How America Killed Transit | Hacker News Reader

How America Killed Transit

citylab.com

77 pointskimsk11293 comments

Public roads are a public transit system. A very useful and productive one. Before paved roads and trucks, many towns and farms were only served by a single rail line. If competing water transportation was not available, the private railroads would charge extremely high rates, extracting all excess production of the area. The coming of public paved roads and trucks was blessing.

Many roads are now past capacity much of the time, which makes them much less useful, and many modern cities have been designed only for people in cars (is there a word like bicyclist for a person in a car?) instead of people walking, which is definitely a mistake. But the high speed, point to point, on demand, variable cargo, transit system of public roads is a great thing. Deride and shame it at your peril.

We need to improve the road system in many ways. Some possibilities are congestion pricing, lots of tunnels, and public spaces people can walk to from their homes, but to believe some externally controlled system for transit is what we should shoot for as a society, I think, is mistaken.

"Motorist" is commonly used for people in motor vehicles.

The problem with cars is that they use so much space. Not only while in transit, but especially when parked. Look at how much prime real estate is devoted to parking in typical American cities. That reduces density and makes cars more important, a vicious circle. The most liveable cities are those where little transport is needed because most things one wants to do are within walking or cycling distance. Such city planning is at odds with car centric designs.

A single passenger vehicle could have a parking footprint about 1/10th of what they currently have. My hope is that we could have electric bikes that are like a mountain bike, can go in bike lanes (at slow speed) or on the street but can go fast enough to take on a freeway.

I'm still disappointed that Segway hasn't become more popular as a concept.

It's too slow. You can ride a bike faster than you can ride a segway. It's healthier for you, too. And, as I said to the parent, at least half the US is under snow 4-6 months of the year. A transit system that is not 100% enclosed, heated and air conditioned is a non-starter.

There's no way to make ebikes safe at 70mph. Plus, quite a bit of the US is under snow 4-6 months of the year.

You can achieve 20+% biking mode share in wintry places like Finland: https://torontoist.com/2017/02/what-toronto-can-learn-about-...

As safe as a smallish motor cycle? I would think so. But "safe"? The word describes a feeling a person has, so unless you specify some kind of measurable metric, like "50% of the population would feel safe using it" or fatalities per mile would never be less than 3 times that of cars, using it is just you personal feeling about things. Useful to you but not so useful to people that don't know what safe means to you.

> As safe as a smallish motor cycle? I would think so.

No. Compare even a beefed up e-bike like the greyp to a smaller motorcycle like a Suzuki DR-Z400 SM. The wheels, fork, frame, rear swingarm, geometry and rake are all different. They need to be to handle freeway speeds safely. By the time you've souped up an ebike to be as safe as a motorcycle at high speed, you've converted it into a motorcycle. Those same changes make it less nimble, and therefore less useful, as a mountain bike. I'm not sure I would mix even small motorcycles in with bicycles on a public road.

> Useful to you but not so useful to people that don't know what safe means to you.

I'm an avid motorcyclist, but most people are not. They don't feel comfortable going those speeds unless they have a cage lined with airbags around them. The fatality statistics suggest they're not crazy for wanting such a thing.

A single passenger vehicle could have this.

The (American) market has shown that people overwhelmingly do not like small personal cars when presented with other options, without the distorting effect of subsidies and tax breaks.

Unfortunately there has been a 25% import tax on trucks since the 1970's and only a 2.5% tax on import cars. Is it any wonder that somehow(marketing for decades) people have been convinced that only losers would drive a minivan (counted as a car).

If someone like Apple or another new company could make a one passenger car really cool looking and inexpensive (Say $5-10k), probably electric, small enough so a least two go into a regular parking space, and a way that those people can share spots, it might just take off. Imagine that when you went to the city, if you see an empty spot in your mini transport, you park. No spots? Well you can park with someone else with a mini (and share the price). Set this sharing up in software and let the cars automatically switch positions, if needed, and I think you could have a real winner. Maybe three or six could fit in one spot. Electric cars sucked and only really strange, low status, people drove them. Post Tesla, I would say that is not the case any more. Similar thing could work here.

I mean, there are still small status cars with good marketing (Mini) and those are not really that small, nor do they sell as well as large cars.

