>> In Germany, Britain, America, and France, the period of explosive growth of railways mainly took place in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
There's a curious European vs American distinction that the article doesn't address -- many modern, large American cities are younger than that.
Especially southern and western ones that grew up on rail lines.
There, the only thing that would be needed is the political will to fund and build new bypass, outside-the-city freight track to free up the contiguous in-city rights of way.
Yes that's one of the big distinctions.
Even American cities that existed then are drastically different and larger than they were back then.
I mean even in NYC in 1850s, 42nd street was practically "uptown" and what we now call "uptown" was farmland. Brooklyn & Queens which are now the population centers of NYC with ~2.5M residents each had a grand total of under 200K back then. At the time Manhattan had 500K residents (2.5x BK&QNS 200K) while it has 1.7M now (1/3 the ~5M across BK&QNS now).
So the population center even within our biggest city has completely shifted from the time our railroads were built out.
> Even American cities that existed then are drastically different and larger than they were back then.
Another major issue is the way transit authorities tend to be governed and funded in the US. They're often prone to political disagreements between cities and suburbs, or between city and state governments, or between multiple states. The two-party system doesn't exactly lead to coalition-building.
Take Philly for example: SEPTA regional rail has been through-running since the mid 80s, which is great, and the network is fairly well-aligned with population centers and employment centers. But year after year, SEPTA is consistently in a state of utter crisis, typically due to lack of funding.
I think another tension aside from the pure source of funding is just the whole transit philosophy differences.
In the US, at least in coastal cities, we sometimes seem more concerned that transit be cheap than that it be good. Transit in NYC is so cheap as to be almost free, especially considering something like 50% of bus riders beat the fare.
NYC subway fare is unlimited distance and about half the price of a London zone 1 fare. This is despite white collar jobs in NYC often paying 2x the equivalent London wage.
So instead of funding with usage fees at all (and say subsidizing/discounting for those in need), we just set ridiculously low fares and then try to go after higher incomes in the region with income tax levies, which is obviously unpopular.
Per BBC graphic / data provided by TfL for example, London Underground is 72% funded by fares vs 38% in NYC.
There’s a weird bipartisan agreement that spans the US, that transit should serve as welfare for the poor especially, instead of being transportation for the rich and poor alike.
I can think of a couple of factors that lead to this state. One is: what is the cost of trying to collect those lost fares, will it even pay for itself? The same reason library fines are sometimes stopped, it costs more to collect than they will get.
The other is that transportation money comes out of the same big bucket, it will cost too much to add lanes for cars, so they try to incentivize more people to take transit instead.
This kind of logic is backwards to me. And I think it creates a slippery slope of disorder. Enforcing laws is not always cost efficient, but the less you enforce the more get broken.
I see it applied to the concept of free buses in NYC where people argue that "when we introduced free buses, assaults on bus drivers went down".
Personally I'd prefer not riding the bus next to a guy who is willing to commit assault over $2.90 (or $1.45 if eligible for income based discount if you make minimum wage.. so 6 minutes of labor income).
There may be good reasons for free transit, but "we need to calm the violent guys down enough to get onto the bus peacefully" ain't it!
This kind of excuse-making for bad behavior always baffles me. It's not like we can have a functioning government if the only regulations and laws it can enforce are against violent behavior.
One example that always depresses me is going into a store in an area with a lot of shoplifting. There are stores near me that have so little issue with it that hunting ammo is literally just sitting out on shelves where anyone can grab it, and yet drive half an hour in the other direction to the nearest metro city and the pharmacies have to keep so many items behind locked glass cabinets to deter theft.
Turns out, people are plenty good at being criminals on their own.
New York is pretty unique because of the way the MTA works. It’s public authority created by merging a bunch of public authorities created by the infamous Robert Moses with the then-destitute NYC transit and the commuter rail portions hacked off the the corpse of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads.
The MTA board is controlled by the governor of the state. This is key because the capital, and most state jobs, are in provincial Albany. The people and cash are in NYC. So MTA is a valuable political tool for patronage.
On the operational side, you also have the TWU (transit workers union) and other unions which are competent and active they aggressively vacuum any money they can. On the capital side, you a whole ecosystem of unions, contractors and various interests who want a vig from the massive MTA capital budget. You have MWBE contractors, some real, some not so much. You have insane bidding rules with multiple prime contractors, weird wage tables, contractural minimum staffing, etc.
Also remember these institutions are old by American standards. The Long Island Rail Road is one of the (if not the) oldest operating railroads in the country. That means old stuff, engineering debt and weird legacy processes.
As an example, when they bored tunnels a few years ago, 50-60 workers were “manning” a TBM. In Paris at the same time with the same machine… 12.
It adds up. Everyone knows it’s a shitshow, which is why many people DNGAF about fare evasion. The cops only care about it as mining operation for overtime. If some dude is making $90/hr for 30 fake laborers, why are you hassling a 17 year old for $3? The $500 ticket costs $2500 in NYPD labor.
Right, the MTA & governor who funds it care more about the TWU/LIRR union/contractors/etc, as a contiguous voting block than they do about the actual riders. The act of spending money for them is the objective, and a form of patronage. Whether it is well spent, or leads to good outcomes is besides the point.
So the spigot of money is sporadic, and everything we spend on is overpriced / not necessarily the right project for riders.
It’s one of those road to hell is paved with good intentions scenarios. If I buy lunch in Poughkeepsie, I contribute as much as a subway rider to the MTA’s coffers.
Frankly the rider is the least important stakeholder. The state would probably save money if it just refused passengers and ran it like a model railroad.
Yep this is what happened in my home city in india as well. Our property which my ancestors purchased for dirt cheap on the outskirts of the city is now smack in the center and valued higher. Populations have also shifted.
We always had a good train network around here. When the shift happened though, the "hub" stations have not really moved. Today the main stations are still where the old center of town was. As a result, taking the train for me is a bit like going to the airport you're gonna have to take a 30min trip(without traffic) and 60min trip(with traffic) or a 30min metro (crowded) or a 45min (but less punctual and gets full too often) bus/suburban train to reach the station.
As I type this, the city keeps expanding on one side, so in a decade's time, there will be a new city center, closer to the airport, but further and further away from the hub station. I'll have to wait and see if they change the hub station to a more central one at that point.
Not just increased in price, but the area is now filled with NIMBYs who would benefit and yet will whinge .. therefore immobilizing any attempt to improve transit.
Way back in the 20th century, Boston's passenger rail service coalesced into two mostly independent systems; a rail network north of the city, servicing the northern suburbs, and the same in the south. The southern system was the northern terminus of the intercity passenger railroad system to New York and beyond. These systems are seperated by about a mile of dense urbanization.
There was discussion during the planning of the "Big Dig" infrastructure project of the 1990s to join these systems via a tunnel, but this was rejected due to the technical complexity, and more importantly, the cost, with the politicial battle around the project as a whole.
We could have had, for example, through service between Lowell and Providence, or between Newburyport and Worcester. Amtrak could have continued the Northeast Corridor into Maine.
I think this stuff is too common in the united states. I think of bart/caltrain/amtrak/busses/etc. It seems like it was only recently that bart reached an airport.
sort of reminds me of shipping before container ships, where you had to have freight forwarders to get stuff through the morass of trucks, trains, and ships, each with their own politics/unions/finances stepping in the way.
The politics of different means of transportation, with different systems just runs into enough of these barriers to self-limit their own use. and we end up being a nation of cars.
I was a Londoner for 20 years and Thameslink (north to south through running discussed in the article) always felt special but I'd never looked into its history. To be able to get on a 'proper train' in Brixton and then run right through to Kentish Town or Luton was kindof amazing. And it was very fast, I'd try and incorporate it into journeys where possible. Like, if you were going somewhere and realised you could do it via Thameslink it felt like a bonus.
Crossrail (aka Elizabeth line) was being talked about or built the whole two decades I lived there but opened after I left.
