Is it just me, or is this obvious? Subways have proven over and over to be the most economical and least objectionable mode of mass transit wherever density is high enough to support them. Any place where subways are viable should have them - buses, trolleys, and light rail are not a substitute. It follows that any place with growing density needs to build more subways, even if that means eternal construction. Besides, subway construction is hard to get upset about, being mostly underground. It's far less disruptive than tearing up streets or surface level rail.
Many people are against public transit based upon a very vocal(and wealthy) minority that is opposed to it being government run instead of private enterprise. It's essentially the opposite of the ideology that caused the build up of many subways systems in the past. These very wealthy powerful people can use their power and money to distort the public opinion so that cheap bus projects end up looking like expensive subway projects and subway projects look like building a land bridge to Mars.
For a great example take a look at the new Maryland Governor and one of his first actions coming into office[0][1] This is someone(and his backers) that are ideologically opposed to public transit even when it is overwhelming supported(and paid for) by the regions it directly effects.
On the liberal side, many people are against public transit expansion because better public transit coverage in outlying areas makes housing more valuable, pricing people out of their apartments.
I live in a dead spot on the South Side of Chicago where, ~80 years ago, the neighborhood association actually had the El demolished over gentrification concerns.
There is little liberal objection to improving public transit in already expensive downtown areas, but plans to improve commute times from the south and west sides of San Francisco will almost certainly be met with vigorous opposition. Even if they wouldn't cost anything.
I am not familiar with any liberal opposition to public transit...anywhere. I have lived in a number of liberal-leaning cities, all of which had extensive public transit.
The opposition to those systems (their expansion, in some cases even just their operation) was universally from the right, because "run gubmint like a business, and if it doesn't make a profit, pull the plug!"
Apparently it wasn't really killed by the local populace. There is narrative about how it would have caused sprawl-like development (certainly a conservative mindset in context). I couldn't find any references to that for Marin though. It seems what did it in for Marin at least was a campaign from the GG Bridge district, fearing a loss of power and money; there was strong support in Marin for BART (https://books.google.com/books?id=z56Ui3QFYPgC&lpg=PA136&ots...).
My father was an Electricain on BART. I remember those dinner conversations about bringing BART into Marin County.
The reason it didn't come through Marin was cost. It might have been political, but I don't believe that was the case. It did seem seems like politicians were much more corrupt than they are today? We had absolutely no way of finding out what they were up to; except for good, honest newspaper reporters.
At the time, the project was incredibly expensive to build. Every foot of track was scrutinized. The people of Marin would have loved to have BART go through their county, especially the SF commuters.
My father's biggest grip was getting to a job site from Marin to San Francisco. He hated the commute, along with myself years later. I guess we were spoiled? The commute was only 45-60 from Marin to anywhere in the city.
At the time, building BART was really a big deal. The enginneers would load materials into these huge round cylinders. Welders would then run beads around the circumfrence of the cylinders. Once everything was secured to to ocean floor, workers from the SF? side would cut into the new section. As a kid, I was allowed to go to work with my father once a year. I would drive electric golf carts up and down the tube.
Times have certainly changed? For some reason, Electricians drank a lot back then? Actualy everyone drank a lot back then. It was not uncommon to see a Electricain drinking a beer down in those dark, dank, tubes--if they had a stationary boring job to do. I recall my father building a lamp from one of the third rail insulators, and I still can't get rid of a "Danger--3rd rail sign" he lifted. On the sign, right after Danger, they put in Pelligro. They actually debated whether it was necessary to put in any foreign language on the signage. It was a different time; Marin and San Francisco were 90% white, mutt, middle class, and Hispanic people were scarce.
I do miss the man, but we had our differences. He always felt that because I went to college, I would turn into some pompous a-hole? I told him, "Dad, I'm going to a state college. I said, "It's actually kind of a joke, but I do want to graduate." He didn't have to pay a dime for my education, so I still don't know what his problem was? It's almost like he wanted me to be happy, but just not happier than himself? Well he won? I remember a christmas card he gave me that had a bunch of "PhD, Doctor, too many degrees, etc." before my name on a card. I went home, from that Christmas dinner, and had a nervous breakdown, and have never been the same. Thanks Dad! Different parenting skills back then?
88% of the people in Marin county wanted to extend BART there, according to polling done at the time. Bridge officials didn't want it, and shopped around for an engineer to until they found one who said the Golden Gate bridge couldn't handle the trains.
The "it'll cause sprawl" narrative apparently did not play much of a role in the actual politics of the planning process.
Transit fights are usually a rich vs. poor issue with a streak of racism running through the middle, with different arguments used by the left and right as representatives of the rich, while the poor are largely uncourted(except as a minority group, which I will illustrate). In all cases the right will claim that roads and car ownership and home ownership foster independence and the solution is to build another highway to a far-flung suburb and to tear down the city. The arguments from the left are more interesting.
The richest neighborhoods - in the suburbs - don't want transit. An unreliable once-an-hour bus is seen as a handout for the poors, an impractical feel-good project that cannot earn its way. A large transit development that aligns with a real neighborhood would upset the balance by making the surrounding area denser and busier. This is the position that the the western San Francisco neighborhoods have been in for the past generation - a bit too wealthy and a bit too suburban to break away from car usage, even as they are far denser than most suburbs. Many of the outlying BART stops, similarly, are large parking lots, a way of sealing in car dependence and transit as a last resort for commuters, rather than a benefit that makes the stop a destination.
But then the reverse applies once you're in central cities and you're dealing with luxury condo residents: Anything less than a world-class rail system is deemed unsatisfactory, but the rails should, of course, go from one wealthy neighborhood to another. Getting the poor into the rapid system equates to more "criminals" or "thugs", and so you would get support for saturation coverage of an area that is already well-served, or a neighborhood that has undergone massive gentrification, but not underserved poor areas. This sort of thing contributes to transit system balkanization - a bad system for the poor, and a good one for the rich.
In both density situations, minority political groups will get showcase wins if they can lock in by-the-doorstep bus coverage of their constituents that is too slow and indirect to be truly useful. This is something that SF and much of the East Bay has avoided, but maybe not for the right reasons. The areas that were historically lower-income got access to BART, but are simultaneously now the biggest targets for gentrification. They were intended to be handout zones, and then the rise of real estate prices ultimately flipped that idea upside down and turned BART into a gentrifying mechanism. And now we are in the situation where the system has to be developed for a plurality, rather than a handout - which is probably a good thing.
I think this is spot on for the most part. However, I think you're discounting "bedroom communities." Chicago does them quite well - you can own a reasonably priced home in an urban neighborhood at a comfortable level of density. Not the inner city, not downtown, but not exurban sprawl either. You get a backyard, but a small one. You may need a car for domestic life, but for work you can drive or bike to the train station and ride commuter rail like Metra to avoid freeway congestion. This, to me, is the best of both worlds - people get their quasi-suburban experiences, but the city still thrives and people don't waste their lives in traffic.
Interesting to hear of objections from an economic angle. Around where I live, the argument tends to be framed as a "spreading crime" issue, which translates to allowing predominantly poor, black neighborhoods access to rich, white parts of town. It bums me out.
One of the things that absolutely blew my mind after moving to bay area were that there were people actively fighting expansion of the mass transit systems, and often successfully.
Mass transit projects in the bay end up being highly disruptive and costing billions a piece. I'd like to see more subways in terms of getting around, but there is plenty of logic in arguing for BRT over trains. I think most cities have that same problem right now, particularly when federal funds for such projects are hard to get or non-existent.
>I'd like to see more subways in terms of getting around, but there is plenty of logic in arguing for BRT over trains
BRT can't move nearly as many people as trains can. It would take many more buses to move the same amount of people. In a dense urban environment, trains make the most sense. In an area that's not dense, trains can allow density to happen. See the development of New York for instance. Plenty of trains went through fields at the time, and the railroads made huge amounts of money off of developing this now useful land (amongst other things). I suppose that's the real reason you get folks in the Bay Area to fight against trains.