You can blame it on marketing, but it's still a problem. What you're proposing just moves cars into the "small, cheap, and shabby" category; people buy cars for status, not just economics.

The current MINIs' size is, for the most part, dictated by safety requirements. They don't sell as well as large cars because they're BMWs and are priced accordingly.

Kei cars (which are similar in size to the classic Mini) do sell large volumes in Japan and are quite cheap, but they don't meet the aforementioned safety requirements (in either the US or EU) and their sales numbers are heavily inflated because you don't need proof of off-street parking to register one.

Could have, can go, and most certainly do! It's spelled m-o-t-o-r-c-y-c-l-e.

And it's a wonderful way to get around both city and country. Motorbikes reduce overall traffic, can fit about 8-10 vehicles into a car parking footprint, have generally low fuel emissions (and can be even lower — lots of new small bikes get ~80 mpg in real world use), and never have trouble finding parking.

Speaking for myself, it makes commuting from the East Bay into San Francisco, not just tolerable, but something to look forward to. 21-25 minutes door to door at peak rush hour; park for free; the view from the bridge is superb.

Of course, the danger of cruising through a flood of slow-moving, angry, distracted, stop-and-go car traffic is considerable — but there's good reason to think (CA CHP motorcycle cop accident statistics) that it doesn't have to be much more dangerous than driving in the first place.

I ride myself. But having one that could transition into using a bike lane would be even better. I hope if automatic cars ever work, then requirements for getting a drivers license can be dramatically increased and riding a motorcycle won't seem dangerous to the general populaton.

> Look at how much prime real estate is devoted to parking in typical American cities.

Not just in the US, but everywhere. Given that most cars are in use for a tiny fraction of their lifetime, they occupy real estate somewhere. Dedicating public space to parking is a huge subsidizing for motorists not often discussed.

If parking was market priced on par with commercial or residental dwellings congestion would become less of a problem but not many people would be able to drive in the larger cities around the world. The latter is a very hard sell for voters for whom cars are of the bigger investments they've made. But in the larger scope of things it's probably akin to throwing good money after bad.

Problem is that point to point is not scalable. Automated platoons only work in highway settings, not in urban areas where pedestrians and cyclists need to cross traffic at regular intervals very frequently. (The American experience shows that even erecting large physical barriers to crossing roads does not work.) And you can't build more roads to get out of this mess, because we have tried and tried and tried and even 26 lanes is not enough to decongest a highway [1].

The new thing is congestion management. Schedule deliveries only for off-peak or evening/night hours. Charge tolls to maintain traffic flow, as high as needed (I-66's market clearing price for a single lane was at one point $46.75 [2]). And above all, stop mandating parking with buildings, and disallow bundling of off-street parking with rent.

[1] - https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2016/09/11/braess-paradox...

[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/03/0...

You can scale with tunnels. I also suggested congestion pricing in my last paragraph. Having congestion pricing on highways is also a good idea because it can reveal the price people are willing to pay for uncongested travel. That gives people an idea on how much a tunnel could make and motivate spending money on building it.

Tunnels right now are way too expensive per lane mile. And you also need interchanges to connect surface with tunnels, which runs into the same space issues that exist above ground.

Yes, the Boring Company is suggesting we can somehow solve this expensive tunnel problem with sleds for cars and vertical elevators, but those are all proof of concepts, and in any case they would probably be less reliable than current infrastructure due to the addition of more moving parts.

I guess my point is that point to point, user initiated transportation is a great idea. It is what makes cities great places to live in. All the millions of possible people to interact with and become friends with, etc. I think we should try to enhance the transportation options of people, not force them to certain train stops or times of day.

You could just do this by walking and elevators, but more extensive transportation would give even more options. There should be 10 or 100 or a 1000 Boring Companies working on the problem with transportation in cities. It is one of the 5 or 10 biggest problems of our age.

Train stops are hardly 'forcing.' Is Lyft, Uber, et. al asking people to walk a few tens of meters and clump up at stops along a route 'forcing'? Because this seems to be the conclusion that even the market-oriented, point-to-point rideshares have come to for efficient transportation after burning through lots of VC money [1]. And if you're feeling social you can interact on the train or bus. The scope of interaction while you're in your own personal aluminum bubble barreling along is much lower.

