I was incredibly lucky the smallish town (40k pop) I went to college in had some remarkably good transportation I had never seen before. There was a bus that cost $.50 per ride circa 2010 and went to about a dozen locations within 20 miles, two different shopping centers (their main attractions being Walmarts but still), the university, the community college, several neighborhoods, and downtown locations, among a few others. Second there was a rental car option through the university where anyone with a drivers license and and a debit or credit card could use it (eg you didn’t have to be 25 or have a credit card). You could reserve time slots in advance online, and it was only $5 and hour or so. There were multiple cars.
The bus eventually went up to $1 per ride but I still think about these two options and wish my town had something like it. With a few small improvements I don’t see why we can’t reasonably subsidize these relatively cheap options in most towns/small cities. The rental car one would be harder, but even the bus would suffice. It notably didn’t stop at any grocery stores, only Walmarts so that’s another thing to improve. But I’d give up my car in a second for that bus back home.
I’m not even sure if this is still their active website http://0060325.netsolhost.com/about.htm but it gives you a picture of what I’m talking about. There’s either another service or a replacement that is $2.00 instead of $1.00 that goes by DCT from what I can tell. I don’t live there anymore so hard to know the current setup. I’m really underselling how good that bus was/is.
I think the biggest problem is attitude; in the US, transit is largely viewed as a welfare program for poor people who are not (yet) able to afford cars. To put it in HN terms, Americans see it like a deprecated API; something you're obligated to support somewhat, but only until your users migrate off of it.
If you look at the Honolulu transit project (Formerly HART, now called Skyline), I think it shows everything wrong with US transit projects:
1. It goes nowhere useful, only going to a bunch of random places on the west side of Oahu where no one really goes.
2. It was pitched as an economic uplift project, not a transit project. "If we build a train in these largely-ignored areas, it will help the people there!"
3. It took years and years to build, full of cost overruns, because it was also pitched mainly as a job creation project. You can't sell a transit project based on that alone, so instead they're pitched as welfare or job-creation programs, which creates the wrong set of incentives. After all, if the project takes longer, that's more jobs!
Seattle-area commuter here. I have to agree, transit seems mostly designed for people who don't value their time. Which don't tend to be the highly paid tech workers with families. I tried so many times to give transit "one more try". The straw that broke my back was when they silently canceled 2 buses in a row for my route, on the coldest day of the year, for a route that has 20 minutes between buses. And my suburb commuter route doesn't even have the big city problems that plague the Seattle buses.
Now I drive my single occupant 6603 lb truck to work once or twice a week, and WFH the rest of the time.
While attitude plays a part I can’t help but feel like ineptitude and broad corruption play a huge role as well.
In NYC transit isn’t viewed the way you’re describing it, pretty much everyone takes it. And yet NYC’s system expands at a glacial pace. A good part of the reason is because everything costs so damn much. Part of that is everyone wanting a piece of the pie so the simplest, cheapest option is very rarely the one chosen.
Repeating myself, I believe that many countries find a good way to make train stations destinations in and of themsevles
Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop.
That's clearly not the only way to do it but it might be a way in the USA? because treating it as a public service just makes it a political tax burden. Something to be cut, under funded, etc....
Los Angeles used to have one of the largest public transit systems. Over 1000 miles of track (compare to NYC 650 miles?) and tons of stations. Most of it was built commercially to sell housing. According to this documentary it worked, until the deals they'd made with the cities to maintain the roads the trains went down ended up costing too much money.
It feels like in Japan, they kind of solved that issue by letting the train companies run their stations as retail/office spaces and all the other stuff mentioned above.
I think Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong probably have government based public transportation but it feels like they've managed to turned many stations into commerce hubs at least.
It's kind of a reinforcing cycle. Since public transit is terrible, everyone wants cars. Since everyone wants cars, there isn't a lot of interest in public transit.
For Skyline, I don’t think you can discount all of the years of political effort to try to cancel it. All that work did was just to slow it down and make it more expensive and risky for the companies involved.
In theory, starting in West Oahu made sense because it’s cheaper to build out there, and TOD will grow the tax base to support the urban stations, but you have to actually build something for that to work.