The other issue we have in the US is our infrastructure costs are way out of line with the world norm. If the Second Avenue Subway had similar per-mile costs to Tokyo subway extensions (or even the maglev they are building), the funding for the first phase would mostly get the subway the length of Manhattan.
(Beverly Hills native here - been following that pretty closely.)
If you dig a little, it turns out the public "it'll blow up our kids!" hysteria was mostly cover for a desire to have route the subway to benefit the city of Beverly Hills instead of the neighboring mostly-office-space Century City. Blocking the subway entirely was basically political blackmail.
Can you clarify how the alternate location would have benefited the city of Beverly Hills other than not tunneling under their high school?
The alternate location is 0.2 miles away, wouldn't even be in Beverly Hills proper, and there aren't any particular commercial developments that would be of better advantage than the current proposal. Heck, the alternate location is adjacent to a golf course.
The issue was the exact route west of the Wilshire/Rodeo stop [1] in western BH. The possibilities were running north of the high school, with a third stop in the city of Beverly Hills, around the Santa Monica/Wilshire intersection [2] and its commercial district; or to run southwest, under the high school, to the office towers of Century City [3].
The distance look close on a map, but the terrain is EXTREMELY unwalkable - what looks like regular roads on the maps of Century City are laid out more like highways, with hundreds of meters between crosswalks, and large blocks without paths to cut across them.
The MTA wanted the Century City route, both because it would have been better placed to catch commuter traffic and because the Wilshire/Santa Monica route would have gone too close to a fault line; Beverly Hills, clearly, preferred the extra commercial activity to contribute to its own tax revenues. So they made up this "oh my god the kids are going to die!" scare; the local congressman, Henry Waxman, backed them by getting the BH route blocked at the Federal level until 2007.
The MTA then brought up the alternative of sending the train through West Hollywood instead, bypassing BH altogether, and the city caved right quick.
Ah, you're talking about the Wilshire route vs the 'Pink' line / West Hollywood route & associated time frame.
I thought you were talking about the opposition indicated per the parent post, regarding the Beverly Hills High School opposition to the Avenue of the Stars / Constellation stop vs the Santa Monica Blvd / Avenue of the Stars stop.
I largely agree with your points but the 'Think of the children' aspect wasn't just contained to that aspect; they had fears of ISIS attacks as recently as last year.
Subways are typically speaking not he most economical form of mass transit. Right of way, interruption and building underground tunnels (not open trench) are super expensive.
That said an above ground system up and down over and across Van Ness, Geary and maybe Judah/Taraval and taking over for Caltrain down the peninsula would be great.
Speaking of the peninsula, it could exploit a system going down the camino real corridor. That alone could alleviate congestion and housing, if only they developed that long corridor and put in mass transit along the line and allow mixed use mid-rises five blocks on either side of it.
What do you mean by being high enough density to support them? Light rail is rarely as economical of a solution as many suggest simply because of the routes it has to take in some cities and going underground just raises the cost exponentially. The cost per mile to develop and maintain rarely comes even close to efficient of above ground solutions. Portland is looking to spend two billion on a line simply because it does go underground. There is no possible pay back.
So don't discount bus service and other alternatives. This romance with rail, either above or below ground, sucks up way too much funding for what it delivers.
I wish every Bart employee were required to travel to Hong Kong and spend a week riding their train systems around. Clean, fast, efficient, cheap, robotic.
Hong Kong has the best subway system I have experienced.
I don't think it's obvious. Building a subway is extremely expensive and disruptive. And if you went to the citizenry to try and collect the funds directly to pay for it, hardly anyone would buy-in.
The same thing could be said of any number of public works projects, which arguably are quite needed. How many people would buy in for sewers, for instance? Especially at the level of money you'd have to charge, and knowing that you couldn't change it based on someone's income?
SF could also, you know, get rid of stupid laws that prevent building more housing, and, I dunno, maybe try to get people to stop peeing and pooping on the sidewalks.
But that's in a perfect world where the local govt cares or has been properly incentivized. (Bribed.)
Only vaguely related, but is it normal for large American cities to completely lack publicly accessible restrooms? I visited Seattle recently, spent a lot of time just wandering around and seeing the sights; it was really alienating that, everywhere I went, you were required to buy something before allowed to ask for the restroom key, like a grade-schooler asking teacher for permission. I'm from Lexington, KY; even those "Restrooms Are For Paying Customers" signs aren't common, and physically locked restrooms are practically unheard of.
And then people complain that homeless folks do their business on the streets. Well, what the fuck else are they gonna do? Eeesh.
Yes. Sufficiently large American cities will have enough mentally ill homeless people to make an unlocked bathroom a big liability. Even if they're a very small fraction of the population, you only have to find the walls smeared with shit, or a guy passed out with a needle falling out of his arm once before the locks go on.
Yeah, I mean, I know the justification, and it's not really any one business' fault. At this point, any place that tries not locking their bathrooms will instantly find themselves the only place homeless people can go to pee in a mile radius, and be overwhelmed.
What sickens me is that people look at ludicrous phenomena like locked bathrooms, or like putting fucking spikes on public benches, and go "Oh, well, you know, those homeless are why we can't have nice things." As if hordes of crazy homeless people are some sort of irresistible natural phenomenon, like locusts, and not something that anyone could possibly do something about. Especially not something that might conceivably have to be paid for with tax money.
Homeless congregate in downtowns because it gives the most profitable begging revenue. Homeless populations are also surprisingly small, something like %0.5 or less of the population of a metro area. And then on top of that, most homeless people aren't crazy people who shit on sidewalks. It only takes a few hundred crazy homeless to make a downtown core horrible.
They exist because there isn't mental health funding to house and manage them. It's a tragedy of the commons problem.
I don't think that's a tragedy of the commons. There's no rational self-interest in people who would rather walk past human misery every day than put a extra couple of dollars towards alleviating it. As you say, proper, civilized mental health funding could go a long way towards fixing this problem; even just funding for public restrooms with full-time attendants would help; but we can't get it. It's hard to put that down to anything other than self-absorbed callousness.
I should of added more detail. Any place that offers some semblance of mental health and homeless services gets everyone else's homeless shipped to them, or they just start coming themselves. You need a federal level mental health program that houses and manages homeless, but it's expensive, and these people are the hard cases, often with little hope of recovery.
The practice of locking publicly-accessible bathrooms in businesses was initially a shock to this Alabama refugee. After I spent some time in SF, the reason for the practice became clear.
In the downtown districts of San Francisco that aren't FiDi, there are usually-operational free public toilets. There aren't enough of them, and they too-often out of service, but they do exist.
Many large cities all over the world have the same problems. There will be a few public restrooms, but even in cities like London and Oslo business - generally places like McDonalds, Burgerking, and the local fast food places - will have locks on their bathroom doors and you need to ask for a code or key from the cashiers.
There aren't as many public toilets as there used to be, but there are still enough (I'm sure homeless people know where they are), and it's rare for there to be a lock on the toilets in larger businesses.
All that article says is that a few super-expensive building projects won't bring down apartment rents for the rest of us. Well, duh. It wasn't supposed to. It was catering to the very high end of the market.
Change zoning restrictions and make it a lot easier to build denser housing everywhere. One lot that currently supports a single house could easily support a five-floor, ten-unit building with much higher aggregate rent than the house.
I don't understand how anyone can say with a straight face that adding more housing exacerbates the problem of not having enough housing. It's not like there's infinite demand, and if you add ten million houses then eleven million people will instantly move to San Francisco. You don't say that giving a starving man food will only make his problems worse.
Just curious, do you own real estate in San Francisco?
>I don't understand how anyone can say with a straight face that adding more housing exacerbates the problem of not having enough housing.
Say you have a building with 3 units all of a type that do not appeal to foreign investors and wealthy people looking for pied-a-terres, and thus are occupied by people who live and perhaps work in San Francisco. Tear it down and replace it with a building with 10 units, all of which do appeal to the aforementioned investors and wealthy people. Then say 8 units get sold to investors who leave the units unoccupied most of the time, and 2 units get sold to people who want to live in the neighborhood. You've now reduced the amount of housing stock available to San Franciscans, even though you've increased the total number of units.
