
The Future of New York City Transportation: Goodbye Cars, Hello Rails - prawn
https://www.inverse.com/article/5839-the-future-of-new-york-city-transportation-goodbye-cars-hello-rails
======
et2o
Adding street cars and limiting car traffic would be an excellent solution in
Manhattan. Installing street cars are probably two orders of magnitude cheaper
than digging the equivalent subway, and we have too many cars as it is. The
second avenue subway is basically a joke; it only has three stops on second
avenue, and construction will be shut down without doing any of the additional
phases of construction that would take the subway further south.

They should also close 1/2 of the avenues and turn them into parks. It would
greatly increase foot traffic to the businesses on the street, and would make
Manhattan much more livable.

~~~
JackFr
What will the businesses sell? Air dropped supplies?

~~~
fowkswe
This argument has the same line of reasoning that the businesses originally
tried to use when the city did put in buffered bike lines - that removing
unfettered automobile / truck access was the death knell to commerce

(Like these:
[http://gothamist.com/2011/07/14/post_blames_bike_lanes_for_b...](http://gothamist.com/2011/07/14/post_blames_bike_lanes_for_bad_busi.php)
[http://www.villagevoice.com/news/new-east-village-bike-
lanes...](http://www.villagevoice.com/news/new-east-village-bike-lanes-good-
for-bikers-bad-for-business-6694622)).

In the case of the bike lanes, this is the furthest from the truth (have a
Google for lots of arguments about the merit of increased bike traffic).

I'm not sure what the solution is, but there certainly is one that would
support a few car/truck free avenues.

~~~
Strang
I believe he meant that trucks need access to the business so the business can
receive its stock

~~~
nmrm2
If this is the concern, then it's a misplaced one, especially for streetcars.
It's totally common in European cities for the busiest streets (with shops
etc) to be exclusively lanes of recessed rail. Trucks have no problem
delivering supplies; in fact, it looked a lot more pleasant than trying to
weave in and out of traffic and hope to god loading area parking isn't blocked
a la busy streets in US cities...

------
Amorymeltzer
Fun fact - almost 40% of US public transportation users are in the NYC metro
area.

[https://twitter.com/bencasselman/status/631939479318626304](https://twitter.com/bencasselman/status/631939479318626304)

~~~
dradtke
The US as a whole is an incredibly rural country. Compared to Europe and Asia,
the US only has a small handful of cities where public transit is economically
viable.

------
oneJob
Bikes! Bikes! and Trikes! Also, with electric bikes, which now make longer
commutes possible, I say, bikes!

Let's look at one possible way in which bikes could be a path forward.

Replace 9 out of 10 miles of road currently utilized by motorized ground
transit with lanes split half for pedestrians, half for bikes, with two
directions of bike lanes being nested inside the two pedestrian walkways.

Ped Walkway =============

Bike Lane >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Bike Lane <<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Ped Walkway =============

Both walking and biking are orders of magnitude lighter and the infrastructure
outlay and maintenance costs will be orders of magnitude lower. Additionally,
as a city evolves, it doesn't require massive planning and public work
projects to introduce new routes/lines or modify existing ones. You simply
take a left instead of a right. Because, bikes are cooler than trains like
that. You can choose which way you turn. The remaining 1 out of 10 miles could
be utilized for hub style (think how airlines organize their routes) public
transit (busses, trains, etc.) routes. This is just one proposal. I’m sure
there are other ways to make bikes a bigger part of our commute
infrastructure.

Pollution; down. Car wrecks; down. Public health; up. Cost of living;
improved. Community; improved.

If you've never been to "Bike Party" and your city has one, I implore you to
go. The sense of community is astounding. Riding with a group of cars has
never been so social, and never will, because you're enclosing yourself in
this box and cutting off most contact with anything outside that box.

Also, as someone that lived and worked in Manhattan for 5 years and is now a
daily bike commuter in Baltimore, it's my opinion that riding a bike is fun,
elegant, exciting, but riding the subway, most of the time, is just not
humane. It's just, not fun, most of the time stressful, sometime it’s running
on time but almost never on your schedule, and sometimes it’s an absolute
nightmare. But, riding a bike, most of the time, it's an absolute pleasure.

------
ohthehugemanate
It would need a huge injection of money to happen. Just last week there was a
major report that the subway system is falling apart.

“Basically at the current pace, there isn’t a foreseeable future in which all
the subway stations are in a state of good repair,”

[http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/09/03/mta-subway-repair-
rep...](http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/09/03/mta-subway-repair-report/)

