Tech population grew faster than the infrastructure in the wider Seattle area. Especially after the return-to-office mandates from the companies, traffic is at LA levels. 1-2 hour 1-way commutes are common.
If only we cared less about those without wealth and power, and bulldozed our way over these helpless communities like other countries with solid public transportation have done.
Americans on HN like to pretend that transit is a magical unicorn fairy dream in other countries, especially Europe.
America has a long way to go, but people who work in this space know that every country has its problems.
There's a passenger rail magazine available at larger American bookstores and sometimes model railroad shops. It covers passenger rail news around the world, and really lays out some of the massive problems that exist in every country.
You cite Crossrail as an example, but Crossrail was notoriously plagued with problems and controversy. It was first labeled a "high priority" 1974. It opened 48 years later.
Britain's train system is so dysfunctional, it's being re-nationalized. Train companies are bailing on their contracts because they can't make money. And the entire country is littered with hundreds of abandoned train station and rail lines that were discontinued, cutting off many towns and villages.
It's also comical that you state that "bulldozing the poor away to build infrastructure" is an American thing, and then turn to China as a shining example. You can't be serious. China has displaced millions of people (bulldozed) because they were in the way of transit projects. If America could employ construction workers for China's meager wages, America would have trains everywhere. Perhaps if it brought back slave labor, like China has, that would work.
> Americans on HN like to pretend that transit is a magical unicorn fairy dream in other countries, especially Europe.
> America has a long way to go, but people who work in this space know that every country has its problems.
Of course nobody is saying transit is perfect anywhere. Hong Kong is expensive, Japan has overcrowding issues (not enough capacity), older systems like Paris and London have relatively frequently breakdowns due to the age / lack newer features like platform screen doors (and retrofitting them is super expensive and long, cf. Paris lines 1 and 4). However, problems on transit in the US are... decades behind, and much worse than pretty much anywhere in the developed world. It was comical arriving at SFO and going to the BART station and seeing a plaque commemorating the mayor/governor/commissioner/whatever for his magical foresight in pushing to have BART go to the airport... something considered common fucking sensepretty much anywhere is being commemorated by plaques in the US, that's how bad things are there.
Yes, Crossrail was massively over budget and late - and of course it was, it was being built in one of the biggest cities in the world which has history and settlements spanning back thousands of years, and had to go around and interface with infrastructure going back more than a hundred years. Very few American cities have anything even close to that amount of complexity.
> Britain's train system is so dysfunctional, it's being re-nationalized. Train companies are bailing on their contracts because they can't make money. And the entire country is littered with hundreds of abandoned train station and rail lines that were discontinued, cutting off many towns and villages.
Yes, the British rail system is badly mismanaged. It's still much better than anywhere in the US though, in terms of availability, punctuality and price. Yes, it simply isn't profitable to serve every little town, so many had to be abandoned which is sad. Nationalising the system is a good step forward that will probably improve service overall.
> It's also comical that you state that "bulldozing the poor away to build infrastructure" is an American thing, and then turn to China as a shining example. You can't be serious. China has displaced millions of people (bulldozed) because they were in the way of transit projects. If America could employ construction workers for China's meager wages, America would have trains everywhere. Perhaps if it brought back slave labor, like China has, that would work.
Yes, it is mostly an American thing, where most cities underwent bulldozing of the poor/non-white neighbourhoods to build highways. When China does it it's more generic "you're in the way" and not an explicitly racist/anti-poor thing. Furthermore, I specifically talked about China's metros, which are in their vast majority underground, so there was nobody to bulldoze over.
People in states (outside of enclave of European hipsters in NYC) still haven't heard about Asian and European tricksters building train lines _underground_. Understandable, since this is quite a recent invention...
In Seattle, we buy a $$$$$$ boring machine, bore a tunnel, and then cut up the machine and sell it for scrap.
Nobody ever thinks "hmm, now we have a perfectly good boring machine sitting at the end of a tunnel in the middle of the metropolitan area. Hey, I have an idea! Let's continue boring and extend the tunnel!"
My favorite was when they bored a new tunnel downtown, and stuffed the resulting rubble into the Battery tunnel, thus providing 0 extra capacity for $$$$$$.
They ripped up the rail tracks from Renton to Black Diamond. After all, what could you do with rail lines connecting one city to a bedroom community?
Lastly, there used to be a rail line connecting Renton to Bothell. What to do with that, what to do with that ... Oh, I know! Let's rip up the tracks, tear down its bridges, and make it thoroughly unusable. Not do anything sensible like connect it to the west side light rail so there's service all the way around Lake Washington. Several people carefully explained to me that it was impossible to use right-of-way for trains for light rail, impossible to poor a concrete platform at stops, etc. But it is possible to spend tens of billions of dollars mowing down neighborhoods on the west side.
Government civil engineering in King County is a mystery to me.
Corporations lobby to back and influence local government to rubber-stamp their plans without requiring the necessary services and infrastructure to be in place or paid for.