On Google Flights, when you search "san francisco" you can choose the San Francisco Bay Area region, which includes SFO, SJC and OAK. I fly into the Bay 3-5 times per year and am generally indifferent between SFO and OAK, but I never manage to find competitively-priced flights to OAK. The last time I was at OAK was 3+ years ago. (As a contrast, when going to DC, I regularly fly into DCA, BWI and IAD; those airports all do have competitively priced flights)
Southwest has gotten so expensive that OAK is rarely a cheap option anymore. RIP Southwest as a "low cost" airline.
Also the transit options to and from OAK are really sketchy during non-daylight hours. If my flight was arriving late in the evening I felt like I had to pay up for an Uber.
SF pausing trains overnight is probably good, since it leaves an overnight window for track maintenance (that New York can't do this is a big reason we have so many weekend shutdowns). In principle it should be easy to replace that capacity with buses, since congestion isn't a problem at night and you don't need the capacity of a full train.
(I think the way Berlin does it - stopping at 1am on weekdays and running all night weekends - is probably the best)
Not literally every line, but most systems will have some segments undergoing maintenance almost every night, yeah. In principle it's possible to try to reroute and still run partial service, but inconsistent unreliable rerouting isn't really much better than just having bus replacements for a few hours
What’s your estimate for how much faster NYC track maintenance could be if outsourced to a private company that didn’t have a union and was paid per-mile-fixed instead of by the hour? I know very little about what they do in NYC but knowing the MTA union and insane safety rules I wouldn’t be surprised if it could be sped up 10x.
So maintenance is split into two types: normal weekday night maintenance (when there's trains every 20 minutes and they work between them), and longer 7 or 55 hour windows (when they shut down the whole line for a night or a weekend). Even the 55 hour windows are much slower (e.g. Singapore manages 10-15km a night compared to 0.17km for a whole weekend in New York). This isn't purely efficiency - Singapore hires more crews and runs more intensely when they do run, so they get more out of the shutdown time (although they do also have significantly higher productivity per worker afaict). In fairness this isn't entirely about unions (although they are part of it), there's also a lot of issues with bad management and inconsistent budgets for the MTA.
The issue with the 24/7 runtimes though is that normal track cleaning/maintenance has to happen in the 20 minute windows between late night trains, which means they can't even bring in mechanized tools and have to do things by hand in short windows. That drives down efficiency by another order of magnitude (on top of the previous gap) and also means there's some tasks they just can't do.
The biggest issue from a rider perspective TBH isn't the cost, it's the frequent unpredictable shutdowns. New York is rich enough to pay the extra cost, but getting worse service and more shutdowns for it is grating.
There are a bunch of ferries on the Great Lakes, they just aren't that useful unless you're going from W. Michigan to E. Wisconsin.
Going from Mid-Michigan to Minneapolis: 9.5 hours via Ferry, 10.5 hours other Ferry, 9.5 hours driving. The ferry costs ~200 as well (round trip).
Going from W Michigan(One of the docks) to Minneapolis 7.5 hours vs 9 hours of driving, but only if the timing actually works for you of when it leaves. If it doesn't, you're overall slower. It departs at 10am/5pm from Michigan, so you're heavily restricted on departure time.
It's probably great if you live on the shore of the lake and want to go to the other shore (ignoring that they don't run in bad weather), but given where people live (SE MI, Mid-Michigan, Grand Rapids) and where they're going (Chicago, Minneapolis, some Wisco travel) it's an expensive form of transit not connecting departures to destinations.
The Jones Act should go, but if we do it won't lead to some ferry revival.
Part of your argument here is about the cost, and the entire point is that Jones Act makes every form of US shipping dramatically more expensive. The first order effect of repealing it would be, I assume, a dramatic reduction in ferry prices. The second order would be that it would make it worthwhile to either run current ferries faster (since cheaper operation gives you more headroom and speed = fuel cost in boating) or else to buy newer, upgraded ferries that can run faster for cheaper.
So the Jones act would most likely result in dramatically cheaper and at least marginally faster ferries. If those two things were enough to drive enough interest, it _might_ also result in increased service runs which goes towards addressing your point about timing/schedules.