If anyone's interested, there's a massive project in Munich to expand capacity, improve performance, and reduce journey times on the suburban lines that run through the centre:
> To upgrade the S-Bahn system and to reduce the traffic burden on the existing core line, two new tracks will be built parallel to it between the stations of Laim in the west of the city and Leuchtenbergring in the east, covering a total of about 10 kilometres. The core of the new east-west connection is a 7-kilometre tunnel linking Munich's main station Hauptbahnhof with the eastern hub Ostbahnhof.
jahahaha, you should have also mentioned that zwei Stammstrecke will make it horrible long to switch from platform 1 to platform 2, through elevators 40m up + down on each side, forcing you to go completely upwards, and then going down again.
Apart from fire security, most people will just hate it :-)
> zwei Stammstrecke will make it horrible long to switch from platform 1 to platform 2, through elevators 40m up + down on each side, forcing you to go completely upwards, and then going down again
Are the connections between the faster and the slower lines going to be equally bad at all five connection points (Laim, Hbf, Marienhof or -platz, Ostbahnhof and Leuchtenbergring)?
There’s a little-used alternative to through-running as described in TFA, which is to turn trains around in an underground loop in the city centre and send them out again, usually on the same line they came from. This is done in Sydney (1920s) and Melbourne (1970s).
In the case of Melbourne, the design was chosen because of the extremely lop-sided development of the city, whose centre (“the city”) lies at the head of a bay, with most of the population and population growth to the south and east of the city in the 1970s. This is true to a lesser extent in Sydney, bearing in mind that its city loop was designed before the Harbour Bridge was built.
Melbourne’s current through-running project, the Metro Tunnel, appears in the first table, but it doesn’t belong in the second table of cities which could greatly benefit from future through-running projects. All 16 lines can access the city loop (which has 4 parallel tunnels). Due to capacity constraints, most of the time one of those 16 lines terminates at a main city station, and two others through run with each other. The Metro Tunnel will relieve the city loop, similar to the Munich trunk amplification project described in TFA; once it opens all lines will either through-run or go around a loop.
Locals are used to the City Loop but some visitors find it hard to navigate. Each line runs either clockwise or anticlockwise. For historical reasons two of the four loops still reverse direction in the middle of the day.
It’s true that a further through-running tunnel (Metro Tunnel 2) and conversion of two of the four City Loop tunnels to through-running (City Loop Reconfiguration) appeared on the long-range plans from 2012. But these are not required yet; the city is building three other major rail projects first.
Through running in Tokyo is next level. You can catch a train from the airport, which then turns into a subway, then later on it becomes a train again.
> a train from the airport, which then turns into a subway, then later on it becomes a train again.
This is confusing.
Subway is already a kind of train.
You mean to say that the train partly runs underground? That is pretty common. I actually can't remember any city where airport connecting train does not do the same at some point or another.
What's kinda interesting is does that train classify as metro transit that goes slightly beyond city to airport and such (making many stops all the way) or distance intercity train that happens to stop both at airport and city? Or does it change this classification? That would be actually unusual.
What they mean is that you have many different train operators who run different portions on the track as independent lines, but seamlessly, without connections, your train will become another line’s train when you reach the border stations.
For example, let’s say you are going from Motomachi Chukagai to Kawagoe, try plugging this into Google Maps - you board the Minatomirai line, then once you reach Yokohama, without getting off your seat you are now on the Tokyu Toyoko line, then again at Shibuya it becomes the Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin line, then again at Wakoshi it becomes the Tobu Tojo line.
4 different train operators maintained and run by 4 different companies with their own rolling stock and drivers, but they share access to the track and trains, they interoperate, and it just feels like one train with no dip in service quality. Many lines here do this.
The difference is in the mode of service. “Trains”/“railways” run less-frequent service over longer distances, with stations often spaced further apart and certain runs that may skip stations. You typically schedule your trip based on the train’s schedule. “Subway”/“metro” service is typically frequent enough that you can just show up and ride. Outside of Tokyo, the seating arrangements are usually different, with “trains” employing transverse seating and “subways” using longitudinal seating.
> > What's kinda interesting is does that train classify as metro transit that goes slightly beyond city to airport and such (making many stops all the way) or distance intercity train that happens to stop both at airport and city? Or does it change this classification? That would be actually unusual
Also, about this part:
> You typically schedule your trip based on the train’s schedule.
Many counterexamples to that around East Asia (and probably Europe?). Trains are frequent enough that you just come most of the day. Apart from late hours when it is the same for both metro and distance trains, you have to know when they depart because both become rare and you can be late for the last one.
I’m speaking specifically about my lived experience using through-running services in Tokyo. Since your questions in this thread reveal that you lack familiarity with this service plan, I encourage you to visit Japan sometime and experience it yourself.
Turns out, I am intimately familiar with this service plan. There are metro trains with more frequent stops and service and there are distance trains with rarer stops (and yes, rarer service, the degree of which varies by country). What is new that I am missing?
Do you defend the subway vs. train terminology? Sometimes distance trains run underground, sometimes metro trains run overground, so it seems pretty pointless to me.
Most subways have move above ground sections than underground. That is why the article uses the term "metro" not subway - it better describes something useful about the system. A Metro is a system that runs completely separate from other traffic - this forces bridges or tunnels where other traffic needs to cross it.
Not in Tokyo. All but the first two of Tokyo’s subway lines run on overhead wires. In fact they had to build most of the subway lines to suburban rail standards because they planned on operating through services in the beginning.
Really depends on the region and any pre-existing constraints at the time of electrification. A better distinction is probably rapid transit (metro, subway, the Tube, MTR/MRT) vs commuter rail.
Apparently in the US there are trains that use dual rail and overhead power, one for subway and another for overground portions.
I suppose a subway train with rail only supply that goes overground sometimes is more dangerous because it is easier to accidentally step on a rail and rail is powered?
Once upon a time you could take a train on the Chicago loop, ride it through the countryside at 90mph, and end up on the streets of Milwaukee like a streetcar.
Ah, the Asakusa line, which has through running on either end to the Keikyu and Keisei lines. Together they form the only directly rail link between Tokyo’s two airports.
The best part is when you get on a through-running trains in Tokyo and the route map in the train has no Tokyo stops listed on it. Signage has gotten better in recent years, at the cost of complexity:
That 1943 map of proposed through-running routes for London...
Anyone who lives on the outskirts of London near a big commuter station knows that pain: 15 minutes to get into the centre, and another 25 to get anywhere else.
In the UK outside London, a journey via a 'metro' (suburban railway), a tram and a bus could well require the purchase of three separate tickets at a significant premium over sticking to one mode of transport even if less efficient. I would suggest a move to single tickets within urban areas. That would allow multimodal travel - if the tram is in and the train is delayed just hop on the tram.
I lived in Santiago Chile over a decade ago, and took a lot of transit. I really liked their bip! card system that gives you two free or really cheap transfers within 2 hours of your first scan. It wasn't distance based or anything like that. Looks like they have peak rating now(I don't remember if they did back then), but it's not super expensive.
Auckland has an almost finished through running project in its city centre, which will greatly improve its railway network. It currently has only one terminus in the city, but trains from one side (the west) have to do an awkward dog leg around the city centre, including a reversal.
Brussels got its through running project in 1952, a 6 track tunnel under its city centre between North and South (aka Midi) stations. That was back when disruption and demolishing things were just things that happened, and it is one of the reasons why ‘brusselization’ is a word. By now operates near its max capacity of 96 trains per hour.
One problem I've encountered in Munich is they essentially have a single trunk that runs through the centre. In the case of problems on one line you can often find multiple other lines are also affected. London always seems to have a redundancy in the case of a line being unusable.
I suppose this is more a problem of sharing track than through running, but I just found it funny to see Munich public transport described so positively.
