|
|
|
|
|
|
by nshelly
2977 days ago
|
|
|
If there were a Paris or Barcelona in the U.S, tons of people would move there. Cost of living in this "Paris" or "Barcelona" would skyrocket and you'd see the transit system hit the max and cost of housing skyrocket. There are just fewer cities in the United States with good transit systems, low-crime, high quality of life and urban amenities. This hypothetical city would go through similar growing pains as NYC and San Francisco have gone through with decent transit systems that just can't keep up with population growth. The logical conclusion of this article is that a higher entity, likely the federal or state government, needs to step in and provide resources to help these mid-tier cities with their growing pains, assuming the optimal scenario is not another metro area with suburban sprawl and lots of traffic. As it stands now, it's unlikely this will change until the system gets much worse due to the high cost of intervention. It costs $1 billion for just one mile of rail in Los Angeles and New York City, and Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million. |
|
|
Just so we're talking about the same scales, the 133 miles of the Paris Métro rapid transit system covers the entire Paris metropolitan area[1], which itself has a population of around 12.4 million residents[2]. NYC's population across the five boroughs covered by the MTA is around 8.5 million residents[3].
The last cost projection for the Paris Métro expansion[4] for 120 extra miles of tracks, stations and lines is roughly $25 billion.
If anything, this clarification only further reinforces your point that, even taking into account a hypothetical 5x cost overrun, Paris would still come out ahead from a $/mile metric.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_metropolitan_area
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/tying-p...