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Why the West Coast Is Suddenly Beating the East Coast on Transportation (nytimes.com)
The subways on the East Coast that allowed New York, Washington and Boston to thrive are showing their age and suffering from years of neglect, while cities on the West Coast are moving quickly to expand and improve their networks. From a report: The Los Angeles area, the ultimate car-centric region with its sprawling freeways, approved a sweeping $120 billion plan to build new train routes and upgrade its buses. Seattle has won accolades for its transit system, where 93 percent of riders report being happy with service -- a feat that seems unimaginable in New York, where subway riders regularly simmer with rage on stalled trains. "It's a tale of two systems," said Robert Puentes, the president of the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonpartisan research center in Washington. "These new ones are growing and haven't started to experience the pains of rehabilitation."
In New York, Polly Trottenberg, New York City's transportation commissioner, returned to a laundry list of messes: a subway crisis, buses that move at a snail's pace, the looming shutdown of the L train between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the rebuilding of the dilapidated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. "There is a political will to invest in expansion" on the West Coast, Ms. Trottenberg said in an interview, though she noted that New York's system was still the country's largest by far. Its daily subway and bus ridership of nearly 8 million dwarfs Los Angeles's 1.2 million riders. Still, transit systems on the East Coast are losing ridership. New York's subway has not expanded in decades, besides a handful of new stations in Manhattan -- one on the Far West Side and three on the Upper East Side.
In New York, Polly Trottenberg, New York City's transportation commissioner, returned to a laundry list of messes: a subway crisis, buses that move at a snail's pace, the looming shutdown of the L train between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the rebuilding of the dilapidated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. "There is a political will to invest in expansion" on the West Coast, Ms. Trottenberg said in an interview, though she noted that New York's system was still the country's largest by far. Its daily subway and bus ridership of nearly 8 million dwarfs Los Angeles's 1.2 million riders. Still, transit systems on the East Coast are losing ridership. New York's subway has not expanded in decades, besides a handful of new stations in Manhattan -- one on the Far West Side and three on the Upper East Side.
Our stupid developers keep building wider cities.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Yes because Los Angeles and California are well-known bastions of conservatives... NOT.
Yea, there is a lot of money being spent, but is it working and will people ride? Those are two very different questions.
Back in the 50s, when the interstate highway system was planned and construction began, did anyone budget for future maintenance? Does anyone consider the long term cost of maintenance when they build roads, bridges, and other infrastructure like subways?
Those folks in Seattle are happy because the system is new and working fine. I'll bet people in NYC were happy with their system when it was new. Let's see how people in Seattle feel about the system when it is as old as the NYC subway system.
In for all the "I have a car so public transportation does nothing for me" comments.
Here is why the west coast is beating the east coast: It is because the west coast is 50 years behind.
Let me explain.
The east coast transportation systems have been around for decades longer than those on the west coast. This means that they are older and require more maintenance.
But, that's not why they are not doing as well as transportation systems on the west coast.
For the real reason, let me use the MTA (New York City) as an example. Out of every dollar of gross revenue brought in by the MTA, 116% of it is required to pay current and future retirement benefits to MTA workers. The current benefits are quite a bit lower, which is why they are still cash flow positive, but even only considering current benefits, there is not enough money left over to maintain the system. Baking in the unfunded future benefits creates a debt load that current gross revenue cannot cover, let alone cover it and pay for maintenance and other operating costs.
Mayor dipshit has no plan for this except to raise taxes on the middle class AGAIN... and AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN.
You can get around NYC on foot, by bus, or by subway. LA is so sprawled that even 100 more miles of subway won't actually cover much ground. The subway hasn't expanded much, but the area's transit coverage has actually increased since the late 80s. NJ Transit built the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, Montclair connection (enabling weekend service on the Montclair line), and Midtown connection (connecting Hoboken trains to Penn Station). Airtrains to JFK and EWR were built in the past 25 years. PATH is being expanded to EWR.
The Los Angeles area, the ultimate car-centric region with its sprawling freeways, approved a sweeping $120 billion plan to build new train routes and upgrade its buses.
