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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm of the opinion that every 500k+ city should have a subway line.

I grew up in a city with one (just one for the majority of my 20 years there) and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating, especially at 2am on a Friday night after a couple of beers with the guys.

The other thing I noticed when I was visiting my family there during the recent holidays is that there are so few cars in places close to the subway lines - roughly half the usual concentration. The incentive to have one is just not strong enough.

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I'm of the opinion that it depends on density. You could build a subway line in some US cities of 1M and nobody would ride it; you could build a subway line in a city of 50k and everyone would ride it. It depends on whether there is density to support walking directly to many things (businesses, residences, and other transit lines) or not.

The subway is the big expensive investment. In theory, businesses and housing etc would develop around the stations. Like how suburbs develop around train stations.

In theory. The commuter rail I sometimes take follows an old rail right of way. Some of the stations are in fairly developed areas. But some of those, like Concord, presumably predate even the original rail. And a lot of the towns are pretty spread out. You can't walk to much until you get to the last two stops in the city proper.

This is because the T is not a "real" transit system in the way that it's simply not designed to move enough people fast enough to compete with cars.

Well, if I’m going into the city 9 to 5ish I’ll usually take commuter rail because it’s less painful even if it takes as long as driving. But I do need to drive to and park at the nearby commuter rail station.

I imagine that at least one factor there is that building up is prohibited by zoning—a super brief glance at Concord's zoning map & code it looks like the only kind of residential buildings you can build anywhere without special permission are single-family.

Now there are surely people living there who would argue that this zoning has protected the shape and nature of the town they that they prefer, but the flip side of that coin is that, at $1.4m, a median home in Concord costs more than 3x that of the country overall.

There's probably some truth in that. On the other hand, Concord is a pretty far-flung suburb; you're probably over 30 minutes to get to Cambridge without heavy traffic. I believe the prison out there is closed now but don't know what the plans are for the land.

Sure, I wouldn't imagine it'd turn into a cluster of skyscrapers if the restrictions were not there, but I would imagine there might be some small apartment buildings near the train station. New Jersey has had some impressive housing changes happen by opening areas near transit to development in not-dissimilar environments.

Apparently, the governor is interested in using it for housing development but I'm sure that will be tied up in the courts for years--especially with it being Concord.

And then landowners who were “smart” enough to own land where this ends up going in get to reap all the financial upside, instead of the public which actually invested in that infrastructure.

Just imagine if the public could capture the (financial) upside it produces, then it could apply that money to do the same thing down the road, then do the same thing again down the road further.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem?wprov=sft...

A version of this is common now in the US through Tax Increment Financing.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ipd/value_capture/defined/tax_incre...

I don’t see how that is a version of what llamaimperative posts.

If anything, TIF increases rewards for landowners who do nothing or otherwise underutilize land. Taxing the product of work to make a piece of land beneficial for society is amazingly backwards.

The proper direction to go in is marginal land value tax rates, with increasing penalties the longer a spaces remains unused.

In some countries the transit companies (public or private) also become the landowners of the adjacent areas - this would be the "rail plus property" model.

In fact, the rail plus property model allows the rail operate to better capture their added value, so it applies even in "private" scenarios. The most famous example would be Tokyo.

The goal shouldn't be for the public to be able to reap direct financial benefits from the induced activity around transit hubs, the goal should be to firstly to incentivize and maintain affordable, high quality, sustainable transit, secondly to provide more and better economic opportunities.

This is the case in Hong Kong as well. The subway company is also involved in the malls built on top of them.

There are malls and neighborhoods built entirely around the subway station

Same in Switzerland, with the added quirk/bonus that shops in train stations are allowed to open on Sundays, when shops outside of train stations usually can't open due to employment laws. This wasn't originally meant as a way to increase attractiveness of businesses in train stations and other public transit places, rather as a way to make sure that people travelling have services available while on their way. But nowadays it's definitely a big reason for people to come specifically shop in train stations on the weekend.

> Just imagine if the public could capture the (financial) upside it produces...

Like through taxes on the sale of the property or the increased business income it produces? The public will.

No, taxes on the unimproved value of the land

Property taxes include that, generally.

