Why the West Coast Is Suddenly Beating the East Coast on Transportation (nytimes.com) 273
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.
The big question (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Yes, often.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_roads_in_the_United_States
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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.
I bet they did originally, then people wanted tax breaks and pension funding and all the planned money went elsewhere. Kind of like most of my work projects.
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Back in the 50s, when the interstate highway system was planned and construction began, did anyone budget for future maintenance?
Yes, it is part of the Federal tax on fuel ($0.184 gallon). Cars and trucks actually pay more in than they use [bts.gov], with transit (in particular, rail) being heavily subsidized in cost. In Seattle, fares cover about 40% of the cost of the Link light rail [soundtransit.org], and only 20% of commuter buses. Seems that roads were properly budgeted for, but transit was not.
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I believe the aphorism you're looking for is, "Penny-wise and pound-foolish."
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So increasing the taxes on the low-and-middle classes (the truck drivers) not on the companies employing them?
Relative utility. (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
This - exactly. To put numbers on it, the greater New York City area is 302 square miles. And it's basically flat (about 400 feet of elevation change).
The Los Angeles Metro area is around 4,850 square miles (about 16 times the area) and is quite hilly (Santa Monica mountains reach over 3000 feet) with lots of steep grades (I don't think you can find a grade over 3% in NYC). NYC is geologically stable; the LA Metro area has 27 major fault lines through it.
Much bigger, much more elevation changes, much mor
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Everything you say is correct except the 3% grade -- Duffy's Hill is 12.6% grade, if only for a few hundred feet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Fort George Hill is also 12-13%...
None of these hills are like the mountains in LA, but still not 3%.
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New versus old (Score:3)
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.
Re:New versus old (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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LA Metro works well if you are close to a station and can get to where you need to go with at most one transfer. Metro has 93 operational stations, or roughly one per 50 square miles of LA County. The system would need to increase by an order of magnitude in track miles and stations to be on par with NYC.
LA public transportation options (Score:2)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org].
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 [latimes.com] dramatically in
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Has anyone actually measured a long-term reduction in traffic? The freeways are still packed, so it seems that whenever somebody gets out of their car and gets on [transit], it's bringing up a little bit more room on the roads, and there's somebody out there waiting to use it. [streetsblog.org]
Cost structures, anyone? (Score:2)
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/... [curbed.com]
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The politicians bullshit about there not being enough taxes or fees, but they (and their media lapdogs) ignore the egregious amount of waste involved.
You seriously didn't already know that New York unions drive the costs of any public works into the stratosphere?
Unpopular opinion: no more linear parks... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]: 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.
Yeah that's not going to fly (Score:2)
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 buil
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No doubt it's popular, and its far-west location makes it less useful for transit than it would be if it were more towards the center, which is why there wasn't much resistance.
The issue with deep tunnels is getting to/from them - long escalators or cramped elevators. The subway stations that can be reached with 2-3 flights of stairs are always better. The only time I've had a pleasant-ish experience with a deep one was Forest Glen DC metro station where they have 6 high speed high capacity elevators to g
Deep stations can work, but are not Muskian (Score:2)
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
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Tunnels are safest place during earthquake (Score:2)
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 [wa.gov].
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.
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Read the article again (Score:2)
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!!!!!!
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Let me Wikipedia that for you: Linear Park [wikipedia.org].
Park that surrounds a bike trail (Score:2)
I first encountered the term "linear park" [wikipedia.org] when studying the greenways [wikipedia.org] that surround some bicycle trails. For example, the Fort Wayne Rivergreenway [wikipedia.org] is a flood control park that forms the backbone of the city's trail network.
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It's the conversion of unused rail rights-of-way to cycling and walking paths. Promoted by legislation giving "rails-to-trails" organization first dibs on available surplus rail property. It is heavily promoted by automotive lobbying groups to stall the growth of new mass transit on these sites.
Infrastructure cannot crumble until it's there (Score:2)
Seattle and Transportation? What a joke! (Score:2)
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
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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: [curbed.com]
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: [seattletimes.com]
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 taki
Mass transit is very important (Score:2)
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San Francisco is decent (not amazing, but decent). My wife and I both use it to commute and to make weekend trips downtown, to the airport and so on.
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$ spent != success and leadership (Score:4, Insightful)
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We're not getting important parts of the story.
Those missing bits likely tell a different story,
Self driving electric cars (Score:2)
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 b
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IOW sort of like a train except about 1000 times more expensive, 100 times more complicated, and 1000 times less efficient.
Re: Self driving electric cars (Score:2)
The biggest impact of self-driving cars will be:
1) 4 daily rush hours instead of one: to work, home (empty) to park for free, to work (empty) to pick up, and to home.
2) people using city streets as free parking lots by having their car do laps around the block (especially after driving empty from home to work, while waiting for passenger to arrive.
