As a NYC resident for 11 years now I see this as a necessary transition. The streets aren't getting any wider unless we do away with street parking. I don't hear anyone rushing to suggest that option, although it's easy to forget there was a time when the streets weren't lined with cars - but horse shit. So we trade one inconvenience for a slightly less inconvenient sight (I own and park my car on the street dealing with the inconvenience of alternate side parking twice weekly). The focus really needs to be on improving the efficiency of the MTA, reducing distance between trains with more efficient switching is big part of that. The inefficiencies of the trains and improved efficiencies of app based rideshare dispatch is what is pulling ridership from the trains the most.
NYC transplants always like to make this argument.
I would rather see lots of smaller cars and more ridesharing services. I think that would be even better than trains. Its my unpopular opinion but I would say in an ideal world, get rid of the trains.
NYC is a perfect place to roll out a driverless car taxi service. You can make it so that you don't need to own a car but when you're traveling with people there is no argument; a car is better however you get it.
I've lived in the NYC area my whole life and somehow, its always the people that just moved here from ohio or california that come up with the half-baked traffic solutions and push them.
I'm 100% in support of less car traffic in NYC but I think there has to be other reliable options in place before that change is made. Many people are using cars and ride-hailing apps as a remedy to the broken public transportation system. If I was working downtown and had a meeting in the middle of the day uptown on the East Side, taking the train would risk missing the meeting. Taking a car meant I had to leave earlier and pay a lot more money, but also meant I could be sure of actually getting there roughly on time. At least in my circles, the preference is public transportation and cars are used for the times when you're waiting 45 minutes or an hour for a train that never comes, watching the arrival timer continually count down to 0 and reset to 12 minutes.
This is one of the only places in the US where public transportation is kind of good. Many people in NYC don't own a car and don't even know how to drive. It boggles my mind the amount of people complaining about how expensive it is to drive to Manhattan. ...Why did you drive in the first place? Unless you need to carry something large/heavy, there's no real reason to drive there. Just park, take a cab/train there, and once you're there, it's faster than driving to use the subway to get places.
NYC is the one US city where trains almost make sense, but there are a ton of downsides related to cost, safety, etc. I'd love to see all those dedicated right-of-ways put to more efficient use with self-driving vehicles.
Great, now expand it to all of Manhattan, instead of just 60th and below.
And while they're at it, build the QueensLink so people actually take transit instead of just turning it into a park so that it can never be built.
It boggles my mind how unable NYC seems to be able to invest it its largest comparative advantage to every other city in the country: its density and transit access.
I moved to NYC a year ago and I really don't like using the MTA. It's dirty, chronically delayed, and randomly alternates between swelteringly hot and freezing cold. Getting anywhere here takes half an hour. Outside of a few choice streets, bike infrastructure is abysmal. Riding the train feels like you're schedule is at the mercy of the whims of some random MTA employee or a weirdo who pull the emergency brake and it makes me wish I had a car again.
I used to be much more sympathetic to these types of articles when I lived in Seattle. Buses in Seattle were generally quite nice and more predictable (Google maps would usually give you a good estimate on your arrival time). Biking was a much nicer experience.
I think cities looking to make better public transit should copy the Seattle model rather than the NYC model.
I just moved to NYC from Durham, NC, and I braced for the change in COL.
But I don't think it's as bad as people say, and I think a big part is transportation.
The 1 month Metrocard costs about what I was spending on gas in a month of commuting with a 124 Spider (not the most fuel efficient car, but very far from a gas guzzler)
Once maintenance and insurance are included, the Metrocard is cheaper (as I take trips outside of work).
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I can also walk to most errands I previously had to drive 15-20 minutes for (40+ minutes total after parking and traffic).
Besides saving money, the time saved is pretty valuable
How much of the overall transit demand in NYC is serviced by public transit? Isn’t it already super high? The homelessness issue is one problem, yes, but I also wonder about how much more traffic the subways could actually support.
There's a solution for that. Grand Central Station. Thousands upon thousands of people commute to NYC by train everyday, leaving their cars at the suburban train station parking lot.
I think nyc used to be an outlook of the subway being for everyone but now its
Busses for the poor
Subway for the poor
Uber for everyone else. Maybe express busses.
The reality is that the subway system is not getting more reliable to a point where my daughter has a harder time getting to school than I did just due to train reroutes and delays daily.
In the US the subway is not seen as an ideal and reliable transportation, even with new York having the best one in the US.
I visited London 10nyears ago and then went back to new york. Was so disappointed the moment I stepped onto the train platform.
This is why other cities have shitty transit. Commutes can't be looked at as the only purpose of a transit system. Especially in NY, it's the PRIMARY mode of transportation for a lot of people. Making it shitty outside of commute hours is not an option.
This kind of thing makes sense in Manhattan. Manhattan is relatively tiny, and it is dense, and there is workable public transit. A subway system with stations every quarter mile or less does wonders.
It just doesn't extrapolate to anywhere else in the country particularly well. Even Boston is a shit-show without cars, and that is another dense, old, East Coast city with legacy public transit, albeit much less well designed.
The problem is that the public transit in NYC area has gone to crap. They haven't made the infrastructure investments considering the potential ridership, and we're paying the price for it.
I say this as someone who hates hiring a car (because they make me motion sick), but if you have to be somewhere on time, even with the congestion, hiring a car is more likely to get you there on time.
As someone who used nyc transit for years you could often walk faster given the number of delays and issues. Driving is definitely faster throughout the city unless things are gridlocked. Parking is the problem. I moved to seattle for work but also to escape the hell of logistics in nyc. To go anywhere outside immediate walking distance was a 40+ minute affair each way, making things like dropping down to buy a pair of pants a half day affair. On the way you’ll probably get to see someone assaulted on the subway, an insane person squeezing feces down their pant legs onto the floor (true story!), or any number of other mildly traumatic experiences folks from outside nyc never fully believe or understand.
But the transit system is also the beating heart of the city. I wish every city had their transit system.
This is a good point. People don't drive in Manhattan because it's cheaper (or less tax) than Public Transportation. There's a reason people aren't taking the Subway and the best way to fix the problem is to make that better instead of trying to make the currently better options less appealing.
NYC transportation sucks even within areas where the population is very dense. It takes 2 hours to get from Bronx to Coney Island on subway. Plus there are almost daily service disruptions of all kinds.
San Francisco's Bart is hated by almost everyone but it is much faster[1]. In fact, I have never taken a slower subway than NYC subway.
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