If it were significantly easier to build tunnels, someone would've done it already. Unlike space, or solar energy, or batteries, or cars, tunnels have consistent market demand, and existing technologies are not meeting that demand very well.

There is already a very lightweight, space efficient transportation point-to-point option; the bicycle. Today with current battery technology, even the crappiest bikeshare e-bikes hit 20-30mph and have a 50+ mile range. If you really need a car, just get a Zipcar or a Reachnow or a Car2Go, etc. But by no means should we continue to favor the car at great expense.

[1] - http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/06/lyft-reinvents-the-bus.ht...

You can scale a lot better if you put trains in those tunnels.

How about trains of vehicles that are automatically driven, can spit apart and only pieces with people in that that want to stop, stop, and the rest of the train just keeps moving? You could even let people pay extra to have a train car just to themselves and their friends. It would never have to stop for other people and go directly to where the group of people wanted to go. These train cars could even be designed to run on public streets and you could take it from the train tracks onto the road system. People could maybe, if they thought it was worth it, even own their individual train cars. They might like to carry around lots of stuff or pick up some furniture or a pile of groceries. Who knows. With such flexible train cars, most people might like using the train.

That's a nice idea. However, it requires a lot of technology that we currently don't have. Given that building new underground lines in cities is already a project that takes more at least a decade from planning to finishing, I don't think waiting for a) self driving technology to mature (this includes regulatory approval!), and b) self driving technology becoming cheap enough to compete with rail, is a good idea if you want to prevent total traffic breakdown in the face of continuing urbanization.

Self-driving vehicles already work really great in a controlled environment like a well marked single lane tunnel. The tech to do this is already here.

The Boring Company has recently announced a Dodger Stadium to Red line tunnel project. Construction time estimated at 14 months. If it is running two years from now, that might get people think about new time frames for tunnel projects. Hope it works.

The public transit system used to be privately owned and operated. Then the cities took over and kicked out the private sector. Now we have terrible public transit.

Yes, even the subways in NYC were built and operated by private companies (there were two, and they competed).

Quite right. Japan has excellent rail systems and they’re all owned by private corporations, albeit with government oversight. However, public trans can be done right, such as the case in mainland China which is state owned.

All comes down to priorities and fairness. Majority of governments and companies don’t have either

Gotta be careful talking about private companies in japan.

For example, last october the bank of japan owned 74% of all publicly traded companies. And it has only been buying more since.

Japan is a strange failed-capitalist state sleepwalking into unintentional(?) socialism. Impossible to make a coherent point about a situation like that.

> Impossible to make a coherent point about a situation like that.

I don't think the situation itself is incoherent, just your comment.

> Japan is a strange failed-capitalist state

Is it? Who says?

There are also many countries/cities with excellent publicly owned transit, various excellent public services in the US, and many terrible privately owned services (including transit services) around the world.

I don’t think this is an adequate complete explanation.

Most european cities and countries have government run public transport or semi private monopolies running the transport. Privatization is usually singled out as the root cause of the sorry state of the rail service in e.g. the UK. Basically it leads to companies cherry picking the most lucrative routes and shutting down the rest.

So, I don't think you can blame the shift from private to public for this. It's not that black and white. I think the car lobby has been a much bigger factor in driving both the construction of highways, suburbs, and destruction of local tram networks across most cities in the US. This did not happen in Europe.

I was in San Francisco a few months ago. The public transport there is pretty bad compared to what I'm used to in Berlin (clean, fast, efficient, etc.). The local muni trains are tiny and infrequent and you basically have to step over hords of homeless people to get into them. I was kind of shocked to see a 1 car muni show up after waiting for that for close to 15 minutes at Powel station. It's like they're not even trying.

They're trying very hard in SF! It's just that the goals Muni is incentivized to achieve might not always be in full alignment with the ones customers might prefer.

Public transit, like most infrastructure, shouldn't be privatized imho. We don't want infrastructure that serves only those who can pay. I'm perfectly fine with a public transit system that needs subsidies. We heavily subsidize cars by providing cheap or free parking in cities, why not public transport?

