Bad Public Transit in the Third World
There’s sometimes a stereotype that in poor countries with low car ownership, alternatives to the car are flourishing. I saw a post on Mastodon making this premise, and pointed out already in comments that this is not really true. This is a more detailed version of what I said in 500 characters. In short, in most of the third world, non-car transportation is bad, and nearly all ridership (on jitneys and buses) is out of poverty, as is most walking. While car ownership is low, the elites who do own cars dominate local affairs, and therefore cities are car-dominated and not at all walkable, even as 90%+ of the population does not own a car.
What’s more, the developing countries that do manage to build good public transportation don’t stay developing for long. The same development model of Japan, the East Asian Tigers, and now China has built both rail-oriented cities and high economic growth, to the point that Japan and the Tigers are fully developed, and China is a solidly middle-income economy. The sort of places that stay poor, or get stuck in a middle-income trap, also tend to have stagnant urban rail networks, and so grow more auto-oriented over time.
The situation in Southeast Asia
With the exception of Singapore, nowhere in Southeast Asia is public transit good. What’s more, construction costs have been high for elevated lines and very high for underground ones, slowing down the construction of metro systems.
In Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, motorization is high and public transit usage is weak. Paul Barter’s thesis details how both cities got this way, in comparison with the more transit-oriented model used in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The thesis also predicts that the poorer megacities of Southeast Asia – Jakarta and Manila – will follow the auto-oriented path as they develop, which has indeed happened in the 13 years since it was written.
The situation in those cities is, to be fair, murky. Manila has a large urban rail under construction right now, with average to above average costs for elevated lines and high ones for subways. But the system it has today consists of four lines, two branded light rail, one branded MRT, and one commuter line. In 2019, the six-month ridership on the system was 162 million. A total of 324 million in a metro area the size of Manila is extraordinarily low: the administrative Metro Manila region has 13.5 million people, and the urban or metropolitan area according to both Citypopulation.de and Demographia is 24-26 million. On the strictest definition of Metro Manila, this is 24 trips per person per year; on the wider ones, it is about 13, similar to San Diego or Portland and only somewhat better than Atlanta.
Jakarta is in the same situation of flux. It recently opened a half-underground MRT line at fairly high cost, and is modernizing its commuter rail network along Japanese lines, using second-hand Japanese equipment. Commuter rail ridership was 1.2 million a day last year, or around 360 million a year, already higher than before corona; the MRT had 20 million riders last year, and an airport link had 1.5 million in 2018. This isn’t everything – there’s also a short light metro called LRT for which I can’t find numbers – but it wouldn’t be more than second-order. This is 400 million annual rail trips, in a region of 32 million people.
The future of these cities is larger versions of Bangkok. Thailand is sufficiently middle-income that we can see directly how its transport system evolves as it leaves poverty, and the results are not good. Bus ridership is high, but it’s rapidly falling as anyone who can afford a car gets one; a JICA report about MRT development puts the region’s modal split at 5% MRT, 36% bus, and the rest private (PDF-p. 69) – and the income of bus riders is significantly lower than that of drivers (PDF-p. 229), whereas MRT riders are closer to drivers.
Even wealthier than Bangkok, with the same auto-oriented system, is Kuala Lumpur. There, the modal split is about 8% bus, 7% train, and the rest private. This is worse than San Francisco and the major cities of Canada and Australia, let alone New York or any large European city. The national modal split in England, France, Germany, and Spain is about 16% – the first three countries’ figures predate corona, but in Spain they’re from 2021, with suppressed public transport ridership. Note that rail ridership per capita is healthier in Kuala Lumpur than in Jakarta or Manila – all rail lines combined are 760,000 riders per day, say 228 million per year, in a region of maybe 7 million people. This is better than a no-transit American city like San Diego, but worse than a bad-transit one like Chicago or Washington, where the modal split is about the same but there is no longer the kind of poverty that is common in Malaysia, let alone in Indonesia, and therefore if people ride the trains it’s because they get them to their city center jobs and not because they’re poor.
Even in Singapore, the best example out there of a transit-oriented rich city, it took until very recently for MRT coverage to be good enough that people willingly depend on it; it only reached NUS after I graduated. In the 1990s, the epitome of middle-class Singaporean materialism was described as owning the Five Cs, of which one was a car; traffic suppression, a Paul Barter describes, has centered fees on cars, much more car purchase than car use (despite the world-famous congestion pricing system), and thus to those wealthy enough to afford cars, they’re convenient in ways they are not in Paris, Berlin, or Stockholm.
The situation in Africa
African countries between the Sahara and the Kalahari are all very poor, with low car ownership. However, they are thoroughly car-dominated.
From the outside, it’s fascinating to see how the better-off countries in that region, like Nigeria, are already imitating Southeast Asia. Malaysia overregulated its jitneys out of existence because they were messy and this bothered elites, and because it wanted to create an internal market for its state-owned automakers. Nigeria is doing the same, on the former grounds; to the extent it hasn’t happened despite years of trying, it’s because the state is too weak to do more than harass the drivers and users of the system.
It’s notable that the Lagos discourse about the evils of the danfo – they are noisy, they are polluting, they drive like maniacs – there is little attention to how cars create all the same problems, except at larger scale per passenger served. The local notables drive (or are driven); the people who they scorn as unwashed, overly fecund, criminal masses ride the danfo. Thanks to aggressive domination by cars and inattention to the needs of the non-driving majority, Lagos’s car ownership is high for how poor it is – one source from 2017 says 5 million cars in the state, another from 2021 says 6.5 million vehicles between the state and Kano State. The denominator population in the latter source is 27 million officially, but unofficially likely more; 200 vehicles per 1,000 people is plausible for Lagos, which to be clear is not much less than New York or Paris, on an order of magnitude lower GDP per capita. Tokyo took until about 1970 to reach 100 vehicles per 1,000 people, at which point Japan had almost fully converged with American GDP per capita.
This is not specific to Lagos. A cousin who spent some time in Kampala told me of the hierarchy on the roads: pedestrians fear motorcycles, motorcycles fear cars, cars fear trucks. There is no pedestrian infrastructure to speak of; a rapid transit system is still a dream, to the point that a crayon proposal that spread on Twitter made local media. That the vast majority of Ugandans don’t own cars doesn’t matter; Kampala remains dominated by the few who do.
Transit and development
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the sort of developing countries that build successful urban rail systems don’t stay poor for long. Part of it is that public transportation is good for economic development, but that’s not most of it – the United States manages to be rich without it except in a handful of cities. Rather, I suspect the reason has to do with state capacity.
More specifically, the reason cities with 100-200 cars per 1,000 people are thoroughly dominated by cars is that those 10-20% drivers (or people who are driven) are the elites. Their elite status can come from any source – passive business income, landlordism, active business income, skilled professional work – but usually it tilts toward the traditional, i.e. passive. These groups tend to be incredibly anti-developmental: they own small businesses, sometimes actively and sometimes passively, and resent being made redundant through economies of scale. India has problems with economic dwarfism and informality, and this is typical of poor countries; if anything, India is better than most at developing a handful of big businesses in high-value added industries.
The upshot is that the sort of people who drive, and especially the sort of drivers who are powerful enough to effect local changes to get incremental upgrades to roads at the expense of non-drivers, are usually anti-developmental classes. The East Asian developmental states (and Singapore and Hong Kong, which share many characteristics with them) clamped down on such classes hard, on either nationalist or socialist grounds; Japan, both Koreas, and both Chinas engaged in land reform, with characteristic violence in the two socialist states and without it but still with forcible purchase in the three capitalist states. The same sort of state that can eliminate landlordism can also, as a matter of capital formation, clamp down on consumption and encourage personal savings, producing atypically low levels of motorization well into middle-income status. Singapore, whose elite consumption centers vacations out of the country, has managed to do so even as a high-income country – and even more normal Tokyo and Seoul have much higher rail usage and lower car usage than their closest Western analog, New York.
India is in many ways anti-developmental, but it does manage to grow. Its anti-developmentalism is anti-urban and NIMBY, but it is capable of building infrastructure. Its metro program has problems with high construction costs (but Southeast Asia’s are generally worse) and lack of integration with other modes such as commuter rail, which the middle class denigrates as only befitting poor people; but the Delhi Metro had 5.5 million daily riders just before corona, slightly behind New York in a slightly larger metro area, perhaps a better comparison than Jakarta and Manila’s San Diego.
It’s the slower-growing developing countries that are not managing to even build the systems India has, let alone East Asia. They don’t have high car use, but only because they are poor, and in practice, they are thoroughly car-dominated, and everyone who doesn’t have a car wants one. A rich country really is not one where even the poor have cars but where even the rich use public transportation – and those countries aren’t rich and don’t grow at rates that will make them rich.
Pedestrian Observations 
Kuala Lumpur did have different tickets for everything until late in 2011. So 2014 data is probably still going to be suppressed due to that to be fair. I’d expect it to be healthier now.
My ridership link to 2016-8 doesn’t show much improvement, even with the MRT opening.
My own limited experience with Bangkok MRT drove home the importance of network effects. Basically, the problem is transit there just doesn’t go anywhere. I can’t speculate about the exact explanation for this–limited state capacity? Runaway elites? Honestly, as a rider, it didn’t seem like a service targeted to the lower classes–if anything it felt like a Potemkin subway, designed to seem luxurious to passengers, but just not functional for actually getting anywhere that wasn’t the mall; like more of an elite folly or a prestige line than something that might actually connect residents to employment or entertainment. Combine this with how aggressively pedestrian-hostile the city is, and it’s obvious that you just can’t grow this system one line at a time, it simply won’t work due to roundabout pathing and how far you’re dropped from your destination. At one point we wound up taking a river boat (very hot, occasionally splashed with sewage) just because it would save an hour over trying to detour to the subway.
Of course cars are a status symbol, and I can’t speak to the bus network (wasn’t even going to try as a tourist). But I cannot imagine anybody in that environment who had both the need to commute to anything like a center and the means to do so by private vehicle choosing anything else.
That does raise another question though–being not at all familiar with the jobs geography of the cities under discussion–how big of a role does a more diffuse job market, or employment focused more on local neighborhoods, play in preventing the implementation of a clearly envisioned transit network?
“Honestly, as a rider, it didn’t seem like a service targeted to the lower classes–if anything it felt like a Potemkin subway, designed to seem luxurious to passengers, but just not functional for actually getting anywhere that wasn’t the mall; like more of an elite folly or a prestige line than something that might actually connect residents to employment or entertainment.”
Very astute observation. But I want to add one thing: Retail, and thus the mall, is an important part of Bangkok’s economy. And since most factories have already moved out of Bangkok proper, the malls are job centers.
And to be honest, the wealth and political clout of mall owners in Thailand cannot be overstated. If not for the malls, the lines won’t even get built. The golden line is for Iconsiam mall and the purple line is for Central Westgate. In other words, the malls cause the rail to get built, instead of planners prioritizing the malls.
Most of the third world cities we’re talking about here are so large (in population and population density) that even if everyone there could afford a car, most won’t be able to drive a car because there won’t be space on the roads for them. And it seems likely that construction of additional roads will be limited due to the massive displacement that would be needed. So no, there won’t be US-level driving in these cities.
Any reason to think that we won’t just see massive “urban renewal” like we did in the U.S. in the mid-20th century? After all, “one more lane” is still the mindset amongst most Americans, certainly among the only-drives elite. It’s a depressing possibility, but “it’ll be different this time” is a mindset that everyone everywhere is susceptible to. Especially given that car ownership and promulgation of private spaces is still considered a major signification of wealth and development, I don’t see why we can’t expect at least some level of auto-centric sprawl in places like Lagos or Nairobi.
Yeah, these cities are enormous, and the one more lane mentality in the United States is in greenfield areas and small cities, not New York. Los Angeles is widening freeways but rarely, since it’s that expensive to do this in such a large metropolitan region.
