Not Just Bikes
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2023
15:49 · 1.3M views · Sep 27, 2021
Not Just Bikes examines Toronto's GO Transit commuter rail, arguing it is a costly system with park-and-ride stations and rush-hour-only service that subsidizes car-dependent suburbs.
Cited in transit debates to show the cost and low utilization of commuter rail and the case for dense housing around stations.
4 comments from Hacker News
There are several talking points mentioned in this thread that are explored more on the NotJustBikes YouTube Channel. - When Canada built a relatively recent urban rail to Toronto, they built it so you have to drive to the train station , and used the high value land right around the station for ... surface car parking. This is absurdly wasteful of valuable real estate and makes the expensive train add much less value to the people. Also the train only runs around rush hours, making it useless for almost anyone who isn't driving to the train for a commute to work. "The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail" - this video - "Why city design is import (and why I hate Houston)" [it's not walkable] - [LINK] - How American urban transit is built misunderstanding the way transit needs to work to be successful, notably trying to build transit as a bandaid over car problems, but not making it regular, frequent, reliable, fast, convenient, instead plonking an isolated transit connection from nowhere to nowhere which runs once every couple of hours and then pointing to it as an example of how transit doesn't work in America - "America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)" - [LINK] - Addressing the "America is too big and spread out for rail" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities" - [LINK]
> The more you add road capacity, the less 'demand is induced', because there's limited amount of people. And how much money would it cost to build out enough road infrastructure to 'overwhelm all possible demand'? How much would it cost to move the same amount of people via some other form of transportation? The province of Ontario finds it cheaper to run an entire railway (GO Transit) compared to being able to build out enough highway infrastructure (and it's not like they've stop building that): * this video And that's just the road infrastructure: what about things like parking space at the destination(s) of where all these folks are going? How much area would have to be bulldozed for all of this?
Somewhat tangentially, I watched a recent Not Just Bikes YouTube video that discusses the merits of commuter rail [1]. The video is obviously trying to discourage infrastructure that supports car-based suburbs, but another point came out that struck me: commuter rail is very expensive infrastructure with very low utilization, say 4 incoming trains in the morning and 4 outgoing trains in the evening. Any public transportation option needs to be compared against the default choice of "run more buses," which it turns out is pretty hard to beat in terms of cost-effectiveness. [1] this video
Building giant parking garages ("commuting park and ride") is a failed concept and does not work. No one wants to live around a giant parking area and no one will walk through it to get to the train because there's no housing density nearby. Better to build high density housing around the station with little parking. this video