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Hayden Clarkin

New York

Transportation Guru at The Transit Guy

Articles

  • 1 week ago | thetransitguy.substack.com | Hayden Clarkin

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  • 1 week ago | thetransitguy.substack.com | Hayden Clarkin

    I would always face bankruptcy playing SimCity 4 as a kid. I’d plant parks on every corner, drop subway stations next to cul-de-sacs, and build fire stations on every street. Balancing what your city wants with what it can afford was hard, and once the money dried up, you had two choices: raise taxes or cut services. Those shiny new parks and busy subway stations? They’d get neglected fast. That’s exactly what’s happening in America today.

  • 3 weeks ago | thetransitguy.substack.com | Hayden Clarkin

    I live on the 7 train in Queens, arguably the best subway line in North America. Trains come every few minutes, 24 hours a day, connecting some of the densest and most diverse neighborhoods on the planet. As a result, it moves nearly 430,000 people daily, more than the entire Chicago L system combined. Cleveland’s only subway line, the Red Line, averages just 8,600 daily riders. That’s about 2% of the 7 train’s ridership, making it one of the lowest-performing rapid transit lines in the country.

  • 1 month ago | thetransitguy.substack.com | Hayden Clarkin

    As I’ve written before, there are few institutions, or people, with a higher approval rating than Dolly Parton. While I love her for her music and the feeling of joy she gives us, I also love that Dollywood Express, the heritage steam train that operates within Dollywood, has a higher rail ridership than 27 states. Dolly grew up in the back hills of the Great Smoky Mountains, not far from a Civil War–themed tourist park called Rebel Railroad.

  • 1 month ago | thetransitguy.substack.com | Hayden Clarkin

    (A must-read and source material: Transit Costs and Understanding the Costs of Transit Construction)No single issue threatens the proliferation of public transit in the U.S. and Canada more than the time and cost it takes to build it. Projects like California High-Speed Rail or New York’s Congestion Pricing face fierce backlash not just because of what they are, but because people no longer trust our ability to execute them. Our institutions have lost credibility.