A few days ago, a man struck a woman with a metal pipe in a Manhattan subway station. A day or two before that, a man attempted to sexually assault a woman in a Brooklyn subway station. A few days before that, a man pushed a woman onto the tracks at another Manhattan subway station. A few days before that, a man trying to steal a backpack slashed the victim with a knife.
Lots of people ride the subways and they are still safe for most riders. But New York police say that transit crime is increasing even as overall crime in the city is on the decline.
Despite this, we — or at least New Yorkers — are supposed to “fall in love with stuffy, crowded subways,” argues Aaron Gordon in Medium. “If we’re ever going to make cities work,” says Gordon, “we need to accept, and come to love, a fundamental truth: Packed urban transit is good urban transit.”
Gordon’s argument is simple: most Americans live in cities. In those cities, “trains can offer service for 20,000 to 40,000 people per direction per hour,” he says, quoting MIT urban planner Yonah Freemark, who adds, “A highway lane can move something like 2,000 cars per hour.” Somehow, he divines from these two facts the need to have overcrowded subways.
Freemark (and, by extension, Gordon) is guilty of the transit advocate’s fallacy of comparing transit capacities with a highway moving cars with only one person per car. What if those 2,000 vehicles per hour were 15-passenger vans with every seat full? Then the number of people moved per hour would be comparable to the rail line. What if the highway lane were moving 500 buses per hour each holding 100 passengers? Then it would be moving more people than almost any rail line. Freemark and Gordon pretend such alternatives don’t exist.
Even if roads couldn’t move as many people as trains, so what? That just means more space might be devoted to roads, but space is something that is extremely abundant in this country. Only 3 percent of the nation has been urbanized, and while there may be special areas that deserve preservation, there is plenty of room for urban expansion without jeopardizing those special places.
Stress is one that a man persistently undergoes at his job, having relationship issues, living a hectic life, etc. view this free viagra india Healthy blood circulation helps a person viagra in india online achieving their goals in their interactions, learning, life and in occupation. The person who wish to stay longer india generic cialis and prevent early discharge of semen Bluze capsules contain 100% potentiality to enhance lovemaking pleasure. She specializes in relationship and family counseling with buy viagra overnight more than thousand sufferers making utilisation for cardiovascular illness, arteriosclerosis, memory challenges, exhaustion heavy metal toxicity, blood flow problems, and lots more. Further, just because most Americans live in cities doesn’t mean they live in dense cities. Manhattan has an average density of 72,000 people per square mile, and New York City minus Staten Island has 33,000 people. Even including San Francisco (17,000), Chicago (12,000), Philadelphia (11,000), and Los Angeles (8,000), the average density of the next 49 largest cities in America is just 3,300. Almost half of the nation’s 50 largest cities and more than 60 percent of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas have fewer than 3,000 people per square mile. Transit, especially subway transit, is simply not viable at those low densities while auto driving is by far a superior way of getting around.
What about New York? As Gordon points out, most of our older cities emptied out after World War II, some losing as much as 50 percent of their population even as their urban areas grew. This was a market response: lower densities allowed more people, both in the cities and in their suburbs, to have better housing and less traffic congestion, especially jobs were also moving to the suburbs. Manhattan also lost population from 1950 through 1980 (in fact, from 1910 through 1980), but it has grown by about 16 percent since then (though still is nowhere near its 1910 peak). Perhaps a lower-cost alternative to fixing the subways would be to let it decline again.
This is an anathema to urban planners such as Freeman. In their circular reasoning, density is good because it supports transit while transit is good because it supports density. Yet the fact that most people live in cities doesn’t even that most people want to live in dense areas.
As a Gallup report published earlier this month found, more Americans in every age class, including 18-29 year olds, want to live in rural areas than want to live in big cities. While the share of Americans who want to live in big cities has increased from 8 to 12 percent since 2001, the fact that 20 percent of Americans actually do live in big cities means that at least 40 percent of those big-city residents would rather be somewhere else.
So don’t tell us we need to love overcrowded subways in order to have the cities we want. Most people outside of New York don’t want to live in the kind of cities that need overcrowded subways. Considering that New York needs at least $40 billion that it doesn’t have to get its subways back into shape, it might be better off transforming into the kind of city that doesn’t need them either.
Have a happy holiday and safe travels.
So we shouldn’t ride subways cause crimes occur on them….how many people get carjacked, mugged or raped in parking lots or hit and run by vehicles.
The biggest gripe riding various mass transit is how hygenic it’ll be, like say a BART station or train where the ejaculate is caked on, hope you like your seat glazed……..at least in my car I know exactly how clean it is, I’m responsible for it.
One does not get various diseases from strangers in your car either.
““A highway lane can move something like 2,000 cars per hour.” Somehow, he divines from these two facts the need to have overcrowded subways.”
