Comment by bsder
7 days ago
> and retrofitting all 30+ deep underground stations to be larger would be an insanely expensive and disruptive exercise.
But before this you had no idea that there was so much demand, right?
It's quite a lot easier to sell a huge monetary upgrade on something oversubscribed rather than a huge monetary outlay that may be a complete white elephant.
It's an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to dig out a 6-car platform the first time around than to expand from 3 to 6 when the system is already operational. And it's a one-off price too: if the platform is built but not used, it incurs essentially no operating costs to have it sit there waiting for the day it's needed.
Everything you said is completely orthogonal to my statement: "It's quite a lot easier to sell a huge monetary upgrade on something oversubscribed rather than a huge monetary outlay that may be a complete white elephant."
A better solution that no one has the political will to implement is inferior to every solution that can actually be implemented.
Or rather politics often results in the implementation of technically inferior solutions. Sometimes the best solution is to do nothing and wait until the political will catches up to reality. Then you will be lambasted for not having acted sooner, but at least it will be done.
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I think one solution is to embed a self-adjusting feedback mechanism into the transit fee.
- If the rush hour contines to get more crowded, the transit fee would raise until people avoid commuting on peak hours.
- If the rush hour disappears, the extra premium fee would fall to zero.
It is not unrealistic as it sounds; JR East (the biggest railway operator in Japan) recently introduced "Off-peak Commuter Pass", which is 1) 15% cheaper than a normal pass 2) and cannot be used between 7:30 - 9:00 AM.
So they are beginning to implement a dynamic policy based on how crowded their trains are.
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It's not. These things become single point of failure for a city by the time these problems arise, and just can't be upgraded or replaced no matter the cost because they can't afford to take it offline for extended periods. "Too expensive" in these cases are just euphemism and technical disclaimer for something impossible.
But that’s not what history shows us. The subway with the second most ridership in the US is WMATA. How did they get there? By going big with their plans in the 1960s. All the systems that thought small in that era (MARTA, BART, LA Metro) have much lower ridership to this day.
There is a good basis to this. Every new mile and station you add to a system compounds on the size of the system. The 11th station connects you to 10 places. The 51st station connects you to 50 places. Build small and you never get the critical mass needed to see widespread adoption.
What is the small aspect of BART? They have ten-car platforms and all that. ETA: the Internet thinks DC Metro platforms are 100 feet shorter than BART platforms.
BART has substantially less urban trackage than DC and cities have much higher transit ridership.
A more DC-like BART probably would have prioritized the second Transbay Tube and Geary Subway over the line to San Jose. BART did throw out the Geary baby with the bathwater when Marin County left.