In 2004 California released an excellent service-led plan to expand its state rail network, both the high-speed rail projects and other corridors and a few BRT connectors. This video by nandert goes in-depth on why service-led planning is an important paradigm all agencies should use (5:33), the benefits of California’s plan, and how the governing boards would need major structural changes and reforming their priorities to actually make it happen this well.
He defines service-led planning as “Start by determining where the transit demand and need is, and tailor the plan to meet that demand.” In other words, determining how much of what kind of service each corridor needs. Then draw up cost estimates for the resulting lines to operators (agencies). The California plan specifies the rail/bus mode and frequency, but you could also leave the mode for a later step before assigning them to agencies, as Jarrett Walker does.
The difference between this and most transit planning is, corridors are chosen to meet the bulk of mobility/trip needs, without certain city/county jurisdictions having undue influence to override these for demands that contradict them. It also puts frequency first in the spec rather than leaving is as an afterthought, so the public can see what minimum frequency the entire network or each project will have so that they can see what their experience will be like.
This is an open thread.
Evolution of the NYC Subway 1868 – 2040 (Geographic Map)
(I would 2x the playback speed and mute the sound). It’s amazing how many different lines they could build in just one year, like 1918, for example.
https://youtu.be/XqUV-3gVzUM
It would be really interesting to have the same type of animation for the base map showing population densities change alongside the construction of each segment.
It’s almost unfathomable but NYC went from 3.8 million people in 1900 to 6.9 million people in 1930. That was entirely after the 1898 consolidation of the boroughs to create the current NYC.
Seattle had explosive growth between 1900 and 1930 too. King county went from 120K to 463K. It was the era for growth!
Of course, these NYC lines were privately built — and taken over by City government in 1940. All of this lacked environmental studies. It was build, baby, build!!
Little known fact, construction of the original London Tube was by and large carried out by US based companies. The old design drawings are in metric but all of the numbers are converted from fractional inches.
Depends on which part of the Underground you’re talking about.
The first sections opened in 1863, and those were just cut and cover steam operated lines. This was well within the abilities of Brummell and other British railway builders.
The first electric line opened in 1890.
American interests arrived on the scene in 1900, and led a considerable consolidation, expansion and electrification effort.
It gives a different picture of subway development than the common refrain. You usually hear that private companies built redundant subways to Lower Manhattan because they were all trying to attract the same Wall Street commuter crowd from each other. But this shows the IRT and BRT elevateds were originally networks in different boroughs with no overlap (IRT in Manhattan, BRT in Brooklyn). And the first overlap was just one tiny extension to one Manhattan station, a bit away from the IRT network.
Queens didn’t get any service until 35 years later. Did Queens not start developing until the 1910s?
I thought the elevateds were dismantled when the parallel subways were built, but they seem to be decades later. And it happened soon after the government took over two of the networks. Did people feel the government promised to maintain the elevated lines but then didn’t? Or did they know the elevateds would be shut down when government control was proposed?
It is possible that some of the earlier elevated lines was not modern enough even by 1940 standard, so they were not worth maintaining and had to be rebuilt.
Queens didn’t get any service until 35 years later. Did Queens not start developing until the 1910s?
I think they got into Manhattan via a ferry or the Long Island Railroad. While Queens goes way back it was booming in the first part of the 20th century. It had 150K in 1900 and over a million in 1930.
No New Yorker here so I could be very wrong. My guess is that Queens probably didn’t function as a city with its own city center like Manhattan and Brooklyn back then.
Brooklyn was its own city and has its historic central business district/Downtown while Manhattan had two of them around the time.
I couldn’t name any CBD in Queens that seems as old as Downtown Brooklyn, Downtown and Midtown Manhattan. Long Island City emerges as something like that but it is very recent.
