^For real. I wonder if it might work out cheaper to keep the Green Line on the surface and bury the older high-floor lines through downtown.
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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
Wait... you want it "lining" a metro line? I guess i didn't get that because it doesn't make much sense. Why is it better to have a "strip" of dense urban area bordered by low density on either side compared to having circular radii of dense urban area surrounding stations? I assumed you were similar to me in wanting density more evenly distributed across the entire city rather than just small areas of density bordered by low density. That's just the exact same thing in a different shape.
If it really was rapid transit that created the type of more uniform density that I prefer then you'd need 5 more Canada lines (with denser stops) spread across the entire city so that the majority of people were within walking distance to a station. But density would need to triple the current level to justify that capacity unless cars were suddenly banned or something.
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The point I keep making is that I want
sustained urbanity. I agree that multi-dimensional sustained urbanity is better than one-dimensional--but a line of sustained urbanity is better than islands of urban pastiche in the suburbs.
Yes, you would want more lines to get sustained urbanity spreading out in all directions!
Obviously that's a stretch for Vancouver, which is where layered transit would come in.
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Again, the transit lines don't create that type of development pattern. It's created by demand paired with land-use policies that allow and direct it. A transit system can help facilitate development and transportation goals and can create demand in areas that didn't have it. But in a place that already has extremely high demand that isn't applicable. I do agree with layered transit services which is what i was arguing for to begin with. But what I'm wondering, is if you think that local service like a tram is what's best to provide that type of density, then why are you arguing for it to be provided by something totally different like a metro? Why wouldn't you just treat the metro as the S-Bahn and call for a network of trams to improve local service?
My issue is that a) transit service is mainly about the service being provided rather than the mode used to provide it, and b) it isn't about one area being served with one thing and another area served with something different. Local service and express service is useful to some degree in every area and can be provided by different modes. In Paris, the metro provides a lot of local service because the density is so high that they need the capacity, while stops are very close together since it's local. Meanwhile the RER is very metro-like n centreal areas and has wide stop spacing which provides express service. But they use metro as a semi-local service because of the capacity requirements, not because local service should be provided by metro in general. So in a setting that dense the metro fills the role that would normally be provided by streetcar or bus. Us saying that bus service isn't acceptable for short local trip and people need to be walking distance to a metro stop is like them saying that local metro service isn't acceptable and anyone near an RER line should be walking distance to a stop.
But that layered approach means that sometimes people would use local transit like buses or streetcars to get to faster services for longer distances. The same way that NYC subway has both local and express service on many lines where someone not near an express station can take a local train and transfer onto an express, someone not on a metro (aka express) station can transit to one from a local bus. Yet somehow people think the former is ok but the latter is a problem. Well they're actually both ok.
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We're getting excessively nit-picky about something we agree on. Let me try to provide some concrete examples and history so we can agree to agree.
Paris is a funny case because they built one of the first metro services in the world. Old metro lines are weird. Budapest's M1, for example, is just a rickety-ass tram trundling around under the street. And they pretty consistently have denser stop spacing. You could argue that this was necessary given limited omnibus service at the time, but I think it's just that the technology was untested and they didn't know how to deploy it optimally.
Berlin's oldest lines also follow this pattern. The U2, in particular, is a slog for much of its length. It also runs parallel to the cross-town S-Bahn lines through the city centre, with two transfer stations. If your origin or destination isn't in the centre, and you don't mind a transfer, you have a faster, more comfortable option. This is great! It also builds important redundancy into the system--people can count on transit getting them where they need to go if something goes wrong or is closed for repairs.
Here are some stats from Berlin, last year. It's in German but I think you can figure it out. Note that the S-Bahn is run by a different agency and this .pdf doesn't include anything about it.
https://unternehmen.bvg.de/wp-conten...iegel-2023.pdf
Germane to our conversation are Bahnhofsabstand and Haltestellenabstand, coming in at roughly 800 m for U-Bahn and 500 m for trams--and busses. You'll probably notice that busses actually run a bit faster than trams and carry almost as many people as the U-Bahn. Busses are obviously a big part of any successful transit system!
Berlin is a fun cases study because it was overwhelmingly destroyed in WW2, and then two competing, ideologically different states spent decades experimenting on their respective sides of the city. The West replaced trams with busses, high-speed roads, and new U-Bahn lines, and boycotted the S-Bahn. The East restored tram lines and expanded the S-Bahn to serve far-flung tower suburbs.
So, in those stats you'll see busses offering a downgrade to tram service (like in many NA cities), subways offering an upgrade to tram service, and trams just being the trams they always were. I think it's notable that pound-for-pound the tram lines that still exist pull more weight than busses. They also serve urban areas that the communists left to rot. Today, those areas are some of the most desirable while the tower suburbs are ghettos.
