throwing money at urban problems does not necessarily have a great track record, and NYCTA has had lots of issues with corruption when they do have money to spend. Id be pretty skeptical that giving them a lot of money would mean you can hop on a train in 5 minutes at 2 am, it wouldnt even be cost effective to run that many trains at odd hours. Cars are terrific for this use case, however.
NYC cops have like a billion dollar budget and while they are great at protecting businesses in wealthy areas they are not very popular in lower income areas as they are both blase and overly brutal at the same time, their huge budget not having helped that aspect very much.
and even with fairly poor mass transit system - it's still is incredibly good by American standards.
I moved from NYC an hour north, to be more isolated than the "impersonal big cities". I barely know any of my neighbors - because there are no sidewalks and everyone is forced to drive for anything.
Car dependence kills people, kills communities and reduces your QoL.
You should move back to the city, then. I moved out because I had enough of the crowds and awful mass transit and I'm good with it. The NYC cops were absolutely awful for us as well.
throwing money at the NYC subway seems to have a generally great track record (albeit one featuring less efficiency than throwing money at other global subway systems). NYC could not function without it.
The 7 line extension cost over $3 billion dollars in 2023 terms to build 1.5 miles of track from Times Sq to Hudson Yards and build one new station there. I defy anyone to conclude this represented good value.
The NYC transit system costs $20BN/year to operate, serves a population of almost 9M people and pre pandemic had nearly 10 million passenger trips a day; currently 5M.
Montana spends $1BN/year on roadways and receives another $3BN/year in federal funding and serves a population of 1M people.
The NYC subways system moves five times the population of Montana every day and costs half as much per capita.
Subways are not a waste of money: throwing money at the NYC subway system under the current set of parameters is a waste of money.
P.S. you're also comparing apples and oranges; you're only looking at the MTA operating budget; not the operating + capital budget which the Montana numbers represent.
It was probably good value for anyone that owned any surrounding property.
Ideally the increase in property value should be captured by the public who made the investment - self funding effectively. But that's just the old LVT argument.
Public transit does not work in a place like Montana or Wyoming. Sorry. Too large, too sparsely populated.
Same reason it won't work for most of Texas either. It's fine in Dallas or Austin, parts of Fort Worth... it doesn't scale to Lubbock or New Braunfels.
A lot of people have no interest in living in your concrete jungle... myself included.
> urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population
> (as of 2018) 31% of the U.S. population lives in urban core counties
Improving public transportation in cities, makes those cities better for those who live and/or work in them. In downtown SF I counted the number of people in cars backed up in a single city block. The traffic looked miserable. It was ~30 people, less than a single bus' ridership that passed by. The only way reducing the supremacy of cars in cities affects people who don't live in "concrete jungles" is that they either have to pay for the externalities of their chosen transportation mode when they visit cities, or "park and ride" from the periphery into the the city proper.
No one wants someone in a Montana ranch to take the bus. That's either a misunderstanding or a purposeful straw man.
I'm pretty convinced that if they expanded or reduced the roads in SF or other dense cities, the traffic would be the same. The traffic reaches an equilibrium with the alternatives. I used to ride BART from Berkeley to SF every day, and it was consistently slower than the driving route despite being a straight shot.
About the externalities, you already pay a lot to cross the more popular bridges into SF by car, you probably pay for parking, gasoline is taxed heavily, and the police don't really protect your car from break-ins. Yet some people want to drive for one reason or another.
Disclaimer: Everything above based on pre-2020 SF cause I left for good.
Yes but the bus in SF isn't a place where the people in those cars would like to be. For anyone who has ever been on a bus, and who has the money to never get on a bus again, buses are a non-starter.
Wiled away the hours as the bus chugs along circuitously to a point that is not quite at your destination?
Tried to carry heavy shopping on a bus?
Walked to a bus stop through bad weather?
Taken one mode of transport that was delayed, making you miss the next leg?
Waited forever for a bus that never comes?
Public transport sucks balls. In the world's densest, biggest cities, you can make it kind-of-tolerable by throwing a ton of tax money at it, but it will never hold a candle to the most basic of cars / bikes / mopeds.
None of those problems you name are inherent in a bus though. Those are common problems with buses, but they don't have to be. A bus should not "chugs along circuitously to a point that is not quite at your destination" - design a better network. A bus should stop so close to where you shop that it is easier than carting that stuff to your car. A bus stop should not be so far away that bad weather is a problem. You should never miss your next leg because the next leg bus is never long in coming. The bus should always come.
The only part of your list that your transit agency shouldn't solve are the raving lunatic. This is easy to solve though as there are not many raving lunatics in the world and so the number of not lunatics riding great transit means they are rare (and there are plenty of others to help deal with them when they get on).
Running great transit costs a lot more $$$ than most transit agencies get though, so they make the best of what money they have. (not really - most waste a lot of money on things that do not make for great transit, but even if they spent everything perfect they don't have anywhere near enough money to run great transit)
Buses will always be open to the entire public. If "the public" includes raving lunatics, then they will find their way onto the buses.
To build a better network, you need to either throw a vast amount of money at it, or have a super-dense city. The public transit in London & NYC is merely OK. In other cities, it will always be prohibitively expensive.
And to say that "the bus should always come" is not exactly an argument in favour of transit. We all know the damn bus should come. But sometimes, it just doesn't.
> And to say that "the bus should always come" is not exactly an argument in favour of transit. We all know the damn bus should come. But sometimes, it just doesn't.