Ok so they approved a plan. Wake me when they actually have a well functioning mass transit system that actually causes a reduction in the number of cars needed. I'll be especially impressed if they actually do it on time and under budget.
Seattle has won accolades for its transit system, where 93 percent of riders report being happy with service -- a feat that seems unimaginable in New York, where subway riders regularly simmer with rage on stalled trains.
Seattle's system is still new. Really new. Sound Transit was commissioned in 1996. Link Light Rail began service in 2009. Etc. I'm sure their system works great compared with mass transit systems many decades older. Maintenance is a harsh mistress. Most transport networks work fairly well when new.
I see a million of these articles, none of which even mention the obscene amount of unnecessary overhead in many of these systems. The politicians bullshit about there not being enough taxes or fees, but they (and their media lapdogs) ignore the egregious amount of waste involved. A starter....
https://ny.curbed.com/2017/12/...
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Because it has been for the last 50 years.
In for all the "I have a car so public transportation does nothing for me" comments.
You have it backwards. It's not that I have a car - it's that public transportation was NOT DESIGNED for me. It's that most cities (including mine) were simply not designed with mass transit in mind and most of them lack the population density to retrofit it now. I live in a suburban area about 20 miles from where I work. There is no economically realistic way to get mass transit from where I live to where I work or to pretty much anywhere else I need to go. The infrastructure was designed for cars and only cars. It was bad planning but we are kind of stuck with it now, at least for the next 50 years. Any plan that would fix this state of affairs is going to cost huge sums and take many decades to implement.
In NYC there is an attitude of taking routes that would be good for transit and building parks on them. The high line could have been an surface level extension of the 7 line from its current Hudson Yards terminal to the 14st area of Manhattan (and duck into a tunnel from there). Or, allowed LIRR to run to a Lower Manhattan terminal without much tunneling (relieving pressure in overcrowded Penn Station by providing more places in Manhattan to get off).
There's a similar argument going on in Queens about what to do with the former LIRR Rockaway Beach branch: one side wants a linear park (despite the fact that it runs through Forest Park, which is already pretty big, and through people's back yards who don't want random people walking by all day), another wants to restore it as an an extension of the subway (connecting the Queens Blvd Line to the A train). The route runs through a transit desert in Queens, and in any of the west coast or midwestern cities with budding new rail systems the population centers being connected would be an automatic no-brainer to put transit there.
Until the west coast has their infrastructure installed it cannot crumble to ruins. That's the first fundamental step.
The left coast is all about socialism. Instead of businesses footing the bill to create these public transportation systems and then make money off of them or not, the left coast forces everyone to pay for the transportation systems whether they use them or not and couldn't care less if they fail to make any profit or not.
I'm sure all those billionaires that live there have no problem paying for the system even though they will never personally use them.
I have a car (BMW).
Why exactly would I ride a bus or a train? Please explain...
Roast beef is generally not ground up, Ace.
For the first half of the twentieth century, a lot of transit systems in the US were private companies. They actually worked fairly well until they started to be bought up by a consortium of General Motors, Firestone and Standard Oil. Efficient trolley tracks were torn up and replaced by buses (which benefited the consortium). Eventually, even the buses were neglected to encourage the purchase of private cars. Local governments had little option but to buy and run the (intentionally) failing transit systems. In short, corporations can't be trusted to serve the public, because someone will always find a way to game the system and make it more profitable to not serve the public. Why do libertarians think they are so god damn brilliant for digging up old ideas that have been tried and failed in the past?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
California has nice trains because it borrowed a lot of money.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/18/the-great-california-train-wreck/
One day in the not so distant future, it will either go bankrupt, or it will divert a large proportion of its tax revenue away from services that help poor citizens (like the police department and forest management) so that they can pay interest and principal on their bonds and pension debt.
There is no magic here. California borrowed a ton of money to pay for trains that won't be used very much. Soon, they will have the pay the money back.
Public transit broke down in smaller cities, because capitalism made society productive enough for those denizens to purchase their own personal modes of transportation, namely cars. That's called prosperity.
