I'm of the opinion that every 500k+ city should have a subway line.
I grew up in a city with one (just one for the majority of my 20 years there) and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating, especially at 2am on a Friday night after a couple of beers with the guys.
The other thing I noticed when I was visiting my family there during the recent holidays is that there are so few cars in places close to the subway lines - roughly half the usual concentration. The incentive to have one is just not strong enough.
I'm of the opinion that it depends on density. You could build a subway line in some US cities of 1M and nobody would ride it; you could build a subway line in a city of 50k and everyone would ride it. It depends on whether there is density to support walking directly to many things (businesses, residences, and other transit lines) or not.
Density yes, but more importantly 1) speed vs traveling by car, 2) starting and stopping in places people want to travel between, 3) safety, 4) real estate prices/regulation.
Density goes to number 1 (more traffic = better reason to use the subway) and 2 (more likely to be able to serve people’s desired trip)
5) Weather. If it's under -20 C or over 40 C, walking five blocks is unpleasant for anyone and dangerous for some. Especially if the walk is unsheltered, which it typically is.
The subway is the big expensive investment. In theory, businesses and housing etc would develop around the stations. Like how suburbs develop around train stations.
In theory. The commuter rail I sometimes take follows an old rail right of way. Some of the stations are in fairly developed areas. But some of those, like Concord, presumably predate even the original rail. And a lot of the towns are pretty spread out. You can't walk to much until you get to the last two stops in the city proper.
I imagine that at least one factor there is that building up is prohibited by zoning—a super brief glance at Concord's zoning map & code it looks like the only kind of residential buildings you can build anywhere without special permission are single-family.
Now there are surely people living there who would argue that this zoning has protected the shape and nature of the town they that they prefer, but the flip side of that coin is that, at $1.4m, a median home in Concord costs more than 3x that of the country overall.
There's probably some truth in that. On the other hand, Concord is a pretty far-flung suburb; you're probably over 30 minutes to get to Cambridge without heavy traffic. I believe the prison out there is closed now but don't know what the plans are for the land.
Sure, I wouldn't imagine it'd turn into a cluster of skyscrapers if the restrictions were not there, but I would imagine there might be some small apartment buildings near the train station. New Jersey has had some impressive housing changes happen by opening areas near transit to development in not-dissimilar environments.
Apparently, the governor is interested in using it for housing development but I'm sure that will be tied up in the courts for years--especially with it being Concord.
Well, if I’m going into the city 9 to 5ish I’ll usually take commuter rail because it’s less painful even if it takes as long as driving. But I do need to drive to and park at the nearby commuter rail station.
And then landowners who were “smart” enough to own land where this ends up going in get to reap all the financial upside, instead of the public which actually invested in that infrastructure.
Just imagine if the public could capture the (financial) upside it produces, then it could apply that money to do the same thing down the road, then do the same thing again down the road further.
In some countries the transit companies (public or private) also become the landowners of the adjacent areas - this would be the "rail plus property" model.
In fact, the rail plus property model allows the rail operate to better capture their added value, so it applies even in "private" scenarios. The most famous example would be Tokyo.
The goal shouldn't be for the public to be able to reap direct financial benefits from the induced activity around transit hubs, the goal should be to firstly to incentivize and maintain affordable, high quality, sustainable transit, secondly to provide more and better economic opportunities.
Same in Switzerland, with the added quirk/bonus that shops in train stations are allowed to open on Sundays, when shops outside of train stations usually can't open due to employment laws. This wasn't originally meant as a way to increase attractiveness of businesses in train stations and other public transit places, rather as a way to make sure that people travelling have services available while on their way. But nowadays it's definitely a big reason for people to come specifically shop in train stations on the weekend.
I don’t see how that is a version of what llamaimperative posts.
If anything, TIF increases rewards for landowners who do nothing or otherwise underutilize land. Taxing the product of work to make a piece of land beneficial for society is amazingly backwards.
The proper direction to go in is marginal land value tax rates, with increasing penalties the longer a spaces remains unused.
That just encourages corporate ownership of property (unless you mitigate that), but overall I don’t know why we’d disincentivize moving closer to a new workplace or into a smaller home once it will do for you.
Outside the US, there are many examples (Japan and China both do this).
In the US, I don't know specific examples, but you can definitely use a combination of policies (building public transit, zoning laws to encourage high density, making parts of the city more pedestrian-friendly - and generally less car-friendly) to encourage high density.
There’s photos of subway stops in random fields in china that sometimes get laughs but in actuality china is just smart enough to build the subway and THEN the buildings.
Meanwhile Japanese rail companies own land where they build rail and can make more money on the land than on the trains
If not a subway at least some form of transport that won't get stuck in gridlock. Three examples I can think of are the Wuppertal suspension railway, Las Vegas monorail (though more of a tourist pull than for the locals) and the dedicated Metrobus lanes in Mexico City.
It's only a short stretch, running the length of I-495, but the XBL in the Lincoln Tunnel is a huge reason why people bother with the bus in northern NJ.
When I was commuting by bus, the inbound morning trip (with XBL) was 20-30 minutes, and the outbound evening trip (without XBL) was 30-45 minutes.
They don't need silly suspension railways in most places. A tram line fits perfectly in 1 lane, so that would make it 2 lanes for both ways. US lanes are so wide that it's likely 2 tram rails fit in 1.5 road lanes, with a bit of extra room for wider sidewalks (sorely needed in most of the US), bike lanes (also sorely needed in most of the US) or just general greenery (hedges would do wonders for US urban landscapes...).
Of course this would require that the 3-4 lane stroads give up 2 of their carlanes so instead of doing the reasonable thing, building infrastructure costing 10x is almost universally preferred.
Heck, it doesn't even need to be a tram. BRTs are good enough for a lot of cases.
Well-done BRTs are probably the best thing you can get for cost/benefit. And you can subway them at points if you want, and if they get super popular you can put them on rails.
Having lived in / visited a few dozen cities in Europe, I actually think trams are generally preferable to subways. In places with both, I tend to use the trams almost exclusively.
A hop on, hop off tram system is much quicker and efficient than going into a subway station, then back up, etc. At least if you aren’t going entirely across town.
What makes for a more pleasant experience is not necessarily the optimal choice for commuters as subway wins over trams by close to an order of magnitude in terms of throughput.
In the city I grew up in during rush hour subway trains leave less than every two and a half minutes and pack well over a thousand commuters each. That is an impossible feat for even the best tram system, as they're limited both in vehicle and station length, not to mention speed, as you can't have 40 tonnes of metal hurtling at 80km/h through intersections.
And also they have much less capacity than mass transit systems like a subway, so they are bad for most commuters who tend to travel at rush hour[1]. I guess they are great in tourist areas though.
[1] In my experience, at least in the cities where I have lived
You could argue trams are more romantic. That is probably the major advantage.
I'd argue there are some limited places where classical trams on the road make sense, like some down town district. But you get almost the same utility with busses, passenger flow per lane is lower with busses, for a lot less money.
If I’m going one, maybe two stops, a tram can be optimal if it’s already in front of me[1]. Otherwise the subway tends to win the curb to curb speed contest for me. It’s a little more traversing through the subway’s infrastructure and getting to the right platform and the right part of the platform, but I’ll get to my destination in less time and it’s not even close.
[1] Otherwise I have to check the Transit app on my phone and do some math factoring in the wait time and the time it takes me to get to the platform. The subway usually wins this contest too.
Depends on the city, but in most places the lanes are wide enough that a tram-designated area isn’t really an issue. Even then, it wouldn’t be a horrible idea if an avenue (running north-south) or two in Manhattan had one less lane for cars and one more for trams.
Not necessarily. Unless I am misunderstanding what specifically is being referred to as a tram. In Portland, Oregon for example, we have small trains that run at street level and share lanes with automobile traffic.