We've had discussions here on HN relatively recently where people discuss housing price inflation in London caused by foreign investors. Vancouver also has a large number of condo high-rises that sit mostly empty most of the time, because they're not occupied.
That can just as easily happen in San Francisco.
Obviously that won't happen if we build 10 million units. But we're not going to build 10 million units. The danger is that San Francisco builds enough units to attract additional investor demand, but not enough to satiate that demand. Which could leave actual San Franciscans worse off.
The problem is that when you stop building housing, the old, crappy housing increases in value. The investors then start purchasing these units and, if they want, gut them and make the interiors modern. Everyone else is priced out.
Look at New York. People are paying thousands a month to live in crappy 19th century tenements that used to be in dangerous and poor neighborhoods.
Really, you can't win by not building housing. "Them Chinese are buying our housing! Let's stop building housing! That'll show them! Now instead of owning 0.1% of housing, they'll own 10%!" How does that make sense?
The foreign investors aren't going to buy 100% of a city. They can't afford it; the total property value of NYC alone is over $800 billion. As they buy, value goes up. If we let builders respond to this demand, they will keep producing new units to make up for foreign investors. They don't have infinite money, so stop pretending they do.
I wasn't advocating not building. I was just giving an example of how housing markets are more complicated than a simple supply/demand formulation.
In these discussions here on housing in San Francisco a pretty strict dichotomy seems to taken hold. A lot of people believe that either you're a fan of The Rent is Too Damn High, and believe that the problem is just zoning and if you just get rid of zoning then all the housing problem in San Francisco will be solved by the power of the free market. Or if you don't believe that, then you're a NIMBY who wants to see zero construction and either doesn't believe in free-market economics, or who wants to restrict construction so as to increase the value of their own property.
It's a tiresome bit of groupthink not worthy of the intelligence of the folks here. Just because I think the situation is more complicated than a simple supply/demand equation doesn't mean I'm anti-growth.
And for the record, I'm a home owner in Mountain View, and in the last city council election I voted for the pro-housing-construction slate of candidates. I also think The Rent Is Too Damn High is a rather stupid book.
I'm from that land called Vancouver, BC. BC in general has NIMBY policies. The cost of construction is also higher. Maybe not as bad as the bay area, but enough to exasperate the problem. BC is also not experiencing a population boom fueled by an economic boom like SF is. It hasn't for the past 20 years, the SFBA has experienced it twice.
London and Vancouver are created by loose investor immigrant laws and tax incentives for the rich. You could get Canadian citizenship as an 'investor' by basically buying a house until very recently. On top of that, you get special tax treatment for the first several years of citizenship if your rich by Canada. Canada's real estate bubble never popped.
China has a large amount of ongoing capital flight, Vancouver is nice and stable, and a relatively quick flight back to China. Vancouver has a huge Chinese immigrant community. All of this combined plus the general Canadian real estate bubble & laws creates Vancouver.
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London is even worse. In the UK they have a nom-dom resident tax law, where you basically just pay a flat tax of ~$40k/yr and have no taxation on your foreign income as a rich person. London is a hub city for the world too. The UK also has very low property tax rates. All of these facts combined create London.
If the UK wants to reverse London, then getting rid of non-dom tax laws, adding wealthy-only property taxes and treating them as normal tax residents will reverse the trend fairly quickly.
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The USA is not an attractive place to be rich resident, unless your wealth comes from a US corporation. The USA has a high relative tax load, citizenship based taxation (only place in the world!), harsh anti-corruption / anti-money laundering laws, a very powerful, wealthy and motivated tax collection agency, a global financial surveillance apparatus, estate tax, a long and annoying immigration process and so on. All of this puts a damper on the super wealthy making another London.
Also the state of a place doesn't really matter, the 'investors' would be interested in molding crack houses. They have the money to turn it into whatever they want. You can do a total rebuild in SF as long as you keep the same square footage. One ancedote is a heavily molded crack shack in my neighborhood listed at ~$600k and sold for ~$900k. Like I was getting an allergy attack just walking into this place for a few minutes. Also see the same thing in Vancouver with this comedy game: http://www.crackshackormansion.com/
In summary: Build more, build tall, we need more 30 story residential apartment complexes! The laws of supply and demand do work! Ideally right beside BART and Muni tunnel stations. The mission became overpriced despite being a bad part of town because of BART.
> Change zoning restrictions and make it a lot easier to build denser housing everywhere.
Which increases infrastructure demands, which increases labor requirements, which increases housing demands ...
> I don't understand how anyone can say with a straight face that adding more housing exacerbates the problem of not having enough housing.
Why is it so hard to understand that ecosystems have equilibriums, and that changing one variable never occurs in isolation, and doesn't magically maintain a balanced system?
> It's not like there's infinite demand, and if you add ten million houses then eleven million people will instantly move to San Francisco. You don't say that giving a starving man food will only make his problems worse.
There's also not infinite supply. Not of resources, not of land, not of infrastructure.
It's not like you can add "ten million houses" and expect that you'll somehow solve affordability in isolation.
That's just naive 5th grade economics.
> Just curious, do you own real estate in San Francisco?
No, I moved away from San Francisco, and bought something elsewhere.
If I owned real estate in San Francisco -- and didn't care about quality of life -- density would be good for my pocket book.
If 1 million people live in a city, and you add 10 million more apartments, would that lower the price of each apartment? Of course, because you increased the supply. Adding housing absolutely decreases the average price of housing. This is supply and demand.
Now, does adding a small amount of housing have any appreciable effect on average price? No.
Therefore, the solution is massive construction of new housing.
If a freeway is full of cars and you add lots more freeway, won't that make more space for cars?
The obvious answer is yes, but the obvious answer is often wrong. Adding more freeway can create more demand, meaning no progress is made. [1] [2]
Right now the major constraint on having a larger tech industry in SF is the real estate expense; both offices and apartments are through the roof. It's so bad that established companies are opening or expanding offices elsewhere, and even many startups are trying other things. They wouldn't be doing that if they could keep expanding here, so no, adding lots more housing might do nothing but create more demand.
Also, saying "massive construction of new housing" so glibly suggests that there is a lot of empty land just waiting for construction. Take a look at a map of San Francisco: there are buildings almost everywhere, and the people in them are generally pretty happy where they are. Where there are no buildings, we mostly have parks, which people are also quite fond of.
Mencken wrote: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." As here, an number of those answers come from applying Econ 101 in a way where one might as well be saying, "Assume a spherical cow..." [3]
Sure, you could easily upzone and fit 4 to 5 times as many people into the city.
Not so easy to upgrade the infrastructure (transit and otherwise) to handle 4-5 times as many people living in (and traveling out of and back into) the city, OTOH.
And if you do that, best case, you've got 4-5 times as many people living in the city, at similar costs, in smaller living spaces. Where's the gain?
> Not so easy to upgrade the infrastructure (transit and otherwise) to handle 4-5 times as many people living in (and traveling out of and back into) the city, OTOH.
Actually, this is the part where cities shine: infrastructure costs in cities are lower per-person than they are in suburbs. It's much more efficient to have a dense enough city that people can reasonably get around on foot or bike, for instance, than a suburb that requires driving everywhere. It puts way less wear and tear on the roads and requires fewer of them.
The suburban cul-de-sac generates traffic by making everyone take the same big roads. Cities can redirect traffic in any number of ways given a well-connected road network. With a mix of uses the need for heavy infrastructure decreases, as many trips that might in the suburbs require a car merely require a body healthy enough to move. Less driving can actually save lives, given how dangerous driving is. And those who drive in cities are probably less likely to die, given that speeds are much lower.
In large cities, transit becomes more efficient than building highways. For example, the DC Metro just got an expansion for ~$3 billion. Meanwhile, a single highway interchange in Virginia was redone with a cost of $.25 billion. A railroad can move way more people than 12 interchanges.
