// So in places where road space is the bottleneck, we expect driving speed to be similar to the speed of the alternative mode.
Doesn't this mean, that the real "battle" between the public transportation and cars, should be based on a better experience ?
And since driving a car in traffic, everyday, is a negative experience and will stay so until autonomous driving - in theory, we could create the right public experience, that will win over most drivers ?
Because it would cost too much. About 90% of commutes are driving, versus 5% for transit (mostly buses). But even though transit accounts for only about 5% or commutes, it accounts for 25% of spending at the federal, state, and local levels (combined): https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/....
The majority of people, quite reasonably, will not pony up even more money for transit until it can actually improve their commutes. And it can’t, for two different reasons. First, it costs us five time as much money to build a unit of rail as it does say Paris (a city where the majority of people don’t drive to work). That kneecaps your ability to increase coverage of the transit network—making it a viable choice for the majority of commuters. Paris has a dense network of subways and commuter stations, which means that people can take a reasonable walk to a transit station. You can’t build a dense network like that if each mile of track costs you five times as much.
Second, our cities don’t look anything like the cities where most people take transit to work. People are catching on to measuring population density of metro regions in weighted terms (calculating the density in a way that shows the density in the places where most people live, rather than using arbitrary administrative lines). Under those measures, places like Paris and Barcelona have metro are densities of 30,000-50,000 people per square mile. Only New York City comes close. San Francisco and LA are at 12,000. DC, Seattle, Portland, etc. are in the 5,000-6,000 range.
Taking both figures together kills you. When you build 10 miles of subway in Barcelona, you might cover 250,000 people (assuming you get people walking from 0.25 miles on either side). And say it costs you $1 billion. In DC that same 10 miles of subway covers 30,000 people. And it costs you $5 billion.
Oh, there is really a third reason. Because you have to drive everywhere anyway, our job centers in the US are widely dispersed. Google’s main Paris office is in Paris itself. Google’s main Bay Area office is in the suburbs of San Francisco. Google’s main DC area office is in the suburbs of DC. Fixed transit networks are awful for such layouts.
> Because it would cost too much. About 90% of commutes are driving, versus 5% for transit (mostly buses). But even though transit accounts for only about 5% or commutes, it accounts for 25% of spending at the federal, state, and local levels (combined): https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/....
That's disingenuous. The driving infrastructure includes both what the state provides as well as what private funding spends (i.e. that cost of the all the cars, fuel etc). The transit infrastructure funding is entirely public in nature.
There are also corridors in L.A. that are very dense and would benefit greatly with transit. L.A. metro is so ambitious because the size of the basin, >500sq miles; you can fit over 20 manhattan islands with room to spare in the basin. Koreatown is the densest part of the town (and very well served by metro rail), and its at 40k per square mile.
Metro is prioritizing building into dense areas and state government and developers want nothing more than to focus new builds around these rails and get these areas one day near ktown density levels. The thorn is NIMBY neighborhood councils and the city councilmen beholden to them that want to plug their ears and hope L.A. gets back to 1960s era population levels by some magical force of collective cognitive dissonance.
The fact is, people are moving to L.A. in droves because they are getting hired in droves, rooting against that is rooting against economic growth of the city.
My intuition says that your 2nd point is, at least in part, caused or exacerbated by how city zoning has progressed from the postwar period to modern day, with large swaths of residences going over here, all the stores and business over there, and industrial going on the other side of the river across a large empty field, because who wants to live or work within smelling distance of the meat processing plant? This seems especially bad in newer sections of the city.
I do have some hope this is starting to turn around. In the myriad construction I've seen going up in my local area, especially near the already-established major transit lines, there's been mixed zoning, with shops at the ground level, and apartments or offices up top, as an example.
Though now that I type that out, it sounds like a chicken/egg problem. Until transit lines are in place and established, there's probably going to be less incentive zone things to make transit worth using. And until things are zoned to make transit worth using, there's probably going to be less incentive to build out transit.
I visited portland recently and was pretty blown away that I could take a train from the departures to my hotel in 20 mins or so, while the city was otherwise choked in rush hour traffic. Transit is always going to loose money, but that's OK. Even for a small city, a good transit network has huge benefits for the environment and just enjoying the city, being able to get around quickly and cheaply.
Google’s main DC area office is in the suburbs of DC.