Portland's trams don't move anywhere close to 35mph as the OP mentioned. Portland's trams are quite capacity constrained due to needing to navigate the short blocks and many intersections of downtown Portland. Dedicated travel cooridors where these trams could move at closer to 35mph would allow trips _through_ downtown to become competitive which currently are often not ideal.
> and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating
I think ours could go up to 50 or 60km/h, but the density of stations (can’t leave any blocks behind!), station dwell times and time for one transfer puts it at equal time to cycling for me in Toronto.
And my cycling route isn’t a more direct route (cuz our surface routes are largely a grid and we just replicated it underground instead of something more synergizing like a giant X).
A fun hobby of mine is to open up Paris on google maps and compare the cycling and transit times in their daytime between arbitrary points and cycling often wins. Theyre drunk on station density so you’re always close to one, but it means a lot of stopping.
> For example, the Purple Line in Los Angeles cost $800 million per mile. By international standards, the New York price tag is stratospheric: A project in Madrid cost $320 million per mile, and one in Paris cost just $160 million per mile.
I'm no city planner, but I would definitely connect the Amrtak station with the University of Arizona and on the other end make it reach the edge of downtown.
The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas but then again my city put a subway station in such a location and it serves a whopping fifteen hundred people daily - that's one subway car, but at the same time appropriately a thousand fewer cars on the road. Still worth it in my book.
> I'm no city planner, but I would definitely connect the Amrtak station with the University of Arizona and on the other end make it reach the edge of downtown.
I went to U. of A. and have absolutely never even heard of any student ever needing to go to the Amtrak station, for any reason. Not trying to be rude, but that smells like unthinkingly-applied urbanist ideology — thinking “trains are cool” and working backwards from there.
But sure, people do go to that area for nightlife, so let’s assume you said something like “Hotel Congress” instead of “the Amtrak station”. Still, that’s less than 3km from campus — even if there were no transit options, you could bike, walk, take a rental scooter or an uber.
But if none of those options work, fear not, there is already a streetcar that basically covers exactly your proposed route: https://www.suntran.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Sun-Link-... . So why would it make sense to spend a giant sum on a subway to replicate the streetcar over this tiny area?
> The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas
That’s my point. Your claim that any 500k city could benefit from a subway is wildly over-general. It entirely depends on the type of city.
I get where you're coming from as I have a lot of words to say to those urbanist ideologues and none of them are pleasant.
Main reason why I think subway is superior to anything, including trains riding on the surface, is that it doesn't get in the way of anything.
My current city is subject to a double whammy of a train and river system. The result is of course gridlock, as bridges have limited capacity and not all train crossings could be made into viaducts. Having a single subway line would greatly improve things, but alas - the city is in debt due to having built a football stadium which went way over budget.
That being said to me American cities stretch the definition of cities. If there's no functional difference between a district within city limits and a suburb, why bother with having a distinction? I mean, we have districts of detached houses in my corner of the world, but they're former villages absorbed by cities and are gradually being densified.
I get where you’re coming from, but I can’t think of a definition of “city” that would exclude Tucson. It’s a large, connected settlement of humans who don’t primarily live from the land.
For what it’s worth, Tucson does have suburbs, which are even less dense than Tucson (e.g. Oro Valley).
In the evolution of English language usage the term "subway" is almost always associated with passenger transport by train.
A "train underground" my or may not have passengers .. the majority tonnage of trains in mine systems is ore transport, many such systems never carry passengers although, of course, some do at shift changes.
Nice effort and just shows you how far the art/science of dataviz has come with the ability of websites to work like realtime game engines.
This is the same information visually expressed in a grid chart from 1983 by Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information). While the method can't scale the same way it feels like a more creative approach :
I wouldn't say that Maray's chart as cited by Tufte is directly comparable: it displays the timings of trains along a one-dimensional railway, therefore displaying two dimensions of continuous data for each train (the second dimension being time). The online map displays a two-dimensional area, with an extra (quantized, not continuous) dimension of time with the colour-coding. It's a tradeoff between displaying more precision for fewer train timings or less precision for many train timings.
I love this. I agree with the "about" that it's visually compelling, and I'm mesmerized.
This doesn't detract from my enjoyment the site, but for trip planning I'm a little skeptical of the results around the edges, especially when I'm assuming multiple transfers would be required (e.g., Local -> Express -> Express -> Local).
With a caveat this was over 10 years ago (~2012-2013), and train frequencies may have changed:
I used to live pretty far up on the upper west side, and took the 1 train from the 103rd street station daily. My weekday route was 1 -> 2/3 -> 7 into midtown. The 20 minute radius is accurate at peak times, when it only takes 2-3 minutes to catch a transfer. However, the website "about" makes an assumption this is for noon on a weekday. I don't think I ever made it to Brooklyn in under 40 minutes.
Something here is not quite right. For example, if you look at the 7th ave line (red line/1,2,3) 18th street and 14th street have similar radii.
But anyone knows that 14th street is much more convenient because it's triply serviced by the 1,2,3 with 2,3 being express trains. 18th street is serviced by one train the runs locally. This ignores that you could easily switch to the L, A/C/E, F/M with a short walk.
Still, a cool visualization to show the power of mass transit, and even compare relatively between lines.
I think it includes transfers and express lines. I noticed if I click on a local stop that meets an express line somewhere, the express line stops are still quite a bit darker than other stops.
That's likely why 18th and 14th street are so similar: It only takes a minute or two to get from 18th st -> 14th st.
I see what you mean. According to this map, you can get from the 18th. street station to the 1st ave. stop on the L in ten minutes, but not from 14th. street.
I've been meaning to try it out in NYC because it seems like that's one of few geos they playtested. It's super fun in other cities but you have to modify the rules and cards a bunch to make it work.
I'm a huge theme park nut that lives in Orlando - I'm trying to design a version that can work across Walt Disney World (or maybe even ALL of Orlando's theme park campuses).
Photos pose a huge challenge because my friends (fellow theme park nuts) can pick out the smallest details in every park -- even the color of pavement and themed lighting fixtures! I'm having fun thinking of what adaptations to make.
Agreed that this product would be better as a game design framework rather than a ready-to-play game in any geo (and tbh, would be a better fit for what Jet Lag is all about: people designing games for themselves to play!)
There is a subway that connects Manhattan and NJ, called the PATH. Unfortunately it’s run by a completely different organization, which I agree is silly.
It would make much more sense for it to be unified with the MTA subway, with more connectivity. My dream would be a single seat ride from Newark Airport to Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, via Newark Penn Station and World Trade Center.
There was also once a proposal to have the 7 train go out to Seacaucus Junction, which would be huge for accessing the East Side for NJers.
Taxi companies don't like rail going to US airports. With JFK you have to take one train, then change, then another train, then you're at the equivalent of Paddington. Would be like having to change at Hayes+Harlington. Luton has this, but that's the odd one.
From Newark I think it's a bus to a train station, then a train to NY Penn.
The "default" way to get from Heathrow/Gatwick/Stansted to London is a train from the terminal to the centre, typically multiple options.
The default way in the US is taxi. Massively inefficient, but a lot of people make a lot of money from it. Why have a plane load of people on a single train costing $5k, when you can have 200 taxis costing $20k, generating 4 times the GDP.
In London, you also have the Piccadilly line depending upon where you're going and how much luggage you have (many of the London tube stations are pretty awful in terms of accessibility as I discovered on a trip where I had heavier luggage than normal last year).
Since 2022 there's also the Elizabeth Line, which uses the same tracks as the Heathrow Express, but then continues under Central London and far to the east.
It takes 27 rather than 15 minutes to Paddington, but it's also half the price of the Heathrow Express.
Right. But I usually stay near Trafalgar Square and the Piccadilly line is much more convenient for that. (Though I will be taking the Elizabeth line from LHR my next trip because I'm initially going to Shoreditch. And, yes, Heathrow Express is something of a rip-off which the airport steers you towards.)
