I was recently reading an article about how they want to connect the BLUE line in Chicago with the BROWN line (building a short line from BLUE lines Jeff…Park Station.)
Of course I realize this will never be done, due to lawsuits and cost.
After just coming back from NY I decided to take a bus from Battery Park to Times Square (at 4pm) thinking “Oh I always take the subway this will be a change.” Of course it was a nightmare and after 20 minutes of going no where I hopped off and on the Subway and ZOOMED up to midtown.
My question is. Is the reason that NYC is so great and can support so many people its subways.
Cities today can’t build them (even when they do they are usually only one line going just a bit). So you have the sprawl like in LA.
Imagine NYC without subways. I would reckon a lot of business would pull out as the traffic would be a nighmare. (ok more so)
Also what is the real reason there is so much opposition to building subways. Can it be cost? Wouldn’t that be offset by the business gains?
Euro-centric view here, but I guess Americans are just a bit too car-focused. Probably cities are also deterred by the costs of subways - not building, but operating them. Virtually no public mass transport system is self-sustaining, they all need plenty of subsidies. On the long run subways might be cheaper because road maintenance and the economic costs of all that time wasted in traffic jams can be quite expensive, but most politicians rarely think beyond the next elections, and roads are more comfortable from the administrative point of view. Cities that already have subways have no problem with expanding the network, but building a totally new one usually is only done in connection with a truly big event that would make you want to present a nice modern mass transport system to the world - many cities got their subways because of the Olympics held there.
Actually, there may or may not be a 3rd avenue subway being dug in Manhattan shortly. But, basically, it’s all in city planning. How do you get there? Do you live there? How do you get around, once there? BART and the NYC subways are used quite a lot.
I realize that the “Straight Dope” has a decidedly Chicagocentric view, but for the bulk of us out her in non-Chicagoland, what’s the deal with this? I understand the cost aspect, but what lawsuits?
I would point out that Cairo is also building more and more subway lines. Mexico City’s system (and Washington DC’s) are both fairly new.
As I understand it, the cost of digging is getting lower and lower. (Still darn expensive I would note.) Nonetheless the prolem seems to be that once a city gets dense enough to warrant a subway, it is very crowded and difficult to build a subway.
It is also noteworthy that the rolling stock of many subways is ancient. (London comes to mind) The tunnels were dug to non-standard sizes long ago and so the cars must be build for specific lines. The tube is too crowded for allow them to be closed for (I dunno) a couple or ten years to have them bored out to modern size.
As my dear granddad the Railroad man used to say, “When times are bad, you can’t make improvements 'cause there is no money; when times are bad you can’t make imporvements 'cause there are trains on the darn track.”
In Washington D.C, seen as a subway success story & fairly good American model, the main issue prevemting expansion is economic (they would expand if the $$$ was there) but politics plays in too.
The Costs of adding just a few stations are astronomically high.
Depending on the plan it runs into the Billions for adding a subway line, to 100’s of millions to add a few stations to existing lines. Even adding a parking garage costs a few million.
Keeping in mind that there is constant pressure to bring costs down and, simultaneously, to keep fares low. Add to this the fact that the DC system is so heavily used that there are not enough subway cars now to offer completely satisfactory service to the areas already served and you get a HUGE tug-of-war over existing funds.
All of this, in DC & I suspect elsewhere, is overseen by a board with representatives from multiple jurisdictions – for some of whom the main priority is expansion, for Some adding cars ot garages, for some the main priority is to keep fares low…
The only way for expansion is if one jurisdiction carries a disproportionate share of the cost or the feds pick it up – almost all the debate focuses on new cars vs. fares vs. maintenance.
Los Angeles has built a subway, the Red Line, and it was a chore. Just not a very easy place to work apparently. And I don’t think the Red Line has enough passengers to offset the costs of construction.
Another european point of view : several french cities build subway systems during the two or three last decades. And not necessarilly big cities. I lived some years ago in a town where two hundred thousand people are living (subburbs included!) and they were building a subway. Each time I heard about a town building a subway, there has been endless debates (subway? bus? tramway?) and each time part of the population was strongly opposed to the project.
In the little town I was living in , I remember that part of the opposition came from the shop owners unions/associations, because they were affraid that they would lose money if people used the subway rather than their cars (they wouldn’t stop on their way). Apparently, they were wrong, and the subway seems to have been a positive impact on sales, on the overall, since people would find easier to come to the downtown.
A subway system is much more efficient, quicker, than a bus network or a tramway system, and of course it reduces traffic, allows to create pedestrian-only areas, etc…But of course it’s costly to build and to maintain. Here, where people living in cities rely a lot on public trabnsportation systems anyway, building new subways (or improving/ enlarging existing ones) isn’t a thing of the past.
I’m not an economist, but I doubt it. There just aren’t enough bridges and tunnels into Manhattan to take up the slack if the subways weren’t running.
There was talk of a subway strike about 6 months ago, and we probably would have muddled through using carpooling etc.
But if that kept up long term, I suspect you’d find lots of businesses moving to 'Jersey, Westchester and Long Island (which is kinda happening anyway)
Building a new line, say a 2nd or 3rd ave line in NYC would be not only expensive, but it would be incredibly disruptive. I think most of the subway was built by cut and fill (or something like that) where they dig a trench, install everything, back fill, then top it with a street. I think for the affected area most people would have to move out and businesses would have to close for the duration of the construction. That is, unless they get a giant roto-rooter and tunnel through. But then they’d probably have to tunnel through bedrock, and I can’t imagine that would be practical. So not only would the construction be expensive, they’d have to somehow handle the high tens or even hundreds of thousands of people who might be displaced.
