This sounds fairly similar to "Why Many Cities Have No Money" [0]. In short, building massive infrastructure for the future is worth very little when the promised future never comes and you're stuck paying the maintenance cost.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13370310

That article is from Strong Towns. Strong Towns' entire premise is that growing outward is inefficient. They would make the same argument I am about planning for the future in a place like Hudson Yards, where millions of square feet are under construction.

It intuitively feels more likely to me that that future may come to New York than to other cities.

It's already there. Hudson Yards is the largest development currently in progress in NYC (maybe the US), and phase 2 will build another million-ish square feet next to it. That is the closest subway station to all of it.

Does that future include >2” of water rise and more floods to fill tunnels?

Yes, NYC is planning for at least two meters of sea level rise. Much of the subway works going on now are to handle more frequent and larger storm surges.

You can actually see how it will look like by watching The Expanse - it takes place in ~2350 and there is a huge wall all around Manhattan including in front of the still standing original UN building, as most terrestrial glaciers are long gone.

But this is actually a much less pressing issue than the couple gigaton nukes the Mars Congressional Republic has targeted on Earth, the ever more emancipated belters and some very shady deals by secretive yet very dangerous corporations.

RIP earth

I think you meant 2', not 2".

Sure but Seattle is a mess today because nobody built the capacity we need.

But this is simply not true. Maintenance costs are rarely significant part of city budgets, they are almost always below 10-15%. I don't want to say that Strongtowns is lying, because that presumes intent, but what they claim simply has little bearing with reality.

Their premise is that governments build infrastructure during their growth phase, but don't budget for maintaining or replacing it at the end of its lifecycle, 30-50 years later when their growth phase is past.

" It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later" As Washington, DC has come to learn with their subway. Decided to cut the third track to save cost and now any minor maintenance causes all kinds of issues and has made the system basically unsustainable without continual bailouts from the taxpayers.

The ultimate pennywise/pound foolish.

I don't mind building extra capacity. I do mind politicians sticking their nose where it doesn't belong.

I can't believe more people are not angry about the World Trade Center Path station. They managed to spend twice the original budget at four billion dollars and all this time there were signal problems between Newark and Harrison because Path didn't have money to fix it.

How do we do huge infrastructure projects when we can't trust the bureaucrats and the politians who are supposed to oversee these things?

Part of the problem here is misaligned incentives.

In the aftermath of 9/11, a lot of federal money was made available for the reconstruction of all the stuff that was destroyed. However, it was only usable for things in the Ground Zero area. So to maximize the utility of all this money, the Port Authority created an insane train station dressed up to the nines to soak up $4B of free federal cash. They also lumped a bunch of other unrelated things into the station that raised the sticker price but would still be covered by the feds.

For what it's worth, this station was also at one point supposed to serve a LIRR extension from Atlantic Terminal to WTC, but kind of died after Pataki could not convince the feds that this was a reconstruction project and he left office. The project was never downsized in scope to match the new reality.

What 100 year horizon? Manhattan has a 30% smaller lower population today than it did in 1920. Even pre-Covid, Manhattan was one of the slowest growing major counties in America.

Population is not very relevant metric here. What matters is not so much how many people actually live in Manhattan, but rather how many people are commuting into it every day. In fact, commuters double the island population every day, and exceed the number of residents in 1920 by 50%.

What happened with Manhattan was that tenements were replaced with office buildings, and these use more, not less commuting.

Manhattan commuters peaked in 1946. The train system was able handle that level of demand without falling apart. All of the messaging from MTA about increasing ridership causing delays is a disingenuous lie.

Considering the fact that much of the same infrastructure they used in 1946 is still in use today (with 74 more years of wear and tear) its not surprising that its falling apart. This would be true even if the MTA wasn't staffed by dishonest, incompetent political cronies. When you regularly do things like spend $600 million dollars on trains that don't work, its not hard to see how you end up billions in debt very quickly.

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-l-train-normal-servi...

Man, you’re really taking a few numbers from decades ago and using that to claim something’s a lie? You ok?

Is a mezzanine considered capacity?

