My experience has been less than stellar. Busses coming 20 minutes late or not at all. 545 at 6 pm on a weekday is so over packed I feel like I’m going to second base with half of the bus.
Seattle should look to a city like Vienna or Prague. The transportation systems are surprisingly well engineered but that might be due to the fact that a larger part of the population takes it.
I'm not a transit engineer but I think this is because we are asking buses to do too much. When a route sends a bendy bus every 10 minutes it's no longer a bus route and is now a really expensive train. The Rapid Rides are packed at rush hour as well. What we need is something like light rail that can go between neighborhoods and then let buses move people within those areas.
"Expensive trains" seem in style, for whatever reason. There are routes that run buses every 4 minutes here. There are other routes that run every 10m, with electric buses on caternary wires. I'll take a good bus line over a non-existent rail line any day. I love trains but if bus lanes and BRT infra are politically expedient, good enough for me.
Because a bus lane is actually a really cheap train. Construction costs are minimal, your "stations" are generally unmanned, and cheap, and if you need to reroute for construction it generally is much less a big deal. There is basically no point at which subway tracks are cheaper than BRT.
The big issue with the Cheap Trains of busses is the lack of commitment that is otherwise nice for transit authorities is not an advantage for real estate. BRT just doesn't indicate commitment to the route enough to really boost property. This is why even though tram lines are basically just busses that can't get out of the way they have a much more marked effect on real estate and neighborhood development.
Tram tracks last about 35 years here in Zurich, but some of the hotspots have to be redone every 8 years. It also heavily depends on the type of trams you‘re running.
Trains are going to beat buses on cost per passenger mile on any decently trafficked route, generally to the point of covering their own operating costs.
You don't have to go straight to subway. Surface light rail can use the same stops as buses. All you need is to lay rails on the street, and you get transit that is vastly more comfortable and inviting than buses.
Setting up dedicated lanes and then running a bus on them is just a waste.
Right of way is the majority of the cost, but grade separation is really, really important. If you don't grade separate, every grey crossing is 1 dead person a year, and likely 2 or 3 car crashes[1]. Idiot drivers just can't be trusted around trains, and billing them damages doesn't prevent the issue from recurring (usually just drives people to bankruptcy).
What we can do is steal some of Portland's better ideas, and put up a green wall on either side of the tracks with shrubbery, bollards at every grey crossing (and gates on the pedestrian crossings) to separate the tracks cost effectively.
We can keep the body count low and trains timely, if we change minor things to effectively separate the rail from other modes of transit.
A bus every 4 minutes is still generally cheaper (and lower capacity) than a tram or high frequency commuter rail.
For instance, here there are a couple of bus routes which do every 6 minutes or so at peak times; each bus takes 80 people. However, the tram lines run every 4 minutes at peak times; each tram takes 360 people.
That's really sad since the tracks already exist on the Eastside (it's the "Eastside Rail Corridor") which Sound Transit is bound and determined to pretend does not exist.
The line extends from Renton to Bothell. Kirkland is only part of it.
In all the articles in the Seattle Times about light rail, the Sound Transit public relations materials, etc., the Eastside Rail Corridor is never, ever, mentioned. How is it that Kirkland has managed a conspiracy of silence about it?
Kirkland is in favor of what the other cities are doing, which is ripping out the rails and replacing with park amenities (so-called "rails to trails"). They even managed to help defeat an effort by the Ballard Spur Railroad to keep rail service on the corridor.
The city council there has been opposed to rail on the ERC ever since Sound Transit 3 was a gleam in the eye. They've wanted BRT, over Sound Transit's objections, because they deem it more compatible with trail uses and not taking up as much space in the corridor. (And able to be located on the eastern edge of the corridor, preserving views to the west. So, yet again, needed infrastructure takes a back seat to scenery.)
The North Lake Washington communities all blow chunks. Asshole bored cops ready to pull you over at a whim, shitty politicians that fight reasonable proposals, and severely crippled infrastructure (No sidewalks, unreliable power, bad internet (due to unenforced franchise agreements), poor sewer availability, etc), every time I head up there it bemuses me that people pay a premium for such poor living conditions.
There isn't even a consistent scheme to the roads up there, they just deadend, with SR-522 being the only arterial (which is totally wrecked 7 hours a day!). Nevermind the shit many of the people that went to school up there had to deal with, makes Seattle Public Schools look reasonable when compared to the shenanigans administrators at those north end schools would play on many of the students they were supposed to be helping.
I hope for those trapped in that area that things get better, but it seems like so many of the newer neighbors in my area are flooding out of the communities on the north end of the lake.
Are several of those extended buses really more expensive than light rail? There's a lot of upfront cost for light rail and if demand changes, routes are pretty inflexible.
Demand almost never changes. Most bus routes are still virtually identical to the streetcar routes they replaced.
And the required infrastructure for light rail creates more demand for development along the line, as the rail itself signals more permanence to developers: they do not worry about it moving in a decade, like a bus route could.
The development demand is not a guarantee, and it can also come at the cost of destroying local businesses which cannot afford the downturn in customers during construction- many of which are small, minority owned sole proprietorships.
As for demand never changing... well, everything changes.
Source: Personal anecdata from living in an area where local government has been pushing more and more light rail development hard, in spite of never actually delivering any of the promised benefits to traffic congestion, ridership levels, community or business development.
I read somewhere that the real benefit of trams or light rail tend to come from the fact that they often come with a redesign of the traffic flows, right of way etc. Whilst busses are often stuck in the old traffic jam.
Bus rapid transit, of the sort you find in South America, has a lot of benefits of light rail without the initial startup cost of putting in rails for the reasons you describe: Dedicated rights of way, signal priority, and a lack of speed-killing sharp turns.
Bus rapid transit is a great compromise. They have special right of ways with dedicated signaling and lanes. But no need to lay rail so costs are much lower.
Not really. Had the "road diet" actually resulted in a shift from cars to transit, the transit agencies would show a corresponding increase in their census and farebox return. They didn't.
However, there is an induced demand effect where because there are less cars, more people will drive. So in effect an extra lane appears, empty of the people riding the bus.
But long-term the maintenance is significantly higher, as you need to replace the road surface very frequently.
A usual bus stop, or a BRT lane, has to be replaced every 6 months if it’s asphalt, and every 18 to 24 months if it’s cobblestone. That’s a significant expense.
While you can build and use light rail for decades.
Pure concrete leads to significant shifts between the plates over the years, leading to the well-known bump every time you pass between plates. This obviously affects the bus’s suspension, and passengers, negatively.
Concrete with asphalt on top of it has the issue of the asphalt having to be replaced frequently.
I’m not sure if US interstates with concrete are different, but these were the only options discussed here in Germany.
Busses have higher operating costs per trip/mike/other measures, because there are way more drivers per rider vs rail. They’re obviously less expensive capital cost.
