I grew up in Northern VA. Public transit here is a solution looking for a problem. The job centers and commercial are too spread out for public transit to make any sense. Most of the population and jobs in the DC metro area aren’t in DC but spread around in Tysons, Loudoun, Reston, Arlington, Bethesda, etc. The state spent billions building the Silver line out to Tysons, Reston, and Loudoun, and ridership was disappointing even before COVID. (And it’s approximately zero now.) In a traditional hub-and-spoke city like Chicago, heavy rail can bring tons of commuters down to where the jobs are in the core. But when the jobs are spread out all over the spokes, that model breaks down. It’s impossible to take Metro to Reston from most of the surrounding residential areas (all the ones except the narrow slice on the Silver line itself). And it’s a huge pain in the ass to do the spoke-hub-spoke commute and take Metro from a different suburb to Reston. And for married couples, it’s a real roll of the dice whether both your jobs will be easily accessible via Metro.
Rail transit is an anachronism, best suited for the 1950s when life involved a woman staying home with the kids while dad took the train into the city for work. I did that for a year before my wife started her job and it was lovely (took Metro North down from Westchester to Manhattan every day). But in a modern family with two jobs in two locations, plus kids with daycare and school and after school activities, it’s not scalable.
My wife and I are “city people.” We really tried to scale the transit lifestyle. We lived in downtown Baltimore for two years and took Amtrak to work each day. We lived in downtown DC and took Metro. We’ve commutes in the Silver line, Orange line, Blue line, MARC, etc. And every year the service got worse, and every time we had another kid the equation got harder to balance. Eventually we threw in the towel, moved to a red county, and bought an SUV that gets 13 mpg. And we’ve never looked back.
You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs. That’s where all the immigrants with kids are, and where the next generation of Americans are being raised. It’s a glorious place. And it doesn’t involve public transit.
> But when the jobs are spread out all over the spokes, that model breaks down.
So don't spread the jobs out all over the spokes? Is some urban planning really hard to do here?
> Rail transit is an anachronism, best suited for the 1950s when life involved a woman staying home with the kids while dad took the train into the city for work.
That isn't true at all in much of the world. Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.
Yes, it's hard to literally relocate hundreds of thousands of jobs according to some urban planners dreams. We aren't talking about intra city planning, but about state wide job markets. I guess Canada is dysfunctional too because there is absolutely no way to get rail service working beyond the big cities. Maybe it has something to do with north America not being Europe so trying to just force a European model here is a pure pipe dream.
Again, not talking about public transit in cities (which is amazing and should be scaled up) but about intercity/state/province transport. The distances, and spread are just not comparable to almost anywhere else in the world and you can't just magically make everyone move.
The context of this thread is about Virginia which is part of the I-95 corridor, the most densely populated area in the country, with a population density comparable to many Western European countries[1].
This is like the one region of the country you actually could scale up intercity/state transport, and it sucks so bad that Amtrak is terrible.
I guess it could be, but the point of the GP was that the jobs and the population were spread out widely even if the population density is similar. Now I could be wrong, but from what I know from the half of my family living in France, transit in Paris for example is mostly pouring into the city where the jobs are. In this case, everything is spread out, so the density itself does not really matter. The problem is the spread.
Even here in montreal, while the metro is pretty good and we are currently building a pretty nice light rail system you still can't really depend on the rail system if your job isn't in montreal itself. The whole transit system is based on feeding the big city, not move people in between smaller cities. (Also, It's a bit tiring then to hear about just how dysfunctional the US is and how good they have it everywhere else when it's just not true. The American self loathing just get repetitive honestly)
I think public transit is amazing for city transit but does not scale very well when there's something else than the usual suburb->city->suburb pattern of movement. You can't really interconnect every single medium-small ish city at a north American scale
> Again, not talking about public transit in cities (which is amazing and should be scaled up) but about intercity/state/province transport. The distances, and spread are just not comparable to almost anywhere else in the world and you can't just magically make everyone move.
This problem has been solved for awhile now, at least since the 1960s when the first intra-city/province shinkansen came online. Just because some other countries suck as badly as the USA at it doesn't mean it is an unsolved problem.
There's just absolutely no way to compare the shinkansen to what would be required in the DC/VA area. Yes the US should connect its big cities with high speed rail but that would still not do anything for small intercity transit for everyone else
This is just rehashing pop-urban planning buzzwords. Like I'm not sure where the trend of just handwaving every problem as easily solvable by "rail! Shinkansen! City public transit even out of cities!" came from but it particularly does not make sense in this situation considering the commenter you replied to specified he talked about spread out, smaller cities with frequent stops. Which is the opposite of what the shinkansen is for.
> Yes the US should connect its big cities with high speed rail but that would still not do anything for small intercity transit for everyone else
Have you ever tried taking these lines before? They have high speed rail between big cities, and tons and tons of small branch/feeder routes out to small towns with the most frequent stops ever imaginable. Getting from huge Tokyo to small Gifu actually works.
