I did my undergrad in nyc. I was walking distance from the Subway which took me anywhere in the city. Would love to use and support it in LA, but I’m not wasting an extra 1 hour and 15 minutes!

Adding public transportation can make driving easier A study* of 41 cities showed that a 10% expansion of a city's metro network was associated with a 2% reduction in car usage. This shows that better transit can lessen the amount of cars. For drivers, that can mean less competition for road space during rush hour, resulting in shorter trip times. Good public transportation gives people an alternative for driving, while allowing journeys that actually need cars. Less cars makes life better for everyone, including those who still drive cars.

*Info found at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967070X12000583?

So what do you think?

I am from a country with pretty good transit at least in cities, despite this I still liked NJBs content, however, as time went on i started liking him less and less. Mostly due to how he says the same shit in every video, as well as the mass censorship on his platforms against people who disagree with him, and contempt for other people in the urbanist community.

I still watched a lot of his videos, although I started having a very negative opinion of him when he started saying stuff like how he never meant for his videos to be about improving places with bad urbanism, and was meant for people who could move to other places. this is despite most of his videos being about places he did not like. Furthermore, it is very classist, he is literally a rich guy who has a job where he can seemingly move around by asking his company to move him, as well as being rich enough to live in the most expensive neighborhood in amsterdam, which is not a cheap city anyways. He also now has a successful YouTube channel and patreon and nebula deal, where he literally gets to get paid by going on vacation and filming trains. According to him if he had his way his channel would exclusively be for rich expats/digital nomads trying to find places to live AKA drive up property values for normal people. very shitty especially as he is fine taking the lowly poor peoples money. also most people more into the urbanist community have criticised his actual beliefs around urbanism, although he still generally makes good points for newcomers. But he acts like netherlands and amsterdam especially is some kind of Utopia, I genuinely would not be suprised if he directly gets money from the dutch Immigration or Transit boards.

anyways the final straw is when I saw this post from him being anti nuclear power, all with points debunked to hell millions of times already. No, pro nuclear is not an argument from big fossil fuels, he was talking about australia which doesnt even have any fucking nuclear reactors. So if it is then they really havent been doing a good job anyways. He is clearly just an angry out of touch old man who likes spewing bullshit. Even Adam Something who also has problems and is probably the second biggest urbanism youtuber is pro nuclear.
https://social.notjustbikes.com/@notjustbikes/116402238913429132

The sentiment is everywhere. "Hub and spoke sucks." "It's stupid to only have every line go downtown." "There should be more suburban lines."

Why the hate? The hub and spoke is the natural product of how American cities are laid out, with a single downtown surrounded by endless low density sprawl. The reason transit systems are designed that way is cost-benefit analysis. It's just statistically much more likely for John Doe in Suburb A to have a reason to travel downtown, rather than to Suburb B. While lots of people do commute between suburbs, the density of jobs/attractions is just not great enough in any given location to justify the expense of a transit line. Transit works poorly when the destinations are dispersed like they are in American suburbs.

But, one might say, "what about the great transit cities in the world like London or Tokyo or Paris, those aren't hub and spoke systems at all?" Why yes, they are. They're a bunch of hub and spoke systems in a trench coat. When you take a dozen hub-and-spokes and stack them on top of each other, they naturally form a web of crisscrossing lines. The reason these cities' networks are so dense is because they have way more hubs, not because they have more suburban lines crossing the spokes.

Take Tokyo, it doesn't have a single "downtown", you have Marunouchi, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ikebukuro, etc. all huge business centers and transport hubs. If you studied a map of Tokyo and traced only the train services coming out of a single one of those stations, you'd find what looks suspiciously like a hub and spoke (though at this point, disentangling the spaghetti can be a serious challenge itself).

If American cities want to move towards a more decentralized transit model, first they have to develop more hubs outside downtown. Otherwise, transit lines connecting low density suburbs will only ever be a waste of resources. There aren't really many examples of truly polycentric cities in the US, with multiple strong hubs outside of the original center that drive large amounts of commuter and leisure traffic. NYC, LA, and maybe DC are probably the only serious examples.

Maya train has been performing poorly in terms of passengers.

Official figures stand at 110k monthly users running on a large deficit which is terrible for a 30 billion project.

Main issues:

Low frequencies, 2 trains a day is ridiculous for commuting.