> And if you do that, best case, you've got 4-5 times as many people living in the city, at similar costs, in smaller living spaces. Where's the gain?
You've got lower infrastructure costs per-person than if 1x the people lived in the city and the other 3x-4x people lived in the suburbs, ultimately saving money. A lot of suburbs are long-term financially unstable as growth occurs because their infrastructure costs grow faster than economic growth grows the tax base to pay for said infrastructure.
Loudon County, Virginia, for instance, has drastically lowered its willingness to approve single family housing because it's realized that each new SFH actually gets a large net tax subsidy unless its value is above a certain threshold. More SFHs = budget death.
Apart from infrastructure cost savings due to the economy of scale, the other huge benefit is actually to economic growth: denser cities are more economically productive than less dense cities. In cities with good human capital, the effect is even stronger with higher density.
It's easy to see why this might be. For starters, for people and jobs in a given area means every person has access to more jobs than they would otherwise. In a spread out region, more jobs would be outside of reasonable commuting distance, meaning a good portion of workers would not be willing to take the jobs, due either to time or cost concerns (especially for the poor who will be less likely to afford a car, bus / train fare, etc.).
So yeah, the benefits are large. We founded cities for a reason thousands of years ago.
Have you tried asking people living in those homes about your "easy" plan? The one that would involve them living somewhere else for a couple of years during construction and then moving back to a smaller, less appealing place? As I said, San Francisco residents mostly seem pretty happy where they are.
Now some might _choose_ to move because they could sell their single-family home for a much higher price to someone who would then build a multifamily building on the lot. But that's obviously their business.
But to the main point of your argument, about happiness: it's a general truism that people in low-density-zoned areas are happy there and oppose any sort of upzoning anywhere nearby. Upzoning nearby but not on their actual lot is particularly bad, because it would reduce the value of their real estate; people fight _that_ tooth and nail.
The result is that everyone who is already there is fine; it's people who are trying to enter the market, either via moving to the area or by growing up and trying to move out of their parents' house, who get screwed. But since by and large those people don't vote (the young for demographic reasons; the not-yet-residents because they're not yet residents), it's the incument residents who get to control the zoning rules to their exclusive (perceived, at least) benefit.
Which is all fine, but then prices get out of hand and people panic and start introducing things like rent control and whatnot, which makes prices get even more out of hand anytime someone actually moves. And then we see the current San Francisco real estate market.
People don't fight upzoning because it reduces the value of their real estate; in fact, it almost always does the opposite.
People fight upzoning because they like where they live, and upzoning would destroy what they like about it.
As for "people trying to enter the market", upzoning makes it that much harder; condos are generally a worse investment, so most high-density developments are rentals. If you think housing prices are high, try the cost of a buying a rental building.
Lastly, the "incumbent residents" bit is hilarious. I believe that's called "a citizen", or "a community member" -- as in, the people who are paying the taxes and electing representative leadership to serve in the interests of their established community.
> People don't fight upzoning because it reduces the value of their real estate
You didn't read what I said carefully enough. People fight _nearby_ upzoning because it reduces the value of their real estate. Upzoning of their actual land increases its value, of course.
Agreed on people fighting upzoning of their own land because it would change the surroundings in a way they find undesirable.
By "people trying to enter the market", I mean the housing market, not the real estate purchase market. That is, people trying to find a place to live. It's quite rare for people first moving out of their parents' house to do so by buying a house themselves; they typically rent. The result is that there are tons of places in the US (including San Francisco) where people have to move far away from their relatives when they move out on their own because there is nowhere nearby that is a viable place to live.
As for that last.... that's true if you exclude the interests of the children of the community (which are nearly always excluded; once the kids finish college they're on their own and typically shut out of the community). It's also true if you ignore the fact that some of these communities (and the Bay Area is particularly bad about it) try to create lots of employment opportunities but without the corresponding housing. This leads to hellish commutes for everyone, including the members of the community in question, lots of complaining, and poorer quality of life than you would have otherwise.
There are some unpleasant tradeoffs here, for sure. The problem is that some people refuse to acknowledge that the tradeoffs even exist and to discuss what the right tradeoff is. They insist that nothing must ever change, period, and it never occurs to them that this means that their commute will suck more and more and their kids will not be able to live near them.
Note that I say this as someone who lives in a suburb. I like it here. I would not be terribly happy with upzoning myself. And yet I'm watching a lot of the resulting problems play out (including people who grew up in the town being completely priced out of it). It's not pretty, and upzoning sure would help some of those problems.
Several of the people I know living in the western half of the city are living with 3–4 roommates in one single-family house, because they can’t afford separate apartments. Because they have rent control, they can continue to afford to stay in places where rents have doubled in the last few years, but they can’t afford to move to a new place, and might have to leave the city entirely to e.g. get married and start a family. Some of them don’t drive, so the excessive parking requirements are useless, but are constantly and bitterly complaining about how slow and unreliable the Muni buses are (the ones who drive complain about traffic congestion instead).
Many such people would be pretty happy to have an independent one bedroom apartment in a 5 story building in the same neighborhood at a similar price, assuming some improved transit.
I agree they would be pretty happy to have apartments. But even they wouldn't be happy to be kicked out of their current place now so that in two years some entirely different people could have 1-bedroom apartments on the land where they once lived. And that's not even considering the current owners or all the neighbors. Your friends are likely to be new arrivals, and so have little connection to the people around them. But for many people living out there, those are their childhood homes, and their neighbors are important parts of their lives.
Personally, I also think a lot of land west of Twin Peaks is underutilized. But I think it's important for people not to be glib about the fact that a lot of the people living there think it's just fine, and that even for those who want something different we're talking about incredibly disruptive and expensive change.
One, I don't think asking for some modest thought and compassion in the face of glib, facile plans is the exact problem SF has. But thanks for sharing your feelings so dramatically; I hope it was cathartic for you.
And two, I think things are working out reasonably well for SF. The US has a history of absolutely terrible attempts at grand redevelopment. Read up on our "urban renewal" waves, for example. San Francisco has mostly avoided or repaired that sort of urban planning idiocy, and I think it would be monumentally dumb to let another bubble lead to big "solutions" to problems that are transitory.
If you and others would like to indulge that third-world dictator tendency to dramatic urban planning, might I suggest finding someplace else in the Bay Area? San Francisco is less than 1% of the land; there's no particular reason to do it here. Or, better, show us how it's done in, say, Texas, which has plenty of space to develop that nobody is currently occupying.
> San Francisco has mostly avoided or repaired that sort of urban planning idiocy
If you think that then I have a bridge to sell you. A nice International Orange one.
SF is a hive of planning idiocy, from dumb height laws, to 1:1 parking requirements, to terrible permit application processes. It's practically a model for planning idiocy at this point.
You do realize that "that sort" restricts the meaning of "urban planning idiocy" to the kind I mentioned in the previous sentence, right?
Assuming you do, then I guess this is just more spleen venting. Anonymous spleen venting of course; I imagine you wouldn't act this way in person: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
I agree, and the maddening thing for me is that my fellow people in the tech industry so rarely say, "Why yes, we are the problem. What can we do about it?"
Thinking the tech industry is the problem is pretty much like saying you get a cold because you go out in cold weather.
It's not true, but it sounds right if you don't look too close.
The tech industry isn't the cause of anything but growth. Growth isn't bad. Growth is totally manageable. It's not like these issues magically showed up in the tech boom of the 90s - it just made them worse.
However what DID cause this: bad urban planning, lack of ability to change, being systemically unable to fix the housing issues over the last 40 years.
Plenty of places cope with growth periods better than SF, but SF doesn't want to cope with them: it wants to have it's cake and eat it too. It can't, but it's been trying for a long time and failing horribly.
This is not a new development. It's not a new problem. The solutions have been the same for a long time but no-one wants to change to fix them.
Growth isn't necessarily bad, but neither is it necessarily good. Some growth is manageable; some isn't.