Every bus needs a driver and a vehicle with yet another powertrain. I'm not sure what energy consumption is like on a train but I suspect operating costs of all the buses is higher than a train that can cover longer distances. It seems to me a mix is the best solution.
Can you name examples where this oft-predicted result has actually happened (in the USA, anyway)? That certainly hasn't been the result in the Bay Area.
It definitely happened in Portland when they ran the Orange line. We were house-hunting a year or two before the new light rail opened, and realtors showing houses along its route were already starting to make a point of mentioning it.
As soon as it actually opened, neighborhoods that could use it suddenly got a lot more desirable (read: expensive).
Bethesda, Maryland. It was very sleepy before it became a metro stop. In the last 30 years it had a crap ton of development mostly centered around the metro.
Actually... Can you name a few places in a metro area that didn't experience such a boom after a transit stop was introduced? In the bay area even? I feel like I have only ever seen examples of it being good for retail, restaurants, home values.
Metro considers itself traditional fixed rail, not light rail.
a metro area that didn't experience such a boom
I was responding to the specific claim "Light rail will create demand to live near and locate businesses near the stations." The point isn't about whether a broad area benefits from rail (vs. no rail at all) but whether adding light rail to a fully built-out environment will drive more dense business development near the added rail and because of the addition of rail. I don't know of any USA data that supports that.
Take a ride from the Seattle airport to downtown on the light rail sometime, then. You will see a lot of nice looking apartments that didn't used to be there. And you will see some less nice neighborhoods interspersed.
It's happening in advance of the Beltline transit in Atlanta. The Beltline has been building out park/trail and surrounding neighborhoods are doing very well. The light rail is currently just a promise.
I have seen this happen firsthand. It took a few years but the "rail line to nowhere" built near me around 5 years ago has giant housing complexes surrounding every station. It runs over capacity during rush hour now.
I assume this only happens in places where the roads are overloaded though
In Seattle at least, I would expect the implicit suggestion to upzone near a light rail station would be at least as important as greater land value from demand. I'm not sure how much a light rail station induces Seattle to upzone -- I've heard mixed reports.
The sad truth is that many cities around the world had light rail 50 years ago, they removed them saying that buses were much flexible and better and now they are bringing them back.
In places that kept them trolleys/street cars slowly morphed into light rail, some is separated from the road but much of it is still shared. The distinction isn't so cut and dry.
I find it infuriating that Renton asked for nothing in the ST3 bill, and Kirkland was swayed by a small group of activists into asking SoundTransit not to use the Cross Kirkland Corridor.
+1 on this. The Vienna transit system is so fantastic that I was able to get around the entire city without even speaking German. I remember one day I was riding the U-Bahn with a local friend and asked him what it was like during rush hour. He said, "this is rush hour". There was still plenty of space for people in all wagons. Simply amazing.
Seattle feels like numerous tangentially-connected villages, mostly based on how it was formed:
- Downtown's financial district and retail core, with the jail, hospitals, churches, and other services (like the methodone clinic and drunk tank) on First Hill.
- Capitol Hill's "crazy night life".
- Queen Anne Hill with normal-ish people.
- Magnolia's rich separation.
- Ballard the Scandinavian fishing village.
- Fremont and Wallingford - the artist and hippie communes, the University District, and Ravenna.
- The International District and The Jungle.
- Beacon Hill and Rainier Beach, where the action happens day or night.
- SoDo (Southern Downtown)'s industrial core.
- Lake City feels like the "northern SODO".
- West Seattle feeling closer to Seatac than Seattle.
A few of Seattle's neighborhoods seem to flow together, such as Wallingford and Ravenna being so overrrun with students that they feel like extensions of the University District. Others, like West Seattle, feel more like the small cities of White Center and Seatac that neighbor it.
That’s actually the ideal situation for a mass transit system. It ensures that passengers aren’t largely going in one direction in the morning, and in the opposite in the evening.
There's just no way to efficiently ship that many people on that route virtually simultaneously.
So many people finish work around the same times that you get this massive spike of people on the hour, and then it's dead quiet once that on-hour spike has been fulfilled. You don't want to be trying to get on the 545 at 5pm or 6pm. Shift your leaving time so you're at the bus stop 10-15 minutes earlier and it's a whole other story. Although I no longer do the 545 any more, for that, and for my current route I switched to arriving early in the office and leaving 4:30ish. I'm almost always guaranteed to get a seat and have less rush hour traffic slowing down my return home.
One thing that the city could do to help, and has helped elsewhere, is to encourage city businesses to shift their starting and finishing hours, especially those businesses that are a bit more regimented. This spreads out the peak over a bigger period of time and allows both more overall flow and less disruption.
ST 510 (Seattle - MLT - Everett, to reach Premera in MLT) was routinely 30+ minutes late, because buses would get stuck in traffic each way. So the common "2 buses at once" would occur. Or sometimes the 1st would be over-stuffed and the 2nd would be 5 minutes behind and almost empty.
MT 550 running 6 buses an hour felt the same in 2016 - packed in like a mosh pit during rush hour. That's when I gave in and bought a truck, and dealt with parking 6 blocks away instead of hiking 9 blocks down Cherry (and past the perpetual tent city) to the tunnel.
You do realize that by driving, you're making the problem worse? The real solution is to just get more cars off the road. There are few excuses to be driving alone in a city.
Clearly, stephengillie gave the bus a more-than-honest try. Having done so and finding that it simply didn't work for his needs, he doesn't deserve your criticism.
In my area, public transit is something that people who don't use it themselves love to criticize others for not using, either.
It's little used specifically because it is badly planned and operated with an eye toward political positioning, not serving would-be passengers.
No one is handing out boy scout patches for trying. I'd prefer we charge singular car commuters the actual price of their destructive habit but for now I will happily settle with shaming their antisocial behavior.
Guess what, the moment this nonsense becomes indefensible or plain too expensive is when that train or bus suddenly starts working and running on time.
You really have an axe to grind. You would obviously rather I bus to work than walk, which is absolute nonsense.
Please, regail us with tales of your bus ridership.
Do you enjoy being squished between people, unable to move? Do you like to "accidentally touch" people on the bus? Or do you get on the bus early and "silently judge" the people who have to stand? Do you pretend to read or work during the ride? (The bus bounces around too much to do any actual work, and that's if you can get a seat.) Or are you one of those annoying people that won't stop talking about Tuscany?
Have you been on a bus when it's had to pull over on the freeway, and turn itself off and on again, to "reboot the bus"? Ever wonder what state the bus has entered that it needs a reboot? What is the driver seeing, or not seeing? How many screens went blank and controls stopped working at highway speeds?
I wish this weren't the case, but I don't take the bus because it triples my commute. A trip that takes 25 minutes by car takes an hour and fifteen by bus for me. I test it every time I need to have my truck repaired.
It's because it's a reverse commute, and so while everyone is trying to get into the city I'm trying to get out. The bus would be pretty good if I lived south of Northgate and worked in the city.
