The thing that makes mass transit work is walkability. There are 3 million people in NYC who use the subway every day. They can do that because the walkability of the neighborhoods complements the mass transit.
In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation we have to do one or both of those things. Otherwise we can build all we like and no one will ride. Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car and you’re not going to get reasonable walkability until you de-prioritize the car.
>Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car
As I've said said so many times before, every nation gets the government it deserves. Americans don't want bikeable or walkable cities, so we don't have them. Europeans do want them, so they have them.
>In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
Yep, I was in Germany recently, and the large cities I visited all had excellent subway/train systems, as well as bike paths on all the major roads. And unlike bike lanes in US cities, the bike lanes were on the same level as the sidewalk, physically separated from the cars. The cities themselves were far more dense too: not as dense as Manhattan, but still far more dense than your typical American suburban "city", so it was very feasible to get around by bike and subway and also tram (electric streetcar).
We're not going to de-prioritize the car because Americans just can't think that way; they can't stand the thought of having to share space with strangers. So we're going to continue building more roads, and getting worse and worse congestion. It's not ever going to get better, because generally, when you look at the history of human societies, things rarely get fixed before there's a total collapse or disaster of some kind. Humans in groups just aren't smart enough to avoid disasters even when they're plainly obvious.
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 cars.
The East Coast used to be the star of American transportation, not much anymore.
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 and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?
I am not saying the subways shouldn't be built or that planning decades ahead is bad. I love subways. But in the area of transportation we will see huge changes in the coming decades.
Of course there will be changes. But the subways and light rails will still be required for a certain level of throughput. The New York City subway, for example, carries 60K people per hour per direction on a pair of tracks, while a car lane carries somewhere in the range of 2K per hour per direction. Self driving cars may improve lane utilization, but not by up to 30x. Shoving people into cattle cars hurtling down a track is just more space-efficient than dedicating an engine and seats for at most four people at a time.
Scooters and bikes have an effective range, particularly in places like LA that can have quite long commute distances.
Motive power source doesn't really change much.
Intra-urban flight would increase required energy for transport a lot and also move the crapshoot that is today's roads and traffic above our heads, ready to hurtle down at us.
Boring tunnels being cheaper has yet to be proven, since the main issues with tunneling are that tunnels have to be tailored to ground conditions.
Shuttles to Mars doesn't change how I get to and from work across town, the same way that airplanes did not.
that seems to be unreasonably long. In germany, both the city I am studying at and the city I was born are undertaking big changes in their transportation infrastructure, and both don't take that long. In munich, building just started and is expected to last unit 2026 [1]. And we always complain that it's taking too long to plan and build!
40 years seems to be crazy! You would have to start repairing the old stuff when the whole project is finished.
Or are you talking about the whole process, including the financing? Then it's more understandable, many big project here also stall for 20 years until everyone has enough money and the political will to follow through. But I thought the financing is covered due to the sales-tax increase.
While it's easy to complain about projects not moving for 20 years, the sums are often quite enourmus and i am not sure whether inefficiencies are to blame, or whether gathering enough money just takes a long time.
For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.
>Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too.
None of those are mass transit. Personal vehicles are fine and dandy, but they can only move one person at a time and will always, by definition, take up more space and resources per person than a solution that can ferry tens or hundreds of people at a time.
> 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 different in 2059 than it does today.
One of the things I don't really see mentioned about scooters is they're less ideal in cold/wet weather. So I'm not sure if the east coast can really capture the benefits as well as California.
I’m from an LA suburb. I’m able to get to Santa Monica/Culver City, LAX, and J-Town just with light rail and a free transfer depending on where I need to go. In terms of time efficiency, it’s comparable to driving (faster than driving/parking in rush hour but not as fast during off hours).
LA metro is dropping track like crazy and way more usable than it used to be. And it’s cheap. $1.75 each way or monthly pass.
For the West Coast, the simplest solution is electric buses with dedicated lanes. Buses better serve the existing low density sprawl than trains. Lack of infrastructure is not the problem, the roads are already built. The real problem of course is lack of political will. Every road with two lanes gets at least one dedicated bus lane. Single occupant traffic would slow to a crawl making the buses faster. Buses would run on time because they have an empty lane. Additional bus routes would be added everywhere, paid for by significant increases to gas taxes. It would certainly work and be more efficient than our current mess, but of course would never be politically viable.
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.
Ottawa managed this by building a massive BRT system with its own roads and off grade bypasses, as well as dedicated lanes in the downtown area. They're beginning to implement light rail [1], which is fairly simple for them as they can upgrade the existing BRT lines with rail, increasing the capacity and decreasing maintenance costs. As you said, they faced initial political opposition, but I think the political will problem is a one-time cost -- once you have the network in place and the benefits are realized it becomes easy to change or upgrade it.