> I just found it funny to see Munich public transport described so positively
Been living in Munich for the past 9 years, with the exception of the S-Bahn, it's still very good. I've never felt the need to own a car (only the occasional rental for moving or trips to more remote areas). Anecdotally, I know colleagues and friends who also make do without one, even those with kids.
Only city I've experienced better is Singapore (where I lived for ~7 years), though people complain all the same :D
In an airport, people complained that luggage delivery was so slow after landings. Airport measured the time, agreed with passengers and increased workforce to reduce waiting times substantially, but the complaints didn't reduce.
Instead, they routed passengers through a longer path, so their luggage was waiting for them when they arrived, and nobody complained about the longer walk.
I've never formally complained about luggage arrival delays, but I have definitely noticed long walks. Some ridiculously so. I suppose I should complain, but to whom?
Your airline, to bug them to land to a gate closer to luggage hall (which might cost them more), and to the airport operator, to don't make especially convoluted paths to mask other operational delays (if there are).
OTOH, you can't make things easier if the airport is really big. e.g.: Rome, New York, Amsterdam (to an extent) and Istanbul.
I fly mostly out of DFW, which is just a complete shitshow. Atlanta is much better for luggage delivery for international arrivals but you still have long-ass walks to get to the immigration hall.
> London always seems to have a redundancy in the case of a line being unusable.
The London underground is indeed a redundant spiderweb. But the article focuses more on mainline trains, which are much more constrained.
The only way right through central London for these trains was north-to-south, the Snow Hill tunnel: Kings Cross -> Farringdon -> City Thameslink -> Blackfriars -> South of the river. This can only be a bottleneck.
But now there is the Elizabeth line east-to-west as well.
It might be nice on paper, but I think that in the Munich implementation there are quite some issues given that there is only a single track connecting Pasing (basically Munich West) to Munich East. In the last years almost every weekend there is maintenance work on the tracks, which introduces issues and doubles the time you need to move to the center. When a track is suddenly blocked, and this happens ~once a quarter, all the S-Bahn trains are blocked and you'll need a lot of patience to get back home. I wonder how it'd be with a more decentralized system where there are 2/3 ways to reach the edges of the city and not a single track
People have no idea how much cars benefited the lower and created the middle class.
Instead of having an hour commute to move a few miles, you could have a half hour commute to move 30 miles.
This made land ownership possible for this group of people. Low value land that was too far from work was now usable for those same jobs.
Whenever I see propositions of removing lanes from freeways, I think how that benefits only rich people and landlords. I can afford to live near my company because I'm well-off, but I know plenty of people making 40-60k/yr that have plots of land 30-60 minutes from their jobs. They would otherwise be renting apartments 1/3 of the size of their home.
>This made land ownership possible for this group of people. Low value land that was too far from work was now usable for those same jobs.
The same is the case with public transport where available and where the city is built to support it. Which is what the poor people and rising middle class used -- especially as they didn't afford a car until the 1930s (and in places like New York not even then, though they still managed to turn from piss poor Italian, Jewish, Greek, Bulgarian, Irish, etc immigrants to middle class).
I've lived 40km from my office, commuting by bicycle (there was an highway and a railway available as well). I was super fit at the time. I've lived 100km from my office, taking a mix of train + bicycle. Despite being a wee bit slower than using a car, I could do something ( or sleep/nap) in the train, so that was better time spent.
Anyway you look at it, even when it is faster, using a car in an area that has decent public transport is a time that is not well spent over different modes of transportation and you don't really gain time if you think of it thorously.
40km is more like a 1h20m-1h40m ride on a slightly above average pace (25km/h-30km/h), it shouldn't take 2h40m to ride 40km even on a very slow pace (15km/h).
> People have no idea how much cars benefited the lower and created the middle class.
Many lower class and even middle class jobs involve physical labor (or even just standing all day). Then they replied, essentially, that they didn’t need cars, they could bike.
So I assumed they also had a job involving physical labor as opposed to their comment being totally out of touch. Biking is a lot more palatable when you have a cushy office job (maybe even with a shower).
If you look at reality, the people biking and walking to work the most are lower class and include physical labor. Migrants working in the fields, construction sites (at least to a pick up point)...
The lower class cannot even afford gasoline and car maintenance.
That heavily depends on where you’re looking, at least in the US.
> The lower class cannot even afford gasoline and car maintenance.
Carpools. It’s why at a job site you might see only 3 cars even though there’s 10-15 guys working there. They’re either arriving together or getting dropped off/picked up by friends or family.
Never in my life have I seen a bike parked at a construction site.
If you look at reality, the people going to work the most are lower class.
Very few workplaces are made up of a majority of upper class people.
With respect to bike riders, there's a lycra clad group who are largely all middle to upper class, they simply don't make up a majority. But they are visible.
> With respect to bike riders, there's a lycra clad group who are largely all middle to upper class, they simply don't make up a majority. But they are visible.
These are only a fraction of people using bikes.
50 miles distance from workplace means around 80km. Both ways, 5 days a week that is around 800km which is pretty much the range of my car. I have to spend around 80€ to fill up the tank. No way lower class people can afford spending 80€/week 300€/month on gasoline only to go to work. That is not counting maintenance, insurance, yearly inspection. This is pure luxury. Even I with a decent income would not commute daily by car as it is just throwing money out of the window.
This is one of those things that works up to a point, and then scaling goes in reverse once everybody starts doing it. You can't maintain 60mph commute. In London the average speed is more like 10mph. There's no way to move enough people in and out on a daily basis without everyone packing into trains.
> Instead of having an hour commute to move a few miles, you could have a half hour commute to move 30 miles.
Traveling faster than what the human body is capable of on its own feels like time travel to me. Horse, buggy, car, whatever... like stepping into or activating a warp bubble where your consciousness arrives at a place faster than humanly possible. Similarly, having access to information or experience (different manners of vehicles) is potentially a huge advantage or major pitfall. (Perhaps why some ancient maps indicate, "here be dragons!")
Inversely, moving slow when others are traveling fast allows you to witness where those paths lead without having to go down proverbial rabbit holes.
"you could have a half hour commute to move 30 miles."
Well unless half a million people try to commute along you during the same rush hour, with their commute ending in the wider centre of an old city which cannot absorb all the cars.
In Prague it is quite common to spend half an hour to cross the outer 25 miles of your journey and spend another half an hour in the traffic jam of the last 5 miles.
If it wasn't for the suburban trains and buses which alleviate the pressure, that last 5 miles would be one huge gridlock moving at the speed of a slow walk.
> People have no idea how much cars benefited the lower and created the middle class.
Yes, and with reference to London, one of the cities discussed, cars are now literally poisoning us.
> The most economically disadvantaged are often those worst affected by air pollution, particularly because they often live in less desirable locations, such as near busy roads. But they are conversely least likely to own a car or use them as much and therefore emit the least pollution.
I don't see how having a decent public transportation network is any different.
I live in a suburb of Stockholm, 15km away from the city centre but it takes me only some 35 min to get to the central station on the metro, I have the option to take a 10 min bus to the nearest rail station that connects me to a different part of the city so if I need to go there I can choose the commuter train. Not only that but I do get local trains taking me to different towns southwards, also a direct connection to the airport and other towns northwards, and a connection to the long distance rail that can take me to the other coast, or south to Malmö/Copenhagen.
My suburb only exists because the metro station was built here, around the station there's a small centre with shops for daily needs, all of that was designed prior the existence of residential buildings to support the city's expansion, around the station are the higher-density buildings with apartments while I live some 5-10 min away in a townhouse; and this suburb is considered a poorer area of the Stockholm metropolitan region, not requiring a car was a must.
It benefited business owners more than anything... wasting hours of your life in a fucking cage you probably pay a loan and interests on because without it you wouldn't even be honoured to slave your life away isn't anywhere close to "benefiting the lower class". Car is freedom, war is peace... people can't even tell how brainwashed they are by the car industry.