Queens used to be a county (it was never a city). There were several large towns and cities. To quote Wikipedia: During the 19th century, as New York City continued to grow in population and economic vitality, so did Flushing. Long Island City was incorporated in 1870. Newton (which was renamed Elmhurst) and Jamaica were also significant towns. All of that part of Queens County was incorporated into NYC as a borough in 1898 (along with the other parts of what is now NYC). Brooklyn was bigger than any of the cities in Queens but the cities and towns in Queens weren’t tiny — it doesn’t really answer Mike’s question (as to why it took so long to add subway lines there).
The Long Island Railroad goes way back (although not necessarily by that name). Here is a map from 1876: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Long_Island_Rail_Road#/media/File:LIRR_map_1876.svg. By then you can see it is covering a lot of Queens. If you look at that map and compare to the subway map from 1910 it makes more sense. Brooklyn has a lot more extensive subway coverage but Queens has the LIRR (and ferries). These go together.
Brooklyn’s BRT didn’t go through to Manhattan either then, it just went to the ferry terminal or whatever. It was a separate network within Brooklyn. Presumably people took it to Brooklyn’s shopping centers as well as to Manhattan. That’s what I expected Queens to have too but it didn’t. So I wondered if Queens was still rural then.
I’m visiting NYC now, in fact. Only there do have enough density, where you can rub several metro lines a mere block apart from each other and expect them all to be well used.
However, in spite of the huge comprehensiveness of the subway, NYC does not neglect its buses. Where the subways run north-south, they have buses every few blocks running east-west. They also have north-south buses that parallel the subway, for people that don’t want to walk as far, or navigate underground stations, and those buses are extremely frequent, and often operate with red-paint bus lanes on the street. The bus routes in Manhattan are also surprising quick and legible. By and large, buses go in a straight line forming a coherent grid, without the twists and turns to reach “preferred” destinations that you see in other cities.
Of course, NYC transit does have its warts. Subway stations still lack air conditioning, and many turnstiles are very awkward to use with strollers or luggage. And, on weekends, some subway lines do get reduced to every 12 minutes, which is less often than Link runs. And, of course, there is no subway line to La Guardia Airport (there are buses, of course).
But, nonetheless, it’s an amazing system, one that can get people between disparate parts of the city as fast or faster than Uber and Lyft during large portions of the day.
I was visiting to and just came back last week.
I have to say NYC has much more than enough density for good transit. Cities don’t have to be as populous as NYC to have good transit.
Many Chinese cities are not even as crowded as NYC but still have okay transit ridership.
That’s true. But there are different degrees of “good”. For instance, where the 1 and 2 lines combine, Link actually runs about as often as NYC subway service (maybe even more often on weekends). But, the geographic coverage of Link is not nearly as good, with most of the city reliant on buses, and some major corridors near the city center, like SLU-First Hill, not even having a bus.
For instance, an NYC-level bus network in Central Seattle would not only have a bus down Boren, it would also have buses down corridors like Mercer, Roy, Alaskan Way, 1st Ave., and still somehow have the service hours to run everything frequently, on top multiple downtown tunnels, with subway lines running both express and local service to Belltown, Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, and the U district (the express service being roughly like the existing Link, the local service stopping every half mile throughout Capitol Hill).
But, we don’t have that. Even a route like the 8, on Denny, we can only afford to run every 15 minutes because there is no parallel route to the north on Mercer or Roy. A person going from, say, Eastlake to the Seattle Opera, is expected to both detour to Denny, and transfer between buses, which are every 15 minutes at best, and maybe every 30 minutes for the return trip in the evening. In practice, they will drive and park, or ride Lyft or Uber. It’s because we have a limited service budget and just don’t have the resources to serve that trip well without taking resources away from other trips with better ridership.
“For instance, an NYC-level bus network in Central Seattle would not only have a bus down Boren, it would also have buses down corridors like Mercer, Roy, Alaskan Way, 1st Ave.”
In NYC’s case, frequency might not be a very important measure for its transit system. I think just like subway, good frequency of MTA subway and buses is a result of high demand rather than the city is trying to push for some kind of Frequent Transit Network. They don’t need to. It was the same story for many Asian cities.