Buses require a circuit to operate, unlike cars which can operate in single-vector mode. Thus, they can be impacted by seemly-non-systematic events such as distant traffic in the other direction.
It's got nothing to do with traffic delays. There are plenty of buses at each leg in my route. My specific problem is that I have to ride for 20 minutes in the opposite direction to get to a transit station where I then transfer to an express bus out to UW Bothell. But the bus from UW to my office isn't synchronized with the express bus so I either wait 15 minutes or walk a mile and a half across I-405.
On the other hand it's very efficient for getting in to the city, as I can hop on a single bus and be in Green Lake or the U district in about 15 minutes, and it's another 10 to cross the canal.
That is a fruitless battle. You are asking people to behave superrationally to escape a collective action problem. That's not how people work. People behave according to their individual self-interest. If it's faster or overall better (comfort, privacy, safety) for them to drive, they will drive.
Make transit better than driving and the problem will solve itself. People are rational.
When I worked downtown in SF, the options were clear. Take transit or deal with ridiculous traffic and costs of close to $600 a month.
Now that work south of SF, I can either take the company shuttle, which takes 40 min and if I miss it, I have to wait another hour. Or, drive my car which takes 20 min and I can arrive/leave whenever I please. Easy decision.
You can't fault people for making a rational choice.
"I can either take the company shuttle, which takes 40 min and if I miss it, I have to wait another hour. Or, drive my car which takes 20 min and I can arrive/leave whenever I please."
For people who can make full use of their time on the shuttle, driving is a 20-minute loss of productivity each way.
The value-math works differently for different people.
> For people who can make full use of their time on the shuttle, driving is a 20-minute loss of productivity each way.
If it's anything like the commuter buses, you can try to open your laptop on your lap with no elbow room, but the bus bounces too much to focus on what you're coding/reading. What you wind up doing is "work theater" where you appear to be working but aren't productive.
And that's if you can get a seat on the bus. For bus companies to make money, they have to pack in commuters like a mosh pit. And you're trapped there; a literal prisoner of the bus. Will the shuttle pull over if you need to step out for a moment?
The commuter routes subsidize all of the mostly-empty city buses that less-able people ride. (These are people who won't/can't walk/drive 6 blocks to the store.)
Most people who do this (taking the car) realize that (if we all take the bus, it would be a pretty smooth ride) - but first of all not all people CAN take the bus (mostly those coming from further away) and second, I can't fault them. If your commute is like 30mins by bus and 15mins by car... easy choice for ~22 days per month
A 30 minute bus commute sounds very optimistic. BART is the only system that has ever made me confident I won't waste 30 minutes before even being picked up.
I took the bus for about 2 years, mostly commuting from First Hill to Factoria. It's about an hour each way, if you don't miss the bus. If you do, it's more like 1.5 hours each way. MLT was an hour there and 2 hours back on the bus, plus a 30-minute hike before and after each way. Bellevue was an hour each way but I went to the gym between commute and work.
After driving for 6 months, I moved across the street from my workplace (literally). Since then, I've moved onto another job in Redmond, which is just 15 minutes down 520. And the traffic on that part of 520 is so good that half of the drivers go 70 until they reach Microsoft.
I lived in Seattle in 2011/2012; the bus was so bad that I bought my first car. So maybe it was worse before, but I did not find it a very good way to get around.
All of these are great things, but I think there's a few other practical considerations the author missed:
1) Paying for parking is really expensive compared to other cities. A downtown parking spot is easily ~$300/month.
2) Most employers subsidize orca cards (transit pass) but do not subsidize parking spots
3) With Seattle traffic being as bad as it is, most buses are just as fast as cars because of the prioritization they get. In any other city the bus takes twice as long. In Seattle it's on par with driving.
4) Seattle's natural geography encourages density which makes public transit more effective. Most new hires and population growth is also happening in the closer in neighborhoods which are already well connected to transit.
5) Suburban commuting is harshly punished by the above geographical and societal pressures. If you live in Woodinville and commute to the SLU you're looking at 1hr, one way, on a good day. Similar point about population growth happening close in to the city.
Re: 4, it's funny because while Seattle is somewhat dense by American standards...it's still got tons and tons of areas that are restricted to only low-density detached single family homes. A major city like Seattle should have few if any areas like that.
(Not that SFHs should be illegal of course, but they shouldn't be mandated)
How did Seattle get more people to ride the bus?
1. They made coummuting by car miserable. Average commute time for Everett to Seattle (24 miles) is 76 minutes, Federal Way to Seattle (22 miles) is 66 minutes... Reducing congestion is not a goal of WA DOT.
2. They make driving really expensive. $30 car tabs that cost hundreds (if not thousands) and one of the highest gas taxes in the nation.
3. They subsidize the heck out of it. Bus fares cover less than 1/3 the cost of operating the bus.
Ironically, if it weren't for all the cars the buses couldn't afford to operate. For every driver that switches to buses cost go up and revenue goes down. Maybe this is fine, but I don't think it should be ingored.
This article seemed to praise Seattle and Metro but the area is always ranked as one of the worst traffic areas in the nation. If it is working so well, why is it so bad?
Is there something Seattle or King County Metro has done well that makes people want to use it? Does it smell nice, is it quiet, are the drivers really friendly, do they offer good coffee..? Or is mass transit around here "good" compared to all the other bad options.
One thing that is not transit's fault that makes traffic bad around here- Seattle area is filled with some of the worst drivers I have ever seen. Born and raised here so I think I am allowed to criticize, we collectively suck at driving!
Commuting from Everett to Seattle via single-occupant car has taken forever since the turn of the century. 405 and I5 simply don't have the space for all of those cars. That's what transit does: it provides an alternative--primarily through the use of HOV/HOT lanes--to slogging along in your own car.
Also, on those car tabs, voters approved them ourselves. Every single transit-related charge on your vehicle registration was approved by a measure put in front of voters. (Same for sales tax.) I disagree strongly with our legislature's predilection for punting hard tax issuers to voters but if you're gonna blame anybody, you've only the voting public to blame. (Full disclosure: I've voted "yes" on every single transit tax measure--except for the monorail--I've ever seen.)
Oh, and on farebox recovery: very, very few transit systems recover their cost of operation. In the United States, only the Las Vegas Monorail recovers 100% of its costs. The only widely-used system that comes close is San Francisco's BART at 71%. (All figures courtesy Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio)
It may come as a surprise to you, but vehicle owners don't directly pay the cost for the roads they drive upon, either. The motor vehicle fuel tax basically pays for the Washington State highway system (including part of the Washington State Ferries...which also has approximately a 70% farebox recovery ratio[0]). County and local general fund taxes pay for local roads, including basically every road you drive on inside a municipality.
This is the same for transit. County and city taxes pay for the bulk of the service and fares and grants cover the rest.
Oh, and public transit taxes in Washington State are almost universally put in front of the voters because the legislature won't let transit agencies impose taxes on their own authority. Road and fuel taxes? Pfft, those are somehow different and they get imposed by the legislature with no vote. I want the legislature and our representatives to handle taxation and spending; that's why we elect them. But this double standard of approval-required-for-transit-but-not-for-roads is galling.