Singapore has privatized transit. Quality of service is exceptionally high and it's one of the cheapest rail services in the world, precisely because the economic pressure encourages the lines to favor QOS and volume.

The MRT and LRT are owned by the Land Transport Authority, Ministry of Transport, i.e. the government. What transit are you referring to?

Mrt was private until last year, so jury's out on where the quality goes. Comfortdelgro runs three subway lines, IIRC.

one of the best public transit in the world is often claimed to be Japan's. It was privatized and went from not functioning to the envy of the world.

Whether it would work other places I have no idea but we certainly have a data point that privatizing can work.

That's a very American point of view.

Here in Paris, public transit is run by the state since the war and works really well. It's going to be open to private concessions in a few years (buses first, subway in 20 or 30 years) because of European regulations, I'm not sure it will change for the better...

Yes, the topic of the thread is US transit. Saying "this works fine in Europe" is at best a non-starter.

Governments are different. What works in France may not work in NYC for all sorts of reasons. For better or worse, the US federal government and most state and local governments are not good at running anything in an efficient manner.

In NYC in particular, the subway is run by the New York State-owned corporation, MTA. It's not that bad, but it's known for slowness and huge cost of any projects it undertakes. Half of its budget is subsidies.

The NYC subways were built via public-private-partnerships, in what would nowadays be called a DBF(O)M (design-build-finance-operate-maintain) model.

I like the comments about how public ownership and operation of public transit works in Europe. I'm curious as to why, and I have some ideas:

  - private ownership of automobiles in the U.S. took off
    much more than in Europe
  - the States did not put much emphasis on public transit
  - the States invested in roads
  - so Americans have long had an alternative to bad
    public transit: just drive
  - European countries put up a lot of impediments to
    private automobile usage: high taxes, limited road
    investment(? guessing on this one)
  - so the cities had reduced incentives to providing
    decent public transit, unlike Europe, where bad public
    transit would have been fatal to many political careers
    just due to the lack of alternatives

There's also the fact that geography meant that private automobile usage in the U.S. had to be higher than in Europe...

Maybe that's all wrong. I'd like to hear what others have to say about this.

Most of Europe is way denser than most of the US.

Parts of the US where density is high, like the Northeast, or areas around Chicago or Seattle, did and do have rather decent mass transit, much / most of it initially privately started, that is, seen as lucrative, in high demand.

Most of US railroads were, and are, cargo-oriented. They haul a lot, but passenger trains are few, except in metro areas. Again, in dense areas like those around Philadelphia / NYC / Boston, commuter trains are a norm.

But once density lowers, keeping up train infrastructure becomes unprofitable, and can only be sustained bu subsidies. Even countries with very high train penetration and very high average popular density, like Japan, sometimes have to stop subsidizing lines to some stations where ridership is too small, and close them.

In US in particular, land is abundant in most of the territory, and home ownership is seen as a status symbol and an investment, so "proper cities" with sufficient density do not form, or form partially, with a lot of city territory being effectively suburbs. This makes investment-heavy public transit not a great option; buses suffice, since roads are already present.

Author doesn't put enough blame on the built environment. If you have urban planning codes that require 2 parking spaces per dwelling and detached single-family homes, the area will not be economically serviceable by transit (nor will it be walkable). In much of America, car transportation is legally mandatory.

You can reach the "serviceable by transit" population density with that requirement for "2 parking spaces per dwelling and detached single-family homes".

Let's allow for a road that is legally 50 feet wide. Each house's share of that is half, so 25 feet. (it is 12.5 feet pavement and 12.5 feet curb/swale/sidewalk/etc.)

We need a 20x20 space for a normal cheap (no elevator) double garage. We want this home legitimately "detached", so let's allow enough room for scaffolding to stay within the property on both sides and the rear. That makes the lot 28 feet wide, and adding room for a staircase takes it to 32 feet wide. Including the half-street, the lot is 49 feet deep. That means 1568 square feet for the house.

At this size, there are 17780 homes per square mile. For comparison, we can fit 841953 homes in San Francisco. We can't just have homes of course, but on the other hand there will be more than 1 person per home. It happens that San Francisco contains almost exactly that many people, 884363 as of 2017. San Francisco also happens to be the second most densely populated large US city, behind only New York.

