I'm really happy that Montreal made this work. We need more alternative examples of public transit build-outs in the west that actually work and come in on-budget. Copenhagen is another good exemplar here with their public/private collaboration for new lines.
I do think this article has a rather unrealistic tone for what the rest of us can learn from this though.
> One advantage is that CDPQ Infra was able to take advantage of existing rights of way to create the route, rather than needing to dig costly tunnels or demolish buildings.
This is huge. In many cities where we most desperately need public transit in the US, this just isn't realistic. We need net new lines either over or underground, and no matter how you slice that they're going to need right of way allowances and NIMBY disagreements. Plus most urban settings that will benefit the most from transit will need tunnel development as part of the cost projections.
> Quebec passed a law that requires municipalities to respond in a timely manner to CDPQ Infra’s requests for permits and other forms of cooperation.
Reading about California's highspeed rail project[^1], it seemed clear that there was deep government buy-in about the end state but the interim goals were over legislated. Counties in the central valley traded their buy-in for the project to starting the line build-out in their counties, even though population centers in LA and SF could have benefited way more from early wins. One thing this article missed was that we need to set more of a precedence for transit agencies / bureaucrats on the ground to make decisions that will further the end goal and circumvent the horse-trading at the legislative level.
King County in Washington State has been determined to avoid using any existing rail right-of-way, and insists on blasting new right-of-way at incredible cost.
The existing right-of-way (sometimes even with tracks still on them!) is turned into bike paths, that nobody uses most of the year because of rain.
They also decided to build a new tunnel under Seattle. What to do with the dirt they dug out? Why, they stuffed it into the old tunnel! Probably the most expensive use of existing infrastructure ever. (The excuse was the old tunnel needed some work to make it more earthquake resistant. All that needed to be done was add a liner.)
It gets even better. They decided to build another tunnel. So they bought a zillion dollar boring machine, and tunneled away. When the tunnel was completed, they cut up the boring machine for scrap! After all, nobody would ever need to build another tunnel.
Since the end of the tunnel was still in the major Seattle metropolitan area, and the machine was already there in place, just keep boring north. But hey, I surely am a dunderhead.
It's so awful one is tempted to characterize it as malicious.
The Burke isn’t exactly equipped to be a light rail corridor after decades of development, unless you want the county go purchase / eminent domain some of the most expensive real estate it can find…
Frustratingly despite CDPQ doing a great job on REM (with several stages left to deliver) the next phase of the project has been taken away from them. REM East was going to repeat plan and success for the REM in the eastern end of the island (historically the poorer parts of the city). It would also provide a whole new line into downtown, providing relief for the overcrowded green line
Some groups (including envrionment groups bizarrely) objected to the elevated rails, even though these would not split neighbourhoods the way elevated highways did in the 60s throughout north america.
The project was taken away from CDPQ who proved they can deliver transit on time and on budget in both Montreal and Vancouver and given back to STM who have a history of cost overruns. STM immediately proposed running the entire network underground and not running it into downtown, requiring a 2 seat ride onto the green line which is already over-crowded. That explodes estimated costs to $36B CDN from CDPQ's $10B and delivers fewer km of track and less function. What a mess.
Environmental groups, and I say this as a self-professed environmentalist, often miss the forest for the trees. They will fight an elevated train line to save a bird or whatever. Despite the fact that the reduced automobile miles means far more humans and animals both not dying and just better for the environment in general. Then they won't make a peep at a giant parking lot being made.
The rail line is killed if even one part can't be made; whereas if there are ten parking lots and one gets blocked because it's a wetland, the other nine still come to be.
It's a shame what happened
, letting the NIMBYs win like that. The complaints about it being an eyesore are crazy. It looks like something out of Tokyo. I guess some people just want to live in the past.
I can imagine the same group of people simultaneously demanding better public transport. A mob can want many different conflicting things at the same time.
Yeah, it's cool, they can ride the green line and suffer stuffed up into people's armpits when it breaks down every few days during the summer. It doesn't bust my balls, which is why I say it's sad, they're only hurting themselves.
There is a serious problem with letting CDPQ Infra operate a downtown line, which is that they couldn't agree on a revenue sharing agreement with the ARTM.
A new downtown line is fine, but if it means insufficient funding for the already underfunded metro system, it's not clear it would actually be a net benefit.
Ultimately the problem is the legislation around the ARTM having to be able to be long-term profitable, which means that such a project can't make sense.
As far as I'm aware, the ARTM and the city also agreed with a plan where the REM de l'est would connect somewhere onto the green line to avoid competing with downtown metro service, but that was rejected by CDPQ Infra as unprofitable.
Indeed, about 80% of the tracks for the new rail system, including the most expensive bits (across the st Lawrence river, through downtown and dense suburbs, under the Mont-Royal) were on pre-existing railways or rights of ways. The rest was built aboveground next to a highway (with a small branch dug underground towards the airport).
By comparison, the Blue line metro extension is being built from scratch, including expropriations, and the projected cost is CAD6.4B for 5-6km of new tunnels and give stations.
Something I’ve been hammering on recently: NYC could build new light rail lines relatively rapidly and cheaply, especially in Brooklyn and Queens: much of those boroughs was covered by streetcar lines until the 1950s, and all of the streets that those lines ran on are still graded for that purpose. In some places they didn’t even bother to pull up the old rails, and just paved over them instead[1]. The roads themselves are owned by the city too, sidestepping half of the bureaucratic process that comes with the state-run MTA.
