Which cities will see the largest growth/improvement of their Rail systems? (Subway, Light Rail, Commuter Rail, etc)? (places, metropolitan)
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I'm guessing that LA and NYC are spending the most money. East Side Access alone is heading towards $14 billion. Not sure what else is happening with Penn Station upgrades and the Second Avenue Subway.
LA Metro has $15 billion in rail under construction with another $3-4 billion for sure and $6-7 billion on top of that very possible.
The LA area also has a streetcar line under construction in Santa Ana. Metrolink commuter rail has a 10-yr plan that includes $2 billion in upgrades (station upgrades, double tracking, signals) that is fully funded. There are several other projects that are scheduled to be funded by next decade. They are working to make them shovel ready because all they need is a loan or higher than expected matching funds from Uncle Sam to get started.
I don't think that buses have to be slow nor are trains always faster. Even without bus lanes, limited stop buses can be just as fast or faster than the streetcars that sunbelters are so sure that they need, even though streetcars get stuck in traffic in ways that buses don't.
How much faster do you think that most light rail trains are compared to limited stop and commuter buses? I think that cities will spend hundreds of millions of dollars extra for very little, if any, gain in speed. They gain capacity, but that's not an issue for most of these cities.
The real issue is the mode and in the sunbelt buses are seen as inferior. Look at Seattle and Portland bus share for comparison. Yeah, they have better buses, but it's because people wanted better buses.
Austin doesn't have and isn't building streetcars... It will have a subway downtown. I'm sorry man but you have no idea what you are talking about. Nobody has a cultural bias against buses, but without separate ROW they are by definition slower than cars. Everyone owns a car here and outside of 1 sq miles of downtown, parking is easy. Nobody is going to take a bus unless it is more convenient. Generally that requires ROW or a dire parking situation.
I agree that streetcars which sit in traffic are also dumb. Good thing that's not what is getting built.
LA seems to have the most projects and I'm impressed with how they are building out their system. Austin also passed their 7 billion dollar plan which seems smart and should serve the area well. Charlotte won't be on the scope as others, but the Silver Line will be built sooner (funding is an issue), 26 miles from the western burbs to the southeastern burbs connecting the Airport. Our Gold Line streetcar is also being built right now through Uptown. New transit station in Uptown as well which will be served by Gold and Silver lines, potential Red Line, Amtrak, and hopefully high-speed rail to Atlanta. Hopefully with Mayor Pete, Schumer, and Biden we can fund more projects...
Austin doesn't have and isn't building streetcars... It will have a subway downtown. I'm sorry man but you have no idea what you are talking about. Nobody has a cultural bias against buses, but without separate ROW they are by definition slower than cars. Everyone owns a car here and outside of 1 sq miles of downtown, parking is easy. Nobody is going to take a bus unless it is more convenient. Generally that requires ROW or a dire parking situation.
I agree that streetcars which sit in traffic are also dumb. Good thing that's not what is getting built.
I've been largely discussing the sunbelt mentality and bus versus rail in general terms and only used Austin once as an example and have twice backtracked on that. I apologize if that was unclear or if you feel that Austin was mischaracterized.
I'm actually somewhat familiar both with what Austin currently has and with what it's planning from a competitor site that linked renderings, so I know that it's not building a streetcar. I don't know exactly what it's building. Feel free to share as I'd like to hear more about it.
I've been largely discussing the sunbelt mentality and bus versus rail in general terms and only used Austin once as an example and have twice backtracked on that. I apologize if that was unclear or if you feel that Austin was mischaracterized.
I'm actually somewhat familiar both with what Austin currently has and with what it's planning from a competitor site that linked renderings, so I know that it's not building a streetcar. I don't know exactly what it's building. Feel free to share as I'd like to hear more about it.
I've heard about this "sunbelt mentality" before on here. The theory is that people in the sunbelt think that public transit is only for the homeless, or something like that? I don't think that's accurate at all. Sun belt cities are built in a less dense, decentralized manner. Road infrastructure is generally very good, and pretty much everyone, regardless of economic class, owns their own vehicle.
There is a single reason that people choose to drive rather than take the bus: it's faster and more convenient. Ascribing it to ignorance instead is kind of offensive to be honest. Us sunbelters have traveled before. Many of us have even lived elsewhere! We're aware of higher density cities where driving and parking is an absolute nightmare but transit is convenient. That knowledge doesn't change the fact that taking the bus anywhere in Texas is going to take me 2-3 times longer than driving, regardless of time of day.
For public transit to take off in the sun belt it has to be more convenient than driving. That is achieved via dedicated ROW that allows it to "skip" traffic. If you don't have that nobody with a choice is going to use it.
Think about what a Hudson tunnel will cost. NYC, without adding any new lines, is going to require an enormous amount of infrastructure investment in the next decade. The track north of the city for the Northeast Corridor is a mess and has to be reconstructed. The airports are saturated. The Northeast Corridor service through Westchester and Connecticut needs to be 150 mph track to get people out of airplanes.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Penna76
In the 2020s, I see LA as making the most progress overall and that is really awesome.