When I was out there The Bus was great. By far one of the best public transit I've seen in the US (clean, mostly on time, seemed pretty safe, fairly priced). I believe I took some sort of light rail for a few trips as well. I suspect a lot of the tourist money helps.
There’s an argument in Atlanta that mass transit hasn’t expanded more outwards because it tends to bring in more problems in terms of people. I think people are starting to change on this, but the cost would now be massive,
> transit is largely viewed as a welfare program for poor people who are not (yet) able to afford cars.
In most of the US, transit riders can’t wait to be able to afford a car and get out of transit. For good reason: the transit experience for them is terrible
The article mentions how global cities outside the US are building out urban rail systems.
Here's some more detail about China, which has the two largest transit systems in the world: Shanghai and Beijing.
In 1993, Shanghai had one line running 2.7 miles with 4 stations. Less than 30 years later, the system had 15 lines, 500 miles of track, and 500 stations. [1]
And in that same time frame, the Beijing subway system was expanded, from 2 lines in 2002 to 27 lines and 500 miles of track, with 13 million riders per day in 2022. [2]
Also in that time, 30 other cities in China got subway systems as well.[3]
In 1993, China's per-capita GDP was $537. By comparison, per-capita GDP in the US was 50 times larger (about $23k). Since then, the gap has narrowed. US per-capita GDP is now 5x of China (66k vs 12k).
China demonstrates that, even with small GDP, if you prioritize the needs of the people over entrenched commercial interests, it can be done.
In the US, if you prioritize the wants of the people, you'll just get wider roads. The people there don't want better public transit; you can see this every time these discussions come up on HN and Americans here respond about how much they hate riding on public transit or walking anywhere. And their all-suburban cities aren't dense enough to make it work economically or practically anyway: everything is just too far apart.
Finally, the largest transit system in the world isn't in China, it's in Tokyo, Japan (though to be fair, it isn't really a single system since it's run by many different companies).
China's public transit success was because of their small gdp per capita, not in spite of it. Their developing economy gave them labor at slave wages and allowed the government to just bulldoze peoples houses without much backlash. Not having those things are the biggest problems the US faces when it comes to building infrastructure.
The heart of the problem is that cars became popular for the majority of the people due to freedom and convenience, causing most of the infrastructure to focus on them. The existing public transit saw worse service and problems such as crime or cleanliness. New projects become more difficult and costly to build, and were hijacked for political causes. Willingness to fund even the existing projects fell.
Nobody wants to ride public transit that is unreliable/late, has limited service times/areas, prone to strikes, dirty or unsafe, etc. It's easier and/or better to own a car or Uber in most areas. It's not really going to improve since we're stuck in a catch-22.
It's not just market forces though; most municipalities in the US legally mandate a focus on cars. For example, most downtown areas in the US are pre-existing, as they're largely illegal to build today due to mandatory off-street parking minimums among other onerous requirements.
… and building for car-centric zoning and infrastructure makes all of walking, bicycling, public transit, and automobile travel a ton worse and/or more expensive, forming a harmful feedback loop. At first the cars were freedom. Now they’re cages. That you’re forced to buy. And not even for much benefit.
Also, it likely worked better before cars became popular. In Dublin, at peak, in 1928, we had 23 tram lines. By 1949 they were all gone. Today we have two to four, depending on how you count them (some branching is involved), but they were only built 20 years ago.
What happened to the old ones? They were largely replaced with buses. Some of Dublin’s bus lines _still_ follow the path of tramlines from a century ago. And the thing is, _at the time_, this kind of worked. Not many people had cars in 1928. There was no significant traffic, and the buses operated about as fast as the trams, and were cheaper to maintain (and the trams from a century ago weren’t the 400 person capacity monsters you get now; they were similar capacity to buses). A few decades later, when traffic picked up and suddenly the buses weren’t so fine, the tram infra was all gone, and it was far too late to go back.
This seems like a plug for a book than anything with a definitive answer. The pull quote near the end of the article implies that the rest of the world has simply caught up and is pressing forward while the US has simply stopped.
I was in Florence not long ago and they are building out a very impressive light-rail network [1]. Twenty years ago a similarly ambitious network was planned in Cincinnati, OH and it was voted down 2-1 [2].
The tone of the article is one of advocacy rather than reasoned analysis, as I assume is the tone of the book. That is not what public transit needs at this point in the US.