It appears we both agree that rapid growth is a proximate cause of the problem, and the tech industry is the main cause of that rapid growth. Where we differ is that you think a bunch of other people should immediately change to accommodate you, while you simultaneously refuse to acknowledge their perspective, which is that their previous system was working well enough for them until tech people came along in overwhelming numbers. And that maybe they were perfectly happy with how things are, and feel no particular need to change to suit you.
The rest looks like dickish handwaving to me. If you'd like to just keep yelling at people, stop bugging me. If you'd like to have an actual discussion, then start behaving respectfully.
> Were you even in SF 15 years ago, when the .com bubble popped and housing prices returned to a degree of sanity?
IIRC, one of the notable things about SF in the .com burst was that housing prices did not drop significantly (as they did in outlying areas of the Bay Area), the rate of increase just dropped, as the people who still had good-baying SF jobs moved in from the peripheries and replaced the people who could no longer afford SF because they fell off the gravy train.
My recollection is that housing rental was in between.
It's worth noting that the dot-com bust hit tech hard, but didn't do anything to housing nationally. So it's hard to separate the effect of the dot-com bust with the housing bubble that was starting to inflate at the time. And thinking about who I know who bought property right after the bust, it was people who made money in the previous bubble, which would also have a masking effect.
I thought the whole roads make cars thing was a case of correlation being confused with causation? The UK provides a case study that tend to discredit this theory. Our government bought into the concept some 30 years ago and major road construction projects were slowed right down. 30 years on we've had little slowdown in growth of car numbers and now have even more congested roads.
What is true is that traffic flow does not depend on e.g. number of lanes. The problem of traffic flow has to be addressed on a system level rather that a individual street level. So e.g. variable speed limits can overall keep traffic flowing more smoothly than adding a lane to a freeway/motorway would.
You do realize that there are people in those cars, right?
In any case, the use of the analogy is correct. People are currently moving to the Bay Area because of the concentration of tech jobs and talent and investor money here. More people moving here means a greater concentration of the things that make people move here. For years this could be seen as a virtuous circle, but I think it has gone well past that. Especially if, as is widely felt, that we are in another bubble fueled by cheap investor money.
> If 1 million people live in a city, and you add 10 million more apartments, would that lower the price of each apartment? Of course, because you increased the supply.
Short term, sure.
Long term, less clear. More people living in the city = more demand for various goods and services = more businesses competing for space with residences and more jobs and, thus, housing demand = higher market clearing prices for housing.
> Adding housing absolutely decreases the average price of housing. This is supply and demand.
You are assuming that the you can increase the supply without affecting demand. This is naïve.
Um, you can't wave a wand and get more housing. It has to go for a rent, that pays the developer for the construction AND land price including annual property tax. In a high-land-value area, available housing will only be built for those that can afford it. No magic bullet.
If you re-zone some significant portion of the western and southern 3/4 of San Francisco by zones that allow for e.g. the construction of 4–5 story low-rise apartment buildings (ideally allowing ground floor retail), there will be room for dramatically more housing units to be built.
Developers are currently rushing to build on every bit of available land in SF that allows medium density construction (all the bits of that map that aren’t pale yellow). All of the parking lots, warehouses, and little one-story buildings in such areas are being converted to luxury condos at maximum speed.
With better transit and municipal planning throughout the Bay Area, there are many places where it would be possible to dramatically expand housing stock and bring housing rent down to more reasonable levels.
If this even worked in the short-term (and so far, no city that has tried this has been successful in making a meaningful dent in the problem), you'd just be delaying the inevitable, and once that inevitable hit, the affordability problem would be even worse.
You can't increase housing supply without affecting demand. You also can't increase housing supply to meet demand ... unless you actually make the area so undesirable that demand itself drops, meeting you halfway.
This observation could be made about anything. If more restaurants open, more people will go out to eat. If more people go out to eat, restaurants will make more money. A vicious cycle! Soon everyone in the world will eat lunch in our city, every day! The humanity!
In fact, interesting yet flawed theories of supply and demand are seldom used to justify some sort of "protect existing restaurateurs' oligopoly" law. That isn't to say that it isn't valid to limit the number or type of restaurant in any particular area for e.g. safety reasons. But that has to be process-based, not just a declaration that this neighborhood has enough.
You can't argue that allowing single-family structures to be replaced by e.g. townhomes in a reasonable fashion is somehow beyond us as a society.
> If more restaurants open, more people will go out to eat.
That's not a change in demand, that's a change in market clearing quantity.
Conversely, increasing residential capacity increases people which increases demand for services for the people which creates jobs which creates demand for residential capacity.
> If more people go out to eat, restaurants will make more money.
In total, sure. Individually? No reason to expect that.
> You can't argue that allowing single-family structures to be replaced by e.g. townhomes in a reasonable fashion is somehow beyond us as a society.
Maybe one could could argue that (or argue that doing so "in a reasonable fashion" is self-contradictory), and maybe one couldn't. But its irrelevant, because that's not what any in this thread did argue.
What has been argued is that the naïve analysis of its effects on affordability considering it only as a supply change in housing without considering the less-direct effects that has on residential demand, demand for (and price of) essential infrastructure and services which factor in to cost of living, etc., is foolishly overoptimistic.
Yeah, I lost track of it being a response to someone making the exact same point I made in a different subthread rather than a downstream response to the post where I made that point, and have edited my post appropriately.
The argument says "you can't argue" a point nobody argued for in the subthread it was responding to (or, AFAICT, anywhere else in the thread, or, for that matter, anywhere else ever.)
1) Allow non-local demand? Do people fedex overnight the food?
2) Significantly increase infrastructure load? Do people live at the restaurants when they're not serving food, and thus require schools, police, parking, roads, jobs, etc?
Even then, restaurants do create demand on the city, and they are managed via zoning laws.
A more accurate analogy -- claiming that high density development will bring more restaurant patrons, resulting in more restaurants opening, resulting in restaurant prices dropping.
Nationally, rents rose 3% in 2013. 6% may not seem like much to you, but some kids got a few more Christmas presents than they would have without the increased housing.
> You can't increase housing supply without affecting demand. You also can't increase housing supply to meet demand ... unless you actually make the area so undesirable that demand itself drops, meeting you halfway.
What do you call this, the Lewis Carroll school of economics?
* Generally, in CA, unless a property changes hands, its annual property tax increase is capped at 2% per year.
* AIUI, SF could waive any property tax increases for residential properties that would have been triggered by flattening the existing structures in order to build much more rental housing. [0]
[0] I'm not convinced that there would be any if the property didn't change hands, but it has been years since I read Prop 13.
> Generally, in CA, unless a property changes hands, its annual property tax increase is capped at 2% per year.
I think you are referring to the maximum increase in tax basis value (which is only equal to the maximum property tax increase if it is taxed at the maximum value already, though that's probably the case, given the low cap on property tax rates also in Prop 13.)
And you are oversimplifying in a way which is misleading in this discussion: new construction triggers full cash value assessment not limited to the annual 2% increase.
> AIUI, SF could waive any property tax increases for residential properties that would have been triggered by flattening the existing structures in order to build much more rental housing.
To the extent that they could, where would the sense be in that? Accommodating more people, but reducing the public available to provide services needed by those people?
> And you are oversimplifying in a way which is misleading in this discussion: new construction triggers full cash value assessment not limited to the annual 2% increase.
1) That's why I listed two points, rather than just one. :)
2) According to the Alameda County Assessor's office, the situation is not as grim as you seem to paint it (for every situation except the "building flattening" situation):
"Only the portion of the property which was newly constructed is subject to reassessment at market value. For example, if a family room is added to an existing home, only that portion is reassessed and the existing home will retain its previously established Proposition 13 base year value." [0]
This might partially explain all the damned San Francisco apartments with funky vintage 1970's-era single-paned windows. :P
> To the extent that they could, where would the sense be in that?
To encourage the build-out of housing in an area that has roughly between three and ten new people move in for each new housing unit constructed annually?
1) It's not like SF is currently starving for cash.