~~~
icehawk219
You don't need a report to tell you that. I ride the subway every day, just go
down there and take a look and you'll find that the phrase "it's falling
apart" is very literal. Cracks in the walls, floor, and ceiling. Tiles falling
off the walls. Railings falling down. Doors hanging by a single hinge. Lights
that burnt out years ago and will never be replaced. And lets not get started
on the dirt and grime. Or the piles of trash littering the tracks. New York's
subway might be great in terms of keeping cars off the road but it's an
absolute maintenance disaster.

------
gambiting
"The third big factor is that autonomous vehicles are coming. We probably will
have them by 2030; they’ll be fairly common. " I honestly think this is
wishful thinking. At least not in the "autonomous" form that many people
imagine. If anything, they will be like Tesla's autopilot mode - so the car
will keep itself in lane, brake and accelerate, but not much more - you still
have to pay attention all the time and be ready to take control at a moment
notice. Fully autonomous vehicles where you can take a nap or turn around in
your seat and read a book or watch a film will take half a century if not
more, if not because of technological reasons then because of legal ones. I
would say both are going to be huge.

------
topkai22
Not as applicable to NYC, but I still wonder if some of these urbanization and
transportation trends will continue as well to do millennials start having
kids in earnest. I'm on the bleeding edge of millennials myself and my
commute/space/living preferences shifted strongly from a walkable downtown
apartment to a suburban SFH (that's still slightly walkable) as soon as my
first kid started to crawl.

I'm a bit of a curmudgeon, and I know the trends won't reverse entirely (there
are many millennials already committed to the urban lifestyle) but i suspect
we'll see some weak deurbanizing trends occurring again pin about 7-10 years
as the center of the echo boom start families of their own.

------
unwind
This:

 _We’re beginning to see traffic volumes of people we haven’t seen on our
subways since the late 1940s. That’s before the big surge in car traffic._

sounded very odd to me; it just went against my bias that "everything
increases". Certainly the population of NYC _must_ have grown significantly in
the past 65 years, and it sounds just weird that all newcomers became drivers.

I tried to find statistics, but the best I got was from Wikipedia which says:

 _Ridership continues to increase, and on September 23, 2014, more than 6.1
million people rode the subway system, establishing the highest single-day
ridership since ridership was regularly monitored in 1985._.

Which seems to support my thinking but misses out on ~35 years. Am I missing
something?

~~~
potatolicious
Many parts of NYC depopulated heavily during suburban flight, in particular
Manhattan - the regional population has always trended up but many people left
for the newly developed suburbs following the war.

Manhattan's population for example peaked at 2.2m between 1910-1920 and still
has never been that high since. Current estimates are around 1.6m.

Population density in Manhattan has decreased dramatically, largely owing to
suburban flight and an increased demand for quality of life - it was 21 people
per 5,000 sq ft in 1910[1], it is 12 people now.

One funny thing about all of this is that the old brick buildings that are
such prized real estate nowadays used to be low-rent tenements, considered
blights on the city, and where a million dollar bachelor pad now sits multiple
families used to fit in the same space.

The pattern extends to other parts of the city also - Brooklyn peaked at 2.7m
between 1940-1950 and rapidly depopulated afterwards, even now the borough
only has ~2.5m people.

The depopulation is a large part of NYC's reputation in the 60s, 70s, and 80s
as a dangerous place - abandoned buildings and depopulated neighborhoods
contributed to crime and general decay, though of course cheap rent also
contributed to a dramatic surge of artistic achievement.

tl;dr: NYC depopulated heavily after 1950, and didn't really start recovering
until the 1990s, and even then NYC's population didn't start growing rapidly
until the early 2000s when the combination of shifting preference towards
urban lifestyles and lowering crime made a large influx of population
possible.

The resurgence of American cities is, in the grand scheme of things, an
_extremely_ recent phenomenon.

[1]
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/01/realestate/man...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/01/realestate/manhattans-
population-density-past-and-present.html?_r=0)

