That's kind of subjective. Every once in awhile, the stars align, and your slow local C train is now running express all the way to your stop at 145th...
... which is great, unless you're actually really trying to get to 103rd.
Huh? The Orange Line has one stop in Medford. I live near it. Before that is an expensive shopping area in Somerville, and after that is Malden Center.
>However, BART runs on time, as does Caltrain. To the minute, unless somebody kills themselves on the tracks. You know exactly when the next BART train will arrive, and when it will get to its destination. By contrast, when I took the Red Line to work I would frequently find myself sitting stopped outside Alewife or Harvard Square for about 20 minutes for track maintenance, or because they lost the third rail, or because there was another train in the station whose doors were jammed, or any number of other reasons that a well-maintained public transportation system shouldn't have.
Boston also sucks at supplying radial transit between the spoke-shaped lines running out of the hubs of North Station, Park Street, State Street, Downtown Crossing, and South Station.
Well, the T train runs down the edge of Bayview as far as the Bayshore Caltrain station. But it's reasonably slow and kind of awkwardly routed for the time being (it goes past the ballpark and along the Embarcadero before reversing down Market). Maybe that will change when they open the central subway in the future.
> In my estimation, shoving onto the train just wasn't worth it.
In my ~17 years of living in NYC, I've never found it to be worth it trying to squeeze myself onto a train. The ride itself is awful and literally you're at most saving a few minutes at the expense of a terrible, terrible experience in the car. The next train almost always has fewer people on the car, and if that's not the case, the one after that most certainly does.
[Edit: I've also been fortunate enough during my time here that I could always afford to be a few minutes later to my destination, that is not always the case amongst those who take the subway]
Good one. They routinely shut down lines and stations for hours/days at a time. The L got shut down between Bedford & 8th Ave for the entirety of Memorial Day weekend. Even when lines are running perfectly, at night they only run once every 30-60 minutes. To riders the changes feel arbitrary and are impossible to predict. I've been stuck dozens of times in random places because I tried to use the wrong line at the wrong time. The only real way to know there's a problem ahead is to have the privilege of riding that line on a regular basis and reading the signs they post. If you look around almost every station will have posters denoting some change that's ongoing or coming up.
>Riding the Link Light Rail is super depressing when it stops at all the streets on Rainier Ave, just waiting to T-bone another left-turning car that isn't paying attention to how things work...
I rarely have it stop anywhere on Rainier, but when it does it takes so long for something that already takes forever. I live south of Seattle and it takes me 45 minutes to get home on the light rail where a bus will take 20 -- unfortunately the bus I need doesn't run on weekends so I have to take the light rail.
>Interesting to see how basically trains can pass each other only at 2 stations: Bayshore and Lawrence
A Caltrain conductor told me that the only time it makes sense to not take from San Francisco the next leaving train is if the train after that is a Baby Bullet.
That's not saying much; our standards are incredibly low.
> Caltrain is pretty awesome
Caltrain is awesome if you are one of the rare few who live within walking distance of a station and your destination is within walking distance of a station, or if only one of those two things is true, but your local Caltrain station has a parking lot that you can afford, or there's actually good bus service to get you the last mile.
Unfortunately, those conditions are not true for many, many people.
On top of that, Caltrain is ridiculously slow, and doesn't run anywhere near frequently enough, even during rush hour.
Everyone complains about the subway, but as someone who lives in Brooklyn it's been generally good enough to get to work without too many headaches.
I live in the Brownsville/Canarsie area, and I generally take the 3 into the city, and that generally just works, but I will admit that it kind of sucks that the 3 is the only train that's easily near me. It's not usually a problem on weekdays, but it's a very annoying problem on weekends when they have to do maintenance, meaning my only easy mode of transportation is either severely limited or non-existent. [1]
Still, I really don't think it's as bad as people complain about. I've lived in NYC for nine years, and deep in Brooklyn for about 5.5, without a car, and it's been "generally ok".
[1] It's not completely horrible, if I'm willing to walk a bit further (about a mile) I can get to an L train and if I am willing to walk a bit further than that I can get to an A.