If you were right about it, then why didn't those local governments fix refresh and revise the "intentionally" failing transit systems? They didn't, for 2 reasons: Personal cars are better for the majority of America, and governments are insanely inept, because governments are composed of people, and the people who compose governments tend to be dummies, as smart and productive folks never aspire to be bureaucrats.
Now, to make this more concrete, we're talking about Big Cities on the coasts, and all we see is this: Governments can't maintain long-lived infrastructure, but they can spend excessive resources building something that is impressive in the short-term (if you don't consider the considerable cost).
Governments are bad investors; governments are bad businesses that won't go bankrupt because they can just decree their income at the point of a gun.
At least those corporations of which you speak don't directly wield the power of taxation, or the jackboots of men with guns. You want to talk about the dangers of large, violent monopoly? Well, look no further than your precious government.
Would you eat a book?
Of course he would, he ate all his spare haiku poem books and that's why I am unable to get a hard copy.
He also eats all the IT spare parts when asked to clean the IT closet by his boss.
Only written by someone who knows nothing about Seattle transit. What kind of misleading comment is "Seattle has won accolades for its transit system, where 93 percent of riders report being happy with service" Right all few thousand of them? At the same time, I5 through downtown Seattle has the same chock point it's had for the last 40+ years. Brilliant idea to build a convention center over the freeway, so nothing can be upgraded. The wonderful light rail system is waaaay over budget and cost by far more per mile than any other city. It's just starting to be useful by connecting to SeaTac, but at what is a huge cost. Buses? Stuck on the same roads with the cars. Only nice thing about the bus is someone else has to deal with the traffic. And to top it all off, the Alaska Way viaduct (3 lanes) will be shutting down to be replaced with a new tunnel (2 lanes) with out on and off ramps in the middle.
Seattle and transportation should only be referenced if they would like to point out what is wrong and how not to do it. I'm sure the vast majority of commuters who try and use the roads would give a slightly lower approval with service. Of course, those evil gas burning cars are what pays for all the mass transit in Seattle.
Please Note: I'm not against trains and such. I used the bus and MAX train system in Portland and it worked great. I just get pissed when someone writes misleading stories to make it sound like the "West Coast" really knows what they're doing with mass transit. At least the Seattle part doesn't have a clue, they just know how to spend alot of money.
Mass transit is very important to my family. My spouse and I are professionals, with jobs in different cities. We cannot (won't) live somewhere where there isn't decent mass transit. Spending a large part of our lives sitting in automobiles is not something we'll consider. Right now, we can live in Europe or the NE US. If the West Coast gets some reasonable mass transit, we'd consider living/working there, too.
I don't respond to AC's.
NYC: 7 train extended to Hudson Yards (http://web.mta.info/capital/no7_alt.html), and Q train extended up the Upper East side (http://web.mta.info/capital/phase2_about_sas.html)
DC: (or rather VA): Silver Line extension to Dulles International (https://www.restonnow.com/2018/01/18/silver-line-phase-2-construction-is-nearly-76-percent-complete/)
The Pennsylvania Turnpike (now I-76) collects tolls that were specifically earmarked in the state constitution for maintenance and upgrades of the turnpike system. It worked well for years...until Ed Rendell was governor.
When he was running for office he swore he wouldn't take money from the rest of the state and send it to Philadelphia but he did anyway, including some accounting shenanigans to divert the turnpike tolls (state police pensions are considered turnpike maintenance aren't they? How else could he fund the big increases he rewarded the unions for their support after raiding the general revenue funds for other purposes?).
I was hoping the article might have comparisons of average commute times, distances covered, safety factors, and possibly some other non-intuitive customer concerns. Instead it lists money spent, voting results, years of service, and number of commuters carried. We're not getting important parts of the story.
kewl story bra
I rode the bus when I lived in Hawaii and it was cheap and convenient.
Terrible example. I've spent lots of time in Hawaii. There is only one large city in the state and the geography elsewhere generally forces people to live close together where buses can actually make some sense. Plus owning and driving a car is crazy expensive there (just like most other things).
