Forbes has a list of the cities with the best commutes. The list:
- Hong Kong
- Tokyo
- Chennai (formerly Madras)
- Dakar
- Osaka
- London
- Beijing
- Mumbai (formerly Bombay)
- Krakow
- Berlin
It’s worth noting that every city on the list has a developed public transit system other than Dakar, where a large portion of workers walk or bike. Also interesting, not a single American city makes the list. Here’s the article. I’ve been to every city on the list other than Krakow.
I’m surprised that Copenhagen or Amsterdam aren’t on the list. They are both places where a high volume of commuters bike, and Copenhagen has restricted suburban development to rail corridors meaning the suburbs are well serviced by an efficient rail system. Perhaps their relatively modest populations play a role in their ommission.
Yeah. I’m a little suspicious of the methodology. As other note the subways in some of these cities are always packed out which is definitely not a “good” part of the commute. The article says this: “Jeffrey Kenworthy, a transportation professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia… measured the world’s 84 largest cities on the following criteria: the cost to the consumer and the government, overall investment in improvements, and the speed and safety with which workers are delivered to offices.” So the title should probably be something like “World’s Most Monetarily Efficient Commutes”.
The Hong Kong subway is fantastic … and busy …
The nicest train is the train to the airport (which costs more) … but it has TVs in every seat and an LED display showing the progress of the journey.
When you are going to the airport, you can even check your luggage in at the station and it then goes in a secure baggage car right to the terminal.
The subways are crowded … but since all the cars are articulated without doors in between them it makes it a bit better during rush hour. Of course when the rail lines dip and turn it makes the train look like some giant serpent that has swallowed you whole.
In Kowloon … they are still using their old double-decker trams … which is an interesting twist on light rail … although they often get stuck in Hong Kong’s famous traffic and pedestrian swarms.
The best thing you can take from Hong Kong’s subway is that it shows how possible it is for a city to weave a functioning subway system amongst hills, lagoons and one of the densest cities on earth
Wow. You’ve done some serious traveling. I’ve only been to one of those cities, and just last month. But having been there, it just makes me want to see Seattle get a decent train system, um, yesterday. *sigh*.
yeah, seattle needs transit so bad. america in general needs it. i wonder why everything is so difficult in america. we need to start doing stuff asia style and just building it. that’s one of several reasons i will be moving to taiwan when i get my degree.
Well, part of the “asia style” (except Japan) is disregard for property rights, poverty-level wages, and lack of any sort of environmental review. But if that’s your bag, go for it.
The poverty-level wages bit is the part that really amazes me. If Delhi, complete with dirt roads, real poverty, and cows wandering the street, can have a nearly New York quality subway system and only charge the equivalent of $0.20 IIRC to ride, then where’s ours?
my point exactly, vietnam is building 196 km of subway in saigon 128 km of subway in hanoi. also a bullet train connecting the two cities. if these poor countries can afford it then so can we.
You’ve got it backwards. Cheap, non-unionized wages are what allow these projects to be built cheaply.
Yeah, if we could pay builders $2,000 a year with no benefits and little safety measures, it’d be really easy to get light rail built cheapily.
Sound Transit has to provide parking within 1500 feet for every working on the Capitol Hill station site. That’s dozens of parking spaces every day within 1500 feet of Broadway and John for the entire years-long construction period. I wonder how much parking Hanoi is providing?
Not to mention:
1) No environmental review
2) No construction-time mitigation
3) No fair price for condemned properties, just take the land and but people off
4) No design review
Of course! Let’s just ship a whole lot of Chinese over here to build our railroads…
Oh wait. We’ve tried that already.
An interesting thing about this article is how it messages the benefits of transit in a way that will appeal to the more ‘conservative’ readers that make up much of who read Forbes.
Apparently I don’t know how to use block quotes, so lets try this agian without them…
An interesting thing about this article is how it messages the benefits of transit in a way that will appeal to the more ‘conservative’ readers that make up much of who read Forbes.
“The speed of transit not only benefits commuters; it contributes to a city’s economic competitiveness.”
and later
“Ease of urban mobility is a prerequisite for business to reach supplies and customers,” says Maria Krautzberger, permanent secretary of the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development. “Cities cannot secure their position in global networks otherwise.”
Especially of note is it’s mention of the benefits of ‘public private partnerships’.
I think when combined, it is a good way to message transit in a way that ‘reaches across the aisle’ to economic/business conservatives who may otherwise be unwilling to support mass transit projects.
Osaka’s rail system is seriously, seriously amazing. Between a bike and the trains I could literally go anywhere.
Nearly everywhere in Japan is like that. I kept finding towns of 2000 with a station that had service several times a day.
Yep. The strange thing is, Japan has a high number of motor vehicles per person. When I was there as an exchange student it seemed like most people I knew had a car so they get out of town or go somewhere fast, but would never use it to commute. The Japanese economy is different in many ways, but the explanation I usually got was that Japanese put more money into transportation than housing vs Americans.
I’ve been to Krakow, but stayed in the central city for the most part and walked everywhere. The train station is pretty central and they have trams/streetcars, but I didn’t ride enough of them around to get a feel for how good the network was. Most of the touristy stuff and bars in basements of medieval buildings were in the central part of the city.
Off topic, the city was never bombed in WW2, so all its architecture is original in the old part of town.:)And the women were incredible..:) And on a sadder note Auschwitz is 1/2 hour bus ride away. Very interesting to go see
TRAINS magazine ran an article on one of the busiest train stations in the world. It is Not Penn Station, not Chicago Union Station, not Grand Central Terminal, not Washington Union Station, nor the new Berlin Central Station(they ran an article on that one the next month), but Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. This is the busiest by passenger volume, and it only hosts conventional electric trains, the bullet trains call at another station. Great article. Also, I heard somewhere else, that in Tokyo, because of so many subway lines, the only places buses go are for feeders, or to areas poorly served by rail(which there are not that many). It’s an amazing system.