Sure, but NYC and LA aren’t growing anything like e.g. Lagos; the elites in these cities mostly drive, too. And I’d be thrilled to hear any evidence to the contrary, but do we have any reason to believe that elites in large third world cities don’t, in at least some corner of their minds, think cars are the ultimate status symbol? The examples from SE Asia suggest the opposite.
Certainly, in the developed world, pure car-centric infrastructure has lost its sheen, and these developing cities will need to build SOME road infrastructure, but Lagos is already working on an elevated highway, and its metro is, so far, diesels. Make of that what you will.
The LA area has about 10 times as much freeway per capita as Lagos (and LA’s freeway is much higher quality). Look at a map of Lagos and tell me where exactly you are are going to put 9 times its current length, and all the massive interchanges needed to connect them. I don’t think it’s reasonably possible. And the difficulties will get even worse with time – Lagos’ population is growing fast while LA’s is stagnant.
Cars are the status symbol of the middle and upper middle class. At the elite level everyone can afford a new Ferrari and Rolls Royce every month, scrapping the old one if they felt like it, so your nice car won’t impress anyone. (I don’t think there is enough supply to do that, but at least in theory everyone has that kind of money). At the middle class level though a car is an expense purchase that you can use to show off as everybody knows how much they cost, and so can be impressed that you managed to afford a nice one – and it is just possible to stay on the roller rcoaster of replacing your car every few years.
The elite still have expensive cars, but it isn’t to impress their peers. It can sometimes impress their middle class friends.
@Eric2 Again, I’m not saying Lagos needs no new roadway infrastructure; that’d be patently absurd, given the economic convergence space it has to work with. I am saying that the priorities seem to be suspect, already, and more wealth seems unlikely to bias physical development towards more efficient uses of infrastructure development as it accumulates.
@Henry Miller. Sure, but the elites will still want nice roads to drive or be driven in their cars on. Being a member of the elite will remain desirable for members of the middle class, and if car ownership and a car-based lifestyle becomes identified with it, then you end up with a middle class that wants cars, too. So on and so forth on down the economic pyramid, until all but the most destitute have cars and therefore want more car infrastructure, i.e., the American scenario.
I don’t mean to seem alarmist or otherwise dramatic, but we’ve seen this pattern happen before. The stakes have always been very high, and now are too high to tolerate repeating the same pattern of mistakes.
Pure car-centric infrastructure might have lost its sheen in the developed world but at least in the United States, the Right is still opposed to mass transit on culture war issues and there is no evidence most Americans are going to give up driving everywhere or live in more dense, walkable and transit friendly places for a variety of reasons.
CDU is running in the Berlin state election repeat on opposition to parking reduction.
Unlike people in Los Angeles, many people in Lagos do not have good lawyers, political clout and legal title to their land. Bulldozing them is gonna be more like 1950s America than like 2020s America…
The one-more-lane mentality is still strong in the US sunbelt, where the cities are still growing. Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, etc. are not ‘small cities.’ Freeway building in urban California and the Northeast may be dead because it’s too expensive, but in rapidly growing cities like Seattle and Austin it is alive & well. Austin has a single project to widen the its downtown freeway that is the same cost as its entire transit capital plan.
Ignoring costs for a moment, but isn’t the difference here that HK and Sing basically started transit development much earlier than the other cities? Also when HK was a colony vehicle ownership was not massively high as it was not that simple to get across the border plus the Zhuhai Macau link did not exist. I was there 1995 to 2001 and only bought a second hand car after a couple of years when kids came along. Having said that I commuted to work by a combination of bus and MRT and/or cycled (younger, fitter and stupider) for the 6 years I was there. The car was a luxury at the weekends. Sing of course made car ownership something else. HK with its heavy bus and minibus network that linked into the MTR and KCR was and is an excellent system, it went almost everywhere and any gaps could be filled with a Taxi ride. Also both are city states with very well defined land boundaries and very centralized planning systems. The other cities you mention would appear to be coming to Mass Transit late in life and their systems may be more constrained because of this? Or by the time a line is built you need 5 others due to continued population growth so the informal transport network remains key to folk getting around, and maybe the initial line is no longer the line of most critical need hence the lower than anticipated ridership as land is rezoned etc?. On of the greatest problems are the megacities that keep on sucking money, resources and people into centralized locations. I sometimes get the feeling that transit systems are built as a way of saying look were doing something even if its a Band Aid for a broken leg. Even Istanbul for example, the ever increasing system is barely making a dent in moving folk. Travelling into the CIty from the Buycekmece area even after the advent of the MetroBUs system can take hours as car ownership increases and folk don’t want to stand nose to nose with 200 other folk. Not sure what the answer is but its an interesting philosophical discussion and I’m sure there must be research on this…..
A bit of push-back against the Japan narrative there. Most of the core surface urban rail network (and the first lines of Osaka and Tokyo’s subways) is built pre-land reform by Private railway companies aggressive using Land-readjustment projects to get the land and to replot it especially around the stations. LR projects are effectively joint ventures in Japan. Japan had very strong class divisions pre-land reform, but local landowner-entrepreneurs were very pro-development. Indeed its local businessmen who stop the bureaucracy from implementing a Green Belt in the 1960’s (bullet dodged there) as they are the backbone of the urban LDP.
Indeed I’d argue that Japan was very lucky to have 1945-68 an era where the local real estate developer had the edge over the Planner bureaucrat in urban policymaking. By the time they do a proper zoning law in 1968 an urban TOD vernacular had matured enough that planners stop trying to make Kanto into Postwar Exurban England. Not that there weren’t costs, but for transport policy it worked wonders. And that leaked into Japan’s neighborhood (Taiwan and Korea especially).
Of course things are different, lots of developing countries don’t have as strong property rights and corporate organisational forms as Japan pre-war* and more cars. That said I do think more could be learned from the experience of Japanese private surface rail systems in the 20th century, the focus on the catenary EMU as the core infrastructure, the use of co-operative land pooling, station commercialisation etc.
* I am aware that sounds ridiculous given 1937-45 but you don’t engage in mad hyper-violent campaigns of world conquest without being functional in your dysfunction.
Sorry misposted, this should be a separate thread!
> the use of co-operative land pooling
Japan’s, and to lesser extent Korea’s and Taiwan’s, success with land readjustment hasn’t gone unnoticed, and there have been attempts to spread it, both by Japan, and NGOs.
However, from what I gather, it’s mostly successful in still pretty poor countries, where the local landowners are extremely pro-development. Once there is an entrenched “anti-developmental class” it’s hard to get the buy in necessary for land readjustment.
While land readjustment is most associated with Japan, it originated in Europe hundreds of years before Japan had any land that didn’t technically belong to the Emperor. However, land readjustment did not find continued success in Europe, probably because not enough landowners want development. And the anti-development shift happened when Europe was much poorer than it is today.
Europe lacks private LR in the way the East Asian’s do it. Could you imagine DB or SNCF doing what Tokyu’s doing right now in Shibuya.
Also Edo Japanese land did not belong to the Emperor. Pre-1871 Land reforms there were intense restrictions on land usage prioritising Samurai privileges and separation in cities, heritidary sucession in status/resources and rice cultivation in the countryside. Rights also varied extremely across Japan given the 200 domains and the strong place of customary law. Samurai in the Edo period did not “own” law they had hereditary stipends paid out of taxes.
LR has died down in Japan more because a lot of the replotting urban land to modern conditions has happened and space demands are falling with the population. (I tried and failed to find good statistics on this).
It’s not just about YIMBYism and NIMBYism. Landlords are anti-developmental in much more pervasive ways. In European history, this can be seen in the politics of the English gentry in the 18th and 19th century, with its desire for protective tariffs that starved the commoners and indifference to any governance reform. The German landlord class was more developmental to an extent, but its main national project was starting a series of wars that led to the destruction of the state, much like the Japanese military culture that it inspired. In the US, there was practically no landlordism in the North, but the South was governed by slaveowners and then by landlords whose land was worked by sharecroppers, and that class opposed any kind of economic development (e.g. the Confederate constitution banned internal improvements); the South only began converging with Northern incomes after a combination of federal transfers and the political destruction of the rural magnates through one-person-one-vote civil rights rulings.
Oh East Elbian Junkers were very much into protective tariffs and opposed to industry.
Well at least opposed to industry in their area. They were surprisingly tolerant of Krupp recruiting away their serfs….
Japan was also helped by not having a bunch of activists and reformers that thought it was weird that private railway companies also owned department stores, supermarkets, and mass entertainment venues like sports teams. Some of the trolley and interurban companies were also involved in real estate, electrical power, and amusement parks but this really freaked out Americans of the early 20th century and they passed laws against it. I try to explain the Japanese private railway companies as imagine the LIRR also owned the New York Mets, the Knicks, Macy’s, and a chain of supermarkets located near every LIRR station. Many Americans seem to find this distasteful for inchoate reasons no matter what their politics are.
Note that the US was like this in the middle of the 20th century. When it involved infrastructure it was ended by anti-trust enforcement (e.g. streetcar and power companies were split), but in pure corporate America it stayed, with a bunch of conglomerates making a lot of different products in different industries surviving to the 1970s-80. This was replaced by a focus on core competencies in which a company should make itself more legible to shareholders by only focusing on one industry and spinning off the rest to independent firms. Japan has only begun to undergo this process, and overall its corporate culture still resembles that of midcentury America, with about the same productivity.
Conglomerates don’t always work but coupling transportation services with real estate development and commerce/mass entertainment does make a certain amount of sense.
Japanese private rail actually was under pressure to be nationalised during the war from the military/”reform” bureaucrats just like 1907 had nationalised most of the trunk network into what became JNR. There were substantial mergers most of which were reversed by the occupation authorities. And had the Japanese Socialist party ever come to power they probably would have at least tried nationalisation (but they were pointedly not a party interested in governance).
I think the thing that really killed off private rail in the US was the zoning system. Unless you have a TOD permissive zoning system and company law private railways will go bankrupt. By the time Japan gets a zoning system in 1968 the TOD vernacular has matured enough that the state implements it as well (e.g. see some of the major Danchi such as Tokiwadaira or Senri New Town etc).
You do see strategies suggesting the core-competency strategy might happen (Tokyu removed railways from the Holding company title). But I think the station’s role as a physical hub makes the rail-real estate-retail core pretty durable. Indeed the success of JR privatisation suggests it too. In particular JR Kyushu’s aggressive leveraging of non-rail profits to avoid the fate of JR Hokkaido and Shikoku. Furthermore state run bits of the rail systems show convergent evolution and find integration works for them (the metros, Tsukuba express etc).
I actually think that we need to see Japanese private rail showing convergent evolution with the state on transport-real estate planning, the untold story of JR privatisation is how much it was copying an existing model (which pro and anti factions both continue to ignore because they are terrible).
It isn’t like private rail did that better in the places in the United States with relatively relaxed zoning systems like NYC, Chicago, and Boston. European cities are generally less strictly zoned than American, Australian, and Canadian ones but even Europeans seem to want something stricter than the Japanese system.
Private rail in the US didn’t have the idea. Japan was building in the mid 1900s, the US was long done building rail, instead it was build more roads. By the time the Japanese example was proven it was far too late. Single use zoning was just taking off when the Japanese were experimenting with the idea.
Though the idea exists in other countries. Can anyone comment on the history of it in counties not torn up by WWII?
“relaxed” zoning in the US implies sprawl inducing zoning, its actually quite strict. And that’s not including Euclidean zoning which insanely stupid unless you plan for cars everywhere. Chicago/NY where not “relatively relaxed” at all given parking minimums, redlining etc etc. Older cities have pre-zoning neighbourhoods not better zoning.