2) In the -very, very unlikely- scenario that only the ultra-wealthy, pensioners, and property "investors" occupy San Francisco, what happens to the tax base? What happens to the character of the city?
Isn't 2%/year enough of a property tax increase? Why should I suddenly get a tax bill I can't afford because some idiot bought the house next door to me for too much money, causing my "property value" to skyrocket?
Because you don't own your home, you are renting it from the state. The state has just discovered that it has a higher market value and can use the money to fund all sorts of cool CA government projects.
Maybe one day Jerry Brown will find enough money to adopt Narendra Modi style initiatives to end open defecation.
People don't seem to be fleeing SF in droves because of the Trinity Towers project. It's possible to have very-high-density housing and have a desirable city; look at NYC or Tokyo.
Hell, aside from the fact that it becomes a ghost town after regular business hours, many parts of FiDi are really attractive places.
Yes, let's look at NYC and Tokyo: despite all that density, the problem of housing availability remains.
If I recall correctly, only 9% of police officers that work in Manhattan live in Manhattan -- and Manhattan boasts an average density of 70k people per square mile.
"let's look at NYC and Tokyo: despite all that density, the problem of housing availability remains."
NYC has a housing availability problem. It's the same one as San Francisco: new denser construction is near impossible to get a permit for. If NYC permitted lots more housing to be built, the cost of housing would become affordable.
Tokyo does not have a housing availability problem. The vast majority of families in Tokyo live in single family homes they own close to parks and rail transit. The ratio of housing cost to family income in Tokyo is more like affordable Dallas or Atlanta than nightmarishly expensive NYC or SF.
How did Tokyo do it? It permitted lots and lots of by-right building on small lots, issued permits automatically for new homes, didn't require any parking at all for every unit, platted out narrow streets, and built lots of rail transit at reasonable prices. There are few skyscrapers -- Tokyo's density is 150 (people/hectare), only double SF's average density and similar to North Beach, Pacific Heights, or Russian Hill.
It's too late for SF to build narrow streets, but permitting multi-story rowhouse construction throughout the city could easily add a few hundred thousand units and substantially reduce housing prices. A full solution will require other Bay Area cities to also permit reasonable density construction.
No, Tokyo had a weak economy. Thanks in large part to non-local demand, however, that affordability is disappearing -- just like everywhere else:
"Japan’s sluggish economy caused price gains in Tokyo to trail those in other urban centers like New York, London and Hong Kong since the 2008 global credit crisis."
"Homes are unlikely to become more affordable, with the yen’s 41 percent decline over two-and-a-half years and investment yields higher than in some major cities abroad propelling foreigners to buy. While Japan remains small by total transaction value compared with the U.S., Canada and Australia, it’s now “comparable” to those markets in terms of the number of clients seeking deals, said Gui of SouFun realty."
"It’s not as tolerable to Japanese. Prices in Tokyo have become “seriously unaffordable,” the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey shows."
And yet NYC and Tokyo are housing way, way more people than San Francisco, so they're actually a lot more successful at being a city in comparison. All of that density has lots of advantages -- and I say that as a Manhattan resident who rarely goes anywhere outside of Citibike range. I certainly wouldn't trade my current situation for the comparative sparseness of San Francisco at the same price.
New York City also does still have lots of opportunities to build upwards, many of which are being taken. A huge amount of housing inventory is coming online each year. The city is accommodating large influxes of new people. It could be doing even better with less restrictive air rights, but things could always be improved. San Francisco isn't doing as well by comparison.
And keep in mind, it's not like there's an infinite number of people living on the planet. Nor does building denser cities cause more people to be born that otherwise would (if anything, it's less). Housing demand thus isn't infinite, and it doesn't logically follow that addressing housing demand by building lots more housing is a self-perpetuating problem.
Notice how the thrust of your comment "Even dense construction doesn't fix the demand problem" is at odds with the claim in pbreit's comment:
> Plus, in your fantasyland, demand would plummet. Who would want to live there?
I assumed that pbriet was making a claim that went something like "Cities that are packed with skyscrapers are barren hellscapes that noone wishes to live in.". To address that claim, I provided my subjective opinion of a section of San Francisco that is packed with skyscrapers, and reported what appears to be the community reaction to a new high-density high-rise apartment building in SoMA.
It's not in conflict; the "fantasyland" of 10M new apartments would house the entire existing population of all boroughs of NYC, and almost that of Tokyo.
Meanwhile, those cities have high density (but nothing as ridiculous as +10M apartment archeologies) and haven't solved the problem.
If the stats in WildUtah's comment are to be believed -and his anecdotes mesh with my understanding of how zoning works in JP-, then Tokyo has pretty well solved the "response to housing demand" issue.
Housing prices in cities are going to be more expensive than housing prices in the countryside. They shouldn't be so expensive that they exclude families and middle-to-lower-income households.
"The trend has already hit Sydney, Vancouver and the U.S. Now it’s happening in Japan: busloads of real estate buyers from China coming in, buying up homes and pushing prices higher."
"Partly as a result of nascent Chinese buying, Tokyo apartment prices have reached the highest levels since the early 1990s, up 11 percent over two years, according to the Real Estate Economic Institute Co."
"It’s not as tolerable to Japanese. Prices in Tokyo have become “seriously unaffordable,” the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey shows."
There's no particularly good reason for police officers to live in Manhattan. Since we have good public transportation you can live in any of the boros and work in Manhattan (not to mention LI, Westchester, Hoboken, Jersey City, etc.)
Since the Bay Area has both crappy public transportation and not enough density it is doubly screwed. But incumbent homeowner NIMBYites and rent are happy, so great I guess?
> But incumbent homeowner NIMBYites and rent are happy...
If you meant to say "renters are happy", no, many of us are not. Those of us who were "lucky" enough to score a rent-controlled apartment around the 2008->2010 time frame are now trapped in those apartments; unable to move despite often worsening and/or malicious corporate landlords because of the substantial increase in rent hike that we would have to endure to find a new place.
If you meant to say something else, please disregard my previous 'graph. :)
Edit: Oh hey! Hallo again! I guess you've already heard all I have to say on the topic already. :)
For others: Don't forget that the city's colossal failure to build negatively impacts both those who wish to move into the city and those who wish to move within it.
"… adding new capacity can no doubt release some of the upward pressure on rents"
The rest is just an extended argument that the international rich are using real estate as a speculative investment vehicle/store of money. True, but that doesn't mean that adding housing exacerbates the problem of rich people bidding the prices of housing higher.
Housing can mean a lot of different things. Adding luxury condos will not help. Adding SROs and other forms of housing for the currently homeless would definitely help.
Frankly, you have to add "luxury" housing, housing for regular people, and housing for low-income folks. Demanding that one form of construction be privileged over the others (or that no "luxury" housing be built, EVER) is a part of what's causing the housing construction logjam in the city.
Where do you think the people that would live in new luxury condos go if there are no new luxury condos? Any chance they may buy up existing rental properties and evict long-time residents?
The idea (and I don't know if it is correct) is that a significant proportion of luxury apartments go to foreign investors seeking secure places to store cash in the case that Russia/China/Some oil dictatorship decides they don't like the wealthy individual in question anymore and they have to flee. Such investors don't care if the property is worth $1 million or $5 million merely that in an emergency it is worth some amount in the millions. There is also a question in the UK if such investors are engaging in money laundering using our property market. This segment of buyers therefore tends to skew the market with what would otherwise be irrational buying practises (extremely overpriced purchases, several million $/£ cash-in-a-suitcase purchases etc).
The problem for middle class people being that the domestic luxury condo buyers then get pushed into midrange property market where they outbid the middle class. The middle class then move into the low range property market outbidding the working class etc.
If new construction is allowed though, the people parking money will encourage more development. You can always add another 5 floors to the top of the building which nobody lives in like they do in NYC.