Absolutely. Mezzanines are critical in flow management during peak. You know how if you go to a Disney ride, most of the line is inside the structure? Same concept. Get people out of the rain/snow/heat and normalize flow.

But a mezzanine is sort of silly considering no one lines up for an hour for a train like they do on a disneyland ride. All the stations in LA have these massive mezzanines too and they are just dead space. They are absolutely empty during rush hour aside from people charging through them to get to the actual platform, because it might take you several minutes to go from above ground, down the escalators, through the mezzanine, down a second set of escalators, and to the platform, at which point the train might be gone and you will sit there twiddling your thumbs for another 10 minutes, clogging up the platform for the next train since you should have made that first one. It's a huge problem at stations like 7th street in downtown LA, where the light rail platform is below a mezzanine but above the heavy rail platform, which bottlenecks transfers due to a lack of thought put into how many stairs and escalators should be made. Probably 1/5 days a week commuting in the before times would I actually make that transfer, the other times you are jammed up by people bottlenecked by the limited stairs and escalators and you watch the train go away without you.

Take out the elaborate mezzanine and make it a simple single level multitrack platform directly under the surface, and you might make the first train and be out of the station in less time, lowering the needed capacity of the station structure in the first place.

In London, it's absolutely the opposite.

London Bridge Station has recently been rebuilt to have a mezzanine style area. It's the 4th busiest in the UK with 61 million entries and exits.

St Pancras and Kings Cross were similarly rebuilt.

It is a bit complex to describe London Bridge to non-Londoners, but simply put, it was 15 or so platforms that were about 20ft wide and 12 carriages long, with nowhere to queue and trains every few minutes, on every platform (and it's a terminus, not a through-station).

A mezzanine in a central city for passengers to wait is an absolute necessity. Doubly so if the station is a terminus, which all of the major stations in London are (I'm not counting Blackfriars or St Pancras).

For the non-English readers, there is only one North-South through railway line in London (Thameslink), and only one East-West (-ish) (Crossrail) and that hasn't opened. All mainline stations in London terminate, and then you have to use the tube to connect to another.

That’s a bit different though, as at London Bridge one is generally waiting for timetabled rail services whereas the New York City subway is turn up and go. A mezzanine is rather pointless if the same service is showing up every 2-5 minutes.

London Bridge tube station had to be rebuilt as well (not too add a mezannine per se but just to have enough space to hold the passengers waiting for trains), in the late 90s to house Jubilee Line but also to expand the Northern Line platforms. Even this 20 years later looks too small. Both these lines operate every 2 minutes (Jubilee slightly more than every 2 mins in peak).

To add to what the other commenter said - Bank station (the busiest on the London tube network) is getting rebuilt too, to add a "mezzanine" type area for the Northern line. Through-trains, all to the same destinations, are every 2 minutes and the platform is frequently closed due to overcrowding. To the point, in fact, where there's often a one-way system enforced in the station, or people are kept at street level.

Ultimately it's usage levels and capacity. UK stations don't have the capacity for the passengers, and often the capacity on the trains either.

I know this station and don't believe the mezzanine is the problem. There are two trains running perpendicularly. The "mezzanine" is the first floor with the blue line platform. Yes, additional stairs/elevators could help, as well as timing changes.

It's simply one of the busiest stations due to its location.

The huge mezzanine in the other stations such as at Pershing is mostly wasted space however.

I've heard people mention fire egress requirements as more or less dictating mezzanines in the US: https://www.nfpa.org/codes-and-standards/all-codes-and-stand...

In LA, you're going to be happy about those mezzanines once Measure R construction fills in your network. In infrastructure projects, what you see today is a small part of the plan.

Can the mezzanine be used to divert foot traffic during multi-day repairs

And how does the Mezzanine helps?

Traveled a lot in the developing parts of asia and their subway stations even when massive are very plain and utilitarian. They deal with much bigger crowds than anything we could reasonably face in the west.

Comparing US infrastructure to infrastructure in the developing world requires a pile of caveats.

The biggest reason for the difference you’re pointing out is safety. A mezzanine creates safety in two directions. First, as a gathering area with likely positive pressure ventilation in case of a train fire. Second, a refuge for incidents on the surface.

