Why Subways in the Northeast Are So Troubled | Hacker News Reader

Why Subways in the Northeast Are So Troubled

nytimes.com

17 pointsgwintrob22 comments

I know that this article is talking just about subways, but they brought up the issue of infrastructure spending being far too low. In many cases, however, it's more about the spending being incredibly poorly directed. I was talking to someone who used to sit on the commission of a Virginia city. He told me that VDOT pays for 95% of road construction and maintenance if it conforms to VDOT urban code. This is incredibly foolish for two reasons:

1. Urban code requires a minimum 28 foot road width. Understanding that "urban" here best means "where there might be some people" rather than significant density, this is a horrendous plan because it encourages huge roads designed for ~45mph. these roads optimize traffic throughput in places that should be optimized for livability, resulting in unnecessarily high spending and, more importantly, dangerous car-paths that discourage crossing the street, or even using it at all without a car.

2. More relevant to infrastructure spending, this imbalanced gravy train means that a town can easily add the tax base of large retailers at the edges of town, and the only cost to them is 5% of the huge roads involved in getting people out to those relatively unproductive stores. The result is a land-use problem where people have no inclination to build near one another, and the resulting dysfunctional road system that tries to move people and foster economic activity with the same infrastructure, and does both quite poorly. It's the futon of roads. And sure it's nice (if you live in one of these places) to be able to drive to the huge grocery store and pick from 8 different kinds of mustard, but if you're buying the specialty versions, you should probably just be ordering it online.

Granted, that's just the Virginia system, but it seems reasonable to expect that it would be similar in other states. In my travels, I haven't noticed many (U.S.) places that didn't fall into similar patterns.

> And sure it's nice (if you live in one of these places) to be able to drive to the huge grocery store and pick from 8 different kinds of mustard

It's not. It's a disaster. It takes you 30 minutes just to grab some toothpaste if you run out. The NOVA suburbs are utterly dysfunctional and traffic is near a breaking point. It's often faster to drive to DC from Annapolis than from Great Falls or Reston (despite the latter being half the distance).

There's a name for this sort of misunderstanding on the internet, but it escapes me.

To be clear, what I meant is "All other factors ignored, it can be mildly convenient to have access to this abundance of choice." Although, I actually hate having this much choice, as it makes it impossible to shop in a grocery store you don't know, and while I'm at it, I love the size of Trader Joe's parking lots. I was trying to address one (of many, many) complaints that people bring when you suggest something taming the infrastructure demon. Also frequently heard: "If you shrink the lane width and slow the roads down to 25, it'll take forever to get across town!" First of all, if you stop building dumb stroads (street-road hybrids, the aforementioned futon of traffic engineering), the towns will be much smaller, so you'll only have to go half the distance. Hell, you might even be able walk or ride your bike!

I feel for you if you're living and commuting around DC. I did a month-long internship that had me commuting between Fort Meade and Annapolis, and it made me swear off commuting by car. I also spent years making frequent trips between Annapolis and Charlottesville, so I got to watch the expansion down the 95 corridor. You haven't experienced the madness of crowds until you've seen people buying expensive homes as far South as Stafford so that they can spend the next decade hating themselves as they spend 10% of their existence hating themselves as they idle on 95. The DC beltway is the epitome of poor land use.

Of course it's faster to drive to DC from Annapolis; Maryland does not have a river between it and DC. There are dozens of streets that connect...it's essentially a continuous urban zone across the border.

To drive from VA to DC, you have your choice of 5 bridges with an aggregate total of about 15 lanes to carry all the traffic. It doesn't take much volume to back things up.

It is not very livable or safe when roads are narrow.

I've lived on that kind of street. There was little margin for kids running out of control. In the blink of an eye, they'd be in the road. (actually happened on my street) Parked cars would constrict the road, and then the snowplows would pile snow against the cars. There was no safety margin for a car that starts to slide on ice.

I was at least lucky that the street was short and didn't really go anywhere interesting. Had that not been the case, there would've been a very slow exhaust-emitting line of cars creeping down the middle. My lungs really don't need that.