It did take some planning however. The USA's model of just "build that office complex wherever you want!" wouldn't work.
>The USA's model of just "build that office complex wherever you want!" wouldn't work.
Which is exactly my point! That's already the current situation on the ground in the USA. So yes, it wouldn't work there. Unless you'd literally move around millions of jobs, offices etc which is absolutely not feasible. Trying to build public transit around that structure just to fit an idealized vision of somewhere else is weird. Japan built the system that fit their needs and their situation and the USA should do the same.
My first comment mentioned urban planning. I that involves more than just planning the transit, you have to plan the work places and residential places as well. The USA is too enamored with personal and corporate liberty to let the government plan anything that would actually be effective beyond “let’s just build freeways everywhere and expect everyone to drive.”
You don't get to "plan" the work places and residential places. They are what they are. Your transit plan needs to serve the commercial and residential areas that already exist, not a hypothetical ideal. It isn't easy in Ireland, Germany, or Spain to reorganize an entire metro area by fiat, either.
Not really. Cities like New York and Chicago built some downtown freeways, but jobs are still clustered in the downtown core. They're still very different from cities like Atlanta and Dallas that rapidly expanded in the mid-20th century around the highway system. The same for suburbs that grew up around traditional cities during the highway era. Loudoun, a booming part of Northern Virginia, was mostly farmland and exurbs even when we moved to the area in 1989. You're not going to make Loudoun look like New York any more than you can make New York look like Loudoun.
Chicago put the major north/south and east/west highways where they are to make areas more clearly delineated between residential and commercial.
They did this for a variety of reasons some noble (grand visions of urban renewal based on cars instead of public transit) and some odious (breaking up non-machine voting wards, enforcing de facto redlining post the Supreme Court decisions, etc). They were able to make sections of the city, specifically the near south and south west places you commuted through instead of to. Similar things were done with tearing out el tracks, trolleys and the removal of commuter rail from further south neighborhoods that had been alternate business districts to the loop. These were conscious urban planning decisions to reinforce the pattern of outward/in commutes.
American Pharoah is a not particularly good biography of Richard Daley that happens to include a good book on Chicago urban planning in the late 40s to late 60s era.
> So don't spread the jobs out all over the spokes? Is some urban planning really hard to do here?
“Just completely restructure every single place 80% of the population in one of the country’s largest metro areas lives and works in.”
Yes, there is an argument that Reston, Vienna, etc., shouldn’t exist in their present form (or anything close to it). But that ship sailed long ago.
Efforts to gloss over that reality end badly. The Silver Line and all the adjacent development are monstrosities. Stations are huge concrete edifices in the middle of freeways that are nerve wracking to navigate with a squirrelly three year old. Billions were spent making places that are nice for just a handful of people who can afford $4,000/month for a two bedroom near the McLean Metro so they can take the Silver Line to their job at Google in Reston.
> That isn't true at all in much of the world. Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.
Those countries are dysfunctional. Birth rates in these transit-oriented metro areas are well below replacement, meaning that their form of civilization is literally sustainable.
>So don't spread the jobs out all over the spokes? Is some urban planning really hard to do here?
Yes, impossible actually to prevent this from happening. Corporations always want a good deal for office space, so they will literally shop around different cities looking at who will give them the biggest tax advantages and the most developable land. City councilmembers literally make careers out of wooing corporations into building suburban office parks, and why wouldn't they? They just injected a thousand white collar workers who will be paying taxes into their school district and another 5 thousand workers who will be driving in every morning and spending money on local sales tax when they get starbucks from the drive through. It's a race to the bottom as long as local governments have local control over their planning processes, and it would probably still continue if planning were done regionally or nationally since it is very easy to bribe American politicians.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we're trying for a different sort of discussion here.
You can make your substantive points thoughtfully, without name-calling, swipes, and the like. If you'd please do that instead, we'd be grateful.
Hong Kong is actually just a few urban areas separated by a bunch of really really tall hills (and rural areas in between). That anyone can get around at all in that city is already amazing.
The DC metro area is just a pretty flat sprawl. It should be an easy case transportation wise, but...Americans.
Visit NYC but try to take a train from somewhere in brooklyn to somewhere in the bronx without having to spend almost an hour with a transfer in midtown manhattan. Even in NYC the rail network is primarily oriented toward you having a 9-5 job in midtown or lower manhattan, and everyone else gets served nearly an hour commute transferring on busses or trains.
Nobody in northern Virginia wants to live in Hong Kong, and even if they did that ship sailed long ago. Also, the fertility rate in Hong Kong is less than half the replacement rate. They’re like the Asgard—an impressive civilization, full of marvels, but without a future.