Atlanta
Austin
Denver
Are the only three other cities that I see making any type of measurable impact in terms of going from making gains in measurable increases in transit ridership, as all three were built around the automobile and now are realizing the growing pains from that.
I've seen a few posts mentioning that Denver will be making big strides and lots of progress ahead in the 2020's. The FasTracks project that opened all these commuter rail lines to the airport and suburbs have largely been completed already with the recent opening of the lines to Thornton and Arvada. The only one left to be completed is the extension to Boulder from the Westminster line and that has not been earmarked for funding. The Denver Metro/RTD doesn't really have big projects set for the decade ahead.
What Denver could use is good intra-city rail service on some of its busiest urban corridors like Colfax Ave, Broadway, and Colorado Blvd. For now what they mostly have is a park and ride system to shuttle commuters from the outskirts to downtown. There really isn't good rail service available to get around the city of Denver itself. But there's nothing planned to remedy these gaps in the system and that's what would likely increase ridership there.
Austin doesn't have and isn't building streetcars... It will have a subway downtown. I'm sorry man but you have no idea what you are talking about. Nobody has a cultural bias against buses, but without separate ROW they are by definition slower than cars. Everyone owns a car here and outside of 1 sq miles of downtown, parking is easy. Nobody is going to take a bus unless it is more convenient. Generally that requires ROW or a dire parking situation.
I agree that streetcars which sit in traffic are also dumb. Good thing that's not what is getting built.
You'll find several examples of what I think could only be called status consciousness or status anxiety in this article I wrote six years ago. (As for me, I took the photo at the top of the article before boarding that very bus to complete the last leg of my journey home from the PhillyMag office; I took one of Philadelphia's two subway lines to get to it.)
What Austin is building is what I have started calling a "light metro." That's what Seattle is building as well.
It's also building bus rapid transit lines. These can indeed be upgraded to higher-capacity light metro routes if demand calls for it. Ottawa, Canada's national capital, is doing this now with its Transitway BRT; the light metro line that will supplant it will run in a subway tunnel beneath downtown. (The situation on the two downtown streets Transitway buses use had come to resemble Tremont Street in downtown Boston when that city decided to build the first subway tunnel in America in 1895.) So is Curitiba, the Brazilian city that became the poster child for BRT when it opened a very-high-capacity and very-high-quality BRT system back in 1974.
The Curitiba system, BTW, is true BRT — passengers board buses at tube-shaped stations whose platforms are level with the bus floors. They pay their fares upon entering the station and before boarding the buses. It's considered the world's first true BRT system, and it's been a huge success. And yet traffic has gotten to the point where it too is planning a subway system:
Yes, streetcars that operate in mixed traffic combine the worst elements of bus and rail transit: They're slow and can't be routed around disruptions. But (as was noted above), they are in some cases the only type of rail transit a city can afford to build.
And many people would rather ride a train than a bus. This very discussion reveals that bias, and it's not limited to the Sunbelt.
And even if you don't build BRT, there are things you can do with the buses that will make then more efficient and useful. Transportation planner Jarrett Walker (Human Transit) demonstrated that in Houston, where he oversaw a total redesign of the city's bus system that cut travel times by as much as half for most users. Ridership jumped in response.
Think about what a Hudson tunnel will cost. NYC, without adding any new lines, is going to require an enormous amount of infrastructure investment in the next decade. The track north of the city for the Northeast Corridor is a mess and has to be reconstructed. The airports are saturated. The Northeast Corridor service through Westchester and Connecticut needs to be 150 mph track to get people out of airplanes.
They already have a Hudson tunnel in the works. It's called the Gateway Tunnel project between Northern New Jersey and NYC. It will double the rail capacity between Newark and Penn Station which is the biggest bottleneck for train traffic on the East Coast. It will also replace a swing-span bridge over the Hackensack River called the Portal Bridge which is 100 years old whose malfunctioning can strand tens of thousands of travelers on any given day. Gateway would also add new tracks and concourses at Penn Station, the nation's busiest train hub. Unfortunately and stupidly, the Trump admin kaiboshed it after the Christie admin did the same years earlier.
Meanwhile Amtrak, NY and NJ are all lobbying to resume construction. With Biden in office and being a huge Amtrak supporter, don't be surprised if Gateway resumes over the next few years. It's long overdue and will alleviate transit delays up and down the Northeast corridor.
As for this decade my vote went to LA, Seattle, Austin, and the 3 Florida metros of Miami, Orlando, and Tampa (because of Brightline). A lot of votes and mention went to Atlanta, but I'm not sure about this decade. It is optimistic. The Clayton County commuter rail may be built and running by the end of the decade, but other than that I don't see a whole lot of movement. For the Beltline it may be another decade or two.
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