You made up a railway logistics company instead of addressing the point about a commuter subway. There is no need for growth in a subway unless they are adding lines or stations. If there is constant growth outside of that then it's just hurting consumers.
More frequent service on the subway doesn't require vast amounts of land to be removed from productive activity. At most it might require a small expansion of stabling facilities for extra carriages and engines.
Induced demand means that when you make the drain pipe bigger, the bucket gets bigger as well, so the sink gets even more full. This is not sustainable.
Until the growth of population slows down, a commuter subway that isn't iterating and improving capacity will get worse too. Just look at New York pre-covid. The subway was literally and figuratively collapsing under the growth in passengers.
The article is holding up an ideal premise that is never going to happen (subways everywhere), as a counter to a viable plan that will be a real improvement over a mediocre existing system (the one we have now).
If the US was ever going to do mass traditional subways, it would have been in the prior 50 years when it could have maybe afforded to. It's never going to happen now, not under any scenario imaginable. Combined with the disastrous cost, time it takes, zoning issues etc. to build above ground in most US locations (eg the California debacle). That's what Musk realized and it's why he is doing a partial patch on the mess with the boring company approach.
There is no plausible alternative. Musk's approach can give us a significant improvement over what we have. Wishing for fantasy subway lines everywhere, that would cost trillions of dollars the US is never going to have to spend on such things (particularly in the next 20-30 years, as entitlement obligations alone are already set to bankrupt the US Government), is pointless.
I don't think self sustaining subways are a good thing. You want tax subsidies on ridership to bring the price really low, to enable as many people as possible to use it as often as possible. Profitable infrastructure defeats the purpose of infrastructure, which is to be a force multiplier on others productivity. Introducing profit motive diminishes the potential effectiveness.
No one likes the current design of subway systems. Therefore it won't see any expansions. The new expansions currently in play are real deep and real expensive. Again no one likes this new design either. No one likes the system of elevated rails. No one likes the bussing system.
What do people like? The expanding ferry line. The trolley on 3rd Ave Brooklyn. The air train. Cheaper fares.
Until there is some new tech that can get people excited about public transportation again, we won't be seeing any new investments.
Given the cost to add more (excess) subway capacity, I don't see the warm in a pause and asking "what if"? What they tried once, where the only goal was a twist on the status quo, isn't the type of mindset I'm proposing.
p.s. If climate change goes as planned, (lower) Manhattan is going to be prone to more and more flooding, etc. Does it make sense to sink more money into the ground, for unrealized capacity?
I understand your example. Unfortunately, it's red ocean. We need a blue ocean approach at this point.
People want to live and work in NYC in part because of those useless subway lines. There is no need for NYC to hand out taxpayer money to any company. Companies will come regardless.
Increasing density isn’t going to make subway lines cheaper by the way.
True I didn't mean to assume away the subway problem - The subway is already over-capacity on many lines in its current state, and the administration has failed to do anything about it. In my 5 years the subway got noticeably worse every year.
Subways are not particularly efficient from a cost perspective. One of the main reasons for the Boring company’s existence is the extremely high costs associated with subway construction. They are trying to bring the costs down by one or two orders of magnitude. This is material.
As someone who's a subway "maximalist": despite my (and millions of others') desire for a radically expanded network, I don't think we'll see one. The political (and capital) costs of expanding the network are immense, and the incentives are all wrong: the MTA is a state agency rather than a city one, meaning that a perpetually underfunded and worse-than-acceptable subway system is a useful piece of political leverage against the city.
Instead, we may see some "expansion" the network by reviving old lines that have fallen into disuse and taking over industrial/freight lines that see less use. The IBX[1] is one such development; my hope is that the MTA also considers re-expanding the G's service back out to Forest Hills (as it was before 2001)[2].
TL;DR: Massive capital investment and home rule need to happen.
And now we fund large, tax-break dependent business and entertainment districts on train yards rather than solve existing capacity and commuting issues within the current system. There are great economic effects in improving the commute of 100,000 people by ten to fifteen minutes, but that's not easy for a property developer to capture, so it's not a good project.
In fact, the 7 Line extension serving the Hudson Yards development in New York also involved a bait-and-switch in which a intermediate subway station was promised, the neighborhood was developed, and then the subway station was cancelled due to cost concerns.
You’ll never be able to build 68 miles of subway in a place like Los Vegas given the cost structure that exists in America today. The next 1.5 mile phase of the second avenue subway in NYC is going to be $7.7 billion. DC desperately needs more downtown subway capacity to accommodate the new suburban lines it has built. It won’t happen. I think you can count the active subway expansion projects in this country on one hand.
Outside somewhere like New York, a cheap low capacity system that goes more places is better than a high capacity subway that doesn’t go anywhere.
> having trouble operating at the capacity the city requires.
It's not just having trouble. The capacity the city requires is far beyond what it's currently running at. Meeting current demand would've meant planning for it two decades ago.
Anyone who lives here will tell you that the subway is wildly unreliable. Huge time gaps between trains, train cars that are dangerously overcrowded, random line shutdowns, local trains randomly going express and vice versa, straight up train direction reversals, "signal problems", "mechanical issues", sick passengers who can't get medical help because there's no medical staff in that station, "police investigations", etc are all part of daily life here.
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