The developing world generally isn’t planning for either in their infrastructure.

I should point out that many of the systems you're discarding in comparison have better actual safety records than the US.

Indeed.

Japan, S Korea, China, Hong Kong, and the rest of Asia operate world class rail systems. The idea that they don't care about safety is ignorant and racist.

What are the costs involved in "retrofitting via cut-and-cover" as opposed to "building more capacity by mining" that makes the second option more palatable for the 100-year timeline?

I don't understand. That's not the tradeoff MTA is making. They're building more capacity now rather than having to try to do it later.

Later would be nigh-impossible because of the skyscrapers going up on every side, and the railyard above. Hudson Yards is a massively complex project.

The parent comment that you responded to:

"... Oversized stations are even more problematic when you consider that the MTA wants to build all of these by mining rather than using cut-and-cover, because cut-and-cover has too much disruption to surface tenants. And mining is far more expensive than cut-and-cover..."

Your response:

"... It is ALWAYS cheaper to build capacity now than to retrofit later, even inflation adjusted. ..."

The implication of your response is that on a 100-year timeline, the way that the modern stations are apparently being built (by mining) is cheaper than building them by the way the parent commenter says (cut-and-cover).

I was just curious why it's "always" cheaper. Is "mine and build big" the cheaper method only when there's a ton of density on top like Hudson Yards, or is it also the case in places with less surface density?

I think that you’re probably always better off building bigger if you expect growth in the next 100 years. How big you should build is just a matter of how much current and future traffic you expect to have.

Apologies - I may have skipped over something when reading. I was responding to the implication that a smaller station now is an appropriate cost savings.

I think what they're looking at is over-sizing rather than right-sizing. Think of it as cost=size*method. Future-proofing increases the size, not the method.

Capacity for what? The line could theoretically be extended by a tunnel to Secaucus but even then only a fraction of the ridership will take that branch and get off at the first stop. The West side is already serviced by two lines so where else can the 7 go?

Bookmarking this thread. I’m interested in getting involved in transit advocacy in NYC. I think Seattle Subway might be a good place for me to start my homework

Reach out anytime! [email protected]

Thank you! I will.

I knew we had light rail in a few places, one monorail and lots of buses, but after living here for 1.5 years now, this is the first I've heard of Seattle Subway. I don't think I've ever heard anyone make reference to it in conversation.

The Seattle has 79% more area than San Francisco and San Francisco has 17% more people. How does it make economic sense to have a Subway when so much of the city is zoned for detached single family homes and there is acknowledged seismic and flooding risk?

In 2020, wouldn't it be far more future proof and likely cheaper to plan on smart streets with self-driving pods like Dubai is doing with its Next platform? The moment autonomous on-demand P2P system is viable, it's going to turn subways in less densely populated cities into albatrosses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlQaCIUHTI

You have $50 billion in mostly grade separated transit coming, largely due to the work of a lot of volunteers from 2011-2012 setting Sound transit up for the ST3 vote in 2016.

What Sound Transit calls "light rail" is as high capacity as some subway systems. I named the nonprofit that led a lot of this organizing Seattle Subway because it got attention when we needed it, and it's true anyway. :)

I think your other questions are interesting, but it seems like you have an opinion and you're looking for a way to defend it. If you're actually curious about why we're building a subway network and aren't just looking for a way to disagree, let me know!

I'm not particularly married to an idea here but it is 2020 and I remember exactly what happened with the Coliseum–Oakland International Airport line. It was planned and designed pre-ridesharing and instead of making $2 million in the first two years, it cost $860 million to operate.

https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/11/27/barts-oakland-airpor...

Now if technological progress in transportation were to completely stall, I'd agree that it likely would make sense, but the last thing I want as a taxpayer is a very expensive project that is eventually outcompeted by advances in ridesharing in the time it takes to build out the network. Given that there is no lack of public transportation boondoggles that have left taxpayers holding the bag, it's not unreasonable to ask questions and exhibit some skepticism, especially when the population density is below 8000 people per square mile.

In places like NYC, I would be in complete agreement with you as the population density would dictates that only a subway would ever make sense because you simply don't have the road system relative to population density for a ridesharing solution to ever make sense.