There are people taking the high speed train from places such as Dijon every day to go to Paris. That is a +300km commute in 1h40 that would take around 3h30 to 4h by car with no traffic jam.
This is true. The rich would like to relegate the poors to public transportation to keep the roads clear and keep undesirables out of their neighborhoods.
The "that's an advantage for the rich" has an easy fix: ban all city traffic except commercial vehicles for delivery of goods, ambulances, etc.
A good public transport is a boon to the poor and even middle class. In Europe, in cities where it's available, even the rich (the top 10%-5%, not the top 0.01%) routinely take it.
We do need to do something about the "holiday conundrum", for lack of a better name. That it, there are times during the year, most notably around Christmas, where suddenly everyone in the city gets time off and wants to travel to visit their family out in the middle of nowhere - and that also includes the operators of public and commercial transportation networks. You have a sudden influx of commuters at the same time as transport service capacity drops to a fraction of the normal.
Not sure how to handle this short of abolishing holidays entirely
(Not necessarily a bad idea - too many things in society already run in synch where they shouldn't; see e.g. most people working 9-5, including services all those people need, so there's e.g. no good time to go to a dentist or visit a bank without taking a day off at work.)
There's a saying to the effect that a healthy society is not one where poor people can afford cars, but one where rich people take mass transit willingly.
Yup. And a big part of it that a lot of HNers don't seem to want to hear is that to get rich people to want to take mass transit, you need to strictly enforce against anti-social behavior. Treating the subway as a shelter or being menacing or foul-smelling should get you swiftly ejected.
This is being discussed in Prague, but it is going to be very expensive.
The city is very much not-flat, with significant altitude differences, a lot of already existing infrastructure under the surface (three extant lines of metro with fourth one being built, some road tunnels, parking spaces etc.), and a major river must be crossed. Plus, the rocks underneath are fractured and finicky. It isn't a nice big slab of granite, but a mixture of sediments, water and various primordial rocks. Quite hellish to put tunnels into.
So why aren't they simply doing dedicated roads for transport?
With AI platooning and supervised self driving, "trains" of busses can run along those lines, but split off and merge in from local service seamlessly.
Commercial traffic (even through traffic) can piggyback on low traffic periods.
In emergencies, they are additional roads for evac or supply.
Roads are much more easily repaired and fail less catastrophically.
Electrification of busses is well underway and should be simpler / cheaper for recharging infrastructure.
Platooned "trains" of busses will conserve energy and likely could go 100 mph or more with proper convergent sensors monitoring and maintenance.
Safety should be equivalent.
I suspect there are political nuances where rail gets its own budget apart from roads, whereas dedicated roads get thrown it with general road funding, and then wouldn't get proper funding.
I'm not sure that's true for HS2. In practice the UK builds occasional new roads and very rarely new rail. Crossrail and Thameslink are exceptions that took decades to get approved.
Who said anything about cars? I guess you are validating my opinion that this isn't politically possible because mentally people immediately assume a road means free access by moms in minivans.
Well if you said 'road' and stressed that it was not a public road but a road with specific rules about what could go on it, that would probably get the message across. Your chosen phrase 'dedicated road for transport' doesn't convey that very well. Everything is transport.
Per mile isn't the right metric in cities, where you need to consider throughput.
Guided busways exist, but as far as I know nobody's doing platooning yet? Edinburgh had a guided busway for a few years but eventually built a tram over it because buses couldn't manage the throughput.
Is this freeway stat per lane-mile? Rail often has 2 sets of tracks along a corridor, or at most 4. Roads have a lot more.
I'm guessing even a busy/congested freeway has a greater throughput per lane than transit; even with automobiles with only 1-2 people in it, vs a train that may have hundreds but pass only every few minutes at most.
One problem with roads is that once you get off the freeway, you need more roads to serve housing and businesses; and the size of those leaf nodes pushes businesses and houses all further apart from each other, necessitating MORE road trips and decreasing walkability.
your unsourced numbers for roads are wrong and at best representative of a rural area single lane mile not a 4 lane highway. Here are some better numbers for different places and types of roads:
Imagine if Elon had put all that money to work on mass transit solutions instead of cars for each and every person, along with tunnels for those cars. Of course, you will never make the same riches, but interesting to imagine how different the impact might be.
Arguably the Hyperloop was publicized specifically for the opposite: to stoke opposition to traditional high speed rail, while at the same time knowing it is completely impractical.
True, but I don't regard that as an original Musk idea. It's been done before elsewhere and, to a lesser extent, done before in the US. He's not even the first racist head of a US car company, that was Henry Ford.
I foresee in the near future, in addition to the archive.is link (which is not needed here thankfully), a summary.is link will be present (which is needed here unfortunately).
It’s an okay article but there’s no real magic to it. It amounts to wordy trivia and you spend your time reading it as I have at your peril. Zero-calorie content is easily forgotten.
>> In Germany, Britain, America, and France, the period of explosive growth of railways mainly took place in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
There's a curious European vs American distinction that the article doesn't address -- many modern, large American cities are younger than that.
Especially southern and western ones that grew up on rail lines.
There, the only thing that would be needed is the political will to fund and build new bypass, outside-the-city freight track to free up the contiguous in-city rights of way.
Yes that's one of the big distinctions. Even American cities that existed then are drastically different and larger than they were back then.
I mean even in NYC in 1850s, 42nd street was practically "uptown" and what we now call "uptown" was farmland. Brooklyn & Queens which are now the population centers of NYC with ~2.5M residents each had a grand total of under 200K back then. At the time Manhattan had 500K residents (2.5x BK&QNS 200K) while it has 1.7M now (1/3 the ~5M across BK&QNS now).
So the population center even within our biggest city has completely shifted from the time our railroads were built out.
> Even American cities that existed then are drastically different and larger than they were back then.
Another major issue is the way transit authorities tend to be governed and funded in the US. They're often prone to political disagreements between cities and suburbs, or between city and state governments, or between multiple states. The two-party system doesn't exactly lead to coalition-building.
Take Philly for example: SEPTA regional rail has been through-running since the mid 80s, which is great, and the network is fairly well-aligned with population centers and employment centers. But year after year, SEPTA is consistently in a state of utter crisis, typically due to lack of funding.
I think another tension aside from the pure source of funding is just the whole transit philosophy differences.
In the US, at least in coastal cities, we sometimes seem more concerned that transit be cheap than that it be good. Transit in NYC is so cheap as to be almost free, especially considering something like 50% of bus riders beat the fare.
NYC subway fare is unlimited distance and about half the price of a London zone 1 fare. This is despite white collar jobs in NYC often paying 2x the equivalent London wage.
So instead of funding with usage fees at all (and say subsidizing/discounting for those in need), we just set ridiculously low fares and then try to go after higher incomes in the region with income tax levies, which is obviously unpopular.
Per BBC graphic / data provided by TfL for example, London Underground is 72% funded by fares vs 38% in NYC.
There’s a weird bipartisan agreement that spans the US, that transit should serve as welfare for the poor especially, instead of being transportation for the rich and poor alike.
I can think of a couple of factors that lead to this state. One is: what is the cost of trying to collect those lost fares, will it even pay for itself? The same reason library fines are sometimes stopped, it costs more to collect than they will get.
The other is that transportation money comes out of the same big bucket, it will cost too much to add lanes for cars, so they try to incentivize more people to take transit instead.
This kind of logic is backwards to me. And I think it creates a slippery slope of disorder. Enforcing laws is not always cost efficient, but the less you enforce the more get broken.
I see it applied to the concept of free buses in NYC where people argue that "when we introduced free buses, assaults on bus drivers went down".
Personally I'd prefer not riding the bus next to a guy who is willing to commit assault over $2.90 (or $1.45 if eligible for income based discount if you make minimum wage.. so 6 minutes of labor income).
There may be good reasons for free transit, but "we need to calm the violent guys down enough to get onto the bus peacefully" ain't it!