Some people will pimp out their cars with Uber, but most people won't want their BMW or Mercedes to get destroyed like a public bus & will just send it home e
SD-LA-SF (Score:2)
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Technically you can take the Coaster in San Diego up to Oceanside, where you can link up with some other service (Metrolink?), but I can't imagine any normal person doing that for work.
Southern California just doesn't have the density for that kind of regional rail, and in order to make it work financially you'd need to convert the relevant parts to something approaching that. No way that happens any time soon, and probably not ever here in San Diego.
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As far as SD-LA, there's a direct train -- the Surfliner aka the San Diegan. It actually runs a fair bit north of LA as well, to San Luis Obispo or Santa Barbara. No need to change in Oceanside unless you're taking local commuter trains the whole way.
Surfliner is an acceptable service, though it really should be electrified between LA and SD. Problem is that train service is nil between SLO and SF, and the "high speed rail" project is turning into a joke -- overpriced and ridden with corruption. Had the
Are they really though (Score:2)
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...
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New Federal standards allow basically unmodified European trains in the US -- lighter construction, more emphasis on crash avoidance vs crash safety. Caltrain is one of the first US railroads to be under contract to buy basically stock aluminium Stadler KISS train sets, the same equipment as Swiss Federal Railways uses on large parts of their network. Compared to overweight trains built to the dumb, old US standards, this hardware is amazing.
https://www.railwayage.com/pas... [railwayage.com]
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Seattle may be great now ...
As a Seattle transit rider, I do feel somewhat obligated to point out that Seattle (and the greater Puget Sound east corridor) does have some great transit in place now - but, even in Seattle proper, there are areas which are very poorly served. And once you get outside of the city, there's a lot more areas which aren't served than are covered.
I can take a train into Seattle, and then ride light rail up to UW - but I still have to drive to the train station because bus service around my house is just about
Real Issue (Score:2)
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?
Boston's problems come from the Big Dig. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: Boston's problems come from the Big Dig. (Score:2)
The Big Dig was expensive, but that's partly because it involved a lot of untested new technologies developed & used for the first time (ex: freezing muddy land under railroad tracks and using hydraulic jacks to ram tunnels through the soggy mud below... or building an underground freeway big enough to play multiple football games in, side by side, while the elevated freeway above remained in use). Some things worked, some things didn't. But SOMEBODY had to be the first to try. Some of those technologie
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Sure, but the fact that *somebody* has to be first doesn't necessarily justify a project you can't really afford.
Everything the Big Dig tried to do -- reconnecting the city to its waterfront, extending and improving certain public transit facilities -- was desirable. But that doesn't make the project good engineering, economics, or public policy, because all of those things have to take *cost* into account. Especially opportunity costs.
If we'd put the same amount of money, roughly 21 billion in todays ter
Re:We have to expand our networks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I think that is because of a lack of planned development; not because developers design them that way.
It's both. Developers want to maximize profit, so they are motivated to spread out looking for cheap lots.
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Re:We have to expand our networks (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org].
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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 [slashdot.org].
Or because I don't care much to live in the noisy city when a large country property is available a 20 minute drive from work. Also the freeway here might slow down to 55 a few times when congested. If I wanted an hour long commute, there is a job 50 miles away that I used to contract for. I wouldn't want to live somewhere that took an hour to drive just ten or twenty miles.
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... having a yard is objectively a good thing ....
Now that the word "literally" has become meaningless, "objectively" seems to have become the new target to be destroyed. I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Objective [merriam-webster.com]: "having reality independent of the mind .... expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations"
Re:We have to expand our networks (Score:5, Informative)
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 [uspirg.org].
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 [strongtowns.org]!
So it's a huge, misplanned mess, not an unplanned one.
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Just because Illinois doesn't know how to budget for maintenance, it doesn't mean that the same is true everywhere.
Yes, sprawl is due to planning, but it isn't inherently bad unless you consider those who have somewhat different priorities bad people. I happen to like living in a place where it's quiet, there's minimal traffic in my immediate neighborhood, I have some land for me and my family to use privately, easy access to open public space, and I can still get to a good job within ~30 minutes. If you w
Re:We have to expand our networks (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [prtctransit.org]. Are you willing to pay that?
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Who says I don't pay full price? Where I live (not Texas), road maintenance is adequately funded from a variety of sources. I pay those taxes and fees like everyone else who lives here.
You know who definitely doesn't pay full price for their transportation? A public transport rider. The rider fees almost never even pay the operations costs, let alone pay back the infrastructure development.
So if you want to complain about subsidizing lifestyles, then don't look at me.
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Isn't public transport also funded from a variety of sources? What makes the two different?
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Yes, true. It can be spun either way.
Though, public transit in my city is used by a relatively small minority of the population and represents an outsized proportion of the budget. That means public transport riders generally pay back less of what they use than average.
Just for reference, the population in the metro area around my city drive over 40 Billion miles each year compared to ~150 Million passenger miles on public transport (i.e. ~0.3% of miles traveled are on public transport). The budget for pu
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You'll find that the high tax areas in general line up with the ones over paying the federal government.