If you're talking about underwater, I don't think that's the problem compared to running track through populated areas, whether that's through tunnels, cut-and-cover, at-grade or viaduct.
I love it, but as someone who lives in Queens I think it’s underestimating by maybe 20% or 30%, particularly when a transfer or significant walking is involved (and I walk quite fast)
They're assuming very quick transfers (rush hour service). But then again, a lot of transit planning seems to assume rush hour commutes are the only reason why it's there.
Travel times would be much improved by a high speed line.
Ie. a route with 4 stops and a travel speed of 100 mph.
The finances of railways actually get better with faster trains - because the sooner you can get the person to their destination, the quicker you can get that train serving another passenger.
MTA runs express trains. They don't get up to 100mph, but they skip many local stops along the way. Raising their speed to 100mph would likely not meaningfully increase transit time - you'd maybe shave off a few minutes.
You just have to look at the peak ridership figures from 1949. They're running well under the capacity the system could handle 75 years ago. Faster trains aren't necessary.
it boggles my mind that a place like new york doesn't have the money to just do that. Raising the speed limit gets more important the longer you travel and connects distant parts your city better. It's a recent trend to build high-speed lines to complement an existing, dense subway network (e.g. Paris goes up to 75 mph).
I mean when were these built, a 100 years ago? Surely there's room for improvement.
You do realize that Manhattan is only 14 miles long? With a stop every 3 miles even a Shinkansen wouldn't reach 100mph before it had to start slowing down again.
In London you can take a high speed train from St Pancras to Stratford, though it's a normal high speed train that then continues far outside the city.
I don't think that's unusual for very large cities with high speed trains. The longest-distance trains probably only stop at one station in each city, but medium-distance trains can stop at multiple.
I've never come across a metro train travelling that fast though. The cost of building the line to support those speeds would be tremendous for a small difference in journey time.
An interesting offshoot of this type of question is: how long does it take to hit every stop on a given transit system? BART has quite a few people making attempts; the official BART website even maintains a little article [1]! A couple have made videos of attempts and theory [2, 3], but the king of these things is tomo tawa linja, who I believe is the current record holder at 5:30:26 [4].
There a pretty neat free tool - http://pedestriancatch.com - that will also let you run walkability simulation anywhere with OpenStreetMap data. Great for when you’re moving or exploring somewhere new.
This is absolutely wonderful. As a former resident of Astoria and soon-to-be Brooklyn resident, I noticed something that becomes pretty obvious quickly to NYC residents: literally all of Queens (except perhaps LIC) is over 40 minutes from the vast majority of Brooklyn by subway. When I lived in Astoria, it was literally faster to _walk_ than to try to take the subway (with weekend delays and redirections and schedules) to most of Brooklyn.
We built a visualization along these lines at Sidewalk Labs back in 2017. It's open source if you're interested in playing around with it: https://github.com/sidewalklabs/router
I particularly liked the multimodal comparison feature. It lets you answer questions like "where does the bus help me get to faster than the subway?" (Answer: basically nowhere.)
Shockingly easy to get to though. LIRR to Jamaica, then AirTrain. Usually faster than a car, and more predictable than taking the A (which you have to be careful to choose the right one).
> Isochrones are manually calculated using turf.js assuming 1.2m/s walking speed after the subway trip.
This is super cool, and I don't want the following statement to be taken as a criticism, because it's an unrealistic expectation: I do not rely on estimates like this until they are ground-truthed.
I'm curious how the creator chose 40 minutes as the cutoff because I use the same cutoff. Less than 40 minutes is normal, ordinary, wouldn't think twice about it. More than 40 minutes is an outrage, preposterous, is this place even still in NY?
This is great. It doesn't paint a full picture, however. It's certainly possible to go farther leveraging the other rail lines in the area: PATH, LIRR, Metro North, NJ Transit Light Rail
Well it depends because they added the Grand Central line so that you can get from the middle of Manhattan to Queens fairly quickly as Grand Central stop at Jamaica station on the Long Island railroad which is a hack to getting to JFK without having to use the Subway.
this is cool but it would pe super interesting to see this adjusted for the ilterva\ timing betweenarrivals assumild i got to station rightafter each train left: all of the area difference is the questionable territory risky to ride from each station unless you have flexibility
The data doesn't make sense to me, at least if it doesn't take into consideration transfers (which are very erratic from my experience).
Ex: The A in general goes express from 125th to 59th st without any stops. Therefore, one would think those stations should be sort of disconnected from each other (sort of islands in the the graph), but the data as presented shows them with a simple gradual extension of time.
nice too. but been a while since I lived in NY. what these things don't tell ya is how frequent the trains break down.
my morning commute would be 30 mins on a packed train, but the evening train would be 2x-3x that time due to trains / track issues.
Cool! Though the data must be a bit noisy as you get some oddities. For instance, if you select Astoria/Ditmars (last top, NW Queens) the Flushing/Main Street stop (last stop of purple -- go directly west on map from Astoria) is out of range. Click Flushing/Mains Street, though, and Astoria/Ditmars is in the 40 minute range.
Which is why people prefer personal cars whenever possible. Mass transit has to operate at 5 minute intervals (so that you are waiting at most 10 to 15 minutes in the event of a missed connection).
If it isn’t that frequent, then I am going to opt for a personal car every chance I can. Using only the subway in Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn is convenient, but as you stray further, it starts getting tedious.
In a car, you still need to park, which in NYC might take 20 mins and still leave you blocks from your destination. The other difference is what you can do with your travel time. While driving, you're limited to passive activities. Cabs and ride share solve this, for a price.
But people do love car travel, regardless of the problems. I have a buddy who would nearly always opt for Uber, even at times when traffic made it slower than the subway.
> Mass transit has to operate at 5 minute intervals (so that you are waiting at most 10 to 15 minutes in the event of a missed connection).
Which is not only possible, but quite feasible. Upgrading to provide six-minute service 24/7 would only require a one-time investment of $300M, because it is projected to raise enough revenue to pay for itself in the long term.
Unfortunately the current governor is trying to cut transit funding again with her most recent budget proposal, so that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.
I'm not convinced it'd pay for itself since maintenance still needs to be done so it's not really 6 minutes 24/7. The 7 train in theory runs on weekends and in theory runs fairly often. In practice it's down every other weekend for I think 5+ years now. The MTA does not have a good track record of timely maintenance and also seems to not care much about long term downtime (ie: like their original proposal for a 15 month closure of the L line).
> The MTA does not have a good track record of timely maintenance
A big part of that is because the MTA has been starved of funding for fifteen years now, to the point where they've had to substitute capital funds for operating funds in an effort to keep the lights on. Maintenance becomes more expensive when it's perpetually deferred - and it just became even more expensive because Hochul's inexplicable last-minute flop in June caused S&P to downgrade the MTA's credit rating, which means all future bonded capital projects will have to waste even more money on higher interest payments.
> (ie: like their original proposal for a 15 month closure of the L line).
That closure was intended to fix damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, and to bolster the tunnels against future climate disasters. The decision to forego the full maintenance (made unilaterally by then-Governor Cuomo as a political move) just kicked the can down the road.
You're conveniently forgetting out the nuance of the MTA. You do recall that the top person in the world for Transit quit because of the bureaucracy there, right?
> You're conveniently forgetting out the nuance of the MTA. You do recall that the top person in the world for Transit quit because of the bureaucracy there, right?
Byford quit because of Andrew Cuomo, the then-governor, not because of bureaucracy within the MTA. This was widely reported even before his resignation was official, but was confirmed explicitly later on[0].
> To use a transit analogy, Byford fled the MTA because he felt like he had been tied to the tracks while a train driven by Andrew Cuomo cut his legs off, Kramer reported
Which is my point: the governing authorities make political decisions to starve the MTA of funding or cancel capital projects at the last minute, which harms the MTA in the long run and creates many of the problems that people end up blaming the MTA for.