NYC’s transit travel time is not that great either if you are going from somewhere Brooklyn to Queens or the Bronx. It is usually great for someone like me (visitors) because my trips often involve Manhattan on one end until I have to go from Flushing, Queens to JFK. That’s why they really need IBX and more rapid transit lines like that. Their situation is probably worse because in Seattle, the traffic congestion is less severe so in some case you can actually install a bus lane that clears all the bottlenecks. Alternately, you can easily walk or bike to deal with the lack of transit on 1st, Roy, Boren, and Mercer St. However in NYC, a trip can very easily be 7-10 miles that you cannot even beat a slow bus. That makes the lack of rapid transit outside Manhattan bigger of problem.
And the point I was originally trying to make was not like Seattle is better or worse than NYC.
I was trying to say we don’t have to have NYC’s density to have good transit. Setting NYC as an example will make some people come to the conclusion that many cities in the US don’t deserve good transit because they are lack of NYC density.
They are many places with less density and still have good transit.
To HZ’s point, transit in NYC is far from perfect. The outer boroughs are very dependent on transit going into Manhattan. Projects like the Interborough Express and the proposed Queenslink will use existing Rights of way to enhance crosstown travel in Queens and Brooklyn, but the issue of getting from The Bronx to any other outer borough is extremely difficult. NYC would benefit massively from a new renaissance of transit construction to unlock faster, more frequent service for areas of the city along the edges. As the city evolves, Manhattan has become less central to the employment market, and as such the dire need for more investment in radial lines is becoming more and more apparently. If you’re curious about previous plans for NYC Transit, I really recommend googling the IND “Second System” plan from the 1930s/40s, which was sort of killed by WW2, suburbanization and the depression. The Second System plan was massive, with many projects at a huge scale. The second Ave. subway was planned as a six track mainline in Manhattan, with branches serving all boroughs.
Another plan was the ill fated 1960s Program For Action, which was killed by the NYC Financial crisis of the 1970s and Ford era stagflation. That plan would have had some really interesting changes like a QBL super express, bringing the LIRR into GCT and to JFK Airport, expansion of the Canarsie line, and of course the 2nd Ave Subway (as a more familiar deep bore double tracked line)
“think just like subway, good frequency of MTA subway and buses is a result of high demand rather than the city is trying to push for some kind of Frequent Transit Network.”
True to an extent, but good frequency still costs money, and that money has to come from somewhere. There are plenty of cities that content themselves with overcrowded buses and trains that people routinely have to let several go by before they can find one to even squeeze onto, so long as the rich can bypass it all with Uber or private cars.
The capacity argument also doesn’t explain why they invest so much in their bus system, given that a subway train has vastly more capacity than a bus does.
“The capacity argument also doesn’t explain why they invest so much in their bus system”
NYC doesn’t have endless budget just like any metro areas in the US. They needs to commit so much to build a subway line which makes running super frequent bus service seem much cheaper.
“Link actually runs about as often as NYC subway service (maybe even more often on weekends).”
That’s the amazing thing: we finally have world-class metro service somewhere, in the Lynnwood-CID corridor.
You may be looking at less-frequent parts of the subway network. I’m most familiar with 8th Avenue where the A, C, and E combine. It seems to be every 2 minutes on both the Local and Express tracks, so that’s twice as often as Link. After midnight it drops to 20 minutes, which is still almost frequent.
I’m not sure about weekends because every time I’ve been there, there’s been some kind of maintenance reduction or other, so trains were either rerouted or part of the route was replaced by shuttle buses. So I don’t have a feel for what “normal” weekend service is like.
I can well believe that service in lower-volume corridors like the N/W tail in Queens may drop to 5-15 minute frequency evenings or weekends. That’s the one part of Queens I’ve been to.
The 8th Ave. Corridor, where the A, C, and E combine is extremely frequent every day, but at 50th, while the A and C continue north, the E curves east and heads to Queens, so many trips depend on the frequency of just the E. The E, alone, seems to be every 6 minutes weekdays, but drops to every 12 minutes on weekends, which is less frequent than Link on weekends in Seattle.