When I moved to Pennsylvania it was less cheap and less convenient, but still did the job fairly well.
I'm guessing you lived in one of the bigger cities if that was the case. I've lived in PA and in most of it bus service is either inconvenient or non-existent. I went to college in Eastern PA and aside from the busses around campus there was very limited bus service around the rest of the metro area (Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton) You basically had to own a car to get anywhere useful in a reasonable amount of time.
Now maybe it's my own fault for not fully realizing that the bus doesn't stop in my part of town, but it's that inconvenience that causes me to just jump on the interstate and park in my building's parking lot, even though I hate the traffic.
The problem is that where you live wasn't designed with bus service or any other public transit in mind. Bus service is almost always just an afterthought which works ok but not great in most cities which were designed with cars as primary transport. It doesn't require rails or other fixed infrastructure like trains or trolleys and it can be re-routed relatively easily. Honestly I've never lived in a place where bus transportation was a practical option.
I've been to the Highline park and it is hugely popular. You may be right it would be better to use those lines for transport, but there's no arguing that people deeply love the Highline park and building of elevated parks like that will (literally) soar... it makes a tone of sense for dens cities since it lets you have a larger park without disrupting traffic while enabling lots more pedestrians in a narrow corridor.
I honestly think Musk has the right idea here. Leave the surface to people and just build a lot more tunnels cheaply to enable transit between different points in a large city.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Self driving electric cars are going to make most of this moot before long. Especially when we're talking about the time frames in the comparison between, say NYC Subway (started 110 years ago) and Seattle's more modern transportation system.
Self driving cars, when fully realized (IE 100% of the vehicles on a roadway are self driving), will be a sight to behold. The density that can be achieved with a networked system of vehicles that communicate one with another is extremely high - they can practically be touching each other. Vehicles can travel faster, merging in and out will be seamless with no slowing of traffic. All vehicles at a traffic light could begin moving at the same moment when the light turns green. The efficiency compared to human drivers will be many times higher. This solves most of the traffic volume issues we see now.
Vehicles can drop off and pick up passengers, then go park themselves (or give other people rides) in the meantime. That greatly improves the parking situation.
Elon Musk is working on longer range transportation (hyper loop) that will transport people in the vehicles they are already in at high speed over longer distances. This is more efficient then taking a taxi to a bus stop and a bus to a subway stop, and vice versa. (and please don't claim the solution is to only live and work next to subway or bus stops).
All of this is more desirable than fixed public transportation (either due to physical limits, like railroad tracks, or routes, like buses).
Better known as 318230.
Here's what's missing -- on the East Coast, you can go from NYC to Boston, DC, Springfield, MA, Harrisburg, Poughkeepsie, Philly, Eastern LI, many parts of NJ, all via frequent commuter or commuter-type rail service. California can't even get LA-SF rail built. There's one train a day that runs via Oakland, doesn't even pass through SF directly.
I Think USA was ONE country that should strive to get their development as a whole, not by establishing a competition of which "coast" does it better. Useless. Unite instead of Reacting.
Seattle may be great now, but have you BEEN on a Caltrain recently anywhere around San Francisco? They are rickety and old and not that far behind NYC in a near state of going to fail soon.
LA may have allocated a ton of money to improve transportation, but it's kind of optimistic to assume it will do anything to help when the can't even get an estimate for high speed rail in CA right within an order of magnitude...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Public schools are arguably a total failure (that's why there are private schools), and clean water is not dependent on taxation (and the preponderance of bottled water and private wells proves this).
Privatize all the things. Taxation corrupts.
The LA metro system is well functioning (I use it to commute to work, and I use it any time I go downtown - I would never drive there any more).
You must be one of the lucky 5 people who actually lives near a station. Doesn't apply to most people in LA as evidenced by their continued overwhelming utilization of automobiles. Approximately 7% of people commute by public transit in LA. Any number greater than zero is good but let's not pretend that it's a hugely significant factor for most of the population. Compare with NYC having around 2/3 of all commuting happening via public transportation.