Google has 2 (or 3?) offices in DC metro. One is on Mass Ave, in the heart of downtown. The 2nd is in Reston, which is suburban (20 miles out of downtown) but is accessible via rail and a 10 minute drive to IAD.
They might have an office in Sterling/Ashburn, but I think that's a data center, so not a huge employment center.
At least as of several years ago, the Reston office was bigger, right? I got the impression that the DC office had more corporate folks while the Reston office is where most of the engineers are.
The Reston office is not accessible by rail. The Reston Town Center silver line station will open sometime this year or next. And even then, it’ll be largely inaccessible by rail to people who actually live in Reston, since the only place the silver line goes is toward DC at one end and toward IAD at the other. From Sterling it’s a 15 minute drive, but an hour and 15 minute trip involving multiple buses. And if you live in one of the Virginia suburbs like Vienna, you can take the train to Reston Town Center, but you have to go in the opposite direction toward DC first on the orange and then switch at Ballston to a silver going back out. 45 minutes or so, versus a 20 minute drive.
I'm not sure about the sizes. I don't think either is a large office.
And you're correct that if you don't live on the rail, nothing is rail accessible. And even if you do, it's hub/spoke, so only useful for going downtown or to IAD, there's no matrix of lines to get from Tysons to Bethesda or similar without going downtown and transferring first.
That said, I think Google is opening a new office at Reston Station (Wiehle Road), which is currently accessible by rail. I don't know if this is an additional office, or if they're moving/expanding the RTC office.
I'm so glad I live and work in Reston, walk to work, and can mostly ignore this stuff. Except for when the weather turns to crap - then I have to deal with traffic on Sunrise and Reston Parkway with everybody else (and it's only getting worse as developers turn all the parking lots into new high-rise developments). I wish Fairfax County's bike lane implementation wasn't so half-assed - many of the areas could be bike-accessible in reasonable time frames (my old Herndon-Fairfax commute was 30 min by car or 45 by bike and saved me working out some other time).
>Oh, there is really a third reason. Because you have to drive everywhere anyway, our job centers in the US are widely dispersed. Google’s main Paris office is in Paris itself. Google’s main Bay Area office is in the suburbs of San Francisco. Google’s main DC area office is in the suburbs of DC. Fixed transit networks are awful for such layouts.
it seems like the government could apply zoning for work places?
It seems like the obvious answer is to consider fixing the "cost disease" of infrastructure as the #1 priority. Not more trains, or faster trains or whatever. Just getting the costs in line with the rest of the world. The extra infrastructure should follow, right?
Okay... and how do you do that? I want to write more here, but I just don't know where to even begin. Where is the money in US infrastructure projects going, and is any of it to things that we can actually agree to eliminate?
A lot of it gets lost to private contractors and consultants. Privatization is nice if you don't have the labor pool to do the work with public employees, but it's very wasteful and costly because everyone down the line needs to get their chunk of the pie. Public can run at cost or over budget and still be a huge success because no one is clamoring for a >30% profit margin. It also invites nepotism.
European cities also generally use private contractors for construction. The Paris subway expansion, which is proceeding at a fraction of the per-mile cost of New York's Second Avenue subway, is being done by private contractors: https://tunneltalk.com/France-25Oct2018-Grand-ParisExpress-n....
This might sound like a cop-out answer, but I think the answer is "nobody knows".
So-called "cost-disease" spans infrastructure, education (public & private!) and medicine (again, public and private). All of these things cost 10x what they used to and 10x what they cost in other countries.
There are a few exposés and studies that try to explain the issue but IMHO none of them are satisfactory:
NYT tries to answer the question for NYC (but then why is cost disease a thing in other cities with different contractor/union/transit authority interactions?)[0]
Alex Tabarrok says it's growth in demand and slowdown in productivity growth (but then why is this a US only phenomenon? Does it really "jive" that infrastructure costs 10x what it used to because of "increased demand and slowdown in productivity?" I don't think it passes the smell test) [1]
I’m talking about the population weighted density of the metro areas, not just the cities. Most people in the Bay Area don’t live in San Francisco (just like most people in “Paris” don’t live in the city itself). So you’ll never move the needle on transit usage if you’re just limited to the city itself. The arithmetic density of the Bay Area is 800 people per square mile. That’s not a very useful measure because that is dragged down by lots of sparsely populated areas where few people live. 12,000 is the population weighted density (basically, the density of the areas where most people actually live). Paris and Barcelona are 3-4 times that.