This idea is brilliant. Cars are inefficient means of transit in dense urban areas. Mass transit easily has many multiples if not an order of magnitude greater ability to move more people/hr than autos. Our cities used to be structured around mass transit and walking before the advent of the car and the exodus to the suburbs. In the intervening century technology has rapidly progressed such that cities are no longer dirty, squalid environments, and in fact, places like NYC have the highest life expectancies in the nation. It’s time to return to proven solutions like street cars, or nowadays, Bus Rapid Transit.
Yep. One thing to note: NYC has attempted Bus Rapid Transit (we call it the "Select Bus Service") to mixed results: the SBS routes are popular, but are also frequently delayed (drivers regularly park and drive in the dedicated bus routes, and the police have no interest whatsoever in enforcing the dedicated rights of way).
Streetcars are significantly more expensive than BRT, but have at least two substantial advantages: they bring civic interest and investment (streetcar lines are semipermanent fixtures that real estate and communities can develop around), and they physically prevent the kind of petty infringement that personal drivers inflict upon bus riders.
> police have no interest whatsoever in enforcing the dedicated rights of way
Why is this stated like an unbreakable physical law? They are employees like any other, I'm sure there are ways to incentivize effective job performance.
I don't know if you live in NY or not, but the these are the facts on the ground:
* When it comes to traffic enforcement, the NYPD has effectively been on a silent strike for the last 3 years.
* It's virtually impossible for the city to assert greater civilian control over the NYPD, in a large part because the NYPD simply ignores any transparency or accountability laws that are meant to reign it in. Punishing them for ignoring the laws is also virtually impossible, because it would require the city's DA's to prosecute the force they currently rely on.
> I'm sure there are ways to incentivize effective job performance.
The best incentive here would be initiating some form of civil liability for the NYPD, or otherwise ensuring that the NYPD cannot rely on the city's general budget to pay for their malfeasance. That's a political non-starter, so maybe just curtailing their overtime.
Longer term, the NYPD needs to lose its special civil service status and require, like every other NYC agency, that its employees live in the city they police. This more than anything else is the most broken incentive around traffic enforcement: the majority of NYC cops live outside of the city and commute by car in[1], meaning that they simply do not care about the basic livability of the neighborhoods they police. This is manifest in the rampant illegal parking and defaced license plates around every NYPD precinct[2].
I suppose the MTA can always handle traffic enforcement. That's how congesting charging is going to work. At this point, I'm convinced that most reckless driving you see in the city is the NYPD on their way to work. (Never forget this one: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/03/30/dept-of-investigation.... Detective texted death threats to 311 callers, from his own number, for reporting illegal parking.)
(I don't choose the MTA because I think they're a remarkably efficient organization. They just happen to already be gearing up to do it, and are outside the reach of NYC politics, for better or for worse.)
I think that we can reform the NYPD with the right mayor. Eric Adams is obviously Not It. I am not sure there is a single viewpoint he has that justifies the "D" next to his name. Fortunately, it appears he is now tied up in some federal campaign finance investigation that will hopefully end with him not being the mayor anymore. (A few weeks ago, he showed up at the DOT office and ranted about how "more bike lanes isn't going to be my legacy". https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/11/01/adams-dismisses-bus-b... He's right. All of his rat violations and campaign finance shenanigans will be his legacy. I would have picked the bike lanes.)
Most every other city is having the same problem. For some reason, police aren’t enforcing laws due to whatever reason (staffing shortage, morale problems, union meddling, etc…).
I can't think of a solution other than a massive increase in police funding. Maybe it could be conditioned on being purely for higher salaries rather than for military weapons. It'd also help if it was tied to prohibiting the disqualification of applicants with high IQs.
More generally, I think it's weird how we tend to hear more about shortages in all sorts of key industries these days. Medical professionals, police, teachers. Well, it seems it was always true for teachers. But I'm under this impression it used to be easier to have a self-sustaining mix of professions in a geographical area, without trying to regulate it all in place. Maybe this is again all going back to the wealth gap and housing costs.
I don’t think funding is the issue here: a junior NYPD cop makes more than the average NYC resident before overtime[1], and gets relatively plum benefits while doing so. Like most forces, they’re also pensioned at 20 years.
The issue here is residency and interest: the NYPD is excluded from ordinary civil service requirements, meaning that they aren’t required to live in the city they police. The majority of them choose not to, meaning that the city’s law enforcement is largely made up of people driving their cars into the city and treating as an “outside” place, rather than their home. Forcing them to live in the city wouldn’t fix everything about the NYPD, but I suspect we’d see less petty infringement of traffic laws by the NYPD themselves.
Long term, higher productivity is inevitable. That means more cameras on buses identifying bus lane violations, and cameras in random places identifying obscured plates, no plates, or stolen plates. Ya, we have this tech already, it’s used in some countries…but the USA will be slower to adopt it (but it’s inevitable). People’s labor is just getting too dear, and so we need to up productivity to compensate. For police, this could also be a win against police abuse/corruption, since the machines are unlikely to at least abuse their power.
In the UK parking enforcement is rarely done by the police. It's done by local government - who are strongly incentivised to make it work because it gives them revenue. The result is that it's not a major issue. The traffic wardens are pretty relentless about ticketing people.
The bus situation is rapidly improved now. Buses are supposed to automatically take pictures of cars in the dedicated bus lane and will auto-fine drivers that park in them.
It sounds great in theory, but the reality is that many car owners obscure their license plates or use ghost plates. NYPD has no interest in enforcing the rules against this either.
Source? It’s illegal in all 50 states to obscure a license plate. I visit NYC frequently, and I don’t recall any obviously obscured plates. It beggars belief a significant fraction of automobiles are sporting fraudulent plates too.