Switching to Europe, most systems where nationlised before electric urban rail had a chance to take off in the Interwar years. The big exception is in Southern England, where the three expansionary rail operators the Metropolitan Railway, Southern Railways and the Underground group are profitable right up to nationalisation. Only the Met does much real estate investment because of its partial exemptions Victorian restrictions on railway diversification and land use. The other two did fine because the massive population-building boom around their systems meant a steady flow of growing ticket revenue. This was so successful that the Labour and the Tories nationalised them and implemented the 1947 system to stop it because they hated the idea of Northern Industrial workers becoming Southern suburbanites like them.
In Germany there was the idea – apparently dreamt up by Edzard Reuter, son of the famous Berlin mayor and public transit visionary – to create a “Deutschland AG” by all major firms having stakes in one another so as to in practice make them all one giant Tsaibatsu. It was never fully implemented, but Franz Josef Strauss certainly flew around the world promoting KWU and Airbus and whatnot (with lots of Baksheesh) like it already existed…
France in its “most French” decades was similar and Sarkozy did a lot of this corporate diplomacy, too. Macron seems to try to do it without the corruption, which is of course d.o.a.
“In short, in most of the third world, non-car transportation is bad, and nearly all ridership (on jitneys and buses) is out of poverty, as is most walking. While car ownership is low, the elites who do own cars dominate local affairs, and therefore cities are car-dominated and not at all walkable, even as 90%+ of the population does not own a car.”
Literally in the first para and stopped to comment. Except for the “90%+” this is the USA.
So, in the US, the average income of transit commuters is about the same as that of drivers, first because transit riders usually live in rich metro areas like New York, and second because even internally to those regions, transit riders have solid incomes relative to those of drivers (a bit lower in New York, a bit higher in most secondary transit cities like San Francisco) because they usually work in city centers.
Reblogged this on Utopia, you are standing in it!.
Where would Mexico City, or Santiago Chile, fall in this?
(If this post is a duplicate, I blame WordPress.)
Mexico City very much has an elite that doesn’t use the metro. Some of them even use helicopters, because PeMex for some reason gets fuel cheap :p
Alon what’s your current opinion on recent French projects in the 3rd world, I’m thinking Morocco HSR and Dhakar TER. They look a little less cursed than the examples you list here, but that could be misreading (I can’t read French).
I can’t find Al-Bidaoui ridership numbers, but the Casablanca Tramway has 220,000 riders/day, so maybe 66 million/year, so about 15 per person. In Algiers, the metro had 40 million trips in 2018 and the tramway has 60,000/day, so maybe 60 million for both combined, again around 15/capita.
The Dakar TER is plausibly the best commuter rail in Africa, but ridership is 75,000/day, so maybe 23 million/year, in a metro region of 3.6 million; it’s comparably terrible to French TERs, and to the extent secondary French cities have even semi-decent public transport, it comes from tramways and metros and not from their TERs.
So less cursed? The costs of construction lower right?
Yeah eyballing from Gmaps, Dakar looks so close to being good. It needs 10 more stations learning to run it like a metro/Japanese urban rail with cheap frequent services and then if they want to separate the hoi polloi from elites/foreigners just a special airport shuttle. The corridor is 4 track right?
Does anywhere in France have that kind of service on surface rail?
The North African construction costs are pretty French in general. Not sure about Dakar.
So close to not sucking…
It’s as expensive to ride as Gautrain locking out quite a few people. Even though the entire corridor has been rebuilt it uses low-floor rolling stock without longitudinal seating. Also phase two bulldozes through built-up areas (even though other alignments bypassing and not bulldozing through Sebikotane wouldn’t even add more than 200 meters to the project) without adding any station but the airport station.
One good thing it has going for it is that almost every crossing in the corridor has been prepared for 4-tracks so in a hypothetical future the regional trains coming from Thies (half a million people and 70 km from Dakar Gare de Central), Djourbel (200,000/150 km) and Touba (1.5 million/200 km) can use their own express tracks with limited stops.
Dakar is also building a World-Bank blue print closed BRT with BEB costing 70 million PPP-Dollars per km. The really upsetting thing though is the concession model for operations mandated by WB: Informal competition is band from operating in adjacent streets, fares increases have to be shielded from political “interference” to ensure the operating margin of the french company holding the concession. BEB buses costing 1.6 million nominal (4.4 PPP) Dollars per vehicle. In Dar Essaalam the start of the first phase of WB-BRT also meant fare increases of up to 55% compared to the previous informal operators – something people who did previously spend 30% of their income on commuting simple could not afford.
The other french flagship project is the metro in Abidjan which like TER sticks to the rail corridor but will use appropriate rolling stock and frequencies. While TER had to stick to the existing rail corridor simply due to the standard used without prohibitive costs – the metro in Abidjan could deviate where it makes sense but doesn’t – so a lot of it’s catchment area is a rain forest reserve and industrial areas with negligible ridership. Following Boulevard Valéry Giscard d’Estaing instead of the rail corridor going through Treichville and Marcory would add 100,000s of people to the catchment area costing maybe $350 million more (in nominal $).
The problem of all of these “solutions” is that no SSA government (bar Angola during a sustained period of high oil prizes) could build and or extend those systems using it’s own funding and is limited to only a few corridors the WB/AFDB/AF/KfW is willing to sponsor. There are only three transit systems (with significant ridership) operating (almost) independent of outside funds:
Anbessa and Sheger Bus in Addis move 1.05 million people per day on fixed routes with 1,500 buses of which about 1,000 are built locally. A bus goes for about 9 million Birr or 420,000 PPP-Dollars. https://addisfortune.news/public-transport-enterprise-going-national-amid-unabated-commuter-crisis-in-capital/
Lagos has an “indigenous” version of open BRT transporting about 130,000 people per day – it has simple side platforms and low-floor buses that can operate outside the dedicated protected lanes on normal streets extending coverage of the system significantly. It also means that every new meter of infrastructure can be utilized immediately compared to closed WB-BRT that uses high floor buses that can ethically operate outside of the expensive dedicated infrastructure. The system is expanded by local state funds mainly and every year new lanes are added (at the rate funding allows).
The last is Kigali. Rwanda forced all informal operators to consolidate into three enterprises that hold a concession for about a third of the city each. Routes are centrally planned and operators have to adhere to a fixed schedule (about , payment is entirely cash-less with funds collected by the city and payed out to the concessionaires. Across all three operators 250,000 people are carried with about 450 buses.
Ah, so much for hopes!
N/b the better examples sound a bit like South Korea before they really started investing in subways in late 1980’s.
Speaking of Gautrain: what an impossibly stupid colonial export for South Africa elites to have saddled their country with.
Teeny tiny ilttle twee English trains, on a line designed and engineered by Britons at almost British costs, teleported from Merry Olde England onto Gauteng with pretty much no consideration for anything.
Much of Africa has one commodity which is critical for success that Europe almost entirely lacks.
A youth that looks optimistically into a future it wishes to shape and knows will be better than the present.
France had that in the Treinte Glorieuse and ran on its fumes during the Messmer Plan. The U.S. had more of it than Europe until recently. China has had it in spades in recent decades.
If you have that resource, it’s much easier to “sell” temporary downsides for the bright future.
If all talk of the future is doom and gloom and society is dominated by those who won’t see the future (bright or not) anyway, there’s much more inherent opposition to change, because it cannot be anything *but* negative, right?
This kind of service is only found on some of the RER branches.
Dakar’s streets are typically African. Pedestrians must regularly walk on the busy pavement because sidewalks are occupied by parked cars and street vendors. Entering Dakar’s renovated station feels like stepping into another continent. The words cursed or less cursed are not coming to mind. It feels miraculous because ten years ago the station only hosted recent but abandoned Indian-made rolling stock. To the extent that rich countries are the ones where even the rich use public transportation, this is a major step because by local standards the TER fares are high. It turns out that there is a good number of middle class patrons. The 36 km TER line has more than three times as many passengers as the larger Caltrain or Los Angeles Metrolink networks.
Morocco tells the same story. Ridership/km on the new tram lines is more than twice the numbers in neighboring Spain and quadruple the US ones. It may be below average by French standards but the 0 to 2% level of fare evasion and high fare box income-cost ratio (94.5% reported in Rabat) are numbers that their operators RATP Dev and Transdev can’t even dream of matching at home. These trams are used by the middle class and women who where avoiding their chaotic and unsafe bus predecessors.
In 2018, new section totaling 40 km, a second track all the way and the elimination of 60 road crossings shortened the Casablanca-Marrakech train trip by 1 hour while third tracking of the Rabat-Casablanca line was almost complete. Four years later the government decided that this was not good enough and contracted with Egis consultants. Chinese, Moroccan and French builders have now been selected for various segments of the 430 km Rabat-Casablanca-Marrakech LGV.
In summary, I don’t understand why Africans need to be lectured about bad transit in the Third World.
Didn’t do the high speed bit but the Moroccan trains generally are pretty non shit. They seem to spend a fair chunk of time going faster than the cars even if not high speed.
Reliability seemed decent too.
It must have the highest % of electrification in Africa, and eyeballing it its actually semi-okay by European standards as % of the network (better than the UK).
In Ethiopia, all standard-gauge lines (2/3 of the overall length) are electrified, as they are a recent Chinese-built project. Lots of PRC investment there, including the Addis Ababa Light Rail (daily ridership: 150,000) and the career arc of Dr. Tedros (global corona death toll: 20 million and counting).
Headdesk.
Ethiopia is one of the interesting stories in Africa because it has potential to go either way….
It could either become an “African tiger” or the “next Zimbabwe”…
And it all depends on political leadership…
Why not both? The state has been caught faking statistics showing it’s an African tiger…
not at all walkable, even as 90%+ of the population does not own a car.
How do they get around? Swim?
They walk on streets that are dominated by cars, which can and will run them over, and often have commutes way longer than Marchetti’s constant. Same thing that people who don’t own cars do in zero-transit parts of the US, like Phoenix, except in Phoenix approximately everyone owns a car.
It’s too bad they offend your upper middle class, first world sensibilities. They walk on them anyway. If there are a lot of people walking on them, they are walkable. Just like people in Manhattan will walk in traffic lanes during busy times.
That’s unjustifiably rude of you, adironbacker. The ‘sensibility’ you sneer at is the idea that ‘walkable’ implies “safely walkable”. Yes, poor people walk on Third World streets and US arterials. And they die, killed by drivers. Perhaps that loss of human life doesn’t offend you, but it really should.
Or even if there isn’t any danger from cars, the distances could simply be too great. A one or more hour walking commute isn’t necessarily ideal.
Ignore the troll
My definition of walkable is the presence of pedestrians. That people do get run down is evidence they considered it walkable. Pedestrians getting run down by automobiles is an automobile problem, not a pedestrian problem.
It’s the old debate between “people who have a choice” and “people who don’t”.
I think every decent human should strive for people to live in a world where the desirable choice from a societal standpoint is also individually desirable. And how do we do that? By making the desirable choice attractive. And we know how to do that in many fields and are working on it in others (nutrition, energy, mobility etc.)
Once car culture takes hold, it is almost impossible to dislodge it. Even if you build good transit, many people seem to prefer to stick with their car and hope it is other people that start taking transit. You also need some stick measures to get people out of their cars and few politicians want to implement them because they know they will be kicked out of office next election.
Because the car is a superior mode of transport which can bring a passenger from anywhere to anywhere at anytime you want. The car gives you freedom of mobility.
I can only think of two ways where public transit is better: a) Fuel consumption and environmental friendliness. b) Capacity.
Adirondacker likes saying that cars are great at getting you to places where and when other people don’t want to go. Anywhere with sufficiently high demand, cars don’t actually give you freedom, unless you like sitting in traffic and circling for parking.
That’s why I say public transit is better when it comes to the problem of capacity. It’s obvious that, once a settlement reached a certain level of density, then no amount of road infrastructure will be enough to solve the mobility problem.
