Actually, the place with the best public transportation system in the U.S. is Disney World.
NYC – especially Manhattan – has an excellent public transport system. The “next train” signs aren’t really necessary – just wait and one will be by. Except after midnight, you rarely have to wait more than 15 minutes.
The Metro in Montreal is pretty good.
As far as auto tranport is concerned, I doubt any city has solved this particularly well – and the problem is getting worse everywhere.
Someone got to Montreal before I did!
I ADORE our public transit system. Just adore it! I intend never to buy a car while I live here. Clean and efficient and cheap, cheap, cheap! A full-priced monthly card (unlimited trips in one month) is Cdn$45. If you have a student card like I do, it’s $19.50! Uh-mazing.
It’s time to reveal my vity planning idea. You build a new city, from scratch, based on a ladder design. This needs a lot of space, and the city would not be allowed to have more than 500 000 people.Prevent that by zoning etc. The city is based on parallel subway/train lines. Between the lines is the urban part, outside the lines is the suburb. Between train stations are bus lines, making the rungs of the ladder. This way, all the people could go outside the city with a few miles drive, where there are parks as well as suburbs. The train lines could be some 50 miles long, so that you get the efficient transportation for your ride to work, down town etc. There would have to be some light transportation that you rent at the other end of the trip, whereas you could have a car at the end where your own house is.Some parts would be dense with bus lines for apartment living, without cars.
City plannning idea, not vity.Don’t make fun of my spelling.The plan you can shoot down, if you wish.
The best public transportation I’ve experienced is in Germany. In cities like Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne, you can get within a short walk of virtually anywhere by bus, streetcar or subway. In addition, maps and schedules are easy to find, and the fare structures are usually straight-forward.
To add a bit more controversy to this thread, when I was living out in SF I remember numerous articles in the weeklies concerning how the transit systems there favor the middle-class suburban commuters over those in poorer communities. BART purportedly received a larger proportion of transit money for far fewer riders (compared to MUNI and AC Transit).
I also seem to remember a statistic that for the amount of money it took for BART to open the Dublin (California, not Ireland) station in relation to the number of potential riders, they could have just bought BMW’s for all of the Dublin commuters.
Any else know anything about this? I am suspecting that this sort of thing is probably common in most cities but it would interesting to hear any other reports.
Montfort, re DC Metro Trains: It’s expensive, but very extensive and safe/clean/efficient. There are obvious faults in the planning of the stations: no stations in Georgetown, Adams Morgan, scant coverage in southeast DC (where the majority of the population – black and poor – live), as well as no “Beltway line” which would solve a lot of suburb-to-suburb commuting problems that didn’t exist 30 years ago when the Metro was planned out.
Well, they’re working on it.
[ul][li]Adams Morgan & SE DC[/li]The Green line just opened the Petworth/Columbia Heights/U St. segment, and several of the ones in SE are being constructed now.
[li]Georgetown[/li]There’s a urban legend out that the Georgetown merchants campaigned to keep the Metro out of GT. But it ain’t true. Truth is, it was just physically impossible. Each station needs a given amount of straight space. To accomplish this and then continue to Rosslyn would’ve required too tight a turn.
[li]Beltway line[/li]This would’ve been nice, especially when I worked at the end of the Orange line and lived near the end of the Blue line. But the Beltway line would’ve been about 60-70 miles long. The existing lines only total 100-some. The priority is the inner lines.[/ul]
Now, there are things that should’ve been done from the beginning
[ul][li]Orange or Blue line to the Capital Center/US Air Arena. Now the owners of the CC did keep the Metro from being convienient to their arena. Why? Parking fees! They’ve charged from $4-$10 per car for years. At the time, they were the venue for all sports and many concerts. Supply & demand, y’know.[/li]
But now there’s the new MCI Center (which hosts the Wizards and Capitals) right on top of Gallery Place Metro, and about a half-dozen other venues that will soon kill CC’s business.
[li]Metro lines to the airports. Yes, the Blue/Yellow has always gone through Nat’l Airport. But it wasn’t until recently that there was an easy way to walk to the terminals from the Metro station.[/li]
And the Orange line could’ve easily gone out to Dulles. But then Virginia would lose all the revenue they pull off of the Dulles Toll Road.[/ul]
Ooh, AWB, you nearly had me.
“And the Orange line could’ve easily gone out to Dulles. But then Virginia would lose all the revenue they pull off of the Dulles Toll Road.”
Of course, you know, that the Dulles Access Road from 495 to IAD is toll-free. It’s the parallel commuter road that’s tolled. And, the Orange line extends west of the Beltway, paralleling 66, anyway.
I forgot your point about Georgetown. Still, something could’ve been done. Maybe not right at 30th and M, but certainly WMATA could’ve put something a bit further west than Foggy Bottom, even if it is just a block or two west.