~~~
rmxt
Where are your numbers for Brooklyn coming from? The population _was_ greater
in the 1940s and 1950s, but it is still well over 2 million, and still the
most populous borough in NYC. (As it seems to have been since 1930s.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn#Demographics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn#Demographics)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City)

~~~
potatolicious
Whoops, we're using the same source but I looked at the wrong column for
current numbers. Fixed. Nice catch, thanks :)

------
Shivetya
You do not need rails to have street cars, in fact it simply is cheaper and
better, let alone more flexible, to rely on automated buses going forward.
While initially you now need a drive going forward automation can play a
bigger role.

When you go rail you immediately restrict yourself to that route. There is
little to not flexibility. Let alone rails on the roads in snowy climates just
cause additional issues. As for simulating with buses, you can embed in the
roadway or even on light poles or similar along the route where you want the
bus to go when automated. Hence its "on rails" without physical rails.

~~~
chipsy
As a modality, rails have two upsides: energy cost and passenger density
relative to space use(you can run a much longer train than a bus) and a
signalling of intent that changes expectations for the area's other
investments. Because a rail stop isn't cheap to move and comes with the
expectation of a certain level of service and traffic prioritization, the
neighborhood grows around the rail line, not the opposite. A BRT line is more
easily neglected.

There's a positive feedback loop involved in any transit investment and how it
affects the neighborhood, but especially so with rail - unquestionably so as
you think at bigger scales. One of the touted benefits of California High
Speed Rail, for example, is that it would bring the Central Valley cities into
the commuting sphere of the other urban centers.

(The worst thing you could do with a rail stop, from a land-use perspective,
is put a big surface parking lot around it. That turns it into a transfer
point for a car commute, not a prestigious destination that other transit will
naturally run toward. One of the problems with the CHSR plan, the last time I
looked, is that the Central Valley alignments are a pretty dodgy package.)

That said, providing better transit at lower cost is always an upside, since
the first-order question for trip planning by transit is always the overall
level of service - frequency and coverage, as well as speed. I would expect
robobuses to usher in a new era for system planners.

------
JDDunn9
How about actually using some new technology, like SkyTran that's currently
being built in Tel Aviv. [http://www.skytran.us/](http://www.skytran.us/)

------
bohm
self driving cars and uberbuses

------
melling
How about a maglev?

[http://giphy.com/gifs/speed-
maglev-a8HzaGEoLYvLi](http://giphy.com/gifs/speed-maglev-a8HzaGEoLYvLi)

A fast smooth ride. Probably only need a low-speed maglev like what's being
built in Beijing:

[http://english.cri.cn/12394/2015/04/21/3381s875320.htm](http://english.cri.cn/12394/2015/04/21/3381s875320.htm)

At 60-80 mph you could be whisked to Giants Stadium or one of the local
airports is 10 minutes, for example.

~~~
untog
Maglev helps when crossing large distances. I don't see how it would help
local travel within NYC.

~~~
melling
Hmmm... I wonder if that's why I got down voted. No one gets it.

Anyway, a low-speed maglev doesn't travel that fast; only around 60-70mph.
It'll also be quiet and smooth, as I already mentioned. The length of
Manhattan is only about 14 miles so at that speed it's a 15 minute trip.
Commuting from far into Brooklyn or Queens can take over an hour to get into
Manhattan.

