161–170 of 207 posts
[1] https://www.bart.gov/news/fun/speedrun
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o9JGsamQF0
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…
I'm of the opinion that it depends on density. You could build a subway line in some US cities of 1M and nobody would ride it; you could build a subway line in a city of 50k and everyone would ride it. It depends on whether there is density to support walking directly to many things (businesses, residences, and other transit lines) or not.
Doing it after the fact is much, much harder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm of the opinion that it depends on density. You could build a subway line in some US cities of 1M and nobody would ride it; you could build a subway line in a city of 50k and everyone would ride it. It depends on whether there is density to support walking directly to many things (businesses, residences, and other transit lines) or not.
In the ideal scenario you build the subway or other transit when density is low and land is relatively cheap, and THEN you make it high density. Doing it after the fact is much, much harder.
Do we have examples of this working? (Genuine question.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm of the opinion that it depends on density. You could build a subway line in some US cities of 1M and nobody would ride it; you could build a subway line in a city of 50k and everyone would ride it. It depends on whether there is density to support walking directly to many things (businesses, residences, and other transit lines) or not.
In the ideal scenario you build the subway or other transit when density is low and land is relatively cheap, and THEN you make it high density. Doing it after the fact is much, much harder.
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…
Moreover, with self driving electric cars, cities will see many of the benefits at far lower cost.
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.
Something here is not quite right. For example, if you look at the 7th ave line (red line/1,2,3) 18th street and 14th street have similar radii. But anyone knows that 14th street is much more convenient because it's triply serviced by the 1,2,3 with 2,3 being express trains. 18th street is serviced by one train the runs locally. This ignores that you could easily switch to the L, A/C/E, F/M with a short walk. Still,…
I got screwed yesterday waiting 23 minutes for an F when normally I'd 5 mins or less.
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…
With subway lines costing a billion dollars a mile that just makes no sense.
eDIT Looks like you are right for the US. In other countries it's apparently much cheaper.
https://www.hsrail.org/blog/why-transit-projects-cost-more-i...
> For example, the Purple Line in Los Angeles cost $800 million per mile. By international standards, the New York price tag is stratospheric: A project in Madrid cost $320 million per mile, and one in Paris cost just $160 million per mile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
Why can't you have trams travelling at 80km/h? That's around the max speed of some of the trams used in Europe.
There exist implementations of this, but it's essentially a train with extra steps.
An interesting offshoot of this type of question is: how long does it take to hit every stop on a given transit system? BART has quite a few people making attempts; the official BART website even maintains a little article [1]! A couple have made videos of attempts and theory [2, 3], but the king of these things is tomo tawa linja, who I believe is the current record holder at 5:30:26 [4]. [1] https://www.bart.gov/ne…