Lastly, I commented in good faith, but this condescension, "but it seems like you have an opinion and you're looking for a way to defend it", doesn't exactly help you garner support for what you're trying to achieve. That's also the kind of accusation that comes from someone accusing others of doing something they are guilty of. Perhaps it's you that has an opinion that you're looking for a way to defend?

You can't expect a human to level with you on the internet if they've hitched their online persona to being an expert with an opinion on the topic.

Generally the people who bring up pod transit will argue you to death. If those systems ever exist (and they’ve been used as anti-transit hobby horses for almost 50 years now) they can’t scale to serve urban environments.

Engaging with them generally just creates visibility for people who can’t tell what’s bullshit.

I cited one very high profile example of ridesharing making a public transport project completely unviable within a few short years leaving taxpayers stuck with the bill and you call such skepticism bullshit even when there is clear evidence for voicing concern? If there is any bullshit here it's more likely to be the person who "hitched their online persona to being an expert with an opinion on the topic" than the person who was raising legitimate concerns supported by evidence.

You've just lost any chance at my support and gained someone who is now more extra dubious of this Seattle Subway project than I was previously all because I now believe it is you that isn't engaging in good faith. It's going to take someone knowledgeable and acting in extra good faith to undo the animosity you're directly responsible for creating.

Whenever Seattle Subway comes up in any discussions, I'll be sure to reference how Ben Schiendelman responded when someone raised legitimate concerns. Good job.

> and they’ve been used as anti-transit hobby horses for almost 50 years now

Because there is so much in common with 1970 vs 2020. Ridesharing only became a thing 10 short years ago. Waymo has been providing autonomous rides in Arizona for a few years now. Companies like Segway and LIT motors have pioneered the use of gyroscopes in transportation such that a completely enclosed motorcycle sized vehicle is nearly viable. The possibility of autonomous pods has never been more viable than is is now. It may have been a bullshit argument 20 to 50 years ago, but it's certainly not a bullshit concern in 2020. Sorry if the future is finally catching up with a career you're heavily invested in, but that's not an excuse to behave as you have here.

Seattle Subway won its war four years ago. Good luck out there.

The problem with Seattle is that while it isn’t that high population of a city, the geographic chokepoints are rather extreme.

There is, quite frankly, not enough capacity north-south or across Lake Washington for people to be in vehicles at the low density of a comfortable car, which is what light rail is for. Already much of the commuting mode share in the Seattle area is people using buses to get downtown, in some cases driving to a park and ride lot to catch a bus there. Seattle has mostly exhausted the limits of this approach, so now there is a huge light rail construction project.

North/South can be pretty painful, but across Lake Washington isn't nearly as bad. I have a view of the entirety of the I-90 bridge which I see every day all day and it doesn't get nearly as bad as coming into Seattle via I-5 or Aurora.

Whether you go with roads or rail, you still have the problem of building across those geographic chokepoints. Either way, you've got the cost of building bridges/tunnels regardless of the mode of transportation.

The issue at hand is capacity. Free-flowing highway lanes move people at ~2000 people per hour per direction per lane, and the Seattle light rail has a capacity closer to ~30000 pphd. So light rail is 15x more space efficient than car travel; you might need to build a bridge, but you will generally need to build less bridge. Autonomous cars may improve road capacity but not 15x. More importantly, roads have a very noticeable capacity curve as they become congested and become less efficient; trains don't really get slower with crowding, they mostly just get more crowded inside.

And I don't know, I-90 is kind of a crapshoot (especially on weekdays) when it comes to congestion. Even worse, it's bad both ways, because you have both heavy inflows to jobs in Seattle and jobs at the various Eastside centers like Redmond and Bellevue. 520 is much better, but it's also tolled, which is also why I-90 is so much worse.

pphd was a new metric for me so I did some googling because I wanted to know more.

From that searching I came across the following article. Now this article has a clear bias (but so do the people advocating for rail), but bias doesn't mean that there aren't valid points being made even if exaggerated. Curious what your response is to their counter claims:

https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/sound-t...

