Category Archives: New York

Infrastructure and Democracy

Posted on 2013/05/07 by

Two stories, one recent and one older, have made me think about the undemocratic way the US builds infrastructure. The older story is California HSR’s cost overrun coming from scope creep; the biggest overruns were in the Bay Area, where … Continue reading →

Posted in High-Speed Rail, Incompetence, New York, Politics and Society, Regional Rail, Transportation | 44 Comments

The Problem with Anchoring

Posted on 2013/04/04 by

A major idea due to Jarrett Walker, adopted with gusto by Vancouver’s Translink, is that transit should be anchored at both ends. That is, transit lines should have busy destinations at both ends, and should strive to reorient development such … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, New York, Transportation, Urban Design, Urban Transit, Urbanism, Vancouver | 35 Comments

C-Shaped Lines

Posted on 2012/12/19 by

The ideal rapid transit line looks something like a straight line. It can have deviations, but on a map it will be more or less a line with a definitive direction. Most rapid transit lines are indeed linear, or failing … Continue reading →

Posted in New York, Regional Rail, Transportation, Urban Transit | 36 Comments

Branching

Posted on 2012/10/24 by

S-Bahns and similar systems have two defining features. One has been hashed to death on this blog: they reuse legacy rail lines, allowing urban rapid transit to extend arbitrarily deep into suburbia. The other, common also to many other transit … Continue reading →

Posted in New York, Regional Rail, Transportation, Urban Transit | 43 Comments

Transit and Place

Posted on 2012/10/18 by

There is a large class of transit supporters who think that every right-of-way that can be used for transit should be preserved for this purpose, even if it is not very useful. A few overzealous railfans on the message boards … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, New York, Transportation, Urban Transit, Urbanism | 53 Comments

Intercity Buses and Trains

Posted on 2012/10/01 by

In the three countries with the longest and traditionally largest HSR networks – Japan, Germany, and France – there is no large intercity bus network, with government regulations against the development of one. The US and Canada are in somewhat … Continue reading →

Posted in High-Speed Rail, New York, Transportation | 123 Comments

Nobody Likes Riding North American Commuter Rail

Posted on 2012/09/14 by

In New York, two neighborhoods at the edge of the city have both subway and commuter rail service: Wakefield and Far Rockaway. Wakefield has 392 inbound weekday Metro-North boardings, and 4,955 weekday subway boardings. Far Rockaway has 158 riders (an … Continue reading →

Posted in Incompetence, New York, Regional Rail, Transportation, Urban Transit, Vancouver | 170 Comments

Sanity Checks on HSR Ridership

Posted on 2012/09/08 by

If you multiply the populations of the metro areas served as a proxy for HSR ridership, then by comparison to Shinkansen lines as well as the AVE, New York-Washington traffic should be about 15-20 million passengers per year. It’s even higher … Continue reading →

Posted in High-Speed Rail, New York, Transportation | 70 Comments

Carolyn Maloney’s International HSR Proposal

Posted on 2012/09/06 by

Carolyn Maloney, the Congresswoman representing Manhattan’s East Side, gave an interview to the Globe and Mail in which she called for high-speed rail between New York and Canadian cities. She did not specify which cities, but presumably those are Montreal … Continue reading →

Posted in High-Speed Rail, New York, Transportation | 80 Comments

Are Larger Planes Feasible?

Posted on 2012/08/23 by

In my previous post, I showed how, in New York, high-speed rail can’t realistically be expected to reduce demand for travel much, and so to decongest its airspace something else is needed. The solutions are to reduce the number of … Continue reading →

Posted in New York, Transportation | 75 Comments