For some Americans, the answer to this problem is “NOT to have a dense downtown or a dense city.” This is not an option for Europeans because their city centers are historical, prestigious, and rich. But I digress.
Outside of dense cities my point still stands, that cars are better than public transit.
It is density that makes city a city, via economies of scale. Low density cities shouldn’t be an option for anyone on this planet. They were created by massive government subsidy and can’t sustain themselves.
It isn’t density, it is the access to a large number of options. that makes cities work. Which is why sprawling US cities works, the options everyone needs (food, schools, parks) are everywhere, the options only a few people care about (magic, blacksmith supplies…), or you only use rarely (zoo, museums…) can be anywhere in the large sprawling metropolis, those who care where make the long but acceptable trip often enough to keep them open.
Sure a dense are makes those places faster to access which is better for them. However they are still in range either way and that is good enough.
Public transit is also cheaper, even with the greater subsidies that cars receive relative to transit. If drivers had to pay the full social costs of driving, it would be a lot worse.
Transit is also much safer; the death rate per passenger-km of trains and buses is like 10% that of cars, or even 1%.
Many humans cannot drive, from age or disability; cars aren’t freedom of mobility for _them_.
Be reminded that trucks exist and they are the backbone of an industrial society. That’s why it makes sense to subsidize roads.
And nearly all humans have friends and relatives who are able enough to drive.
Being dependent on the availability and goodwill of your driving-enabled friends and family is not a superior freedom to just being able to take public transit (or walk, or bike) by yourself.
Trucks may need roads. They do not need an abundance of subsidized curbside or off-street parking, and the land-use distortions to provide such parking. They do not need recurrent rounds of road-widening to (fail to) address congestion. They do not, I think, kill nearly as many people in crashes as private cars do. They do not emit as much pollution as cars do.
“Outside of dense cities my point still stands, that cars are better than public transit.”
Most people now live in cities. Mostly in cities dense enough to make mass driving problematic, except when prohibited by zoning — and even the USA’s low density big cities like LA or Atlanta have massive traffic problems.
And dense cities are more efficient in multiple dimensions, so trying to ban density means embracing inefficiency for the sake of an inefficient transportation mode, as well as _less_ freedom of mobility when you consider all humans, not just drivers of sufficient ability and financial means.
Should remind you that industrial revolution preceeds mass motorization.Trucks didn’t make industrial society. Trains did. With the help of direct and indirect government subsidy, trucks just took freight traffic away from existing markets served by rails instead of creating new ones. They almost succeeded in killing the entire freight rail business by encouraging decentralization of industries – the same way private cars enabled mass surbanization and caged people in car-dependent suburbs.
Although freight rails in the US proved to be more resilient and survived, they were forced into an “efficiency” trap. Given that trucking industry don’t need to pay for roadway construction or maintenance, freight rails think they have to imitate – minimizing their infrastructure assets to remain efficient and competitive. That’s why the Class Is keep dismantling their legacy tracks and signals year over year, meanwhile investing in advanced train technology like DPUs.
Uday Schultz wrote an excellent blog on this:
@mindstalk0
Given how many people moved into the suburbs, we can say that people (especially the US people) love to live in suburbs more than in dense cities.
And economical efficiency is less important than the will of the people. It is more productive to work seven days a week, but people don’t want to, and you just can’t tell the people it’s for “teh ekonomikal effishensie”. If you force the people, bad things will happen.
@xh
Neither trucks nor trains made industrial society. Ships did. Even as of now, ships are still the cheapest (thus preferred) method of transporting a lot of cargo.
Have you seen how expensive city centers are? There’s plenty of will to live there, but the US is unusually bad at redeveloping already developed places over NIMBY opposition. Western Europe is better but still not great – it respects anti-skyscraper NIMBYs way too much.
Sure, people love suburbs when other people are picking up the check. Tons of middle-class welfare and handouts subsidizing them.
But given relative housing prices, we could say that more Americans want to live in cities than in suburbs. Or at least that there’s a huge unmet demand for urban living.
@Frederick This whole line of reasoning is such B.S. It’s right there in the name: look at the word “suburb”. You can’t have a “suburb” without an “urb”. Those cities without dense, employment and consumption-heavy areas are so inefficient with that without constant growth, subsidy, or both, they fail. Look at the Rust Belt cities: heavily suburbanized, but for exogenous reasons, their population shrank, and many of them have had to declare bankruptcy, or at least have become bywords for failure (e.g., Detroit and Cleveland).
And as Alon says, the high price of housing in urban areas is precisely a sign of success. It people didn’t want efficient, low-cost access to urban areas, proximity would be irrelevant to cost. The only cities where proximity to a geographic core is irrelevant are those without an actual economic core, clouds of activity waiting to a strong enough wind to disperse them completely. Phoenix springs to mind, especially, but this applies to other U.S. sunbelt cities (i.e., Texas, and even LA), as well. As soon as their state governments are forced to see these areas as the fiscal drains they are, they’ll fail, and eventually cease to exist.
It seems like it can never be said enough: car-centric urban planning is a luxury that places can never truly justify, only justify.
You don’t need trucks if you do railroads right.
A Belle Epoque era railway pioneer company could build a makeshift “last mile” Feldbahn in a week or two. There’s no reason we couldn’t do better with modern technology if we wanted to.
And most industrial transport needs have the advantage of being relatively constant in place and scope…
It’s amazing how the idea that rail was dated technology managed to take hold throughout a good chunk of the world in the mid-20th century. Even in places where most people could not afford cars, the preference seemed to be for informal transit jitneys and buses over rail in any form and built by private or government bodies. Seoul and Sao Paulo started building their subway at the same time but Seoul managed to develop it faster and remain less of a car city. This is despite both South Korea and Brazil not being democracies at the time and democratizing around the same time in the 1980s. The car was seen as more modern in Brazil by just about everybody and got favored as the mode of transportation.
So, re democratization, I considered writing it in the post but decided against it on flow grounds.
The issue is, practically no state wants to have a mixed regime (Iran is the only exception I can think of). It wants to be either democratic or undemocratic: the US, Germany, Taiwan, Israel, India, and Brazil want to be democratic, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Egypt want to be authoritarian. Mixed regime features are a product of either some kind of instability, as in Turkey, or more likely out of the inability of the state to fully realize its idealized regime; these features may include the Pakistani deep state, the populism and personality politics of the Philippines, the political dynasties of India and Bangladesh (and, let’s face it, the US and South Korea), the constant coups of Thailand, and whatever is happening in Bolivia right now. The same is true in autocracies that feel unable to murder all political opponents, like Venezuela with Guaidó.
What this means is that if a regime is mixed – as in Bangladesh, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Indonesia, or even in more strongly democratic Brazil or Mexico – then it’s probably because the state is too weak to enforce a regime type. In East Asia, this was the situation in prewar Japan, which had 15 years of constant assassinations and coup attempts, all lightly punished as long as the perpetrators were motivated by right-wing nationalism, before settling on a totalitarian military regime that promptly started a war that led to the destruction of the state. But subsequently, the East Asian model has avoided mixed regimes – Japan has been democratic, China has been authoritarian, and South Korea and Taiwan moved rapidly from authoritarian to democratic, both transitions taking about a decade (cf. France taking from 1789 to 1871).
Of note, I am convinced that the reason Taiwan has such high construction costs, unlike Japan and South Korea, is that it happened to be planning and building the MRT in that decade of mixed-regime instability. Seoul began building the subway in the 1970s, so it built it as a stable state with little worry about its survival, and this depoliticized characteristic survived the 1987-97 transition. Taipei, a smaller city, only did in the late 1980s, at which point the KMT could see a future in which it might not be in power, and therefore did what a lot of corrupt mixed regimes do and splurged on politically favored contractors in order to make sure the money would stay in the hands of allies rather than falling into Green hands. Taipei MRT construction was infamous for corruption in the 1990s, and involved blurred lines between party and state money precisely because the KMT party-state was in decline. The splurging in turn persisted into the current era of stable democracy.
France only allowed women the vote in its *fourth* republic.
And if *one guy* hadn’t had a weird disdain for la Tricolore, France would’ve a monarchy before the third Republic turned eighteen…
Remember Korea is a dictatorship but the combo of Land reform and a very tight labour market meant Korea was relatively equal wheras Brazil was very very unequal. Also Korean politics are highly unstable pre-democratisation; multiple coups, false democratisation moments, assassinations etc. The presence of the DPRK means legitimacy problems and a direct military threat so the state had to perform to survive, and its important to understand that the regimes often did have some democratic buy-in (think Erdogan with respect of bureaucratic expertise/practice). Regional divisions and ideological divisions added further pressure on the regime to perform (there was a right democratic opposition as well as left one, that’s where Kim Young Sam came from).
There isn’t a good history of Korean urban development and transport yet unfortunately. Clearly there is a lot of Japanese influence on what ideas for a successful city look like, but the greater role of buses and the much more top-down land planning system mean major differences. It was and is a much more centralised society than Japan.
I think it’s important to note, too, that in South Korea, the political elite on the right, which held power from Sygman Rhee until democratization after Chun Doo-hwan, were and are much more pro-Japan. Pair that elite deference to the Japanese example (Park Chung-hee’s looking at Japan’s highways and ironworks and saying, “I want that”) with the leftover infrastructure from the colonial period (both the Gyeongin Line and the Gyeongbu Line stick out in my mind), and it’s not surprising that Korea’s urban forms and transport paradigm fairly strongly resemble Japan.
In some ways the Korean War was a Japanese-Chinese proxy fight overlaid on a Soviet-American one.
North Korea of course reverted to mean far more after 1989/1991 by aligning strongly with China whereas South Korea has dared defy Japan diplomatically on some occasions, most notably with regard to WW2 atrocities which Japan refuses to admit…
I think in Latin America it is important to remember the deep and lasting legacy of caudillismo.
The charismatic personality of a leader (Chavez got his start with a failed coup for example) is often far more important than any alleged ideological commitment.
If you try to understand e.g. Nicaraguan politics 1979-present on an ideological basis, you’ll have to conclude that some people went from Maoist to Trotskyist to Fascist to Leninist to liberal to Maoist. Which is of course absurd.
Just try to analyze the career of Eden Pastora without reference to whether he personally thought allying with Ortega was in his interest at any given time. And that’s one of the guys who “invented” Sandinismo, the alleged governing ideology of Ortega…
But aren’t Taiwan, South Korea, non poor population of China, and rural Japan all have high car usage?
How rural is rural here? Are we talking Gunma (sprawl with industry) or Akita (rice fields lots of rice fields)? And what kind of rural Europe are we talking about? “Rural” Switzerland which probably has the best rural transit in the world is relatively dense and has freight, tourism on a scale Littoral East Asia doesn’t (Switzerland is more dense than Tohoku and Shikoku).
Fully rural is just very hard. The real problem is not rural but in the regional cities, Yamagata, Utsunomiya Niigata, Okayama, Oita etc all have the track they need to s-bahn like services, but don’t do it. And that feeds into rural transportation weakness. These countries are dense enough that urban focused services could reach out into the rural areas quite easily.
Japanese real estate systems are also not optimised for shrinking poor rural cities (partial exceptions like Toyama) because people want newer housing but its cheaper to build on greenfield than replace existing housing. This means you have rotting inner cores of many regional cities with increasingly decentralised employment and retail which in turn pushes people towards cars (Hachinohe, Iwaki, Fukui, Tsuruga). The exceptions are areas where rail networks are strong and there is tourism demand e.g. the prefectural capitals and their Shinkansen stations or tourist hotspots like Takayama or Kakenodate
>How rural is rural here?
Sendai and below
Then yeah Japan is not very good at all. I’m currently writing a dissertation on infill stations along the regional mainlines since privatisation in 1987. Short version: pretty much all of these stations are successes with 2000-6000 passengers per day, but that implies they should have at least 2x more and decades ago.