I live in a dense part of Brooklyn, and I would estimate that 3-5% of all of the cars I see on my daily commute (by bicycle) have defaced, obscured, or illegal paper plates.
If you want to see evidence of this yourself, I'd recommend stopping by the 78th precinct. NYC's finest have many creative examples to offer.
Edit: A recent article on the phenomenon[1]. It's hard to get statistics for this kind of thing, since the NYPD has demonstrated a tactical indifference towards it.
> NYC's finest have many creative examples to offer.
Am I understanding you correctly that the police staff themselves use illegal or obscured plates on their private vehicles which they park at the police employees parking lot, with no consequences whatsoever? If so this is insane.
Yep, it is surreal. It’s one of the many ways in which the NYPD communicates its utter lack of respect for the city it’s meant to protect.
I’m not aware of a court case that has tried to fight this, probably in part because of procedural challenges (the NYPD spans 5 boroughs with 5 different court systems, standing is unclear, etc.). Unfortunately, the city’s courts probably just aren’t equipped to handle this kind of en masse, “mild” collective punishment by law enforcement itself.
I noticed it when I was in Brooklyn two months ago. In DC, where speed and stop cameras are the only form of traffic enforcement and where the bus cameras are also being piloted, the proportion of cars with fake (temp Maryland tags printed on a library printer) or obscured plates is probably approaching 10% of vehicles on the road, and 90% of routine reckless drivers. If NYPD demonstrates a studied indifference to public safety, DC MPD is doing a post-doc in the field.
Do you have a link or article for that? That's great if so, I hadn't heard about it.
(I live on one of the most heavily used SBS routes in Brooklyn, and I've been disheartened by the blatant disregard trucks and other large cars have for the bus lane and bus parking slots. The stop closely to me is more often than not occupied by a trailer truck, meaning that the SBS bus unloads 50+ directly into traffic.)
> and they physically prevent the kind of petty infringement that personal drivers inflict upon bus riders.
Dedicated bus roads (not just lanes) would do the same thing. Lots of street car systems also share lanes with cars, so I wonder what is even the point of those.
Street cars can brake abd dodge less. That makes them much harder to bully.
Get in an accident with a bus, and the bus driver has some suspicion on him, people won't immediately blame you. Get in an accident with a tram, and you are just an idiot.
One of the most perverse things about large cities to me is that they start with a far too low roadway to person ratio for efficient car usage and then throw away half their road capacity so people can park on it.
Non-grade separated street cars are dangerous and can still get into accidents, while they only provide slightly more capacity than buses at the expense of a lot of flexibility. But they are more charming at least, in a city like Bern or Lyon.
Streetcars/Trams can have a lot mote capacity than a bus.
Cities such as Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Constantine use 7 section Alstom Citadis trams, and there is even a 9 section version. Articulated buses stop at ~3 sections.
I did say slightly more capacity? A tram in bern has a bit more capacity than an electric caterpillar bus used in Lausanne. They aren’t doing many 7 section trams in Bern because much if their routes aren’t completely grade separated. I’ve actually never seen a 7 section tram anywhere, including Paris…a new thing?
Almost double (a Citadis tram can accomodate up to 370, "super articulated" buses like the Citaro CapaCity up to 200) isn't slightly more.
> They aren’t doing many 7 section trams in Bern because much if their routes aren’t completely grade separated
It's not the grade separation that matters, but turn radii and intersection length and distance (basically can such a tram fit in the physical space available).
> I’ve actually never seen a 7 section tram anywhere, including Paris…a new thing
Paris Tram T3(a and b) have been using 7 section trams since the original opening as T3 in 2006. According to Wikipedia there are at least 8 cities with 7 section Citadis, and at least one with 9 sections (Dublin) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom_Citadis . And of course this isn't the only model of modern trams in existance, there's also Bombardier's models (acquired by Alstom), Siemens, Pesa, Solaris, Stadler, etc.
I don't know if sections is really the ideal measurement unit for trams – maybe metres makes a bit more sense. Double-articulated buses are usually around 25 m long.
In Germany, the default maximum legal length for a tram running in road traffic (including on dedicated transit lanes [1]) is 75 m. Of course not every tram network goes up to that limit, but at least ~40 m isn't too uncommon, which also approximatively corresponds to the length of a seven-section Citadis (around 43 or 44 m).
[1] Unless all intersections with road traffic are signalized as full-on railway-style level crossings.
Imagine me your sworn enemy. I hate you and you shall never be redeemed in my eyes. I own a home on the route. How much will it cost you to overcome me? Add that to the cost. That's the true cost.
Imagine I'll claim all sorts of things: environment, the poor, gentrification, toxic chemicals.
I don’t understand this comment, sorry. Are you being sarcastic, or do you not like streetcars?
Edit: I read again, and I think you’re trying to point out that there’s a higher true cost. There almost certainly is, and it’s going to be more than similar projects in similar cities. The only really relevant question is whether it’s cheaper than building new subway lines, which it also almost certainly is.
> And stations have to be created in the middle of the street, a hazard for pedestrians.
Why? The NYC bus network closely mirrors the old streetcar network, and uses sidewalk dropoffs; there’s no reason why reactivated streetcars couldn’t do the same.
The point about integration with traffic is a reasonable one, but see below the point about civic value: NYC needs less traffic on its streets, and inducing behavior away from driving by taking up that space with a permanent streetcar line doesn’t seem like the worst approach to me.
I was very impressed with Montreal and its decentering of cars the last time I visited...it seems to be a city that is leading bike and public transit-friendly development in North America.