My theory for solving the “Beltway Line” problem is to loop the Red Line, linking the new Glenmont and Shady Grove stations. That would be awesome, especially for us MontCo. folk. Ditto linking up the Green line and Orange/Blue lines in PG County.
My point about the scant coverage in SE/Green line is that the Green line, AFAIK, was an afterthought to the Metro plan. It was as if someone realized that they compeletly slighted the majority of the city’s population. If it wasn’t an afterthought, they certainly took their sweet time starting it.
This discussion is fun in a pipe-dream sort of way. While I’m improving the Metro, I’d have it run until at least 2-3am, have more late-night buses out in suburbia, and insist that no more stations be repainted (like Farragut North and Federal Center SW were).
Paris and Vienna, hands down. Both are clean, well-lit, easy to get around in.
As for London, sorry, but the Underground is AWFUL. At least this summer it was. Part of the Circle Line was closed for repair, and every day that we were there, there was a problem with one of the other lines. TWICE they closed Victoria underground station at rush hour.
That was bad enough - these things happen, after all - but no instructions were provided for alternate routes, no additional service on other lines was provided, no extra buses, etc.
This is what happens (let me get on my soapbox here for a minute) when mass transit services are decentralized. In NYC (where I grew up) or Paris, for instance, if a heavily-traveled subway line will be closed for a length of time, extra service can be provided on other lines, or extra buses can be used, or whatever (not that it always happens like it should, but it does happen). There’s someone (a General Manager for the entire system) who can make that decision and has the authority to enforce it. But London privatized its mass transit services. Now, if the Underground can’t make service, there IS no General Manager who has authority over both the rail and bus systems - the bus company is a separate, private company with no special obligations to the Underground system.
This wasn’t just my personal impression - I talked to commuters in London, and also some friends who live there, and they confirm this.
I work in the transit industry, can you tell? 
(getting off soapbox)
The Cat In The Hat
Montfort sez: “Those Soviets could build a
system.”
Oooooh yeah. In Moscow during rush hour, the trains run every 45 seconds. I’m not any kind of expert on Urban train systems, but I’m pretty sure that DC/NYC/Chicago couldn’t beat that with a machete. It’s the one mind-bogglingly efficient thing to come out of Soviet Union whole. So ironic you could cry.
Melantonin: I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not, but I don’t think so. I haven’t been in any other Soviet-bloc nations except the Czech Republic, and the public transportation system there simply kicked ass. Not just the (beautiful) subways, but the tramlines run circles around most other cities plans.
The efficiency reminds me of what they used to say about fascist Italy: At least the trains ran on time.
What? Nobody has mentioned Boston? You can get anywhere worth being in the Boston area (and quite a few places where no sensible person would want to be) on the T. It runs till about 2 AM, and the subway fare is only 85 cents!
Then again, the topic was “best transportation,” not “best public transportation,” and the experience of driving in Boston is so foul that the city is probably disqualified on those grounds despite the T.
I seem to recall that many years ago, I read about some city which tried making public transit completely free, but at the same time, stopped all suburban vehicles from entering the city except for deliveries. There were large parking lots that all commuters must park and then take public transit into the city. Was I mistaken about this? Its been a LONG time! It obviously was an experiment that did not last.
And a further addendum on the DC metro- It’s now staying open an hour later (12:30-1 AM). Good news for the bar hoppers!
And the good of the DC metro is counterbalanced by the evil of beltway/66/270 traffic. Its a yin/yang thing.
I was in Japan 6 days.Rode the subway once, with help.I couldn’t make sense of the addresses and names in Japanese that quick.We rode the trains on the surface all over, because the station names are in Roman letters as well.
It looked like very few people drove to work, though they had a car for shopping etc.The street traffic downtown is pretty jammed.
No point in metropolitan Paris is further than 500 metres from a métro station.
I never cease to be amazed whenever I see the idiots “shopping” downtown on Saturday, by which I mean sitting in their cars in the middle of Ste. Catherine St. praying for moving traffic/a parking space. I of course laugh merrily as I emerge from the metro and sashay down the sidewalk.
I’m serious. Time from my house to Eaton’s by foot & metro: 30 minutes (if I JUST miss my train). Time from my house to Eaton’s by car: 40 minutes, easy.
Actually, car & metro is more like 20-25 minutes if I just miss my train (this is Saturday, you realize.) And it takes me 10 minutes to walk to my metro stop.
If the busses and the Underground are separate, it must be the doing of Maggie “I was Reagan’s when Monica was in diapers” Thatcher. The last time I stayed in London for any length of time was before she started dismantling the UK, but they both used to be arms of London Transport.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Yeah, I think it was her doing. It was started during the big “Let’s privatize everything and to hell with the consequences” movement in Britain a few (well, more than a few) years back.
The Cat In The Hat