C'mon, ride the train
On labor strikes, the Long Island Rail Road, and why we need to think of something beyond population growth when it comes to planning transportation networks
The Long Island Rail Road is shut down due to a labor strike, and if a contract agreement doesn’t come together by Monday, it’s estimated that 250,000 people will be without their normal way to get from the suburbs to the city and back.
■ What generally goes under-appreciated about good transportation systems (especially mass transportation) is that they flatten the constraints of geography, making it possible for larger numbers of people to enjoy the benefits of metropolitan consolidation.
■ The quip has always gone that investors should buy land because “they’re not making any more of it“. That may be literally true for the most part (though landfill has been selectively expanding some metro areas for centuries -- about a sixth of Boston has been “created”), but good transportation can render it practically untrue.
■ Once we escape the bounds of immediate walkability, then time in transit preponderantly matters more than physical distance. A bumper-to-bumper 5-mile highway commute and 20-mile light rail commute might each take 30 minutes, and it’s the time that really counts (not to mention the quality thereof).
■ Most of the signs point toward it being very unlikely that the United States will find itself much more heavily populated in the future -- the CBO guesses that we’ll probably peak at 364 million people around the year 2056. This means that we may not be all that far off from peak crowdedness in most places. Some cities will still boom or bust, but by and large it’s probably a fairly safe bet that aside from a few exceptions, most places are about as populated as they’re ever going to be.
■ This should nudge us into thinking about how to use transportation networks not to turn places into new giant magnets for newcomers, but rather to make them better-integrated places for people to use their time more efficiently and have quicker access to the jobs, services, and amenities that improve the quality of life. 250,000 people may well be about to feel the pain of having those quality-of-life gains torn from their hands.
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