Japanese regional transport failure is based on 1. failure to do enough electrification/infill stations to provide s-bahn style service on the regional cities 2. Lacking light rail/trams to cover the gaps for where the legacy heavy rail lines don’t go.
Isn’t the “LRT-ka” Conversation to LRT, recently proposed for some low ridership lines risking closure, an attempt to infill the lines?
Yeah there is a real shift to loving the light rail again. And there are some real cases where its appropriate…which aren’t really happening. Integrating Iyotetsu’s trams and trains into LRT in Matsuyama and Kumaden-Kumamoto Trams in Kumamoto. Kyoto should also consider connecting up Keihan’s trams and light rail systems in northern Kyoto to relieve congestion and pressure on bus finances. They’ll say their bankrupt and I’d tell them to stop being Nimbies and build more apartments/hotels.
Problem is that the demographic profile of most places is such that conversions are judged to have low payoff. And LRT isn’t a good option for low population DMU lines in rural Japan. Had they done it before the population decline really set in over the last 10 years, the cities could shape themselves around the system sustainably.
We’ll see with the upcoming Utsunomiya LRT, as a former Utsunomiya commuter I have mixed feelings since it may be too little to late (Utsunomiya is wealthier and demographically healthier than most places). And I think turning the Nikko-Tohoku-honsen-Karasuyama lines into an s-bahn would have been faster, easier and cheaper.
Half of South Korea lives in Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi, and half of the people in that region commute by public transport. Add in Busan, Daegu, and Daejeon, and you get to a national modal split of around 30%, which I think is the highest in any developed country that isn’t a city-state (and if you define it as formal transit then I think you can also remove the qualification “developed”).
Taiwan is more auto-oriented, yeah. I think it really does boil down to construction costs, at least in the capitals; in the second cities I’m less sure – Busan has nearly three times the ridership per km of Kaohsiung.
Taiwan followed the auto-oriented US as the model during its post-war reconstruction. Now it has auto-oriented infrastructures and a motorcycle-oriented population.
I wouldn’t call Taiwan a US model at all. If anything South Korean’s street design (especially new Towns) is more auto-oriented than Taiwan. The real problem is a failure to build enough rail mass transit which is related to the high costs Alon has detailed and the buses aren’t as good as in Korea too (but you’d want to move to subways given the wage cost problem and….you’d want more bomb shelters).
There has been an effort to build more Transit in Taiwan’s secondary cities. Kaohsiung, Taichung and Taoyuan are all planning and constructing major metro expansions currently. These systems are aiming to eventually reach a 3-4 line network, which would begin to make rail transit truly useful in these cities. Kaohsiung was planned as auto-oriented city, with wide boulevards, however it’s core areas still have more than enough density to support rail transit. With these expansions, hopefully transit ridership will improve significantly. However Taiwan’s secondary cities do have relatively small metropolitains, Kaohsiung is about 2.6 million, Taichung is about 2.6 million and Taoyuan is about 2.2 million.
In addition, Taiwan Railways Administration(TRA) has implemented several grade separation projects in urban areas, adding infill stations too. I think this actually one of the most impressive efforts to grade separate and enhance rail service around the world. Kaohsiung’s tunnel and Taichung’s viaduct have been completed, and Taoyuan’s tunnel is currently under construction. Taoyuan area’s stations for example increase from 3 stations, to 8 stations. Kaohsiung increased from 3 to 10 stations. TRA has moved towards serving commuter and short-distance trips, as the THSR replaced it on longer routes. As such, it is aiming to provide a S-Bahn like corridor which supplements existing urban transit. These new expansions have yet to lead to large ridership increases, but with metro completions in the coming decade, this should improve overall connectivity and ridership on urban transit in Taiwan.
Alon once said that grade separation projects are inherently roadway improvement projects rather than rail improvement projects. I think this is the case, especially for those TRA underground-ization projects.
Take Taipei rail underground-ization project as an example. An elevated boulevard (the Civic Boulevard) was built along the ex-ROW of the now underground-ized surface rail. It’s clear that actual purpose of this underground-ization project is to relieve traffic congestion, at the cost of Railway Reconstruction Bureau’s huge capital investment and TRA’s skyrocketing operation budget, since underground rails are costlier to operate.
Rail service did not see any improvement. Tracks though Taipei Main Station have been at capacity for a long while. Should underground-ization didn’t proceed, it would be much cheaper to quadruple this section today.
The current Taiwanese consensus is that there should be transit, but there should also be ample car infrastructure. So they push forward, slowly but surely, with new rail lines, but at the same time undermine demand with lots of new highways, underground garages, and greenfield development. Moreover, it appears to me that alignments are chosen more for coverage rather than to meet actual demand. For example, the Wanda Line makes a strange S turn through Yonghe and southern Wanhua, instead of going straight for central Taipei, and then stops a km or so short of Main Station. Meanwhile, there are no plans to relieve the overcrowded Banqiao line, and only vague discussion of relieving the Neihu line.
Overall it sounds very similar to Korea, except maybe the poor alignment choices, but much too late to meaningfully hold off auto-oriented development.
Won’t the Wanda line (especially Phase II) and circular line both relieve the Banqiao line?
I’m not sure how? Wanda Phase 1 is too far to the east. Phase 2 is closer but only to the lower-ridership tail end which runs at half capacity anyway. Even if it was closer to the Banqiao Line, the Wanda Line doesn’t take you to any of the major destinations the Banqiao line does, or arguably to any major destination at all. If you’re headed to any of Taipei’s job or commercial centers you’re stuck with a transfer at CKS.
The circular line is probably adding more trips to the Banqiao Line than it relieves, since it’s perpendicular and makes the Banqiao Line a more convenient option for anyone traveling from Xinzhuang, western Zhonghe/eastern Banqiao to central Taipei. It does improve travel between Banqiao and eastern Zhonghe/Yonghe/Xindian, but it’s so slow that it barely beats taking the Banqiao line to get from Xindian.
If they really wanted to get crowds off the Banqiao Line they’d need better TRA service, a Xinzhuang Line that takes a more direct route to central/east Taipei, or improved transit on Xianmin Blvd or Zhongshan Rd.
The current Wanda Line is definitely suboptimal but I wouldn’t say a disaster.
And yes it definitely needs an extension north, something like this (current line in orange, proposal in blue).
Perhaps not a disaster, but certainly a wasted opportunity.
I don’t think the blue extension will work, what I saw suggested the Wanda Line will be level with and therefore blocked by CKS station. Also there is very little going on along Minzu, though the Blue Line transfer would be nice. I think the best thing they could do would be to merge it with the Minsheng Line, which also awkwardly avoids Taipei Main Station. Sending it up Bo’ai or Chonqing could provide a good transfer to the Green Line at Xiaonanmen, the Airport Line at Taipei Main, and the Red Line at Shuanglian, while providing some relief from the Red Line’s busiest section. Even better, you’d get direct access to the job centers near Taipei Main and Ximen, not to mention a two seat ride to Neihu.
Even in Seoul they seems more auto oriented than e.g. Tokyo, Shanghai.
Yes, and a lot of public pressure goes into ensuring that future railway projects don’t interfere with road traffic. All of Seoul’s new tram-service-quality lines are almost if not entirely underground (Ui, Wirye, Sillim, Dongbuk), and one on Yeongdo in Busan is trying to be descoped by locals concerned by the possibility of essentially turning a major roadway into a tramway. There’s some real discordance in how much railway and roadway infrastructure is built in Korea.
Not for China. Major Chinese cities have regulations that discourage car ownership and usage. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_space_rationing_in_Beijing)
have policy against using cars doesn’t mean isn’t designed for cars
See Mexico City and its “hoy no circula”
My experience with some African cities:
In Yaoundé, Cameroun (4M people) there was no bus network within the city when I was there, I know there was one until the 80s and there have been several failed attempts of coming back. Public transport is really only collective taxis. They have bad reputation there, mostly for safety and comfort reasons, but I found the system quite efficient, you shout your destination and price (generally 100f = 0.15€ for short distances) and the driver decides to stop or not, you rarely wait for long time but sometimes need to take 2 or 3 taxis if you destination is far. They’re almost all very old Toyota Corollas painted in yellow and take up to 6 people + the driver. You can pay a little more and get a regular “taxi dépot” but you’ll need more time to get one.
Many streets are quite walkable… due to their poor state and often not being paved. All main roads have sidewalks there is no urban freeway
In Douala (also 4M) and smaller cities, it’s more or less the same except you also have a lot of moto-taxi (not allowed in Yaoundé, I think). I heard there used to be many bicycles but you rarely see them anymore, neither in hilly Yaoundé nor in flat Douala
Everybody that can afford a car have it but they’re generally old cars that cost 0 in Europe because they can’t even pass the technical inspections so you don’t need to be very rich to have a car. There were in 2018 over 1.2M cars registered in the country (Vs 0.2M in 2000) for around 25M people and it’s growing fast in spite of the economy not growing.
Any correct bus, tramway, metro or RER system would have huge success as the cities are dense and compact, but but there would need to be state capacity that current regime spent last 40 years to kill so until then cars are developing fast. Of course you have more and more traffic jams so cars won’t be a solution neither if no infrastructure improvement. The taxi system might be politically difficult to replace as many people live from that and drivers have been quite active in the past with obvious capacity to block the city.
In Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, there is supposed to be a bus network but never saw one bus, no collective taxis (and very few regular taxis) so people use cars, motorbikes or bicycles or walk depending on how rich they are.
In Dakar, Senegal, I was there before the TER started, there was a decent bus network and no collective taxis but very efficient and safe regular taxis. You have also better roads with kind of freeways but it still remains quite walkable overall. State capacity looks indeed much better than in Cameroon in spite of lower GDP.
This post recalls your magnificent examination of the avoided depreciation costs in New York City because people who don’t need a car can avoid thousands of dollars a year in depreciation costs. It’s a source of upward mobility for poor people not saddled with depreciation, gas, and insurance costs.
What keeps poor cities poor is the inability of the poor to build wealth. NYC makes owning property too expensive because of housing costs, but it doesn’t saddle the poor with thousands of post-tax dollars in costs annually to own and maintain an automobile. I’d imagine the poor in Bangkok or KL might get a down payment nut out of the thousands wasted annually on cars, ignoring the cost in wasted time.
Well, in NYC this is sort of a give-with-one-hand, take-away-with-the-other situation. You save a lot of money on car costs, but housing supply being so tight means a lot of that savings is extracted by the landlord class (who of course have a vested interest in further suppressing the housing supply)–add to which that the real estate industry’s shenanigans create such mistrust that even the poorer people who would benefit from more housing don’t trust the only institutional mechanisms available to provide it.
At the same time, if the non-owning class collectively are *all* accumulating a down payment but the city isn’t building excess housing, then it’s a game of musical chairs: what used to be enough of a down payment now isn’t any more, since there’s still only X apartments for offer. For that wealth to be realized, people have to leave the city, which means they no longer benefit from either the resources available from cities or from the savings of a transit-oriented lifestyle.
This reminds me a bit of that Marxian aside about Russian village communities having proto socialist elements and whether one could jump from that to true socialism without having to tear it down via capitalism first. I think history gave a pretty definitive “no” answer…
But then we *do* see examples of the global South “skipping steps”. Like landlines. Or large amounts of paper money (instead paying with phone credit based systems). And some wish to skip fossil fuels by going nuclear from the get-go… Unfortunately KWU is no more, Rosatom is a shady supplier and the Hualong One isn’t yet being exported in large numbers. Are the Koreans up for it?
In developing countries, there are big trust issues that reduce acceptance of nuclear power. The same is true of the developmental Asian states; the center-left in Taiwan calls itself the Pan-Green Coalition after the green movement, specifically its anti-nuclear aspects, because who the hell could trust the 1980s’ KMT (or, let’s be real, the 2010s’ KMT) to operate these plants safely.
