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This had nothing to do power outages, infrastructure, etc. Plain and simple mismanagement. This is your govt at work. Once you give somebody a subsidy, an entitlement, they have no responsibilities anymore.
So you must not sit in any car traffic with your commute, the government must be doing good work for you in that category I can only assume.
What do you mean by the other line? There are four tracks, but it would be unreasonable and impractical to have another train line parellel just for redundancy. The NYC subway below about 59th street does have a lot of transit redundancy but the demand is high enough to support lines very similar that it doesn't cut into frequencies.
He means the high voltage power line. There are 2 feeding into the MTA substation. They were repairing/upgrading one and the other failed.
Any actual business would have insisted that instead of repairing/upgrading the existing line, a third redundant line be provided. Then you would repair/upgrade the existing line. This is what you get when the govt is in charge.
I've seen plenty of expressway jams caused by a lane closed for construction.
Heck, I have sat in that kind of traffic before. Even worse is when there are natural bottlenecks due to poor planning for future traffic. Yet this poster seems to only obsess about how horrible it is for mass transit.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
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Quote:
Originally Posted by blisterpeanuts
Mass transit is great for several things:
1. tourism - people visiting from other countries don't have to rent a car and can get to the important stuff. Also, visitors flying in for conventions and trade shows and the like. Cities that want to encourage this kind of visitor should have good mass transit at least between the airport and the major sites.
2. Young and low income workers - enables them to get to work. All those janitorial staff at those fancy downtown hotels have to get to work somehow. Young people can't necessarily afford a car, and mass transit gives them a way to build up some savings and gain some experience while they build their careers.
3. Commuter trains to the suburbs - helps keep the city vital and prosperous with businesses, stores and restaurants patronized by professionals who can afford to live outside the urban boundaries. In some places (e.g. Boston) it's cheaper to live outside the city so that's where people go to raise families, then take the trains to work.
We need both private and public transportation. It's silly to condemn one or the other. Both are subsidized, and millions of jobs depend on road maintenance, automobile manufacture, and bus and train manufacture and maintenance. Transportation is a huge sector for employment and it's not going to change any time soon. And let's not kid ourselves; oil is heavily subsidized by the our military which has expended trillions of dollars and many lives over the decades, defending the oil lanes and propping up friendly regimes.
In addition:
1. Tourism: the tourism / hospitality staff is generally low paid. With out mass transit wages would have to increase significantly hurting tourism and its fantastic economic multiplier.
2. And middle age/middle class workers! In Boston, Chicago, SF, there were low and middle wage, young to old people using transit for work and everything else. Even if you could afford a car, you couldn't afford to park or didn't want the often additional transit time.
3. It helps supply the workers to the financial districts AND keeps the outer suburbs alive. A commuter rail stop does wonders for the real estate of a burb.
4. If there was no mass transit, the people that do drive now would suffer even worse commutes, which increases their costs and makes jobs in the city less attractive (which will hurt the financial/business districts in a multitude of ways)
5. There would be a large increase in need for parking, which really just does waste land area that could be use to better uses and would increase the costs of office space (which again harms businesses)
Any actual business would have insisted that instead of repairing/upgrading the existing line, a third redundant line be provided. Then you would repair/upgrade the existing line. This is what you get when the govt is in charge.
That's not true; a private business would have made a cost vs risk analysis about whether it was worth being temporarily non-redundant. The MTA did such an analysis also and decided against the third line. They chose unwisely in hindsight.
Nothing beats NJTransit's decision to leave trains in a flood zone during Hurricane Sandy.
Or not spend any money to prevent subway tunnels from flooding or have their power sources all sitting next to the water with poor flood protection in place. These are the things I thought about during the time I sat without power for five days, or when I had to ride the bus to Manhattan for a couple months while they pumped water out of the subway tunnels.
Or not spend any money to prevent subway tunnels from flooding or have their power sources all sitting next to the water with poor flood protection in place. These are the things I thought about during the time I sat without power for five days, or when I had to ride the bus to Manhattan for a couple months while they pumped water out of the subway tunnels.
PATH is the Port Authority not NJ Transit. this was a classic photo:
We were lucky enough to be a few blocks in where the land is higher, closer to the water saw some serious flooding that blew out a few garages. Though we lost power in the middle of the storm only to later find out that the power station was flooded as well because there was no real protection for that. That was really annoying.
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