It's not been without its detractors [0], but overall the mayor remains quite popular and making Montreal more accessible to bikes and pedestrians has been a consistent priority since the beginning of her mandate.
The issue is that, in typical Quebec (and Canadian) fashion, the entire thing has 0 vision or innovation to it. The shift to a more walkable city has been to imitate European cities as is, as if Montreal isn't different from say, Amsterdam or Copenhagen.
For most of the year, due to the cold and snow, the bike lanes are unused and are not convertible to anything else. Sure, some people still bike in the very cold months but that's an extreme minority that inherently includes mostly young, mostly fit cyclists. (Yes European cities also have winters, but they are usually way milder, even in northern cities like Stockholm)
Now, I'm still fully on board of having a walking/biking centric city when it makes sense, so convertible infrastructure would have been amazing. But instead we get half of the roads being unusable for anything during the colder months (look at St-Denis st. for example). Not even for bus transit. Which is to me ridiculous and is again, typical of Montreal's infrastructure projects.
Both directions of the bike lanes on St-Denis take up about one car lane. The street has 2 lanes for car traffic and 2 more lanes for street parking on most sections of the road. I think that's a fair trade-off for the very high traffic the bike lanes receive on non-snow months. Not all public infrastructure needs to be used at capacity all the time (like public swimming pools, playgrounds, tennis/basketball courts, un-plowed walking paths, etc).
Although Montreal is leading the way to sustainable transportation, I don't think Montreal is copying European cities enough. Most of the biking infrastructure around the city is paint on roads making it a patch work system that kids and elderly people can't use safely.
I don't think it's fair to say that crucial roads should be underutilized, especially for crucial main streets! I agree with you that saint Denis is very very heavily used by cyclists in the warmer months, and I agree that the "paint a line" types of bike lanes are a cop out. But I think that Montreal should've explored convertible, semi permanent infrastructure. Not simple painted lines, but not inflexible set in concrete paths either.
We could've even set a new "standard" for cities that face the same challenges! That way, there's no trade off. We could use it in the winter for bus/priority lanes, and have the very useful and safe bike lanes in the summer. Sure, I don't know of anywhere else that implemented something similar, but that's the point :)
> For most of the year, due to the cold and snow, the bike lanes are unused and are not convertible to anything else. Sure, some people still bike in the very cold months but that's an extreme minority that inherently includes mostly young, mostly fit cyclists. (Yes European cities also have winters, but they are usually way milder, even in northern cities like Stockholm)
> Sure, some people still bike in the very cold months but that's an extreme minority that inherently includes mostly young, mostly fit cyclists.
It's very much the same in my decidedly European country.
Recently I was doing an errand that I knew would be the easiest to do by bike, since my destination was less than 6km away and I have bike lanes/tempo 30 streets all the way up to there. But it was raining, so I decided against that and took an Uber because I don't need this sort of excitement in my life.
And with all that I'm still below average in terms of frequency of choosing to drive.
People, unsurprisingly, don't enjoy the logistics of cycling in inclement weather and they will go as far as to sit in traffic and spend 20 minutes looking for a parking spot instead.
Yes, but it doesn't really make a difference. You end up needing the same gear and you get to a point where you expend enough energy biking that you actually have to vent and cool down. The big pain points are salt on the road and lack of infrastructure.
IME, the snow is really the killer for bikes. And there is a lot more snow in Montreal than in anywhere in Europe! The snow is also usually salted, so there's a permanent "slush" like cover on the roads...
> CDPQ Infra was able to take advantage of existing rights of way to create the route, rather than needing to dig costly tunnels or demolish buildings. In one area, they repurposed an old rail tunnel
I'm listening to the podcast about Boston's Big Dig (https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig), and one of the things that came up in Episode 6 was cost overruns in the 1990s, particularly on the I-93 segment (burying the highway to replace the elevated highway from the 60s).
The engineers and administrators had no idea what they would be getting into when they drew up the estimate, because no one really knew what was underground when they started digging 100 feet below street level next to Boston harbor and well below the water table. They found everything - old pilings, sewer tunnels from the 1800s, archaic utilities, and mud that was exceptionally sticky. It turned into a series of change orders which greatly increased the $7.7B original price ($10.8B adjusted for inflation) to $14.8B.
TFA mentions the Green Line extension in Boston which has been a costly disaster for different reasons, from ADA compliance to mislaid tracks.
It's funny that this is the big cost overrun that all Americans know, when it's so small. The SF-Oakland Bay Bridge cost $6.4 billion (2013 dollars) and that was 25x the original estimate, and we didn't get anything new out of the deal, it's a straight replacement of the bridge with an equivalent facility, same lanes, same route.
The article is way too rosy. Sure it didn't cost much but it also uses a shit rail technology IMO that is very noisy. Go ask the residents that live near it if they find that nice. They had so many complaints recently that they had to do urgent work to mitigate.
The problem we have in general is that the REM should have been expanded way beyond the Montreal suburbs. All the planning for public transit is controlled by local agencies and no larger integration vision. I have a family member that now has a longer commute because the bus go to the REM instead of straight to downtown Montreal.
It's also super useless if you live a bit further out than the immediate Montreal suburb like I do since you already have to take your car to the highway so it is faster to continue driving on the island vs getting out, finding a parking, waiting for the train, etc.
Personnaly I am very critical of how we handle public transit here vs what I saw can be done in Europe.
Direct bus lines don't scale. As the city grows large enough, you have to replace them with trunk lines. Otherwise there will be too much traffic and too little passenger capacity in the central parts of the city.