Here's a vibrant area served by U-Bahn and tram.
There's another piece of history that matters here that I don't think has a direct parallel with anything that's happened elsewhere. The DDR ran the S-Bahn. Remarkably, they kept running it, with customs stops at the wall, through west Berlin, for decades. West Berliners were obviously not interested in using this service, so they duplicated it with what is today Berlin's longest U-Bahn line, the U7. The U7 cuts a long arc through a variety of central neighbourhoods, before sending long tails into off to the west and south. The route west took it through the massive Siemens industrial estate to a satellite city within the city, Spandau. But in the south, the west made its own attempt at tower suburbs. The result isn't to my taste. But if you look at the satellite view of the area, you'll see that they set stops about 800 m apart and built a sustained dense area along the U7.
If you zoom out a bit, you'll see some tram lines ending near the old wall strip. Eventually, these will be extended westward. If you inspect the areas around the tower suburb, you'll see they're mixed density. Zoning isn't very restrictive here. With the extension of tram service, they will likely densify organically.
It's interesting that both sides felt it necessary to expand the city's footprint, despite the city's population being far smaller than prewar, and both used transit to affect their visions. Obviously land-use planning also affected what came after. There's a reason I pointed out totalitarian governments as a reason for longer stop spacing. Totalitarians hate urbanity and love pastiche. They want to see people isolated in post-card-perfect, postage-stamp-small environments that give way to nothingness. Beyond that is work and only work. This may be the gentlest form of control.
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That's partly true but there's more to it than that. People traveling longer distances benefit most from faster modes. People in dense urban areas can more easily take buses, streetcars, bikes, or even walk to many destinations but that's much more time consuming for people traveling further. So the more important speed becomes the longer the journey is, while the more important frequency and stop proximity are the shorter the travel distance. And the further someone is going, the farther they're willing to travel to get to a fast service. That's why you see so many feeder buses connecting to outer suburban metro stations giving those stations higher average ridership than many more urban ones.
So it's both density and the length of the trip that matters. Someone living and working in a dense area is likely not making as many long trips as someone living in a low density area and working downtown. So in a dense area, ridership is driven by the sheer number of potential riders, while in a less dense areas it's driven by a greater need for transportation. The only reason you see lower ridership in less dense areas now is that there's more competition from the car since we've designed most lower density areas to be car-biased.
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NA cities do face a particular problem in that they've hemmed themselves in with thick rings of car-based suburbia. It's hard to see how to unfuck some of it. At the same time, we can't just build new transit through greenfield and build new dense, urban neighbourhoods. It's a tough problem but I don't accept that we can't do better than pockets of towers wedged in along freeways.
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Not really a valid question considering that it has high transit usage. DC metro has long had higher transit usage than the Chicago L which has tighter station spacing in a much larger, denser city/metro area. And DC has higher ridership than the subways in its peer cities like Boston and Philadelphia. So the correct question would be why does it have such high ridership if wide station spacing is so detrimental?
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Boston and Philly both have really small metro systems compared to Washington. Comparable metro systems, measured by length (208 km) or number of stations (98) have multiples of Washington's ridership.
Even comparing at riders per km/stop, Washington is worse than Boston. SEPTA in Philly is pathetic but I think everyone has always hated SEPTA.
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You're putting the cart before the horse. I already agreed that denser areas warrant a higher density of stops. This whole discussion pertains to areas that you yourself characterized as being low density. The line was built in the context of the existing and planned urban form at the time, not some hypothetical denser form that there was no plan to create. If you want to create uniformly dense urban fabric then you need to address the zoning first. It doesn't make sense to create transit infrastructure in the hope that it'll make density appearing when there's no guarantee that the rules will change to permit it.
If you lift all barriers to density in a high demand region then you'll get skyscrapers regardless of the station spacing. And if you prohibit density then density won't increase. You need policies that specifically allow medium density. There are large parts of Montreal with medium density that are several km from a metro line (much of the north and north east). They would benefit from having rapid transit but they were built and existed for decades with just buses so their existence is clearly possible without everyone being walking distance to a rail station. That's one of the reasons I said that you're missing something. You keep saying you want to create dense urban areas but seemingly miss the fact denser stop spacing of a metro line doesn't do that.
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Do we agree that transit is a carrot for development? I know Translink treats it as such, even baiting developers with infill stations should they build between stops. It seems to work.
In as much as transit does spur development, I think my ramblings about history and real-world systems provide a few demonstrations of the correlations between density of transit and density of city. I certainly don't think it's impossible for areas to develop with sustained density without dense transit coverage.
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