Where I’m staying, I find myself riding the E a lot. Weekdays, it’s great, but the 12 minute weekend frequency is definitely less than ideal.
“The E, alone, seems to be every 6 minutes weekdays, but drops to every 12 minutes on weekends, which is less frequent than Link on weekends in Seattle.”
I think it may have something to do with their maintenance schedule as they seem to close two of the tracks for maintenance regularly. Somewhere along the 8 Av corridor, they probably just couldn’t run more than 5 E Train per hour.
Perhaps the current progressive government in New York City will work to remedy some of the warts. Air conditioning alone could go a long way towards making some of the other warts more tolerable.
NYC subway question: I always preferred to stay/go to places along 8th Avenue because I assumed the combined 3 services (A/C/E) would be the most frequent. But later I read that the numbered lines services to be more frequent than the lettered ones. The numbered services tend to have only one service in the corridor. I assumed all services ran at the same frequency, so 2-3 services meant 2-3 times as frequent. But is that true? Do the numbered services that are alone in their corridor run 2-3 times as frequently as the lettered services on average?
That I’m not sure. But, I do know that the 1, 2, and 3 follow 7th, which is just one block over. So, if you do prefer numbers over letters, you only have to walk one block.
The blocks are very wide east-west. So it’s a ten-minute walk from one avenue to the next if I remember. North-south is normal like Seattle.
Well, the numbered routes (generally) happen to have the most ridership. They go through the densest parts of the city. They are based on the IRT, which was built first, and they have narrower tunnels, and therefore narrower cars that hold fewer people. Since the frequency of every route is determined by how crowded the trains are, the numbered ones tend to be more frequent.
But some of the lettered routes are also very frequent. The most frequent routes, in order, are: the 7, the 42nd Street Shuttle (S), the L, the 1 and the 6, the E and the F. Although it’s not quite so simple, as during different times of the day they run at different frequencies, as the schedules are adjusted according to crowdedness.
Thinking in terms of corridors can be a little misleading because each one has both local and express tracks. So for example, on 8th Avenue, you have the A/C/E, but the A is on the express tracks and the C/E are on the local tracks. So you can go wait on the express platform for the A, or the local platform for the C or E. You can try to switch platforms if you see a train on the other one come first, but that can involve some runnning up and down stairs.
And the expresses can be faster, even if you need a local stop. I used to live on the 1, and that is a very frequent train, but it was a local. Depending on where I was starting from, it would be quicker to wait for the 2 or 3 and take that to 96th before switching to the 1.
Generally speaking, I don’t think I’d worry much about being near a specific avenue in Manhattan. It’s pretty narrow. The subway map is distorted in a way that unfortunately makes Manhattan look much wider than it is. Walking all the way from 8th (the “blue” line) to Park (the “green” line) takes less than 15 minutes.
That’s possible. Numbered line has shorter car than lettered lines.
NYC Train/Movie trivia. In opening of Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta is walking down a sidewalk, and you can see elevated subway tracks in the shot. That was filmed in the Bensonhurst/Bath Beach neighborhood, and today the train line is called the D Train, but in the above linked Evolution of the NYC Subway video, it was originally the BRT West End Line built in 1916.
Metro Liner has similar evolutionary maps for other cities’ rail networks, including London, Los Angeles, Paris, Chicago, and the Vancouver Skytrain. One thing that struck me was how many things that I thought had long been in place before my time, were actually started while I was a child or just before I first visited those cities (Chicago O’Hare 1986, Vancouver early 1990s, London 1998, New York 2000, Chicago 2000).
Chicago: I saw O’Hare’s L station entrance at O’Hare in 1986 but didn’t have time to visit the city before my plane transfer. The extension had opened two years earlier. I didn’t get back to Chicago for a proper visit until 2000.
Vancouver: I visited a church in the early 90s in Cloverdale, a then-rural area south of central Surrey. The Skytrain went to Scott Road, and churchgoers got a ride from there. “Downtown Surrey” was in planning but not built up yet. Scott Road opened in 1990, King George in 1994. That’s a 4-year span, and I went to that church a few times in between.