Criminalizing behavior creates criminals.
Riding the bus is a far less violent act then driving a car. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish.
This kind of excuse-making for bad behavior always baffles me. It's not like we can have a functioning government if the only regulations and laws it can enforce are against violent behavior.
One example that always depresses me is going into a store in an area with a lot of shoplifting. There are stores near me that have so little issue with it that hunting ammo is literally just sitting out on shelves where anyone can grab it, and yet drive half an hour in the other direction to the nearest metro city and the pharmacies have to keep so many items behind locked glass cabinets to deter theft.
Turns out, people are plenty good at being criminals on their own.
New York is pretty unique because of the way the MTA works. It’s public authority created by merging a bunch of public authorities created by the infamous Robert Moses with the then-destitute NYC transit and the commuter rail portions hacked off the the corpse of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads.
The MTA board is controlled by the governor of the state. This is key because the capital, and most state jobs, are in provincial Albany. The people and cash are in NYC. So MTA is a valuable political tool for patronage.
On the operational side, you also have the TWU (transit workers union) and other unions which are competent and active they aggressively vacuum any money they can. On the capital side, you a whole ecosystem of unions, contractors and various interests who want a vig from the massive MTA capital budget. You have MWBE contractors, some real, some not so much. You have insane bidding rules with multiple prime contractors, weird wage tables, contractural minimum staffing, etc.
Also remember these institutions are old by American standards. The Long Island Rail Road is one of the (if not the) oldest operating railroads in the country. That means old stuff, engineering debt and weird legacy processes.
As an example, when they bored tunnels a few years ago, 50-60 workers were “manning” a TBM. In Paris at the same time with the same machine… 12.
It adds up. Everyone knows it’s a shitshow, which is why many people DNGAF about fare evasion. The cops only care about it as mining operation for overtime. If some dude is making $90/hr for 30 fake laborers, why are you hassling a 17 year old for $3? The $500 ticket costs $2500 in NYPD labor.
Right, the MTA & governor who funds it care more about the TWU/LIRR union/contractors/etc, as a contiguous voting block than they do about the actual riders. The act of spending money for them is the objective, and a form of patronage. Whether it is well spent, or leads to good outcomes is besides the point.
So the spigot of money is sporadic, and everything we spend on is overpriced / not necessarily the right project for riders.
It’s one of those road to hell is paved with good intentions scenarios. If I buy lunch in Poughkeepsie, I contribute as much as a subway rider to the MTA’s coffers.
Frankly the rider is the least important stakeholder. The state would probably save money if it just refused passengers and ran it like a model railroad.
It's very akin to ad-funded web properties. Riders / users are not the customers, and priorities flow from there.
You may enjoy this video showing the expansion of NYC over time from the first Dutch settlement to the present day: https://youtu.be/f6U7YFPrz6Y
1842 is at 2:55 in the video.
Yep this is what happened in my home city in india as well. Our property which my ancestors purchased for dirt cheap on the outskirts of the city is now smack in the center and valued higher. Populations have also shifted.
We always had a good train network around here. When the shift happened though, the "hub" stations have not really moved. Today the main stations are still where the old center of town was. As a result, taking the train for me is a bit like going to the airport you're gonna have to take a 30min trip(without traffic) and 60min trip(with traffic) or a 30min metro (crowded) or a 45min (but less punctual and gets full too often) bus/suburban train to reach the station.
As I type this, the city keeps expanding on one side, so in a decade's time, there will be a new city center, closer to the airport, but further and further away from the hub station. I'll have to wait and see if they change the hub station to a more central one at that point.
Transit is one place where I'll say authoritarianism and central planning are superior.
The laissez faire model of urban planning sucks, because it acquires necessary infrastructure after the land needed has already increased in price.Not just increased in price, but the area is now filled with NIMBYs who would benefit and yet will whinge .. therefore immobilizing any attempt to improve transit.
Way back in the 20th century, Boston's passenger rail service coalesced into two mostly independent systems; a rail network north of the city, servicing the northern suburbs, and the same in the south. The southern system was the northern terminus of the intercity passenger railroad system to New York and beyond. These systems are seperated by about a mile of dense urbanization.
There was discussion during the planning of the "Big Dig" infrastructure project of the 1990s to join these systems via a tunnel, but this was rejected due to the technical complexity, and more importantly, the cost, with the politicial battle around the project as a whole.
We could have had, for example, through service between Lowell and Providence, or between Newburyport and Worcester. Amtrak could have continued the Northeast Corridor into Maine.
I think this stuff is too common in the united states. I think of bart/caltrain/amtrak/busses/etc. It seems like it was only recently that bart reached an airport.
sort of reminds me of shipping before container ships, where you had to have freight forwarders to get stuff through the morass of trucks, trains, and ships, each with their own politics/unions/finances stepping in the way.
The politics of different means of transportation, with different systems just runs into enough of these barriers to self-limit their own use. and we end up being a nation of cars.
> It seems like it was only recently that bart reached an airport.
How recently is recently?
BART’s SFO station opened June 2003, and the OAK station opened November 2014.
I was a Londoner for 20 years and Thameslink (north to south through running discussed in the article) always felt special but I'd never looked into its history. To be able to get on a 'proper train' in Brixton and then run right through to Kentish Town or Luton was kindof amazing. And it was very fast, I'd try and incorporate it into journeys where possible. Like, if you were going somewhere and realised you could do it via Thameslink it felt like a bonus.
Crossrail (aka Elizabeth line) was being talked about or built the whole two decades I lived there but opened after I left.
If anyone's interested, there's a massive project in Munich to expand capacity, improve performance, and reduce journey times on the suburban lines that run through the centre:
https://www.2.stammstrecke-muenchen.de/home.html
> To upgrade the S-Bahn system and to reduce the traffic burden on the existing core line, two new tracks will be built parallel to it between the stations of Laim in the west of the city and Leuchtenbergring in the east, covering a total of about 10 kilometres. The core of the new east-west connection is a 7-kilometre tunnel linking Munich's main station Hauptbahnhof with the eastern hub Ostbahnhof.
jahahaha, you should have also mentioned that zwei Stammstrecke will make it horrible long to switch from platform 1 to platform 2, through elevators 40m up + down on each side, forcing you to go completely upwards, and then going down again. Apart from fire security, most people will just hate it :-)
(Source: Projektplan / SZ.de)
I'd not really considered connections or which trains which run in which track/tunnel once it's finished(!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_line_2_(Munich_S-Bahn)#/...
> zwei Stammstrecke will make it horrible long to switch from platform 1 to platform 2, through elevators 40m up + down on each side, forcing you to go completely upwards, and then going down again
Are the connections between the faster and the slower lines going to be equally bad at all five connection points (Laim, Hbf, Marienhof or -platz, Ostbahnhof and Leuchtenbergring)?
There’s a little-used alternative to through-running as described in TFA, which is to turn trains around in an underground loop in the city centre and send them out again, usually on the same line they came from. This is done in Sydney (1920s) and Melbourne (1970s).
In the case of Melbourne, the design was chosen because of the extremely lop-sided development of the city, whose centre (“the city”) lies at the head of a bay, with most of the population and population growth to the south and east of the city in the 1970s. This is true to a lesser extent in Sydney, bearing in mind that its city loop was designed before the Harbour Bridge was built.
Melbourne’s current through-running project, the Metro Tunnel, appears in the first table, but it doesn’t belong in the second table of cities which could greatly benefit from future through-running projects. All 16 lines can access the city loop (which has 4 parallel tunnels). Due to capacity constraints, most of the time one of those 16 lines terminates at a main city station, and two others through run with each other. The Metro Tunnel will relieve the city loop, similar to the Munich trunk amplification project described in TFA; once it opens all lines will either through-run or go around a loop.