At the turn of the century HOV lanes were rare (1 on I-5, 0 on 16) and Sound Transit was almost non-existent (sure they were there but they just quietly taxed us and nobody really saw them and no light rail around here. At the turn of the century I didn't dread going anywhere near downtown or the airport. At the turn of the century it took 30 minutes to go the 30 miles door to door from Tacoma to Auburn. By 2010 it took 45 minutes to try and meet somebody half way. That is why I quit meeting my friend to play tennis after work, which is why I got fat. Thanks mass transit for making me fat.
Only tolls really pay directly for the roads- and now more and more tolls are being charged, in addition to the other taxes and fees.
I agree we (not me) voted for $30 tabs, many times and never saw them. And yes we (not me) voted for the new Sound Transit. Since we did pass the last one I actually stand behind it, if we sold bonds based on the taxes we have to pay them now.
"I want the legislature and our representatives to handle taxation and spending; that's why we elect them." -Agree with you there!
I am perfectly fine having transit subsidized. The transit agencies love to adverties what a bargain it is and many of the comments mentioned how much they use the bus. My only point is transparency. If the true, unsubsidized fare were charged would people still ride? Would it still seem like a good deal? Would it still seem like the best plan?
I often don't care if it is left or right, red or blue- just if it works. Seattle seems to be a shade of blue that doesn't work well, at least in transportation. Something Seattle and King County are doing, or not doing, is failing miserably and keeps getting worse. We keep giving the transit agencies with more and more money and they keep delivering more and more congestion. This is the commonly accepted relationship we have with them, the cycle will only continue until something gives.
I wouldn't be surprised if Seattle bans cars soon, except for the rich and government employees of course.
"My only point is transparency. If the true, unsubsidized fare were charged would people still ride? Would it still seem like a good deal? Would it still seem like the best plan?"
Do you pay tolls for all the roads you use? Do you pay to park at the store? Do you pay for other's care for their emphezama? Will you buy their flooded house? Do you pay for the funerals of dead walkers and cyclists? Will you pay for new habitat for the wildlife displaced by roads?
Nope, Single Occupancy Assholes, who make up sub-30% of Seattle Commuters and create nearly all the traffic are very entitled. They expect the rest of us taxpayers to fully subsidize the roads, provide free parking at most public buildings, parks and on most streets, and then have the gall to complain about minor point of use fees!
Lets cut the bullshit and bill drivers directly for every mile of wear they put on the road, and for the massive hidden (and unbilled) cost of car storage on public streets and at public facilities. Given a fully transparent market, single occupancy commuting would die a quick death!
Hell, even a minor $1 entrance fee into/out of downtown would shave SOV traffic down 15% to 20%, despite not passing through much of the cost.
> My only point is transparency. If the true, unsubsidized fare were charged would people still ride? Would it still seem like a good deal? Would it still seem like the best plan?
Says the guy who apparently has no fucking clue how expensive the unsubsidized cost of driving is and is complaining about mere hundred dollar car tabs. Get back to me when you’re paying the $6/gallon gas taxes and $20/day congestion charges and $10 bridge tolls and $8/hr parking costs, and we’ll see how many drivers are left.
The core reason why transit is so heavily subsidized is because we have so many buses running empty, and the reason so many buses run empty is because entitled assholes refuse to take any mode except their single occupancy vehicles and then lose their minds and beat down politicians’ doors any time we suggest raising taxes to pay for all their driving. Transit is literally subsidized because cars are subsidized. Make drivers pay their costs and transit will be way more sustainable.
> We keep giving the transit agencies with more and more money and they keep delivering more and more congestion.
Can you please clarify on how you've arrived on the idea that it's the transit agencies specifically that are causing this? I lived in the Seattle/Tacoma area for a few years back, and acted as both a driver and a transit rider; the traffic was horrible seemingly regardless of whichever you were. Much of I5 going between Tacoma and Seattle was just at capacity, especially heading to Seattle where you're on a raised roadway above the bay - I'm not really sure what you can do to improve this short of trying to find ways to lower the total number of vehicles on the road, which is really only possible if you're moving more people in less vehicles or providing outlet paths that get you to the same destination.
There are just tons of people driving I5, and the effect can be felt as far as Tacoma on the weekends; I'm not really sure that it's a failure of the transportation department or the fault of anything except excess wealth and urban sprawl putting more cars on the road. Even in sections where there isn't an HOV lane, one accident, slow driver, anything put traffic to a crawl. Tacoma doesn't have the HOV lanes (unless this has changed in the last 3 years) in the parts closest to the city and it's still a slog every single day from 0700-1000 and 1530-1730 on I5.
Like, I get in essence what you're saying to some degree - make the full unsubsidized cost transparent, which sure, I agree with that as long as the subsidies remain in place. Removing the transit isn't the solution here, because the overall traffic flow just seems to be inhospitable to the current traffic situation in the Greater Seattle area. More carpooling, proper rideshare solutions (Uber is not ridesharing), or more public transit use is pretty much your only option for reducing such traffic. The current path I5 takes was not chosen well as it doesn't allow for expansion at its choke points.
Traffic at the turn of the century in Seattle was shit, I remember how great it was to be able to check the traffic on a Treo before we'd slog it out on I-5! That was huge innovation, to know whether Aurora or I-5 was truly fucked up.
Now, I have significantly better bus service with dedicated lanes into downtown, and for last mile hops it is easy to grab a bike and go.
WRT Transparency, lets pass through all costs to the end user and let people decide! Do you want to pay $1 to cross the Ballard Bridge each way in a car? How about $4.50 for any mass transit mode? Or $1 for a bike for an hour?
Hiding the true cost of infrastructure, whether its through free parking, subsidized roads, or reduced fares is wrong, people should know what it costs and be able to choose freely!
In a well designed city 24 miles is a ridiculous commute. How much of your drive is through a) the middle of nowhere or b) land itself dedicated to automobiles?
Unfortunately, if you haven't lived in a well-designed city it's hard to truly understand the lunacy of US urban "design". Cities there are as though they were built for 100 foot tall collosi, with everything spread insanely far apart. Of course, the collosi in question are cars, and in serving cars we made them a necessity, while destroying places that actually served humans.
> For every driver that switches to buses cost go up and revenue goes down.
How does that work? Surely the marginal cost of an extra passenger is less than the total cost divided by the number of passengers? Not only that but if the bus is not already full one more passenger is very nearly pure profit.
I don't want to take away from the good things that Seattle has done with transit, but it's worth pointing out that Seattle is far and away the fastest growing city in the US, with an astonishing 3.1% (21,000 people) between 2015-2016.
If ridership increased by 4.1% between 2015-2016, then population growth alone may account for a significant chunk of that.