Both BRT and LRT don't necessarily solve the first- and last-mile problems, though. Many US cities are using park-and-ride stations, but that can just spread traffic out instead of eliminating it. It's important to create networks for short trips to and from transit stations with things like bikes and scooters.
Simplest solution for the transit planner, maybe; but for people who want to get around, who wants to be stuck in a bus? Why should we settle for a crappy, minimally-functional experience? Let's build good transit that people will actually want to use.
Weird that they don't mention New York's awful inefficiency, especially since it was reported by the same paper. NYC tax payers are already spending billions and not getting much to show for it.
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, and who knows if they'll ever be, not to mention that they are not for everyone. My grandmother is not going to ride one -- nor my wife, for that matter, nor should the kids. But the Subway is a common denominator.
This reflects in the daily ridership. MTA carries an order of magnitude more passengers than, say, BART. The same can be said about overall transit ridership[1].
East Coast vs. West Coast is a silly comparison when NYC Metro alone has more ridership than nearly all other major metro areas combined (including both Coasts, the Midwest, and the South).
So it's really NYC vs. Anywhere Else, and Anywhere Else still sucks when it comes to public transport because, in practical terms, most people aren't commuting by public transport in Anywhere Else, but they do in NYC.
You can't slap a Lime scooter on a suburban development and call that "public transport". And a self-driving car is still a car, a glorified jitney cab if and when it arrives. And it's not going to solve the problems of the car-centric (sub)urbanism[2] anyhow.
The mistake the article makes here is a classic one: percentage growth vs. absolute value. Doubling from, say, 500K in a metro area with 7M population is going to be a bit easier than doubling the 14M ridership in a 20M metro.
As for the problems - people on HN of all places should be the ones who understand scale and that some problems simply don't exist when the scale is insignificant.
I want every city to be a public transit success story, but as it currently stands - the rest of the country will be playing catch-up for a long time.
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.
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 found respect for it!
I think LA's is only really usable to get to/from DTLA. The nice part is DTLA is becoming more eventful, so you actually want to go there sometimes for non-work reasons.
Getting anywhere else is a bit of a crapshoot for the last-mile. I don't think LA's train system is ready for primetime until it can reasonably get into LAX; preferably with a more direct route from the westside that doesn't detour through DTLA.
It's worth noting that Boston has been investing quite a bit in improving the T.
New rail cars are being added to all lines over the next 4 years. As another poster mentioned, a new North/South link project is likely to start soon. The Green Line is being extended into neighboring Somerville. The article seemed to focus solely on NYC.
For years and years Seattle and LA doubled down on a automobile oriented infrastructure system that clearly wasn't working, but voters finally gave up and got tired of it. Given that referendums are so difficult to win, especially ones that impose higher taxes, this is a commendable achievement.
Not mentioned is the other west coast success story, Vancouver, which has lead North America transit growth, with ridership up 5.7% in 2017. This has been driven by major government investments to drive expansion and improve services across the board. Additionally the system has not been hindered by ride share competition.
NYC's subway's are at a halt unfortunately. The MTA unions have paralyzed innovation and development.
The West coast has an opportunity to one up them, but a lot of money gets appropriated and given to contractors without a lot of actual results a lot of the time.
The west coast epitomizes postwar American culture - car infatuation, suburban sprawl, and so on. Transit is growing in the west coast, sure, but transit needs a critical mass of convenience for people to actually live without depending on their car (or choosing to own one at all)
We're not going to see cities go all-in on transit while self driving cars are on the horizon.
Maybe after cars drive themselves, when people learn traffic is still not getting better, more cities will get serious about transit infrastructure.
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.
Of course it is easier to build out new infrastucture to exacting specifications than it is to update 100+ year old infrastructure to meet modern demands.
The post's title different from the article's title : "Why the West Coast Is Suddenly Beating the East Coast on Transportation". Anyone else seeing different titles?
Also, the article is nothing but PR for the NYC transportation commissioner. Of course the NYC commissioner is going to say X is beating NYC because she wants more funding. She could have gone to Boise, Idaho and came back with similar story.
Electric scooters and a couple of test rides in self driving cars means the west coast is beating the east coast on transportation. Really? NYC metro area by itself outshines the entire west coast when it comes to public transportation. I couldn't take this article seriously. There is certainly room for improvement and investment in the NYC metro area, but what's the point of "east coast vs west coast" comparison that is simply not true.
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 Vancouver, WA across the river, and we spent $4.5 million on coming up with several failed plans for a new bridge. The new line headed SW has to be voted on by the city of Tigard. It'll go up to the bottom of the OHSU hill, but they chose to simply increase the number of shuttles.
The buses are mostly reliable and can get you downtown. But several areas feel underserved, especially if you live outside Multnomah county.
