![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Radial rail
Matthew Yglesias argues that, in metropolitan areas with good mass transit, demand for gasoline is more elastic than you think, and says something about Boston:
If you don't live downtown, and you're not lucky enough to live near the same radial line as your workplace (as once happened to me by accident, but only for about a year), the commuter rail system is essentially useless for getting between your home and your workplace. You'd have to ride into North or South Station, transfer from one to the other by subway in some cases (which itself involves changing subway trains), and then ride back out again on another train; that's likely to be a multi-hour trek to get to a spot fifteen or twenty miles from where you started. The alternatives would have to be pretty amazingly expensive to make that seem worthwhile.
Buses help fill up the gaps in the inner part of the network, but in the suburbs they're often scarce and unreliable. I also rode a bus to work for years, but even that line was mostly radial; it would have been much harder to do otherwise. (Some people also associate a social stigma with riding the bus, but they are stupid, so I won't say any more about it.)
Transit planners like to talk about the problem of circumferential mass transit, but I'm not sure it's all that solvable. More likely we'll have to see land-use patterns, especially for commerce and offices, change back toward greater centralization as a result of rising oil prices. That will just make rent in the city even more expensive, but at some point employers may see urban locations as worth the price again.
The kind of situation we have here in Greater Washington where for many suburbanites a brief drive to Metro station followed by a ride downtown is a viable alternative to commuting by car all the way downtown would accomplish a lot. I recall that Boston's commuter rail system was set up to work pretty smoothly in this fashion for a large number of suburbanites but the trains and parking lots were, in practice, usually operating well below capacity because people preferred to drive.That's part of it (though I am definitely not one of those people), but there's something else as well that I've become acutely aware of. Boston's commuter rail system, like the Green Line streetcars before it, is set up entirely for radial travel in and out of the city center. In some industries, though, the employers have all relocated out of the city to office parks in ring suburbs; the workers are assumed as a matter of course to be capable of driving there.
If you don't live downtown, and you're not lucky enough to live near the same radial line as your workplace (as once happened to me by accident, but only for about a year), the commuter rail system is essentially useless for getting between your home and your workplace. You'd have to ride into North or South Station, transfer from one to the other by subway in some cases (which itself involves changing subway trains), and then ride back out again on another train; that's likely to be a multi-hour trek to get to a spot fifteen or twenty miles from where you started. The alternatives would have to be pretty amazingly expensive to make that seem worthwhile.
Buses help fill up the gaps in the inner part of the network, but in the suburbs they're often scarce and unreliable. I also rode a bus to work for years, but even that line was mostly radial; it would have been much harder to do otherwise. (Some people also associate a social stigma with riding the bus, but they are stupid, so I won't say any more about it.)
Transit planners like to talk about the problem of circumferential mass transit, but I'm not sure it's all that solvable. More likely we'll have to see land-use patterns, especially for commerce and offices, change back toward greater centralization as a result of rising oil prices. That will just make rent in the city even more expensive, but at some point employers may see urban locations as worth the price again.