>>>a. Suburban-to-city center commuter trains stopping every two miles or so, vacuuming up all the people from the suburbia that want to get to the city without the hassle of endless traffic jams. These need a certain density of the suburbs, so that the stops make sense and the train is "just full", but not absurdly crammed.
UHMmmmmm
Cal train from south SF to say - moutain view on a bike was the worst...
They would only pull a couple cars and only one of them would be a bike car.
Many times had the bike car been full and I had been physically stopped from boarding the train with a bike... when there was clearly more room on the train's bike car - it was that the bike-hangers were full...
I was late to a number of meetings because of this.
Also - Rail is so poorly integrated that BART and Amtrak and Caltrain all have less than optimal intersecting stations.
> We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART)
Out of curiosity, do you ride Bart at commute hours? At 5pm, the platforms at Embarcadero and Montgomery are dangerously packed. I didn’t think there is much excess capacity for commuting.
> Very few residents take advantage of the weekday commuter lines running from the new Wickford Junction Station.
I wanted to take MBTA commuter rail to Boston on a Wednesday afternoon to see the Red Sox play the Giants at Fenway Park. There were no trains leaving Wickford between 1:25 and 5:30 pm, so I had to park at Wickford Junction, take a bus to Providence, and walk three blocks to the Amtrak station to catch a train. What good is a beautiful station if there is a 4-hour gap between trains on a weekday?
> Without that train living in the suburbs and working downtown would be shit.
I second that. I live in the suburbs of Chicago. When I moved here - I thought I would drive to downtown (my work location). Everyday, my one way drive was taking about 2 hours. It was pathetic. I switched my commute to train. It was about 30 mins ride along with the benefit of either taking a nap or doing my work.
> Seattle’s public transit system and transit policy are just plain good. Buses are clean/new, frequent, and on-time; trains (while they don’t yet extend as far as they need to) are reliable and have good coverage along frequented routes...
Did we live in the same city? This is the exact opposite of my experience with Seattle transit.
> and a far more solvable one (how do you solve sick passengers?)
You move them off the train ( 2 minutes ) and let the train continue moving.
Improving signal system won't fix delays. The article is about what about makes commute terrible. MTAs customer does not give a flying f!ck about why there are the delays. MTA customer wants to have no delays. MTA's solution? Contractless payments! New L cars with folding seats!
Subway in NYC runs on electricity. It is not possible to run more trains on most of the lines than already run. MTA got a stupid grant from feds of several hundred million dollars to upgrade one of the L substations. It will add two or maybe three additional trains in the rush hour when trains already come every 3-4 minutes. No improvement in switching infrastructure would fix it. A train stopping for twenty minutes on Bedford St would affect the system for hours because of the idiotic 8th St design.
Oh how about someone having an episode in a tunnel, followed by a dumb-ass passenger pulling emergency brake. In a tunnel. Guess what happens? The conductor has to check every car before the train moves forward even though he or she knows where the emergency brake was pulled. So you now have a sick passenger in a tunnel and entire system again stops. Fun, huh? But sure, through the magic of signal system improvement we will totally address dumb design ideas.
> Whether the Caltrain schedule matches the highway 17 bus's schedule is not solely the fault of Caltrain -- it's either a 2 way street, or else they're both neglecting it, unless you have proof otherwise.
You're talking about a bus route with two stops. The only thing it does is travel between Diridon station and downtown Santa Cruz. I'm assigning responsibility for the station's scheduling to the station, which is Caltrain.
>Second, we already have a perfectly fine train to O'Hare!
I wouldn't say that it's perfectly fine. The Blue Line to O'Hare has become notorious for it's overcrowding. I think the goal is to reduce some of that congestion to O'Hare and get people to stay at hotels in the city. I'm not convinced that it's worth it though.
> I used the light rail occasionally (the Expo Line) and I too found it underwhelming. The headways were long, often 15 or 30 minutes. The trains had only 2 cars and were often crowded.
This was the case in the past. Expo line trains are now typically 3 cars, and come every 6-12 minutes.
It can still get crowded during rush hour, but otherwise has plenty of room.
That's kind of subjective. Every once in awhile, the stars align, and your slow local C train is now running express all the way to your stop at 145th...
... which is great, unless you're actually really trying to get to 103rd.
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