They could be certainly correlated but why would you assume that growth automatically means an equal (or slightly higher in this case) ridership? After all, the out of towners all didn't take the bus there. Most public transportation I've experienced (subways, buses, trollies, local trains, etc) have a lower-band economic class, for reasons that I could only assume and is an entirely different topic. These lower economic classes aren't pushing the growth of Seattle's population. If Seattle is getting the middle and upper classes to take the bus then they very-well deserve kudos.
And some of the worst housing affordability. People who move out of the city can't justify to drive and park in Seattle.
It would be near impossible to navigate Metro, SoundTransit, and surrounding transit agencies without OneBusAway or Google Maps. Idk, SoundTranist also tried a massive money grab on car tabs on inflated valuations. They are doing just as much to undermine support for transit as anyone.
Thanks, I appreciate the kind words about the utility of OneBusAway for you. You may not know this, but the people who make OneBusAway for iOS and Android are unpaid volunteers.
Thanks a lot for your great work! I'm surprised the linked article didn't mention OneBusAway, which greatly changes the experience of using a bus for me. Like many in Seattle, I live a couple blocks from a stop, use OneBusAway to time things so I don't have to wait more than a couple minutes, and -- just as importantly -- I don't ever sit there wondering whether there's any bus coming at all.
I notice on onebusaway.org that the system is now used by other cities, including NYC, Washingon D.C., and Tampa Bay. Do other large cities generally use some kind of competing, comparable proprietary system, or do bus riders in most cities have no way of getting real-time bus data online?
I believe that most major cities' transit agencies are now creating GTFS feeds[1], which can be consumed by a variety of apps and services, like Transit and Citymapper. These apps are available in hundreds of cities around the world. They also have the advantage of having millions of dollars in venture funding behind them, which I'm sure helps expansion :)
I did not know that, and I appreciate your efforts. It's one of the few apps that I know fairly consistently works, even though it's an inherently chaotic system that deals with estimation.
Is the data behind that available anywhere as an api or anything? I was trying to find a way to parse out some stuff for a project at home, and access to the times in say, json, would be helpful.
Thanks, I did too, which led me to volunteering on the iOS app a few years back. One thing led to another, and I now maintain it. I can always use more help, and I'm happy to help people who are just getting their feet wet on iOS learn more: https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-iphone#picking-an-a...
Really quite a stretch to call it fraudulent, given that the formula is derived from the State Legislature.
In any event, I have very little sympathy, since the current car tab is at least an order of magnitude too small.
The car tax rate in Singapore is at least 100x higher than the Sound Transit tax. The tax is equal to 100% of the sale price of the vehicle for the first $15,000 USD, 140% between $15,000 and $35,000, and then 180% on any value above that.
That seems a bit too high given the way American cities have been built up, but 1.1% is just absurdly and catastrophically lower than it should be.
State Rep. Judy Clibborn, the chairwoman of the House Transportation Committee, said it hadn’t even occurred to her that Sound Transit would use the older method to calculate car-tab fees, which lawmakers long ago decided was unfair.
“Sometimes if you don’t think to ask the question, you make an assumption, because it’s not even on your radar screen,” said Clibborn, D-Mercer Island.
> The language that specified how the agency would calculate car-tab fees was included in every version of the transportation revenue bill lawmakers considered in 2015, dating to at least four months before the measure was finally approved.
> The topic even came up on the Senate floor in February 2015, when the Senate voted down a proposed amendment to change the car-tab valuation schedule to a third, completely different formula.
> “Each step of the way, this language was there,” said state Sen. Marko Liias, D-Lynnwood, one of the negotiators of the 2015 transportation package. Liias explained how the car-tab fees would be calculated in a short speech during the 2015 floor debate.
Again, you can claim it was misleading, but you can't call it fraudulent.
This is the sort of obviously important detail you expect staffers to be on top of. It's silly to later claim no one had thought of what method would be used to calculate the value of a car when enforcing a percentage tax on the value.
>the current car tab is at least an order of magnitude too small.
Your opinion may be clouding your judgment. It's not right to inflate the value because you can't pass a higher rate with legislation. This is why a lot of people don't support transit, because the people advocating it can't be honest.
This is also why Washington State voters keep passing a cap on the car tab fee. Like it or not, the voters of the state still get to decide on the rules that govern them. They agreed to a rate increase on the fair-market value of their vehicle, not for Sound Transit to charge whatever they want because they lost some grant money.
> not for Sound Transit to charge whatever they want because they lost some grant money
I really, really, really wish the residents of the Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority who are pissed off about this would get the message:
SOUND TRANSIT DID NOT SET THE DEPRECIATION SCHEDULE, THE STARTING POINT FOR THAT SCHEDULE, OR WHEN THE SCHEDULE SHOULD BE USED.
For the love of all that is good and wonderful, go read the Revised Code of Washington (the bit of law that is passed by the legislature and signed by the governor or that citizens can amend themselves through the initiative process).
RCW 81.104.160 [link 1] clearly states: "Regional transit authorities that include a county with a population of more than one million five hundred thousand may submit an authorizing proposition to the voters, and if approved, may levy and collect an excise tax, at a rate approved by the voters, but not exceeding eight-tenths of one percent on the value, under chapter 82.44 RCW..."
160 also states, "Notwithstanding any other provision of this subsection or chapter 82.44 RCW, a motor vehicle excise tax imposed by a regional transit authority before or after July 15, 2015, must comply with chapter 82.44 RCW as it existed on January 1, 1996, until December 31st of the year in which the regional transit authority repays bond debt to which a motor vehicle excise tax was pledged before July 15, 2015."
Sound Transit is legally obligated to use the old depreciation schedule instead of the one that was updated in 2003. Again, the legislature wrote that law.
RCW 82.44.035 [link 2] sets out how the valuation for the motor vehicle excise tax is to be calculated: "For the purpose of determining any locally imposed motor vehicle excise tax, the value of a vehicle other than a truck or trailer shall be eighty-five percent of the manufacturer's base suggested retail price of the vehicle when first offered for sale as a new vehicle, excluding any optional equipment, applicable federal excise taxes, state and local sales or use taxes, transportation or shipping costs, or preparatory or delivery costs, multiplied by the applicable percentage listed in this subsection (3) based on year of service of the vehicle."
On this bit:
> This is also why Washington State voters keep passing a cap on the car tab fee.
That is a false equivalence. Those votes are statewide, unlike the votes on the Sound Transit propositions which happen solely in the Sound Transit district. The car tab fee cap keeps failing in the western Puget Sound counties--notice how Tim Eyman can't seem to muster up the signatures for his latest three attempts, because people in Snohomish, King, and Pierce counties aren't signing the petitions and that's where the people mostly live--because voters here don't want to kick the legs out from underneath our transit (AND FERRY!) authorities a second time.
Also, I think it's pretty damn shitty that our "democratic initiative system" gives people in the entire rest of the state veto power over what the legislature tells part of the state it can do with its own tax money. People in Walla Walla, Grant, and Spokane counties don't get to vote for or against Sound Transit propositions and don't pay any of the tax dollars that support them. Why should they get a statewide veto? At what point is a vote "settled law" and the relevant authorities can get on with doing "the will of the people?"
