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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Many people see the busses as a distraction issue, but they're a lot more important than they seem at face value. They're basically a microcosm of how the social fabric of a city is structured. New York City can be justly criticized for its wealth inequality, but you have to give it one thing: it's a place where a managing director at JPM and a guy who works at the Starbucks in the building ride the same midtown subway or bus to work in the morning. And that's a start. Public infrastructure works best when everyone has a stake in it. It's bad to have the rich ride around in their own private shuttles, but it's also bad for the rich to bankroll public busses they never use. Neither is a path to building a sustainable, functioning city.

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Public infrastructure?

Perhaps they should start with toilets for the street urchins.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/us/06bcseats.html?pagewant...

http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/3758-why-is-there-so-m...

I'm pretty sure most managing directors at downtown banks aren't taking the subway or the bus too often. They get driven around, just not in shuttle buses.

This is like how Bloomberg would take the subway* once in a while.

*Get driven in his convoy from his house to the subway station.

Bloomberg would take the subway 10 stops about three days a week. He got driven to 59 street, skipping 2 stops, which is the nearest station that has express service on the 4. That's pretty legit.

John Paulson, the investor responsible for the single biggest trade in Wall St. history which netted him $4 billion personally, routinely took the public bus to his office.

Your rank-and-file MD isn't getting driven to work. He or she is taking Metro North from Westchester or LIRR from Long Island. There'a lot of people making $500k-5m in New York who take public transit or walk to work.

Driving from Westchester to Manhattan is 1.5 hour drive in slow-moving traffic to a city where parking is almost dollar a minute. Taking the train is 20 minutes, with bathrooms, often times wifi, and comfortable seats. Subway is usually about 35-45 minutes. Public transport is comfortable and saves time.

Attorneys, bankers, and businessmen routinely take BART/MUNI/public transport to their offices in downtown SF just like their secretaries do, yet MUNI still stinks and BART literally stinks.

NYC also has public transportation that's actually usable.

Infrastructure gets usable surprisingly fast when rich people rely on it. After hurricane sandy, metro north was back up in days, amazing considering all the track clearing repair and inspection involved. The line I rode was used by rich commuters coming in from Greenwich, as well as working class Hispanic immigrants from New Rochelle and Portchester. If it was just the latter group, I doubt the city would've acted so fast.

Was it an Amtrak line belonging to a single company with a single decision maker somewhere up the corporate chain?

Caltrain is financed by three counties it spans - San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara, all with their own budgets, schedules and current issues, coordinating anything expensive in regards to Caltrain would require coordinating everything with those counties.

Then if your project requires any personnel changes, you have to coordinate that with Amtrak, as Caltrain subcontracts their employees. Amtrak might or might not have the human resources.

No, it was Metro North's (a division of the NY MTA) own track, which spans several counties and two states. I don't doubt MTA is a more efficient organization than Caltrain, but that's also just a byproduct of rich people actually relying on the MTA and creating the political imperative to consolidate all the operations.

> Public infrastructure works best when everyone has a stake in it.

These are private busses. Not public ones. That's not public transportation.

> > Public infrastructure works best when everyone has a stake in it.

> These are private busses. Not public ones.

The busses aren't the infrastructure being used.

But the buses use far less infrastructure than if each employee drove themselves, or even if they all carpooled.

They are using public bus stops, and allegedly create traffic backups which is also an effect on public infrastructure. To what extent they impact traffic I don't know. I'm not saying whether there is a net gain/loss here, but there is an impact on the roadways.

If employees used their own car instead of the shuttle there would probably be more detrimental effects on the traffic.

In the short term. In the longer term, they'd be less likely to work in Mountain View and live in SF at all, which might offset that.

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