Many urban transportation types and city planners in general give off a culty, can-I-tell-you-about-my-Lord-and-Savior-Mass-Transit vibe that is very off-putting to many, if not most Americans. Their writings gloss over the practical issues of American weather, last-mile, families with children, lugging home shopping, aging…along with deprecating any personal valuations of saving time, spontaneity, avoiding unpleasant interactions, carrying your large purchases with you…. You ignore my real world, lived experience in your screeds, I ignore you. And so they shout into the void.
America is HUGE... And all of the big cities seem unable to herd their own cats. People often forget that the USA is really 50 small countries wearing a trench coat. Just look the maps linked below. The EU has all its people piled up close where as the US has HUGE tracts of low population areas. That's why you'll never see a high speed coast to coast rail system here. logistically it's just not possible (at least not on the west coast). I live in one of the unpopulated areas and by car it takes over an hour of continuous travel at 70 MPH (115 KPH) to get to a smallish big city. There's just too much empty space.
I could see local areas like California or New York getting some high speed rail but even then, how many people would use it and where would they be going?
> People often forget that the USA is really 50 small countries wearing a trench coat
Then why do all of those 50 countries has so extremely similar problems? Not all have the same level of those problems, but the states with the least murder rate are similar to the EU countries with the highest murder rate etc, or good public transit is like EU bad public transit etc. Police brutality in the states with the least is like police brutality in the worst part of EU etc.
Cleary there must be some very shared culture for that to happen, as there are many such extreme stats compared to the rest of the world. Otherwise you would have a lot of states that were like average European countries.
I've seen a lot of suggestions that there should at least be a high speed rail corridor from Chicago to NYC and one from SF to LA because those are 2 of the most highly trafficked domestic flight paths.
The fact there isn't really high speed rail connections across large cities in the Midwest is kind of silly considering there isn't much terrain to contend with like there is on the coasts. Even the 1 new route Amtrak introduced from Chicago to Minneapolis has seen pretty high demand.
I mean, the EU is 27 small countries barely even bothering to wear the trenchcoat. It is not like the EU has some sort of integrated transport policy, except in the vaguest terms; every country does its own, and they’re often quite different. In many countries it even varies quite a lot between cities.
I lived in New York City until 2020. According to the 2010 census, the majority of households in New York City do not own a car. I got around fine via buses, subway and railroads. If need be I could take a taxi. The subway runs all night, all over the city, as do buses. The city even improved its transit - the subway now goes to the Javits Center. The Long Island Railroad now goes to Grand Central Station.
I was in San Francisco once and the latest Caltrain going from Sunnyvale to San Francisco was before 11:30PM, and the latest Caltrain going from San Francisco to Sunnyvale was three minutes after midnight. In New York PATH trains, LIRR trains, Metro North trains, New Jersey transit trains all leave well past that.
My question is, who is constructing these rail systems in each of the countries? My understanding was that Chinese companies had built a lot of the biggest subway systems in various cities from Kiev to Singapore.
For political reasons that would be untenable in the US. Therefore we have to pay full price to build a thing we’re not good at building and don’t have the ramped up supply chains to support. If there’s only one company left that builds a component you need, guess what? You pay whatever they ask.
>These are the statistics underlying the reality that in San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Boston; Atlanta; and many other major cities in the U.S., not a single mile of rail transit is currently under construction.
Here are some of the current U.S. cities with rail projects under construction:
Los Angeles, California - Extensions to the existing light rail network
As much as I like to see it happening, San Diego is too spread out geographically to make use of their rail projects effectively, unless you're really well situated on the lines. That said, it makes for a great way to explore the city for a day.
Has the author of this article ever driven across the US? It takes days and days. The US is huge; it makes absolutely no sense to build mass transit connecting that many places where people live when it's so uneconomical. The US isn't China; the government can't just decree that something happen.
The states along the coasts aren't huge (they are roughly like large European countries) and there isn't good public transit there either compared to the rest of the first world, and that is where most people live.
Exactly. Most Americans have to commute long distances crossing multiple states. Daily commutes between places as far apart as Texas and Florida are common. Lots of people working in New York commute by car every day from Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina, and even Mississippi. There aren't any kind of clusters of people living together in the US, normally called "cities" in other countries, because Americans all live equally spaced apart across the continent, so that's why public transit can't work in the US.
