Posted on 04/06/2017 4:01:35 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
I think both of you are right in certain aspects. Left alone and with the proper motivating ridership based on verified economic need and willingness to pay it IS efficient.
Unfortunately, in this country the political aspect of ANY public transportation has been too long abuse and it is nothing more than a jobs program, appeasement program, a legacy retirement program and an overall tax burden. The examples for this are too many to count, in fact.
You have to have the population density and cattle mentality of Europe and japan.
I am not arguing for trains here. I am just pointing out that they do work in places where they are an integrated component of a transportation SYSTEM.
Not quite 48 hours station to station and nearly eight hundred dollars. Each way.”
OUCH!!!
Government run transportation companies ALL need to be privatized, and then (a) unprofitable routes & schedule times will be ended, and (b) fares will either pay for the business or it will go out of business. “Mass transit’s” problems are ALL related to its addiction to being subsidized by the taxpayers. It could be healthy, in some certain cases, if it wasn’t a government treasury addict.
It may also mean that some major metro areas will shrink in population, as the actual transportation cost of operating with financial efficiency at their present sizes will not be possible, without government subsidies. That means, long term, industry should quit concentrating work into already concentrated areas, and as it develops spread the jobs out across the country.
“Trains work wonderfully in Japan and Europe - but that is because the transportation infrastructure is largely based on trains, so that you can actually get from point A (near where you live) to point B (work, shops) efficiently.”
What you say is quite true, but in Japan, they are so prolific that they are a blight on the landscape.
Yeah, there’s a simple name for Metro here in the DC area but I’m just going to leave that as an exercise for the reader. Hint: It’s not an acronym and doesn’t include the word “Africans”.
Based on recent reports the DC metro was not safe because it had not been properly maintained. So, why add more to a system that they cannot take care of now. I forget how many billions were spent in the 70s ($30B?)putting this system together. It was supposed to pay for its operational expenses by the ticket price but since part of operational expenses is supposed to go for maintenance and since maintenance was not kept up, one has to figure the fares are too low or the money was diverted to salaries. Before Metro, DC was kind of a sleepy town. With the ability to move hundreds of thousands of fun loving bureaucrats between the district and the suburbs, it has become a monster. Seems quite counter intuitive given in the old days most of the clerical stuff was done by an army of clerks. With the advent of computers, the clerks are gone, the files digitized and the buracracy expanded exponetually.
I passed through that hole around 2010 to attend a funeral. While there was a recession in the US, one would have thought they landed in cloud city, no sign of recession, no one worrying. Arteries, despite Metro, full of newer model high end cars, people well dressed, no worries.
Perhaps my diatribe is a bit biased as I hate that place!
I live in the area, metro’s fares are the highest in the nation and are priced to distance, not a flat rate like nyc or atl. The workers pay is about the same. The problem is that the system is divided across three jurisdictions, all who think the other should be paying more so arguments over funding are a race to the bottom.
The board in charge is also divided and takes forever to make decisions so all the needed improvements over the years just weren’t authorized. After traveling the east coast continuously over the past 7 years I can tell you the dc metro is the cleanest with best employees.
“It doesn’t work in the U.S. because...”
Why do trains work better in Europe?
1. Distance. Europe is relatively small (especially when compared to the US.
2. The War. Much of Europe was destroyed in WWII and had to be rebuild. For the most part our trains are following the same routes that were laid out in the the 1800s. When you get closer to the center of urban areas the less options you have in putting in new routes.
3. Passengers. European rail service is designed for passengers, the US rail service is designed for freight.
The list goes on.
Europe choose public transport, Americans choose private automobiles.
I remember a time in San Francisco (50s -60s) they had something called a “jitney”. A cross between a taxi and a bus and while it followed a route it was also flexible as to where it would pick up or drop someone off. In other words it would take you to your home and not just stop at a pre arranged bus stop.
This would be more useful then a fixed train system in a urban environment since the routes could be adjusted as required.
Not sure why they went away but it does seem UBER is performing some of these functions today.
Amen. There is no reason for the rest of the country to bow to the diktat of D.C. liberals. Prince William County, VA, just west of the District, decided to not participate in Metro. The county government voted to not support running a Metro line our direction. There is a perfectly good commuter rail line for those who choose to not drive.
Most public transit was actually run by private companies prior to the 1960s. That used to include the New York City subway, much of which was built by three different private companies.
Agreed. I've lived in DC for 40 years. I came to work on the Hill and have always lived on the Hill. My views are very much colored by living through the post-Marion Barry DC renaissance, of which Capitol Hill gentrification was one of the iconic success stories. But the rolling disaster of suburban gridlock is appalling. There are great neighborhoods all over the metro area. People need to get serious about living closer to their jobs. And if you live somewhere like Manassas, take the train.
I'm not knocking suburban neighborhoods per se. Many of them are wonderful. But the moment you get out on a main road, it's a disaster. There is simply no way to build enough new roads, or to add enough lanes to existing roads. It's a physical impossibility. Densification is a reality whether the car nuts want to hear it or not, and a first corollary to densification ought to be a planning focus on walkable, bikeable neighborhoods to allow people to minimize use of their cars.
On the Hill, over 60 percent of people do not drive to work. Kids walk home from school (usually starting in 5th grade). High school kids attend school all over the city and inner ring suburbs, and they mostly get themselves home. People walk to the parks, walk to Eastern Market, walk to H Street and 8th Street for restaurants and bars, etc. It's how city neighborhoods are supposed to work, and historically did before most people bought into car culture. The question is to what degree this can be replicated in other parts of the city (a lot) and in denser suburbs as well (tbd).