It thus works fine, or at least as well as the second most dense large city in the USA.

Bay area public transport is the worst. Forgot about quality, it does not even reach everywhere. Bart is not even safe, I can’t believe I miss subway

"not even reach everywhere"

This is the fault of building where there isn't transit. Not the fault of transit. Do we complain that municipal water doesn't go "everywhere" because some people build wells?

Also, if bart is unsafe I have bad news about roads for you.

The length of the high speed rail system in the US leaves a lot to be desired. Their HSR system doesn't even crack the top 10 [1].

[1] - https://geoshen.com/posts/10-longest-high-speed-rail-systems...

In the Seattle area, the local government insists on ripping up the tracks to create urban "trails".

My armchair perspective of this is that rails-to-trails is a federally-sanctioned move and adding transit use to those rails is both difficult and politically hard.

It is difficult because leaving the rails as-is means small rail operators like Ballard Terminal will insist on still being able to run one freight train a week so that means transit has to compete for time slots and the operating agency has to buy FRA mixed-use compatible train sets (expensive, slow, noisy) or plead for a waiver like Denton’s DCTA got (not gonna happen in this administration).

It is politically hard because, to pick on Kirkland, people get very cranky about rail near neighborhoods and they insist that it brings “the wrong people” and the idyllic pictures of fit people walking and jogging and cycling with their kids along a leafy path...not that “terrible” transit that will “destroy” quality of life.

So trails move on and transit has to fight some other time.

FRA compliance should get easier soon, see 'alternative compliance'.

If you don't want to buy FRA mixed-use compatible train sets, simply cut the connection to our nationwide rail system. You don't need to rip up the whole track. It probably makes the most sense to remove the switch tracks, but I guess you could blow up some tracks or dump a load of concrete on top.

> adding transit use to those rails is both difficult

I can't imagine how boring tunnels under Bellevue is easier.

Tunnels are invisible, so NIMBYism is less triggered?

It may be technically more involved, but politically much more palatable.

The OP's article links to another on how Seattle (the City, not 'the area') improved its transit ridership and got voters to invest in transit bigtime. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/10/how-seattle-b...

Sound Transit never mentions the eastside rail corridor, which runs from Renton to Bothell. It could form the core of an eastside transit system. The corridor could be used to complete a loop around Lake Washington, making the entire rail system far more useful. But no. Instead they bore tunnels under Bellevue.

https://www.soundtransit.org/blog/platform/bellevue-light-ra...

A few years back, they ripped up the tracks from Renton to Black Diamond, and paved it all over.

The urban trails are one of the best public amenities in Seattle. The problem is that there's not enough of them.

It's 2018. If fixed rail is the answer, we're asking the wrong questions.

What alternatives come close to the carrying capacity of fixed rail?

Fixed rail is indeed better than anything else at carrying large numbers of people from one place where they don't want to be to someplace else where they don't want to be.

Networked autonomous road vehicles are the obvious way forward, but achieving their true potential will require more organization than our society can apparently bring to bear.

Why is real estate around train stations more expensive if that's a place where people don't want to be? Maybe you should look at places where public transport works before claiming such nonsense.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life living next to a train station, and the rest of your career working next to a different one?

Didn't think so.

I'd like to move closer to a train station, yes, but rent there is too expensive for my taste. Currently I have to walk 15 minutes to get to the nearest train station, or take the bus. I already work next to a train station. I only use the trains when the weather is really bad though, because I'm a little bit faster on my bike and I like the exercise.

I honestly don't understand your point. What's so bad about living next to a train station? There are all kinds of shops there and the trains take me to basically anywhere in the city in less than 40 minutes. Would you rather live next to a highway?

Everyone can live near a road, if they wish to do so, and most people do.

Not everyone can live near a train station.

Seems like this should be obvious, but...

... but you must be thinking in a different context or have a different set of assumptions to other people, given that it's presumably not obvious if you've had to say it. Here's an opportunity for everyone involved to expand their minds by trying to understand other people's assumptions, axioms and contexts.

The context is reality. The assumptions are necessarily biased. And the axioms are those of Euclid ("There's only so much space next to the train station") and Pauli ("It's already full.").

Perhaps we could build another rail station. This happens where I live. There's a new one being built on an existing line because the number of people living near it is enough to justify a new station.