New York: I visited in 2000. The number/letter scheme started in 1967 soon after I was born.
London: I first saw in 1998. I’d heard about the Docklands Light Railway, and it was described as having so much new density and highrises it was “surreal” like Manhattan. So I went to look. The DLR opened in 1987. I suppose it wasn’t that recent, 11 years. I didn’t see anything surreal: it looked like an ordinary residential area to me, not like Manhattan. Later on another trip I saw Canary Wharf, and it’s much bigger. But somehow I didn’t see or notice Canary Wharf in 1998 or it was still small then.
I also rode the East London Underground line in 1998 or 2000. The corridor goes way back, but it became a separate line in 1990, and was reassigned to the Overground network in 2007. So I rode it between those.
FWIW, I went to Dusseldorf in 1998. I stayed in Ratingen, a suburb north of it. At the time there was a half-hourly bus to that part of Ratingen (“Ratingen-West”). Downtown Ratingen is “Rattingen-Mitte” in the middle. Two S-Bahn lines came north from Dusseldorf but they skirted the western an eastern edges of Ratingen, so that wasn’t feasible. There’s one east-west bus route that connects all these and also goes to Dusseldorf airport. So to get from Dusseldorf city, I could either take a half-hourly gnorth-south bus from Dusseldorf to Ratingen-West (partly on the autobahn), or I could take the western S-Bahn three stops north (still in Dusseldorf) and transfer to the same north-south bus. Now according to the map, there’s a light rail line from Dusseldorf to Rattingen-Mitte. If only it existed when I was there. :)
Another NYC subway question. I’d read that there were “shuttle lines at 14th and 42nd Street”. But when I visited in 2000, only 42nd was a shuttle. 14th was part of the L service to Brooklyn. And it seemed like the L had been there for decades. So was the guidebook wrong? Was there ever a shuttle train on 14th in Manhattan? The last time I was in New York around 2008, I stayed with somebody on the L so I took it for the first time.
My friend didn’t actually live on the L, but somewhere beyond it where subways didn’t go. I think it was in Flatbush somewhere. We got off at a station and transferred to a non-MTA bus route. I asked if it would accept my MetroCard; it did. The neighborhood was all 2-story houses. The were small houses (500 square feet?) on small lots, but still houses. I hadn’t realized part of Brooklyn didn’t have subways and was so low density.
The 14th Street tunnel was always connected to Brooklyn. It was one of the last parts of the line to be constructed. There was never a shuttle there.
A non-MTA bus that took Metrocards? Hmm. I don’t think there was ever anything like that in Brooklyn. There is the Nassau County bus system, which uses the same payment system as MTA, but that only goes to Queens. There are also the dollar vans, but as far as I know, they’ve never taken Metrocards.
What you saw in Southern Brooklyn might be Command Bus. NYC tried private franchise model in the 2000s. I think it is probably just like DART routes here but perhaps with more independence.
There is this reddit thread that has some pictures of it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nycbus/comments/1ro7jon/what_do_you_remember_about_the_command_buses/
When you mentioned the Non-MTA bus, the first thing I was thinking was Dollar Van. I read about this from NYT a couple years ago, but clearly they don’t accept MetroCard. I think they are cash only.
Inside the Dollar Van Wars
It was a bus, not a van. It seemed to be the normal bus service in the neighborhood. It didn’t have an MTA logo or colors; that’s what surprised me. I don’t remember what color it was. It could have been the bottom right one. The top left one looks like King County Metro in the 80s, so I would have remembered that. The top right one looks too swooshy new; the bottom left one too old-fashioned.
I used to take a private greyhound style commuter bus out of Grand Central to go bowling out in Queens. It was maybe double or triple the cost of a subway token, and I believe I paid cash.
Nandert is like a true transit investigative reporter. I am always impressived how deep he will go into his topic in his video.