This seems to come up once a month or so on HN. Here is a non-ideological take, which I suppose means everyone will hate it because it doesn't echo their pet theory:
The US's basic problem with large building projects nowadays is federalism. There are so many different jurisdictions that opponents can always find some court or legislative body that they can exploit to slow down or stop the project.
Everything else flows from that.
Lawsuits? Too many courts.
Legislative opposition? Too many governmental units. Even if the public as a whole supports it, some jurisdictions will not.
Administrative permit hearings, which go on endlessly? Too many governmental units.
Yes, things used to work better in the US, but things change and all systems decay.
The new York metro has pretty much become a prop location for tiktokers. They might as well make it an official partnership at this point and get some of their fare revenue back
It’s hard in the US because of politics, corruption, favors, contracts for the purpose to burn money, transit other than cars is only for poor people (a US thing), poor people aren’t a priority, reputation for working on transit for people won’t get you reelected by your rich donors and constituents.
It’s kind of a shame because whenever Americans get back from Europe they rave about being able to take the train everywhere.
Context: this is a copy I posted r/boulder some years ago to people's wish for ( long promised) rail to Denver.
I commuted to Denver daily from Boulder, CO for three years and never drove during that time.
My shortlist of why I only want bus service to Boulder County ( for reference I typically pick up the bus at Table Mesa).
I only moved to Boulder in 2009 so I know I haven't carried as much tax burden as some people who "dream of light rail to Denver" but I'm very very happy with the FlatIron Flyers.
1. Buses can adapt to weather conditions
- Frequently coworkers training up from the tech center were 10x more likely to have issues with trains when the weather was icy, during the three years that I compiled this list of why I prefer buses.
2.Buses can adapt to other buses on the same route failing
- the RTD train infrastructure has very few places that light rail can pass one another so it doesn't matter if your train is working if the one ahead of your fails
3. Buses do not have routes altered/closed for maintenance
- when I would take the light rail to the company's Parker office or visiting friends it was surprising to have to get off and catch a bus around a section of rail under repair.
- I acknowledge that sometimes specific stops can be closed or moved but rarely is a whole section down and require alternate solutions (i.e. deboarding the train to board a bus to deboard on the other side of maintenance and board a new train)
4. Buses have express options.
- see the comment above regarding the few places that RTD rails can pass other trains
- note when the W line opened the express bus routes were removed, I think that was also true with another line but I can't remember. My favorite part of this is the coworkers I know who used that route started driving because the train was significantly longer commute times.
5. Buses typically have storage for up to six bikes per vehicle and don't block entries of others
- as an avid bike-the-final-mile commuter having storage for bikes that don't hinder other passengers boarding or exiting is nice (if you want to complain that it sometimes means staying at a few stops longer go ahead)
6. Buses Can turn over quicker at end of the line
- waiting for the E Line to swap directions at union station was comically slow when compared to catching the FF2 that just dropped off people and pulled around to pick up.
7. Buses can reroute around accidents that happen.
- E line and other northbound rail had to stop because of a car accident on the I-25 on the other side of a jersey wall where someone died. But the law says all traffic must be stopped from crossing an area of a certain diameter from the accident scene. So the next train had to stop. No place for passengers to deboard in the middle of the railway and blocked trains behind it.
- See comment above where other trains would be impacted as well
8. IMO, The payment and boarding method is a better User experience on the bus.
- this was more true before the mobile app could hold an annual pass
9. I'm sure I could come up with more reasons.
- oh, I'd rather take the AB to the airport than the A-train (sheesh that is a long train ride for such a short distance)
- oh, someone just mentioned the "rich people lane" yes, the bus uses the HOV lane! How great.
10. Air circulation is better inter city buses
When my office opens I'll return to bike/bus commuting. It is a bummer that during covid the express buses have stopped but understandable. The few times that I have bused in during 2020 the added time of FF1 was noticeable. Typically bike/express-bus takes me 50minutes house door to office door
meroes|1 year ago
The bus eventually went up to $1 per ride but I still think about these two options and wish my town had something like it. With a few small improvements I don’t see why we can’t reasonably subsidize these relatively cheap options in most towns/small cities. The rental car one would be harder, but even the bus would suffice. It notably didn’t stop at any grocery stores, only Walmarts so that’s another thing to improve. But I’d give up my car in a second for that bus back home.
