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  #21  
Old Posted Jan 1, 2020, 8:40 PM
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Originally Posted by SFBruin View Post
I mean, this is cherry-picked data, though. The London Underground covers a larger land area than does the NYC subway, and very well cover a larger population. So, the fact that it has lower ridership than does the NYC subway might indicate that the London Underground is underperforming.
The Underground barely serves Greater London south of the Thames. In Outer London, which is sparsely populated compared to NYC's outer boroughs, the lines diverge and become 2 miles (ish) apart.

So the Underground serves about the same land area as the NYC Subway and a much smaller population, yet manages to draw 5 million riders each weekday. This leads me to conclude that NYC Subway underperforms on paper, without taking into account actual quality of service and politics. Other factors probably include NYC being more traversable by car (taxi, ride share, private auto) and population distribution whereby the outer boroughs have a certain independence from Manhattan.


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  #22  
Old Posted Jan 1, 2020, 10:59 PM
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Paris metro has a ridership of 5.6 million passengers per day (more than London Undergounrd) and it yet barely goes outside the small City of Paris limits (40 sq mi).
Fun fact, more people ride the Paris metro than there are inhabitants in the City of Paris (2.19 million)*.

*What shows how stupid it is to only look the city proper figures, especially in the case of Paris, because obviously in this case there are a lot of people living in suburbs who commute to the City and take the subway

Last edited by Minato Ku; Jan 1, 2020 at 11:12 PM.
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  #23  
Old Posted Jan 2, 2020, 1:10 AM
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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse View Post
No, because it was so outlandishly off-topic and nonsensical. I mean, literally claiming that people are communists just for being affordability advocates (a concern shared by people across the political spectrum) while actual communists are amazing at public transit. Yet he manages to blame them for the transit problems in the epicenter of capitalism. Faceplant to the Nth degree.
Bingo.
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  #24  
Old Posted Jan 2, 2020, 12:59 PM
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Wow I didn’t know the tube coverage south of the Thames is so poor
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  #25  
Old Posted Jan 3, 2020, 1:07 PM
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Originally Posted by dc_denizen View Post
These articles also never really account for the fact that greater New York at around 20 million people is a lot bigger than greater London (11-12 million)
Is that better or worse in the context of this thread?

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Originally Posted by dc_denizen View Post
Wow I didn’t know the tube coverage south of the Thames is so poor
Three reasons behind that:
- London’s development going back to the Roman era was primarily north of the river.
- The National Rail lines south of the river were far more developed relative to their counterparts to the north which tended to be focused around Main Lines to other parts of the UK.
- Geology north of the Thames is mostly clay which is easy to tunnel through, whereas the ground south of the Thames consists of different sands which even to this day is incredibly hard to work with.

It goes someway to explain why the likes of Southeastern, South Western Railway and Govia Thameslink Railway are the largest rail operators in not just London, but the UK.

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  #26  
Old Posted Jan 3, 2020, 2:43 PM
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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse View Post
Communists and socialist don't believe in starving public transit of funding. They may want public services to be affordable and accessible to everyone, but they don't see any value in blocking one source of funding such as user fees without replacing it with another such as subsidies. Surely everyone has seen the metro systems built by the USSR. Spoiler alert: They're somewhat dissimilar from the NY subway.

Obviously a lot of people have specific targets to which they want to pin blame for everything in keeping with their world view, but shouldn't they at least be a little plausible?

another spoiler alert. the russkie commie metros are nice because they were built to be bomb shelters.

so dual purpose would also make them doubly better than the nyc subway i guess.
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  #27  
Old Posted Jan 3, 2020, 3:11 PM
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Why do we take the word of an elite journalist with zero experience running a train or bus over anything, especially over something as complicated as public transit in two of the world's largest and most complicated cities?
Public transit services levels are affected most by local politics, the citizens usually get what they want most over many decades and throughout their history.
Are the two systems different? Yes of course, why would we expect anything else?

Deciding which system is better is a fools errand. If you wish to create complete chaos, swap the two transit systems between the two cities. There is no possible way that the London Underground system would work under New York City, or vice versa.
Neither system was built to be under any other city, they were custom built for their own city.
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  #28  
Old Posted Jan 3, 2020, 11:18 PM
Rational Plan3 Rational Plan3 is offline
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The main take is that money has been spent on london, so it runs frequently and is cleaner etc etc. New York is hamstrung by the State and not enough has been spent, and what has been built costs far more than it should.
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  #29  
Old Posted Jan 4, 2020, 2:38 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mrnyc View Post
another spoiler alert. the russkie commie metros are nice because they were built to be bomb shelters.

so dual purpose would also make them doubly better than the nyc subway i guess.
They wanted the stations to be palaces of the people. They thought the finest, grandest spaces should be for the the enjoyment and elevation of the average person rather than for royalty, aristocracy, and religious authority in contrast to the rest of Europe. Obviously there's nothing about being deeper underground that inherently requires something to be nicer.
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  #30  
Old Posted Jan 31, 2020, 10:17 AM
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The tube mostly covers north London, where the clay traditionally enabled deep lines and easy tunnelling. South London's bedrock is covered by a vast web of overground lines instead.

The tube is only one component on the much larger 1000+ station London transport system that covers the entire metro region of 24 million (ROSE - 9.3 million city proper plus Rest of South East, denser than NYC CSA, at 15 million), with a million heavy rail (non London Overground) users commuting in each day




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One of London's problems is the high cost of staffing on the Tube thanks to the most aggressive trade unions in the country (which equates to high ticket costs also), but this in turn has led to increasingly automated service, signalling and operations, hence the larger coverage, higher frequency and better timing despite a slightly smaller ridership.

Last edited by muppet; Jan 31, 2020 at 11:03 AM.
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  #31  
Old Posted Jan 31, 2020, 10:57 AM
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A NYC and Paris construction compared:


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/n...ion-costs.html

"An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.

The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”


^^NYC is not the only city that suffers this, London's tube upgrade went through the same inflated costs, corruption and thieving of the public purse during the noughties
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  #32  
Old Posted Jan 31, 2020, 5:36 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse View Post
They wanted the stations to be palaces of the people. They thought the finest, grandest spaces should be for the the enjoyment and elevation of the average person rather than for royalty, aristocracy, and religious authority in contrast to the rest of Europe. Obviously there's nothing about being deeper underground that inherently requires something to be nicer.
except the deep de-elevation below ground was for quite another reason. obviously, if you are going to have to live in a metro tube for an extended period during a crisis, you might want your stations to be very nice and to reflect well on leadership while you are stuck there.

and otoh and just as obviously, if you aren't so paranoid about wars on the homefront, you pay your sandhogs a living wage, have goods and services readily available for them to buy, have a participatory government, you might make the el's and cut and cover subways with so-so station adornments and go about your business.
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  #33  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2020, 2:25 AM
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I assume by "go about your business" you mean allowing political dysfunction and lack of commitment to public services to gradually erode the functionality of the system? In any case, at least we can agree that whatever the reasons for the communists' amazing systems, at least the deficiencies in western systems is one thing they can't be scape-goated for.
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  #34  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2020, 4:23 AM
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NYC will end up getting .1 miles of subway built a decade with the way things are going. Hopefully, all those construction companies go out of business.
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