I think you will struggle to convince people here. Your style of argument alienates your audience.

Given that any road could be a rail, any arguments about how everyone could have a road near them could presumably be met with the idea of having a rail near them.

If you want axioms, I believe that everyone could live near a rail station. It's not physically impossible, despite being impractical and so forth. I find your arguments unconvincing and deliberately patronising, which does not help your case.

Given that any road could be a rail, any arguments about how everyone could have a road near them could presumably be met with the idea of having a rail near them.

Ridiculous and incoherent.

Your style of argument alienates your audience.

As does your insistence on mass behavior modification, I'm sure.

Umm... yes... I built a whole tool to figure out the best combination of stations and it's been fairly popular.

What counts as "next to"? I've lived within ten minutes walk of two or three different stations for the last thirty years, and I've worked within fifteen minutes walk of one for the last twenty years over a number of different jobs.

When I'm considering where to live and where to work, I won't consider a house more than ten minutes away or a workplace more than fifteen, and have rejected houses and jobs on that basis in the past. I'm not alone.

A cynic might say something like, "Fine. Enjoy Kowloon. Just don't make the rest of us endure it or pay for it," but I'll refrain on the grounds that it's more provocative and less respectful than I want to sound. But my counterargument would definitely be along those lines.

At the end of the day, rail scales in only one dimension, while roads scale in two. That's important, IMO. Cities should not dictate the movement of people and goods; it should be the other way around.

Just don't make the rest of us endure it or pay for it

Pay for it? It is the city-dwellers who subsidise the low-density areas.

As for "I would say this ... but I won't"; no, you just did, didn't you? Trying to hide behind a weird passive-aggressive "here's what I won't say" shield doesn't change anything; it's just passive-aggressive childishness and you know it. If you want to take the high road, then take it.

Denny Way called and wants its traffic crisis back.

Roads do. Compare the size of the gap between vehicles. Fixed rail is a really inefficient use of land. Most of the time, the rail is just sitting there without a train anywhere in sight. It is normal for the rail to be idle for long periods of time. The density of a packed-full train does not make up for this. Of course, many systems are running trains that are far from being packed full.

Roads, which is the default everywhere, have literally the least capacity. Single-occupancy vehicles have the worst, followed by normal buses, followed by rapid transit buses, followed by rail.

Trains already work as well as they possibly can. There is no room for improvement in fixed rail, no space for progress. Fixed rail is, well, fixed. If it doesn't exist where you are at the moment, or go where you want to go, that's too bad.

And if everyone achieves their dream of living next to a fixed rail station, as advocated so enthusiastically in this thread, this is what their homes will look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdzJpM-EMNg&feature=youtu.be Or does everyone on here just naturally assume the penthouse with the tennis court and helipad will be theirs?

Conversely, if you can look at a crowded, congested city full of automotive traffic and think, "This is as well as this system can possibly work," I have to wonder what you're doing on a site called Hacker News.

What a single road lacks in capacity, it makes up by being part of a larger network. In every other context on HN, that's considered a good thing. When it comes to transportation, not so much. I will never understand that.

Fixed rail is, well, fixed. If it doesn't exist where you are at the moment, or go where you want to go, that's too bad.

Is that not true of roads? If there is no road right now where I want to go, I'm out of luck. Or do you mean than no new rail is being laid? That doesn't fit my observations. I see new rail and new stations.

I wonder if you've got a specific context; perhaps you're thinking of small regions of the USA? Many of us (myself included) do not live in the USA. The USA is notoriously bad at rail.

Take a look out your window... all of your windows. Roads are already pretty much everywhere, for better or worse. Rails are not. I believe that we should be working on forms of transit, both new and old, that take advantage of the infrastructure we already have.

The USA's geography is very different from places like Europe and Japan, if that's where you're coming from. Centralized transit is a lot more effective in places where 200 km is considered a long distance, and where the bulk of the population is already compressed into compact urban centers.

You're comparing roads that run at full capacity to rails that are basically unused. Heavily used lines have intervals of less than two minutes between trains and the trains are absolutely packed during rush hour. No road can compete with that. Imagine these people would each occupy a car:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMZhQLhcB08

Take note of the intervals between trains.