In India, there is some construction of nuclear power, but not much – right now it’s 1.5% of installed capacity and falling, not because plants are taken offline (they’re not, they’re growing) but because everything else is growing faster; supposedly a bunch of new thorium reactors are going to come online in the next few years, but the program is not massive. The closest thing to a recognizable center-left in India, AAP (in charge of two small states), is anti-nuclear on anti-corruption grounds, and meanwhile, renewables are growing very fast and are 40% of overall capacity. The renewable share of actual electricity is of course much lower – just 22%, about half of which is hydro, with nuclear adding another 3%, but that 22% is rising pretty quickly.
Answer to first part of your comment is pretty easy – That Marx’s vision of socialism being a more progressive form of capitalism is incorrect
Finally got around to reading this. So for the booming Southeast Asian countries rapidly expanding their public transit, they basically have to do what they can to keep their high growth rates going so as to keep paying for more and more infrastructure construction.
Which means doing what they can to make sure US-China conflict doesn’t get too big (maybe with regional diplomacy plus balance of power hedging between the two powers), hoping China’s probable economic slowdown isn’t too great so that its infrastructure loans still keep coming, hoping the Taiwan issue keeps below open warfare, expanding trade and finance links with countries not currently super-connected economically to the region like those in the EU, and not doing anything really stupid in their domestic environment (see for example Thailand which seems to have slowed down its growth with the 2014 coup compared to peers such as Malaysia or Vietnam). Also I suppose countries with declining population growth like Thailand and Vietnam might start feeling the negative long-term effects from that but there’s likely still a few decades’ worth of gas in that tank.
Kind of a challenging set of issues but I suppose the region has muddled through so far for the last 30 years so maybe it’ll keep doing so. Basically long-term infrastructure construction is an issue of political economy.
A lot of these places aren’t even getting Chinese loans, but Japanese ones. In Vietnam, Hanoi brought in China to build its metro and Ho Chi Minh City Japan; the costs of both are about equally high, but Hanoi’s schedule overruns led to complaints in the Vietnamese press that it was a mistake to bring in China and it would have been better to stick with Japan.
The U.S. is basically just the most developed part of the world — it went through the whole transport evolution faster than anyone else. The transit lobby just didn’t have enough time to get too powerful back then, unlike now, where it’s often fueled by subsidies to spend lobbying — they don’t have passenger business now. In Europe, public transit’s modal share is slowly declining as countries get wealthier — although let’s be honest, some of them haven’t really developed much at all in the last 15 years. (U.S. are in stagnation since like 2019, at best I would say).
Now take cities like Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, New York, or London — textbook examples of what you could call “poor-rich” cities. Over the last two decades, they’ve only gotten more unaffordable while offering less and less in terms of real prosperity for the average person. People don’t move there to thrive economically. They move there because… well, it’s there. It’s the place to be. Either you’re loaded and enjoy the scene, or you’re broke and stuck, or fresh off a plane and hoping for something better. But financially? Good luck.
Urbanists love to go on about “15-minute cities” and how every dream city should be crossable in half an hour — but they seem to forget that nobody dreams of commuting. Daily commuting gives very little value unless you’re being forced into it by housing costs. And if public transit is so great, why do transit-heavy cities have the longest commute times?
Let’s look at the numbers, I’ll take 2022-2023 for the headstart of public transit heavy cities one way commutes:
Yeah, I’m sure the folks in Hong Kong just love spending over three hours a day squeezed into a train — purely out of joy. It’s obviously not because they can’t afford to live . Do we really think Houstonians are just lazy or allergic to commuting? Or could it be that the cities with endless public transport commutes are forcing people to travel for a long time just to make ends meet?
Here’s the thing: rich people don’t waste time on long commutes — because time is their money. Long commutes are a symptom, not a lifestyle choice. They happen because people have no better option. These cities aren’t efficient — they’re just expensive and over-glorified. And right now, the situation’s not getting any better. But hey, at least they have a train, right?
Wow, wrong in almost every point.
“just the most developed part of the world”
Ah yes, the ‘development’ of decaying streets and roads, no high speed rail, transportation disenfranchisement of at least 30% of the populations (the share of Americans who don’t have a driver’s license.)
One could easily say that the US is simply a rich Third World country, with high aggregate wealth but politics too dysfunctional to actually build a nice place to live.
“the whole transport evolution”
Never seen the Whiggish fallacy for transport before, but okay. If there’s a single path of evolution then where are our high speed trains? Our bike friendly cities? If you try to put US cities, Amsterdam, and Shanghai on a development line, one can only conclude that the US is woefully underdeveloped.
“They move there because… well, it’s there.”
No, they move there because the jobs are there. Even if housing prices make prospering difficulty, it’s better than staying home.
“how every dream city should be crossable in half an hour”
Most urbanists, talking about 15 minute cities, mean 15 minute neighborhoods: places where you can do most things other than work within a 15 minute walking radius. Including everyone’s jobs is a minority opinion, and I’ve never seen “crossable in half an hour” proposed as some high target.
“why do transit-heavy cities have the longest commute times?”
Perhaps because they’re also the biggest cities (whether because transit grows size, or size necessitates transit.) On your list of cities, Houston is kind of a small city; only 2 million people in the city proper, 7 in the metro, smaller than NYC proper.
You’re also cherry picking your examples, ignoring smaller European cities that would have high transit and shorter commutes, and US metro areas where people are driving longer and longer to be able to afford housing.
It is not the entirety of the question, but the Whiggish view is largely correct. Ordering modes of transportation by typical power per ton of payload, you get: ships, trains, road vehicles, aviation. This is substantially the same as the historical order of dominance. In the developed world, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, inland navigation was dominant, with some regions building extensive canal networks. In the mid-19th c., railways took that place. After rail’s century in the sun, over the mid-20th c. lorries and cars greatly constricted its ubiquity. Aviation became commonplace in the late 20th (“the jet age”).
This coincidence is not at all accidental, but a straightforward function of societal wealth i.e. capital per person, or to put it differently, machinery per person. The same is also at play in the case of bicycles being shoved off the road by cars in the mid-20th. In the developed world, technological development increasing engines’ power-to-weight figures is an additional factor, and can be seen in the transitions from steam to internal combustion, or from reciprocating piston engines to turbines (in ships and aviation).
Yes, different societies also differ in their capacity to organize themselves, whether through government or private companies. In the developed world of 1910, cities had extensive networks of trams, and particularly large ones were building metros. In the third world of today, cities have endless flows of motorbikes and hundreds of van-bus-taxis operated as family businesses.
The situation of the US is quite particular as far as this latter factor is considered. It inherited from its past not just physical infrastructure that it is functionally unable to reproduce, but also a number of competent organs of society (e.g. airlines, FAA, NTSB) that couldn’t be brought together today.
“the Whiggish view is largely correct”
What you detail might be called _a_ Whiggish view. It is not the view I was rebutting, that cars are clearly superior and that all societies progress toward greater and greater car use.
Yeah, railroads solidly wiped out canals. Cars devastated bikes and transit in most places… but not entirely or to the same degree everywhere, and there’s pushback/reversal now. So either Whiggishness is _wrong_ and breaks down at this point, or the actual Whiggish progression is to realize cars were a mistake and to start investing in transit, bike paths, and high speed rail again.
(On major rivers and on some canals with rather larger gauges than British narrowboats, inland shipping still exists — mostly for bulk freight of low value density. Likewise in railfreight, less-than-load completely vanished, wagonload severely contracted, but unit trains largely held their own in the face of trucking, while intermodal grew.)
A different but related question of Whiggishness is speed. For the sake of simplicity, assume a single CBD; cities start effectively “walking size”. Each successive technology is adopted principally because it is faster than the previous. This has the effect of bringing previously non-urban (mostly agricultural) land within commuting time, causing the growth of suburbs largely dependent on the new technology — be they Metroland, streetcar suburbs, car-dependent ones, or in the future, flying-car-based ones. For technologies with clear access points (stations, onramps), pedestrian and car traffic is concentrated close to said access points, drawing shops (big box malls). Quirks of geography and network growth creating extremely well-served suburban spots can cause secondary CBDs (Midtown, La Défense, edge cities).
Each new technology tends to cause friction with the city preexisting it. They are definitionally faster, obviously correlating to danger (at the time, newspapers complained about those hooligans on their velocipedes crashing into pedestrians). Their higher speed also imposes a desire to keep “obstacles” out of their path — and the default way to clear their way if at grade is to be dangerous. Their higher power tends to, ceteris paribus, make more noise (even if indirectly, as with steel els). Because their N-fold higher average speed implies a city with an N^2-fold larger area, unless the city grows extremely rapidly (whether by births, urbanization, or as a port of immigration), they imply a lower land use density — as people move to the suburbs (and pull shops with them) the new tech can cause the existing buildings to either become a sorry state of run down, or demolished to accommodate the increased space demands of the new vehicle (if applicable). The site of defunct big box stores will make for the ideal place to put flying cars’ runways, with onward mobility on surface streets. Municipal governments can also go bankrupt from people and economic activity leaving.
So, yeah, absent coordinated steering or pushback (that dreaded term, social engineering), there absolutely is a (walking ->) bike/jitney -> motorbike -> car -> flying car (today: helicopter, bizjet, or “the V-tail doctor-killer“) succession both as societies get richer as a whole over time, and as one goes from the economic bottom to the economic top within a society at any one instant in time. (Naturally, if you have a higher budget to buy/rent machinery, you also have a higher budget to buy/rent land on which to store said machinery.) Because individuals over their lifecycle tend to climb somewhat economically (esp. in a growing society, such as the Baby Boom), it can happen that e.g. bikes become seen as childish; fit for teens but not for serious adults.
Obviously, such pushback maintaining the water on the top of the slope is possible — sidewalks have continued existing since before cars, and there’s the Netherlands — but all of them (sidewalks, transit lanes, filtered permeability / superblocks, congestion charge) rely on persistent social/political support being maintained for decades on end. You can’t simply blow up the highways, they would be rebuilt. The more interesting question is, what happens to the toothpaste out of the tube, the car-oriented sprawl that has already been built? Do we assume population growth of such scale that all of it can be subjected to “sprawl repair”? If not, do we get land values dropping moderately, middle-and-above class people moving into the niceified (urban?) areas, less well off new residents moving into the still car-dependent area? Do we repeat this until there’s nobody poor enough left, land values reach zero as suburban population density decreases, with structures abandoned (partially) standing, unrepaired after malfunction/storm/fire/etc.? A mix of these possibilities (build highway-speed transit in one place, repairing and densifying that area, by pulling the population from other, unserved areas)? Assume Nordic costs, assume unrestricted housing construction, and assume that the new residents will come from evaporating Midwest small towns?
It’s a good analysis of real ‘Whiggish’ or ‘progress’. I would note though that the car-dependent status quo _also_ requires persistent political/social support. In the US, public subsidies for driving are _massive_, if partly hidden (e.g. low density zoning and parking mandates, also the tolerance of pollution and crash deaths). We spent and spend tons on interstate highways, road widening, downtown demolitions, and building urban-level infrastructure for low-density suburbs (which, according to many, is fiscally unsustainable: taxes won’t cover maintenance.) It’s not a ‘natural’ state.
The modern Netherlands looks the way it does because such social support was not persistent: in the face of rising deaths (especially child deaths), support for cars was withdrawn and shifted toward street safety; the US and UK instead reacted by reducing the independence of children (something I would consider an anti-progress pattern, actual regression).
Copenhagen supposedly went in for bike infrastructure after WWII because they couldn’t afford car infrastructure, but looking at Third World cities shows that wasn’t an inevitable choice: poverty + elite preference for cars = lots of cars (and pollution and deaths).