This typically goes to the higher level of government. Not the local one that manage and build that transit system.

Why should the transit system butt into the jurisdiction of the traditional government just because transit is built somewhere?

As a silly dystopia, imagine that a transit agency could grab revenue as you suggest it might. Then everything becomes a transit land grab.

> Like through taxes on the sale of the property

That just encourages corporate ownership of property (unless you mitigate that), but overall I don’t know why we’d disincentivize moving closer to a new workplace or into a smaller home once it will do for you.

It also disincentivizes speculation, which is just a flurry of repeated transactions.

Spec can be loooooong term, even longer than natural person

Perfect is not the enemy of good.

In a lot of places, due to tax revolts there are now property tax caps which effectively prevent this from happening.

Then the people have spoken. They can speak again and differently if they like.

Density yes, but more importantly 1) speed vs traveling by car, 2) starting and stopping in places people want to travel between, 3) safety, 4) real estate prices/regulation.

Density goes to number 1 (more traffic = better reason to use the subway) and 2 (more likely to be able to serve people’s desired trip)

5) Weather. If it's under -20 C or over 40 C, walking five blocks is unpleasant for anyone and dangerous for some. Especially if the walk is unsheltered, which it typically is.

People do have to walk from their cars too (for any city I've been to)

Also the shape of density.

A small city in a straight line along the coast is going to get a lot more mileage out of a single line than something spread out across a plain.

In the ideal scenario you build the subway or other transit when density is low and land is relatively cheap, and THEN you make it high density.

Doing it after the fact is much, much harder.

> In the ideal scenario you build the subway or other transit when density is low and land is relatively cheap, and THEN you make it high density

Do we have examples of this working? (Genuine question.)

Outside the US, there are many examples (Japan and China both do this).

In the US, I don't know specific examples, but you can definitely use a combination of policies (building public transit, zoning laws to encourage high density, making parts of the city more pedestrian-friendly - and generally less car-friendly) to encourage high density.

Definitely! Here’s a video with some discussion

https://youtu.be/MnyeRlMsTgI?t=667&si=g-xwXEjLPPobUkzy

There’s photos of subway stops in random fields in china that sometimes get laughs but in actuality china is just smart enough to build the subway and THEN the buildings.

Meanwhile Japanese rail companies own land where they build rail and can make more money on the land than on the trains

You don't decide to make things high density out of the blue. People have to WANT to live there.

Cheap + quick commute to downtown takes care of that.

There is only a downtown if there are jobs there.

Well yes, one clear indicator of that is where homes are expensive. Like in places with great transit and amenities.

Building a subway system after the city is so dense that it will be ridden by “enough” people is exactly the wrong way to create livable urban spaces.

Building a subway is the solution to inducing density, not responding to it.

If not a subway at least some form of transport that won't get stuck in gridlock. Three examples I can think of are the Wuppertal suspension railway, Las Vegas monorail (though more of a tourist pull than for the locals) and the dedicated Metrobus lanes in Mexico City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Monorail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs

What others have I missed?

(btw I never noticed before that HN can't handle UTF-8 chars in urls)

American cities of 500k people really don’t see gridlock though. Maybe a couple blocks downtown by the highway ramps thats it.

yes, but wikipedia can handle unaccented

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrobus

You missed Adelaide's O-Bahn, which is another way to mitigate the "buses get stuck in traffic" problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Bahn_Busway

This is fantastic. How do the locals experience a bus suddenly in the air? Does it feel safe?

They don't need silly suspension railways in most places. A tram line fits perfectly in 1 lane, so that would make it 2 lanes for both ways. US lanes are so wide that it's likely 2 tram rails fit in 1.5 road lanes, with a bit of extra room for wider sidewalks (sorely needed in most of the US), bike lanes (also sorely needed in most of the US) or just general greenery (hedges would do wonders for US urban landscapes...).

Of course this would require that the 3-4 lane stroads give up 2 of their carlanes so instead of doing the reasonable thing, building infrastructure costing 10x is almost universally preferred.

Heck, it doesn't even need to be a tram. BRTs are good enough for a lot of cases.