Only if the junctions are grade separated. Otherwise capacity is much less, something like 800 cars per hour.
If subways are overcrowded then the prices are set too low.
“Further, just because most Americans live in cities doesn’t mean they live in dense cities. ”
Density is only one part of the picture. Also, it depends on how the person gets from their home to the transit stop – the capture area of the stop depends upon how fast this journey is done. Also transit frequency, ticket price …
What if passengers don’t love stuffy, crowded subways? New York City’s residents don’t seem to love them, since they’re leaving them in droves. People with resources — and there are many of them in Manhattan — are able to avail themselves of better options, especially with all the new options that have recently been introduced.
The notion that crowded subways are necessary for cities to function is a uniquely New York-centric or Northeast-centric (in the United States, at least) perspective. Even in urban areas like New York, there are a variety of densities throughout the region. Residents are able to choose the combination of locations, amenities and travel modes, subject to prices, that best suit them. But reading commentaries like the one in Medium, one gets the distinct impression that the author has spent precious little time outside the confines of his own neighborhood.
The notion that subways are indispensable, even in a place like New York, may not always be true. We have no idea what transportation services will look like 20-30 years from now. Service providers like the NYCMTA will need to focus on improving the quality of their services in order to retain customers. Suggesting that people need to just toughen up and “learn to love” crowded subways is a recipe for mediocrity and continual decline.
In the history of great cities, they eventually reach a density or level of size til they collapse or reform because of some odd variable. Usually a disaster. How cities react to that is what sets them apart.
London had it’s great fire……..several.
Jerusalem was invaded………..several times
Washington was burned
Pompeii had a volcano
Now economics and infrastructure collapse are the plague affecting America’s urban areas now. And how politicians who run them react………this experiment is being viewed now.
What interesting is that Gordon is able to see how the subway transformed farm fields but does not recognize it as a change enabled by technology. The auto is just a different technology with it’s own trade-offs.
Maybe it’s because Mr. Gordon is too busy painting a picture of utopic subways, that somehow brought people together only for the car to pull them back apart?
In ¶9, “even” –> “imply”
As to Gordon, what else would one expect from claims like “The car is the ultimate example of low-density transit, in which one person?—?sometimes more, but usually just one?—?takes up much more space than they need.” These folks are obsessed with dictating how people must live. Just because he wants to live a hamster-style life doesn’t mean the people he wants in flesh crushing proximity want to be anywhere near him – and they won’t be without artificial constraints imposed by local government.
One doesn’t have to support Elon Musk’s solutions to agree with his assessment [quoted in the Gordon article]
“I think public transport is painful. It sucks,” he infamously declared at a Tesla event. “Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time… And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer. Okay, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport that goes where you want, when you want.”
Gordon further states: “Everyone being able to get to where they need to go, affordably and reliably, comes first. And this won’t happen unless those of us who live here enthusiastically embrace crowded transit as good transit. ” The premise is wrong and the followup exhibits major fallacies. One obvious one is that crowded transit is only really good for those not using transit – frees the roads up a bit. Another is to not live there – and that’s one reason for out-migration to areas that have larger homes, less density, and more appreciation that shared public space is not a substitute for individual private space in housing or transportation.
Gordon believes this is good, something people should want.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/553a8ddae4b0bd1c1a10972e/t/579fe4596a4963aa41f24439/1470096476153/muni35nygettingongood.jpg?format=1000w
This idea that the only way moving about can be cheaper is if everyone does the same thing ( that’s a religious claim, not a scientific one, btw ) seems to come from the same knee-jerk reaction as someone like Bernie Sanders who complains that it’s wasteful to have so many flavors of salad dressing in the store. “We should all just use the same one. it would be way more efficient, duh” is the broken logic.
Cramming everyone into the same space on the same route isn’t necessarily more efficient. If it was, you’d see Delta buying A380s left and right to fly between their domestic hubs. They’re not. It’s a balance of volume versus operating + fixed costs.
For the individual it’s the same. Sure, you can skip dealing with rush hour traffic which is a bonus. But then you find yourself having to walk 3/4th a mile from the station to the office in the winter. Or you pay for it by being crammed into a subway car like the picture above where there’s a bad chance some strangers crotch is going to touch you in a way you don’t like. Or worse, you’re crammed in next to some guy who hasn’t showered since Pepsi lit Michael Jackson’s hair on fire. Or even worse, the stranger starts to talk at you, just talk and talk.
Dealing with rush hour isn’t fun but neither is transit. Driving, for most people for most trips isn’t rush hour, it’s just a simple, mindless task. Transit on the other hand is always a crap shoot, every time. You’ll have some uneventful trips. But with that sort of volume, chances are you’ll have multiple encounters with characters that more often than not will not be making your day better.