Hong Kong’s MTR is excellent. Trains run pretty much continuously until midnight or so. Buses can be somewhat cryptic especially the mini-buses. The best thing about it is the Octopus card. Absolutely stunningly brilliant.
Calgary’s C-Train is pretty good. One of the most successful light rail lines in North America in fact. At least it gets you downtown. The buses on the other hand feed to the train, so you can find yourself taking 3-4 hours getting from one point in the city to the other if you time it wrong (and there is a bus that goes there).
You didn’t mention the extensive network of ferries and even hovercraft plying the harbour. As well as the quaint electric trams. Significantly, most of the public transport options are public/private partnerships, and operate at a profit, yet still manage to be astonishingly good at a decent price to the consumer.
But Hong Kong pales into insignificance next to Singapore. Public transport in Singapore is magnificent. You are rarely more than about 200 metres from some form of transport - train, subway (MRT, to confuse matters), or bus. It’s all of it spotlessly clean, air conditioned, cheap, and very very efficient. And if it’s not running, the taxis are exemplary and inexpensive too.
Oh, well, of course. I’ve taken the Star Ferry many a time just because of the views rather than the speed. Also, the cabs are cheap enough that you don’t have to worry if you can’t find a bus to take you somewhere, too.
Never been to Singapore, though, other than a stop over in the airport on the way to HK.
I took an Urban Sociology class years ago, wherein the prof said that the main deterrent to Detroit having any kind of rapid transit was the fact that the local economy was based on auto manufacturing.
When SEMTA (Southeast Michigan Transit Authority?) was formed 'way back when, city fathers looked to titans of industry to serve on the authority as committee and board members. These titans all came from the auto industry, seeing as how there really wasn’t much else in the way of business leadership in the area.
They, of course, shot down all suggestions of rail-based transit because it meant fewer cars would be purchased. In addition, I believe it was GM who also built city busses. They could not wait to tear up the old street car tracks and lay down pavement.
A few attempts have been made toward train service to the northern suburbs and Ann Arbor, but most citizens of the city and suburbs must rely on car ownership, car pools or patchwork bus service.
The San Francisco area transit agencies have been working on their own version of this for years. Their name for it is TransLink. When it works, I’m sure it will be a technological wonder at least as amazing as Octopus. They’re getting close, but the problem has been trying to harmonize each agency’s fare structure into a pre-paid form. The hardware rollout has been vexing as well. The mix of being mobile and being touched by the public are a double-whammy for electronic devices.
The main issue has been sorting out how a person can pre-load X dollars on the card through any number of means - cash or credit card at a pass vending machine, credit cards online, or “Commuter Check” contributions from their payroll, then use a train that charges a distance-based fare with no monthly pass option, but has varying levels of discounts for buying high-value pre-paid tickets, then transfer to a bus system that charges $2 for 90 minutes travel time or $60 for a monthly pass, but offers discounts for transfers from the train, then transfer to a train that charges either a single distance-based fare, a discounted distance-based multi-ride ticket, or a flat monthly rate. :eek:
For the systems that have a per-ride or a monthly fare, do you just sell the card user a monthly pass automatically on the first use, then prepare for complaints about people being charged $60 to ride the bus once, or do you track usage and after 30 rides, convert those individual rides to a monthly pass?
My daughter was in college in Germany last year. All the students from other countries were agog at how great the German public transportation system was. Almost all. The Japanese students thought it was a bit ragged.
Philadelphia’s system is wacky – not so much that it can’t get you where you want to go, but you have to switch from the subway to rail to bus to get there. Philly’s got about four different separate systems in place.
It’s an SF tradition on par with the Niners and leather chaps to bitch about Muni & BART, but they’re really pretty awesome. Except when they break down. But otherwise awesome. I ditched my car at the beginning of this year and haven’t looked back.
Muni is a subway, too, and has been since 1978. J KT L M N all go through the Market Street Subway and share the four downtown stations with BART. KT L M go through the Twin Peaks Tunnel out to West Portal.
n00b.
It is up and running, and while it’s not perfect, it’s doing pretty well. My friend lives in Marin (Blue & Gold Fleet), works in SF (Muni & BART), and visits her bf in San Jose (CalTrain) and her Translink has been great for her. I use mine on Muni & BART, and I have no complaints either. Muni Fast Passes are loaded with no problem, as are many commuter check specials. Take another look.
Philly is by far the worst. I say that as a longtime user of SEPTA buses, subways, and trains. It’s one of the most expensive systems in the country, yet the service is horrible. Service is rarely on time, and there are technical problems daily. I’ve had to wait over an hour for the next bus to work because a driver didn’t feel like coming in that day, and SEPTA is not obligated to send a replacement. The whole system is poorly managed, and railroad geeks can vouch for all the problems they’ve had with setting up train lines and big projects that never panned out, plus their issues with diesel engines.
Also, Philly’s system largely ignores whole neighborhoods so that people have to go out of their way and take an extra bus or train to get where they need to go. This is notorious in Northeast Philly, and many places in the suburbs.
NYC - now there’s a good subway system. Love it - never had a problem on it, never had to wait more than 10 minutes for a train, and can get anywhere I want to in the city.
I also remember Paris, France, having an excellent subway system. I loved getting around Paris - it was so easy.