One thing that stands out is that ST3 is saying it is a theoretical limit of 16,000 pphd not 30,000. Where did you get the 30,000 figure from?

I can respond to some of the statistics used in this article.

> The problem is that Sound Transit officials are comparing 16,000 humans to 2,000 vehicles.

This is actually not that bad of a comparison; most Americans drive alone. The FHA, hardly some anti-car agency, estimates car occupancy at 1.54 persons a vehicle, and overally light-vehicle occupancy at 1.67 persons a vehicle. Unless American social mores are going to change significantly, I don't see why self driving cars would really change the fact that people like being in a car alone.

> Light rail is, by definition, light capacity transit. The theoretical 16,000 people per hour requires a “target max load” of 200 people per car on four-car light rail trains at three-minute headways for a full hour, a concept unheard of in the United States.

This is not unheard of at all. We have bigger light rail systems running smaller headways, to say nothing of very large traditional rail systems. New York City is running 600 foot trains every 2 minutes with an ultimate capacity of >60000 pphd.

Also, this article is a bit dated; we now know that Sound Transit is purchasing the Siemens S70. The identical Portland model carries 240 people per car. And while the current service plan calls for trains every four minutes in the busiest segments, the signaling system actually supports trains every 2 minutes so long as you have the vehicles. (This is not the lower limit for rail signaling systems; trains every 90s are run on many systems around the world.) Buying new trains is cheap compared to building more tracks or lanes.

> Sound Transit officials also claim that they will carry 561,000 to 695,000 unlinked daily trips by 2040 if ST3 passes. Let’s assume Sound Transit carries its highest projection of 695,000 daily trips with their estimate that most (91%) will be trips taken by existing transit riders. This means that only 62,550 will be trips taken by new transit riders.

This assumes the only utility of a transit project is new trips or new riders. This isn't true; there is also value in speeding up existing commutes. The bus gets caught up in the same highway traffic and has very high labor costs per trip; moving bus passengers to a light rail train free from traffic will increase reliability and reduce commute times. And every person on a light rail train is a person not taking up space on a road. Which isn't to say that it relieves congestion, but rather it frees up space and provides an alternative to congested roads.

It's also worth noting that Sound Transit's recent record shows that it is most likely underestimating ridership: in 2016, the brand new University Link extension had already doubled initial estimates of its first year ridership, and the line well exceeded its 2020 ridership goals in 2018. https://www.historylink.org/File/20720

> This means that under ST3, each new transit rider will cost over $1 million dollars.

It's worth noting that this figure is not qualified by how much road projects cost per road user, because this is not meant to be a comparative talking point. Roading projects are just as expensive, if not more due to higher land requirements; yet they are not scrutinized to the same degree.

If you were to even try and match half of the capacity in a road expansion, it would be prohibitively expensive. The SR 99 tunnel we just built cost $3.2B for two lanes in each direction with no exits. This is double the cost of the aforementioned University Link, which is nearly a mile longer than the road tunnel to boot. The reality of the situation is any additional capacity in the transport system is going to cost a lot of money now that the city is rapidly growing and densifying, and roads cost more because they require more land.

Thanks for the response. Lots of really good points.

In a vacuum, I'm actually totally fine with either option (public transportation or cars) and not particularly married to see either one built or against either one being built and both have their utility. Personally, I think both need to be built. My main concern is really about who is going to pay for it.

Such projects really disproportionately benefits those that will be commuting into and out of Seattle and those people in Seattle that live in parts of the city where they don't have parking and are likely to live near a station.

I'm a huge proponent of people paying for those services they use and for services to be financially self sustaining.

People who take the train should fund the train. People who drive cars should fund the roads and the DMV.

Furthermore, the same argument for greater throughput of a system should also support the argument that such a system should generate greater revenue and be naturally self sustaining. But for this to be true, all calculations shouldn't be based on theoretical limits but actual predictions of how many more people will be moved per hour per direction and that needs to be compared to the revenues and the costs to figure out if the current design of the system is sustainable (a lesser more modest design might be warranted once faced with the reality of how many riders are actually expected).