You could also build the bus station 10 miles outside of the city, near the
stadium, for example, and quickly get everyone into Manhattan. 230,000 people
take a bus into Manhattan daily.

[http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/03/could_the_new_port_...](http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/03/could_the_new_port_authority_bus_terminal_be_built_in_nj.html)

Btw, Beijing's low-speed maglev is only 11 miles:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR)

~~~
potatolicious
The NYC subway isn't a commuter rail system, it's a metro, which means stops
are spaced closely together - the standard interval is every 0.5 mi.

A maglev train is of pretty marginal benefit here - it'd be a smoother ride,
but there is simply no way with the station spacing you can get up to the
kinds of speeds where maglev shines. Not to mention having to account for
standing passengers means stricter bounds on permissible acceleration, which
further knocks down your speed gains.

So sure, hypothetically a maglev train line from Inwood to the Financial
District would get you there in 15 minutes... without stopping, but I don't
think it's a stretch to say that's not a particularly useful mass transit
system ;)

> _" You could also build the bus station 10 miles outside of the city, near
> the stadium, for example, and quickly get everyone into Manhattan."_

Right, and this is also why maglev, while being an interesting thought
exercise, ignores practically all other constraints.

The bottleneck getting people from NJ into Manhattan isn't the speed of the
trains, it's the fact that all rail traffic must pass through Amtrak's aging
tunnels that suffer from poor signaling and deteriorating conditions - both of
which cause frequent delays. The fact that you're squeezing all this traffic
into two tubes itself puts a pretty hard cap on the amount of capacity you
have.

NJ-Manhattan rail links are constrained not by speed but by overall capacity.
Faster moving trains present an extremely marginal gain on overall capacity,
especially when they have to share space/schedules/speeds with non-maglev (is
that even possible?) traffic.

There have frequently been thoughts of moving the PABT out to Secaucus where
commuters can catch a frequent, fast train to transfer to Penn (or in the
future, GCT), but the reality is that the Amtrak tunnels are already operating
at capacity so adding a frequent shuttle service is really just a pipe dream
at this point.

If NYC/NJ suddenly got a big truckload of cash to invest in infrastructure,
"maglev trains" are very, very, very far down the list. Much higher on the
list (if not the very top item) would be "build the damn Gateway tunnel",
which will double rail capacity under the Hudson and into NJ, and make adding
new NJ-Manhattan train service even a possibility.

~~~
melling
People that take a bus don't use the Amtrak tunnels.

If you are going to build a maglev then you'd probably have express trains.
That does without saying, right?

The A train covers 31 miles. That's a long ride.

[http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ffsubway.htm#stations](http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ffsubway.htm#stations)

I'm sure there are plenty of places where we'd benefit by greatly reducing
commute times.

As for the Gateway tunnel, yeah, that should have been done.

~~~
potatolicious
Right but you're talking about improving the system by taking current PABT bus
commuters and putting them in NJ, and connecting them to Manhattan via some
kind of rail link.

It's a common idea, but it won't work for the same reasons stated already -
there isn't any capacity left in the tunnels.

> _" If you are going to build a maglev then you'd probably have express
> trains. That does without saying, right?"_

You'd need very wide station spacing for the speed gains to really matter,
which makes the tech more appropriate for suburban commuter rail, not metros.
So think LIRR/Metro North/NJT instead of the subway.

The main problem there is that all commuter rail routes converge onto a single
set of tracks coming into Manhattan - via the Hudson tunnels on the NJ side,
or along Park Ave on the Metro North side, or via the East River tunnels on
the LIRR side, and all the commuter routes are rather long, so there's no
convenient 11-mile stretch to try this out like the Beijing S1.

Sharing track is also going to be an impossibility I think - you're not going
to be able to have standard gauge heavy rail sharing the exact same track as a
maglev, so you can't, say, replace one branch of the LIRR with maglev. It's an
all or nothing affair.

I mean yeah, in a hypothetical world where we had infinite resources, maglev
would be pretty f'ing cool, but in the actual world it's so far down the list
of priorities for our money that it might as well not be on the list.

------
bane
I don't know. I think we've found that packet-like networks (cars) are more
robust than the alternative (trains). Robustness gets built into rail systems
by adding more tracks that sit unused most of the time so you can bypass
problem sections. Otherwise, a train breaks down/derails/rails go out of
alignment, etc. and not just that line fails, but the entire systems is
impacted. In other words, whatever solution they start with, will be overcome
by the event of a fleet of self-driving taxibots.

Still, I think it's fair to view the dismantlement of NYC's above-ground rail
system as having been a mistake in many ways. It was replaced by fleets of
yellow cabs, and while living conditions in buildings are better, and more
light gets to the streets, the road system has become more difficult to deal
with.

Perhaps the better solution is to force all non-taxibot traffic (except for
delivery trucks) to park in peripheral garages in New Jersey or somewhere and
force everybody to taxibot where they want to go?

hmm...on second thought, I guess this is a hard problem without a single
solution?

