(Responding to an old post...)
Paul Corfield wrote:
On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:57:05 -0500, David of Broadway
wrote:
Although London's rail network has pretty wide coverage, it has limited
capacity in comparison to NYC's. Our trains are wider and longer and
most of our major trunk lines (and some of the minor ones, too) have
four tracks. Given how crowded our trains get, if we had to give up our
express tracks and shorten and narrow the trains, the buses would become
a lot more popular, by necessity.
I'm a tad taken aback by your comments on the relative capacities of
London's rail network vs NYC's. Now I'm certainly not an expert on your
subway or rail network but surely your rail network (not subway) is but
a mere shadow of London's?
By "rail" I was including subway/Underground.
But, including everything, you still might be right. It's difficult for
an outsider to get a good sense of your rail network.
From memory PATH is only twin bore into both WTC (as was) and 33rd
Street. Metro North is twin bore into Grand Central or is that 4 tracks?
Metro-North has four tracks along Park Avenue.
I think that LIRR and NJT into Penn Station is 4 tracks under the river.
NJT has only two, shared with Amtrak.
Here's a track map of the rail systems in the NYC region, excluding the
subway, PATH, and everything west of the Hudson:
http://www.richegreen.com/NYCTrackMapV3.pdf (an 8.7 MB file)
Now OK some of your trains are pretty long but overall frequencies and
distances covered are nothing like the density of service that we have
on networks like Southern, South West Trains or One from Liverpool
Street. I've observed Grand Central and Penn Stations in the rush hour
and certainly large volumes of people are shifted but it didn't feel on
the same scale as London's main line networks.
From the little I've seen in London, you're surely correct. Victoria
may be no busier than Penn, but we only have one other station similar
to Penn while you have lots more similar to Victoria!
I confess I don't know how many people are carried on LIRR lines that
terminate in Queens and Brooklyn.
Nor do I, I'm embarrassed to say. Since fares are the same to LIC and
Brooklyn as to Penn, and more trains go to Penn than to LIC or Brooklyn,
many passengers who might find the LIC and Brooklyn terminals useful
(it's easy to get to East Midtown from LIC and to Lower Manhattan from
Brooklyn) go to Penn anyway.
On the subway you do have much longer and bigger profile (than our tube
stock) trains and the benefit of express lines. In my (albeit limited)
experience of the NYC rush hour you get pretty high frequencies on
common sections of route served by multiple services but if you want a
particular letter / number then frequency drops noticeably compared to
almost all of London's tube service pattern.
Yes and no.
Where we have multiple services sharing a trunk, you have a single
service with multiple branches. I would argue that a single service in
NYC is more akin to a single branch in London. For instance, the
Central line would probably be treated as two routes in NYC, and the
Metropolitan would be at least three. The Northern would probably be
four, assuming current service patterns (which somewhat resemble our
service patterns on the 2 and 5, except that no 2's go to Dyre and only
a handful of select rush hour 5's go up the branch to 241; our south end
is a bit more complicated, with off-peak 5's terminating at Bowling
Green and lots of rush hour 5's going to Utica or New Lots rather than
Flatbush). And don't get me started on the District!
That said, your trains do tend to be more frequent than ours, it seems.
Especially off-peak. And some of our branches are fairly infrequent
-- I ride the B, for instance, which runs at about 6 tph all day except
for a brief period northbound in the AM rush and southbound in the PM
rush. I could also ride the Q, but I have to select one or the other in
advance, since they run on different lines in Manhattan.
One problem with express services is that they tend to dilute service to
local stations. Most of our expresses run on weekends, and a few even
run overnight!
I'm interested to get your feedback on what I've not noticed about NYC's
trains compared to ours here in London.
I think you've noticed quite a bit!
Also, most NYC neighborhoods not near the subway developed in the
automotive age. Most people in those neighborhoods use their cars for
all of their trips except into Manhattan. In those neighborhoods, the
only major demand for bus service is to the nearest subway station.
(And to nearby schools.) From what I've read here, London has a lot of
local travel by bus outside the central area.
I think we're sort of back with history here in that the rail and subway
networks are typically strongly radial links with little local traffic
(relative to flows into the centre) and virtually nothing offered for
orbital flows. Buses have always had a strong purpose given those gaps
in the rail network.
But my feeling is that the demand for local and orbital bus links is
much greater in London than in NYC. Car ownership and use is high in
parts of NYC not served by the subway.
In older times when we had less congestion many bus routes were very
much longer than today and lengthy radial journeys were also possible
into the suburbs or across the central area. Sadly this is now
relatively rare with few radial routes stretching from Zone 1 to beyond
Zone 2. There are more longer radial routes in South London that North
of the river - probably reflecting the influence of the tube network
north of the Thames.
We also have relatively few bus connections between the boroughs. There
are many routes running between Brooklyn and Queens (which does not
generally entail crossing a body of water) and between the Bronx and
Manhattan (which entails crossing the narrow Harlem River with its many
short bridges), but any other borough-to-borough trip involves a major
river crossing. We do have some -- the B39 and B51 between Manhattan
and Brooklyn, the S53 and S79 between Staten Island and Brooklyn (the
S93 is really just the S53 Limited), the M60, Q60, and Q101 between
Manhattan and Queens (also technically the Q102, which runs from Queens
into Roosevelt Island, formally part of Manhattan), and the Q44 and QBx1
between the Bronx and Queens -- as well as the (heavily subsidized)
express routes. But the vast majority of interborough trips are taken
on the subway.
You might find these links interesting:
http://www.nymtc.org/data_services/HBT.html
--
David of Broadway
New York, NY, USA