It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's plausible since there simply are not large population centers where the Great Lakes are in the way when driving. Minneapolis is so far West and South that most trips aren't going to be longer, except for people leaving from Northern Michigan and that's not a lot of people.
The difference from Detroit to Minneapolis (the only 2 large cities with a Great Lake in the way) is 540 miles (straight line) vs 600 miles (ideal ferry position). But, the ideal ferry isn't optimally served by roads so it probably comes closer to like a 30 mile distance/avoiding Chicago traffic (but you have to wait for the ferry).
Yeah, more people would mean more ferries, but who is the hypothetical person that's served by this ferry? Lake Michigan isn't dividing large population centers, and that's before you account for stuff like "why would someone in W. Michigan go to E. Wisconsin (or vice versa)". Both states have substantial in-state recreation cultures of going Up North, a 2 hour ferry and then driving 4 hours up North isn't better than simply driving 4 hours Up North.
Speeds might come down, but google suggests the top speed worldwide for a car ferry currently (for a fast cat design) is 67mph. That's still 1.25ish hours, assuming instantly at top speed and no loading times (and costs almost as much for a car as the current ferries on Lake Michigan) which strongly suggests price and speed would not actually shift very much.
As to the rest of the Great Lakes, same kind of issue. Cleveland to Ontario? Barely shaves any distance. Toronto to Buffalo? Barely shaves any distance, and you still have to figure out customs on these. As for L:ake Superior: I'm fully on board with a ferry, provided we use to move more moose to the UP. Since the UP has like 10 people and Canada North of it has like 8 people, I don't think it'll support the traffic.
This is a solution to some problem, just none of the problems people in the Midwest are facing.
On free mass transit: I do think there is a world where free mass transit *could* work (and this is probably the world progressives are thinking of when they push for free transit?) - where public services are valued and funded, where homelessness is largely solved, where antisocial behavior is penalized or discouraged, and where public health is much better. Then you're maybe in a state where you can look at eliminating fares. But America today is stuck in a "can't have nice things" mode, so you need fares to fund the system and to deter unwanted behavior.
Re: motorcycles: bikes are about 50% as dangerous! ~12 fatalities per 100 million miles. Not clear to me if deaths per mile is always the right metric (bikes are of course much slower) but if the question is drive 5mi to work vs. bike 5mi to work, riding a bike is much riskier.
Re: free bus fares: many college towns do this, at least for the students (which in practice means anyone who looks like a student rides free, anyone who looks "sketchy" has to pay). Has the predicted effects on critical mass of positive ridership experience.
Re: trains and planes: I am always blown away by how "transit advocates" fail to see the obvious advantages of a vehicle that can travel 3-5x faster than a train, does not require miles of track, and can be routed to a variety of different destinations. Call me when the vactrains are ready though.
I imagine the riskiness of riding a bike depends very much on the available infrastructure, as well - if you're fully sharing the road with cars, then yeah, that's incredibly dangerous. If you're on bike trails and fully separated bike lanes, is that still risky? I would expect not?
Seattle fare payment really is a mess. When my wife and I visited, we took the train back from the airport. We bought ourselves each an ORCA card, filled it up with cash, then rushed to the train platform to catch the train. It was only after we got on the train that we realized there was nowhere to tap our card on. But the train had already left the station.
There was no turnstile on the path to the train, and no place to tap the card on the train platform, so we had assumed it had to have been on the trains themselves. Later on, we discovered that what we should have done was to *turn around* just before we climbed the stairs to the platform, and tap an easily-missable machine on the nearby wall.
Partly because this system is so easy to miss or screw up (and undoubtedly partly due to lefty anti-cop politics) Seattle’s replaced fare enforcement officers with “fare ambassadors” who don’t write tickets. Sure enough, we got talked to by one who politely helped us clear up our confusion and let us go on our way.
Sure, I was happy to not have to pay a fine. But I couldn’t help but feel like this just could have been avoided if they had just put a turnstile in the way. We were the best-case scenario, we actively wanted to pay our fare, and we still screwed it up. I expect sky-high fare evasion to be the norm there.
Australia bought automation to the ports to a degree, it took literally skulduggery and led to violent clashes, but, whilst the union ultimately won in court, they had to accept a new order and productivity was revolutionised:
I think you have bigger differences of opinion with Tyler Cowen than just congestion pricing (ha), but he repeatedly criticized NYC congestion pricing on both MR and in his Bloomberg column. Interesting to see how things have played out.