And by definition when people from the suburbs take the metro they aren't driving. So, yeah, it does cause a reduction in the number of cars on the freeways and surface streets.
Curious then that ridership is falling dramatically in the last 5 years and that Seriously, LA's mass transit is barely more than a bus system that nobody rides if they don't have to. The infrastructure was designed around cars and remains so to this day. Changing that is going to cost VAST sums of money and take a long time to take effect in a substantial way because it will require convincing a LOT of people to relocate.
I know, I know. You'll be now be setting new, higher bars you demand to be cleared for your satisfaction.
Not at all. You will need to clear the old ones first before I worry about moving any goal posts. The evidence doesn't support your thesis.
The democrat part favers urban thugs and city dwellers over hard working real Americans who live in rural and suburban areas. They funnel trillions of taxpayer dollars STOLEN from hard working Americans and put it into fat cat union beurocrat run wasteful flim flams and shams.
Minnesotans are practical people who also tend towards socialist ideas.
Guess what? They chose automobiles.
I first encountered the term "linear park" when studying the greenways that surround some bicycle trails. For example, the Fort Wayne Rivergreenway is a flood control park that forms the backbone of the city's trail network.
These Eastern Cities that have these Mass Transit systems, are actually still thriving vibrant cities. It is more of an issue of poor leadership where everyone put off doing maintenance and putting a smaller amount of money into fixes and upgrades, and just put it off for the next administration, until it reaches a point it is impossible to fix.
The supposedly Blue states, like NY have had a GOP controlled leadership up the board. Normally you will only get consistently blue votes for US Senate and Presidential Votes, but when it is broken down to districts, there is much more GOP control. and the GOP doesn't want to spend money on anything. Thinking that if they don't spend the money they won't gain more expenses. Which only lasts for a short period of time.
The high taxes in these blue states, is due to them having a number of highly consecrated population centers, which needs more government services to keep the people safe and prosperous.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I refuse to use it. It's been a disgraceful hackorama since I can remember. The MBTA union is a large part of the problem. You work 20 years and retire with full pay for the rest of your life.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
According to the NY Times detailed report on MTA problems there is plenty of blame for all. I can find absolutely no supporting evidence that "GOP Controlled Boards" are responsible and I trust the left-leaning NYT to have found them if they existed. Yes absolutely the Republican mayor and governor screwed the MTA but so did the Democratic legislatures back their proposals, and the Democratic mayors and governors did no better. Everyone in office treated the MTA as a piggybank and robbed it.
Sorry I was trying to illustrate two points.
1. Poor leadership is the cause of the problem, not tax rates.
2. States are actually more diverse then what Cable News lets on.
The topic was stating that it was because of the Democrats and High Taxes was the cause. However those are not the major factor.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The problem is that everywhere else invested in shitty-tier light rail to maximize the amount of subsidy from the federal government. Lightrail has been an unmitigated disaster everywhere it has been built at grade. Only cities that actually built completely (subway) or mostly grade separated systems are actually getting use.
Vancouver BC, has the most frequent, most used, and cheapest to run transit system in North America. One of the municipalityâ(TM)s (Surrey) wanted to ruin it by running shitty surface lightrail though the fastest growing section just to make developers happy and their entire council was voted out.
Smart cities build grade-separated automated rail transport like Honolulu. Stupid cities follow Portland like Houstonâ(TM)s crappy dangerous systems that have hundreds of human-caused accidents per month.
I hesitate to hold out Russia as a positive model for anything, but they have very deep subway stations and the escalators I rode in St Petersburg worked really well, carrying a ton of people (basically one very long escalator down).
There's at least one other city I've been in (I think in Europe) that also had very good deep subways, though which city it was eludes me...
However with Musk's tunnels you don't have very deep entry stations. You get in at a station maybe two stories down, and for longer trips the car or bus transfers to deeper tunnels as needed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The real issue is: Which subway has the most excrement on it?
The most feces and urine all over the station, in the train cars, and on the seats?
And how much do you have to walk through when you get off the train?
"Highly consecrated population centers"?