Take Tyson's as an extreme example. The daytime population is over 100,000. Fewer than 20,000 people live there, and that's counting the Tyson's "metro area," which includes big chunks of Vienna and McLean. But virtually everyone drives everywhere; the typical Tyson's person would get into his car to cross the street -- and given the barrier roads, he might have to. If I recall correctly (I'm not going to go hunting for the statistic now), 97 percent of Tyson's workers commute by car, despite the availability of bus and metro, and despite the presence of a lot of housing with a one mile (walkable), five mile (faster to bike than to drive), and ten mile (easily bikeable for young adults) radius. And even if you tried to bike or walk, the spaghetti bowl mess of roads would make it unpleasant and unnecessarily cumbersome. This is the product of 50 years of development by people who worshipped the car and never stopped to consider the problems of overbuilding.
But think of Tyson's if 50 percent of the people working there got out of their cars. Over time, this can be done. Look at Crystal City, which has become attractive, or the Ballston-Clarendon corridor. Fairfax County now wants to "urbanize" Tysons, and this is all to the good, but if Fairfax had done some very simple things from the start, retrofitting would be far faster and cheaper than it is going to be. 100,000 people is much too big to be a shopping center/office park. It needs to be a town. Unfortunately, it wasn't built as one, and it was planned in ways that make turning it into a town unnecessarily hard.
Both the road and rail systems in DC were built on the hub and spokes model, designed to get suburbanites in and out of downtown. We are now overbuilt on the spokes and hub model and have terrible congestion on all the arterial roads. (I know one woman who drives in every day from Gettysburg, a man who comes in from Harper's Ferry, and a couple of people who come from Fredericksburg. This is insane.) One result is a growth of suburban job centers, which takes some of the load off downtown. But this has led to a continuing increase of inter-suburban commuting, which is a problem because of the lack of lateral arteries.
So we built the beltway, which is terminally congested.
Before the beltway, Maryland built East-West highway, which is terminally congested.
We cannot build more beltways and more East-West highways because there is nowhere to put them. Nor can we build more arterial roads into the center, because there is nowhere inside the beltway to put them.
The problem would slowly self-correct if we could magically get government out of the way and let nature take its course. Suburbanites could sit in gridlock until they give up and move closer to their jobs. Close-in areas would gentrify, and the concentrations of poor would be dispersed (a good thing) or move to Baltimore (not a good thing). This is already happening. But there is pushback. Suburbanites get frustrated and drive their politicians into short-term responses (that never actually solve the problem) that end up destroying closer-in communities in order to create new traffic lanes and turn neighborhood streets into high-speed commuter racetracks. That's what needs to end.
People need to accept the idea of living closer to their jobs. We need better lateral movement around the periphery, including rail. (Buses sit in the same congestion as do cars.) We need more walkable, bikeable neighborhoods. We need a flexible intermodal system that gives people varied options. I've lived in the same neighborhood for 40 years and in the same house for most of that time. During that period, I've mostly biked or taken metrorail to work. I did drive for about five years when I worked in Rosslyn; metrorail would suited my own purposes, but my life was complicated by the fact that I was, at the time, a chauffeur for little people and needed a car for school pickup. Circumstances and needs change. A transportation system that provides multiple options is a great thing to have. But it is predicated on sufficient density. In cities that are past the point of diminishing returns on automobile commutes, that is the goal towards which we must evolve. But it's a lot easier to do if a little foresight is exercised early on.
Btw, thanks for posting the proposed Purple Line map. I'll just note that it doesn't show the transportation issues that plague PG County. The east side was always the "working" side of Washington, with the blue collar, get-your-hands-dirty type of industries. One result is that it still has the railroads, as well as the Anacostia River, the Eastern and Northwest branches, Sligo Creek, and Paint Branch Creek, all of which are major barriers to lateral movement. People who aren't familiar with the area need to understand that inside the beltway, there is only one continuous road (East-West Highway) that will get you across PG County without having to take multiple detours and zig-zag through residential neighborhoods to get to the infrequent bridges. This is a problem and it's going to get worse because the east side was Washington's stock of reasonably close-in, affordable housing. It's already gentrifying. The transportation need is huge, and new highways won't be the solution.
Then unions, politicians seeking lower commuter fares, and regulations ended up sapping profitability out of them, which meant investment and upgrades dwindled, leading to “poor” trains and buses, finally ending in demands for government takeovers.
The stupid fellow-traveler Liberals, always, always do the initial lifting for the Marxist - what needs to happen first is the destruction of private markets in a private industry, so conditions in the industry deteriorate, upon which Lefist demands for a takeover can get enough buyers.
You see, Obamacare, in spite of everything everyone believed it was going to be, always WAS intended to RAISE the demand for “single payer”. The destruction of the private markets was no accident.
The problems you mention are only that part of the federal govt that allowed itself to get so big this largess is needed. If the Maryland residents want then pony up the $$ for it. Don’t ask the rest of us the rest of the country to pay for it. Spend their own money. Not one foot is outside of Maryland. Maryland problem.
The immediate issue here is transportation. The underlying issue is urban/suburban sprawl. In the post-WWII era, we slipped into the habit of socializing infrastructure costs. Without that big thumb on the scale, cities would have remained much denser to take advantage of existing infrastructure and economies of scale. Whether that would have been better or worse is an open question, but we would certainly have a very different country today.
A lot of people debate the issue as if suburban sprawl and the automobile commute are the natural order of the universe. Not so. They reflect quite specific policy choices and enormous commitments of government resources. And now we're living with the consequences.
The Purple Line would be nice, but do we need it?
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