I live in Budapest and would definitely not prefer a personal car. Public transport is super convenient, cheap and fast here, and I don't need to worry about parking, fuel, congestion or maintenance.
They are mutually exclusive in the US because space for cars (current US sized cars) means everything is farther apart, which means the public transit is not economical, or lots of walking. And walking is more dangerous for pedestrians due to inattentive drivers and large arterial roads with wide crossings.
The constraints lead to completely opposite designs, which is why only very few, very dense cities in the world have convenient public transit, and they also happen to be inconvenient for personal cars.
There’s a tram line in Dublin which hits every three minutes at peak times, which is just bonkers (it’s not fully segregated, so if there’s any traffic problem at all then about four of them end up piled up one behind the other). Its most busy section was meant to be converted to metro, but due to planning permission nonsense it will just continue to be one of the world’s busiest tram lines until at least 2040 (it is actually higher peak time capacity than many metro lines at this point).
They just got permission to go from 22 to 26 trams per hour at peak times. I’m thinking that by the time it gets metro-ified it’ll just be a continuous procession.
The level of redundancy in the NYC subway is marvelous. In most of the densest areas, you have 4-track lines and often other lines within a mile. It makes it possible to do maintenance while still offering 24/7 service.
If you have a 2-track line, you can close one of the tracks for maintenance on weekday nights when frequency doesn't need to be very high. That's how Copenhagen does it.
There are a few -- select the 79th street station on the #1 line (farthest west in Manhattan) and look at Brooklyn, due pretty much directly south. The 36th Street station on the D/N/R lines is reachable in 40 minutes because it gets express service, but the stations to the north and south are local stops, and for that reason, take longer to get to.
Is the migrant crime the only crime you are trying to get away from? Are you ok with local crime? One would hope you just want to escape crime, unless you are insinuating that all crime is migrant crime or most crime is migrant crime. Neither of which is true.
I'm of the opinion that every 500k+ city should have a subway line.
I grew up in a city with one (just one for the majority of my 20 years there) and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating, especially at 2am on a Friday night after a couple of beers with the guys.
The other thing I noticed when I was visiting my family there during the recent holidays is that there are so few cars in places close to the subway lines - roughly half the usual concentration. The incentive to have one is just not strong enough.
I'm of the opinion that it depends on density. You could build a subway line in some US cities of 1M and nobody would ride it; you could build a subway line in a city of 50k and everyone would ride it. It depends on whether there is density to support walking directly to many things (businesses, residences, and other transit lines) or not.
Building a subway system after the city is so dense that it will be ridden by “enough” people is exactly the wrong way to create livable urban spaces.
Building a subway is the solution to inducing density, not responding to it.
Density yes, but more importantly 1) speed vs traveling by car, 2) starting and stopping in places people want to travel between, 3) safety, 4) real estate prices/regulation.
Density goes to number 1 (more traffic = better reason to use the subway) and 2 (more likely to be able to serve people’s desired trip)
5) Weather. If it's under -20 C or over 40 C, walking five blocks is unpleasant for anyone and dangerous for some. Especially if the walk is unsheltered, which it typically is.
People do have to walk from their cars too (for any city I've been to)
The subway is the big expensive investment. In theory, businesses and housing etc would develop around the stations. Like how suburbs develop around train stations.
In theory. The commuter rail I sometimes take follows an old rail right of way. Some of the stations are in fairly developed areas. But some of those, like Concord, presumably predate even the original rail. And a lot of the towns are pretty spread out. You can't walk to much until you get to the last two stops in the city proper.
I imagine that at least one factor there is that building up is prohibited by zoning—a super brief glance at Concord's zoning map & code it looks like the only kind of residential buildings you can build anywhere without special permission are single-family.
Now there are surely people living there who would argue that this zoning has protected the shape and nature of the town they that they prefer, but the flip side of that coin is that, at $1.4m, a median home in Concord costs more than 3x that of the country overall.
There's probably some truth in that. On the other hand, Concord is a pretty far-flung suburb; you're probably over 30 minutes to get to Cambridge without heavy traffic. I believe the prison out there is closed now but don't know what the plans are for the land.
Sure, I wouldn't imagine it'd turn into a cluster of skyscrapers if the restrictions were not there, but I would imagine there might be some small apartment buildings near the train station. New Jersey has had some impressive housing changes happen by opening areas near transit to development in not-dissimilar environments.
Apparently, the governor is interested in using it for housing development but I'm sure that will be tied up in the courts for years--especially with it being Concord.
This is because the T is not a "real" transit system in the way that it's simply not designed to move enough people fast enough to compete with cars.
Well, if I’m going into the city 9 to 5ish I’ll usually take commuter rail because it’s less painful even if it takes as long as driving. But I do need to drive to and park at the nearby commuter rail station.
And then landowners who were “smart” enough to own land where this ends up going in get to reap all the financial upside, instead of the public which actually invested in that infrastructure.
Just imagine if the public could capture the (financial) upside it produces, then it could apply that money to do the same thing down the road, then do the same thing again down the road further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem?wprov=sft...
In some countries the transit companies (public or private) also become the landowners of the adjacent areas - this would be the "rail plus property" model.
In fact, the rail plus property model allows the rail operate to better capture their added value, so it applies even in "private" scenarios. The most famous example would be Tokyo.
The goal shouldn't be for the public to be able to reap direct financial benefits from the induced activity around transit hubs, the goal should be to firstly to incentivize and maintain affordable, high quality, sustainable transit, secondly to provide more and better economic opportunities.
This is the case in Hong Kong as well. The subway company is also involved in the malls built on top of them.
There are malls and neighborhoods built entirely around the subway station
Same in Switzerland, with the added quirk/bonus that shops in train stations are allowed to open on Sundays, when shops outside of train stations usually can't open due to employment laws. This wasn't originally meant as a way to increase attractiveness of businesses in train stations and other public transit places, rather as a way to make sure that people travelling have services available while on their way. But nowadays it's definitely a big reason for people to come specifically shop in train stations on the weekend.
A version of this is common now in the US through Tax Increment Financing.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ipd/value_capture/defined/tax_incre...
I don’t see how that is a version of what llamaimperative posts.
If anything, TIF increases rewards for landowners who do nothing or otherwise underutilize land. Taxing the product of work to make a piece of land beneficial for society is amazingly backwards.
The proper direction to go in is marginal land value tax rates, with increasing penalties the longer a spaces remains unused.
> Just imagine if the public could capture the (financial) upside it produces...
Like through taxes on the sale of the property or the increased business income it produces? The public will.
> Like through taxes on the sale of the property
That just encourages corporate ownership of property (unless you mitigate that), but overall I don’t know why we’d disincentivize moving closer to a new workplace or into a smaller home once it will do for you.
It also disincentivizes speculation, which is just a flurry of repeated transactions.
Spec can be loooooong term, even longer than natural person
Perfect is not the enemy of good.
In a lot of places, due to tax revolts there are now property tax caps which effectively prevent this from happening.
Then the people have spoken. They can speak again and differently if they like.
This typically goes to the higher level of government. Not the local one that manage and build that transit system.
Why should the transit system butt into the jurisdiction of the traditional government just because transit is built somewhere?
As a silly dystopia, imagine that a transit agency could grab revenue as you suggest it might. Then everything becomes a transit land grab.
No, taxes on the unimproved value of the land
Property taxes include that, generally.
Also the shape of density.
A small city in a straight line along the coast is going to get a lot more mileage out of a single line than something spread out across a plain.
In the ideal scenario you build the subway or other transit when density is low and land is relatively cheap, and THEN you make it high density.
Doing it after the fact is much, much harder.
> In the ideal scenario you build the subway or other transit when density is low and land is relatively cheap, and THEN you make it high density
Do we have examples of this working? (Genuine question.)
Outside the US, there are many examples (Japan and China both do this).