I knew NYC was holy ground for the upper class, but I didn't know all evil was banished from there. Maybe that's why their gun control works.
The Big Dig was the most expensive mile of road ever constructed. It replaced the 1950s era elevated highway that cut off Boston from its waterfront. Which is nice, but the problem (aside from the astronomical cos) is that it violated the Clean Air Act.
So the state cut a deal: they'd mandate the extension of the MBTA (the mass transit system for Boston and its suburbs) along with a number of facilities improvements like parking lots. That's nice too, except there was no funding for these things, forcing the MBTA to pay for these improvements out of money that would have gone to maintenance and replacing rolling stock.
Consequently, the MBTA has some nice new facilities, but their core commuter services are old and breakdown-prone. They're particularly notorious for stranding commuters in extreme cold weather. The MBTA is also saddled with 125 million dollars a year in debt service to pay for stuff it had to build to make the highway possible.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The only reasoning that is warped appears to be your own.
Only written by someone who knows nothing about Seattle transit. What kind of misleading comment is "Seattle has won accolades for its transit system, where 93 percent of riders report being happy with service" Right all few thousand of them?
You claim to be familiar with Seattle but obviously aren't. Transit use is popular - and growing. Fewer people drive to work in Seattle than take transit, bike, or walk - and that's been true for a number of years.
As of February 2018:
48% of Seattle workers are taking transit
25.4% are driving solo
10% car or van pool
8% walk
3% bicycle to work
6% "other"
Back in February 2013:
43% of Seattle workers rode either the bus or the train
34% drove solo
9% car or van pooled
6% walked
4% telecommuted
3% biked
I've been taking transit to work in Seattle since 2003 - And absolutely LOVE having light rail to UW (since 2016)!
#DeleteChrome
How do you account for the fact there are 27 major fault lines in the LA Metro area?
That's EXACTLY why tunnels are the future in places like LA, because they are way safer than surface structures in an earthquake.
As Musk pointed out, rescue workers were able to get inside Mexico City after the huge earthquake there by using the UNDAMAGED subway lines.
You could almost imagine a large network of tunnels under a city as a vital emergency services access measure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ah, I see that now. Thanks! Agreed!
I've watched people try to make a public transportation commute work in LA for decades. Recently a buddy was on a rant about how, even though the commute literally used the intersection between two of the major bus routes, the lines were so out of sync that the unexpected convenience was minimized. 30 minutes by car during worst case evening rush hour, 2 1/2 hours minimum by bus no matter what.
LA will only improve when the political will exists to legislate around the automobile or consumer flying car technology arrives from China. The later is standard 18 - 36 months away forever and the former is "only after the big one"
Liberals actually approve funding for public infrastructure! (And for you conservatives out there: the more they spend on transportation, the more they can skim off in graft!)
The only place to go is up. The west coast is still shit.
"Its daily subway and bus ridership of nearly 8 million dwarfs ...."
The lower you are underground the safer you are, because there is less motion. The closer you get to ground level, and then beyond that, the more the waves from earthquakes amplify motion.
I am not comparing anything, I am explaining how earthquakes work!!!!!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes. Portland's system sucks. It's faster to walk than to take a streetcar, and driving takes half the time of MAX.
San Francisco's rail is fine where it's underground, but becomes an unusable nightmare where it runs on surface streets.
Which I will have to use in my next argument about privacy (since no one in America has the wherewithal to care about it anymore, even though my grade school teacher used to rant about how without privacy the communists will have won...)
The money needed to keep the subway system is getting used for city social spending and other virtue signalling city services.
No new money is going in and any money created by the subway is getting used to pay for city services not related to the subway.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Reading this while traveling 70mph under ground on the BART, while everyone else above ground is stuck in traffic. It works, alright!
We're discussing New York City here. Are there any Republicans in office in the five boroughs? I'm guessing more endemic corruption probably did it.
I too live in the area - this does not reflect the reality of my cohort in any recent Seattle jobs. I don't believe the survey is accurate, perhaps due to a sampling error. How do you sample for a question like that in a town as judgmental as Seattle?
