The Future of New York City Transportation: Goodbye Cars, Hello Rails

https://www.inverse.com/article/5839-the-future-of-new-york-city-transportation-goodbye-cars-hello-rails

by prawn • 11 years ago

45 57 11 years ago

bohm• 11 years ago

self driving cars and uberbuses

Shivetya• 11 years ago

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.

ido• 11 years ago

The main advantage is that rail is cheaper per passenger/km beyond a certain capacity, since it's more efficient to drive on metal rails than tires on asphalt.

So even if it's more expensive upfront after X years you get continuous savings every year from increased efficiency.

chipsy2• 11 years ago

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.

melling6• 11 years ago

How about a maglev?

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

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

untog4• 11 years ago

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

melling6• 11 years ago

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_...

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

ohthehugemanate• 11 years ago

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...

icehawk219• 11 years ago

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.

JDDunn9• 11 years ago

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

Amorymeltzer• 11 years ago

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

https://twitter.com/bencasselman/status/631939479318626304

chimeracoder• 11 years ago

And one third of all subway stops in the entire US are within New York City city limits.

dradtke• 11 years ago

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.

et2o2• 11 years ago

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.

JackFr2• 11 years ago

What will the businesses sell? Air dropped supplies?

fowkswe4• 11 years ago

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://www.villagevoice.com/news/new-east-village-bike-lanes...).

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.

et2o2• 11 years ago

They will just drive the truck from the next avenue over to the avenue that is closed and carry it from there. I don't think this wouldn't add that much delivery time.

As another commenter said, this setup is totally normal in most old European cities. Not a big deal at all.

fowkswe4• 11 years ago

They should also close 1/2 of the avenues and turn them into parks

I've always thought this too. The city has made attempts to make up / down town bike routes on most avenues but it's still a dicey proposition to ride through midtown. At least close 2 of them allocating half of each for uptown and downtown bike traffic. The other half could be pedestrian / public park space.

JackFr2• 11 years ago

The 1.5 million people living in Manhattan (not even counting those who come in to to work here) need toilet paper, popsicles, beer, vegetables, furniture, etc. to live. Additionally we need our popsicle sticks and empty beer cans hauled away. Trucks driving on avenues facilitate this.

I happily live without a car in Manhattan, and have for the past 20 years, but I realize that my walk/public transport lifestyle is facilitated by trucks which bring things to my local stores.

unwind• 11 years ago

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?

melling6• 11 years ago

There are a million more people in NYC now than in 1940. The population hasn't always increased.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_Cit...

untog4• 11 years ago

Certainly the population of NYC must have grown significantly in the past 65 years

Economic stagnation in the 70s meant that the population of NYC has not always been growing.

And it definitely hasn't always been the city it is today - the subway had a terrible reputation in the 80s as a place of crime, so many didn't take it.

chipsy2• 11 years ago

According to Wikipedia's stats, the population of New York declined slightly between 1950-1960, recovered 1960-1970, and then declined again, more sharply, 1970-1980. The big growth years started after 1980 - i.e. around the same time their ridership tracking began.

Correspondingly, the cultural legacy of New York as it started the 80's was one of a city in disarray with trashed streets and little public order or prospects for a future - great material for gritty films about crime and societal breakdown. The economic situation and mood started changing over the course of the decade, and the image of "Disneyfied New York" finally emerged in the 90's under Guliani's mayorship.

So, going back to the original question, New York went through a rough period following WWII, and that combined with a broad switch to cars accounts for changes in ridership.

mercutio2• 11 years ago

You're missing the precipitous post WW2 drop in ridership. A discussion of this curve, with a link to the ridership graph:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/2bk7f5/new...

Zach_the_Lizard4• 11 years ago

I understand ridership declined due to things like crime, growth of the suburbs, etc., but how much of an impact did things like tearing out the elevated rails in Manhattan have on these ridership numbers? What would they have looked like had they not been torn down?

potatolicious5• 11 years ago

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...

rmxt• 11 years ago

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/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor...

bane6• 11 years ago

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?

TheCoelacanth2• 11 years ago

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.

potatolicious5• 11 years ago

I crunched the math on this a little while back as a fun exercise:

To replace a single rush-hour NYC subway train with all single-occupancy vehicles, based on the average length of car in the US, would occupy every lane in a single direction on Market St in San Francisco from the waterfront all the way to Van Ness.

In other words, in order to get a subway train full of people into the city, but in cars instead, the lineup of cars (spread over multiple lanes!) would stretch the entirety of downtown SF. And this assumes perfect packing - i.e., bumper to bumper.

Side note: I'm quite optimistic about self-driving cars, but it never ceases to amaze me how many self-driving car proponents seem to be utopian futurists who are entirely reality-resistant. No, self-driving pod cars will not produce greater capacity than a heavy rail mass transit network, are you even serious. They may very well become a key fixture of our transportation infrastructure, but there is simply no physical way fleets of taxibots will ever rival the throughput of a NYC subway train at rush hour.

bane6• 11 years ago

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_Lizard4• 11 years ago

To duplicate the capacity of the trains, you'd need enormous amounts of parking and bridges. Someone crunched the numbers and found you'd need a parking lot the size of Manhattan and at least two layers deep to accommodate all of the commuters if they drove, as well as 48 additional 8 lane bridges.

https://mtayloranalysis.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/an-auto-ori...

Cars are in many ways less robust than trains.

bane6• 11 years ago

Right, but with a self-driving taxi system you don't need a discrete car per person that's only used for transit in and out of the city. You can use fewer and reuse them over and over and over again during the course of a day. This is both a more flexible and more robust system than trains. Plus, given a grid system like Manhattan, blockages can be routed around.

People don't seem to believe me, but we're all on the internet aren't we?

gambiting• 11 years ago

"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.

oneJob• 11 years ago

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.

topkai22• 11 years ago

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.

The Future of New York City Transportation: Goodbye Cars, Hello Rails

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