Houston So FUCKING spread out, it’s like they knew they had tons of flat land so didn’t care.
Yeah, it’s ESPECIALLY bad in Houston, but fwiw this is an issue that affects basically every American city. Even where I’m at has issues, and I feel like we’re pretty densely packed into rowhouses.
The saddest thing about living in Queens is seeing all the old tram tracks everywhere. There used to be a massive network of trams connecting most of Queens to the subway lines and providing intra-borough transit.
They’re all gone. But the tracks are there peeking out from under the asphalt.
If I were the dictator of NYC, I’d replace a lot of lanes on the roads in Queens and Brooklyn with modern trams. I’d also put shuttle trams every 10 streets or so in Manhattan going crosstown.
We still have surface trolleys augmenting a lot of the transit network in Philadelphia that link into the two Cartesian arterial subway lines in the city.
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Obvious answer to all traffic problems is people tubes like the fish tubes.
The tricky part in New York is the sheer volume of people using even the existing transit.
People who don’t live here seem to conflate all “subways” together. But the passenger capacity of almost any other system is laughable compared to New York trains.
We made our trains so long we started getting rid of stations! It got to the point that a 6 train would leave 14th street, and the tail end would still be visible when it stopped at 18th street!
A New York subway train is over 600 feet long (183.5 m)! It consists of 10 cars for a seated capacity of 560 and a listed standing capacity of ~2,020. In practice the standing capacity is significantly more during rush hour on packed trains.
*There are some alternate configurations. G and C trains can and usually do run with 4 cars. The shuttles run 2 cars. The 7 train actually has 11 cars, but they’re an older type.
I’d really like to see how this stacks up against Paris or Tokyo… Basically any European city. I wonder how true that is.
For the record this is genuine curiosity. It’s astonishing to me whether or not it’s accurate.
This is also why if anyone is holding the doors on the subway open, it should be legal to shove them in or out. If you delay a completely packed train for just one second, you just wasted an hour of people time. That’s just one second. Delays of minutes quickly add up to days, weeks, and months of wasted time. A 3 minute delay of a half emptry train wastes 50 hours of human time. No individual person feels the direct burn, but the economic damage of these delays is actually enormous.
The light/commuter rail in those cities is different from the intra-city local rail.
London has a huge capacity for its commuter rail, but the intra-city subway lines don’t actually have that much capacity or run that frequently.
The highest capacity trains in the entire London Underground are on the Elizabeth line. A train can hold 450 seated people and 1050 standees. Meanwhile the Central line holds a mere 270 seated and 570 standing. Neither runs as often as most NYC subway lines.
Wait are you talking about the subway or are you bringing the metro cardinal directions into this?
Just intra-city subways. Not anything that runs services outside of the cities themselves.
These 600’ trains are literally just to get from one part of NYC to another part. The local economy and movement patterns are so tightly coupled to the subways that it wouldn’t make sense to count commuter rail.
I clearly have a bit to learn. I’ll chat with you once I fully grok the difference between light commuter rail and whatever it is I’m taking to work tomorrow.
Think of it this way. New York needs a giant fleet of 600’ trains running 24/7 just to get people to their local schools, to the grocery stores, to the parks.
It’s just table stakes to keep the most basic transportation needs of the city covered, and is woefully inadequate to the true demand.
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China kicks our ass up down and sideways on trains. And they do so for the simple reason that there’s political will over there to connect their country up with high speed rail.
And by political will, you mean the Communist Party that can pretty much do whatever it wants without having to worry about people disagreeing.
It’s easy to do what you want when you don’t have to answer to the voters, deal with an opposing political party, or worry about environmental concerns.
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It’s significantly more complicated than that… but it sort of boils down to it yes.
That said, the communist party can do what it wants because it genuinely enjoys popular support, for economic reasons.
If either of our two parties gave us the economic prosperity over the last 4 decades as the CCCP has for China, I imagine they’d have the ability to ram through such things as well.
So I guess… no, by political will I mean political will. Popular support of the CCCP and therefore popular support of high speed rail.
I will take the lack of good train infrastructure over China’s gov’t any day of the week.
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I’m honestly on the fence.
I’m not gonna sit around here defending china or it’s communist party. They’ve done some shit.
I will try and spread a bit of understanding. If you’re a poor country, you basically have 1 goal. Stop being poor, by hook or by crook improve the standard of living for the people who live there.
In this regard China has been a resounding success. It’s really not unreasonable for people who have seen such an improvement in their daily life to support their government. Graveyard in it’s closet though it may have.