With trunk lines, you have to make compromises between speed and service level. Urban light rail moves slowly and stops frequently. Suburban lines are faster and have fewer stops, which allows them to provide a reasonable service over longer distances. Once you go far enough, suburban lines also become too slow, and you have to switch to regional heavy rail with faster trains and even longer distances between stops.
As you get farther away from the city center, the distance between stops on the trunk lines gets longer and the fraction of the area served by the lines gets smaller. If you live in a distant suburb or a satellite town and you are not near a local public transit hub, you can't get good service. Trying to provide it to you would be a waste of money. If you need better transit, you have to choose between driving and moving.
If things look better in Europe and Asia, it's because the people who use public transit have taken the level of service into account when choosing where they live. And every time the transit network changes, there are similar complaints to yours.
> Direct bus lines don't scale. As the city grows large enough, you have to replace them with trunk lines.
If you have a route that has hundreds of thousands of people going in the same direction, true enough. However, America has very few of those routes, even in big cities well-served by transit.
NYC obviously has extremely high density and is very well-served by successful transit. Outside of NY, there aren't many success stories.
The busiest light rail line in San Francisco serves ~60,000 riders/day, and most of the others serve far less. Caltrain serves ~20,000/day. BART serves about 100,000/day on its routes, 400,000 in total. And that's the second most-dense city in the US.
Because of the land use, there is basically nowhere in the United States that can support a viable rail system. There are systems that kind-of-sort-of work -- like SF BART, Portland TriMet, DC WMATA, Boston MBTA, Chicago CTA -- but none of them are very good, and they never will be, nor can they be (excepting maybe CTA), without completely changing the land use in this country.
The problem is that America keeps cargo culting rail systems in areas where there is just zero chance for them to ever be effective, like Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Honolulu, Los Angeles, etc.
I don't know enough about it to weigh in on the economics (though I live in Montreal and this is the first good press I've seen so I'd take it with a grain of salt). But noise-wise, I was really surprised at how loud it is. I don't live along the route but I run along the Lachine Canal and and I don't know if it's because it's elevated but it is way louder than you'd expect for what looks like a small train going by and jarring in an otherwise very quiet area.
When C$119M is a “bargain” compared to US costs, it should come as no surprise why public transit has so little utility in most cities (as measured by utilization as a percent of total trips).
That isn't a whole lot more than the cost per kilometer to construct urban roads with a comparable passenger throughput, though. And construction cost alone isn't exactly a fair price comparison because users of urban roads tend to need to supply their own vehicles, at considerable cost to themselves, and more money also has to be spent to provide space to store those vehicles when not in use.
And you could argue that roads are actually even more expensive to invest in because they tend to create a feedback cycle that promotes even more spending on road construction. Because as more people use roads, you need to widen them to increase their carrying capacity, and because road-oriented infrastructure encourages sprawl that pushes people toward choosing driving, and spending more time on the roads, which increases the need for more roads to be built.
A nice case study here is Chicago versus Detroit. Proportionally speaking, they had similar and approximately contemporaneous population growth and loss trends over the 20th century. But that trend didn't cause the same financial catastrophe for Chicago that it did for Detroit, and one argument for why this is is that, since Chicago retained a denser, more public transit oriented urban plan, its infrastructure costs relative to population stayed lower, which in turn meant that it was able to weather a lot more population decline without its economy shrinking too much to be able to affordably maintain its infrastructure, including transportation infrastructure.
> isn't exactly a fair price comparison because users of urban roads tend to need to supply their own vehicles, at considerable cost to themselves
Which isn't a fair comparison at all because you are completely ignoring the positive values of vehicles.
I live in Christchurch, with very cheap buses. One destination I need takes me >2 hours by bus that is <15 minutes by car (bus is star network and long waits). Another destination I need has a bus one way once a day only on business days. And I often am carrying more than a backpack can take.
What do you want GP to do? Drive some buses to improve service?
Star topologies coupled with infrequent service is often what makes public transit suck. It's why I can frequently leave my house later in my car than I'd have to arrive at my destination if coming by public transit. [0]
There's no practical action I can take to "get the problem fixed", because it requires completely re-thinking how my local transit system works [likely to include the transit system spending many 100s of millions more per year on increased service] and, well, I've got a lot of other shit I can actually make progress on in my life rather than shaking a cane at the sky.
The terrible transit service story above is in Massachusetts, which has been pretty close to single-party ruled for four decades or more. I'm going to go vote tomorrow, but many races are uncontested and certainly no one's running on a platform of "we want good public services" against someone else running on "we want terrible public services".
Your answer is to ignore reality and wave a magic wand to fix everything.
If they spent 100x as much public money (our bus service is hugely subsidised and still completely inadequate), a mesh network would still not be able to cover my regular travel needs. Let alone the more complex needs of others.
Possibly we can solve the problem with a shared-Uber system. But there's no way my city government could be trusted to develop that. There are systems that have been developed out there but they are not in my country yet. It's been possible for a decade, so probably another decade away.
Your answer is that I need to wait a decade at a bus stop for a new technology to be deployed in my city.
Meanwhile "Full suspension of NZ Bus services impacting bus users from 2am Friday 14 July; Auckland bus users urged to plan ahead due to driver strike from Monday; Aucklanders urged to plan ahead with train services disrupted and Harbour Bridge closures possible; Auckland's buses are back on track - Bus driver shortage has reduced by 72%"
Fuck that.
There's a reason people spend a shit-ton on cars - because cars have value (they are not just status) and public buses don't work.
Cars have value, and for a few trips they are clearly better no matter what transit does. However for most of the trips people make every day a great transit system could exist that we be as good as - or better - than a car trip. Yes it would cost a lot more than the current transit system, and it would at best take a couple decades to build. However such a system could cover your needs.
