The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

The thing that makes mass transit work is walkability. There are 3 million people in NYC who use the subway every day. They can do that because the walkability of the neighborhoods complements the mass transit.<p>In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.<p>If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation we have to do one or both of those things. Otherwise we can build all we like and no one will ride. Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car and you’re not going to get reasonable walkability until you de-prioritize the car.

The article doesn&#x27;t really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed).<p>If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college.<p>What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. Few, if any, combustion engine cars are left on the streets. Truly self driving cars are likely too. Drones that fly you across town? Boring tunnels in multiple levels? Shuttles to Mars?<p>I am not saying the subways shouldn&#x27;t be built or that planning decades ahead is bad. I love subways. But in the area of transportation we will see huge changes in the coming decades.

For the West Coast, the simplest solution is electric buses with dedicated lanes. Buses better serve the existing low density sprawl than trains. Lack of infrastructure is not the problem, the roads are already built. The real problem of course is lack of political will. Every road with two lanes gets at least one dedicated bus lane. Single occupant traffic would slow to a crawl making the buses faster. Buses would run on time because they have an empty lane. Additional bus routes would be added everywhere, paid for by significant increases to gas taxes. It would certainly work and be more efficient than our current mess, but of course would never be politically viable.

Weird that they don&#x27;t mention New York&#x27;s awful inefficiency, especially since it was reported by the same paper. NYC tax payers are already spending billions and not getting much to show for it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;28&#x2F;nyregion&#x2F;new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?module=inline" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;28&#x2F;nyregion&#x2F;new-york-subway-...</a>

Hahaha.<p>I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on Long Island, spent a summer in Seattle, and I live in San Jose now.<p>One can&#x27;t speak for the entirety of the either coast, but no city in CA comes <i>close</i> to what NYC offers in terms of public transportation.<p>And what NYC offers is a true car-free lifestyle which carries you to work, leisure, and back home via public transport.<p>E-scooters aren&#x27;t a reliable way to get anywhere yet, and who knows if they&#x27;ll ever be, not to mention that they are not for everyone. My grandmother is not going to ride one -- nor my wife, for that matter, nor should the kids. But the Subway is a common denominator.<p>This reflects in the daily ridership. MTA carries an <i>order of magnitude</i> more passengers than, say, BART. The same can be said about overall transit ridership[1].<p>East Coast vs. West Coast is a silly comparison when NYC Metro alone has more ridership than nearly all <i>other</i> major metro areas <i>combined</i> (including both Coasts, the Midwest, and the South).<p>So it&#x27;s really NYC vs. Anywhere Else, and Anywhere Else still <i>sucks</i> when it comes to public transport because, in practical terms, most people aren&#x27;t commuting by public transport in Anywhere Else, but they do in NYC.<p>You can&#x27;t slap a Lime scooter on a suburban development and call that &quot;public transport&quot;. And a self-driving car is still a car, a glorified jitney cab if and when it arrives. And it&#x27;s not going to solve the problems of the car-centric (sub)urbanism[2] anyhow.<p>The mistake the article makes here is a classic one: percentage growth vs. absolute value. Doubling from, say, 500K in a metro area with 7M population is going to be a bit easier than doubling the 14M ridership in a 20M metro.<p>As for the problems - people on HN of all places should be the ones who understand <i>scale</i> and that some problems simply don&#x27;t exist when the scale is insignificant.<p>I <i>want</i> every city to be a public transit success story, but as it currently stands - the rest of the country will be playing catch-up for a long time.<p>[1]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov&#x2F;transit-ridership" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov&#x2F;transit-ridership</a><p>[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;the-download&#x2F;611557&#x2F;self-driving-cars-could-make-urban-traffic-jams-worse&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;the-download&#x2F;611557&#x2F;self-dr...</a><p>--------<p>TL;DR: NYC mass transit carries more people than systems in <i>all</i> other major metros combined[1]. Any comparison - including this article - is silly.

I’m surprised by this article. Most people seem to agree that the the metro systems of NYC, Philadelphia, and DC are much better than those of the west coast. LA’s is unusable for most people because there aren’t enough stops. Seattle’s light rail is definitely gaining steam as it adds more stops.

It&#x27;s worth noting that Boston has been investing quite a bit in improving the T.<p>New rail cars are being added to all lines over the next 4 years. As another poster mentioned, a new North&#x2F;South link project is likely to start soon. The Green Line is being extended into neighboring Somerville. The article seemed to focus solely on NYC.

How about beating Europe or Asia?