One could fairly argue that elite preference for separating themselves from the masses makes throwing support to cars an expected outcome, but I think this stops being a Whiggish progress narrative, and more an “inequality tends to increase if not counteracted” narrative.
True; some aspects of American car-orientation are more-than-market. (Even in the absence of pro-car zoning, in decreasing-density “downtowns” it can be a profitable business to buy buildings to demolish them and turn them into parking lots or garages. And many commercial establishments would still have some “free”-for-customers parking. A few for-profit toll highways, too.)
Elite preference for separation also exists with modes other than cars! Some American commuter railroads have the operating pattern where they only transport passengers during the peak and only in the peak direction — they don’t run off-peak, and either run reverse-peak as deadheading, or not at all and simply store trains in a downtown yard. It’s very obviously “we will take you to and from your office job, Mr. Hawthorne, while making sure we don’t take the urban yootz to your house, and also making sure that nobody with a retail job would even want to move in next door to you, because our service span doesn’t cover their ‘nontraditional’ work hours”. Or for that matter what happened to Pascal’s carriages. (It’s a pity the vehicles were so small and underpowered that they couldn’t install a divider and invent travel classes.)
And it is, indeed, no longer a Whiggish question, but one of how a society conceives of its own structure/subdivisions and how power and legitimacy is distributed among them. Alon sometimes mentions “herrenvolk democracy”; Dr. Devereaux has excellent articles on poleis, Rome, the Diadochi, etc.
Are you calling New York and London poor-rich? What?
I’m calling New York and London cities for either extremely rich or extremely poor.
Either you don’t have to care how much it costs to live here or you have nowhere else to go(poor migrants). Anyone else just slowly but steadily leaves.
You’ll have more prosperous life in Edinburgh than London if you don’t do few very specific things that are concentrated in London like finance(and it’s also questionable if you’re not top in the sphere). This is the case for absolutely any other transit heavy city in the world. Houston, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio manage to be big and cheap which is absolutely abnormal for their size, reports cite that you have to make only 125k $ in Houston to live like New Yorker making 312k $, while median income is only like 18% less in Houston. So basically you can work less than 6 month in Houston to be able to live on the level of New Yorker working the whole time.
If you’re talking about inequality, then at first pass the biggest determinant of a first-world metro area’s inequality is whether it’s in the US or not. New York is (on ~2010 data) the most unequal US metro area but the range is fairly narrow, narrower than the difference between American inequality and inequality in most other developed countries including the UK.
The $125,000 vs. $312,000 report you’re thinking of is expatriate living costs, making a lot of questionable assumptions, e.g. that people own cars in both cities, that they get city center apartments, etc. The BEA publishes regional price parities (RPPs) and the gap is much less than 2.5:1 and not much more than 1:1; in 2023 the deflator for metro Houston was 120.756 and that for metro New York was 135.52. Most of this is a matter of rent, and you can approximate things pretty well with household income statistics, which only count income from work and therefore exclude the income of the landlords. So in effect the mean or median household income number for an American region already takes most living cost differences into account; the remainder of the difference is the New York-specific issue of expensive groceries because city politics excludes national hypermarket chains, which problem does not exist in London or Paris or Berlin.
Being a landlord is work. Even if the work is cooking the books until they are particularly well done like the Trumps did.
Household income includes things other than wages. I suspect the net profits from the property are counted as income. Not rent, because the landlord has bills to pay, lots and lots of bills. Which is one of the ways the Trumps cooked their books, having their shell company charge them twice what the vendor did.
There is at least one national chain operating supermarkets in New York City. Well, international because they also have supermarkets in Europe. Aldi doesn’t operate hypermarkets they operate 1950s-ish stores. They also operate in New York City, including Manhattan. So does Lidl. And when the supermarket is next door to a …. variety store… and that is next to a chain pharmacy you don’t need everything duplicated in a hypermarket. Duane Reade which used to be the bane of New York City life is Walgreens under a extra special metro New York brand.
National supermarket chains tend to avoid metro New York, they cannot compete with co-ops like ShopRite, Key Food or C-Town.
I don’t care about inequality, I explain that all big transit cities experience.
I like that you make generous “assumptions” to support your narrative that lead to 1:1, it’s always amazing, but why do you use words you don’t understand – like gdp deflator is not applicable at all here.
Not even for median(cause New York is more unequal), even for average income in New York it will be true that average New Yorker lives in poverty/extreme poverty by Houston standards.
Everything has to be adjusted for the specific conditions we have.
For example, the housing question does not account for the fact that what is considered “average” New York rent is inapplicable to the majority of people. The New York housing market is sort of a museum.
It has “rent-stabilized” apartments that skew statistics because they are extremely cheap by New York standards, yet absolutely inaccessible (the chance for even an average American to get one is not even 0.1%). Moreover, they are of extremely low quality by Houston standards.
We have to adjust for both — to get the full picture of reality, we also need to account not only for prices but for what you get for them: at any price point, Houston housing will be much bigger and offer much better amenities. How do you account for this discrepancy?
Or, for example, we have to account for commute times: a Houstonian will spend around 60 minutes commuting, while a New Yorker will spend 100 minutes. I’m not even talking about the quality of the commute.
I’m not even trying to make assumptions about the real costs — the MTA will never pay off its debts, so how do you account for the fact that at some point the debt will be collected from New Yorkers (of course the feds could cover it), but for a true comparison we have to account for that too.
And so on and so forth — in the end, you arrive at the fact that the statistical person living in Houston lives at least 2x better than a statistical New Yorker, even in a static comparison. But if we look at the real-world scenario, it’s at least 3x, because you will never get the statistical rent price in New York.
Yes, a New Yorker will still be wealthier than a Londoner, but for the USA, it’s a poor city
There are more people in the city limits of New York City than there are in metro Houston.
Some people prefer to avoid the car dependent hellscape of traffic jams and chain stores on stroads. There are more people in the city limits of New York City than there are in metro Houston. Many of them avoiding traffic jams because they can lead fulfilling interesting lives without a car. They have to venture out into the suburbs for stroad experiences.
The resident(s) of a Houston housing unit gain access to more amenities inside the unit than those of a New York housing unit. The resident(s) of a New York housing unit gain access to more amenities outside the unit itself than those of a Houston housing unit. The respective sets of amenities have some vaguely overlapping items (stereotypical: “home theater”) but are largely distinct.
Notably, because the units don’t need to dedicate floorspace to the amenities not located inside them, the New York units can be significantly smaller than the Houston ones, while still offering access to a set of amenities that most (prospective) residents value enough to be willing to pay a premium to get access to.
The actual answer is that there are hedonic adjustments for all of this in the regional price parities. The myth of New York poverty comes from the following sources:
1. The typical American lifecycle is to move to New York or another high-cost city for university and early career and then suburbanize or move to a lower-cost city. Thus, people disproportionately experience New York during the lowest-living standard period of their lives, even as the city on net remains very rich (because the people who work jobs requiring degrees past age 30 earn a lot of money).
2. New York is very liberal and therefore has a large coterie of NGOs agitating for more left-wing policy by highlighting local poverty and inequality. This poverty exists in Texas too – for example, Texas is far and away the #1 US state in uninsured population (link) – but as a more conservative state, Texas has fewer institutions to highlight this.
3. New York is full of national media using it as a way of telling stories about inequality. Much easier to talk about a City of Contrasts or some such cliché than to do deep reporting on what poverty is like in the Rio Grande Valley.
Aren’t you tired of fighting windmills? Everything I say is objectively falsifiable — it can be verified using .gov sources, third-party datasets, or maybe even logic someday.
“Live in the stage of life when they are poor… and so feeling…”
“More activist groups…” — like, what is that even supposed to mean?
Can you teach me how to be this delusional?
So now New York is poor because of dogmas from TV or graffiti on the wall?
“I feel it’s a narrative pushed by…” — seriously? Who in their right mind would say that New York or London are poor cities? They’re considered lands of opportunity by the vast majority. It’s just me and a few others who actually bother to look at real numbers and know what something like the “GDP deflator” is — not just “feelings.”
The fact that NYC leans liberal is simply because it’s old and the most developed part of the U.S. — but again, that doesn’t mean it has to be the richest or have the best quality of life to be considered “developed.”
It just got unlucky: its “highway boom” came in the form of steel rails, which are inferior for modern economic activity that doesn’t revolve around manual, low-skill factory labor on Manhattan.
Why do you always cherry-pick whatever supports your narrative, relying on the most anecdotal evidence possible?
Yes, poverty exists everywhere. But the thing is, NYC doesn’t just have more relative poverty — it’s also poorer in absolute terms compared to Houston.
Insurance? Don’t even start. The vast majority of Americans don’t understand how their own healthcare system works — let alone people outside the field. People believe that healthcare system in the USA is shit — but it’s a myth. European system doesn’t have better outcomes than the one US has.
And here’s something that’ll blow your mind (again): the best way to get top-tier healthcare in the U.S. without going bankrupt is consciously opting to have no insurance at all.
It takes research and planning, but if you do it right, you’ll be much better off than relying on an insurance plan that may not even cover what you need.
The fact that Houston has a lower insured rate doesn’t say anything about the quality of its healthcare system — that gap could be explained by very specific local conditions. I don’t know why the percentage is so different, but it is.
You have to compare apples to apples. And in that regard, New York has no advantage.
Transplants, cancer treatment, complex cardiac surgery — statistically, the outcomes are better in Houston.
But honestly, even that comparison is misleading. These procedures are outliers and don’t define the overall quality of a system.
Let’s talk about something that might say something about healthcare — though healthcare’s impact on life expectancy is far smaller than people think, but that’s what we have.
Life expectancy:
NYC: ~81 years
Houston: ~78 years
Does a 3-year gap between people who walk everywhere and people who barely know what walking is really count as meaningful?
And if we factor in commute time — because most people don’t live just to sit in traffic — the useful lifespan is basically the same.
And that’s despite America’s — and especially Texas’s — horrendous road design and disproportionately high traffic fatality rates.
I’m literally linking to these .gov sources about metropolitan labor incomes and regional price parities. This doesn’t give you the exact table because it’s a dynamic site but you can go to the RPP tab and look at price deflators, or to economic profile -> net earnings per capita (this is labor income, i.e. excluding landlord income; it’s the statistic that goes into median household income, the BEA just reports it per capita and not per household).
Also, “does a 3-year gap count as meaningful?”? Yes, it does. Corona was a one-time 2.5 year life expectancy hit in the worst-hit developed countries, like the US and Spain (link).
Oh.. I see. There’s a reason why I say .gov and third-party websites. If you don’t use ready data from people who know how to do economic math, you can do it using raw data yourself. Otherwise .gov is useless. So you base your opinion on PCPI? In 2025? Seriously? Okay I understand people in 1950th may see any number as better than no number, but like it was still an insanity to use it back then, I can’t add here anything and don’t want to.
Sorry, I rechecked the info, life expectancy in New York is 80.7 years and 79.2 years for Houston in 2021. So it’s 1.5 years difference, actually if we account commute people in Houston have longer useful life? Even considering that Houstonians never ever experienced such thing as walking?
Covid-19 has mostly nothing to do with lifespan drop of 3 years even assuming everyone had it multiple times at 0.6% fatality rate, its still marginal.
It’s the BEA and the World Bank (sourced to the WHO on life expectancy, I think), take it up with them.
Your Ivy League upper middle class symbol manipulator bias is showing. Again. And even among the Ivies only 3 of the 7 are in big cities. An infinitesimal fraction of the small fraction of people in college do it in big cities.
Seven Ivies? What is Dartmouth to you, chopped liver?
But anyway, it’s not exactly about Ivies, because Princeton does not have this reputation that New York has. People go to Princeton as students but don’t stay there as early-career university graduates; they do go to New York this way, and this includes people who didn’t go to Columbia or NYU or anywhere else in the city. This is magnified in media, which is full of people who are culturally visible but also don’t earn a lot of money.