> There is at least one bright spot: Citi Bike has become an essential part of the city’s fabric. The bike-share system has 12,000 bikes across Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens and recently announced plans to expand under new ownership by the ride-hail company Lyft, which will triple the number of bikes.
Almost a non-sequitur to mention Citi Bikes in particular when there are far more notable examples like Lime. This must be a paid advertisement.
Ugh classic hype machine bullshit confusing the derivative with the function itself.
West coast is still total shit in land use, other than parkland allocation sometimes, and until they make the hard choices to undo a century of mistakes, can they catch up with the east coast's century of stagnation.
Well the West Coast may be beating on getting voters to agree to dump money into long term transit projects. Actually getting them built in our lifetimes and then getting people to use them is a very different problem.
[+] [-] lambdasquirrel|7 years ago|reply
In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation we have to do one or both of those things. Otherwise we can build all we like and no one will ride. Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car and you’re not going to get reasonable walkability until you de-prioritize the car.
[+] [-] magduf|7 years ago|reply
As I've said said so many times before, every nation gets the government it deserves. Americans don't want bikeable or walkable cities, so we don't have them. Europeans do want them, so they have them.
>In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
Yep, I was in Germany recently, and the large cities I visited all had excellent subway/train systems, as well as bike paths on all the major roads. And unlike bike lanes in US cities, the bike lanes were on the same level as the sidewalk, physically separated from the cars. The cities themselves were far more dense too: not as dense as Manhattan, but still far more dense than your typical American suburban "city", so it was very feasible to get around by bike and subway and also tram (electric streetcar).
We're not going to de-prioritize the car because Americans just can't think that way; they can't stand the thought of having to share space with strangers. So we're going to continue building more roads, and getting worse and worse congestion. It's not ever going to get better, because generally, when you look at the history of human societies, things rarely get fixed before there's a total collapse or disaster of some kind. Humans in groups just aren't smart enough to avoid disasters even when they're plainly obvious.
[+] [-] cmiller1|7 years ago|reply
Why does it have to be a competition? I'd like to see both coasts have great systems for transportation!
[+] [-] hannasanarion|7 years ago|reply
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 cars.
The East Coast used to be the star of American transportation, not much anymore.
[+] [-] flexie|7 years ago|reply
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 and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?
I am not saying the subways shouldn't be built or that planning decades ahead is bad. I love subways. But in the area of transportation we will see huge changes in the coming decades.
[+] [-] bobthepanda|7 years ago|reply
Scooters and bikes have an effective range, particularly in places like LA that can have quite long commute distances.
Motive power source doesn't really change much.
Intra-urban flight would increase required energy for transport a lot and also move the crapshoot that is today's roads and traffic above our heads, ready to hurtle down at us.
Boring tunnels being cheaper has yet to be proven, since the main issues with tunneling are that tunnels have to be tailored to ground conditions.
Shuttles to Mars doesn't change how I get to and from work across town, the same way that airplanes did not.
[+] [-] LeanderK|7 years ago|reply
that seems to be unreasonably long. In germany, both the city I am studying at and the city I was born are undertaking big changes in their transportation infrastructure, and both don't take that long. In munich, building just started and is expected to last unit 2026 [1]. And we always complain that it's taking too long to plan and build!
40 years seems to be crazy! You would have to start repairing the old stuff when the whole project is finished.
Or are you talking about the whole process, including the financing? Then it's more understandable, many big project here also stall for 20 years until everyone has enough money and the political will to follow through. But I thought the financing is covered due to the sales-tax increase.
While it's easy to complain about projects not moving for 20 years, the sums are often quite enourmus and i am not sure whether inefficiencies are to blame, or whether gathering enough money just takes a long time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_line_2_(Munich_S-Bahn)
[+] [-] skookumchuck|7 years ago|reply
For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.
[+] [-] naravara|7 years ago|reply
None of those are mass transit. Personal vehicles are fine and dandy, but they can only move one person at a time and will always, by definition, take up more space and resources per person than a solution that can ferry tens or hundreds of people at a time.
[+] [-] pc86|7 years ago|reply
> 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 different in 2059 than it does today.
We'll probably still be using JavaScript, too. :/
[+] [-] Eridrus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masayune|7 years ago|reply
LA metro is dropping track like crazy and way more usable than it used to be. And it’s cheap. $1.75 each way or monthly pass.
Tl;dr it’s awesome now and getting better!
[+] [-] QML|7 years ago|reply
Personally, I’m fine with any large transit project as long as it goes faster than a car and cheaper as well.
[+] [-] francisofascii|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|7 years ago|reply
Give buses priority at intersections, or even better build them dedicated overpasses if you want to see buses really move.
