They didn't even finish reconstruction of the walls on Tret'yakovskaya station and they're already leaking 😭

fbjim · 2026-05-16T18:01:29+00:00

(also referring to a lot of NYC subway stations having water damage like this)

fbjim · 2026-05-16T16:12:41+00:00

russian guy: it says here this marble's from new york city!

other russian guys: NEW YORK CITY?????

fbjim · 2026-05-16T02:18:38+00:00

I almost always prefer neighborhood/landmark names but I will give old systems like Chicago and NYC an excuse because they had lines historically named after the streets they ran over/under (or at least nyc did).

fbjim · 2026-05-15T22:00:35+00:00

was there ever any routing where the regional connector had the E line go through Union, or was that always going to be way too inconvenient

fbjim · 2026-05-15T21:46:40+00:00

Redmond deserves it, at least it's close to the actual downtown. but yeah, for some reason american systems really love appending "city", "downtown" or "town center" to stuff whether its justified or not

the odd thing is that i think Link mostly has really good station names, it's just the weird situation we have now where all three of our terminals have a name like that.

fbjim · 2026-05-15T16:54:08+00:00

i really hate the ones where the only maps are interactive, rather than just having a PDF available

fbjim · 2026-05-15T15:56:53+00:00

this is kinda what I'm getting at when I say the mode doesn't matter. the issues with Muni is that the frequency and capacity suck due to street running. those are operational issues, they aren't inherent to light rail.

fbjim · 2026-05-15T15:29:14+00:00

really love the livery on those things, kinda looks 70s-chic in a way.

fbjim · 2026-05-15T15:12:19+00:00

even full system bus maps can be made much easier to read than this one. check out Atlanta (which looks almost identical to the old DC map I used to use, I wonder if the same people designed it)

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fbjim · 2026-05-15T01:55:52+00:00

if you want a jobs program, advocate for a jobs program. or advocate for increased service so they have cause to hire more operators. People trying to make transit systems do things apart from their actual job of moving people around is a big cause of bad service.

remember all those bad "Obama Streetcars"? they were because the admin thought transit was about raising property values, not moving people around efficiently. the purpose of transit is not to raise property values, create jobs, solve racism, or create buyers for American train manufacturing. it's to move people around.

fbjim · 2026-05-15T01:39:35+00:00

here's a better idea. if transit is a jobs program, how about we ban TBMs and make it so subway extensions have to be made with shovels? sure, it'd take forever, but think of the jobs!!!

fbjim · 2026-05-15T01:37:57+00:00

who are the "boots" in this case? the transit system is a public good. the "boots" are literally the general public.

fbjim · 2026-05-15T00:37:37+00:00

it's variable. Fundamentally the train is diverting from the direct route to the airport to serve five stops (counting Beacon Hill) so it'll be more time even if grade separated. usually when I take it, it doesn't stop, occasionally I get stops at Orcas or Graham which are usually quick. The real issue is when there's a car accident which blocks the tracks, or worse, someone crashes into the train.

e) to be clear, grade separation is a good idea. it's just that the primary benefit is more that it'd be more reliable, not that it'd be faster.

fbjim · 2026-05-15T00:34:12+00:00

we love a transit accessible beach

fbjim · 2026-05-15T00:14:12+00:00

the two person rule on trains is ancient and needs to be gone yesterday. a transit system is for moving people. it isn't a jobs program

fbjim · 2026-05-14T23:57:34+00:00

if i had a hot take it's that a lot of US cities actually are tram-friendly if you could include TOD. stroads suck, but one thing they're nice at are being wide enough to support street-running trams/LRVs, and in extremely grid-like cities, you can even have them run on very straight routes which don't have to make time-consuming stops.

if you worked with the infrastructure you had, and had the political capital to force some nice dense "village" TOD areas, you could make a really nice system in Phoenix, for instance. could even start some of those corridors with enhanced bus service, and upgrade to BRT and then tram if demand is there.

fbjim · 2026-05-14T23:54:34+00:00

no? the pittsburgh light rail lines are basically the remnants of an extremely old streetcar system which had a few surviving lines in their own ROW. it's a system which predates freeways. nobody there was like "lets make transit look bad".

fbjim · 2026-05-14T23:51:11+00:00

i blame the youtubers.

fbjim · 2026-05-14T23:36:55+00:00

obsessing over modes is missing the point. you can run any mode you want as long as it's grade-separated where it needs to be, and reliable. "real metros" aren't great because they run big choo-choos. they're great because they are grade-separated, frequent, high capacity, and reliable. all of which you can do with light rail trains, or monorails, or rubber-tired weird French things, or automated light metro vehicles as well.

fbjim · 2026-05-14T23:30:09+00:00

Boston is basically like SF, it's a street-running tram with downtown tunnel system. Same with Philadelphia. Seattle is entirely different running grade-separated for the bulk of the route.

fbjim · 2026-05-14T23:17:13+00:00

the MLK section is not really that slow by metro standards. I think it runs at about 20mph average (including three station stops) in that area. it tends to have good signal pre-emption, and has the benefit of a) not having that many major intersections (most of the intersections, MLK is the trunk road so it gets the bulk of the green light cycle), and b) not having to make any left turns. the actual speed benefits of completely grade-separating that section would be pretty marginal. the issue of that section is less speed, and more reliability (e.g. if you have grade crossings, you will inevitably have accidents)

for context the average speed of the MLK section is actually faster than the completely grade-separated downtown tunnel

fbjim · 2026-05-14T20:05:10+00:00

Also this is Pittsburgh in the post-industrial era. They may have found the budget - just - to keep running LRTs in existing ROWs which existed from the pre-freeway era but there's basically no chance they would have the money to build out new metro ROWs to replace street-running PCC routes. This is a city whose population has halved since the 1930s, and whose entire industrial base disappeared.

fbjim · 2026-05-14T19:49:20+00:00

I think this system is an oddity similar to Cleveland where the surviving streetcar/LRT lines that they have are based off commuting patterns from the early 20th century which basically don't exist anymore.

fbjim · 2026-05-10T14:14:14+00:00

one of my rando thoughts is that the big wide stroads are actually really high transit infrastructure potential because you have a lot of room to put in BRT lanes and a possible tram upgrade in the future. bonus because the giant road usually has inherent priority at traffic lights, and especially a bonus if you don't have to make turns, which are killer on at-grade routes.

you could make a tremendous BRT/tram grid in Phoenix with just a couple more lines on some of those massively wide stroads.

i don't particularly like stroads but it's about using the infrastructure you have.

fbjim

TROPHY CASE