On bus fares and enforcement in a place like NYC with a subway network, it's also worth considering what share of transit trips might begin on a bus but then transfer to the subway (and vice versa), at which point riders hit a turnstile and then have to/should pay.
On at least some bus lines where the vast majority of riders transfer to (or from) the subway, it might speed up operations to have the subway turnstile serve as the payment point, and not worry about fare collection on the bus (which can help speed up the journey, reduce costs, etc). If the alternative is roving fare inspectors/safety officers, then maybe that logic can help prioritize which bus routes they focus on.
I think the comment about Ferries on the great lakes is wrong. There's is already one service - operating on the most obvious route. (https://www.lake-express.com/).
I'm not sure why the Jones act would prevent more - my guess would be that the distances and weather make fixed schedule service uncompetitive with driving. I'm not sure there's any trips that are significantly impeded by the lakes - other than crossing lake Michigan which there is a ferry for.
The exception is Ohio -> Ontario - which would relieve traffic in Detroit and is a corridor people likely want to travel - but then again I don't think these services would be limited by the Jones act?
Color me unconvinced by that Shinkansen-on-West-Coast map. Among other things the Redding-to-Eugene stretch is an entire Kyushu worth of mountainous wilderness with zero population centers no matter how you route it. Shifting the overlay further south to cover just Sacramento to San Diego is better but you run into the same issue TGV did, that the Central Valley just is not very worth connecting with HSR unless you choose an awkward route indeed.
Motorcycles aren't that much more dangerous than biking if you simply remove age 18-24 males from the cohort, driving drunk, and not wearing helmets. Plus, you can buy airbag vests and pants that make dying 10-100x rarer.
I ride both motorcycles and bicycles and I feel much more likely to die riding a bicycle on the street. In fact, I think riding a bicycle on the street is the most dangerous thing I've ever done and I'm technically a combat veteran and have jumped out of a perfectly good airplane.
> David Zipper: More evidence that transit improves public health: When a new rail station opened in Osaka, nearby residents' health expenditures fell ~$930 per capita over four years.
Let me guess, they’ve committed the classic fallacy of forgetting that people living longer is actually detrimental to the costs of healthcare because most costs are due to the elderly? The same fallacy has been used over and over to claim that smoking reduces the costs of healthcare.
> Is collection of tickets so bad that you cannot pay the hourly cost for a police officer to write the tickets, even if you discount the incentive effects?
You also need to kick people out at the next stop if they don’t have a ticket and those without ID + without money to pay on the spot need to be taken to the police station for identification, which means a cop has to be part of the enforcement team as well. Thats how it’s done in Prague and it works well.
> Palmer Lucky: lmao, Caltrain's tweet claiming their trains are "100% Billionaire-free" got deleted after me and a bunch of other Caltrain-riding billionaires responded
Palmer (I suspect) is only riding it because Silicon Valley doesn’t have congestion pricing pricing so it saves him time vs driving. Add congestion pricing and he’ll be in the back of a giant SUV instead.
Ditto for anyone who can afford a Tesla, as FSD is now a 100% replacement for human driving, making the whole “I can read a book on the train!” argument a relic of the past.
What's your model of how life expectancy correlating with costs would affect the Osaka rail? Is the speculation that younger people moved into the area changing the city demographics?
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/traffic-and-transit-roundup-1
On Google Flights, when you search "san francisco" you can choose the San Francisco Bay Area region, which includes SFO, SJC and OAK. I fly into the Bay 3-5 times per year and am generally indifferent between SFO and OAK, but I never manage to find competitively-priced flights to OAK. The last time I was at OAK was 3+ years ago. (As a contrast, when going to DC, I regularly fly into DCA, BWI and IAD; those airports all do have competitively priced flights)
There as of now to my knowledge no direct flights between OAK and any NYC airport any day of the week.
Southwest has gotten so expensive that OAK is rarely a cheap option anymore. RIP Southwest as a "low cost" airline.
Also the transit options to and from OAK are really sketchy during non-daylight hours. If my flight was arriving late in the evening I felt like I had to pay up for an Uber.