> It's worth noting that this figure is not qualified by how much road projects cost per road user, because this is not meant to be a comparative talking point. Roading projects are just as expensive, if not more due to higher land requirements; yet they are not scrutinized to the same degree.

They should get the same scrutiny. One proposed system getting this scrutiny isn't an argument that neither should get the same scrutiny.

> The SR 99 tunnel we just built cost $3.2B for two lanes in each direction with no exits.

And it has tolls, but the tolls should probably be 3x higher than they currently are. Every system, roads or rail, should pay for itself. Any system that isn't priced appropriately is distorting the market and making it harder to figure out the true cost and plan effectively.

One thing I would love to see adopted in the US is a public transportation tolling system like they have in Japan where you pay for distance traveled and the cost of your commute in general.

In the interest of stating my biases, personally, I purchased a home in a part of Seattle that is unlikely to ever see much if any benefit from a subway system. I'm familiar with the geotechnical concerns where I live and the only public transportation which will ever serve my home and my neighborhood is likely to be a bus (this is not too dissimilar to the reason why Beacon Hill will also not benefit). I am, however, in favor of buses and would also like to see investment long term in smart streets that provide a foundation of an autonomous vehicle system.

Lastly, thanks for engaging in good faith discussion unlike other commenters here.

> They should get the same scrutiny. One proposed system getting this scrutiny isn't an argument that neither should get the same scrutiny.

It is a statement about the bias of the linked piece though, which is quite clearly right-wing.

> One thing I would love to see adopted in the US is a public transportation tolling system like they have in Japan where you pay for distance traveled and the cost of your commute in general.

Roads also work like this in Japan. But I wouldn't call the Japanese system much better; Japan allows companies to subsidize 1000USD per month for each employee, in a manner similar to how American employers subsidize healthcare. This has the effect of making travel relatively pricey in general (because people with subsidy can afford to pay more), and also the effect of concentrating employment in major urban areas, because if you live in a small city with low transportation costs you are essentially leaving most of that 1000USD off the table.

In the West we treat travel as a public good, but it's really only an American thing that we tilt so much funding in favor of just the car.

> the only public transportation which will ever serve my home and my neighborhood is likely to be a bus (this is not too dissimilar to the reason why Beacon Hill will also not benefit).

There's nothing wrong with buses. The major problem is that Seattle has relied too much on buses; pre-COVID, public transit funds were being unspent because the ability to allocate money to transit has exceeded the capability to actually spend it for such a purpose. They literally could not find enough drivers to run the service already being funded because of how tight the employment market was.

One major reason why light rail is being pushed so heavily is because it is both more labor efficient in general (a driver can either operate a 40/60 foot bus or a 380 foot train), and because the major speed and reliability increases of the rail system will allow less vehicles to serve the same frequency. The long-term plan (at least before COVID took a sledgehammer to public finances) was to redirect bus resources from long, infrequent commuter routes to short, frequent feeder routes to Link.

Also your comment about Beacon Hill is strange, because Beacon Hill does have a light rail stop, today. Even if you're not next to it, the 36 bus runs straight through Beacon Ave every ten minutes throughout the day.

I think they're describing it as the "Seattle Subway" for the benefit of non-local audiences.

The subway they're referring to is almost certainly the Link light rail, which runs through the bus tunnels, and has other extended stretches underground. It's probably the same light-rail that you're referring to.

Yes. And we called it Seattle Subway for the local audience, to get attention to the fact that we could significantly accelerate construction of the system with an additional ballot measure. Most of what Sound Transit calls "light rail" counts a a subway anyway.

And increasing the construction speed is the major thing we need to do here! Otherwise many of us working in seattle from outside will be retired or dead by the time it gets to us. I'm very eager to spend more of my own tax money to construct the system faster. Plus we should do it before Tim Eyman eventually takes away our ability to tax ourselves.

That’s what we did in 2016. Instead of plodding along with one line at a time, we funded an entire generation to get started at once.

In the US you can’t really make each line’s development faster, but you can start earlier. We cut at least a decade off Ballard, West Seattle, Everett, and Tacoma extensions.

I think he's referring to the Seattle area pro-transit volunteer organization "Seattle Subway" https://www.seattlesubway.org/