Well-done BRTs are probably the best thing you can get for cost/benefit. And you can subway them at points if you want, and if they get super popular you can put them on rails.

It's only a short stretch, running the length of I-495, but the XBL in the Lincoln Tunnel is a huge reason why people bother with the bus in northern NJ.

When I was commuting by bus, the inbound morning trip (with XBL) was 20-30 minutes, and the outbound evening trip (without XBL) was 30-45 minutes.

https://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/en/lincoln-tunnel/xbl...

In Chicago, the "L" network also has stretches that run down expressway medians, along with the elevated lines and the subway sections downtown.

Having lived in / visited a few dozen cities in Europe, I actually think trams are generally preferable to subways. In places with both, I tend to use the trams almost exclusively.

A hop on, hop off tram system is much quicker and efficient than going into a subway station, then back up, etc. At least if you aren’t going entirely across town.

Trams do need dedicated lanes.

Not necessarily. Unless I am misunderstanding what specifically is being referred to as a tram. In Portland, Oregon for example, we have small trains that run at street level and share lanes with automobile traffic.

Portland's trams don't move anywhere close to 35mph as the OP mentioned. Portland's trams are quite capacity constrained due to needing to navigate the short blocks and many intersections of downtown Portland. Dedicated travel cooridors where these trams could move at closer to 35mph would allow trips _through_ downtown to become competitive which currently are often not ideal.

The streetcars in Portland OR are useful on some routes but they're pretty much painfully slow around downtown.

Depends on the city, but in most places the lanes are wide enough that a tram-designated area isn’t really an issue. Even then, it wouldn’t be a horrible idea if an avenue (running north-south) or two in Manhattan had one less lane for cars and one more for trams.

> * trams are generally preferable to subways. In places with both, I tend to use the trams almost exclusively*

In towns with trams I've found Ubers almost always faster. That said, most American trams are at grade, so you get a bus that can't change lanes.

What makes for a more pleasant experience is not necessarily the optimal choice for commuters as subway wins over trams by close to an order of magnitude in terms of throughput.

In the city I grew up in during rush hour subway trains leave less than every two and a half minutes and pack well over a thousand commuters each. That is an impossible feat for even the best tram system, as they're limited both in vehicle and station length, not to mention speed, as you can't have 40 tonnes of metal hurtling at 80km/h through intersections.

Why can't you have trams travelling at 80km/h? That's around the max speed of some of the trams used in Europe.

Because pedestrians and drivers are idiots (or if you want to be nice, have lapses in judgement).

Whereas it is possible to have a subway where it’s completely impossible to get on the tracks without heavy equipment or the right keys.

Because at that speed its braking distance is close to 200 metres, so you need to separate such a vehicle from the rest of the traffic.

There exist implementations of this, but it's essentially a train with extra steps.

I disagree. Trams are too slow. They are not good for long tracks, like sub ways.

And also they have much less capacity than mass transit systems like a subway, so they are bad for most commuters who tend to travel at rush hour[1]. I guess they are great in tourist areas though.

[1] In my experience, at least in the cities where I have lived

Worse in the outskirts, but better in the town center if you can hop off every couple 100m without 2 escalators/staircases

You could argue trams are more romantic. That is probably the major advantage.

I'd argue there are some limited places where classical trams on the road make sense, like some down town district. But you get almost the same utility with busses, passenger flow per lane is lower with busses, for a lot less money.

If I’m going one, maybe two stops, a tram can be optimal if it’s already in front of me[1]. Otherwise the subway tends to win the curb to curb speed contest for me. It’s a little more traversing through the subway’s infrastructure and getting to the right platform and the right part of the platform, but I’ll get to my destination in less time and it’s not even close.

[1] Otherwise I have to check the Transit app on my phone and do some math factoring in the wait time and the time it takes me to get to the platform. The subway usually wins this contest too.

Trams are super slow. They take space on the road or need their own full lanes. It's much worse than a subway.

most us cities did have subways (or streetcars), then GM bought 'em all and shut them down. [0]

[0] Taken for a Ride - The U.S. History of the Assault on Public Transport in the Last Century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4&t=1590s

Did the US have any subways shut down? I know there are some metros like Cincinnati that abandoned an unfinished subway

> and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating

I think ours could go up to 50 or 60km/h, but the density of stations (can’t leave any blocks behind!), station dwell times and time for one transfer puts it at equal time to cycling for me in Toronto.