I tend to agree with this, and its nice hearing it from someone in a position of authority, but it is a minority view unfortunately. San Francisco has been poisoned by the "low hanging fruit" which is a series of "manageable" projects which are going to improve things but which turn out much more expensive and much less effective than the "big thinking" alternatives. And yes, I know it is easy to get tricked into comparing the projected cost of project A with the actual cost of project B (as project A would have had overrurns etc) but you can double or triple the proposed cost of some of the larger projects and not come close to the actual cost of some of the "simpler" projects.
It isn't about cost, it is about willingness to embrace change and move forward.
I wonder if the right vocabulary is to talk about local optima, even though that isn't really the problem with being incrementalist as a rule. Or maybe once upon a time "paradigm shift", also not the right concept.
Anyway, my point being that constant iteration or the use of heuristics have value, but it can also be useful to understand models, and occasionally take a break to think big about the direction you want to move in the long term, with the realization that many of the steps to get there will violate some pet heuristics.
You can't really have a paradigm shift without a foundation. Apple had a long history in software before the iPhone, SpaceX and Tesla have been leveraging the US long history of car and space industry etc.
As far as I know the US does not have a very good foundation for public infrastructure projects nor the cooperation between public and private entities. What you need to do is, like China, buy the best proven technology currently available. Then after you've made that work, take all that knowledge and invent the next big thing.
> San Francisco has been poisoned by the "low hanging fruit" which is a series of "manageable" projects which are going to improve things but which turn out much more expensive and much less effective than the "big thinking" alternatives.
One could say the same thing about agile software development. :)
">>Making it easier and faster to approve transit projects."
I moved out of CA, and man alive is it surprising how... corrupt... Caltrans is. I mean, really. In Denver we are building a rail line all the way out to the airport from downtown, something that I got to see start (2011) to finish (granted, spring 2016, but I have no doubts about it) for $1 billion total([2], projected cost) at ~8200 per foot. It's not a subway, so no digging, and the land is cheaper, but all the same. Something like this would be unimaginable in CA to take less than 15 years. The AirBart cost about $29,000 per foot and still costs $6 per ride [0] with a development time of ~30 years([1]data is suspicious though). Yes, it's elevated and in earthquake country, but my god, 29k a foot?! That's 3.5 times the cost per foot than in Denver. I honestly don't see it. Sure, the balance sheets are all likely out there in the public ledger, but honestly, I don't if I can trust them. In the end here, the author of this piece is right, but he misses the issue of corruption that plays into "Showing a willingness to think big." You can think big all you want, but if there is excessive need to 'grease wheels' to get something moving and built, then all the pie in the sky thinking in the world isn't going to do anything without the cash.
$29k a foot is nothing! The Central Subway project currently under construction from Chinatown to the CalTrain station (the only major subway project built in SF in many decades) will cost $1.6 billion (assuming no cost overruns) to build and go 1.7 miles. That's around $190,000 per foot!
That's 3.5 times the cost per foot than in Denver.
Heh, given that land out there east of the Arsenal refuge is almost free and the cost of building an elevated structure in an earthquake zone... this comparison is the first time the AirBART replacement has sounded cheap!
Being the jewel of the Bay, San Francisco should aspire to something more interesting than near-constant subway construction. What if commuters to the peninsula were launched from glider bays at the top of the city skyscrapers, sent floating peacefully home with nary a cubic inch of congestion? It's probably brilliant and I just don't realize it yet.
Japan had a interesting mix of private companies providing and competing in areas where public transit is actually profitable and the government providing it in areas where it won't be profitable. To me that's politics done right. The market is the strongest force you can use if it works in your favor. But it's key to understand when it won't. Too bad that on the US that decision is usually driven by ideology rather than practical thought.
The big takeaway from all these stories is that there's no solution to these problems. To address its housing and transit issues, San Francisco should have changed its zoning and construction plans decades ago. Now, nothing it can do will meaningfully address the problem in any relevant timescale.
Why not just leave San Francisco basically as it is? The city works okay right now. You can get around it reasonably well.
Housing and transport are only a problem if you're going to keep trying to cram more people in there. That's silly.
Part of what makes San Francisco one of the USA's most appealing cities is that it hasn't expanded all that much in the last eighty years or so -- due to its unique geography which prevents outward expansion. (The population in 1930 was 634,000, in 2010 it was 805,000.)
Even Tokyo has most of it's trains above ground. See Yamanote line with 29 stations versus the 16 cumulative underground stations that both the Tokyo Waterfront Area Rapid Transit and Saitama Rapid Railway Line serve.
Also of note, the New Oakland Bridge that took years to build, went seriously over budget, included a very disappointing design flaw. This bridge was mostly paid for by the State of California not San Francisco by itself.
If San Francisco wants to have dozens of miles dug beneath its surface ignoring the potential of a "black swan" earthquake event then perhaps San Francisco and not the state of California should pay for it. Or more accurately, San Diego county, Orange County and Los Angeles county should NOT have to pay for it.
We love you San Francisco but you're not that awesome.
I find it a bit bothersome when you start to compare SF to Tokyo. The fact that its subway only serves a bit more than 20% of Tokyo's rail traffic, yet at the same time is world top at daily passenger-kms, shows just how massive Tokyo's public transport network is. Earthquake safety have nothing to do with this, it's simply the ability and will to invest in public transport on a massive scale that's proportionate to population growth. I mean just look at table [1]. Japanese do a factor of 25 times the rail passenger kms per person compared to Americans. And I don't think Americans have a much shorter commute. Another way to put it, Switzerland, in total, with just 8M inhabitants, does 1.8x the passenger rail traffic as the whole US [2]. Just think about that for a moment. It doesn't matter whether you put it under ground, above ground or through somebody's swimming pool - any rail is progress in the US.
Edit: Another fun list: The world's 50 busiest train stations. Guess how many are Japanese [3].
It is not a very good argument to call SF seismically active and then compare it to Tokyo. Tokyo sits where three active fault lines converge. Having lived in each for a year, you can expect to experience more activity in two weeks in Tokyo than a year in SF.
Also, claiming that most of Tokyos subway is above ground is incorrect. The subways, Tokyo metro and Toei, are nearly entirely underground within the city center. This is hundreds of stations. Yamanote line is part of an entirely different set of trains for longer distance transit.
Respectfully this is why I called it active. Much like a weather report here is a seismic map of northern and central California: http://scedc.caltech.edu/recent/
Your comment that San Diego, Orange County and LA should not have to pay for infrastructure work in San Francisco presupposes that the Bay Area is contributing less to state taxes then it's receiving. I'm interested to understand stats on geographic collection/distribution of taxes in CA, and how you know the Bay Area is a net beneficiary. I'd venture that the national trend of wealthy cities paying more state/federal taxes then they receive applies within CA.
Also, suggesting that state taxes should not be unevenly distributed among the state misses the point of state taxes. It's fine to argue where the funds should best be used, but not that a county should only get the proportion it contributed. Why not just have local governments be the primary collectors/distributors of taxes then?
BTW, I love southern CA and think you're awesome :)
Thank you, I go to San Francisco every year. I had no problem with financing the Oakland Bridge but the subway a subway has present danger and high costs.
GDP Distribution per Brookings Institute numbers:
Los Angeles: $860-billion
San Francisco: $331-billion
San Diego: $202-billion
San Jose $173-billion
This is so much FUD. As a state we spend plenty of money subsidizing infrastructure in places like LA or San Diego suburbs, it just happens that everything is a bit more spread out, so no specific project looks quite as expensive.
Infrastructure spending in cities, even with big projects like bridges and subways, is much more efficient per capita than infrastructure spending in the suburbs.
Compared to the cost of cars, parking spaces, roads of all sizes, deaths and medical bills when cars hit each-other or pedestrians, CO2 emissions from gasoline engines, wasted time on long commutes, immobility in car-centric communities for people unable to drive, health effects of a sedentary lifestyle, etc., subways and other types of mass transit are an incredible bargain.
Beyond transit, consider the additional overhead costs of greater distances to get to schools, hospitals, police and fire departments, government offices, libraries, museums, grocery stores and all sorts of other businesses, or the higher per capita cost for electricity/gas/telecom/water/sewage infastructure, trash collection, street sweeping, etc. etc.