DC's metro system is in another league of dysfunction from the other systems which suffer from the typical, chronic burden of heavy use.

The article lumps it all together; "hey, we should do a transit article today".

Raising federal gasoline taxes to pay for infrastructure? Since when does that make sense? Let the people that use the subway, pay for the subway's maintenance-- that way, the larger the amount of people that use it, the more money that gets allocated to maintaining it.

Keeping this kind of thing within the cities that are affected by the issues ensures that the amount of funding scales with the population of the cities, and ensures that a the infrastructure being maintained doesn't depend on the (often unreliable) federal government to give them money.

If we assume that these systems are in dire need of repair (which many of them are), and that they are unreliable (which they frequently are), then it can be a hard sell to ask riders to pay more. Pay more for what? Improvements years from now, when what I really need is reliable transportation to and from my job NOW?

Also, if we can continue with the assumptions about these systems, they're not in a position to sustain increased ridership or increased trips, which makes it very hard to capture that revenue in the way you propose.

Worth considering when reading that article... http://theweek.com/articles/449646/why-expensive-build-bridg...

The new eastern span of the SF Bay Bridge is about 6x over budget because politicians wanted it to look pretty. There's no need for a suspension bridge there; the water isn't deep and it's not a major navigation channel. It could have been a set of short spans, like the old one, and much cheaper.

And we still can't ride a bicycle all the way to SF from the east bay (well, without going via San Jose at least)

I just want to leave this here - http://narrowstreetssf.com/ one can dream.... America with narrow streets

That kind of dream is called a nightmare.

We block out the Sun. We replace the nice smooth concrete sidewalks with cobblestones... causing more noise from wheels (carts and strollers and bikes too, not just cars) and causing people in high heels to sprain their ankles. Oh, and cobblestone is crazy expensive. I guess we'll be needing mass transit, but we just made the street to narrow for it. We make it really tough to transport a family. We made the area inhospitable for people (often women and elderly) who feel unsafe out of their cars.

I know it's cute. It's not actually livable, unless maybe you are an athletic single male who telecommutes. Oh, and the weather is at least as nice as SF.

Replace subway with road or airport and you get the same article for the rest of the major cities in the US.

The 2 hours a day I sit in my car to drive 10 miles to work and back cost me more in lost time (translated to money) than the property taxes I pay.

You can't tax cut your way to prosperity.

Because to the New York Times only the Northeast exists. San Francisco Bay Area BART is having troubles- but I doubt we will be seeing federal dollars routed our way. But by all means lets all worry about DC and NY.

It is called the "New York Times."

The author wrote what she knew. Better to stop short of some relevant instances than to make sweeping generalizations that you can't defend (especially if they turn out to be wrong.) So yes, by all means let's worry about the problems that we understand, rather than swinging in the dark at ones we've never seen or studied.

On another note, have some faith in Silicon Valley. The enormous wealth of the area ties back to massive federal spending, and surely they still remember how to grab some money while it's being passed around.

> The Federal Transit Administration found that public transit systems have a backlog of $86 billion in critical maintenance nationwide.

I wonder how that backlog is allocated: e.g., how BART's backlog compares to NYC, Boston, and DC.

DC and BART are about the same age (1972 vs. 1976), but DC has 68% more riders[1] and an operating budget that's almost double[2]. (So, yes, WMATA also spends more per rider.)

Everyone's hurting for investment in general.

[1] Weekday Daily Ridership from Wikipedia: 423,120 (BART) vs. 712,843 (WMATA). [2] FY16 Annual Operating Budgets: $900k (BART) vs. $1.8B (WMATA)

You mean BART spends more per user.

No, not according to these numbers. $2,528 for WMATA vs. $2,127 for BART. (Operating budget divided by daily riders.)

But is that an apple to apple comparison? Operating budget means only so much -- it ignores major costs like pension and benefit obligations and debt service (BART is among the worst at both).

It's just a data point. I have no idea how they really compare, or which one is in "worse" shape. As a DC resident, I know the impending metro shutdown is going to be a disaster.

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