While stuff takes time to build, at the end of the day there is a lot more land to build buildings than there are people who want to live there. And unlike in SF, if there is new demand then those buildings will actually get built.
edit: Was referring to the LIC location, not VA.
I can only think of four spots in the city that are better served by transit: Times Square, Grand Central, Fulton Street, and Atlantic Avenue.
https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20170913/OPINION/17091...
https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/201...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Maspeth,+Queens,+NY/@40.74...
You have another thing coming if you think a) self driving cars will be here in five years or b) that they will make NYC traffic a dream to navigate when they do.
Self-driving cars don't magically make other cars, self-driving or not, vanish from the roads and they certainly can't match the raw throughput of moving thousands of people in a single train on a dedicated right of way.
I mean that's what they're supposed to do, if they can all drive one behind another at a constant speed without crashing or creating traffic jams. But more importantly, if you can be doing work while your car is driving itself then your effective commute is zero. And if your car can park itself in the suburbs, then that creates yet more space in the city that can be used to create housing. Self-driving cars, if they actually work, should radically reduce housing costs -- both by making formerly unlivable places suitable for residential buildings, and by freeing up significant amounts of land.
That’s a big if. I’ve commuted in an Uber pool many times and hardly ever see any of the other passengers working. Most of them seem to be going to/from the office like me.
Working on a rail commute seems more common. The smoother ride lends itself better to laptop work.
On a person-kilometre-minute basis, cars are absurdly inefficient. Stupendously so.
A typical subway train typically runs to about 157 metres. A 2018 Camry runs to about 5 metres. That gives about 31 car lengths for the subway car.
Assume that every Camry is fully loaded with 5 passengers. That's 155 people. In the ideal condition, driving bumper-to-bumper with no other cars, 155 people in 157 metres -- about a person per linear metre.
Here's the fun bit: the passenger capacity of an R142A carriage is 176.
Not the whole train.
One subway car.
One subway car, approximately 16 metres long, holds more people than an entire train's length of self-driving Camrys driving with zero tolerance.
Now add the fact that the trains have dedicated rights of way and note that even with the profound multi-decadal mess made of the MTA you simply cannot replace the subway with any other mode of transportation, not now, not ever. Self-driving cars don't repeal the laws of physics and they don't override Little's Law either.
The problem is the subway comes maybe once every 11 minutes when it's working properly, and if someone tries to kill themselves by jumping in front of a train in south Brooklyn (or trips or gets pushed) then trains stop working all the way up through The Bronx. And potentially on both the east and west sides of both Manhattan and The Bronx if it happens at one of the stations where the 2/3 and 4/5 overlap. And this isn't an unusual occurrence, it happens once or twice per week during rush hour alone. Every time some minor thing goes wrong ('sick passenger', signal malfunction, track fire, etc.) then the entire city's transportation basically gets shut down. I agree that cars are absurdly inefficient, but at least they're somewhat more resilient. If we could use self-driving technology to at the very least increase the bus coverage then that would be a pretty good outcome.
The problems of the MTA aren't solved by switching to something that won't fix the problems of the MTA. They're solved by fixing the MTA. And even its currently-degraded state it can't be replaced by any other mode at rush hour. There is literally no physical way to fit enough vehicles on the road to replace even shitty subway service.
You have forgotten about the human actually getting to the subway station in the first place. You need to include the distance from every person to the subway station they want in your length calculation.
You also need to include how long it takes the person to get there in your minute calculations.
Your point is an argument in favour of extending subway coverage and doesn't change the basic physics of how cars and trains utilise space.
For my own self, everywhere I want to go is served by the subway system. Often poorly, but that's a rip on the political history of the MTA, not on the nature of subways in general.
If you closed the subways, New York would seize up and die. In fact we're going to get a taste of what a minor arterial clot is like when the L shuts down next year.
You do that by not going there in the first place.
A properly-designed network of self-driving cars would be a train. One that is always there when you need it, one that inherits the vast scale of existing infrastructure, and one that isn't vulnerable to paralysis through single points of failure.
But as the posts on here tend to emphasize over and over again, no one has the vision to make this happen. HN's love affair with fixed rail is nothing less than one of history's great irrational obsessions.
Public transportation is the one engineering discipline where solutions based on technology are "pedantic nonsense," while literally binding and constraining entire cities with hardware straight out of the Civil War era is considered the height of progress.
No, it wouldn't, for the reason I describe. Cars occupy too much space per person by a factor of about 11x times on the figures I gave further up. Self-driving cars will be part of the mix but they physically cannot replace the subway.
Useful mental exercise: next time you're out of the house, imagine that every automobile parking spot, parking lot, and parking garage you see is actually a transit depot. That's what optimal engineering and regulation of self-driving cars would buy us. Of course, being Americans, I'm sure we'll try everything else first.
Hell, this is probably as it should be. NYC would be better off with fewer cars and further prioritization of other modes of transport.
There are general issues with transportation efficacy in NYC right now (subway reliability etc.) but none of them are LIC specific.
People complain about Manhattan, but attempts to build out Brooklyn, Jersey City, Long Island City and Stamford always end up falling short of the original goals, because of the commute.
People from Long Island, Connecticut, Westchester and New Jersey can get to Manhattan with a single mode of public transportation (because they only have to cross one river.) When you move to any of those other locations, you eliminate a large chunk of potential employees, because their commute effectively goes up by >50%.
Also, Crystal City has two metro lines so not entirely a transportation despert.