Why do you think that Sound Transit isn't required to use that depreciation schedule when the law directly says that Regional Transit Authorities (of which Sound Transit is the only one) are required to use that depreciation schedule?
Also, Sound Transit didn't write the legislation. They don't have that kind of clout in Olympia. If they did, explain to me how it is that they keep losing to WSDOT and UW, two state agencies that do have clout in Olympia. That UW Link Station is located where it wound up is prima facie evidence that ST has limited "pull" with the state.
(Notice how amendments were brought to modify the depreciation schedule at least twice and were voted down in the legislature. Senator O'Ban, the vocal critic against Sound Transit, voted in favor of the bill containing the Sound Transit 3 authority--TWICE--before he decided he didn't like it.)
And, of course, the linkage between population growth and transit use could go the other way. Maybe more people are moving to Seattle because it has a good transit system (among other things.)
Well. If people start to invest into public Infrastructure and Busses, Trams, trains. The quality will increase and more people will use it. The same thing with dedicated bike lanes. Not for every scenario. But it helps the people. The low and middle class and that is the best we can do. Help those who don't have the money.
I'm not the parent and I don't have any data, but I think he is saying that he thinks people in lower income areas tend to not be supportive of efforts to support bicycling and/or bicyclists.
Just based on my personal experience, I think there may be some correlation, possibly due to the fact that bicycle commuters tend to be from higher income brackets, and that lower-income folks often see efforts to support bicycling as both a symptom and cause of gentrification that does not do anything to help them personally as they are less likely to be bicyclists themselves.
> bicycle commuters tend to be from higher income brackets
In the United States, the income segment with the highest rate of bicycle commuting (1.5%) is those individuals earning $10k/year or less [1]. Workers from households earning under $35k/year are 10x more likely to bike to work than workers from other households [2].
Of course, this doesn't directly imply that bicycle commuters tend to not be from higher income brackets, but if you examine the US household income distribution [3], it seems probable; as of 2014, a third of US households have an income below $35k/year. The Census Bureau provides some data tools which one could certainly use to break down bicycle commuters by income category, but their interface gives me trouble.
Ironically, between the poor weather, the hills everywhere, the high traffic and the poor road surfaces, bike lanes are the last thing that Seattle should be worried about.
At a given intersection downtown per cycle, you will see dozens of cars and people, and MAYBE one bike. Almost all of Seattle's bike infrastructure is very underutilized. But Seattle cyclists are loud when it comes to local politics, because most seattleites think of themselves as temporarily inconvenienced cyclists.
Transportation is a big and growing problem and this exceptionally interesting HN discussion is a testimony to that. But, no mention of a potential to reduce the problem by increasing the number of people working remotely from home and eliminating part of the transportation demand. Any thoughts on this?
I can't imagine remoting will be that huge a chunk of the market for a long while. Even in software whenever I go over postings its usually only about 20% that offer remote as an option - and in practice software development is one of the most remote friendly careers.
It could get even more people to ride the bus if they extended the idea of dedicated lanes for buses farther into the suburbs and along major corridors (like I-5, but they'd get crucified by all the car drivers if that were to happen).
I absolutely hate my commute because on the very best of days (i.e. minimal traffic, which is almost never), it's 1h20m long (were I to drive on that exact same day and conditions instead, it would be 30 minutes--that's a steep price to pay for me to prefer public transit). 10 years ago it was great--40 minutes max by bus, but commuting from point A to point B almost only ever gets worse over time, never better. I'd love to take the bus all the time if it was much more consistent--but it never will be.
Which is one of the reasons why they're going to be kicking all of the buses out of the tunnel as soon as 2019. Good for light rail, but I don't see how 3rd Ave won't become total chaos.
I think what Muni in SF has done with putting cameras and microphones everywhere has kept the thug problem under control. I used to ride Muni a lot before that and would regularly watch and overhear people graffiting, planning some sort of gang violence, screaming in ecstacy while obviously extremely high after refilling their opioid prescription at sf general, openly smoking their crack rocks across from me, etc. That's why people don't ride public transit.
Both Muni and BART are also getting more crowded due to the new California law[0] that exempts juveniles from fare evasion enforcement; they can effectively ride anywhere for free, now.
[0] SB882 (Hertzberg) This one change costs BART alone $25 million per year (Matier & Ross, SF Chronicle, May 8 2017, page C1)
I’ve been harassed a few times in Portland and that stabbing that happened a while ago stopped
Me from using the max trains completely. There’s like no law enforcement on them.
That’s awesome. The bus authority in my area saw massive ridership changes when they added BRT to one trunk route. It dramatically improved transfers and has been a boon to them.
Riding the bus in Seattle is usually a bad experience (olfactory, auditory, etc). Hobos, wangsters, creepers, stinkers, etc.
But it costs ~$40 to park downtown for work day. How could anyone afford/justify that? I had a parking pass that my company paid for for about $250 a month for a while. The lot was crazy packed and was valet only (but not in a nice way).
I work from home now, and we got an office in Lynnwood. Not as cool, but it works for us. Parking was too expensive, bus far too time consuming..
I used to Work in Seattle. I just moved to Belltown a few blocks from work. Saved a lot of money on gas and commute time. Parking was a pain, but then again my company offered a subsidized 90$/mo pass. My rent did go up a lot, but when factoring in gas/time saved it was worth it to me.
> They added bus bulbs on the side of the road to pick up passengers without blocking traffic.
Interesting. Here in Munich new bus stations are explicitly not in bulb form, because buses tend to pick up too much delay from morons ignoring the bus while it blinks and blinks and blinks until finally someone has the sense to let the bus merge into traffic.
On the other hand, the "blocking" way has its own downsides. I live on a 1-lane-per-direction road, directly next to a recently converted bus station - and now I have angry honking whenever there's a load of school kids or wheelchair-bound people, and morons trying to overtake the car on the other direction's lane... so far no accident has happened but I'm waiting for it.
because buses tend to pick up too much delay from morons ignoring the bus while it blinks and blinks and blinks until finally someone has the sense to let the bus merge into traffic.
That would be easily solved by making buses always have the right of way --- when it starts signaling, traffic behind it has to stop if safe to do so and let it merge in.
In Portland, they already do have right of way. Still drivers often don't yield. Most experienced bus drivers learn to just play a game of chicken and pull out anyway. Makes for some exciting conflicts.
If the park and ride lots didn’t fill up the bus would be viable for our household. We actually went from using the bus to not using it because of this issue.
I live on the Eastside, so not sure that my experience qualifies as "Seattle", but bus transit is so good here that I sold my car and my wife and I reduced down to a single car household.
I bus commute to work 5 days a week and couldn't be happier. My bus is nearly never late, my connections are short, the buses are clean and comfortable. I have no regrets on selling my car.