In the US, I don't know specific examples, but you can definitely use a combination of policies (building public transit, zoning laws to encourage high density, making parts of the city more pedestrian-friendly - and generally less car-friendly) to encourage high density.
Definitely! Here’s a video with some discussion
https://youtu.be/MnyeRlMsTgI?t=667&si=g-xwXEjLPPobUkzy
There’s photos of subway stops in random fields in china that sometimes get laughs but in actuality china is just smart enough to build the subway and THEN the buildings.
Meanwhile Japanese rail companies own land where they build rail and can make more money on the land than on the trains
You don't decide to make things high density out of the blue. People have to WANT to live there.
Well yes, one clear indicator of that is where homes are expensive. Like in places with great transit and amenities.
Cheap + quick commute to downtown takes care of that.
There is only a downtown if there are jobs there.
If not a subway at least some form of transport that won't get stuck in gridlock. Three examples I can think of are the Wuppertal suspension railway, Las Vegas monorail (though more of a tourist pull than for the locals) and the dedicated Metrobus lanes in Mexico City.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Monorail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs
What others have I missed?
(btw I never noticed before that HN can't handle UTF-8 chars in urls)
It's only a short stretch, running the length of I-495, but the XBL in the Lincoln Tunnel is a huge reason why people bother with the bus in northern NJ.
When I was commuting by bus, the inbound morning trip (with XBL) was 20-30 minutes, and the outbound evening trip (without XBL) was 30-45 minutes.
https://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/en/lincoln-tunnel/xbl...
They don't need silly suspension railways in most places. A tram line fits perfectly in 1 lane, so that would make it 2 lanes for both ways. US lanes are so wide that it's likely 2 tram rails fit in 1.5 road lanes, with a bit of extra room for wider sidewalks (sorely needed in most of the US), bike lanes (also sorely needed in most of the US) or just general greenery (hedges would do wonders for US urban landscapes...).
Of course this would require that the 3-4 lane stroads give up 2 of their carlanes so instead of doing the reasonable thing, building infrastructure costing 10x is almost universally preferred.
Heck, it doesn't even need to be a tram. BRTs are good enough for a lot of cases.
Well-done BRTs are probably the best thing you can get for cost/benefit. And you can subway them at points if you want, and if they get super popular you can put them on rails.
In Chicago, the "L" network also has stretches that run down expressway medians, along with the elevated lines and the subway sections downtown.
American cities of 500k people really don’t see gridlock though. Maybe a couple blocks downtown by the highway ramps thats it.
You missed Adelaide's O-Bahn, which is another way to mitigate the "buses get stuck in traffic" problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Bahn_Busway
This is fantastic. How do the locals experience a bus suddenly in the air? Does it feel safe?
yes, but wikipedia can handle unaccented
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrobus
Having lived in / visited a few dozen cities in Europe, I actually think trams are generally preferable to subways. In places with both, I tend to use the trams almost exclusively.
A hop on, hop off tram system is much quicker and efficient than going into a subway station, then back up, etc. At least if you aren’t going entirely across town.
What makes for a more pleasant experience is not necessarily the optimal choice for commuters as subway wins over trams by close to an order of magnitude in terms of throughput.
In the city I grew up in during rush hour subway trains leave less than every two and a half minutes and pack well over a thousand commuters each. That is an impossible feat for even the best tram system, as they're limited both in vehicle and station length, not to mention speed, as you can't have 40 tonnes of metal hurtling at 80km/h through intersections.
Why can't you have trams travelling at 80km/h? That's around the max speed of some of the trams used in Europe.
Because at that speed its braking distance is close to 200 metres, so you need to separate such a vehicle from the rest of the traffic.
There exist implementations of this, but it's essentially a train with extra steps.
Because pedestrians and drivers are idiots (or if you want to be nice, have lapses in judgement).
Whereas it is possible to have a subway where it’s completely impossible to get on the tracks without heavy equipment or the right keys.
I disagree. Trams are too slow. They are not good for long tracks, like sub ways.
And also they have much less capacity than mass transit systems like a subway, so they are bad for most commuters who tend to travel at rush hour[1]. I guess they are great in tourist areas though.
[1] In my experience, at least in the cities where I have lived
Worse in the outskirts, but better in the town center if you can hop off every couple 100m without 2 escalators/staircases
You could argue trams are more romantic. That is probably the major advantage.
I'd argue there are some limited places where classical trams on the road make sense, like some down town district. But you get almost the same utility with busses, passenger flow per lane is lower with busses, for a lot less money.
> * trams are generally preferable to subways. In places with both, I tend to use the trams almost exclusively*
In towns with trams I've found Ubers almost always faster. That said, most American trams are at grade, so you get a bus that can't change lanes.
If I’m going one, maybe two stops, a tram can be optimal if it’s already in front of me[1]. Otherwise the subway tends to win the curb to curb speed contest for me. It’s a little more traversing through the subway’s infrastructure and getting to the right platform and the right part of the platform, but I’ll get to my destination in less time and it’s not even close.
[1] Otherwise I have to check the Transit app on my phone and do some math factoring in the wait time and the time it takes me to get to the platform. The subway usually wins this contest too.
Trams are super slow. They take space on the road or need their own full lanes. It's much worse than a subway.
Trams do need dedicated lanes.
Depends on the city, but in most places the lanes are wide enough that a tram-designated area isn’t really an issue. Even then, it wouldn’t be a horrible idea if an avenue (running north-south) or two in Manhattan had one less lane for cars and one more for trams.
Not necessarily. Unless I am misunderstanding what specifically is being referred to as a tram. In Portland, Oregon for example, we have small trains that run at street level and share lanes with automobile traffic.
Portland's trams don't move anywhere close to 35mph as the OP mentioned. Portland's trams are quite capacity constrained due to needing to navigate the short blocks and many intersections of downtown Portland. Dedicated travel cooridors where these trams could move at closer to 35mph would allow trips _through_ downtown to become competitive which currently are often not ideal.
The streetcars in Portland OR are useful on some routes but they're pretty much painfully slow around downtown.
> and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating
I think ours could go up to 50 or 60km/h, but the density of stations (can’t leave any blocks behind!), station dwell times and time for one transfer puts it at equal time to cycling for me in Toronto.
And my cycling route isn’t a more direct route (cuz our surface routes are largely a grid and we just replicated it underground instead of something more synergizing like a giant X).
A fun hobby of mine is to open up Paris on google maps and compare the cycling and transit times in their daytime between arbitrary points and cycling often wins. Theyre drunk on station density so you’re always close to one, but it means a lot of stopping.
most us cities did have subways (or streetcars), then GM bought 'em all and shut them down. [0]
[0] Taken for a Ride - The U.S. History of the Assault on Public Transport in the Last Century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4&t=1590s
Did the US have any subways shut down? I know there are some metros like Cincinnati that abandoned an unfinished subway
Have you spent much time in ~500k cities? Many of them have a lot of sprawl and very little traffic.
With subway lines costing a billion dollars a mile that just makes no sense.
Where did you find that cost?
eDIT Looks like you are right for the US. In other countries it's apparently much cheaper.
https://www.hsrail.org/blog/why-transit-projects-cost-more-i...
> For example, the Purple Line in Los Angeles cost $800 million per mile. By international standards, the New York price tag is stratospheric: A project in Madrid cost $320 million per mile, and one in Paris cost just $160 million per mile.
Where would you put the subway line in Tucson, AZ?
I'm no city planner, but I would definitely connect the Amrtak station with the University of Arizona and on the other end make it reach the edge of downtown.
The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas but then again my city put a subway station in such a location and it serves a whopping fifteen hundred people daily - that's one subway car, but at the same time appropriately a thousand fewer cars on the road. Still worth it in my book.
> I'm no city planner, but I would definitely connect the Amrtak station with the University of Arizona and on the other end make it reach the edge of downtown.