Cornell is a fancy name for SUNY Ithaca. On the other hand they have a presence in New York City. On the third hand it’s New York’s land grant school and they do agricultural stuff and run the extension service. https://www.nifa.usda.gov/about-nifa/what-we-do/extension
Google says there are 16,000,000 million undergrads in the U.S. And 9,000 total at Princeton. I leave it up to you to calculate the infinitesimal percentage of college attendees at Princeton. Go ahead add up the Ivies. Add places like Stanford. And the former women’s schools. You might make it to one percent?
Even Princeton attendees went to high school with people who didn’t have the grades or the test scores to make it into Princeton. And went to State U. and will get jobs “back home” when they graduate. Just like the high school classmates that decided they don’t want to spend their whole working life typing and decided to go to community college for something like HVAC, installation, repair and design. Ehitch Vee Eh See is an acronym for heating ventilation and air conditioning, the guy who fixes the heat that when typing doesn’t solve the problem. It’s almost always a guy. Gives you the skills to explain to the customer why they want to pay for the Manual J estimate. The women tend to go for something in health care or … culinary arts. You have to be trained to use a 3 compartment sink or restaurant customers may get sick. And when your associate’s degree in culinary arts gets you promoted to running the kitchen, be able to explain it to new dishwashers. The ones who go for an associates degree in automotive arts have to type occasionally too. Completing invoices, documenting emissions tests, requisitioning parts.
@ Nist. I used to work on small cruise ships. Weeks passed at a different speed depending on our guests origin. US crowds would line up at the restaurant door soon after the captain had finished introducing his officers. European and Latin Americans would socialize for so long that the restaurant crew had to drag them in.
You think the US is the most developed part of the world. I disagree. I see development as a multidimensional process and the US as a world apart, a victim of its wealth, size, strength and navel gazing. Most other places try to be more efficient in terms of construction costs, land and energy use. Different policies are pursued here and there, and their outcomes are the topic of this blog.
With a life expectancy of 76 against 84 in Tokyo and Hong-Kong, 83 in Singapore, 80.1 in the South East of England, 81.5 in NYC, the race to the grave is one dimension in which Texas is clearly ahead. Car centric life style is a factor. After commuting 5 days a week over 50 years, Tokyoites will have spent another uncomfortable 25 000 hours commuting but outlive Houstonians by 70 000 hours. Long Hong-Kong commutes take 37 500 hours of the 70 000 hours survival advantage. Houstonians saved 15 500 hours over Singaporeans and beat them to the grave by 61 320 hours. Saving 12 000 hours over London-bound commutes, they reached their resting place 35 916 h sooner. They saved 24 750 hours over NYC commutes and their lives are 48 180 h shorter. You think that long commutes are a symptom, not a life choice and you are wrong again. Most of these people support investments in mass transit and don’t want their towns to be like Houston.
Plus, while we probably visualize the infamous sardine subways of Japan’s past, in practice not all that commute time is wasted. Some people get seats and can read, or manage to use their phones while standing. And some of the commute time is walking or biking to a train station, exercise which helps contribute to the longer lifespan. Meanwhile the driving Texan has to pay for a gym, or otherwise find time to make up for the lack of activity — if he does.
And the transit city doesn’t practically disenfranchise 30% of the population, as car-dependent US areas do.
What sort of leisure activity can you engage in while you are driving? Especially when you are in bad traffic.
You are missing the point. When you are in a private automobile your chances of running into the those people, whoever they are, is very low.
I can’t talk about Tokyo but I had years of blissful commute towards Northern Virginia. A 20 minutes walk was followed by a 30 minutes subway ride and 20′ in a bus. My long commute was a choice. I could have lived in Virginia and driven a few miles but chose to live in Washington D.C.. I could park for free in front of my apartment. Driving saved time since I was reverse commuting but I only drove about twice a month to keep the battery charged. The other days I enjoyed the ride, the opportunity to read and learn a foreign language, and the sense of community with my fellow bus riders. Nist’s idea that driving is the most advanced stage of transport evolution is completely foreign to me.
Here’s another statistic from Houston (that I have posted on PO before, an oldie but a Goldie)
From Jane Holtz Kay, p32 in Asphalt Nation:
There’s another category that Houston tops the tables, though I don’t suppose it is enough to account for the lower lifespan in Texas:
I suppose speed is one way they keep their commuting times down, however I also suspect those stated times are “typical day” and don’t factor in the notorious accidents which occur 3 to 4 times each day and by definition occur on the busiest commuter routes and cause freeway shutdown for hours.
Your fine quote about the depth of experience reminds me of another day on the seas. The hotel manager had fired a few of his subordinates for minor infractions causing them to loose the large bonus due at the end of their 6 month contract. There was no risk of mutiny but the crew was on edge. One of them was sick but afraid to take the evening off. I told her I would speak to the manager and take her shift at the reception desk. So here we are, in glorious Cook Bay where the Bounty crew and Marlon Brando fell in love with French Polynesia, and this young American couple points at the wall of VCR tapes behind my back asking “Doc, which X-rated one do you recommend ?”
There’s a saying — “anecdotal evidence.” That’s what you’ve just presented.
There’s a difference between what you think and what you do. There’s also a difference between what you imagine in your head and what actually exists in the real world.
For any discussion to make sense, you need a proper methodology — and that includes agreed-upon terminology, definitions, and assumptions.
Otherwise, it’s all just whataboutism without substance.
I never said that everything the USA has is cutting edge. I said it’s the most developed part of the world.
There was a time when everything cutting edge was, for a while, being created in the US and not elsewhere — but that changed as the US developed further.
“Developed” doesn’t mean “the best.” It means the country has gone through a specific trajectory of growth — and, because government expanded in these sectors also, stagnation. The same growth and eventual decline will likely happen in the places you now consider “cutting edge.”
This doesn’t mean the USA as a whole has declined — it just means that the previously cutting-edge sectors have already peaked domestically, and the government’s expansion has eroded their dynamism. As a result, these sectors no longer appear cutting-edge by today’s standards.
As I said, this doesn’t mean that the US have collapsed — it means that the “cutting-edgeness” has peaked and was exported elsewhere, and capital has moved on to create the next sector — in areas not yet burdened by overregulation, like the early days of the internet, AI, etc.
That’s what is meant “developed”.
The question of longevity is extremely complex, but we see the same patterns everywhere:
Factors like obesity, for example, are rising even faster in Europe than in the US — but Europe is simply 20–40 years behind in the same development cycle.
Plus, you don’t see how the mistakes in development of the USA got solved in the USA and exported already with “cures” so that other places don’t have the same problems — like obesity in EU is on the rise, but cause the USA have already had this problem for long time, the cure was also developed here – Ozempic. People in the USA didn’t have it 30 years ago when the problem started to materialise, but people in the EU have the cure already, before they have experienced the same level of issues as once was on the other side of Atlantic.
Your statement that “Europe is simply 20-40 years behind in the same development cycle” as the US is another anecdote illustrating Texan navel-gazing. No-one believes that Romania, the only European country whose obesity rate (38,34%) is close to the US 41.64%, is 20 to 40 years ahead of Denmark (15.7%), Switzerland (15.07%), The Netherlands (15.05%) or France (10.18%) (country ranking @ data.worldobesity.org).
Obesity has a complex relationship with development. In countries with Gross National Income per capita below $1005 or below $4000 in PPP, obesity is associated with higher socioeconomic status. In developed countries, it is the opposite. In Obesity and socioeconomic status: a systematic review. Obes Rev 2012: 13(11): 1067-79, Dina, Goryakin et al. showed that in countries transitioning between low and high income status the evidence is mixed. The CDC report Obesity and Socioeconomic Status in Adults : United States 2005-2008 shows that the US is another country with mixed evidence. As elsewhere in the developed world, US women’s obesity rate is associated with lower socioeconomic status. Among US men, obesity prevalence is generally similar at all income levels, with a tendency to be slightly higher at higher income levels. The Make American Great Again slogan and vote suggest that many Americans believe the US is transitioning in the wrong direction.
The only measure where the US is meaningfully ahead of Europe is GDP per capita, and to a smaller extent wages.
On pretty much every other quality of life measure the US is behind to a greater or lesser degree.
The ancients knew about obesity. It’s just that it wasn’t as common then as it is now. They knew what the cure was too, eating less. Ozempic is just a new way to eat less. It’s not the first or only option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bariatric_surgery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenfluramine/phentermine
There are more.
Ozempic is also Danish.
yes, but without American drug market it wouldn’t have existed for a few decades at least
It’s ‘Murcan when you use alternate facts.
I’m not a pharmacist and I’ve already spent 2 or 3 minutes checking Wikipedia. Ozempic is the brand name for semaglutide. Your mileage may differ depending on your regulatory authority. Ozempic is for managing type II diabetes. With a side effect of making weight loss much easier. It’s branded as Wegovy if you want to take it for the side effect of weight loss. It’s not the first drug in it’s class either. The other ones work similarly and with similar effects. It’s probably the one Nist knows about because apparently he’s in Real America ™ where people are deluged with prescription drug advertisements. I’m willing to speculate you have never heard the phrase “you or someone in your family has had medullary thyroid cancer” or “multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type II” while the melody from David Paton’s “It’s Magic” with new and exciting lyrics plays in the background…
It’s not 1947 anymore and people outside of the U.S. can afford drugs. And the international drug companies you imagine to be American do research outside of the U.S.
No, they can’t — at least not right now.
Just because someone somewhere has money doesn’t mean they’re actually allowed to use it. We don’t live in a free world.
That’s exactly how the drug market works: money doesn’t mean much, because you’re simply not allowed to buy stuff, even if you can afford it.
That’s why almost all drugs are developed with the American market in mind — because in the U.S., it is built so that people are allowed to buy slightly more than anywhere else. Every other market is basically an afterthought — like carmaker making a car for the market and then later also winning contract for police — good but they aren’t that interested in doing car only for a police contract.
It doesn’t mean that without American drug market there won’t be drugs at all, it means that there would be much much less new drugs. Semaglutide producers made 48% of the profit in the USA, and 27% of the profit in EU, Middle East and Africa combined.
Do you even know what outsourcing is — and why it’s done?
I don’t see how you can feel deprived just because something somewhere else seems better to you and you feel the need to proclaim something.
Are you sure they didn’t make half the profit in the Americas?
Yes I’m sure, it may include Canada(which won’t be more than a few percent), but surely not Americas, you can check it yourself. Actually I made a mistake cause I said revenue, which is irrelevant, what truly matters is profit, and profit in U.S. won’t be 45%, it will be much much higher cause it’s a huge premium market.
https://www.novonordisk.com/content/dam/nncorp/global/en/investors/irmaterial/annual_report/2022/novo-nordisk-annual-report-2021.pdf
Mexico and the Caribbean may also count as “north America“. They are in that continent formally.
no they aren’t considered as a North American market. What’s your point at all? U.S. is a prime market with more than 70%+ of pharma profits worldwide, that’s not North America, not Americas, it’s exclusively the USA, nobody argues with this . It means that in current system the main reason of any new innovation in pharmaceutical industry is there
They charged a lot in the U.S. Hearing relentess ads that ask if “you or someone in your family has had medullary thyroid cancer” or “multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type II” costs money. An expense that reduces profits. So does relentless bribery a.k.a. lobbying. By the drug companies and the health insurance companies. You reallllllllllly don’t want to watch America television late in the year when retirees have to select a health insurance plan. Those relentless ads do crowd out the ads for drugs….. there is that… And promulgating the propaganda Nist is spreading, that costs money. I wonder if he gets paid to do it or is so brainwashed he does it for free.
I beginning to suspect for free. Because a paid propagandist would move the goalposts or change the goalposts. Moving them and changing them multiple times is amateurish.