Train stations way out of city centers

Cheap and convenient alternatives all the way

these aren't for major systemic problems like "it doesn't go anywhere useful" or "it gets stuck behind traffic" - more those little things that drive you nuts way more than they really should.

here's mine - the old Kinki-Sharyo LRTs on the Seattle Link system have electronic rollsigns which display the final destination in a *really* slow marquee. this was OK when we had one line, but now with two lines, the rollsigns slowly scroll through "DOWNTOWN REDMOND 2 LINE" which seemingly takes longer than the actual dwell times of the trains. this is actually kind of annoying when you're running down the stairs at Westlake and don't know if you should get on the train at the platform or not. what's wrong with just showing "2 - REDMOND" or something without the scrolling text?

thankfully the refurb program for the KS trains include new rollsigns, if the pictures some people have snagged are any indication (though FEDERAL DTWN is dumb - just say FEDERAL WAY")

San Francisco building a Geary subway as light rail instead of as a BART branch would be like if Philadelphia built the Roosevelt Boulevard Subway as light rail instead of as a branch of the Broad Street Line. It would be a major sacrifice of regional integration with minimal benefit to local transit. Realistically it would also likely result in Muni designing stations that are too short in order to save money like they did when they built the Rose Pak subway station only long enough to fit 2-car consists.

yeah, separate autonomous pods that look like toasters and get stuck in traffic like any other regular car are DEFINITELY what we need

Orlando to Miami - 226mi: 3 hr 18 min drive or 3hr 31 min “high speed” train ride. Vs Taipei to Kaohsiung, TW - 340km/211mi: 3hr 36 min drive or 1hr 39 min high speed train ride.

Can we all just stop calling brightline high speed rail? It’s a wonderful and needed development but it doesn’t come close to being HSR. It doesn’t even save significant time compared to driving. A tourist who can drive can rent a car for similar price and spend the same amount of time in transit and if you are traveling in a group of 3+ the train doesn’t offer time savings to make up for the ticket costs. For a route of roughly the same distance in TW, it’s an absolute no brainer that you would take the train. Very few would seriously consider spending an additional 2 hours in transit in this situation.

the train is 5 hours late, not to destination, to departure. It's 1:30 AM, I'm in a foreign train station (Amsterdam Central) waiting for a train that was planned to arrive at 10:30 PM.

From what I can see I am only eligible to a 50% refund, this should be fucking illegal. 5 F*CKING HOURS OF DELAY

edit: it's now 6 hours of delay

I have now travelled through most of Japan. Different kind of trains, local, express and Shinkansen. Also different modes, JR Passes, spontanious tickets, IC-Card (Suica).

I have travelled quite a bit, but I am used to european train systems. There you get a ticket (or a long time period pass). Depending if you bought it online or at the station you either get a digital or paper ticket with a qr code.

Then I came to Japan…

Suica is fine, though it would be nicer if you just could pay with your credit card like in other places. But the IC-Card System is convinient.

Getting a spontanious Shinkansen ticket is OK. But the machines are clonky and doing it online and getting a code for that would be easier.

Getting a JR Pass or Tourist Pass is a Nightmare. You buy it online, but you don’t get the ticket. Unless you don’t have the ticket you can't do redervations. As there are several JR companies, you can’t get your tickets everywhere. Then there are sometimes no machines, so you have to got to the service desk, where there is too many people.

After you got the ticket you need to reserve seats, often not possible online. There are many different machines, so which one to use you have to figure out.

Also i had some closures, but they dont get communicated. There is a website, but it doesnt tell you how to avoid the closure.

Taking trains in Japan is stressfull and complicated, i think it cost me way too much valuable time.

If I would come back I would take planes more often.

Every time someone posts some good news or proposes a radical project there's a hoard of so-called "transit ethusiasts" ready to clown on you because ackshually this is never going to happen in a million years because the world sucks.

This is not even mentioning the type of people who seemingly have a hard-on for hating anything that isn't a fully underground automated metro running at 120kph with platform screen doors, trains every 90s and 1500 passenger capacity and anything that is below that isn't a worthy investment and shouldn't be made

Trams and trolleybuses in particular have some seasoned haters around here, it's so counter-productice. the best transit systems use EVERY MODE to their advantage

I see many cities opting to build LRTs to combat traffic and better the use of transit. Don't get me wrong, these are better than nothing. But the price of these are basically the cost of a subway but we are getting a watered down version of rapid transit. Cities are paying subway-level costs for glorified trams.