While it looks like your bus service is hugely subsidized,it is NOT! Sure the numbers are big, but look at per person in the city and the amount is tiny. If you forcefully took the money everyone spends on cars and put it to transit that would be many orders of magnitude more money than they are getting now. What great transit needs is about what you spend on a car in a month for just insurance and fuel (meaning maintenance and the cost of the car are not included), so if you get rid of a car (not all cars, one car!) you can save a lot of money and that is something your transit system could do in your city if you would invest.
The a bus can go on strike is a problem to work on. You don't allow your electric service to turn off service because of a strike. You don't allow the hospital close because of a strike. (both of them do have unions and go on strike).
> but look at per person in the city and the amount is tiny
In a city of about 400,000 people the per-person taxes that pay for the system are no-fucking-where-near "tiny".
For a grid public network that also works at night the costs would easily be thousands per year per person (I did look up the current figures).
The bus service is virtually unused by the vast majority:
On average, Christchurch residents spend 221 hours a year behind a wheel to just 10 hours on public transport. For Aucklanders, it's 187 hours to 25, and for Wellingtonians, 134 hours to 34.
Because buses are simply unusable without rediculous compromises.
I know because I try to use buses and this expensive system is usually unavailable to me (my parents place has no service, there is no service at night, I can't carry tools, trailer, zero recreational trips). I have lived without a car for plenty of time (6 months last year) so I know the actual individual costs and benefits.
Other people can't afford the compromises required to use the bus service. If you can afford a car you use one because the public alternatives are shit.
Only a despotic Stalin could force most people to use a public transport system in my city. Perhaps you don't believe in freedom of choice. You wish to tax people to pay for a system they don't want to use. Cars are the long term outcome of people voting with their feet and their wallets.
I understand why public transport is good. But you seem unwilling to listen to why public transport in my city is unusably bad.
> However for most of the trips people make every day a great transit system could exist that we be as good as - or better - than a car trip.
Condescending. Even the best public transport I have used is often a shit experience.
Wave that magic wand again and give us all our own unicorn
Roads are about $5m/km in the US. Over course size matters, but that number covers a two lane road near me that goes to a school (read designed for school buses)
A surface road being cheaper than a tunnel shouldn’t surprise anybody, but a single highway lane can move about 2,000 cars an hour (much less for city streets). Assuming all the cars have two people (they don’t) that’s 4,000 people an hour. A modern metro line can do 40,000 an hour (in Tokyo they’ll do 60K/hour packing people in like sardines). So you need a 10 lane road in one direction just to match the single line’s people movement.
Of course, the whole concept is moot considering the built form around said subway line needs to be able to support having ridership like that.
The new rapid transit line in Montreal mostly elevated. A comparable road project would be a bridge or an overpass, and you certainly can't buy those for $5m/km.
Transit looks really expensive until you start looking into how expensive cars are including roads, cars, maintenance, gas, insurance, etc.
Car insurance alone in small city is what ~= 80$/month/driver * 1 million drivers = approximately 1 billion dollars per year.
When people drive less they don’t just use less fuel and save on maintenance etc, but also get into fewer accidents driving down insurance. People also avoid traffic tickets, and cities need fewer traffic cops etc. The city’s air quality improves which reduces respiratory issues saving not just lives but sick days etc. Local property becomes more valuable and congestion shrinks.
The costs comes out of cities budgets, but the savings largely goes to individuals.
Austin Texas has 1 million people living inside city limits, but 1.8 million people in the metro area and therefore more than 1 million drivers.
Large vs small vs tiny is an arbitrary separation, but Chicago is the 39th largest city in the world. Auston is so far down that list it’s a small city IMO. By comparison Terre Haute, Indiana with 60k people can be called a city, but it’s a tiny city.
The ones living outside the city limits: is it practical for and done by most of them to use public transit and thereby save money by not owning a car?
Your facts are correct, but you are severely biased in one direction. Personal vehicles often save huge amounts of time, and are often the only reasonable solution for many needs.
I often use public transport, but the downsides can be extremely expensive. The inconvenience of buses often means it is cheaper to use an Uber (only available due to roading network).
It isn't just a path-dependency. Public transport is often unpopular for extremely valid reasons (I personally hate cars and try to use public transport in the limited situations it has any use to me).
Public transport is a nightmare for the disabled and the infirm. Public transport completely and utterly failed after the Christchurch earthquake - bad luck if you needed to rely on it!
Personal vehicles only save time at the individual level, but individual driving slows everyone down due to congestion. Even if mass transit is only faster for say 10% of people taking 10% of drivers off the road makes a huge difference. Imagine pandemic levels of traffic becoming the norm, except as you get people out of cars driving becomes more efficient. That’s the feedback loop which makes it seem like mass transit is always slow even when it’s massively improving things.
Building infrastructure is always an optimization problem and it impacts not just current users but also where people build apartments etc.
1: any successful public transport solution must be be desirable by individuals. The alternative is to force people to use the system - that would not be democratic freedom!
2: any public transport has to be better than what we currently have. Cars are pretty damn good - even though they have downsides they also have some very valuable upside features! Most public transport currently has huge negative problems. It can work in large cities, but buses fail abysmally in my own city (~400000) even though expensive subsidies pay for most of it. Chesterton's fence - we have evolved to cars because they have features that are hard to replicate.
I would like to see an Uber like shared transport on-demand system developed and deployed in my city. I did read about a city (I think in a scandy country) that has a working 24 hour system.
