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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

No, they are forced to move to these areas because they want to have a bearable commute. Your solution is to jam everyone into a more confined area.

Another solution is to make commuting from a "long distance" (e.g. 60-120 miles) more bearable. In NYC, for instance, subways could be built to NJ.

Faster trains (low-speed maglevs) could be built like what's being done in China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR).

Mountain View to San Francisco is 40 miles. Is there some reason that isn't a 40 minute commute?

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The train part itself is 46 minutes if you take a bullet (red columns): http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/weekdaytimetable.html

That would only be your full commute, though, if you were doing deep SoMa to downtown Mountain View.

Yes, this seems to be very successful.

http://www.mercurynews.com/scott-herhold/ci_26809055/herhold...

We need more of this. I don't know where the low-hanging fruit is in mass transit, but a lot more could be done.

The Caltrain electrification project will further speed this trip since electric trains can accelerate and decelerate more rapidly. The full San Jose to SoMa trip should be roughly 16 minutes quicker based on impact studies.

Some 5 to 10% of Caltrains are delayed though, and if that delay happens to be a fatality, expect that train to be really late. (2011)

http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/__Agendas+and+Minutes/JPB/Boa...

Commuter trains have to stop and let people on and off.

Cities like Chicago have long distance commuter trains, but the commutes are still long. You can take a train from the near west side of Chicago to HArvard, IL (where Motorola built a huge campus and then abandoned it) in about an hour and 45 minutes. But it would be a 70 mile drive. But that skips over a bunch of farmland.

Chicago to Cary, IL would like SF to Mountain view. Train ride is 1:15 minutes. But then you need to get from the train stations to each door on both ends. Realistically its more like 1:45 door to door. People do it.

But living in a high rise is much more preferable to me.

I don't get why'd you make an low speed maglev.

> In NYC, for instance, subways could be built to NJ.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_%28rail_system%29

Yes? That's about 100 years old and not part of the NYC subway. It also requires you to leave and pay again on the NYC Subway. It's a great system, and about a 12 minute walk from my apartment, but not what I meant. Not sure where you're going with this?

Anyway, I was thinking more along the lines of extending the 7 to NJ.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/03/could_the_new_port_...

Enter the train at Secaucus, for example, then be able to go to Grand Central Station. Part of the hassle of mass transit is that if you need to make 3 transfers, and have to wait 10 minutes at each one, your commute gets long fast. Extending the NYC Subway in NJ would have several benefits, including reducing the slow crawl through the Lincoln tunnel, where almost 7000 busses cram in daily.

Sounds like you would have liked the new tunnel that Christie single-handedly killed in 2010

"ARC would have cut passenger transfers by 97 percent and taken an average 23 minutes off each trip, according to the GAO. It also would have been financed at historically low rates."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-06/christie-e...

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