And my cycling route isn’t a more direct route (cuz our surface routes are largely a grid and we just replicated it underground instead of something more synergizing like a giant X).

A fun hobby of mine is to open up Paris on google maps and compare the cycling and transit times in their daytime between arbitrary points and cycling often wins. Theyre drunk on station density so you’re always close to one, but it means a lot of stopping.

Have you spent much time in ~500k cities? Many of them have a lot of sprawl and very little traffic.

With subway lines costing a billion dollars a mile that just makes no sense.

Where did you find that cost?

eDIT Looks like you are right for the US. In other countries it's apparently much cheaper.

https://www.hsrail.org/blog/why-transit-projects-cost-more-i...

> For example, the Purple Line in Los Angeles cost $800 million per mile. By international standards, the New York price tag is stratospheric: A project in Madrid cost $320 million per mile, and one in Paris cost just $160 million per mile.

Where would you put the subway line in Tucson, AZ?

I'm no city planner, but I would definitely connect the Amrtak station with the University of Arizona and on the other end make it reach the edge of downtown.

The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas but then again my city put a subway station in such a location and it serves a whopping fifteen hundred people daily - that's one subway car, but at the same time appropriately a thousand fewer cars on the road. Still worth it in my book.

> I'm no city planner, but I would definitely connect the Amrtak station with the University of Arizona and on the other end make it reach the edge of downtown.

I went to U. of A. and have absolutely never even heard of any student ever needing to go to the Amtrak station, for any reason. Not trying to be rude, but that smells like unthinkingly-applied urbanist ideology — thinking “trains are cool” and working backwards from there.

But sure, people do go to that area for nightlife, so let’s assume you said something like “Hotel Congress” instead of “the Amtrak station”. Still, that’s less than 3km from campus — even if there were no transit options, you could bike, walk, take a rental scooter or an uber.

But if none of those options work, fear not, there is already a streetcar that basically covers exactly your proposed route: https://www.suntran.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Sun-Link-... . So why would it make sense to spend a giant sum on a subway to replicate the streetcar over this tiny area?

> The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas

That’s my point. Your claim that any 500k city could benefit from a subway is wildly over-general. It entirely depends on the type of city.

I get where you're coming from as I have a lot of words to say to those urbanist ideologues and none of them are pleasant.

Main reason why I think subway is superior to anything, including trains riding on the surface, is that it doesn't get in the way of anything.

My current city is subject to a double whammy of a train and river system. The result is of course gridlock, as bridges have limited capacity and not all train crossings could be made into viaducts. Having a single subway line would greatly improve things, but alas - the city is in debt due to having built a football stadium which went way over budget.

That being said to me American cities stretch the definition of cities. If there's no functional difference between a district within city limits and a suburb, why bother with having a distinction? I mean, we have districts of detached houses in my corner of the world, but they're former villages absorbed by cities and are gradually being densified.

America never had city walls, so the density pressure provided by them is only found where natural rivers and other boundaries occur.

Subways are so expensive that we don’t see existing rail/tram lines being buried to reclaim land in some of the most valuable cities in the world.

What's the difference between a train underground and a subway?

In the evolution of English language usage the term "subway" is almost always associated with passenger transport by train.

A "train underground" my or may not have passengers .. the majority tonnage of trains in mine systems is ore transport, many such systems never carry passengers although, of course, some do at shift changes.

I get where you’re coming from, but I can’t think of a definition of “city” that would exclude Tucson. It’s a large, connected settlement of humans who don’t primarily live from the land.

For what it’s worth, Tucson does have suburbs, which are even less dense than Tucson (e.g. Oro Valley).

> Still worth it in my book.

I take it your book isn't an economics book?

Hard no: subway infrastructure is incredibly expensive and only makes sense for high density cities.

Moreover, with self driving electric cars, cities will see many of the benefits at far lower cost.

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