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How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

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Re: How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

#121

Post by ghaff »

balderdash wrote: post #70
acjohnson55 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make much more sense for it to be unified with the MTA subway, with more connectivity. My dream would be a single seat ride from Newark Airport to Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, via Newark Penn Station and World Trade Center. There was also once a proposal to have the 7 train go out to Seacaucus Junction, which would be huge for accessing the East Side for NJers.

It blows my mind there isn’t the equivalent of the Heathrow express in nyc (even if it was just a regular express train subway)

In London, you also have the Piccadilly line depending upon where you're going and how much luggage you have (many of the London tube stations are pretty awful in terms of accessibility as I discovered on a trip where I had heavier luggage than normal last year).

Re: How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

#122

Post by Tade0 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #104
Tade0 wrote: post #11

I'm of the opinion that every 500k+ city should have a subway line. I grew up in a city with one (just one for the majority of my 20 years there) and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating, especially at 2am on a Friday night after a couple of beers with the guys. The other thing I noticed when I was visiting my family t…

Where would you put the subway line in Tucson, AZ?

I'm no city planner, but I would definitely connect the Amrtak station with the University of Arizona and on the other end make it reach the edge of downtown.

The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas but then again my city put a subway station in such a location and it serves a whopping fifteen hundred people daily - that's one subway car, but at the same time appropriately a thousand fewer cars on the road. Still worth it in my book.

Re: How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

#123

Post by macNchz »

ghaff wrote: post #22
HPsquared wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subway is the big expensive investment. In theory, businesses and housing etc would develop around the stations. Like how suburbs develop around train stations.

In theory. The commuter rail I sometimes take follows an old rail right of way. Some of the stations are in fairly developed areas. But some of those, like Concord, presumably predate even the original rail. And a lot of the towns are pretty spread out. You can't walk to much until you get to the last two stops in the city proper.

I imagine that at least one factor there is that building up is prohibited by zoning—a super brief glance at Concord's zoning map & code it looks like the only kind of residential buildings you can build anywhere without special permission are single-family.

Now there are surely people living there who would argue that this zoning has protected the shape and nature of the town they that they prefer, but the flip side of that coin is that, at $1.4m, a median home in Concord costs more than 3x that of the country overall.

Re: How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

#125

Post by School-Cotton »

Tade0 wrote: post #122
School-Cotton wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would you put the subway line in Tucson, AZ?

I'm no city planner, but I would definitely connect the Amrtak station with the University of Arizona and on the other end make it reach the edge of downtown. The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas but then again my city put a subway station in such a location and it serves a whopping fifteen hundred people daily - that's one subway car, but at the same time appr…

> I'm no city planner, but I would definitely connect the Amrtak station with the University of Arizona and on the other end make it reach the edge of downtown.

I went to U. of A. and have absolutely never even heard of any student ever needing to go to the Amtrak station, for any reason. Not trying to be rude, but that smells like unthinkingly-applied urbanist ideology — thinking “trains are cool” and working backwards from there.

But sure, people do go to that area for nightlife, so let’s assume you said something like “Hotel Congress” instead of “the Amtrak station”. Still, that’s less than 3km from campus — even if there were no transit options, you could bike, walk, take a rental scooter or an uber.

But if none of those options work, fear not, there is already a streetcar that basically covers exactly your proposed route: https://www.suntran.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Sun-Link-... . So why would it make sense to spend a giant sum on a subway to replicate the streetcar over this tiny area?

> The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas

That’s my point. Your claim that any 500k city could benefit from a subway is wildly over-general. It entirely depends on the type of city.

Re: How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

#126

Post by Symbiote »

ghaff wrote: post #121
balderdash wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blows my mind there isn’t the equivalent of the Heathrow express in nyc (even if it was just a regular express train subway)

In London, you also have the Piccadilly line depending upon where you're going and how much luggage you have (many of the London tube stations are pretty awful in terms of accessibility as I discovered on a trip where I had heavier luggage than normal last year).

Since 2022 there's also the Elizabeth Line, which uses the same tracks as the Heathrow Express, but then continues under Central London and far to the east.

It takes 27 rather than 15 minutes to Paddington, but it's also half the price of the Heathrow Express.

It's the purple edged line: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-rail-and-tube-services-map...

Re: How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

#127

Post by bob_theslob646 »

marcinzm wrote: post #48
londons_explore wrote: post #24

Travel times would be much improved by a high speed line. Ie. a route with 4 stops and a travel speed of 100 mph. The finances of railways actually get better with faster trains - because the sooner you can get the person to their destination, the quicker you can get that train serving another passenger.

You do realize that Manhattan is only 14 miles long? With a stop every 3 miles even a Shinkansen wouldn't reach 100mph before it had to start slowing down again.

According to chatgpt, the max speed is higher than what you stated and is 155mph before needing to slow down.

Re: How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

#128

Post by bob_theslob646 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #86
ahstilde wrote: post #82

This is great. It doesn't paint a full picture, however. It's certainly possible to go farther leveraging the other rail lines in the area: PATH, LIRR, Metro North, NJ Transit Light Rail

Depends what your transfer process looks like. Some of those trains are not very frequent at all outside the 9-5 commute pattern.

Well it depends because they added the Grand Central line so that you can get from the middle of Manhattan to Queens fairly quickly as Grand Central stop at Jamaica station on the Long Island railroad which is a hack to getting to JFK without having to use the Subway.

Re: How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

#129

Post by Tade0 »

keiferski wrote: post #88
Tade0 wrote: post #11

I'm of the opinion that every 500k+ city should have a subway line. I grew up in a city with one (just one for the majority of my 20 years there) and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating, especially at 2am on a Friday night after a couple of beers with the guys. The other thing I noticed when I was visiting my family t…

Having lived in / visited a few dozen cities in Europe, I actually think trams are generally preferable to subways. In places with both, I tend to use the trams almost exclusively. A hop on, hop off tram system is much quicker and efficient than going into a subway station, then back up, etc. At least if you aren’t going entirely across town.

What makes for a more pleasant experience is not necessarily the optimal choice for commuters as subway wins over trams by close to an order of magnitude in terms of throughput.

In the city I grew up in during rush hour subway trains leave less than every two and a half minutes and pack well over a thousand commuters each. That is an impossible feat for even the best tram system, as they're limited both in vehicle and station length, not to mention speed, as you can't have 40 tonnes of metal hurtling at 80km/h through intersections.

Re: How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

#130

Post by bob_theslob646 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #50
marcinzm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced it'd pay for itself since maintenance still needs to be done so it's not really 6 minutes 24/7. The 7 train in theory runs on weekends and in theory runs fairly often. In practice it's down every other weekend for I think 5+ years now. The MTA does not have a good track record of timely maintenance and also seems to not care much about long term downtime (ie: like their original proposal for a 15 mo…

> The MTA does not have a good track record of timely maintenance A big part of that is because the MTA has been starved of funding for fifteen years now, to the point where they've had to substitute capital funds for operating funds in an effort to keep the lights on. Maintenance becomes more expensive when it's perpetually deferred - and it just became even more expensive because Hochul's inexplicable last-minute f…

You're conveniently forgetting out the nuance of the MTA. You do recall that the top person in the world for Transit quit because of the bureaucracy there, right?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43561378

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