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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.
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.
Our stupid developers keep building wider cities.
I think that is because of a lack of planned development; not because developers design them that way. Suburban sprawl is not planned by cities... it just happens when cities and counties don't regulate growth.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
In for all the "I have a car so public transportation does nothing for me" comments.
I live in a mid-sized city with very little public transportation (might as well be none)... so it really does do nothing for me. :)
That said, public transportation helps everyone even car drivers in cities that have functioning public transportation by:
a) Driving up desirability of location- thus helping your property value
b) Removing congestion from the streets.
c) slowing the deterioration of roadways meaning less frequent need to repave and delay your trip in.
Public Transportation may cost more to run than governments recoup but it's a net win if you figure in all the fringe benefits.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
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.
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.
Naah. You'll be happier in your slumber.
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).
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.
I know, I know. You'll be now be setting new, higher bars you demand to be cleared for your satisfaction.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
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.
Suburban sprawl happens because Americans have been conditioned to exercise their "freedom" to spend countless hours of their lives trapped in little wheeled boxes travelling at the breakneck speed of 5 MPH down long strips of asphalt.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
So exactly like every other form of infrastructure that not everyone uses equally. Deal with it -- it's part of the cost of a modern civilization.
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.
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.
So that you can do something else with that time.
So that you can reduce your impact on global climate change.
So that you don't have to pay for parking, gas, tolls, and maintenance on your car.
So that you're not stuck in traffic jams.
Or you could care because it keeps a lot of other drivers off the road making your commute less painful.
Of course, if you had a Tesla instead of a BMW, many of those reasons wouldn't apply or would be significantly reduced.
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.
Sure, I will respect your choice to live in a low density neighborhood when you are willing to pay full price for your lifestyle. TxDOT found that it would require a gas tax of $2.22 per gallon. Are you willing to pay that?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.