Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
>> Back in the 50s, when the interstate highway system...did anyone budget for future maintenance?
Yes, often.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_roads_in_the_United_States
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.
a) Driving up desirability of location- thus helping your property value
One day soon, I'll be laughing at these numbskulls all the way to the bank--literally. Seems the value of my flat in Stockholm has more than doubled in less than ten years, largely due to its proximity to the subway and bus lines...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Actually, it's not a lack of planning, it's really bad planning, and far too much of it. Minimum parking requirements incentivize people to drive everywhere, filling the roads and streets with cars which require more, costly infrastructure which doesn't pay for itself by half.
The parking lots themselves also pay hardly anything in taxes compared to the businesses and residences that could be put there, and because they are non-destinations, they contribute to longer travel distances between actual destinations A and B. This makes walking and transit infeasible (not that cars are feasible, see above).
Building codes like height limits, minimum setbacks, and maximum floor area ratios also create sprawl and limit a city's productivity, jobs per acre and tax revenue per acre. So to make up the difference, cities expand out until they can't, and because they never budget for maintenance 30, 40, 50 years down the road, the more they build, the poorer they get!
So it's a huge, misplanned mess, not an unplanned one.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
You left out something:
The suburban sprawl is made up of McMansions built mere feet from each other yet 5 miles away from the nearest store, with petty tyrants and control freaks running home owners associations.
Whereas in Stockholm, my flat is within 5-15 minutes walk of several grocery stores, various shops, schools, daycare centres, restaurants, cafés, 2 clinics, at least 2 dentist's offices, a public library, a subway station, a bus station, ...and a big forest preserve containing two lakes.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
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