A big reason that the bus doesn't come is that it's gotten stuck in traffic. As in, behind cars. Give the buses their own space so they don't get stuck behind cars and they can be a whole lot more reliable.
Of course, since we've handed over essentially all our street space to cars already, doing so involves taking some space away from them, and drivers will scream about that.
SF has bus-only lanes everywhere. The bus is still very slow, even if you don't have to wait, because of all the extra stops. I'm looking at visiting parts of western Europe where supposedly public transit is good, but actually it's far slower than driving. The only way driving ever ends up being less convenient is if there's constrained parking. It's just very hard to beat a car that can go directly from point A to B.
What also beats mass transit is walking, if a city is laid out such that you don't usually need to walk very far.
I wouldn't say everywhere, but wherever they were introduced they reduced travel time significantly, and traffic in those corridors didn't get any worse. The 38AX became redundant after the Geary bus lane because the 38R is just as fast.
> The only way driving ever ends up being less convenient is if there's constrained parking. It's just very hard to beat a car that can go directly from point A to B.
Or if everyone else also decides to drive. Traffic continues to get worse until alternative ways to travel become faster. If there are no alternative ways to travel, traffic becomes worse and worse without bounds beyond human patience. Paradoxically it also means that improving transit travel times also improves driving times.
> What also beats mass transit is walking, if a city is laid out such that you don't usually need to walk very far.
There Venn diagram of people that want walkable cities and better transit might as well be a circle.
> Paradoxically it also means that improving transit travel times also improves driving times.
This is part of what I'm saying. If mass transit is improved, more people use it, so driving is still faster.
> There Venn diagram of people that want walkable cities and better transit might as well be a circle.
Walkable city works well with public transit along longer and simpler routes, like between cities or cross-town express. I'm not interested in public transit that stops every 2 blocks.
As transit gets good people start to realize they don't need to drive so they don't even if they could. Yes driving gets easier, but transit should stand well even in the face of little traffic
> The only way driving ever ends up being less convenient is if there's constrained parking.
And in cities there should be constrained parking, because parking takes up valuable space that could be used for lots of other things. If you have abundant parking, it's probably not a very walkable city, because the parking itself is dead space that pushes everything else farther apart.
If the bus gets stuck in traffic that means there is enough demand to run a subway (often as an elevated train). A bus is the easy solution to routes where there isn't much traffic and there isn't as many people who want to ride. (you don't need many people on a bus to pay for it)
There's a world of difference between having to use a car every day of the week to do literally anything (as the case with multiple suburban areas) and using it for it's intended purpose of hauling things.
Having a lunatic on the bus is hardly an excuse to force everyone to use cars and the systematic destruction of walkable human scale neighborhoods.
But sure. Let's abolish all public transit just because sometimes there are lunatics. US had a raving lunatic as a president, we definitely should abolish US.
Your problems seem to highlight especially America's problems, where "raving lunatics" seem to be found also in road rage, at groceries, churches, and schools (highway shootings, especially).
But in Japan, Switzerland, Barcelona, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Sweden, or the Netherlands I've not experienced this much; in many of these cultures since the public bus also serves schools and the elderly, they solve these problems.
Ever been in a car driving next to a raving lunatic? Nearly get forced offroad at 60mph into a gully by a braindead 'passer'? 'Throwing tax money...' ... you mean, like building yet another $500M freeway that almost immediately becomes congested? (Heavy shopping: Did that recliner fit in the back of your BMW?)
I've ridden metro buses since I sold my Dodge van in 2006. Total raving lunatics: 1. Collisions/repairs,oil changes, tires, license fees: $0. Total buses that chugged: none. Grocery-shopped by bus? Always. Waiting for a bus that never came? 1.
Heavy shopping? delivered. (It's a thing now.)
Bad weather: usually I wait until tomorrow.
Yes, that is funny to read. European cities with population less than 100k could have public transport and bicycle infrastructure while much bigger American city could not.
No one is asking you to live there or not have a vehicle.
What makes it a problem is the financially unsustainable suburban sprawl(single family zoning laws or covenants with the same effect) and people's expectations of car owners being catered to primarily.
I mean... why else would high density cities like Atlanta and DFW have massive X+Y lane interstates cut through the city? In so many places in the US it's straight up impossible to walk 1000ft.
> Public transit does not work in a place like Montana or Wyoming. Sorry. Too large, too sparsely populated.
And individual car ownership only works in those places because of the massive federal welfare they receive in the form of multi-billion-dollar federal highway grants.
The federal government spends over $1800 per person per year on roadways in Montana.
Public transit would work in a lot more places than you give it credit for. Sure Wyoming isn't dense enough, but that is because nobody lives there. If your town has 10,000 or more people public transit could work and would be cheaper than cars. However it requires a large investment to make it work. (the town of 10,000 can't work alone - it needs all the other towns in an hour drive to also have transit and a network of transit between them)
It doesn't matter if everyone in lubbock drives cars, thats obviously not what this thread of discussion is about and you know it. It matters if everyone in Austin/Dallas/Houston is forced to drive cars. Quit being dense on purpose.
Unless you consider that most areas (urban and rural) in both Texas and Montana were founded before the car existed; that the ebike has higher speed, higher carrying capacity, and lower costs of ownership.
If you add that in with legacy residents complaining of population booms and losing "the old ways", or nostalgia for self reliance, then Montana fits in perfectly. (Ps I rode in the ~1 uber in Missoula in 2018, and the hotel I stayed in Bozeman in 2022 had free bikes - and many bike lanes, and a nice bike trail)
