[Gigachad]

I feel like the failure here is that it gets so packed that there isn't space for a bike. Because it's not just bikes impacted here. If you can't fit a bike, you can't fit a wheelchair, you can't fit a pram, you don't have space for someone who needs to sit down, or someone who can't handle being pressed in at all sides by other passengers.

It's a wrong allocation of resources where we decide everyone can have 4 empty seats to drive to work but we can't fit 1 person and a bike on PT.

[jmm5]

Pretty much any decent mass transit system in the world is packed at rush hour. The whole advantage over private vehicles comes from the fact that people take up less space.

[Gigachad]

I agree it's a fairly common issue but I feel like it's not an impossible issue to solve. A person and a bike is still massively smaller than a person in an SUV. The system is basically designed with just enough capacity to barely work. But I feel like if we really wanted PT to be the obvious best choice it should be provisioned a bit over the least possible capacity.

[crazygringo]

I mean sure it's not impossible if you are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to tunnel additional subway lines all over the place.

When they were built, these subway systems obviously were provisioned over expected capacity. But obviously, cities grow and nobody has a crystal ball to know what the population of a city will be 50 years from now.

The thing about subways is that adding significantly more capacity on an existing line isn't really possible if you are already running the trains as close as possible together as safety allows, which is often the case at rush hour. It's not like buses where you can just add more to the schedule.

[massysett]

The thing is, everyone can't have 4 empty seats to drive to work in New York City. There's only so much space on the streets and in the bridges and tunnels, and now there's a congestion charge on top of that.