All civilizations in decline because they can’t accommodate the basic human function of conveniently raising 2.1 new humans per couple. What’s the point of technology that doesn’t serve human needs?
Go to Dallas and look at all the families with 3-4 kids. That’s what the future looks like. (Except the minivans and pickup trucks are probably electric.)
California is a big place. Just 13% of San Francisco’s population is under 18; and Hong Kong is about the same. Garland and Bakersfield are double that. Public transit apparently kills a civilization’s desire to perpetuate itself.
We're moving to a future where fewer humans are necessary to run economies. The trend of the future is smaller and more prosperous populations doing more meaningful activities, rather than a future of slum-ponzi-ism where an ever increasing amount of bodies are needed to fuel economic growth.
> Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.
Define "works". Sure it can move millions of people each day, but those people live miserable lives most of the time. Have you lived in a city where commuting one hour each way by train is considered "very good" ? And some of the worse are around 1.30-1.45 hours each way, each day? Even if for a while the train is fine, if the city is growing it will become unbearably crowded, smelly, hot and just a nightmare to deal with when you're tired and want to get home at 6 PM.
Yes, our life in Franconia (northern Bavaria) is nothing but suffering, in our townhouse with a yard that’s a 600m walk from a subway station and a suburban rail station, either of which gets me to downtown Nuremberg in 20 minutes, because that place is a hellhole, and to the miserable corporate 35-hour-a-week job (the fault of IG Metall) that pays for said townhouse in 40 minutes. I especially resent the fact that I can go out for that swill they call beer in Bavaria with my colleagues after work in that dump called downtown Nuremberg without worrying how I’ll get home.
A truly regrettable existence that no human should have to endure. We mourn the lack of a reason to own a second car. My husband’s bike ride to work is an even worse torture.
I was talking about cities (e.g. London) where commuting by train+buses takes 1-2 hours each way. Not sure why you thought I was talking about medium sized cities where you can drive anywhere in 20 minutes. Washington DC is just massive, the metro area is immense both area and population wise, public transport wouldn't do much there.
To be fair, I have no idea how my cousin managed to afford a house in Wendelstein, they all seemed pretty expensive for being a drive away from the subway as opposed to a walk.
Because every year we refuse to fund public transport at an appropriate level to prevent it from getting worse let alone improving.
If your idea of public transport is confined to only what the US has to offer currently, then you have already stopped having a conversation in good faith and instead are being myopic in the realm of solutions.
I also grew up in Northern VA. Biggest issue there is how hard it is to build public transit. The silver-line was such a clusterfuck largely because of fights over who should pay[1], how much it should cost and how to balance construction-induced disruption and costs with long-term TCO.
If we could build rail miles as cheaply and quickly as Western Europe, everyone in Fairfax Co could commute via rail except perhaps those work west of there.
1: Fairfax county is rather centrally planned compared to everywhere else in the US I've lived since then, but the DC Metro is funded by MD, VA, DC, and the federal government. The difficulty of building infrastructure seems to scale super-linearly with the number of people paying for the infrastructure...
> If we could build rail miles as cheaply and quickly as Western Europe, everyone in Fairfax Co could commute via rail except perhaps those work west of there.
I agree. But we can’t. It’s a cluster fuck even when it’s just one state. Maryland spent $7 billion building the Purple line, which is what Western European countries spent for similar amounts of fully automated underground heavy rail.
At some point we have to treat our infrastructure costs as realities to be planned around rather than solvable problems. This is a keen insight Lee Kuan Yew had in building Singapore. He admired many aspects of Anglo culture, but realized that not all of them would work in an Asian country: https://web.colby.edu/eas150/files/2017/11/Zakaria_LeeKuanYe.... America is a decentralized, low cohesion society built around having plenty of space for a bunch of different groups to leave each other alone. America is continually replenished by the people who are antisocial enough to leave their kin and homelands to start new lives thousands of miles away.[1] We aren’t Germans or Swedes or Japanese and shouldn’t beat our selves up trying to be them. Our future is electric cars and freeways, not trains.
[1] Asians are the biggest immigrant group in the US, but when polled, under 10% of people in Asia said they would immigrate to another country if they had the chance. Guess what kind of people end up making the journey?
> At some point we have to treat our infrastructure costs as realities to be planned around rather than solvable problems.
I think this is the main point of disagreement in this thread; if we have to spend $500M/mile for light rail in the US, it's fairly obvious that rail is not an option. If there is a large learning-factor for building rail that would bring costs down significantly with more miles built, then rail is certainly an option for the northeast US.
Yes—I think it’s a difference between people who accept that light rail costs us $500 million/mile and subways cost us $5 billion/mile and those who don’t. Also, those who think we can run reliable, efficient public transit even with good funding, and those who accept that we can’t.