I went to U. of A. and have absolutely never even heard of any student ever needing to go to the Amtrak station, for any reason. Not trying to be rude, but that smells like unthinkingly-applied urbanist ideology — thinking “trains are cool” and working backwards from there.
But sure, people do go to that area for nightlife, so let’s assume you said something like “Hotel Congress” instead of “the Amtrak station”. Still, that’s less than 3km from campus — even if there were no transit options, you could bike, walk, take a rental scooter or an uber.
But if none of those options work, fear not, there is already a streetcar that basically covers exactly your proposed route: https://www.suntran.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Sun-Link-... . So why would it make sense to spend a giant sum on a subway to replicate the streetcar over this tiny area?
> The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas
That’s my point. Your claim that any 500k city could benefit from a subway is wildly over-general. It entirely depends on the type of city.
I get where you're coming from as I have a lot of words to say to those urbanist ideologues and none of them are pleasant.
Main reason why I think subway is superior to anything, including trains riding on the surface, is that it doesn't get in the way of anything.
My current city is subject to a double whammy of a train and river system. The result is of course gridlock, as bridges have limited capacity and not all train crossings could be made into viaducts. Having a single subway line would greatly improve things, but alas - the city is in debt due to having built a football stadium which went way over budget.
That being said to me American cities stretch the definition of cities. If there's no functional difference between a district within city limits and a suburb, why bother with having a distinction? I mean, we have districts of detached houses in my corner of the world, but they're former villages absorbed by cities and are gradually being densified.
I get where you’re coming from, but I can’t think of a definition of “city” that would exclude Tucson. It’s a large, connected settlement of humans who don’t primarily live from the land.
For what it’s worth, Tucson does have suburbs, which are even less dense than Tucson (e.g. Oro Valley).
America never had city walls, so the density pressure provided by them is only found where natural rivers and other boundaries occur.
Subways are so expensive that we don’t see existing rail/tram lines being buried to reclaim land in some of the most valuable cities in the world.
What's the difference between a train underground and a subway?
In the evolution of English language usage the term "subway" is almost always associated with passenger transport by train.
A "train underground" my or may not have passengers .. the majority tonnage of trains in mine systems is ore transport, many such systems never carry passengers although, of course, some do at shift changes.
> Still worth it in my book.
I take it your book isn't an economics book?
Hard no: subway infrastructure is incredibly expensive and only makes sense for high density cities.
Moreover, with self driving electric cars, cities will see many of the benefits at far lower cost.
Nice effort and just shows you how far the art/science of dataviz has come with the ability of websites to work like realtime game engines.
This is the same information visually expressed in a grid chart from 1983 by Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information). While the method can't scale the same way it feels like a more creative approach :
https://www.edwardtufte.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/VDQI-...
I wouldn't say that Maray's chart as cited by Tufte is directly comparable: it displays the timings of trains along a one-dimensional railway, therefore displaying two dimensions of continuous data for each train (the second dimension being time). The online map displays a two-dimensional area, with an extra (quantized, not continuous) dimension of time with the colour-coding. It's a tradeoff between displaying more precision for fewer train timings or less precision for many train timings.
I love this. I agree with the "about" that it's visually compelling, and I'm mesmerized.
This doesn't detract from my enjoyment the site, but for trip planning I'm a little skeptical of the results around the edges, especially when I'm assuming multiple transfers would be required (e.g., Local -> Express -> Express -> Local).
With a caveat this was over 10 years ago (~2012-2013), and train frequencies may have changed:
I used to live pretty far up on the upper west side, and took the 1 train from the 103rd street station daily. My weekday route was 1 -> 2/3 -> 7 into midtown. The 20 minute radius is accurate at peak times, when it only takes 2-3 minutes to catch a transfer. However, the website "about" makes an assumption this is for noon on a weekday. I don't think I ever made it to Brooklyn in under 40 minutes.
Technical term is isochrone map: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map
Thank you so much for this, I have trouble communicating time from maps even though its often so interconnected and this concept opens it up.
[flagged]
Something here is not quite right. For example, if you look at the 7th ave line (red line/1,2,3) 18th street and 14th street have similar radii.
But anyone knows that 14th street is much more convenient because it's triply serviced by the 1,2,3 with 2,3 being express trains. 18th street is serviced by one train the runs locally. This ignores that you could easily switch to the L, A/C/E, F/M with a short walk.
Still, a cool visualization to show the power of mass transit, and even compare relatively between lines.
Does it include the express trains? (those trains that skip a bunch of stops on certain lines, so they can go faster like the 2)
I couldn't figure that out. I remember when I was in NY those trains really moved.
https://mta.info/map/5346
I think it includes transfers and express lines. I noticed if I click on a local stop that meets an express line somewhere, the express line stops are still quite a bit darker than other stops.
That's likely why 18th and 14th street are so similar: It only takes a minute or two to get from 18th st -> 14th st.
I see what you mean. According to this map, you can get from the 18th. street station to the 1st ave. stop on the L in ten minutes, but not from 14th. street.
Time of day / day or week ?
I got screwed yesterday waiting 23 minutes for an F when normally I'd 5 mins or less.
Excellent information if you're playing Jet Lag: The Game's[1] home game[2]
1: https://www.youtube.com/c/jetlagthegame
2: https://store.nebula.tv/products/hideandseek
I've been meaning to try it out in NYC because it seems like that's one of few geos they playtested. It's super fun in other cities but you have to modify the rules and cards a bunch to make it work.
I'm a huge theme park nut that lives in Orlando - I'm trying to design a version that can work across Walt Disney World (or maybe even ALL of Orlando's theme park campuses).
Photos pose a huge challenge because my friends (fellow theme park nuts) can pick out the smallest details in every park -- even the color of pavement and themed lighting fixtures! I'm having fun thinking of what adaptations to make.
Agreed that this product would be better as a game design framework rather than a ready-to-play game in any geo (and tbh, would be a better fit for what Jet Lag is all about: people designing games for themselves to play!)
So I actually live in Orlando and bought the game with the intent of doing exactly that...
I'm not a theme park nut but that seemed like a fun way to play the game (actually I was thinking Universal might work better but I wasn't sure).
Definitely share if come up with something good.
It's crazy how dysfunctional the state structure can be - in any functioning country the subway would extend to NJ.
There is a subway that connects Manhattan and NJ, called the PATH. Unfortunately it’s run by a completely different organization, which I agree is silly.
Transit in NJ is served by PATH, NJ Transit Rail, and NJ Transit Light Rail
They share multiple exchanges.
Crossing state lines causes regulations to triple (new state, and federal), so this is what we have.
The PATH train does exactly that.
the PATH train is a lousy a replacement. Just look at the connectivity and coverage of NJ vs Queens & Brooklyn:
https://stewartmader.com/wp-content/uploads/Subway-NY-NJ-sca...
That's a separate issue versus trains going to/from NYC. They do.
The Jersey side is so sad, for one of the country's most densely populated areas.
The NJ side is definitely sad, but your map is missing NJ transit.
It would make much more sense for it to be unified with the MTA subway, with more connectivity. My dream would be a single seat ride from Newark Airport to Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, via Newark Penn Station and World Trade Center.
There was also once a proposal to have the 7 train go out to Seacaucus Junction, which would be huge for accessing the East Side for NJers.
It blows my mind there isn’t the equivalent of the Heathrow express in nyc (even if it was just a regular express train subway)
Taxi companies don't like rail going to US airports. With JFK you have to take one train, then change, then another train, then you're at the equivalent of Paddington. Would be like having to change at Hayes+Harlington. Luton has this, but that's the odd one.
From Newark I think it's a bus to a train station, then a train to NY Penn.
The "default" way to get from Heathrow/Gatwick/Stansted to London is a train from the terminal to the centre, typically multiple options.
