That's a ridiculous assertion. In most major cities, you don't buy "tickets" for public transportation (except maybe light rail). Everything is fare based (used to be token based, but have mainly switched to cards). You pay the fare, you ride the subway or the trolley or the bus until you get off. The fare is the same no matter how far you are going. Most of these things travel in loops. You get to the end of the line, it either turns around, or just goes in the opposite direction.
Those were the top of a very brief search. If I looked a bit more, I'm sure I could find more examples backing up my original claim. There's nothing ridiculous about the assertion at all.
In Shanghai, it's fare based, but the fare is definitely not the same no matter how far you're going. The fare is determined as a function of where you enter the system and where you leave, with longer trips being more expensive.
There's no time limit; one entry will let you stay in the subway system all day. But you can't just live on the trains, because they shut down at night.
Somehow I suspect that if Shanghai can shut down the subway overnight, New York, with half the ridership, could handle doing so too, so the question "why is this allowed to happen" seems valid.
In nyc they have multiple tunnels for the same line, so one can be maintained while the other is active. Cities that shut down their metro do their maintenance then, because their lines don’t have a backup track.
Not sure about Shanghai, but in most countries there are (generous) time limits associated with fares, measured from first entry. Obviously this isn't enforced "in flight", but the gate will not let you out when you try to leave and you'll need to explain to staff why you've just spent 4 hours traveling one stop -- since odds are you actually went somewhere else and jumped the turnstile both ways.
I don't think there is a limit in Shanghai. A few years back there was a heat wave and the subway stations were full of people who just came to hang out where there was air conditioning.
Shanghai subway closing at 11pm or earlier is a huge inconvenience, especially for destinations on Pudong side where distances between locations are quite big. It is generally a big (positive) deal when a subway announces it can do late night services.
Zones are used for the light commuter rail service that connects to counties external to city limits.
Inside city limits, the distances travelled are so compressed (even interborough), that most trips are less than ten minutes of actual train ride.
Once you start dealing with zones, you also have to start operating on fixed schedules. The New York City system does have time tables but they don't really operate to the minute. The listed times are mostly just targets. More important is the frequency of trains, back to back trains (double capacity) with five minute frequencies during rush hour, and graveyard has 20 minute frequencies, everything else aims for ten minutes between each individual train.
Again, most people are travelling less than 45 minutes on trains set for 30MPH speed limits.
Hong Kong is significantly smaller than even Manhattan and still employs distance-based fares quite successfully.
I can go from my local station to the CBD (2 stops, around 5 minutes) and it costs roughly US$0.60; another 5 stops on the same line to get to my favorite restaurant bumps the journey to about 12 minutes and costs me ~$0.90. Crossing the harbor from Hong Kong island to the Kowloon peninsula takes less time but actually costs more (almost $1.50) thanks to tunnel fees.
On a side note, public transit timing is one thing that has been irrevocably ruined for me by living in HK. On my usual travel routes the train frequency is typically 2-3 minutes and during rush hour it’s on the order of 30 seconds - the next train often enters the platform just as the last car of the previous train leaves. Granted it does shut for a few hours each night, but even the other top Asian metro systems can't match it.
When I used to spend a lot of time in NYC (before moving to Asia) I had no problem with the subways; now it’s a significant consideration for me when thinking about moving.
I think that the gap between trains and the number of trains per hour is different. I can believe that there are sometimes merely 30 seconds between trains, but train frequencies don't really exceed, let's say, 50 trains per hour (and this is being very generous) because of a combination of signalling constraints and the need to reverse the trains at the end.
You're correct, but this is a mostly academic distinction on a network like Hong Kong's. The gap between trains is a much more important human metric, and it changes based on where you are in the network.
An example: you could fill as many trains as you could physically fit on a track coming from Central (the CBD) during rush hour; a train every 30 seconds or so is crucial to keeping things civil on the platform. As you get farther from Central, utilization falls until you reach a terminal station, where the time between trains can be more like 2-3 minutes without any problems. Through clever signaling you can achieve a much higher perceived throughput on the busiest stretches without actually running more trains.
In the Netherlands all public transport (from city buses you only use for one minute to intercity trains to the other side of the country) use the same chip card. You scan it where you enter the bus/tram/metro/train and scan it where you leave, you pay depending on distance travelled. The buses use GPS to calculate your cost.
It's usually fine for high frequency metros, particularly in peak times with more trains, but time-based zone fares aren't always reliable in other cases.
For example, in most of Switzerland and probably Germany that uses unified zone systems for everything (intercity trains, local buses, boats, funiculars, etc.) the frequency of most train routes is nowhere near those of a typical bus.
Zones aren't usually time based though, they're based on where you got on and how many zones that is away from where you are when your ticket is checked.
The flat fare is actually more progressive when it comes to transportation. In a large city, poor people generally have to travel further for work, so a distance-based fare hits them harder.
Well, perhaps both approaches are unfair. Perhaps you cannot have a system that's perfectly fair for everyone. That's not to say that you shouldn't try.
Yea as a NYC resident who travels to SF I’m always amazed at the cost of the BART system. Seems super shitty for low wage workers traveling long distances.
And it adds up so quick, with no unlimited option.
I guess it’d be like taking the Metro North or LIRR to work everyday but it still seems like a lot of money to me.
Denver’s RTD is zoned. The bay’s CalTrain is zoned. Atlanta’s MARTA is not zoned (it is a considerably smaller system though). Those are all my data points.
In most major cities you swipe a metro card that calculates the fare where you got on and got off, or applies zoned travel on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual rate. In some cities you can just swipe an NFC bank card. To have a 'ticket to ride' seems ridiculous.