Yep, came here to say the same thing. I routinely search SFO + 50 mile radius and OAK (let alone SJC) just isn't competitive for the flights I want.
SF pausing trains overnight is probably good, since it leaves an overnight window for track maintenance (that New York can't do this is a big reason we have so many weekend shutdowns). In principle it should be easy to replace that capacity with buses, since congestion isn't a problem at night and you don't need the capacity of a full train.
(I think the way Berlin does it - stopping at 1am on weekdays and running all night weekends - is probably the best)
Is there really so much track maintenance that every line needs to be shut down every night? That seems like it's own issue.
Not literally every line, but most systems will have some segments undergoing maintenance almost every night, yeah. In principle it's possible to try to reroute and still run partial service, but inconsistent unreliable rerouting isn't really much better than just having bus replacements for a few hours
(this isn't NYC specific, every system does this)
What’s your estimate for how much faster NYC track maintenance could be if outsourced to a private company that didn’t have a union and was paid per-mile-fixed instead of by the hour? I know very little about what they do in NYC but knowing the MTA union and insane safety rules I wouldn’t be surprised if it could be sped up 10x.
So maintenance is split into two types: normal weekday night maintenance (when there's trains every 20 minutes and they work between them), and longer 7 or 55 hour windows (when they shut down the whole line for a night or a weekend). Even the 55 hour windows are much slower (e.g. Singapore manages 10-15km a night compared to 0.17km for a whole weekend in New York). This isn't purely efficiency - Singapore hires more crews and runs more intensely when they do run, so they get more out of the shutdown time (although they do also have significantly higher productivity per worker afaict). In fairness this isn't entirely about unions (although they are part of it), there's also a lot of issues with bad management and inconsistent budgets for the MTA.
The issue with the 24/7 runtimes though is that normal track cleaning/maintenance has to happen in the 20 minute windows between late night trains, which means they can't even bring in mechanized tools and have to do things by hand in short windows. That drives down efficiency by another order of magnitude (on top of the previous gap) and also means there's some tasks they just can't do.
The biggest issue from a rider perspective TBH isn't the cost, it's the frequent unpredictable shutdowns. New York is rich enough to pay the extra cost, but getting worse service and more shutdowns for it is grating.
There are a bunch of ferries on the Great Lakes, they just aren't that useful unless you're going from W. Michigan to E. Wisconsin.
Going from Mid-Michigan to Minneapolis: 9.5 hours via Ferry, 10.5 hours other Ferry, 9.5 hours driving. The ferry costs ~200 as well (round trip).
Going from W Michigan(One of the docks) to Minneapolis 7.5 hours vs 9 hours of driving, but only if the timing actually works for you of when it leaves. If it doesn't, you're overall slower. It departs at 10am/5pm from Michigan, so you're heavily restricted on departure time.
It's probably great if you live on the shore of the lake and want to go to the other shore (ignoring that they don't run in bad weather), but given where people live (SE MI, Mid-Michigan, Grand Rapids) and where they're going (Chicago, Minneapolis, some Wisco travel) it's an expensive form of transit not connecting departures to destinations.
The Jones Act should go, but if we do it won't lead to some ferry revival.
Part of your argument here is about the cost, and the entire point is that Jones Act makes every form of US shipping dramatically more expensive. The first order effect of repealing it would be, I assume, a dramatic reduction in ferry prices. The second order would be that it would make it worthwhile to either run current ferries faster (since cheaper operation gives you more headroom and speed = fuel cost in boating) or else to buy newer, upgraded ferries that can run faster for cheaper.
So the Jones act would most likely result in dramatically cheaper and at least marginally faster ferries. If those two things were enough to drive enough interest, it _might_ also result in increased service runs which goes towards addressing your point about timing/schedules.
It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's plausible since there simply are not large population centers where the Great Lakes are in the way when driving. Minneapolis is so far West and South that most trips aren't going to be longer, except for people leaving from Northern Michigan and that's not a lot of people.
The difference from Detroit to Minneapolis (the only 2 large cities with a Great Lake in the way) is 540 miles (straight line) vs 600 miles (ideal ferry position). But, the ideal ferry isn't optimally served by roads so it probably comes closer to like a 30 mile distance/avoiding Chicago traffic (but you have to wait for the ferry).