~~~
TheCoelacanth
The packets in this case have an enormous overhead. A four-car train takes up
about as much space as 4 or 5 cars, but can carry 720 people compared to a
best case of about 20 for the cars.

~~~
bane
Yeah sure, there's all kinds of ways to pack lots of people into a little
space and get them marginally close to where they started from and where they
need to get to. But there's still the first and last legs of that journey.
Even in Paris, where no spot in the city is further than 500m from a station,
means you may still have to walk a km in the worst case.

It's fine when holding nothing, now do it with a couple armfuls of groceries
or whatever.

A car free city eliminates cars, which carry around big empty storage boxes in
the back all day, and can go from right where you are to right where you need
to go. Bikes are an "ok" solution for some segment of the population, but not
for every.

A quick example, my 80+ year old father, who walks with difficulty with a
cane, would not be able to live in a car free, train only city at all, and
bikes are not an option for him for the same reasons. But he still insists on
working every day because retirement bored him. There's lots of people like my
father, old, handicapped, both, how do you design a mass transit system that
can accommodate people like him?

That's why transit systems designed by healthy 20-40 something internet forum
people are usually bad ideas, they optimize for these kind of best-case
scenarios, but there's so many edge cases in humans that these solutions work
poorly in general. Cars work well in general, but a terribly many of them in
places like NYC are personal vehicles used for just a few minutes a day,
adding to congestion.

There's only ~13k Taxis in NYC and ~40k other for-hire vehicles. What if we
doubled those numbers, and killed off all other personal non-business vehicles
entirely (the majority of vehicles in the city)? Sounds like that solves
pretty much all of the problems.

Okay it doesn't solve all of the problems, you still have to deal with Taxi
drivers.

~~~
Zach_the_Lizard
Bikes can actually be better for people with mobility issues than cars. Biking
is pretty low impact and uses less energy than walking, so for some people for
whom walking is a challenge, biking might be possible. With safe bike
infrastructure, these people can still get around without cars. As a bonus,
the exercise will keep them mobile longer.

> There's lots of people like my father, old, handicapped, both, how do you
> design a mass transit system that can accommodate people like him?

You build an ADA compliant system. Compare the NYC subway, built long before
the ADA, and the DC Metro. Except when elevators are broken (a big problem
given WMATA's incompetent stewardship of the system), you can use pretty much
the entire DC metro system in a wheelchair. Escalators are in every station.
In Japan IIRC there were markings in the walkways of train stations, airports,
and sidewalks to help the blind navigate, and we could incorporate that in the
States.

~~~
bane
> You build an ADA compliant system.

Right, the system can be very easy to get around in, but it's the system to
destination legs that can be impossible. This is _almost_ always bridged with
some kind of handicapped-accessible bus system in addition to the normal bus
system. But then we're back to surface vehicles. Trains can _never_ provide
door-to-door service, it's a classic "last mile" problem.