The default way in the US is taxi. Massively inefficient, but a lot of people make a lot of money from it. Why have a plane load of people on a single train costing $5k, when you can have 200 taxis costing $20k, generating 4 times the GDP.
In London, you also have the Piccadilly line depending upon where you're going and how much luggage you have (many of the London tube stations are pretty awful in terms of accessibility as I discovered on a trip where I had heavier luggage than normal last year).
Since 2022 there's also the Elizabeth Line, which uses the same tracks as the Heathrow Express, but then continues under Central London and far to the east.
It takes 27 rather than 15 minutes to Paddington, but it's also half the price of the Heathrow Express.
It's the purple edged line: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-rail-and-tube-services-map...
Right. But I usually stay near Trafalgar Square and the Piccadilly line is much more convenient for that. (Though I will be taking the Elizabeth line from LHR my next trip because I'm initially going to Shoreditch. And, yes, Heathrow Express is something of a rip-off which the airport steers you towards.)
I wonder if the real limit is tunnels. Connectivity doesn't fix the issue of physical limits on tunnel capacity and the massive cost of new tunnels.
If you're talking about underwater, I don't think that's the problem compared to running track through populated areas, whether that's through tunnels, cut-and-cover, at-grade or viaduct.
That would cause a huge headache for the NYC side to be subject to FRA regulations, it’s a big part of why PATH costs so much to run
it does, check out PATH.
Big +1, and an obvious observation for anyone who moved here
"Full code for the isochrone workflow is available on"
https://github.com/chriswhong/nyc-subway-isochrones
Mapbox also provides an isochrone API: https://docs.mapbox.com/playground/isochrone/
I love it, but as someone who lives in Queens I think it’s underestimating by maybe 20% or 30%, particularly when a transfer or significant walking is involved (and I walk quite fast)
Yeah, I wish I could get from Astoria to Forest Hills in only 40 minutes.
I live in NYC and I can tell you... these times seem optimistic.
They're assuming very quick transfers (rush hour service). But then again, a lot of transit planning seems to assume rush hour commutes are the only reason why it's there.
Why don't any of the trains go into New Jersey? That seems like a big wasted opportunity for adding more space that can easily commute into the city.
Trains do go into New Jersey from NYC. Just not MTA trains.
Because it's the New York City subway.
There are trains that go to New Jersey - the PATH trains, as well as NJtransit commuter trains that leave from Penn Station.
Travel times would be much improved by a high speed line.
Ie. a route with 4 stops and a travel speed of 100 mph.
The finances of railways actually get better with faster trains - because the sooner you can get the person to their destination, the quicker you can get that train serving another passenger.
MTA runs express trains. They don't get up to 100mph, but they skip many local stops along the way. Raising their speed to 100mph would likely not meaningfully increase transit time - you'd maybe shave off a few minutes.
I wonder if there was a way to calculate how many more passengers they could serve if they had faster trains?
You just have to look at the peak ridership figures from 1949. They're running well under the capacity the system could handle 75 years ago. Faster trains aren't necessary.
it boggles my mind that a place like new york doesn't have the money to just do that. Raising the speed limit gets more important the longer you travel and connects distant parts your city better. It's a recent trend to build high-speed lines to complement an existing, dense subway network (e.g. Paris goes up to 75 mph).
I mean when were these built, a 100 years ago? Surely there's room for improvement.
Used to be 55mph, it was lowered to 40 tops after an accident in 1995, some places the limit is 15mph
"The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down"
https://www.villagevoice.com/the-trains-are-slower-because-t...
Similarly there's a top speed of 79mph on the rest of the country on most passenger rail since the Naperville Train Disaster of 1946
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naperville_train_disaster
> it boggles my mind that a place like new york doesn't have the money to just do that
Because building a subway in New York City costs $4 billion per mile.
Some kind of Metro (that runs) North?
You do realize that Manhattan is only 14 miles long? With a stop every 3 miles even a Shinkansen wouldn't reach 100mph before it had to start slowing down again.
According to chatgpt, the max speed is higher than what you stated and is 155mph before needing to slow down.
Are there any metros with intra-city high speed trains like this?
In London you can take a high speed train from St Pancras to Stratford, though it's a normal high speed train that then continues far outside the city.
It's the blue+yellow line which goes off the east side: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-rail-and-tube-services-map...
I don't think that's unusual for very large cities with high speed trains. The longest-distance trains probably only stop at one station in each city, but medium-distance trains can stop at multiple.
I've never come across a metro train travelling that fast though. The cost of building the line to support those speeds would be tremendous for a small difference in journey time.
An interesting offshoot of this type of question is: how long does it take to hit every stop on a given transit system? BART has quite a few people making attempts; the official BART website even maintains a little article [1]! A couple have made videos of attempts and theory [2, 3], but the king of these things is tomo tawa linja, who I believe is the current record holder at 5:30:26 [4].
[1] https://www.bart.gov/news/fun/speedrun
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o9JGsamQF0
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFWp_LH3X5k
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmQTnSlL4C4
The NYC version has a wikipedia page[0]. The record is Kate Jones, in 22 hours, 14 minutes, 10 seconds.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subway_Challenge
There a pretty neat free tool - http://pedestriancatch.com - that will also let you run walkability simulation anywhere with OpenStreetMap data. Great for when you’re moving or exploring somewhere new.
This is absolutely wonderful. As a former resident of Astoria and soon-to-be Brooklyn resident, I noticed something that becomes pretty obvious quickly to NYC residents: literally all of Queens (except perhaps LIC) is over 40 minutes from the vast majority of Brooklyn by subway. When I lived in Astoria, it was literally faster to _walk_ than to try to take the subway (with weekend delays and redirections and schedules) to most of Brooklyn.
We really need the Interborough Express (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express) 50 years ago.
We built a visualization along these lines at Sidewalk Labs back in 2017. It's open source if you're interested in playing around with it: https://github.com/sidewalklabs/router
I particularly liked the multimodal comparison feature. It lets you answer questions like "where does the bus help me get to faster than the subway?" (Answer: basically nowhere.)
Super cool! Its kinda crazy how out of the loop JFK airport is
Shockingly easy to get to though. LIRR to Jamaica, then AirTrain. Usually faster than a car, and more predictable than taking the A (which you have to be careful to choose the right one).
I made the mistake of trying to use subway to get to JFK. That day I learned the way was to take the LIRR from grand central station.
I’ve always wanted a feature like this in Zillow for filtering the results by commute time to a given destination, but this is even cooler!
> Isochrones are manually calculated using turf.js assuming 1.2m/s walking speed after the subway trip.
This is super cool, and I don't want the following statement to be taken as a criticism, because it's an unrealistic expectation: I do not rely on estimates like this until they are ground-truthed.
I wonder if they factored in the time to walk to and from the surface and platform here. Also intersection signal patterns on the surface.
Unsurprisingly, next to nothing is reachable in 40 minutes that is not tightly packed next to the subway system.
From any subway station, you can reach, in forty minutes, a large swath of the subway system and its small vicinity.
I'm curious how the creator chose 40 minutes as the cutoff because I use the same cutoff. Less than 40 minutes is normal, ordinary, wouldn't think twice about it. More than 40 minutes is an outrage, preposterous, is this place even still in NY?
What is the search bar for (that populates with other cities)? I tried both SF and Seattle and both just move the map ~50 miles away from NYC.
Does this only visualize NYC, or does it also work elsewhere?
This is great. It doesn't paint a full picture, however. It's certainly possible to go farther leveraging the other rail lines in the area: PATH, LIRR, Metro North, NJ Transit Light Rail
Depends what your transfer process looks like. Some of those trains are not very frequent at all outside the 9-5 commute pattern.
Well it depends because they added the Grand Central line so that you can get from the middle of Manhattan to Queens fairly quickly as Grand Central stop at Jamaica station on the Long Island railroad which is a hack to getting to JFK without having to use the Subway.
But how long does it take to get to Mornington Crescent?
