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The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

pedestrianobservations.com

51–60 of 113 posts

Re: The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

#51
post #20

That's the fate of all large cities: infrastructure gets more and more complicated, and bureaucracy always keeps growing. The way to fix it is to stop building large dense cities. We need tax incentives for companies to create jobs in sparsely-populated regions and for remote jobs. Also probably something like cap-and-trade for dense office space. This way, eventually we won't need Downtowns with super-concentrated o…

Humans have been aggregating into cities for thousands of years because they are more economical than living sparsely.

With sparsely populated areas you also have logistics problems but no economy of scale. Every stand-alone dwelling adds new infrastructure requirements to the road/power/water/fuel system and increases maintenance costs. Cities tend to be net tax payers while suburban and rural areas tend to be net tax beneficiaries, subsidized by the taxes from cities.

Both types of places are important, but rural and suburban are already heavily tax-advantaged.

Re: The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

#52
post #4

I don’t think anyone needs reminding. Anyone who lives in NYC implicitly understands that we’re stuck with approximately the subway system we have now, forever.

Voters don't seem to vote in ways that are consistent with improving subway building functionality.

Which office are you specifically talking about?

Hochul just got a bunch of funding through:

> But the biggest lifeline arrived in April, when Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers agreed to include new and recurring funding for the M.T.A. in the state budget.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/06/nyregion/mta-nyc-subway-s...

And the mayor doesn't really have any power - although I haven't seen anything to suggest that Adams is anti-transit.

Cuomo did fuck up a good thing with Andy Byford. But fuck that guy

Re: The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, it will get far worse. The congestion tolls are both going to send tourists and business fleeing. Manhattan will be a beautiful playground for the people who live there until things start failing.

Tourists don't drive in Manhattan and businesses there don't rely on vehicle traffic. And delivery vehicles are not charged as far as I am aware in the current proposal. The people who will suffer the most are people who drive in for work and suburban families that drive in for weekend day trips. The latter can afford to pay for the privilege. The former tends to be people under-served by transit, which is unfortunat…

Do you think the hybrid office environment might change the equation a bit? The commute or not questions has a spectrum of answers now. If commuting norms drop from three days a week to two days a week, that's half the amount of congestion (from a certain source anyway), but it's also a drop in certain kinds of economic activities.

Re: The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

#54
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an objectively true statement. Suburbs do not pay for their own maintenance and cities have to carry their economic weight: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=zYfcwVLx0DYoexnM

Depends greatly on the suburb, many are subsidized but it’s a long way from all.

I don't think the 1% that pay their share are very relevant. The only example I know of a suburb that pays its fair share is the beach front suburb near Charleston, SC and that's very wealthy area that we couldn't expect to replicate on a widescale.

Re: The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

#55
post #46

> the norms is that not only is design done with consultants, but also the consultants are supervised by another layer of consultants Consultants. Is this the whole problem? My own experience with consultants is that this model rarely works. Consultants are usually not knowledgeable enough about what you are doing to do a good job. They’re also incentivized to drag things out and create dependencies and if this harms…

It's a good question. Consultants fundamentally have different incentives than the organizations that engage them. Look at the "gilded age" of Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan, Vanderbilt... did any of them build their business empires on the advice of consultants?

Re: The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

#56
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, it will get far worse. The congestion tolls are both going to send tourists and business fleeing. Manhattan will be a beautiful playground for the people who live there until things start failing.

>will be a beautiful playground for the people who live there Which is the attitude that a lot of people who live in larger cities have. "I don't want people driving or otherwise coming into my city." But most cities aren't sustainable on that basis.

Nonsense. People don’t want people driving into their cities and making noise/ taking up a bunch of space with their cars. We have zero problems with people taking transit in. Suburban residents want to treat the city as both a low density car friendly space and a place filled with culture/concerts/plays/restaurants, not realizing that the two are opposites.

Re: The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

#57

I don’t think anyone needs reminding. Anyone who lives in NYC implicitly understands that we’re stuck with approximately the subway system we have now, forever.

We just need another Robert Moses /s

We need another Giuliani (90s Giuliani, not what he's become).

Re: The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

#58
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voters don't seem to vote in ways that are consistent with improving subway building functionality.

Which office are you specifically talking about? Hochul just got a bunch of funding through: > But the biggest lifeline arrived in April, when Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers agreed to include new and recurring funding for the M.T.A. in the state budget. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/06/nyregion/mta-nyc-subway-s... And the mayor doesn't really have any power - although I haven't seen anything to suggest that…

When it costs absolute bullocks to actually build/revamp any sort of infrastructure, I’d say it’s kinda hard to level up the quality to other cities’ levels.

Re: The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

#59
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>will be a beautiful playground for the people who live there Which is the attitude that a lot of people who live in larger cities have. "I don't want people driving or otherwise coming into my city." But most cities aren't sustainable on that basis.

Nonsense. People don’t want people driving into their cities and making noise/ taking up a bunch of space with their cars. We have zero problems with people taking transit in. Suburban residents want to treat the city as both a low density car friendly space and a place filled with culture/concerts/plays/restaurants, not realizing that the two are opposites.

Except that taking transit in, especially for an evening event, is often not a reasonable option. I'll happily take commuter rail in if I have to go into our urban office for the day but it's utterly unworkable for an evening event given how few trains there are and how long they take.

And this is a city (Boston/Cambridge) with relatively good transit options. If driving in for the evening became any more difficult than it is today (which is not trivial) I simply wouldn't come in. So your comment boils down to not wanting people to come into the city for a night activity because they don't have a reasonable alternative to driving in most cases.

Re: The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build

#60
High costs is a double whammy for transit systems. High costs mean you need to spend more to build transit. At the same time, it means you can build much less transit. That, in turn, reduces how useful transit is to the public, and ultimately, public support for building transit.
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