[+] [-] edaemon|7 years ago|reply
Both BRT and LRT don't necessarily solve the first- and last-mile problems, though. Many US cities are using park-and-ride stations, but that can just spread traffic out instead of eliminating it. It's important to create networks for short trips to and from transit stations with things like bikes and scooters.
[1] https://www.stage2lrt.ca/
[+] [-] marssaxman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balthasar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swebs|7 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[+] [-] jdhn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romwell|7 years ago|reply
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, and who knows if they'll ever be, not to mention that they are not for everyone. My grandmother is not going to ride one -- nor my wife, for that matter, nor should the kids. But the Subway is a common denominator.
This reflects in the daily ridership. MTA carries an order of magnitude more passengers than, say, BART. The same can be said about overall transit ridership[1].
East Coast vs. West Coast is a silly comparison when NYC Metro alone has more ridership than nearly all other major metro areas combined (including both Coasts, the Midwest, and the South).
So it's really NYC vs. Anywhere Else, and Anywhere Else still sucks when it comes to public transport because, in practical terms, most people aren't commuting by public transport in Anywhere Else, but they do in NYC.
You can't slap a Lime scooter on a suburban development and call that "public transport". And a self-driving car is still a car, a glorified jitney cab if and when it arrives. And it's not going to solve the problems of the car-centric (sub)urbanism[2] anyhow.
The mistake the article makes here is a classic one: percentage growth vs. absolute value. Doubling from, say, 500K in a metro area with 7M population is going to be a bit easier than doubling the 14M ridership in a 20M metro.
As for the problems - people on HN of all places should be the ones who understand scale and that some problems simply don't exist when the scale is insignificant.
I want every city to be a public transit success story, but as it currently stands - the rest of the country will be playing catch-up for a long time.
[1]http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/transit-ridership
[2]https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611557/self-dr...
--------
TL;DR: NYC mass transit carries more people than systems in all other major metros combined[1]. Any comparison - including this article - is silly.
[+] [-] dangwu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicwilson|7 years ago|reply
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 found respect for it!
[+] [-] kenhwang|7 years ago|reply
Getting anywhere else is a bit of a crapshoot for the last-mile. I don't think LA's train system is ready for primetime until it can reasonably get into LAX; preferably with a more direct route from the westside that doesn't detour through DTLA.
[+] [-] gamehendge|7 years ago|reply
New rail cars are being added to all lines over the next 4 years. As another poster mentioned, a new North/South link project is likely to start soon. The Green Line is being extended into neighboring Somerville. The article seemed to focus solely on NYC.
[+] [-] StreamBright|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dirlewanger|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chimeracoder|7 years ago|reply
London is the only city in Europe that even comes close to offering what NYC alone does in terms of public transit.
Even Berlin, the second largest city in the EU, has pitiful public transit in comparison.
[+] [-] pishpash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|7 years ago|reply
Not mentioned is the other west coast success story, Vancouver, which has lead North America transit growth, with ridership up 5.7% in 2017. This has been driven by major government investments to drive expansion and improve services across the board. Additionally the system has not been hindered by ride share competition.
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/translink-ridership...
[+] [-] exabrial|7 years ago|reply
The West coast has an opportunity to one up them, but a lot of money gets appropriated and given to contractors without a lot of actual results a lot of the time.
[+] [-] helen___keller|7 years ago|reply
We're not going to see cities go all-in on transit while self driving cars are on the horizon.
Maybe after cars drive themselves, when people learn traffic is still not getting better, more cities will get serious about transit infrastructure.
[+] [-] crimsonalucard|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] huffmsa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samfisher83|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] porpoisely|7 years ago|reply
Also, the article is nothing but PR for the NYC transportation commissioner. Of course the NYC commissioner is going to say X is beating NYC because she wants more funding. She could have gone to Boise, Idaho and came back with similar story.
Electric scooters and a couple of test rides in self driving cars means the west coast is beating the east coast on transportation. Really? NYC metro area by itself outshines the entire west coast when it comes to public transportation. I couldn't take this article seriously. There is certainly room for improvement and investment in the NYC metro area, but what's the point of "east coast vs west coast" comparison that is simply not true.
[+] [-] DubiousPusher|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ppseafield|7 years ago|reply
The buses are mostly reliable and can get you downtown. But several areas feel underserved, especially if you live outside Multnomah county.
[+] [-] jeromebaek|7 years ago|reply
Almost a non-sequitur to mention Citi Bikes in particular when there are far more notable examples like Lime. This must be a paid advertisement.
[+] [-] inamberclad|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ericson2314|7 years ago|reply
West coast is still total shit in land use, other than parkland allocation sometimes, and until they make the hard choices to undo a century of mistakes, can they catch up with the east coast's century of stagnation.
[+] [-] gok|7 years ago|reply