I used to be a rail fan. Then I rode Amtrak to work for a couple of years. I saw the DC Metro, which is well funded, so badly maintained that automated train control, a core feature when the system was built 1970s, had to be turned off. (That was a decade ago and there is no sign of it ever being reenabled.) I came to the conclusion that Americans running transit projects like the Europeans or Japanese is just wishful thinking. A camel cannot be a bird no matter how much it wants.
So prove it with more than your ridiculous anecdotes and metaphors. You do a lot of claiming and literally no sourcing. Try again, this time with data.
It doesn't exactly help that tall office buildings are not allowed in DC. It's hard to have a "hub" when it's illegal to build a hub.
>You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs.
Can I point out the irony that you're posting this in a thread about a natural disaster exacerbated by suburban development patterns, and your example of Dallas suffered a similar disaster less than a year ago, made worse by the thermal inefficiency of the same development patterns? Is that the future we should want?
Also, Dallas is the anti-thesis of good urban design. The I-35 corridor in the area and the surrounding metroplex is a damn nightmare, and only getting worse.
If you design your space for cars as the mode of getting to places, you get exactly that… but it really doesn’t have to be like this. It is possible to plan cities in a way that public transit works. Obviously it won’t if you need to jump into a car to buy bread for breakfast, because otherwise you won’t be back for dinner.
I say this as a member of a two car family who routinely ferries children to places and hates every minute of it that could be spent paying attention to something other than the road.
I lived literally next to Dulles International Airport - ~8 miles. Yet, to get to Dulles (or Reston/Herndon) by Public transit, would've taken me 2 hours perhaps, or more.
Ha! I live in Reston and mapped out some options on Goole Maps...
Home to IAD by car: 5 miles, 9 minutes
Home to IAD by transit: 40+ minutes across 2 bus lines
Home to IAD by foot: 10.9 miles, 3+ hours
Home to WAS by car: 24 miles, 29 minutes
Home to WAS by transit: 90+ minutes across 1 bus line, 2 Metro lines, and a few walking segments to link them.
It's sad that walking to the airport is twice as far than driving. It's also sad that I can drive to a airport further away than I can access my closest airport by transit.
Fair enough, I always take a cab/Uber to IAD, as that cost is far less than the price of parking. And living so close to IAD, I try to fly out of it whenever possible (all work travel, 80% of pleasure travel).
Except (unless they've built new paths since I last checked) you can't realistically walk to the airport either. The only non-limited-access highway entrance is on the north side of the airport, so unless GP lives in Ashburn, you'll have to walk around the airport first (and if you're east, that means finding a decent crossing for Route 28...). Then you have such pedestrian friendly places as this[1].
This arrangement is the result of one of the biggest social engineering projects in human history. In order to make this happen the federal government had to massively subsidize loans for single-family homes, build enormous interstate highways (that always seem to be adding a lane), and make alternative living arrangements illegal via zoning.
I read your comments downthread, which I think are pretty insightful; it may be the case that the ship has sailed and we're not going back (and it may even be the case that there's something in our national DNA that prevents us from competently building and operating transit). But it should at least be acknowledged that the status quo isn't the result of personal choice or revealed preference; it was quite literally a big-government social engineering project.
I just want to say that the comments about public transport in DC are spot on. It's incredibly hard to design a system that can actually get people where they need to be because A) people are so spread out, B) everyone is going to different places, C) there is minimal incentive to make public transit better because costs completely outweigh potential ridership.
It's sad, but without a car in the DC area, your options are very minimal and you pretty much have to live in the city.
I lived in the DC area for nearly 30 years and moved out right as Covid hit, and have tried to use public transit at various points in my adult life. Unless you live super close to a metro stop and/or need to go to a metro stop the system will barely work for you, and even then you'll be hamstrung with where you can go and how long it will take you to get there.
>You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs. That’s where all the immigrants with kids are, and where the next generation of Americans are being raised. It’s a glorious place. And it doesn’t involve public transit.
Dallas should probably get some better research universities if this is going to be a thing.
Rail transit is an anachronism, best suited for the 1950s when life involved a woman staying home with the kids while dad took the train into the city for work. I did that for a year before my wife started her job and it was lovely (took Metro North down from Westchester to Manhattan every day). But in a modern family with two jobs in two locations, plus kids with daycare and school and after school activities, it’s not scalable.
My wife and I are “city people.” We really tried to scale the transit lifestyle. We lived in downtown Baltimore for two years and took Amtrak to work each day. We lived in downtown DC and took Metro. We’ve commutes in the Silver line, Orange line, Blue line, MARC, etc. And every year the service got worse, and every time we had another kid the equation got harder to balance. Eventually we threw in the towel, moved to a red county, and bought an SUV that gets 13 mpg. And we’ve never looked back.
You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs. That’s where all the immigrants with kids are, and where the next generation of Americans are being raised. It’s a glorious place. And it doesn’t involve public transit.