The NYC subway running 24/7 is a HUGE plus for it – since I’m closest to NYC, it was my “baseline” for public transportation. I was amazed when I began venturing afield to other large cities (especially in Canada and down the US eastern seaboard) that NYC seems to be nearly unique in this aspect. How can so many large cities, cities that clearly have business and pleasure activities going on 24/7…not have their public transportaiton open past, say, 1am? Weird.
Bangkok’s Skytrain and subway both shut down at midnight, to restart at 6am. There are still some buses after midnight, but those of us hitting the bars rely on the cheap taxis and consider it just another expense for a night out.
The key thing is that much of NYC’s subway is four-tracked, for the express trains. That way, in the middle of the night they can do maintainance on some of the tracks and still provide service on the remaining tracks. Most other systems around the world do not have four tracks on most of their lines. They still need to do overnight maintanance, and so they have to close the system.
Pleasure activities? I’m intrigued 
This is driven by demand, of course. When other cities become as densely populated and have as many 24×7 businesses as NYC does, then it will make sense to run the local public transportation system all night long. That was sort of the reason for the light-hearted jab I made at Moscow’s system back on page 1. Sure it’s a great system, but to benefit from it you’d actually have to live there.
My only thought for improvement of the DC system is that they should keep developing the blue line down to Richmond and the green line up to Baltimore. That would make some of the undeveloped counties in Virginia more accessible and help create a Richmond-DC-Baltimore job market.
Just think Bangkok. Taxis do a booming business shuttling couples to and from short-time motels in the wee hours of the morning. But I guess it would be a bit awkward to take your scantily clad new “girlfriend” onto the subway.
Yup I was there last May and will be back there again in less than a month. I definitely plan to partake of some pleasure activities. You know, exotic food, beaches and such.
One would be hard pressed to find a bad transit system in a European capital. I worked or toured in just about all of them and never had a problem getting from A to B. London is probably the most efficient, but Paris and Moscow are very good. Even the creaky old systems that were in Warsaw and Prague were good in the 80s, and are probably better nowadays. Lisbon has a very good tram system.
In the US, San Francisco is great, as is NYC. WDC was great back when we lived there in the 90s, at least for subway travel. Seattle is okay; Portland, OR is very good and getting better all the time.
For such a politically progressive city that proclaims itself “green” at every opportunity, public transit in Austin is pretty bad. There’s very little service more than five or six miles from the city center, and many suburbs have no transit service at all. Safety issues have kept a commuter rail system from opening about a year ago. Buses are clean and there’s no external advertising, but that’s abot it.
What about Mexico City? They have earthquakes there. There’s a risk obviously, but I suppose the attitude is that it’s necessary, and if an earthquake happens, you just repair and rebuild. Subways are pretty much the only viable option for rapid transit in many areas, and those tend to be just those areas where the density of traffic makes it viable. Most of L.A.'s subway tunnels are very deep; structures in or on the bedrock are less vulnerable than surface structures on looser rocks/soil.
The Red and Yellow cars were fast in the early days, but as surrounding neighborhoods developed, and the number of cars in the road increased, so did the travel times on the trains. Streetcars do offer significant advantages to the passenger, in comparison with buses, but they usually get bogged down in the same snarled traffic that buses do. I’ve never heard about Ford playing a role in the transit system’s demise, but what you say is mostly true with respect to Goodyear and GM. In particular, GM did buy out the streetcar companies of many cities and replace the cars with their own buses. Buses were noisy and smelly, and don’t accelerate nearly as well as streetcars, even if, in heavy traffic they are effectively as fast overall. It’s not unreasonable to assume that the shift from streetcars to buses drove many people to solo driving who had formerly been content to use public transit.
I was in Mexico City maybe a couple of years after a major earthquake in the 1980s. The subway was working fine, but I still saw major building damage. Dunno exactly how the subway was affected at the time. I wonder what that would have felt like to be riding on it when the quake hit.
Toronto’s subway isn’t too bad but the stations have all the charm of a public washroom. That isn’t an issue when service is running smoothly.
The buses are a different matter, at least where I currently live. Now, I can understand if there are delays in service during a blizzard, but I have often waited over 20 minutes for a bus that is supposed to come every 12 minutes. What really pisses me off is when three “out of service” buses will pass before an in-service bus comes by.
And today was great. There was a huge crowed at the 3 bus stops I could see. Of course the first bus that comes by is out of service, but stops 15 feet pass the stop to pick up a TTC employee. I wanted to strangle somebody.
I’ve also had drivers of in-service buses blaze past my stop without even tapping the breaks.
Oh, and has anyone yet mentioned that TTC is looking to raise the fare from $2.75 to $3.00 and the monthly pass from $109 to $136 ( I think).
I’ve been here in LA for 5 years and I don’t own a car. (actually I’m in the San Fernando Valley, but it’s part of LA) I use public transit almost every day and have rarely had problems. It gets me where I want to go, I don’t have to drive in rush hour traffic…what’s not to love?
They are actually working on putting the trolley system back in on the Loop. There is a little model in a storefront window on Delmar. I don’t remember when/if it’s really going in, but I think it will connect to Forest Park. We shall see. It will just be a touristy type thing anyway.
Kansas City has an effectively zero public transport system. Ok, they have a bus system, which really sucks. I rode it a couple times and you had to switch buses about 5 times to go 15 miles.
No light rail, no subway, just a bus system that sucks.
I’m not staggeringly impressed with SF public transit-- but I grew up in the NY Metro, so a traffic-dependant heavily bus system feels like step down from the subway network.
The famous cable cars are part of the public transit system, you can get on them with the same MUNI pass that gets you on the bus. I know someone who actually commutes on one. The downside is, they can be mobbed with tourists in the summer and pretty damn miserable in the winter if you get stuck on the outside.
But on a warm spring/fall afternoon, hanging off one of those poles can be the most enjoyable, and beautiful “public transit” experiences you’ve ever had.
Hey, c’mon, you can get from one stadium to the other on it (when it hasn’t run into a car).
I rode the Mexico City subway in…2004, I think it was. It was staggeringly cheap (IIRC, the equivalent of 10 cents) and efficient, but it was INCREDIBLY crowded. Despite the fact that the trains seemed to come every 30 seconds or so, they were all just completely packed. And there wasn’t any AC. Pluses and minuses.
Crowded, yes. I actually removed one guy’s hand that had found it’s way into my pocket. It made it halfway into my pocket anyway. Hmmm.
And I recall entering and exiting the cars resembled a game of American football, with the two sides pushing into each other with great force.
It’s pretty easy to figure out why buses come in packs: if loading more passengers takes more time, and passengers arrive at stops at a constant rate, then as soon as a bus gets a little behind schedule (b/c of random event), there a few more passengers will be waiting at the next stop. So the bus takes longer at that stop, putting it farther behind, rinse repeat. And while that’s happening, since the following bus will now be a little closer, and have fewer passengers waiting, it will get ahead of schedule, until there’s a convoy of two buses right behind each other.
It’s not an easy problem to solve for transit agencies.
Really? That’s interesting! Do they plan to run it down Delmar? That could really bog up traffic in those few blocks.