Yeah, more people would mean more ferries, but who is the hypothetical person that's served by this ferry? Lake Michigan isn't dividing large population centers, and that's before you account for stuff like "why would someone in W. Michigan go to E. Wisconsin (or vice versa)". Both states have substantial in-state recreation cultures of going Up North, a 2 hour ferry and then driving 4 hours up North isn't better than simply driving 4 hours Up North.
Speeds might come down, but google suggests the top speed worldwide for a car ferry currently (for a fast cat design) is 67mph. That's still 1.25ish hours, assuming instantly at top speed and no loading times (and costs almost as much for a car as the current ferries on Lake Michigan) which strongly suggests price and speed would not actually shift very much.
As to the rest of the Great Lakes, same kind of issue. Cleveland to Ontario? Barely shaves any distance. Toronto to Buffalo? Barely shaves any distance, and you still have to figure out customs on these. As for L:ake Superior: I'm fully on board with a ferry, provided we use to move more moose to the UP. Since the UP has like 10 people and Canada North of it has like 8 people, I don't think it'll support the traffic.
This is a solution to some problem, just none of the problems people in the Midwest are facing.
On free mass transit: I do think there is a world where free mass transit *could* work (and this is probably the world progressives are thinking of when they push for free transit?) - where public services are valued and funded, where homelessness is largely solved, where antisocial behavior is penalized or discouraged, and where public health is much better. Then you're maybe in a state where you can look at eliminating fares. But America today is stuck in a "can't have nice things" mode, so you need fares to fund the system and to deter unwanted behavior.
Re: motorcycles: bikes are about 50% as dangerous! ~12 fatalities per 100 million miles. Not clear to me if deaths per mile is always the right metric (bikes are of course much slower) but if the question is drive 5mi to work vs. bike 5mi to work, riding a bike is much riskier.
Re: free bus fares: many college towns do this, at least for the students (which in practice means anyone who looks like a student rides free, anyone who looks "sketchy" has to pay). Has the predicted effects on critical mass of positive ridership experience.
Re: trains and planes: I am always blown away by how "transit advocates" fail to see the obvious advantages of a vehicle that can travel 3-5x faster than a train, does not require miles of track, and can be routed to a variety of different destinations. Call me when the vactrains are ready though.
The California HSR funding might have been better spent just improving rail connections to all the airports in the SF, San Jose, and LA areas.
I imagine the riskiness of riding a bike depends very much on the available infrastructure, as well - if you're fully sharing the road with cars, then yeah, that's incredibly dangerous. If you're on bike trails and fully separated bike lanes, is that still risky? I would expect not?
I think the health benefits of cycling are strong enough to easily overcome the extra risk of injury.
Seattle fare payment really is a mess. When my wife and I visited, we took the train back from the airport. We bought ourselves each an ORCA card, filled it up with cash, then rushed to the train platform to catch the train. It was only after we got on the train that we realized there was nowhere to tap our card on. But the train had already left the station.
There was no turnstile on the path to the train, and no place to tap the card on the train platform, so we had assumed it had to have been on the trains themselves. Later on, we discovered that what we should have done was to *turn around* just before we climbed the stairs to the platform, and tap an easily-missable machine on the nearby wall.
Partly because this system is so easy to miss or screw up (and undoubtedly partly due to lefty anti-cop politics) Seattle’s replaced fare enforcement officers with “fare ambassadors” who don’t write tickets. Sure enough, we got talked to by one who politely helped us clear up our confusion and let us go on our way.
Sure, I was happy to not have to pay a fine. But I couldn’t help but feel like this just could have been avoided if they had just put a turnstile in the way. We were the best-case scenario, we actively wanted to pay our fare, and we still screwed it up. I expect sky-high fare evasion to be the norm there.
Australia bought automation to the ports to a degree, it took literally skulduggery and led to violent clashes, but, whilst the union ultimately won in court, they had to accept a new order and productivity was revolutionised:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-14/waterfront-dispute-pitted-workers-against-each-other-recruits/105007704 (somewhat partial take that gives a good gist of the political will and corporate skullduggery involved).