Locals are used to the City Loop but some visitors find it hard to navigate. Each line runs either clockwise or anticlockwise. For historical reasons two of the four loops still reverse direction in the middle of the day.
It’s true that a further through-running tunnel (Metro Tunnel 2) and conversion of two of the four City Loop tunnels to through-running (City Loop Reconfiguration) appeared on the long-range plans from 2012. But these are not required yet; the city is building three other major rail projects first.
Through running in Tokyo is next level. You can catch a train from the airport, which then turns into a subway, then later on it becomes a train again.
> a train from the airport, which then turns into a subway, then later on it becomes a train again.
This is confusing.
Subway is already a kind of train.
You mean to say that the train partly runs underground? That is pretty common. I actually can't remember any city where airport connecting train does not do the same at some point or another.
What's kinda interesting is does that train classify as metro transit that goes slightly beyond city to airport and such (making many stops all the way) or distance intercity train that happens to stop both at airport and city? Or does it change this classification? That would be actually unusual.
What they mean is that you have many different train operators who run different portions on the track as independent lines, but seamlessly, without connections, your train will become another line’s train when you reach the border stations.
For example, let’s say you are going from Motomachi Chukagai to Kawagoe, try plugging this into Google Maps - you board the Minatomirai line, then once you reach Yokohama, without getting off your seat you are now on the Tokyu Toyoko line, then again at Shibuya it becomes the Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin line, then again at Wakoshi it becomes the Tobu Tojo line.
4 different train operators maintained and run by 4 different companies with their own rolling stock and drivers, but they share access to the track and trains, they interoperate, and it just feels like one train with no dip in service quality. Many lines here do this.
That is not what they wrote, but what you describe sure sounds like an interesting design that I don't recall in countries other than Japan.
The difference is in the mode of service. “Trains”/“railways” run less-frequent service over longer distances, with stations often spaced further apart and certain runs that may skip stations. You typically schedule your trip based on the train’s schedule. “Subway”/“metro” service is typically frequent enough that you can just show up and ride. Outside of Tokyo, the seating arrangements are usually different, with “trains” employing transverse seating and “subways” using longitudinal seating.
My comment said:
> > What's kinda interesting is does that train classify as metro transit that goes slightly beyond city to airport and such (making many stops all the way) or distance intercity train that happens to stop both at airport and city? Or does it change this classification? That would be actually unusual
Also, about this part:
> You typically schedule your trip based on the train’s schedule.
Many counterexamples to that around East Asia (and probably Europe?). Trains are frequent enough that you just come most of the day. Apart from late hours when it is the same for both metro and distance trains, you have to know when they depart because both become rare and you can be late for the last one.
I’m speaking specifically about my lived experience using through-running services in Tokyo. Since your questions in this thread reveal that you lack familiarity with this service plan, I encourage you to visit Japan sometime and experience it yourself.
Turns out, I am intimately familiar with this service plan. There are metro trains with more frequent stops and service and there are distance trains with rarer stops (and yes, rarer service, the degree of which varies by country). What is new that I am missing?
Do you defend the subway vs. train terminology? Sometimes distance trains run underground, sometimes metro trains run overground, so it seems pretty pointless to me.
Most subways have move above ground sections than underground. That is why the article uses the term "metro" not subway - it better describes something useful about the system. A Metro is a system that runs completely separate from other traffic - this forces bridges or tunnels where other traffic needs to cross it.
Yes. Subway train that goes over ground is just train. Metro or long distance is an actual distinction. If they blend in Japan then that's rare.
Typically trains are powered from above, and subways are powered from the rails. Perhaps this is the distinction, rather than running underground.
Not in Tokyo. All but the first two of Tokyo’s subway lines run on overhead wires. In fact they had to build most of the subway lines to suburban rail standards because they planned on operating through services in the beginning.
Really depends on the region and any pre-existing constraints at the time of electrification. A better distinction is probably rapid transit (metro, subway, the Tube, MTR/MRT) vs commuter rail.
Apparently in the US there are trains that use dual rail and overhead power, one for subway and another for overground portions.
I suppose a subway train with rail only supply that goes overground sometimes is more dangerous because it is easier to accidentally step on a rail and rail is powered?
This is common in London as the suburban rail network there is a mix of third rail and overhead lines.
Typically, trains power themselves.
Also not really true. There are trains all over the world that draw power from over head lines and from 3rd and 4th rail systems.
I design rail systems. That is not true, except maybe in your city.
Once upon a time you could take a train on the Chicago loop, ride it through the countryside at 90mph, and end up on the streets of Milwaukee like a streetcar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroliner
It sounds crazy to say now but America used to have the best passenger rail infrastructure in the world.
It is... still possible to get on a train in the Chicago loop and take it to Milwaukee.
Ah, the Asakusa line, which has through running on either end to the Keikyu and Keisei lines. Together they form the only directly rail link between Tokyo’s two airports.
The best part is when you get on a through-running trains in Tokyo and the route map in the train has no Tokyo stops listed on it. Signage has gotten better in recent years, at the cost of complexity:
https://www.kotsu.metro.tokyo.jp/subway/stops/asakusa_sogo.h...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toei_Asakusa_Line
That 1943 map of proposed through-running routes for London...
Anyone who lives on the outskirts of London near a big commuter station knows that pain: 15 minutes to get into the centre, and another 25 to get anywhere else.
Rule of thumb in London is that it takes an hour to get anywhere, no matter how far it is
Just a point: ticketing in cities.
In the UK outside London, a journey via a 'metro' (suburban railway), a tram and a bus could well require the purchase of three separate tickets at a significant premium over sticking to one mode of transport even if less efficient. I would suggest a move to single tickets within urban areas. That would allow multimodal travel - if the tram is in and the train is delayed just hop on the tram.
I lived in Santiago Chile over a decade ago, and took a lot of transit. I really liked their bip! card system that gives you two free or really cheap transfers within 2 hours of your first scan. It wasn't distance based or anything like that. Looks like they have peak rating now(I don't remember if they did back then), but it's not super expensive.
Auckland has an almost finished through running project in its city centre, which will greatly improve its railway network. It currently has only one terminus in the city, but trains from one side (the west) have to do an awkward dog leg around the city centre, including a reversal.
Brussels got its through running project in 1952, a 6 track tunnel under its city centre between North and South (aka Midi) stations. That was back when disruption and demolishing things were just things that happened, and it is one of the reasons why ‘brusselization’ is a word. By now operates near its max capacity of 96 trains per hour.
One problem I've encountered in Munich is they essentially have a single trunk that runs through the centre. In the case of problems on one line you can often find multiple other lines are also affected. London always seems to have a redundancy in the case of a line being unusable.
I suppose this is more a problem of sharing track than through running, but I just found it funny to see Munich public transport described so positively.
> I just found it funny to see Munich public transport described so positively
Been living in Munich for the past 9 years, with the exception of the S-Bahn, it's still very good. I've never felt the need to own a car (only the occasional rental for moving or trips to more remote areas). Anecdotally, I know colleagues and friends who also make do without one, even those with kids.
Only city I've experienced better is Singapore (where I lived for ~7 years), though people complain all the same :D
I once read an anecdote:
In an airport, people complained that luggage delivery was so slow after landings. Airport measured the time, agreed with passengers and increased workforce to reduce waiting times substantially, but the complaints didn't reduce.
Instead, they routed passengers through a longer path, so their luggage was waiting for them when they arrived, and nobody complained about the longer walk.
We, the humans, are interesting.
> nobody complained about the longer walk
I've never formally complained about luggage arrival delays, but I have definitely noticed long walks. Some ridiculously so. I suppose I should complain, but to whom?
Your airline, to bug them to land to a gate closer to luggage hall (which might cost them more), and to the airport operator, to don't make especially convoluted paths to mask other operational delays (if there are).
OTOH, you can't make things easier if the airport is really big. e.g.: Rome, New York, Amsterdam (to an extent) and Istanbul.