I strongly suspect that, although the price-per-kilometer might be lower, the price per traveled-kilometer is literally multiples of that.
I do know in my city-area, price to build, maintain and travel on bike infra, public transport and even dedicated bus infra is far cheaper than the same distances for cars. And that excludes private costs for fuel.
Don't forget the enormous land-use opportunity cost of a metro road network. In Los Angeles,I once read in the LA Times that when you factor in residential and commercial parking, drive ways, and incedental adjacent land consumed eg in ramps medians and cloverleaf's, more than 80% of land in the LA basin is devoted to auto use.
Even in The Netherlands, where we have decades of investment in bike and PT infrastructure, and therefore one of the highest bike and PT use in the world, a staggering amount of land is used for cars. In most cities, the land used for cars surpasses the land used for living, gardening, working combined.
I bet I can name the other 3 cities where that’s possibly true in the US: DC, Chicago, and Boston.
So 4, maybe 6 if you add Atlanta and Seattle (both of which I doubt have a majority share of transit), out of over 300 cities (or equivalent) with 100k+ people.
So you're saying that in a country that has been organised around the personal automobile for the past 70 years (going so far as to actively undermine public transport in certain cases), there are few cities with good public transport? Yes, I think we can all agree on that
Yes. And the cost of providing of usably pervasive public transit is a huge part of that.
I live in Cambridge, MA (attached to Boston and sharing one of the top 5 transit systems in the US). We have one car per driver and expect to maintain or exceed that ratio for the next three decades as we can’t afford to spend the increased time needed to do all trips via transit. Or even transit plus ride-share.
> We have one car per driver and expect to maintain or exceed that ratio for the next three decades as we can’t afford to spend the increased time needed to do all trips via transit. Or even transit plus ride-share.
That's exactly what needs to be fought. A bit of carrot, a bit of stick
AFAIK sokoloff was commenting on a GP. And that poster's further comments. And they didn't give any clear indication that they have indeed read TFA while they were engaging in discussion with sokoloff.
> I'd love to see public transit's utility improved
Me, too. For instance, I'd like to see some modern effort to reduce the effects of the tinnitus-causing screeching of rail cars on the MBTA. For daily commuters who take particular routes, the noise pollution is a serious issue.
For another example, I'm reasonably sure regenerative breaking is not a thing for the light and medium rail, (might be for the silver line) because those systems are old enough designs that efficiency wasn't so much of a concern. Rather, I recall hearing they use big resistor packs to turn speed into heat, and maybe stink up a station when they fail.
The REM is pretty sweet, the only down side is the bus system getting to it in the suburbs is a bit shambolic. Driving to the station takes 7 minutes, but parking is full by 6:30, while the most direct bus takes over half an hour!
the parking is free so of course it's quite popular. Having been there regularly on the busiest weekdays you really have to arrive close to 8:00 to see a full lot. I do agree the REM is sweet and very effective.
There's one thing that Montreal can do that's very cheap and would improve significantly the transit in the city: increase utilization of the local train network
It's simply stupid to have suburban trains running only every hour/30m
That isn't so simple. The issue is a lot of the tracks are one way so you aren't able to return the train sets in the suburbs during peak hours. This means that every frequency you add means an extra train set that you need to buy, maintain and store somewhere on the island during the day.
Having just stayed in Milan for a week i was really impressed with how the metro had been built and continually improved.
I wanted to know though, how was the tunnelling done so cheaply? I noticed the lines seemed to follow roads a lot, did they do cut and cover along the roads to keep costs down?
One thing to mind is that infrastructure project's financing and cost allocation is different in Europe vs North America. All countries and jurisdictions counts things differently. Are stations part of the cost, what about roads and paths leading to them, getting right of way, buying land etc. some of these costs are often incurred by local governments and municipalities and aren't considered part of the infrastructure project while other projects will include them as part of their costs.
The Milan project is fantastic, but it's difficult to have more than a ballpark comparison based on general numbers such as these.
Don't forget that Milan is a very old city (initially settled 400BC) so there was probably lots of old infrastructure and stuff to work around. Similarly old Amsterdam has a collection of all the objects found during the digging for one of the metro lines in one of the stations, with all sorts of very old coins, plates, knives, etc.
Makes me wonder if the right answer will be dedicated surface roads with a mix of buses and self-driving cars on them. It certainly seems like transit is overpriced by comparison.
The problem with that is it doesn’t solve the surface space problem, i.e. unnecessary city sprawl and reduced walkability due to 30% of space being dedicated to roads
certainly agree. but busses at least dont have the associated surface costs of parking, and you can shunt them into tunnels without having to transfer like seattle used to do
Buses are only a good compromise as long as car usage remains low.
For example, in Chicago car ownership has increased as wealthy people move back into the city, and quality of bus service has declined because buses are also stuck in all the congestion that the cars generate. The city has started creating dedicated bus lanes, but they aren't actually improving the situation much because painting the right lane red doesn't actually prevent it from being jammed full of cars waiting to make right turns and double-parked delivery and rideshare vehicles.
Yeah you have to really separate the lanes and go heavy with cameras and fines (at least at the start). One thing that never works is when municipalities are too timid to really close off roads/lanes for buses and instead opt for a bit of paint and "cars can still cross here if they need to"
I was more thinking of separated bus lanes. The idea being that if you can create a separated railroad in a space, you can create a separated bus lane in that same space for significantly less cost.
The cost for rail and roads is about the same. This is more expensive because it isn't on the ground. Building a road on a bridge is vastly more expensive.
what you can do with bus lanes is take an existing multi-lane road, and turn it into a single lane road + a dedicated bus lane. This has the advantage of making things easier for the bus and also harder for cars. So people start to see they can actually save time by taking the bus
Buses are very hard on pavement, once your bus lane is end of life rail would have been cheaper. A bus also has much less total capacity so if it becomes popular you need to.figure out how to get a train there.