The problem in the Seattle area (including Kirkland and surrounding areas) continues to be 1) Park and rides are completely full by 8:30 2) street parking was stopped in many areas by making it 2 to 4 hours only 3) many waiting areas have no cover -- so you'll stand in the rain waiting for a late bus.
> many waiting areas have no cover -- so you'll stand in the rain waiting for a late bus.
This is something I don't get about the Seattle area. It's like people here are in complete denial about the fact that it rains for 9 months a year. It's not just bus stops - my daughter says recess at school sucks most of the year because the playground and other play areas are all uncovered. So all the kids have to stay stuck in a very limited covered area where there's nothing for them to do. Same thing with parks - no covered playgrounds or places where people can sit and relax without getting wet.
It tends to be annoyingly cool when it rains for about six months out of the year. Take today for example -- 50 and raining. It won't kill you if you're otherwise healthy, but being caught out in it without proper attire feels "shitty". Good rain gear that you can wear every day for months doesn't come cheap, either.
The heavily urbanized San Gabriel Valley in the LA metro is serviced by—amongst a few public transit agencies, including the county's system, Metro—the privately operated Foothill Transit. Foothill also runs commuter bus lines to/from downtown LA.
There's EZ-ride in Boston which has a few routes and uses the same model of buses as the mbta as far as I can tell[1]. There was also Bridj in Boston and DC, which wasn't buses but Vans and it was supposedly changing it's routes to meet demand on a frequent basis[2]. Bridj did shut down however.
The Seattle bus system is pretty good, they’re always improving. I know that a lot of people won’t ride the bus because they complain about homeless people sleeping in the back, it is an over exaggeration. Lately, I’ve noticed an influx of tech bros who refused to ride the bus because it “smells bad.”
I’ve been using the Seattle public transit over 7 years to mostly commute to downtown, it has been a good experience.
Personal, on-demand, point-to-point, high-speed, low-cost, environmentally-friendly, and quiet transportation seems to me what people want. This is what we as a society should be working towards. Not making using a car so broken that a train or a bus in dedicated lane is the better option.
I hope Elon Musk can get his tunnels with electric vehicles going and remove most of the problems with our current transportation systems. By taking the shortcut of making using a car a moral failing, instead of the negative externalities of car use, we end up condemning a great tool that just needs improvement to remove its current negative aspects.
Having lived in the kind of city that non-car-design makes possible, no. The negative externalities are inherent to personal, on-demand vehicles: they just take up so much space, even with tunnels the loading and unloading areas would take up a huge chunk of prime locations.
It is a moral failing, but moralising rarely works; better to make drivers pay the true costs of car use (in particular, making sure they pay a fair price for the land they're taking up) and let them decide whether it's worth it for them.
I'm not against dense cities that were designed before cars. Those can be great and I really am happy they exist. I just think that trying to make Los Angeles into a Manhattan or a Paris should not be the goal of the urban planners of LA. Houston and Atlanta are also not going to be able to change that much. It would be very hard to do; really impossible without some kind of wholesale destruction by war. Maybe some other way of city living can be a great also. Let humanity try it out. There are lots of cities in the world. If Elon Musk leads a group to start building a tunnel from his house to SpaceX as an experiment, I'd say encourage that effort. LA with lots of tunnels should be much better that what it is now and could be something great and completely unexpected.
> I just think that trying to make Los Angeles into a Manhattan or a Paris should not be the goal of the urban planners of LA. Houston and Atlanta are also not going to be able to change that much. It would be very hard to do; really impossible without some kind of wholesale destruction by war.
It's possible to get incrementally better though. LA is building more and more metro lines, because they're working.
> Maybe some other way of city living can be a great also. Let humanity try it out. There are lots of cities in the world.
Building in a sprawling, car-oriented way has been tried though, and it's resulted in cities that aren't very nice to live in. At what point do we draw a line under it and say the experiment has failed? I'm all for having city design experiments, but at some point we have to put those experiments into practice and use the results to create more livable cities.
I don't like taking out the trash and sorting my recycling. Being able to just dump garbage out the window is what I want, but unfortunately, there are many factors which prevent this from being the most optimal option.
Space efficient in what way? Parking. I don't think this is a limiting problem. It is the gridlock on the roads. Tunnels can be put underground with a large number of levels if need be. People don't really like the space efficiency of standing packed right next to each other for an hour.
With an automatic system of vehicles you can build a tunnel/track and can put into the system any size vehicle you want. One passenger, two, three, ten, twenty, one hundred. What is the difference between a car, or a bus, or train anyway in this system? Without a driver needed you can have vehicles of any capacity.
No, not just parking. For every passenger that takes a train, that’s one passenger not sitting in a car that takes much much more space. An average subway train can fit around 800 people seated, and takes up much less space than 800 cars. It is precisely how much space vehicles take while being driven that is the issue here.
Likewise, “flexibility” is precisely the issue here. Why should a train carrying 800 people have effectively the same priority as a car that carries one, maybe two or three people?
I know that it’s tantalizing to think that cheap tunneling can solve this issue, but you are just outsourcing the fundamental problem that traffic exists because people want to go places.
A good example is going to the airport. People need to get off, unload their luggage, and there’s only one place you can do it, at the departures terminal. No amount of self-driving is going to solve the problem that the transport vehicle needs to stop, let these people off with their luggage, and start again.
Transit-only lanes are a colossal waste of space. Let's say we have a 5-mile long route with 12 minute headways. In San Francisco, buses move about 8.1mph, so that's 3 buses. (Each bus completes a loop every 36 minutes, and we'll "assume a spherical cow" by saying that bus bunching doesn't exist and they're evenly spaced. We'll also assume that the extreme ultra-luxury decadance of a mere 12-minute wait somehow got past SFGov).
Three buses, 40 feet long, on 26,400 feet of road. Only 0.45% of the road is utilized. 99.55% of the bus lane is being wasted.
It would be smart to keep the road below the point of saturation, where it declines in utility for everyone, but demanding that 99.55% of it sit empty is certainly not an efficiency-minded position.
I'm not sure if you're being satirical or not, but the efficiency of a road (or any transport method) is not, and should not, be the density of vehicles able to be contained on it.
At least go approximately by how many people can use it in a given amount of time, at what cost, to get people from their trip start to their destinations.
Lets not even get started on the additional considerations for transport logistics (where you park, fill up, what you block via each option, who pays), because at the very least you first need to understand the notion of throughput rather than vehicle density :\
>, but the efficiency of a road (or any transport method) is not, and should not, be the density of vehicles able to be contained on it.
Great! Then you will not ever point to parking space to claim that cars are inefficient, and will join me in calling out people that do?
>at the very least you first need to understand the notion of throughput rather than vehicle density
Yes! And although a road packed with buses has higher throughput than a road packed with cars, in practice our choice is between a road packed with cars and a road which sees a bus every 10-20 minutes. Since each bus has 8800 feet to itself to carry 45 passengers, each passenger can actually have 195 feet to themselves at breakeven. The bus route with realistic headways has much lower throughput than heavy private car traffic. Although I agree, it would be nice to see wall-to-wall buses with multiple buses stopping per minute.