I’m not even sure if this is still their active website http://0060325.netsolhost.com/about.htm but it gives you a picture of what I’m talking about. There’s either another service or a replacement that is $2.00 instead of $1.00 that goes by DCT from what I can tell. I don’t live there anymore so hard to know the current setup. I’m really underselling how good that bus was/is.
infotainment|1 year ago
If you look at the Honolulu transit project (Formerly HART, now called Skyline), I think it shows everything wrong with US transit projects:
1. It goes nowhere useful, only going to a bunch of random places on the west side of Oahu where no one really goes.
2. It was pitched as an economic uplift project, not a transit project. "If we build a train in these largely-ignored areas, it will help the people there!"
3. It took years and years to build, full of cost overruns, because it was also pitched mainly as a job creation project. You can't sell a transit project based on that alone, so instead they're pitched as welfare or job-creation programs, which creates the wrong set of incentives. After all, if the project takes longer, that's more jobs!
qwerpy|1 year ago
Now I drive my single occupant 6603 lb truck to work once or twice a week, and WFH the rest of the time.
afavour|1 year ago
In NYC transit isn’t viewed the way you’re describing it, pretty much everyone takes it. And yet NYC’s system expands at a glacial pace. A good part of the reason is because everything costs so damn much. Part of that is everyone wanting a piece of the pie so the simplest, cheapest option is very rarely the one chosen.
nox101|1 year ago
Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop.
That's clearly not the only way to do it but it might be a way in the USA? because treating it as a public service just makes it a political tax burden. Something to be cut, under funded, etc....
Los Angeles used to have one of the largest public transit systems. Over 1000 miles of track (compare to NYC 650 miles?) and tons of stations. Most of it was built commercially to sell housing. According to this documentary it worked, until the deals they'd made with the cities to maintain the roads the trains went down ended up costing too much money.
https://www.amazon.com/This-Pacific-Electric-Stephanie-Edwar...
This video also shows two extensive train systems from past L.A.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQfUFhchIlM
It feels like in Japan, they kind of solved that issue by letting the train companies run their stations as retail/office spaces and all the other stuff mentioned above.
I think Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong probably have government based public transportation but it feels like they've managed to turned many stations into commerce hubs at least.
thayne|1 year ago
earthboundkid|1 year ago
In theory, starting in West Oahu made sense because it’s cheaper to build out there, and TOD will grow the tax base to support the urban stations, but you have to actually build something for that to work.
giantg2|1 year ago
pylua|1 year ago
dado3212|1 year ago
acchow|1 year ago
In most of the US, transit riders can’t wait to be able to afford a car and get out of transit. For good reason: the transit experience for them is terrible
rayval|1 year ago
Here's some more detail about China, which has the two largest transit systems in the world: Shanghai and Beijing.
In 1993, Shanghai had one line running 2.7 miles with 4 stations. Less than 30 years later, the system had 15 lines, 500 miles of track, and 500 stations. [1]
And in that same time frame, the Beijing subway system was expanded, from 2 lines in 2002 to 27 lines and 500 miles of track, with 13 million riders per day in 2022. [2]
Also in that time, 30 other cities in China got subway systems as well.[3]
In 1993, China's per-capita GDP was $537. By comparison, per-capita GDP in the US was 50 times larger (about $23k). Since then, the gap has narrowed. US per-capita GDP is now 5x of China (66k vs 12k).
China demonstrates that, even with small GDP, if you prioritize the needs of the people over entrenched commercial interests, it can be done.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Shanghai_Metro [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Subway [3] https://qz.com/1010911/a-beautiful-data-animation-shows-the-...
shiroiushi|1 year ago
Finally, the largest transit system in the world isn't in China, it's in Tokyo, Japan (though to be fair, it isn't really a single system since it's run by many different companies).