I can’t help but wish Nandert or a clone was looking at the irrationality of ST3 — and produced these quality videos to demonstrate how such a bold vision has major flaws within the details. His graphics explain and emphasize things that paragraphs cannot.
I doubt he will do that any time soon. So far I think he only creates content about things he is very familiar with like things in Southern California and now California statewide.
He is probably not in this for serious money given how lengthy his video is and how much time possibly he has spent on digging out every piece of correspondences.
https://www.everettpost.com/local-news/the-i-5-question-people-keep-asking-about-everett-light-rail-path-construction/
“The question, Dunn, summarized, goes like this, “The question I get the most is, ‘why don’t we just go up the spine, up I-5 and go straight up (from Lynnwood) because it would be shorter and potentially cheaper?”””
Some thoughts:
We’re probably past the point where the alignment could be adjusted, but I think the best alternative would have been to jog to SR 99 and back to I-5. I don’t really see how a straight shot down I-5 would be worth it, since I-5 is already fairly fast between the freeway stations north of Northgate.
From my perspective, if Link is built out to Snohomish, it should probably go through the densest cluster of housing/jobs in the county, and that’s the Paine Field area (see map below). I think Paine Field itself also has a lot of promise as a secondary airport for the Seattle region.
Select “Pop + Jobs”: https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/databook/neighborhood-explorer.html#Everett%2C%20WA
The problem is, the Paine Field link station is not really within walking distance of anything. It’s just a transit center in the middle of nowhere. To actually get to the Paine Field airport terminal, or any of the industrial jobs, people would have to transfer to a shuttle bus. The transfer overhead will kill the time competitiveness of Link with driving, so people will do it only if they don’t have a car or would face big parking costs. Even then, you could offer the equivalent shuttle bus experience from a station along I-5, albeit at greater bus operating costs. You don’t need the Paine Field station for that.
The alignment can be adjusted any time before construction starts. If ST chooses an alternative that wasn’t in the EIS, it would have to add it to the EIS before construction. The barrier to switching is primarily political.
The comment section has a history of complaining about alignments that avoid high density residential and commercial areas, only to advocate for alignments that do just that, because it’s either easiest, cheapest, or fastest.
Sam, unlike Link, you seem to lack a Spine. Be brave and name the miscreant(s) whom you judge to be hypocritical.
Smugly tarring the entire Blog readership is not a good look, and certainly undeserved.
Sam is the Emperor of the Comments Section in his own mind, so he can think anything he likes. The problem with this comment is it seem to be false. When does the comment section do the second part, advocating for an alignment that avoids a high density residential/commercial area? I didn’t know what to reply because I couldn’t understand the comment.
Because WSBLE was a Draft EIS a few years ago, West Seattle Link EIS was called a Final EIS recently. Then afterwards the ST Board dropped Avalon Station and moved Alaska Junction Station a block. So adjustments after the EIS are possible. The Shoreline Station also moved a few blocks north after the Final EIS.
That EIS issue is probably why ST calls the newer plan CID-North and CID-South rather than name them differently.
Anyway, because the documentation is there, minor adjustments can be made by submitting a statement that the original study is not significantly changed, or that if it is significantly changed it would be a supplement to the Final EIS as a new alternative.
The EIS is literally what it’s called — a statement of impacts to the built and natural environments.
If ST staff did want to study following 99 between Airport Road and SR 526. The local advisory board and elected officials shot that idea down unfiretunayeky.
Nothing like a bunch of people with clout driving to a meeting to put transit where they think it should go. But not thinking through what happens except what ifs like to park their $50K car or SUV at a station and ride the train that costs so much to build.
The West Seattle EIS changed because ST couldn’t afford a 3-station project without delaying it. ST wants it done now and done first, so it refused to delay it. The other projects are longer-term so ST is less concerned about delays.
CID-N and CID-S were temporary working names. The station at James is now called “Midtown”, and the station at Dearborn is “Chinatown/International District”. The reason for these names is the EIS and federal grants. The representative alignment in the ballot measure had those names. The draft EIS has those names, and that’s what the federal grantwriters reviewed. So ST can say it’s simply adjusting them a few blocks south, so they’re still serving their original walksheds/ridership markets (so ST claims).