It doesn't seem to be fair that a state like NJ that ends up paying a larger proportion of its funding from local taxes is not able to get a little relief for its citizens as they help fund the low tax states.
https://wallethub.com/edu/stat... [wallethub.com]
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It doesn't seem fair that someone in New Jersey, with the exact same income as me, ends up paying less federal income taxes because of writing off your higher taxes.
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Why? you benefit more from federal spending, and on balance you come out ahead even (in general, can't actually speak for your state vs NJ).
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By the way...the STATE doesn't pay anything...individuals do.
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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.
Actually, it was planned... by the feds. The interstate system was specifically designed to enable communities to sprawl so that it would be harder to nuke the US into oblivion.
Now, 60 years later, we just think this form of development is normal.
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I have no problem with people spending their hard earned money on whatever housing they choose.
But what you describe does not scale, so there is no positive point in encouraging it. Beyond a certain point, we have people taking 70 minutes on what used to be a 30 minute commute, and then taxes get raised on everyone to add another freeway lane. But the commute does not get shorter with more lanes, we only get yet more sprawl to clog the same freeways.
In fact, the infrastructure to support sprawl is subsidi
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Guess what...
It ain't your decision.
And you can deep six that bullshit about spreading the costs. My little community pays for what we have. We built our own roads, our own schools, etc.
Re:We have to expand our networks (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:here we go (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:here we go (Score:4, Informative)
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...
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Well, European cities have grown with public transportation in mind. I have never been to Stockholm, but I assume it is similar to other European cities I have visited. A large backbone of high density, high speed public transit (typically subway and trains), and many more flexible option to cover last mile (typically buses).
That was made possible by the relative density of European cities at the end of the 19th century. North American cities were typically built assuming people would own car and so the bac
Transport network design is the problem (Score:3)
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 an
Still about network design (Score:2)
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
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In for all the "I have a car so public transportation does nothing for me" comments.
Every time I've visited Los Angeles I've seen the light rail trains going down the tracks in the highway median. Zero passengers. So, yes, probably all the readers in that area are going to say they have a car and don't use public transportation.
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Be it in LA or Minneapolis, empty trains running means your tax dollars hard at work paying the driver and other operations staff as well as wear and tear maintenance.
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I bought a house in Charlotte, NC about a year and a half ago. Public transit in this city is terribly under scaled. There are essentially two lightrail lines both going to uptown, one recent from the university, and one older from the rich neighborhood in the south.
I work for the university, so naturally, I tried to find a location where I could leverage the rail (which had not opened yet at the time). And what found is that the last mile is a real issue in Charlotte. If you are not on the rail path, getti
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A Brief History of Private Transit (Score:5, Informative)
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> They actually worked fairly well until they started to be bought up by a consortium of General Motors, Firestone and Standard Oil.
By then, the street cars were already failing. Downtown-oriented travel patterns (the majority of the population headed there every day to work or shop) resulted in trolley traffic jams. Meanwhile, the operators were losing money because, responding to public pressure, government would not allow them to increase fares to keep up with inflation.
The solution was widely believe
Re: A Brief History of Private Transit (Score:2)
Before the "car and oil companies destroyed trolleys" tripe gets rolled out yet again, no. They were destroyed at the behest of suburbanites who hated trolleys because they caused accidents & clogged roads.
Getting rid of trolleys (and curbside parking) is what enabled us to have divided 4 & 6-lane roads with proper left turn lanes in built-up areas without having to demolish every building on one side to make the room.
The entire reason Miami voters keep wanting Metrorail (elevated heavy rail) expan
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By your reasoning, we should get rid of modern medicine because some patients can't be saved. My great-grandfather died of blood poisoning from a tooth abscess; I'm guessing you'd enjoy sharing his fate?
TL;DR: Perfect is not the enemy of good [rationalwiki.org].
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Re:And why should I care? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's easy (Score:5, Interesting)
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-1, Cites Washington Times as a credible source of news
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divert a large proportion of its tax revenue away from services that help poor citizens (like the police department and forest management)
Isn't San Diego the city where the police stopped responding unless someone was shot? Story [voiceofsandiego.org] seems to confirm that was the case in 2011, and still mostly the case now.
As for Fire Management, I think last month speaks for itself.
So where do they cut to make the payments? Your suggestions have already been done.
VOSD is a bit slanted when it comes to that. I'd take a look at the average POV of all the various local media to get a better view on things. Basically, no that's not the case.
Back on topic, San Diego is one of the few West Coast cities that's made its light rail system work and not sink into the red by focusing on commuter corridors, gradual expansion, and using existing right-of-ways. That said, like all CA cities it was not laid out with transit in mind and San Diegans as a whole are not in favor of con
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Biking in San Diego is generally done "by choice", either for recreation or sport. The beach communities, downtown, and the few other flat neighborhood regions that exist are really the only locations where it's a reasonable option for anything else (i.e., short term commuting).
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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 Preside
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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.
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