I fly mostly out of DFW, which is just a complete shitshow. Atlanta is much better for luggage delivery for international arrivals but you still have long-ass walks to get to the immigration hall.
That's an apocrypha, not an anecdote.
Context, though. At the end of a flight, i.e. multiple hours where I have to remain seated, a 2-5 minute walk doesn't feel long or a burden.
I also don't think walking is a burden as long as I'm not running to catch a transfer flight.
I prefer to take a later connection flight to prevent these runs, though.
> London always seems to have a redundancy in the case of a line being unusable.
The London underground is indeed a redundant spiderweb. But the article focuses more on mainline trains, which are much more constrained.
The only way right through central London for these trains was north-to-south, the Snow Hill tunnel: Kings Cross -> Farringdon -> City Thameslink -> Blackfriars -> South of the river. This can only be a bottleneck.
But now there is the Elizabeth line east-to-west as well.
It might be nice on paper, but I think that in the Munich implementation there are quite some issues given that there is only a single track connecting Pasing (basically Munich West) to Munich East. In the last years almost every weekend there is maintenance work on the tracks, which introduces issues and doubles the time you need to move to the center. When a track is suddenly blocked, and this happens ~once a quarter, all the S-Bahn trains are blocked and you'll need a lot of patience to get back home. I wonder how it'd be with a more decentralized system where there are 2/3 ways to reach the edges of the city and not a single track
I'm surprised by the lack of mention in this article of the on-hold "Crossrail 2" project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail_2
There is also an element of critical mass - a city needs to get to a stage where it is a reasonable decision to not have a car.
Many of these cities were large before the car. Tram networks provided the backbone for work commuting.
People have no idea how much cars benefited the lower and created the middle class.
Instead of having an hour commute to move a few miles, you could have a half hour commute to move 30 miles.
This made land ownership possible for this group of people. Low value land that was too far from work was now usable for those same jobs.
Whenever I see propositions of removing lanes from freeways, I think how that benefits only rich people and landlords. I can afford to live near my company because I'm well-off, but I know plenty of people making 40-60k/yr that have plots of land 30-60 minutes from their jobs. They would otherwise be renting apartments 1/3 of the size of their home.
>This made land ownership possible for this group of people. Low value land that was too far from work was now usable for those same jobs.
The same is the case with public transport where available and where the city is built to support it. Which is what the poor people and rising middle class used -- especially as they didn't afford a car until the 1930s (and in places like New York not even then, though they still managed to turn from piss poor Italian, Jewish, Greek, Bulgarian, Irish, etc immigrants to middle class).
There is no need for a car to do that.
I've lived 40km from my office, commuting by bicycle (there was an highway and a railway available as well). I was super fit at the time. I've lived 100km from my office, taking a mix of train + bicycle. Despite being a wee bit slower than using a car, I could do something ( or sleep/nap) in the train, so that was better time spent.
Anyway you look at it, even when it is faster, using a car in an area that has decent public transport is a time that is not well spent over different modes of transportation and you don't really gain time if you think of it thorously.
You biked 50km after 8+ hours of physical labor?
That was a typo, it was actually 40km but yes, and I enjoyed it.
It was basically free 2h40 of fitness every day.
What kind of work did you do? I would personally not look forward to a 2h40m bike ride after doing physical labor all day. Impressive.
40km is more like a 1h20m-1h40m ride on a slightly above average pace (25km/h-30km/h), it shouldn't take 2h40m to ride 40km even on a very slow pace (15km/h).
40km was one way. I was doing 80km a day, so around 2h40 a day when I didn't decide to extend the ride back.
I understood that, I interpreted the comment I replied to as: "why would you bike 2h40m after a shift?", I might have misunderstood that one though.
Parent says that they had an "office" job. Where do you get " 8+ hours of physical labor" outside of the cycling?
Because the comment they were replying to said:
> People have no idea how much cars benefited the lower and created the middle class.
Many lower class and even middle class jobs involve physical labor (or even just standing all day). Then they replied, essentially, that they didn’t need cars, they could bike.
So I assumed they also had a job involving physical labor as opposed to their comment being totally out of touch. Biking is a lot more palatable when you have a cushy office job (maybe even with a shower).
If you look at reality, the people biking and walking to work the most are lower class and include physical labor. Migrants working in the fields, construction sites (at least to a pick up point)...
The lower class cannot even afford gasoline and car maintenance.
That heavily depends on where you’re looking, at least in the US.
> The lower class cannot even afford gasoline and car maintenance.
Carpools. It’s why at a job site you might see only 3 cars even though there’s 10-15 guys working there. They’re either arriving together or getting dropped off/picked up by friends or family.
Never in my life have I seen a bike parked at a construction site.
In my working class rural area, if you see a man on a bike, and he's not dressed like Lance Armstrong, it means he lost his license to a DUI.
If you look at reality, the people going to work the most are lower class.
Very few workplaces are made up of a majority of upper class people.
With respect to bike riders, there's a lycra clad group who are largely all middle to upper class, they simply don't make up a majority. But they are visible.
> With respect to bike riders, there's a lycra clad group who are largely all middle to upper class, they simply don't make up a majority. But they are visible.
These are only a fraction of people using bikes.
50 miles distance from workplace means around 80km. Both ways, 5 days a week that is around 800km which is pretty much the range of my car. I have to spend around 80€ to fill up the tank. No way lower class people can afford spending 80€/week 300€/month on gasoline only to go to work. That is not counting maintenance, insurance, yearly inspection. This is pure luxury. Even I with a decent income would not commute daily by car as it is just throwing money out of the window.
> a half hour commute to move 30 miles.
This is one of those things that works up to a point, and then scaling goes in reverse once everybody starts doing it. You can't maintain 60mph commute. In London the average speed is more like 10mph. There's no way to move enough people in and out on a daily basis without everyone packing into trains.
Occasionally it gets completely out of hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Highway_110_tra...
> Instead of having an hour commute to move a few miles, you could have a half hour commute to move 30 miles.
Traveling faster than what the human body is capable of on its own feels like time travel to me. Horse, buggy, car, whatever... like stepping into or activating a warp bubble where your consciousness arrives at a place faster than humanly possible. Similarly, having access to information or experience (different manners of vehicles) is potentially a huge advantage or major pitfall. (Perhaps why some ancient maps indicate, "here be dragons!")
Inversely, moving slow when others are traveling fast allows you to witness where those paths lead without having to go down proverbial rabbit holes.
> you could have a half hour commute to move 30 miles
only by ignoring the externalities of traffic and highways. If everyone tries to do this, it doesn't work. Hence the need for public transit
"you could have a half hour commute to move 30 miles."
Well unless half a million people try to commute along you during the same rush hour, with their commute ending in the wider centre of an old city which cannot absorb all the cars.
In Prague it is quite common to spend half an hour to cross the outer 25 miles of your journey and spend another half an hour in the traffic jam of the last 5 miles.
If it wasn't for the suburban trains and buses which alleviate the pressure, that last 5 miles would be one huge gridlock moving at the speed of a slow walk.
> People have no idea how much cars benefited the lower and created the middle class.
Yes, and with reference to London, one of the cities discussed, cars are now literally poisoning us.
> The most economically disadvantaged are often those worst affected by air pollution, particularly because they often live in less desirable locations, such as near busy roads. But they are conversely least likely to own a car or use them as much and therefore emit the least pollution.
https://trustforlondon.org.uk/news/london-inequalities-infec...
https://www.london.gov.uk/press-releases/mayoral/bame-and-po...
If cars are so great all around, ever think why "near busy roads" are "less desirable locations" ?
I don't see how having a decent public transportation network is any different.
I live in a suburb of Stockholm, 15km away from the city centre but it takes me only some 35 min to get to the central station on the metro, I have the option to take a 10 min bus to the nearest rail station that connects me to a different part of the city so if I need to go there I can choose the commuter train. Not only that but I do get local trains taking me to different towns southwards, also a direct connection to the airport and other towns northwards, and a connection to the long distance rail that can take me to the other coast, or south to Malmö/Copenhagen.