I think you have bigger differences of opinion with Tyler Cowen than just congestion pricing (ha), but he repeatedly criticized NYC congestion pricing on both MR and in his Bloomberg column. Interesting to see how things have played out.
Zvi's point: private train, the Brightline, is lovely and efficient. We should have more private trains.
I don't totally disagree because I think we could use more trains in general, but man, the Brightline is a bad example to use. It is literally the deadliest train line in the US: https://www.wlrn.org/killer-train-brightline-death-toll-surpasses-180-but-safeguards-are-still-lacking?utm_campaign=npr&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews&fbclid=IwY2xjawLmDsBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHjR0tcmHu2SseI07tXsbYSljjqrs-Gf0yjcZ7uaUwcrvZ_UdV0V52uFMuNzG_aem_uWHH2MPogCuQXgM8vpyjKw
It's also not doing well financially.
We need Anton Chigurh to see to the disruptive and intemperate on buses. Then ridership would go up.
On bus fares and enforcement in a place like NYC with a subway network, it's also worth considering what share of transit trips might begin on a bus but then transfer to the subway (and vice versa), at which point riders hit a turnstile and then have to/should pay.
On at least some bus lines where the vast majority of riders transfer to (or from) the subway, it might speed up operations to have the subway turnstile serve as the payment point, and not worry about fare collection on the bus (which can help speed up the journey, reduce costs, etc). If the alternative is roving fare inspectors/safety officers, then maybe that logic can help prioritize which bus routes they focus on.
I think the comment about Ferries on the great lakes is wrong. There's is already one service - operating on the most obvious route. (https://www.lake-express.com/).
I'm not sure why the Jones act would prevent more - my guess would be that the distances and weather make fixed schedule service uncompetitive with driving. I'm not sure there's any trips that are significantly impeded by the lakes - other than crossing lake Michigan which there is a ferry for.
The exception is Ohio -> Ontario - which would relieve traffic in Detroit and is a corridor people likely want to travel - but then again I don't think these services would be limited by the Jones act?
Color me unconvinced by that Shinkansen-on-West-Coast map. Among other things the Redding-to-Eugene stretch is an entire Kyushu worth of mountainous wilderness with zero population centers no matter how you route it. Shifting the overlay further south to cover just Sacramento to San Diego is better but you run into the same issue TGV did, that the Central Valley just is not very worth connecting with HSR unless you choose an awkward route indeed.
Northern California <-> Southern Oregon is pretty, though!
Motorcycles aren't that much more dangerous than biking if you simply remove age 18-24 males from the cohort, driving drunk, and not wearing helmets. Plus, you can buy airbag vests and pants that make dying 10-100x rarer.
I ride both motorcycles and bicycles and I feel much more likely to die riding a bicycle on the street. In fact, I think riding a bicycle on the street is the most dangerous thing I've ever done and I'm technically a combat veteran and have jumped out of a perfectly good airplane.
> David Zipper: More evidence that transit improves public health: When a new rail station opened in Osaka, nearby residents' health expenditures fell ~$930 per capita over four years.
Let me guess, they’ve committed the classic fallacy of forgetting that people living longer is actually detrimental to the costs of healthcare because most costs are due to the elderly? The same fallacy has been used over and over to claim that smoking reduces the costs of healthcare.
> Is collection of tickets so bad that you cannot pay the hourly cost for a police officer to write the tickets, even if you discount the incentive effects?
You also need to kick people out at the next stop if they don’t have a ticket and those without ID + without money to pay on the spot need to be taken to the police station for identification, which means a cop has to be part of the enforcement team as well. Thats how it’s done in Prague and it works well.
> Palmer Lucky: lmao, Caltrain's tweet claiming their trains are "100% Billionaire-free" got deleted after me and a bunch of other Caltrain-riding billionaires responded
Palmer (I suspect) is only riding it because Silicon Valley doesn’t have congestion pricing pricing so it saves him time vs driving. Add congestion pricing and he’ll be in the back of a giant SUV instead.
Ditto for anyone who can afford a Tesla, as FSD is now a 100% replacement for human driving, making the whole “I can read a book on the train!” argument a relic of the past.
What's your model of how life expectancy correlating with costs would affect the Osaka rail? Is the speculation that younger people moved into the area changing the city demographics?