If ST renames them, it has to make more extensive changes to the EIS, which the feds would have to approve, and it draws attention to the fact that they might not serve their original walksheds/ridership markets, which could make the feds more skeptical. The target goal for Midtown station was Madison Street/RapidRide G transfers. The target goal for CID was Jackson Street walk-ups and bus transfers. Do the new locations still serve those adequately? ST says they do, so they still deserve those station names. Some commentators laugh at that, and weep at the hardships being imposed on walk-up riders. We’ll see what the feds think. They’ll probably approve it, since they’ve accepted the project so far, and they’ve accepted other questionable Link and RapidRide choices.
Ballard Link Extension open house tonight at 6pm at the National Nordic Museum in Ballard. All the big elected officials and ST leads will be there.
Project info, timeline update, cost savings… opportunity to ask questions and share thoughts.
Another point about transportation in Manhattan is that, excluding commuter rail that leaves the city entirely, or driving FDR Drive at 3 AM, it is impossible to get anywhere, by any means particularly fast. Whether you take the subway, a bike, or a taxi, your door-to-door speeds are limited to around 10-15 mph, at most.
Critics of city life will point out that driving a car in a car-centric city, you can move much faster than this. Which is true in terms of pure miles per hour. But, in Manhattan, everything is so close together that the distance you need to travel to reach a particular amenity is often much less than in a car-dominated city, so the net effect is that taking transit in Manhattan somewhere is roughly time-equivalent to driving from a random home to a similar amenity in Houston.
One effect of everything being slower and closer together is that it makes the simplest mode of transportation – walking – competitive for a lot of trips. For instance, in Houston, you might drive 5-10 minutes to go eat Thai food; in Manhattan, you do it by walking 5-10 minutes, without needing to ride a bus or subway train at all. Even a trip that’s a 20 minute subway ride can usually be walked in under an hour. Whereas a trip that’s a 20 minute drive in Houston is usually far enough that walking it would take several hours (if you can get there at all without being run over).
While I love New York City’s frequency and walkability, when I thought about what my trips would be, I probably couldn’t afford Manhattan so I’d have to live in Brooklyn, Queens, or Jersey City, and those are a half-hour subway ride away to get to midtown Manhattan, so my typical travel times would be 30-45 minutes, the same as in Seattle.
Of course, if I lived in Brooklyn or Queens I could find destinations there with shorter travel time, but I don’t really know what’s there or what locations would be close to the kind of destinations I go to. I’ve been to Brooklyn and Queens but I’ve only seen a bit of them, just a single destination at a time, and I don’t know what’s around them.
I tried riding the 7 deep into Queens, but I couldn’t see much of Long Island City, and beyond that it was all industrial for miles. I rode half an hour and turned around, so I never got past the industrial area. if there is anything past the industrial area.
That’s sad. The 7 has Jackson Heights and Flushing, the two best neighborhoods for food in New York. Maybe next time.
N the 1990s, I worked downtown on Wall, and later at the Trade Center, and lived in in a number of places in Brooklyn, including Borough Park (D train), Kensington (G and F), Prospect Heights (2 3 4 5 A B C G), Brooklyn Heights (2 3 A C F), Redhook (F G). I also lived in Jersey City (PATH).
Brooklyn Heights was the bomb, just a couple stops to Manhattan and the ability to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge if you cared to, but all the neighborhoods, especially those in the gravitational pull of Prospect Park and Park Slope (I could never afford Park Slope itself) had a lot to offer. Jersey City… eh….it was cheap.
I don’t think Queens and Brooklyn are necessarily the secondary choice to Manhattan for every one. I always like Brooklyn more in terms of living there hypothetically. It just seem more local-oriented than Manhattan in general.