I visited the Bay Area for the first time (as an adult) a few weeks ago and was astonished by the difference between what I was expecting based on HN comments, and reality.
All I saw of the city made it seem like a giant suburb. BART stations were miles apart and therefore practically useless. It is really not that dense and traffic is not bad.
I am sure some areas are different. I was mainly in the area around SFO, and my conference was not hosted in downtown because apparently the homeless problem is bigger there, but at that level of low density and congestion, I fail to see how public transit is much of a win. People will not realistically take public transit if it doubles their travel time. And this case applies doubly to medium-sized suburbanized cities in the central US.
On the other hand, I can see what people mean about a housing problem when there are virtually no buildings taller than 3 stories except hotels in such an urban area.
> All I saw of the city made it seem like a giant suburb. BART stations were miles apart and therefore practically useless.
While there are multiple BART stations in the city, it is not the main public transit in the city, Muni is. BART is the regional rapid transit connecting suburbs to the city.
> I was mainly in the area around SFO
Then you quite possibly didn't actually see any of the City and County of San Francisco. SFO is operated by the San Francisco International Airport Commission, which is a body subordinate to the government of the City and County of San Francisco, but is not actually within the geographical boundaries of the City (or County, the two being one and the same.)
> Then you quite possibly didn't actually see any of the City and County of San Francisco.
Very possible. I got a good sampling of a 5 mile radius around SFO and sporadic sampling elsewhere. I wouldn't claim to know 1/100th of what a resident does about the area.
However, I was interested in testing to the extent I could the implicit hypothesis often floated on HN, "the Bay Area is borderline uninhabitable". If an area 15 miles away from downtown seems quite low-density, and assuming a 15 mile commute is reasonable (assisted by BART, whose analogue doesn't exist in many comparable cities), I concluded complaints on HN are overblown, especially considering everyone doesn't commute to downtown. For example, YouTube headquarters were pretty close to SFO. Stanford is not near downtown either. Not sure where all the other headquarters are located.
I don't have high confidence in that conclusion obviously because my information is very limited. But I am comparing to cities I know better like DC and NYC.
> it is not the main public transit in the city, Muni is
I assume "Muni" means buses or cable cars, and I will only say that during wandering around for ~20 hours, I didn't see a single bus, so I conclude Muni doesn't service suburbs.
> However, I was interested in testing to the extent I could the implicit hypothesis often floated on HN, "the Bay Area is borderline uninhabitable".
I've seen lots of people claim that about (especially downtown) SF; the normal claim about the rest of the Bay Area is that it's unaffordable because of the people that want to keep it habitable, not that it is uninhabitable.
> I assume "Muni" means buses or cable cars
The San Francisco Municipal Railway operates busses and cable cars, sure, but also surface and subway trains which share several of BARTs dowtown underground stops, but also have a lot more stops in the city that are not shared with BART.
> and I will only say that during wandering around for ~20 hours, I didn't see a single bus, so I conclude Muni doesn't service suburbs.
It doesn't (that I know of, there may be some lines that go out of the city, certainly many non-SF operated lines go into the city); there are many other transit agencies in the Bay Area, many of which have bus lines in the suburbs, including lines that run into the city. The area right around SFO (excluding the airport itself) may be a relative dead zone, I haven't really spent much time there.
I wouldn't generalize about the Bay area from a few days in a particular corner of San Mateo County, though.
> I wouldn't generalize about the Bay area from a few days in a particular corner of San Mateo County, though.
I'm very wary about it too, but the persistent claims that SF/Bay Area has some peculiar kind of dysfunction, rendering it hard to live in, that doesn't exist in other major metros has always piqued my curiosity. It seems like an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
The only real evidence I've seen supporting this idea is very high housing prices. I sat next to a woman on my flight who paid $5K/mo for a 2-bedroom apartment, shared with 2 others. Sounds insane. And of course I've seen more systematic evidence of this.
But after my visit, I wonder whether she, and perhaps others on this board, don't consider the SF suburbs as worthy for a potential living space. Or alternatively whether the claims are true that there is very high demand and these suburbs would be demolished and replaced by high-rise apartments but for zoning restrictions.