HDThoreaun|1 year ago
China's public transit success was because of their small gdp per capita, not in spite of it. Their developing economy gave them labor at slave wages and allowed the government to just bulldoze peoples houses without much backlash. Not having those things are the biggest problems the US faces when it comes to building infrastructure.
giantg2|1 year ago
Nobody wants to ride public transit that is unreliable/late, has limited service times/areas, prone to strikes, dirty or unsafe, etc. It's easier and/or better to own a car or Uber in most areas. It's not really going to improve since we're stuck in a catch-22.
infotainment|1 year ago
vundercind|1 year ago
rsynnott|1 year ago
What happened to the old ones? They were largely replaced with buses. Some of Dublin’s bus lines _still_ follow the path of tramlines from a century ago. And the thing is, _at the time_, this kind of worked. Not many people had cars in 1928. There was no significant traffic, and the buses operated about as fast as the trams, and were cheaper to maintain (and the trams from a century ago weren’t the 400 person capacity monsters you get now; they were similar capacity to buses). A few decades later, when traffic picked up and suddenly the buses weren’t so fine, the tram infra was all gone, and it was far too late to go back.
twright|1 year ago
I was in Florence not long ago and they are building out a very impressive light-rail network [1]. Twenty years ago a similarly ambitious network was planned in Cincinnati, OH and it was voted down 2-1 [2].
[1] https://en.comune.fi.it/administration/tramway/system.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetroMoves
onecommentman|1 year ago
Many urban transportation types and city planners in general give off a culty, can-I-tell-you-about-my-Lord-and-Savior-Mass-Transit vibe that is very off-putting to many, if not most Americans. Their writings gloss over the practical issues of American weather, last-mile, families with children, lugging home shopping, aging…along with deprecating any personal valuations of saving time, spontaneity, avoiding unpleasant interactions, carrying your large purchases with you…. You ignore my real world, lived experience in your screeds, I ignore you. And so they shout into the void.
robwwilliams|1 year ago
sb057|1 year ago
mitthrowaway2|1 year ago
normalaccess|1 year ago
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/geo/popul...
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/fragmentatio...
I could see local areas like California or New York getting some high speed rail but even then, how many people would use it and where would they be going?
Jensson|1 year ago
Then why do all of those 50 countries has so extremely similar problems? Not all have the same level of those problems, but the states with the least murder rate are similar to the EU countries with the highest murder rate etc, or good public transit is like EU bad public transit etc. Police brutality in the states with the least is like police brutality in the worst part of EU etc.
Cleary there must be some very shared culture for that to happen, as there are many such extreme stats compared to the rest of the world. Otherwise you would have a lot of states that were like average European countries.
conor-|1 year ago
The fact there isn't really high speed rail connections across large cities in the Midwest is kind of silly considering there isn't much terrain to contend with like there is on the coasts. Even the 1 new route Amtrak introduced from Chicago to Minneapolis has seen pretty high demand.
rsynnott|1 year ago
dado3212|1 year ago
pgodzin|1 year ago
Ologn|1 year ago
I was in San Francisco once and the latest Caltrain going from Sunnyvale to San Francisco was before 11:30PM, and the latest Caltrain going from San Francisco to Sunnyvale was three minutes after midnight. In New York PATH trains, LIRR trains, Metro North trains, New Jersey transit trains all leave well past that.
janalsncm|1 year ago
For political reasons that would be untenable in the US. Therefore we have to pay full price to build a thing we’re not good at building and don’t have the ramped up supply chains to support. If there’s only one company left that builds a component you need, guess what? You pay whatever they ask.
rsynnott|1 year ago
From Kyiv to Singapore, sure, but not far west of Kyiv. I’m not aware of _any_ Chinese transport project in Western Europe?
bmicraft|1 year ago
hnburnsy|1 year ago
Here are some of the current U.S. cities with rail projects under construction:
Los Angeles, California - Extensions to the existing light rail network
Denver, Colorado - Commuter rail lines
San Diego, California - New light rail extensions
Seattle, Washington - Ongoing Commuter rail lines
Minneapolis, Minnesota - Southwest Light Rail Transit (SWLRT) project
latchkey|1 year ago
lurking_swe|1 year ago
Gud|1 year ago
I have lived in some cities where things are not like this. Where public transportation is amazing and getting better by the year.
It’s a shame every time I read people ignorant how a modern city can function with a pedestrian/bicycle/tram/bus/train. Where it’s quiet and calm.