Buses are great for roads where there isn't much traffic. However if traffic is bad you have enough demand that a train is better investment.
I have learned to expect buses to be delayed by up to 45 minutes during commuting times. Trains slow down at peak hours, too, because more people getting on and off means more time stopped in stations, but in my experience it typically only adds about 5 minutes to a 20-minute trip.
I am strongly coming to suspect that a lot of the talk about buses being all you need is fueled more by a sort of NIMBYism than by a fully-informed position. Buses are great and good transit systems need more of them than they do trains, but an ideal urban transit system has both.
Surface streets are much slower because of pedestrians and intersections. This is more expensive, but also much faster as they don't have to stop for other traffic. When you count how many more people can be on this vs a freeway it is a bargin (assuming people use it )
They could if there wasn't government interface. NYC subways were built by the private sector and made money until the 1920s when the city didn't allow them to raise fares to cover inflation. Also most private railroads have to pay property taxes which goes to subsides the roads they are competing with.
If you go full libertarian the government should not build roads private rail competes well, but I don't see that happening.
NYC subways were all built by the city, but most were not operated by them. There are privately built subways around the world (especially in Japan), but globally it's a rarity. This isn't a surprise, considering that subways are long term investment (and nobody can get money cheaper than a government), should be built with a long term plan to increase network usefulness (and thus the usage of each individual line) without competition between individual lines [1] and, especially if built outside already dense inner cities, should be accompanied by densification along the line to justify the investment (look at china or the danish finger plan for some examples). The operations can be private (they don't have to be, there's no clear "best way"), but the planning, financing and building should at the very least be heavily overseen by the government.
Outside of already very dense cities which heavily discourage using a car (think large asian cities, not montreal), you won't see newly built underground lines built privately. People aren't as captive today and even in the 1900s londons subways weren't very sound financially as companies.
[1]: Transit systems benefit strongly from integration between lines and modes, as well as making interchanges as painless as possible. This is mostly antithetical to multiple companies building lines inside a single city, which often ends up with little fare-integration and annoying interchanges. This can also happen with government built lines, but is less likely.
https://transitcosts.com/ has a lot of data, but that focuses on underground while this is mostly elevated. Spain has built fully underground subways for less, but most of the world is a lot more expensive.
Try to get around the Montreal subway on a wheelchair or pushing a stroller. You can't. There are multiple flights of stairs to get anywhere. Accessibility has not yet been discovered there. There are no old people on the Montreal subway for some reason?
Accesibility is certainly not where it needs to be for our metro, and elevators at every station is long overdue.
That said, the STM _has_ been installing elevators, and currently 25 stations have elevators, which is a lot more than even a few years ago [0]. Five additional stations are under construction [1].
That's a good start but if you're old or with multiple young children it requires careful planning. I drive into the city with my family rather than trying to remember exactly which stations I won't be trapped in.
It doesn't need to solve everything for everyone if it succeeds in reducing road congestion by being accessible by 95% of the population.
Also strollers are much easier with elevators, but they're not impossible to use with escalators and even can be reasonably lifted for stairs. We've done it plenty. Of course the stroller should be city-sized, not suburban-sized.
See above, 95% of parents could use an on-body carrier. Baby in the carrier and older kids walk, they'll drag your speed down a bit but you'd probably not stroller for hours on end.
Plus you don't need that huge SUV to fit that stroller and awkwardly park it in the entrance of restaurants and so on.
My wife and I always marvel at how much shit other parents carry. I don’t get it at all. Why make things harder than they need to be?
We rarely used a stroller except when our kids were quite young and we were gonna do a lot of walking. Like at the zoo or something. Then, we’d use a cheap little light stroller, not one of those giant monster cargo ones most people have. On-body carriers were better in other cases. And when they could walk, we made them walk, frequently, to get them used to it, carrying less and less over time.
If I went out solo with a young kid, I usually could fit everything I needed for 3-4 hours away in my pockets, easily. We had the usual giant diaper bag with the first kid but rarely used it, and I think we got rid of it before having more kids and didn’t replace it. There was just no need.
IDK what all these parents are carrying around in their cargo-strollers and 20 gallon diaper bags. Kids can travel really light if you’re only gonna be out during the day.
I live in a central city without a car. Our stroller was used for carrying groceries and getting our daughter to/from daycare in a reasonable amount of time. But our sole focus deciding on the stroller was good storage for grocery runs and otherwise compact enough to use on dense city sidewalks or lug down the subway. I too scratched my head when suburbanites brought out their huge strollers from their huge cars/SUVs and essentially lounged at their destinations.
Big stroller as grocery-bag-holder for the walk home does make sense. Yeah, that’s a good example of when they’re not a bad call.
> I too scratched my head when suburbanites brought out their huge strollers from their huge cars/SUVs and essentially lounged at their destinations.
Yeah those are the biggest head-scratchers for sure. People at the friggin’ grocery store or park, which they drove to, with what seems to be several pounds of kid-supplies in huge strollers and bags. Like… you can go back to the car. You probably won’t need to, but if you do, it’s right there. Leave most of that in the car. You don’t need to carry 20 diapers or whatever in the store. One or two will do.
I mean people can do whatever they want, of course, it just seemed like such a weird choice to us. Carrying so much stuff you almost certainly won’t need, so much that you need big, dedicated equipment for it. Seems like hard mode for no reason.