This seems like a bizarre data point to extrapolate from. Aren't airports often specifically put away from dense population centers (for obvious reasons)? It's not as if Charles De Gaulle is on the Seine.
It doesn’t. The Toronto and Montreal metro areas are about twice the density of the DC metro area (14,000 people per square mile in weighted terms, versus under 7,000). But about 20% of DC area commuters take transit, versus 22-23% in Toronto and Montreal. (Remember, we’re talking about the whole metro area—in all three places, most people don’t live in the city proper.) In all three places, roughly 70% of people drive to work.
Comments like this make me really wonder if companies like the boring company actually have the right idea, but maybe a slightly wrong implementation. What if the tunnel networks were based on pedestrian traffic rather than vehicle traffic? The tunnels wouldn't have to be exceptionally large, but they could carry a tremendous amount of traffic.
Even better, they would be insulated from the weather, which is by far the worst part of the pedestrian experience in big cities, IMO.
Cars on surface streets are quite probably the worst approach possible from an efficiency standpoint, but they appeal for experience reasons.
Private transportation is fundamentally at odds with public transportation as far as I can tell; public transport campaigners just don't "get it".
In cities where public transportation is a huge success, it's because driving is completely impractical due to congestion.
Even a first class compartment on a train is frankly uncomfortable compared to sitting in a car.
An autonomous car or a chauffeured car beats it hands down, because public infrastructure is never going to be as clean or as luxurious as an individual can afford.
I love public transport and I want it to do well because, well, it's ultimately the only thing that's going to scale. But it's just not acceptable to say "oh well the train is warm and smelly, deal with it". Unless it's a cause that really matters to them, most people who can afford it are going to opt out of that.
Well, it seems to me that you don't get it. In the city where I live, car traffic is not especially impractical, and I drive from time to time. But if I have the chance to go somewhere by subway, I prefer that, since I can read or do seomthing else in the meantime. If I can walk, this is even better.
For longer travels, a train is always better than a car for me: I can read, watch a movie, study. The time of arrival is known in advance unless there are delays and I can just relax.
You seem to assume that everyone prefers to be in a car, but this is just not the case
The thing I'm getting at here is not whether you, or I, personally drive or not.
It's that public transport is built (necessarily) for the public. It's lowest common denominator. Very, very few systems worldwide are actually comfortable places to be.
A car that has air conditioning, your own seat, space, etc is more comfortable than a tube carriage that's crammed to the rafters and is 30+c.
A specific individual might prefer the cost/time/whatever tradeoff of one over the other. But to pretend that cars are just strictly inferior is only true in a situation where public transport actually works properly - which is really vanishingly rare.
Even in a place like London with its' fantastic tube network, it's completely normal for people to stand armpit-to-armpit in a sweltering carriage. A car might be slower, but it provides an opt-out for that discomfort, and some people will choose that unless you literally ban it.
London is particularly bad, and one reason is the insane increase for demand in commuting capacity.
I can't find the source, but in 2010 or so, there were about 250k people traveling to London daily for their work. (That figure was 350k in early 2013.) In 2019, there are something like 850k people doing the same.
Even if the numbers were only vaguely there, that still means >200% increase in required commuting capacity in a decade. Don't know if any transport infrastructure could support that kind of expansion.
I think we agree. I am not sure of the percentages, but there are some people that prefer cars, others that prefer public transport, other that prefer bikes. The way you phrased your comment seemed to assume that car is a preference for everyone, which in my experience is not true (although of course it is for some people)
"Even a first class compartment on a train is frankly uncomfortable compared to sitting in a car."
- So being able to stand up, walk about, have space* is not luxury to you? Could I get those knockout pills you take?
* I have Jeep Cherokee and the space I get is less than first class rail.
> Even a first class compartment on a train is frankly uncomfortable compared to sitting in a car.
I strongly disagree. On a train you can stand up, walk around, go to the bathroom, etc. and the ride is usually smoother than anything short of brand new shocks plus pristine road conditions.
In the US, Amtrak often gets "stuck in traffic", because freight trains have priority. I think a lot of people don't realize this and it contributes to the general opinion that Amtrak just sucks for no reason.
Doesn't this mean, that the real "battle" between the public transportation and cars, should be based on a better experience ?
And since driving a car in traffic, everyday, is a negative experience and will stay so until autonomous driving - in theory, we could create the right public experience, that will win over most drivers ?
And so, why haven't we done that ?