as LA goes the results are not exactly convincing. I wonder if 't seven possible to have decent public transportation in an area that's as spread out.

LA's rail system connects Downtown, Pasadena, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, and Long Beach. The rail systems under development will add in the airport, the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys, and South LA.

LA's bus system is the largest in the world on the basis of coverage, and is the most-heavily used bus network in the Western world.

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

#154

Post by naravara »

pc86 wrote: post #73
flexie wrote: post #10

The 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…

> What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? > Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. > Few, if any, combustion engine cars > Truly self driving cars If history has taught us anything, it's that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. The infrastructure of NYC, LA, Seattle, San Francisco, etc will not look much diffe…

>If history has taught us anything, it's that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. The infrastructure of NYC, LA, Seattle, San Francisco, etc will not look much different in 2059 than it does today.

I think there is a Bill Gates quote about how most people overestimate how much things will change in one year and underestimate how much they will change in ten.

Of course, when you find yourself 10 years in the future you'll probably just forget how different your city used to be because the changes unfolded too slowly for you to notice they were changing. In most of these cities, for example, the infrastructure might look the same but the way people are using it is very very different.

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

#155

Post by edaemon »

ppseafield wrote: post #44
ppseafield wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're closing a few downtown stops that saw low usage to speed things up, but it will still be sluggish. I think the only real solution would be to move the Red/Blue lines to the transit mall and put all the downtown track underground with a cut-and-cover tunnel.

Also, the attempts to get the Yellow line into Vancouver fell through because the Washington legislature voted against it. There are renewed efforts to build it, though.

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

#156

Post by gamblor956 »

nicwilson wrote: post #50
dangwu wrote: post #4

I’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…

Irvine is not part of LA's public transportation system...

And in the case of London and Berlin, you're comparing national rail systems to that of a single city that could easily fit the 4 cities you mentioned within its borders and still have room for Paris and Tokyo. And let's not even get started on the LA metropolitan area, which is geographically the largest in the Western world.

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

#157

Post by crimsonalucard »

West coast public transportation will absolutely never beat East Coast transportation and I say this as a person who has lived on the West coast my entire life. In fact West coast public transportation will always be significantly worse than the east coast.

It doesn't matter what initiatives or policies are being implemented on the West coast. It is literally financially and physically unrealistic to have any transportation system even remotely close to what they have in NYC on the West Coast.

The reason is the layout of cities. West Coast cities are mostly suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl does not lend well to public transportation. For public transportation to work, you need a high density city. Los Angeles will never be walkable and will never have a subway system that all people use regularly simply because the city is too spread out.

Lets put it to numbers:

L.A. County has 4,084 square miles. New York City has 304.8 square miles.

For LA county to build a network of rails with the same effectiveness of NYC, the size of the NYC subway needs to be replicated approximately 13.4 times.

The NYC subway system has about 236.2 mi of rail. AN equivalent system for the same coverage in LA will be 3165 mi. The current longest subway system in the world is the Shanghai Metro at 420 mi.

Effective Public transportation will not work on the west coast due to physical limits and impossibilities. If you want to live in a city with great public transportation you need to live in a city of apartments. Any city where you can have your own backyard is a city that is not dense enough.

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

#158

Post by maxxxxx »

gamblor956 wrote: post #153
maxxxxx wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle have started pouring money into their new transit systems, " As far as LA goes the results are not exactly convincing. I wonder if 't seven possible to have decent public transportation in an area that's as spread out.

LA's rail system connects Downtown, Pasadena, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, and Long Beach. The rail systems under development will add in the airport, the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys, and South LA. LA's bus system is the largest in the world on the basis of coverage, and is the most-heavily used bus network in the Western world.

Maybe it works if you live one of the centres but I have tried several times to use it and each time a 45 minute drive would have been replaced with a 3 hour trip.

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

#159

Post by crimsonalucard »

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.

It's not security or policing. It's the attitude of people and homeless people in the city.

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

#160

Post by crimsonalucard »

tokyodude wrote: post #40
pcr0 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beijing's subway carries over 10m passengers a day and definitely has less harassment and human excrement.

Tokyo's rail transit is at 40m passengers a day. We don't have the poo. We do have occasional vomit from drunk salary men. Fortunately it gets cleaned up relatively quickly. The cars are clean unlike SF.

This has everything to do with the attitude of people who ride the transit. You don't have poo because nobody does that in tokyo.
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