New York could not support such a dense population without its mass transit system.
There is a thing called a cost/benefit analysis. Basically, you try to determine if the benefit of a project outweighs the cost. Saying “Wouldn’t that [cost] be offset by the business gains” is simplistic as there is not necesarily a one-to-one relationship.
It’s very expensive to install a subway line underneath an existing city. Expecially when most American cities consist of a relatively small downtown surounded by miles of decentilized suburbs.
The size of the trains on the London Tube isn’t really a problem, so there’s no demand for any reboring of the tunnels. Access certainly is a problem though, whether for maintenance, expansion or even cleaning. Other problems for the London system is that it’s a complex network and there are geological problems which together mean than many of the tunnels are very deep – much deeper than New York or Paris for instance.
Nevertheless, they do expand the system when they can. Tourists may also be interested to note that there was a press release today about a planned major refurbishment of one of the stations they use most frequently – South Kensington, which is 135 years old and serves the Natural History Museum, Science Museum, V&A etc.
NY would be impossible without its subway. It would just be much smaller and more spread out. Even now, one of the obstacles to sprawl is that there are not enough tubes under the Hudson. Since 9/11 closed one of the PATH tunnels several ferry services have opened.
Why can’t they build subways today? All the reasons mentiioned above are valid, but the basic one is lack of political support. The reluctance on the part of the taxpayers to subsidize public transport is certainly not matched by a reluctance to subsidize an expensive road system. You say that the road system is paid for by gasoline taxes? Nonesense. Only if you ignore all the indirect costs. For instance the real estate taxes foregone on all theland used for roads. The cost of all that pollution. And if it weren’t banned, I could mention the cost of keeping the oil flowing.
As a historical note, New York City did have elevated lines until around WWII; these predated the modern subways in the city (not counting Alfred Beach’s, which only ran a short time).
Els were easier to build (and also were originally built by railroad companies, who had the money to bribe the right politicians). But they were torn down because of their noise and because they depressed property values on the streets they used.
The subways were problematic, too – the major subway companies in NYC could only rarely make a profit. The city got into the business with the 8th Avenue line in the 1930s (later the IND), and took over the BMT and IRT lines in the 50s. Now, the differentiation between lines are lost (other than the letters and numbers). There’s a fascinating website at http://www.nycsubway.org
New York City would be nothing without its subways. At least, not compared to other modern American cities. It’s simply too small and crowded for the kind of sprawling highways that LA has.
The Second Avenue Subway is being built right now. It only took 80 years. Plan is to begin major construction by 2004. Just in time for the 100th birthday of the IRT.
It is worthy of mention that elevated lines still exist in NYC, in Queens, Bronx and outer Brooklyn.
I was always in favor of a 2nd avenue line, and given 4/5/6 crowding due to saturation on the East side, I think it would make sense on a long term basis for service to the Financial district and Mid Town.
Of course no one listens to me back in the states, otherwise my other brilliant projects such as rooftop park subsidies for micro-climate control would have taken off. (Well, also looking out the 44th floor at ugly rooftops also has it’s own tedium)
To support heavy rail-based transit, what you need is density. Urban development and landholding patterns outside the U.S. have made density the rule rather than the exception. My understanding that in much of the word, through much of history, even where land has been relatively plentiful compared to population it was often difficult to acquire legally: title was held by the state or a nobility.
In the U.S., by contrast, land has been cheap and easily bought. We also developed a large, acquisitive middle class before most places did, and that middle class inherited a cultural tradition of wanting space: a house surrounded on all sides by open land, even if only a little open land. And that’s completely incompatible with the cost of building large-scale rail transport. It can, at best, support a few suburban trunk lines (that’s essentially what the DC Metro is), although even those usually aren’t profitable.* It certainly can’t support a New York, Tokyo or London scale subway network.
So that’s what we now have. We’re learning the cost of that space preference, but even now most families aren’t willing to give up their privacy to live in multifamily dwellings. I suspect many of us will only begin to do so as a last resort - and we may not reach that point for generations.
*I agree that it’s probably not reasonable to expect most transportation of human beings to be profitable in the absence of major government subsidy. I don’t know of a single system - air, boat, rail, or wheel - that has been for more than a few years at a stretch.
A couple of things on new subway construction: until not so many years ago, the Blue Line in Chicago didn’t go all the way out to O’Hare. The Orange Line to Midway (although it’s elevated, not a subway) didn’t exist at all until not so many years ago. I remember having to take about 75 buses and trains to get from Evanston to O’Hare as a kid. I always wondered why there were so few connections between train lines in Chicago; why don’t we have something like what other major cities with well-developed transit networks have, which is a line that connects all the other lines like the spokes of a wheel? The trip from Howard St. to O’Hare could take 30-45 minutes instead of 2+ hours, and it would actually be a viable option for people who works at companies in the western suburbs but live on the north side/north suburbs. Most of those people drive to work now, because there is no other direct way to get there.
An Italian friend from Rome told me while I was visiting there that the Roamns would love to develop their subway further, but every time they start digging, they run into important archaeological ruins and end up excavating them. I suppose the same could be true in many old cities, although it probably isn’t as much of an issue in NY or Chicago.
As for NYC, I’ll try to see what my dad’s thoughts are; he’s a technical manager on the NY Transit Authority’s capital improvements project, so I’m sure he has some opinions. He’s only a couple of years from retirement, though, so he probably won’t see his ideas implemented.