But how do you convince people who have only seen the insides of cars that public transportation can be superior?
nathanaldensr|1 year ago
Jensson|1 year ago
shiroiushi|1 year ago
AlbertCory|1 year ago
The US's basic problem with large building projects nowadays is federalism. There are so many different jurisdictions that opponents can always find some court or legislative body that they can exploit to slow down or stop the project.
Everything else flows from that.
Lawsuits? Too many courts.
Legislative opposition? Too many governmental units. Even if the public as a whole supports it, some jurisdictions will not.
Administrative permit hearings, which go on endlessly? Too many governmental units.
Yes, things used to work better in the US, but things change and all systems decay.
xeromal|1 year ago
malloryerik|1 year ago
ackbar03|1 year ago
iJohnDoe|1 year ago
It’s hard in the US because of politics, corruption, favors, contracts for the purpose to burn money, transit other than cars is only for poor people (a US thing), poor people aren’t a priority, reputation for working on transit for people won’t get you reelected by your rich donors and constituents.
It’s kind of a shame because whenever Americans get back from Europe they rave about being able to take the train everywhere.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
codeangler|1 year ago
I commuted to Denver daily from Boulder, CO for three years and never drove during that time.
My shortlist of why I only want bus service to Boulder County ( for reference I typically pick up the bus at Table Mesa).
I only moved to Boulder in 2009 so I know I haven't carried as much tax burden as some people who "dream of light rail to Denver" but I'm very very happy with the FlatIron Flyers.
1. Buses can adapt to weather conditions
- Frequently coworkers training up from the tech center were 10x more likely to have issues with trains when the weather was icy, during the three years that I compiled this list of why I prefer buses.
2.Buses can adapt to other buses on the same route failing
- the RTD train infrastructure has very few places that light rail can pass one another so it doesn't matter if your train is working if the one ahead of your fails
3. Buses do not have routes altered/closed for maintenance
- when I would take the light rail to the company's Parker office or visiting friends it was surprising to have to get off and catch a bus around a section of rail under repair.
- I acknowledge that sometimes specific stops can be closed or moved but rarely is a whole section down and require alternate solutions (i.e. deboarding the train to board a bus to deboard on the other side of maintenance and board a new train)
4. Buses have express options.
- see the comment above regarding the few places that RTD rails can pass other trains
- note when the W line opened the express bus routes were removed, I think that was also true with another line but I can't remember. My favorite part of this is the coworkers I know who used that route started driving because the train was significantly longer commute times.
5. Buses typically have storage for up to six bikes per vehicle and don't block entries of others
- as an avid bike-the-final-mile commuter having storage for bikes that don't hinder other passengers boarding or exiting is nice (if you want to complain that it sometimes means staying at a few stops longer go ahead)
6. Buses Can turn over quicker at end of the line
- waiting for the E Line to swap directions at union station was comically slow when compared to catching the FF2 that just dropped off people and pulled around to pick up.
7. Buses can reroute around accidents that happen.
- E line and other northbound rail had to stop because of a car accident on the I-25 on the other side of a jersey wall where someone died. But the law says all traffic must be stopped from crossing an area of a certain diameter from the accident scene. So the next train had to stop. No place for passengers to deboard in the middle of the railway and blocked trains behind it.
- See comment above where other trains would be impacted as well
8. IMO, The payment and boarding method is a better User experience on the bus.
- this was more true before the mobile app could hold an annual pass
9. I'm sure I could come up with more reasons.
- oh, I'd rather take the AB to the airport than the A-train (sheesh that is a long train ride for such a short distance)
- oh, someone just mentioned the "rich people lane" yes, the bus uses the HOV lane! How great.
10. Air circulation is better inter city buses
When my office opens I'll return to bike/bus commuting. It is a bummer that during covid the express buses have stopped but understandable. The few times that I have bused in during 2020 the added time of FF1 was noticeable. Typically bike/express-bus takes me 50minutes house door to office door
emsign|1 year ago
jjcm|1 year ago
xeromal|1 year ago
thefz|1 year ago
Public transit does not need to turn a profit, it's a public service. It must provide a service. It is already paid off.
"... but muh capitalism brought me the iPhone!"
Yeah, what about being able to walk your fucking neighborhood though?