(Obviously all of this is crude since at some point stopping and starting at red lights, and waiting for pedestrians before turning, becomes a major concern).
Tunnels can be put underground with a large number of levels if need be. People don't really like the space efficiency of standing packed right next to each other for an hour.
People don't like taxes either :) Boring is expensive, boring more is more expensive. And to achieve the same throughput of people you'll need something like forty times the number of lanes; just imagine trying to get all these cars entering and leaving the tunnel the same time as a single bus: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3662/3398936283_f32ac7d42a_o....
An alternative would be to have trains with platforms with regular seats, and platforms for transporting cars (like Amtrack's Auto Train, but open). Then people willing to pay for the extra space could do so.
A think we both really agree on the solution, just coming from slightly different perspectives.
Boring is expensive. That is why Elon Musk wants to develop new systems and thinks a factor of ten in cost reduction is not to hard, with smaller tunnels being the biggest easy gain.
With your cars on trains idea you almost get what I am saying, but why do you need the cars to go onto trains? Just get the vehicles to run close together and you have the density of a train. Imagine a tunnel with cars going at 100mph and 40ft of space per car. One gets a rate of 13200 cars per hour. BART at peak does about 60,000 people per hour. If you mixed this tunnel with buses and cars with various amounts of people in them you could get a great throughput. Like you said, charge by the total space taken up by the vehicle. Bus rides pay a $1 each while the single person in a huge car pays $20. You don't need taxes. People will pay for transportation, just not many want to pay for others peoples transportation.
Cities have a lot of their value in allowing millions of people to potentially interact with millions of others. Restricting when and where people can meet really diminishes the vitality and value of the urban life.
With your cars on trains idea you almost get what I am saying, but why do you need the cars to go onto trains?
Trains - or Elon Musk's "skates" - allow you to use existing cars, without having to wait for the whole fleet to go electric and self-driving, but sure, in the future they could not be needed.
An advantage that does hold even for future cars is saving their batteries for outside travel.
Yes, the skates are good for moving non-electric cars with electric cars in tunnels. I think it is a great idea you have to equate and call these closely-packed individual vehicles trains. Trains are a morally good way to travel while using a car is a morally bad way to travel. We all want to be morally good, right?
$20 per car, 13,200 cars per hour, eight hours a day gets you $770,880,000 a year.
The Big Dig in Boston cost $14 billion, but some estimates put it at more like $22 billion when all is said and done.
So if you run your big cars through the tunnel for twenty years, you'll pay for one small tunnel.
But fine, Musk can get it down to 1/10th - but the Big Dig is 3.5 miles, and you need to effectively replace highways. Unless everyone in their big car pays up front for decades of highway use (this is HN, so maybe we can use an ICO, why not), you're going to need cash up front - the kind of cash that governments that want their constituents to live in a nice place and prosper therein are willing to provide.
(Someone double check my math and assumptions, please, I'm neither a civil engineer, nor a city planner, nor an economist.)
Tunneling in the US is really expensive but many projects have been done for a billion per mile (China is like $100 million per mile). The Big Dig is the highest priced tunnel ever done and not the expected cost of tunneling. If we could do $100 million per mile from San Francisco to Palo Alto (~45 miles), that is $4.5 billion. Charge the $20 each and make ~$1 billion a year. This would be a no brainer. Even at $1 billion a mile and $45 billion total it would almost make sense financially in the current low interest environment. For keeping people sane in the Bay Area, it would definitely be worth it.
Mass transit will always be cheaper than individual transport, and we often can't even get taxpayers to fund that. I love the idea of efficient, on-demand, self-driving vehicles, but a world where everyone has access to them is an impossible utopia for the foreseeable future.
Also a world where everyone has access to efficient, on-demand, self-driving vehicles will result in a traffic congestion nightmare due to the poor space efficiency of cars. Even the smallest Smart FourTwo is much larger than a cyclist or person standing on a bus.
When you don't have to pay a driver, I don't see why that is the case. A bus costs around 1/2 to a million dollars. A very good used car is 2 grand. Electric car motors are expected to last a million miles and the rest of the car, excepting tires, brakes, and batteries, can be made to last that long also. Electric cars are likely to be less expensive that ICE cars in the long run.
Automatic vehicle systems today could easily run in a tunnel or other highly controlled road today. Small and large vehicles (cars and buses) could both use such a system. This would be a mass transit system that could work for everyone.
Because what you're primarily saving with public transport is not the cost of the vehicles themselves, but all the infrastructure needed if people who would otherwise take the bus all own cars.
Sure, if the 50 people on the bus all buy used beaters you'll probably come out ahead, but once you start thinking about the real cost of the land in big cities needed to park those 50 cars it gets expensive real fast, and that's before factoring in extra load on the road system and other externalities.
Yes, I agree. That's why a multi-level tunnel system with automatic vehicles is needed if we would like to have our world get better instead of worse. Hope we can try it and see if it works at least.
You're comparing what I assume is high end bus costs, as the prices I found for buses were much lower[1], to low end car costs and still ignoring the infrastructure costs. Yes buses and trains cost more per car but they use far less space during transit. Since our transit problems are due to peak throughout times we need far more infrastructure in terms of highways, bridges, etc if we plan around cars than if we plan around mass transit. As the poster you replied to said, if we can't get people to agree to fund mass transit due to the sticker shock when it's a much smaller price than building a highway or making tunnels, how are we going to get people to agree to fund all this extra infrastructure we'd need for everyone to have their own car for all transportation?
I'm hoping with automatic vehicles and tunneling this mass transit versus not mass transit dichotomy will just fade away. Automatic buses and cars could use the same tunnel. Just make sure the tunnel does not clog up by charging each vehicle by how much space it uses up. People are willing to pay for transportation, many just don't like paying for other peoples transportation.
With enough tunnels traffic congestion disappears. Unless for some reason you think people should just not be able to move around when they want to, this would be great.
I've had a couple of used cars that I bought for around 2 grand and "very good" is not how I would describe them. The used cars I got for 8 and 12 grand, on the other hand, were excellent investments. Those cheaper rides were sitting at over 200k miles and I can tell you there was a lot more than brakes and tires getting worn out. I shudder to consider the state of even a single owner vehicle with a million miles on it, nevermind a million automated taxi miles. That said, those little exceptions are a lot cheaper when leveraged on mass transit, batteries especially so in EVs.
Interestingly enough, in the UK, that 1/2 million cost (345,000GBP is about 1/2 million USD) is the 14 year running cost[1]. That doesn't make it cheap, but suddenly that 2K car is not 2K when looking at the 14 year running cost.
Seattle should look to a city like Vienna or Prague. The transportation systems are surprisingly well engineered but that might be due to the fact that a larger part of the population takes it.