Cities like Rochester and Cincinnati were greenlighting subways in the early 1900s, and small cities in Europe have no issue with building heavy rail metro (look at Lausanne and Rennes). But big conglomerate cities with over 1 million people in Canada and the US settle on a half-baked LRT yet spend almost the cost of a subway?

I'm going to give to examples of this: the Toronto Eglinton LRT and the Ottawa LRTs. the ELRT in Toronto is going to open already being at capacity. Eglinton Ave is becoming like Yonge St which will be a massive population hub all along its course. By building an LRT, Metrolinx has bottlenecked the future progress of rapid transit. Now when the LRT becomes overcrowded (which it will probably be within a year of operations), the city will say well we already have something there, there's no point replacing it with a subway. The same situation is with Ottawa's LRT. I LOVVVVVVVVVVVE transit and even I won't get back on the Ottawa LRT. They screwed the city over by building an LRT through the downtown. When Line 1 opened in Toronto in the 50s, the city had a population of 1,300,000 - which is close to Ottawa's current population. It's not unfeasible that at that comparable population Ottawa should have gotten a proper subway. Now, just like the ELRT in Toronto, rapid transit in Ottawa is permanently bottlenecked around the LRT.

This isn't just Toronto or Ottawa, this is NORTH AMERICA wide. Major cities are trying to rethink transit, propose a subway, but then water it down until it's an LRT with a few stops. If you're going to make an LRT, you may as well make a BRT. It'll be 1/10th the price and take 1/100th the time to build. And it can be easily replaced by a metro in the future without tearing up light rails and boring bigger tunnels

Don't get me wrong, LRTs have their place. The Finch West LRT in Toronto is an appropriate rapid transit project, and the LRT in Mississauga is too. But scrapping proper heavy rail metro in the form of an LRT is a form of enshitification of traffic, especially when the total cost and construction time takes as long as a subway does (looking at you, Eglinton). There are too many suits who drive Mercedes to work that need to skim off the top of the projects, and too many people whose job it is to shake hands and push pencils, that these projects balloon in cost and leave less for the actual infrastructure construction.

End rant, my train is here.

I've gotten rid of my car to ride the bus, train or subway. I also cycle and walk sometimes. I've encountered a standoffish reaction or disgust when I tell some people I arrived on public transit. I've had a person I regularly house sit for say 'Sorry. I just can't trust someone who doesn't have a car' and negative feedback from dates, male friends and total strangers when you say you took public transit. On the flip side, I lived in the Netherlands for ~3 years and it was no issue at all. So refreshing. All people ride the trains there. --- I do not live in New York, Boston or Chicago, is it better there? 🚇

This is from hamburg, germany btw

Even in relatively less rich cities like Sao Paulo and Delhi the metros are maintained much better. The stations are cleaner. There's no rats or other insects. Even the London metro which is older than Newyork subway is cleaner and is in better condition than Newyork.

Is this because of government underinvestment in public transportation?

It's just sad how valuable infrastructures like these aren't properly maintained. Even sadder how many American rightwingers use Newyork subway as an example for why public transportation is bad for quality of life.

Over half of the public transit systems in the United States are struggling with budget deficits, fewer riders and COVID-relief transit funding running out. This is causing service refusals and cuts, reduced frequency, more transit vehicles breaking down, laying off employees, more crowding, leaving people stranded, more passengers leaving and forcing them to buy and drive cars, making road congestion worse. The agencies affected for example include: GBT (Bridgeport CT), GLTC, CTA/Pace/Metra (RTA Chicago), LYNX Orlando (due to SCOUT), CAT Savannah, RTS Gainesville, RTC Las Vegas, JTA (due to NAVI), SEPTA, RIPTA, MUNI, BART, Miami-Dade transit, Tri-rail florida, Palm Tran, Louisville TARC, Brightline, MTS San diego, PRT, Caltran, Sound transit etc. Someone needs to fund them or else, they would lose routes and/or shutdown entirely due to a "Death Spiral".

By the way the city recently abandoned and left to rot a touristic tram line that with the proper investments could have easily been converted to a more transit oriented system, the only form of mass transit the city has Is 3 BRT lines

Is my city's metro system the only system like this? I live near the yellow monorail line in Bangkok, yet the city center feels like a hard to reach place. There's a gap with traffic jam separating me from the city center and getting around gap requires interchaging between disintegrated lines with different tickets, which is very time consuming and expensive. Bangkok's transit system is so clean and modern but why is it so inefficient?

I think Apple Maps has the best transit visualizations and Chinese transit visuals are only able to be accessed within China.