For years and years Seattle and LA doubled down on a automobile oriented infrastructure system that clearly wasn&#x27;t working, but voters finally gave up and got tired of it. Given that referendums are so difficult to win, especially ones that impose higher taxes, this is a commendable achievement.<p>Not mentioned is the other west coast success story, Vancouver, which has lead North America transit growth, with ridership up 5.7% in 2017. This has been driven by major government investments to drive expansion and improve services across the board. Additionally the system has not been hindered by ride share competition.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vancouversun.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local-news&#x2F;translink-ridership-growth-leads-canada-u-s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vancouversun.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local-news&#x2F;translink-ridership...</a>

NYC&#x27;s subway&#x27;s are at a halt unfortunately. The MTA unions have paralyzed innovation and development.<p>The West coast has an opportunity to one up them, but a lot of money gets appropriated and given to contractors without a lot of actual results a lot of the time.

The west coast epitomizes postwar American culture - car infatuation, suburban sprawl, and so on. Transit is growing in the west coast, sure, but transit needs a critical mass of convenience for people to actually live without depending on their car (or choosing to own one at all)<p>We&#x27;re not going to see cities go all-in on transit while self driving cars are on the horizon.<p>Maybe after cars drive themselves, when people learn traffic is still not getting better, more cities will get serious about transit infrastructure.

West coast public transportation will absolutely never beat East Coast transportation and I say this as a person who has lived on the West coast my entire life. In fact West coast public transportation will always be significantly worse than the east coast.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter what initiatives or policies are being implemented on the West coast. It is literally financially and physically unrealistic to have any transportation system even remotely close to what they have in NYC on the West Coast.<p>The reason is the layout of cities. West Coast cities are mostly suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl does not lend well to public transportation. For public transportation to work, you need a high density city. Los Angeles will never be walkable and will never have a subway system that all people use regularly simply because the city is too spread out.<p>Lets put it to numbers:<p>L.A. County has 4,084 square miles. New York City has 304.8 square miles.<p>For LA county to build a network of rails with the same effectiveness of NYC, the size of the NYC subway needs to be replicated approximately 13.4 times.<p>The NYC subway system has about 236.2 mi of rail. AN equivalent system for the same coverage in LA will be 3165 mi. The current longest subway system in the world is the Shanghai Metro at 420 mi.<p>Effective Public transportation will not work on the west coast due to physical limits and impossibilities. If you want to live in a city with great public transportation you need to live in a city of apartments. Any city where you can have your own backyard is a city that is not dense enough.

Of course it is easier to build out new infrastucture to exacting specifications than it is to update 100+ year old infrastructure to meet modern demands.

Compare NYC public transportport to silicon valley transport and it&#x27;s no contest. Give me NYC. It connects way more places.

The post&#x27;s title different from the article&#x27;s title : &quot;Why the West Coast Is Suddenly Beating the East Coast on Transportation&quot;. Anyone else seeing different titles?<p>Also, the article is nothing but PR for the NYC transportation commissioner. Of course the NYC commissioner is going to say X is beating NYC because she wants more funding. She could have gone to Boise, Idaho and came back with similar story.<p>Electric scooters and a couple of test rides in self driving cars means the west coast is beating the east coast on transportation. Really? NYC metro area by itself outshines the entire west coast when it comes to public transportation. I couldn&#x27;t take this article seriously. There is certainly room for improvement and investment in the NYC metro area, but what&#x27;s the point of &quot;east coast vs west coast&quot; comparison that is simply not true.

Kind of funny they don&#x27;t mention Portland at all. It actually has a well functioning system already built.

&gt; There is at least one bright spot: Citi Bike has become an essential part of the city’s fabric. The bike-share system has 12,000 bikes across Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens and recently announced plans to expand under new ownership by the ride-hail company Lyft, which will triple the number of bikes.<p>Almost a non-sequitur to mention <i>Citi Bikes</i> in particular when there are far more notable examples like Lime. This must be a paid advertisement.

Electric scooters aren&#x27;t public.

Ugh classic hype machine bullshit confusing the derivative with the function itself.<p>West coast is still total shit in land use, other than parkland allocation <i>sometimes</i>, and until they make the hard choices to undo a century of mistakes, can they catch up with the east coast&#x27;s century of stagnation.

Well the West Coast may be beating on getting voters to agree to dump money into long term transit projects. Actually getting them built in our lifetimes and then getting people to use them is a very different problem.

Can anyone in other west coast cities speak about the crime on the new transit systems? I&#x27;m in Portland, and for the first time in my life, I&#x27;m worried about crime on mass transit. Maybe it is just the automated news feeds that are circulating stories of stabbings and attacks that have heightened my internalized hysteria. At the same time, I&#x27;ve felt a larger presence of people on mass transit who seem to be dealing with a mental health crisis of some kind. And, it makes me feel less excited to bring my kids with me when I ride. This article does not touch on that.