Assuming multi-modal travel is allowed of course.
this is cool but it would pe super interesting to see this adjusted for the ilterva\ timing betweenarrivals assumild i got to station rightafter each train left: all of the area difference is the questionable territory risky to ride from each station unless you have flexibility
The data doesn't make sense to me, at least if it doesn't take into consideration transfers (which are very erratic from my experience).
Ex: The A in general goes express from 125th to 59th st without any stops. Therefore, one would think those stations should be sort of disconnected from each other (sort of islands in the the graph), but the data as presented shows them with a simple gradual extension of time.
makes me wonder about its accuracy in general.
Hmmm. I've made it from Jamaica Station (coming from Long Island) to Yankee Stadium in under 40 minutes many times.
I loved the domain name, once I figured out it was a reference to "watersheds".
This feels like a question you would ask if you were a level designer for a zombie video game.
nice too. but been a while since I lived in NY. what these things don't tell ya is how frequent the trains break down. my morning commute would be 30 mins on a packed train, but the evening train would be 2x-3x that time due to trains / track issues.
There seems to be a bug:
Click on Howard beach (JFK Airport), then on Broad Channel. The times are not updated.
Cool! Though the data must be a bit noisy as you get some oddities. For instance, if you select Astoria/Ditmars (last top, NW Queens) the Flushing/Main Street stop (last stop of purple -- go directly west on map from Astoria) is out of range. Click Flushing/Mains Street, though, and Astoria/Ditmars is in the 40 minute range.
Does it take into account the way that some subway lines run much less frequently than others?
No, it seems to assume changing trains is instantaneous and trains are waiting for you.
Which is why people prefer personal cars whenever possible. Mass transit has to operate at 5 minute intervals (so that you are waiting at most 10 to 15 minutes in the event of a missed connection).
If it isn’t that frequent, then I am going to opt for a personal car every chance I can. Using only the subway in Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn is convenient, but as you stray further, it starts getting tedious.
In a car, you still need to park, which in NYC might take 20 mins and still leave you blocks from your destination. The other difference is what you can do with your travel time. While driving, you're limited to passive activities. Cabs and ride share solve this, for a price.
But people do love car travel, regardless of the problems. I have a buddy who would nearly always opt for Uber, even at times when traffic made it slower than the subway.
> Mass transit has to operate at 5 minute intervals (so that you are waiting at most 10 to 15 minutes in the event of a missed connection).
Which is not only possible, but quite feasible. Upgrading to provide six-minute service 24/7 would only require a one-time investment of $300M, because it is projected to raise enough revenue to pay for itself in the long term.
Unfortunately the current governor is trying to cut transit funding again with her most recent budget proposal, so that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.
I'm not convinced it'd pay for itself since maintenance still needs to be done so it's not really 6 minutes 24/7. The 7 train in theory runs on weekends and in theory runs fairly often. In practice it's down every other weekend for I think 5+ years now. The MTA does not have a good track record of timely maintenance and also seems to not care much about long term downtime (ie: like their original proposal for a 15 month closure of the L line).
> The MTA does not have a good track record of timely maintenance
A big part of that is because the MTA has been starved of funding for fifteen years now, to the point where they've had to substitute capital funds for operating funds in an effort to keep the lights on. Maintenance becomes more expensive when it's perpetually deferred - and it just became even more expensive because Hochul's inexplicable last-minute flop in June caused S&P to downgrade the MTA's credit rating, which means all future bonded capital projects will have to waste even more money on higher interest payments.
> (ie: like their original proposal for a 15 month closure of the L line).
That closure was intended to fix damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, and to bolster the tunnels against future climate disasters. The decision to forego the full maintenance (made unilaterally by then-Governor Cuomo as a political move) just kicked the can down the road.
You're conveniently forgetting out the nuance of the MTA. You do recall that the top person in the world for Transit quit because of the bureaucracy there, right?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43561378
> You're conveniently forgetting out the nuance of the MTA. You do recall that the top person in the world for Transit quit because of the bureaucracy there, right?
Byford quit because of Andrew Cuomo, the then-governor, not because of bureaucracy within the MTA. This was widely reported even before his resignation was official, but was confirmed explicitly later on[0].
> To use a transit analogy, Byford fled the MTA because he felt like he had been tied to the tracks while a train driven by Andrew Cuomo cut his legs off, Kramer reported
Which is my point: the governing authorities make political decisions to starve the MTA of funding or cancel capital projects at the last minute, which harms the MTA in the long run and creates many of the problems that people end up blaming the MTA for.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/exclusive-andy-byford-m...
Sure. My point is that cannot magically assume all of that will go away in the future when making forecasts on the impact of changes.
I live in Budapest and would definitely not prefer a personal car. Public transport is super convenient, cheap and fast here, and I don't need to worry about parking, fuel, congestion or maintenance.
Mass transit and personal cars aren't necessarily mutually exclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
They are mutually exclusive in the US because space for cars (current US sized cars) means everything is farther apart, which means the public transit is not economical, or lots of walking. And walking is more dangerous for pedestrians due to inattentive drivers and large arterial roads with wide crossings.
The constraints lead to completely opposite designs, which is why only very few, very dense cities in the world have convenient public transit, and they also happen to be inconvenient for personal cars.
Plenty of metros run at 5 minute frequencies or less. Some _trams_ do, at peak times.
The highest frequency subway lines do 3 mins at peak, which is amazing.
There’s a tram line in Dublin which hits every three minutes at peak times, which is just bonkers (it’s not fully segregated, so if there’s any traffic problem at all then about four of them end up piled up one behind the other). Its most busy section was meant to be converted to metro, but due to planning permission nonsense it will just continue to be one of the world’s busiest tram lines until at least 2040 (it is actually higher peak time capacity than many metro lines at this point).
They just got permission to go from 22 to 26 trams per hour at peak times. I’m thinking that by the time it gets metro-ified it’ll just be a continuous procession.
Trams running every two to three minutes on a few central sections is nothing out of the ordinary in a number of tram systems.
The Victoria Line in London has a 100 second interval, although apparently in practise it's more frequent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ0zk4MWCQY
From a quick search, there are also lines in Paris and Moscow with similar frequency.
Jackson Heights is the winner here
The loser is 241st in the Bronx. Can't even get out of the Borough.
Unless we're also considering Staten Island, which few do :)
Also the Rockaways, which are famous for being remote and poorly transit-served.
Apparently you can walk to North Brother Island in 20 minutes from 138th St.
anyone remember this from the 2000's when it was called triptropnyc ?
https://www.triptropnyc.com/
Does it also work at 3am?
It does. New York's system is one of only a handful in the world that operates all (or nearly all) lines 24/7.
The level of redundancy in the NYC subway is marvelous. In most of the densest areas, you have 4-track lines and often other lines within a mile. It makes it possible to do maintenance while still offering 24/7 service.
If you have a 2-track line, you can close one of the tracks for maintenance on weekday nights when frequency doesn't need to be very high. That's how Copenhagen does it.
I don't see any violations of locality here.
There are a few -- select the 79th street station on the #1 line (farthest west in Manhattan) and look at Brooklyn, due pretty much directly south. The 36th Street station on the D/N/R lines is reachable in 40 minutes because it gets express service, but the stations to the north and south are local stops, and for that reason, take longer to get to.
Logistically, space is not euclidean.
Much slower than I would have guessed
Very cool project
Very cool!
Yeah. Isochrones are great, because they clearly show the inferiority of ANY type of public transit to cars.
FYI, the average speed of a car in midtown Manhattan is under 5mph. The subway is 17mph.
does it include going to subway station ("total time of travel")
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Is the migrant crime the only crime you are trying to get away from? Are you ok with local crime? One would hope you just want to escape crime, unless you are insinuating that all crime is migrant crime or most crime is migrant crime. Neither of which is true.
Be a Luigi, take a bicycle.