Athens, Greece, has a trolley system that is notorious for having old men who love to pinch. I was told that if this was to happen, I should scream really loud and some old lady would come to my rescue and hit the perv with her purse!
Forgot to mention the Athens subway. I can’t speak for its usefulness, as I wasn’t there long enough, but it looks amazing (several of the stations have exhibitions of ancient Greek art and pottery found when they dug the subway tunnels) and it was very clean as of 2006, when I visited.
Istanbul is criss-crossed with bus lines that got me anywhere I wanted to go. There’s also the Tünel, the Metro, and a tram that I rode only occasionally.
The most pathetic has got to be the Baltimore subway. It’s got like 8 stops and AFAICT, goes nowhere.
Seconded. It is amazing that everything is on the same system, and the variable-rate system (pay less for shorter trips and more for longer trips) makes a lot of sense to me - even the buses are variable-rate! IIRC Tokyo and HK also have variable-rate systems for their subways but their transit systems on the whole are not as well integrated as Singapore’s.
From my experience, I would say that while LA’s transit system manages admirably considering the sprawl, sprawling cities are not conducive to getting around easily by public transit. I once took the transit from Hermosa Beach to Disneyland and back - we spent over 5 hours of the day riding the bus or LRT! I imagine if we had a car we could have spent less than 2 hours in transit (depending on traffic I suppose). It was by far the best “value” I’ve ever gotten from public transit though, as a day pass was only $3.
I am impressed with New York and London in terms of the convenience of many stations and lots of track, but I would like to nominate Hong Kong in the category of…SAFETY!!!
In Hong Kong all the platforms are glassed-in, so that the train pulls up to a certain point and the train doors open simultaneously with the platform’s glass doors. There’s no way you can fall off the platform and get run over! No need for a subway hero at all!
Hong Kong is also no slouch when it comes to user-friendliness: when you get on the train, you see a map of the route with a colored light indicating your present position, and colored blinking lights indicating your direction!
Good ventilation too – straphangers literally have the wind blowing through their hair.
I live in Los Angeles, and I have top say that i prefer my city’s public transportation to San Francisco’s – surprise! The last few times I was in SF, i waited interminably at bus and trolley stops due to breakdowns, lateness and weekend re-routings. Yuk.
St. Louis public transit sucks. We have buses, but they cut a lot of them, then temporarily restored them. No one takes them unless they do not have a car as far as I can tell (like no one takes it cause it will be easier, they take it because they have to). St. Louis is spread out and driving makes more sense if you have a car.
We have a Metrolink but it sucks too. It has a Y-shaped track (used to only be a straight line). Doesn’t go far into any non-city areas but some people take it to avoid traffic for work, especially if they work downtown where parking is a hassle. Drive to a station, park and ride. The nearest station is almost 20 mins away from me so I only take it to avoid parking if I go to a Cardinals game downtown or some other big downtown event. With the bus cutbacks also came cutbacks to the Metro system and now there is a longer wait time between trains, and it has always shut down too early to take it for going out, it closes hours before the downtown 3am bars close. On the main line it mostly goes into more undesirable/sketchy areas and you don’t necessarily want to be walking around unless you are really familiar with the area.
St. Louis is so spread out, they would have had to built their train tracks a loooong time ago to have gotten a system that covered enough area to be useful really. I’d love to live somewhere that had great transit that a lot of people used.
I was at a conference in Salt Lake City last year, and their light rail was very similar to that of Portland, if smaller. it also had a free region in the center of the city. I rode it from Temple Square out to the library just for fun, and it was pretty nice.
I agree with some of this - the Metro system frequently makes it difficult to travel between neighborhoods that should be short trips, but are on separate lines that don’t interconnect sufficiently. And the safety issues are real enough - though I’d note that riding Metro is still far, far safer than driving. But at the end of the day - I’ve lived in this city for over three years now (well, I’ve been in Arlington the past few months), and never really felt the lack of a car. Metro rail, buses, my feet, and the (very occasional) taxi take me everywhere I need to go. There are problems, but the DC metro area works as a car-free zone.
It’s not ideal, but in all fairness - a fifteen-minute walk (at a leisurely pace) from Rosslyn or Foggy Bottom gets you to the M Street strip. And there are also the buses - getting to Georgetown from Upper Northwest, at any rate, is entirely painless. When I was an undergrad intern, my bus route ran right from the Tenleytown metro to M Street. (By a similar token, it’s easy to get to Old Town Alexandria from the King Street metro- perhaps a ten-minute walk.)
Plus, the Octopus card can be used for a number of other things as well. IIRC, you can use if for pretty much every store in the MTR and convenience stores like 7-11 anywhere else. You can use it for the ferries and cabs, too.
In fairness, Hong Kong got this idea from Singapore (who in turn may have copied Moscow or St. Petersburg). I remember when I lived in HK reading a newspaper article mocking Singapore for its paternalistic safety ethic, and citing glassed-in subway stations as an example of this. This was about 10 years before the MTR added glass walls to its stations.
:eek:
But at the end of the day - I’ve lived in this city for over three years now (well, I’ve been in Arlington the past few months), and never really felt the lack of a car. Metro rail, buses, my feet, and the (very occasional) taxi take me everywhere I need to go. There are problems, but the DC metro area works as a car-free zone.