Agreed. My girlfriend, who grew up in Brooklyn, had the itch to live “in the city,” and paid far too much for too little, sharing a studio on 86th and 2nd on the eastside far from the subway line for more than I paid for a whole 1 bedroom in Brooklyn Heights 2 blocks from High street. I definitely preferred Brooklyn.
I’m sure I couldn’t afford it now, but then it was $800/mo. NYC was depressed in the early 90s.
This actually might be my apartment. Not as bad as I thought, actually. Though hard to stomach 600K for 550 sq ft. Looks like it would rent for about 4K/mo, based on similar rentals.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/59-Pineapple-St-APT-6L-Brooklyn-NY-11201/79488478_zpid/
$800 in the 90s still sounds like pretty decent price after inflation adjustment.
I thought a place in Brooklyn Heights can be ridiculously expensive like 5-10 blocks away from Midtown Manhattan. Maybe it is today after all the urban renewal projects along Brooklyn waterfront.
“it is impossible to get anywhere, by any means particularly fast.”
At least subway remains fastest option for many trips in the NYC.
And you were right about commuter rail being very fast. I think it is the part that makes NYC transit World Class. For less 20 minutes, it gets you from Jamaica or Flushing in Queens to Midtown Manhattan in comparison to 50-minute subway express train ride. This is why real estate in Midtown Manhattan is more desirable than Downtown Manhattan today.
Commuter rail, itself, can be very fast, but still requires transfers through a hub, so the door to door travel time is not as fast. At 3 AM, a car driving across empty bridges and tunnels would undoubtedly be faster. But, what makes the rail competitive is that, during the daytime, traffic congestion going into and out of Manhattan is severe, making driving a very slow option.
In general, the fastest door-to-door travel times in cities around the world almost always involve driving through a car centric city during times of low congestion. But, in a dense city, getting those kind of speeds in a car is geometrically impossible – it would require so much of the city to be demolished to make room for more roads and highways, that what’s left would have no more density than Houston or Dallas. So, in a dense city, driving is by necessity, slow, which allows a transit system – if well funded and run properly – to be relatively fast.
I saw news reports about last night’s Ballard Link meeting. I skipped going because I live in SE Seattle and it looked like a PR stunt to me and not a place that input would be valued.
Instagram promoted this commenter, and there already has been over 40K views of his comments.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DetDNgDqvcM/?obrf=MWk1azlhOTZrazFhZQ==
I get his frustration. I do disagree that details in design do matter — but I also agree that some of the speakers should have known that the cost estimates were low-balled.
It still confounds me how someone can both plead naïveté about the ST3 cost estimates that he actually helped to define — yet then become the head of the transit agency that made them.
Those involved in 2016 should quit blaming inflation and admit their mistake in developing and trusting the 2016 cost estimates and the underlying design assumptions that were apparently very unrealistic. That’s the accountability that seems to be frustrating this poster.
Nowhere in the world plans something that is 30-year beyond with this level of detail because that’s pointless. If they wouldn’t be able to open it before 2060, that means the project is dead for now, but they just won’t admit it.
Again I wish there will be a conversation about what ST would do (like more bus service in Ballard) between now and Ballard Station opening in unforeseeable future. I think that’s more relatable to people who are around now. That’s a better gesture than saying they will design the whole thing now but they couldn’t commit an opening date.
Public service reminder: ST3 included projects to improve RapidRide C and D in the interim. They were intended to be early deliverables but the first realignment postponed them to the end of ST3. The second realignment (the one this year) didn’t mention them in either the do or defer list, so it seems they forgot about them or memory-holed them. They would be worth reminding ST and your boardmembers of.
Surprised to see the 111 rather full at least during peak hours. Good move by Metro. But the bus won’t use the HOV lanes yet and literally going slower than it should.
How much of south 405 is still under construction with reduced lanes? That may interfere with using the HOV lanes. In my Renton bus trip, the 111 was slowed by construction bottlenecks.
One thing that surprised me was people getting on/off at the freeway stops, when there seemed to be few parked cars or housing in walking distance. Where were they all going to? Were these the owners of the few parked cars? But none of them walked toward the cars.