I used to be a bus rider to my (previous) Seattle job, until politics resulted in Metro cancelling the always-full "express" route from Kirkland to Seattle through some odd accounting (deciding that the one-way express routes were 40% empty by using a phantom empty return trip), to allow them to justify more routes to "underserved" but not as busy routes for people not commuting to a day job.
That's ultimately why Seattle can't do mass transit... or clean up downtown, or reduce crime... every decision is cast in intangible and ever-changing social justice terms, with competing interests and ideologies.
Did you read the links you provided? Those numbers do not cover Seattle as you imply, they only cover the 200K city center workers.
Greater Seattle's population is something 3.5 million.
I actually use Portland's system every day. Certainly the street car sort of sucks, not that taking the street car is slow, but when my destination is a 15 minute walk and the next car is 15-30 minutes I just end up walking. The Max on the other hand works wonderfully for me. As a student at PSU I enjoy reading or sleeping on the train for the 40 minutes it takes to get me home. Traffic on the major freeways during commute time can often take longer than that. As a cyclist also I would rather have the rails underground as they can become a mess for bicycles to navigate across.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
New York state, in particular, keeps electing corrupt politicians who refused to invest in infrastructure but instead mainly serve to line their own pockets and the pockets of their family and friends. Countless NY state legislators have been arrested and convicted.
But what gets me is why New York keeps electing governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo famously launched an anti-corruption task force shortly after he was elected the first time. But then when the anti-corruption task force started investigating people close to the governor, Cuomo shut the anti-corruption task force down!
New York City gets shitty subways because New York keeps electing shitty politicians like Andrew Cuomo.
While the West Coast is finally getting its act together and doing its best to go heavier on transit /before/ it begins to mimic the super-high density of New England metropolitan areas, let's not rush to praise all of the novelty in recent transportation news.
The electric scootershare thing, for example, has been shown to actually make transportation worse. That sub-industry is not taking people out of their cars. It's convincing people who would have otherwise ridden the bus, subway, light rail, a bike, or just walked to pay to stand still. Few people use the scooters according to the law (most states ban them from the sidewalk) and cities are being sued for ADA violations because the cities haven't reacted quickly enough to have the scooters removed when they show up to operate without a business license.
Moreover, the race to "get big and win" within electric scootershare has encouraged companies to cut corners. As with the "hoverboards" fad, some companies are beginning to source lower and quality batteries so they can charge less and less per ride with fiery results. Similarly, they're using less reinforcing material, so they're breaking after less use. The wise cities are waiting to see who survives the race to the bottom and, if their communities support the inclusion of electric scootershare, how best to implement them locally.
Cities have been also reluctant to embrace self-driving cars because they don't yet operate with the consistency and adaptability required to gain trust. The whole idea of jumping from pure-human driving to never-human driving is a fantasy. We're going to slowly gain more and more autonomous features in our purchased vehicles before the majority of people begin to actually trust autonomous vehicles enough to fully relinquish control of who (or what) is driving their children to school. Most municipalities do not want to be testing grounds for such nascent technology that a contract must include clauses regarding death.
If you want to talk non-existent, I went to college in rural Alabama and the only buses there were Greyhounds.
That describes most of the US outside of major cities and not very far outside those cities either. The nearest regular bus service to where I currently live is about 15-20 miles away in a local college town. It's actually just as far for me to reach the nearest Amtrak station. It's not like I live out in the Styx either. I can be in my local Nordstroms at an upscale shopping mall in under 20 minutes door to door. It's just that once you leave the major cities the population density drops precipitously so bus service (not to mention trains) rapidly become too expensive to justify.
I UBER most places now, which does little to help with traffic congestion.
Not an affordable option for me - you must not travel a huge amount. I drive 30-40K miles per year. Uber is a reasonable option if you don't travel huge distance or are in need of an occasional taxi ride but I drive so much that the cost of the car per mile is easily cheaper to own a car. In my case I now use an EV for most commuting which has saved me a small fortune in gas and maintenance. (probably ~$1500 in the last 6 months)