Never mind that the reason all those people are crammed into one train is that that's where the train is. (Also, I have to ask, are you trying to sell me on this lifestyle, or trying to scare me into further entrenching my existing beliefs?)

In other areas of life, deliberately creating bottlenecks is frowned upon.

Yes, I am comparing roads that run at full capacity to rails that are basically unused, because that is normal.

Realistic trains in the USA are perhaps 20% full. Including the stops, they average 35 MPH, which is about 56 km/hour. They run once or twice an hour in the morning and in the evening. They shut down for many hours each day, for example from 1:30 PM to 4:30 PM and also from 8 PM to 5 AM.

I'll pick several examples I've seen. These are thus not perfectly random, but they are not chosen to be unusually bad. Typical railway right-of-way is 100 feet, which is enough for a highway.

Caltrain example: It's every 90 minutes, though sometimes better if you are at the right stop (express service) or at the right time of day (rush hour). On weekdays, 62190 people ride it. It goes for 77.4 mi (124.6 km) in 143 minutes, so about 32 MPH or 52 km/hour. The land usage per person is 657 square feet.

Tri-Rail example: Trains normally run an hour apart. It is 38 miles per hour (61 km/h) overall average, which is pretty awful compared to a car on the nearby interstate 95. It carries 14000 per day over 71 miles, but of course most people don't go the full distance. The land usage per person is 2678 square feet.

MBTA Lowell example: Today they ran 8 trains. On weekdays they run up to 26 trains, with a shutdown for 6.5 hours each night. The line does 11965 people per weekday, with maximum distance 25.4 miles (40.9 km). It takes 47 minutes, so about 32 MPH or 52 km/hour. The land usage per person is 1121 square feet.

Look at the square footage. Without subsidies, ticket prices would need to be like a day of renting a townhouse.

Isn't the same rail capacity used somehow by freight trains when passenger trains are not running?

Also in the Seattle area the local government insists on building huge amounts of rail based mass transit (just because an abandoned rail line exists doesn't mean it's in a suitable location or condition for integrating into a transit system).

A line running the entire eastside, Renton to Bothell, connecting them to downtown Bellevue and downtown Kirkland, paralleling I405, could hardly be in a more suitable location.

By having hundreds of thousands of 5+ seat vehicles with 1 person inside.

That comparison to Toronto is absurd. It’s a metro area with many times the population and density of the other cities listed. And what the hell is this?

“Below is a set of maps that show the present-day network rail and bus lines operating at least every 30 minutes, all day to midnight, seven days a week”

This effectively excludes every bus line, because there is no reason for bus lines to run the same route all day long. This is one of the major advantages of buses.

"Being able to rely on buses as a piece of infrastructure" is the reason. Because you don't want to buy a car for two parties a year that run late. Just as you wouldn't want a disused sidewalk or a country road or a bridge to close completely during periods when they're not being worked to capacity.

This isn't a major advantage of buses, it's a major cost: They're so expensive to run that you only get to deploy them for peak periods.

If you _do_ have to buy a car for two parties a year that run late, well then why not use the car for the daily commute?

If everyone made that choice, it would destroy the city.

The availability of Uber et al is a massive public good for a city, because it can patch over failures like this in our public transportation system in a demand-responsive way without inducing a lot of additional traffic.

>This effectively excludes every bus line, because there is no reason for bus lines to run the same route all day long. This is one of the major advantages of buses.

I can't think of a single bus line in my city that actually changes it's route throughout the day. Sure there's some that don't go as far into the suburbs after a certain time, but the part in the city would still qualify as "all day" by that definition. And as a rider, I would hate to use a bus that goes by one neighborhood in the morning and another in the afternoon. That's what different route numbers are for, there's no reason to have the confusion.

GP doesn't mean that some bus lines change routes. In American cities most bus routes stop running or run less frequently as it gets later in the day. This article is excluding any that stop or become less frequent before midnight.

And many bus routes run only at night

I'd think safety (or lack of the same) might be a factor too.

cars kill ~3x as many people per year as gun crime.
Public transit is orders of magnitude safer than personal transit.

crime excludes suicide. total gun deaths per year is about the same as vehicle deaths per year.

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