“How much highway would you need to move 5.5 million people into and through a dense downtown core” is a question almost no city in the US besides New York needs to ask.
NYC is uniquely dense: https://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2012/09/th.... The weighted population density (the density in the parts of the metro area where people live) is 30,000 people per square mile. LA and SF, the next most dense, are less than half as dense, at 12,000. DC, at 6,400, is about 1/5 the density of New York. Portland and Seattle are even less dense, at 4,000-5,000, which is about the national average.
The Silver Line example is much more illustrative of a typical place in the US. In these places, the higher theoretical capacity of rail is irrelevant, because the commuting pattern isn’t about bringing a large number of people along a few major paths to a downtown job center. It’s about shuttling people between job clusters spread out among the suburbs: http://www.robertmanduca.com/projects/jobs.html (scroll over to Northern VA, west of DC). There might be heavily used corridors like VA7, but the commutes both start and end in suburban locations. You couldn’t pick out a few key paths where being able to move 100,000 people a day from point A to point B and intermediate points would really be all that helpful.
“The peak capacity of a mile of track will always be less than that of a mile of highway. ”
All we’re doing is arguing by examples.
Clearly, depending on the population it’s simply not true. I don’t know the specifics in each case. I’ve been stuck in huge traffic jams in Seattle, New York/New Jersey, Washington DC, Virginia, Philadelphia, etc. I’d say we need more mass transit in those places.
Yes, mass transit needs to go where a certain number of people want to go. However, we’ve ignored mass transit in the US and we complain that it doesn’t work, when it seems to work everywhere else in the world.
So, we’ve mostly build minimal mass transit and lots of roads in the US and are using that as an example that mass transit doesn’t work.
It’s not just SF. 85% of the Bay Area lives outside SF. The area’s key industry is not only outside SF, but mostly scattered among random suburban office parks in the South Bay. Densifying SF won’t do it. You have to get the jobs out from the big suburban office parks into downtown, or at least in transit accessible locations in a handful of South Bay cities.
I really want to agree with you, but I don't think that's the case.
Most of the US isn't dense enough to avoid the same DC metro area problem. In most places, you're transporting people between suburban areas, not between the suburbs and the city, and not between different places in the city. If you have hundreds of suburban areas that are spread out over thousands of square miles, the amount of rail necessary to adequately service that area without stranding people at one end or the other is just massively infeasible.
Even look at the Bay Area. Say you live in SF and work somewhere in the peninsula or south bay. If you don't live near one of the Caltrain stations in SF, you're probably going to spend 30-60 minutes just getting there on Muni. Then you ride for 45-90 minutes on Caltrain. But what if your job isn't along the Caltrain corridor, which is most of the area? Ironically, some of the companies which are within a reasonable distance from Caltrain (walkable, or the company could provide a frequent shuttle bus) provide their own buses to and from SF. Clearly, the preference is just not to have to deal with the mess of Caltrain. And people who don't have shuttle buses still find driving a better use of their time.
Given that the Bay Area is (on either side of the bay, anyway) relatively long and narrow, another one or two parallel trains might solve the problem, though it'd be prohibitively expensive and I doubt the NIMBYs would yield right of way. I think this is an example of the opposite problem: cherry-picking examples that just happen to work out due to favorable land shape and suburb clustering.
No, I think that Maryland pretty much proves that public transit doesn't work. You better tell London and Hong Kong and Tokyo and Paris and Beijing and New Delhi to shut down their systems.
Who said public transit doesn’t work? It clearly works some places. But what transit advocates ignore is that there is just one city in the entire US like London or Tokyo: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/10/americas-truly-denses.... In terms of weighted density, New York stands apart, 2.5x denser than SF or LA, and 5-6x denser than Seattle or DC.
The situation in Maryland illustrates what happens when you try to impose transit in a place that doesn’t have that kind of density.
You must have posted at least a dozen comments about the Maryland subway system in a thread about the Bay Area. Either you think the Maryland example is relevant to other areas, or you think it is irrelevant, and are just posting random anecdotes.
you’re giving me confirmation bias.
You’re cherry picking one example that confirms your bias. No first principles reasoning.
You’re giving some specific example about a setup in Washington DC.
This has absolutely nothing to do with how well mass transit can do versus cars. It’s one specific implementation.
In NYC, for example, 5.5 million people take the subway per day. How much highway will you need to carry that many people?