My suburb only exists because the metro station was built here, around the station there's a small centre with shops for daily needs, all of that was designed prior the existence of residential buildings to support the city's expansion, around the station are the higher-density buildings with apartments while I live some 5-10 min away in a townhouse; and this suburb is considered a poorer area of the Stockholm metropolitan region, not requiring a car was a must.
It benefited business owners more than anything... wasting hours of your life in a fucking cage you probably pay a loan and interests on because without it you wouldn't even be honoured to slave your life away isn't anywhere close to "benefiting the lower class". Car is freedom, war is peace... people can't even tell how brainwashed they are by the car industry.
You can take suburban trains in Paris to well over 50 km outside of the city center.
There are people taking the high speed train from places such as Dijon every day to go to Paris. That is a +300km commute in 1h40 that would take around 3h30 to 4h by car with no traffic jam.
This is true. The rich would like to relegate the poors to public transportation to keep the roads clear and keep undesirables out of their neighborhoods.
The "that's an advantage for the rich" has an easy fix: ban all city traffic except commercial vehicles for delivery of goods, ambulances, etc.
A good public transport is a boon to the poor and even middle class. In Europe, in cities where it's available, even the rich (the top 10%-5%, not the top 0.01%) routinely take it.
We do need to do something about the "holiday conundrum", for lack of a better name. That it, there are times during the year, most notably around Christmas, where suddenly everyone in the city gets time off and wants to travel to visit their family out in the middle of nowhere - and that also includes the operators of public and commercial transportation networks. You have a sudden influx of commuters at the same time as transport service capacity drops to a fraction of the normal.
Not sure how to handle this short of abolishing holidays entirely
(Not necessarily a bad idea - too many things in society already run in synch where they shouldn't; see e.g. most people working 9-5, including services all those people need, so there's e.g. no good time to go to a dentist or visit a bank without taking a day off at work.)
>Not sure how to handle this short of abolishing holidays entirely
Giving people more time off around the year.
I am rich and I want to be able to take public transit to work
There's a saying to the effect that a healthy society is not one where poor people can afford cars, but one where rich people take mass transit willingly.
Yup. And a big part of it that a lot of HNers don't seem to want to hear is that to get rich people to want to take mass transit, you need to strictly enforce against anti-social behavior. Treating the subway as a shelter or being menacing or foul-smelling should get you swiftly ejected.
Here's to hoping that Andy Byford can make through running happen at NY Penn.
Why not think bigger? https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1hwChHpCfdV23GhvcZCun...
As of right now, it would just be pork. The traffic patterns it would enable are very low volume.
In the long term, it's anyone's guess. My fear is it would be another Airtrain.
This is being discussed in Prague, but it is going to be very expensive.
The city is very much not-flat, with significant altitude differences, a lot of already existing infrastructure under the surface (three extant lines of metro with fourth one being built, some road tunnels, parking spaces etc.), and a major river must be crossed. Plus, the rocks underneath are fractured and finicky. It isn't a nice big slab of granite, but a mixture of sediments, water and various primordial rocks. Quite hellish to put tunnels into.
Costs of transport infra per mile:
Heavy rail; 50 million
Light rail: 25 million
Freeway:5-10 million
So why aren't they simply doing dedicated roads for transport?
With AI platooning and supervised self driving, "trains" of busses can run along those lines, but split off and merge in from local service seamlessly.
Commercial traffic (even through traffic) can piggyback on low traffic periods.
In emergencies, they are additional roads for evac or supply.
Roads are much more easily repaired and fail less catastrophically.
Electrification of busses is well underway and should be simpler / cheaper for recharging infrastructure.
Platooned "trains" of busses will conserve energy and likely could go 100 mph or more with proper convergent sensors monitoring and maintenance.
Safety should be equivalent.
I suspect there are political nuances where rail gets its own budget apart from roads, whereas dedicated roads get thrown it with general road funding, and then wouldn't get proper funding.
Rail is expensive in the US because you've lost the skills to build it. In Europe its cheaper than freeways.
Also in London we dont have space to build massive carparks everywhere so lots of people in London dont have cars.
> In Europe its cheaper than freeways.
I'm not sure that's true for HS2. In practice the UK builds occasional new roads and very rarely new rail. Crossrail and Thameslink are exceptions that took decades to get approved.
Who said anything about cars? I guess you are validating my opinion that this isn't politically possible because mentally people immediately assume a road means free access by moms in minivans.
Well if you said 'road' and stressed that it was not a public road but a road with specific rules about what could go on it, that would probably get the message across. Your chosen phrase 'dedicated road for transport' doesn't convey that very well. Everything is transport.
Per mile isn't the right metric in cities, where you need to consider throughput.
Guided busways exist, but as far as I know nobody's doing platooning yet? Edinburgh had a guided busway for a few years but eventually built a tram over it because buses couldn't manage the throughput.
Is this freeway stat per lane-mile? Rail often has 2 sets of tracks along a corridor, or at most 4. Roads have a lot more.
I'm guessing even a busy/congested freeway has a greater throughput per lane than transit; even with automobiles with only 1-2 people in it, vs a train that may have hundreds but pass only every few minutes at most.
One problem with roads is that once you get off the freeway, you need more roads to serve housing and businesses; and the size of those leaf nodes pushes businesses and houses all further apart from each other, necessitating MORE road trips and decreasing walkability.
> I'm guessing even a busy/congested freeway has a greater throughput per lane than transit
Not even remotely close: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity
Put that plan underground and add a few more vehicle classes and you'd have invented the boring company!
I wish I knew how much that cost, but I'm starting to see its point now.
your unsourced numbers for roads are wrong and at best representative of a rural area single lane mile not a 4 lane highway. Here are some better numbers for different places and types of roads:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/appendixa.cfm (scroll down a little ways)
so your reference for freeway is likely using a single lane number not the actual cost of a 4 lane high way which would be 12 - 80 million per mile.
So that's why Kassel Hauptbahnhof is a terminus station, while the busier station is Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe.
[dead]
I stopped reading at "termini".
Imagine if Elon had put all that money to work on mass transit solutions instead of cars for each and every person, along with tunnels for those cars. Of course, you will never make the same riches, but interesting to imagine how different the impact might be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
Both of these companies contributed approximately nothing to the advancement of Mass Transit.
Arguably the Hyperloop was publicized specifically for the opposite: to stoke opposition to traditional high speed rail, while at the same time knowing it is completely impractical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_(politics)#Controll...
Why rely on one man?
The goal is not to rely on one man, but regardless of what you think of him, he has proven to be very effective at bringing big ideas to reality.
Ah-hahahahahaha.
Good one.
This message was not written from my hyperloop commute to Mars.
Sure, but who do you know who actually built a functioning rocket launch company privately AND also built a leading EV company when it was unheard of?
I agree that he also has stupid, botched ideas, but pretending like he’s incompetent is just cope.
> very effective at bringing big ideas to reality
With specific reference to Mr Musk and commuter rail, this is the opposite of reality. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44297667
Maybe the OP is taking about some other Musk's ideas brought to reality, like fascism in the US.
True, but I don't regard that as an original Musk idea. It's been done before elsewhere and, to a lesser extent, done before in the US. He's not even the first racist head of a US car company, that was Henry Ford.
No point in imagining that whatsoever. Just like imagining Bezos paying taxes or Trump not lying.
Or like imagining people on the internet not make everything about American politics
I foresee in the near future, in addition to the archive.is link (which is not needed here thankfully), a summary.is link will be present (which is needed here unfortunately).
It’s an okay article but there’s no real magic to it. It amounts to wordy trivia and you spend your time reading it as I have at your peril. Zero-calorie content is easily forgotten.
It’s ok to not like trains. Just read something else instead.