Tokyo "downtown" doesn't have most of its transit above ground. There are only ~3 lines above ground in the center of Tokyo. The Yamanote, the Chou, and the Sobu lines. Compared to 14 below ground. And, they've built plenty of new lines underground. The Oedo line which opened in 2003 is entirely underground. The Fukutoshinsen line which opened in 2013 is entirely underground. The Tsukuba line, 2005, is underground at least downtown.
It's often said the being in the subway in Tokyo is one of the safest places to be in an earthquake. It might be scary but things are less likely to fall from 10 to 20 stories on your head like they are in outdoors in Tokyo.
On top of that for a place like SF subways don't have to be deep. It's not like there's 100 meters of earth above the subway. There's the street, under which there's the line. The only thing above your head is effectively a bridge construction except unlike a bridge it's got continuous support instead of a leg every 50 meters.
> Even Tokyo has most of it's trains above ground. See Yamanote line with 29 stations versus the 16 cumulative underground stations that both the Tokyo Waterfront Area Rapid Transit and Saitama Rapid Railway Line serve.
I've lived in Tokyo for a year, and this comment is grossly ignorant.
First of all, Tokyo Metro is just one subway company in the region. Tokyo Metro according to Wikipedia has 142 unique stations, most of which are underground.
For surface trains, the Yamanote loop line circles central Tokyo, with Chuo-Sobu cutting through the center. There are other surface trains that feed into central Tokyo but don't necessarily take you through Tokyo. There are some trains that also run along sections of the Yamanote line like the Keihin-Tohoku line and Saikyo line.
Other than those lines, if you want to travel around central Tokyo (within the area circled by Yamanote, you will most likely ride a Tokyo Metro subway (underground) or a Toei Subway (underground). Toei is the other major subway company in the region.
If anything, Japan and Tokyo is proof that SF and LA have no reason to not build subways despite their seismically active areas. Remember, Japan, including the Tokyo region, was hit with a 9.0 magnitude earthquake recently and many other high magnitude earthquakes in the last century alone. Tokyo is proof that earthquakes can be mitigated.
If there's one engineering failure of Tokyo it would be reclaimed land. A large portion of Tokyo (famously Odaiba, and Haneda Airport) are built on reclaimed land. This type of land shows problems especially due to earthquakes. For this reason residents tend to shy away from purchasing houses in these areas because there's a high risk of issues with the soil and foundations. But this makes perfect sense, reclaimed land is basically dumping dirt into what used to be water to make more land.
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The only way this comment gets remotely close to accurate is if it is counting for the entire Tokyo region and not just Central Tokyo. But this would be the equivalent of comparing the entire Bay area. Outside of central Tokyo, the trains do run on the surface. But Tokyo uses trains as a primary means of transportation so lines can continue for hours as they go into remote areas of Tokyo or connect to other lines despite different ownership of the track. For example it is possible to take a single train (no transfers) from Haneda airport to Narita airport. The ride will take over 2 hours but you will have technically traveled on 3 separate lines operated by 3 separate rail companies. Oh and one of those lines is a subway line.
Isn't there a consideration of geological stability underneath San Francisco? I don't think much of the city could support tunneling underneath; large chunks are built on sand dunes and landfill.
The liquifaction susceptibility map shows that most of Market St is red. Seeing as that's where the existing BART tunnel is, I suspect it's not much of an issue.
I think the bigger issue is all the hills. They are bedrock, so arnt an issue for liquifaction, but make any underground line much more difficult to construct. For rail to get most places in san francisco its not enough to just rip up the street and put tracks underneath, like was done along market street. You need serious tunneling. Thats why historically transit in SF was mostly cable cars, which were replaced over time by buses. Its much easier to go over the hills.
Effective ride-hailing services like UberPool and Lyft Line make congestion pricing feasible. Congestion pricing can banish traffic from the face of the planet.
Our roads can move a certain number of vehicles per minute at their maximum throughput. When more cars attempt to access the road, throughput goes down. Set the price of driving on a road at the level that maximizes throughput.
As prices go up, some people won't be able to afford to drive alone. Instead, they'll pick up paying passengers, or pay another driver for a ride. As more people desire to travel in San Francisco, the price will go up, and more people will share a van (or a bus!) to get where they need to go. Traffic won't come back.
Today, San Franciscans pay for their commute by sacrificing time they could spend with their friends and family. Instead, we should pay by sacrificing personal space during our commutes.
Subways are an unnecessary expense when our streets are so poorly utilized. We can triple the capacity of our roads by charging a price that keeps traffic moving.
> Subways are an unnecessary expense when our streets are so poorly utilized.
It terrifies me that you are serious. The best way to better utilize our streets is to dedicate more space for cycling, there is absolutely no way to get the same density in an automobile.
Your idea also presents basically no solutions for people who don't have elasticity in their budget. "Sorry, grandma, you can't go to the doctor today because the market is readjusting the price of transit to optimize for throughput in the future, when you might be dead."
Better bike routes/friendlier designs are a good thing, but they're still space inefficient compared to rail systems or even just plain buses. This is a favorite gif of mine to show the difference: http://i.imgur.com/kw8DaST.gif
In an ideal situation, we would have good subway systems alongside more promotion of bike use. I personally have a couple disabilities making bike use difficult :( I would kill to have a Seoul Subway-esque system in SF (the best system I've experienced firsthand, I'm sure there are better but it's among the best/biggest).
A full van is more space efficient than 12 bikes. I am a cyclist and I think there need to be safe routes to get everywhere in a city. Bikes aren't enough, though.
The price doesn't adjust for future optimization. It adjusts for current optimization.
Price-sensitive people like Grandma would go to the doctor for the same price she always does. She'd just share the ride with more people. This is exactly what a subway would do, except without the need for expensive infrastructure.
> A full van is more space efficient than 12 bikes.
Arguable, but buses are higher density than vans, trains are higher density than buses, and subways aren't subject to traffic.
The bicycle isn't in competition with the subway, it's in harmony with it.
> She'd just share the ride with more people. This is exactly what a subway would do, except without the need for expensive infrastructure.
I don't think if you extrapolated the current ridership of BART just for people traveling within San Francisco that you would find it practical to run buses for all of them, and when a vehicle on the ground during rush hour (including buses) is rarely moving more quickly than a typical pedestrian, the subway has an obvious advantage.
You can try to traffic engineer all day, but the fastest route between two points on earth is through the earth. :)
With congestion pricing, nothing is subject to traffic.
Buses move slowly because they're stuck in traffic and they stop all the time. Congestion pricing eliminates traffic. Ride hailing apps reduce the number of stops.
Subways are better than buses. That doesn't mean we need subways. We can eliminate traffic all over the city for a much lower price, then we can build more subways when streets packed with full vans aren't enough to move people around.
It's still subject to traffic because there are still lots of people who do not have choice as to when they go. And taking Lyft/Uber isn't going to help, as those drivers are going to have to make enough to cover the congestion charge as well as profit, or they're not going to drive.
It is not subject to traffic. People don't have infinite money. There is a price at which few enough people are willing to pay that traffic flows freely. That is the price that will be set. People who don't have a choice of when to travel will share a ride to split the cost.
Yes, the driver will need to be paid as well, but people often run carpools that only charge for the price of gas. The prevailing rate for a ride will be low because there are plenty of people heading in the same direction who just want to defray their costs. Regardless, the mechanics of congestion pricing guarantee that people will use alternatives to driving. The congestion price will go up until people start choosing to share rides, take transit, or do something else.
Congestion pricing works. It's not an untested idea. It just isn't widely used. It should be, because it eliminates traffic. Ride hailing apps give even cities without great transit a great alternative to driving alone, which makes congestion pricing a universal solution to traffic.
Congestion pricing works to empty your roads. Without alternative transport modes, it will also work to crash the economy.
The choice is not between paying $3000 a year in congestion charges (to pick a number that would plausibly dissuade) or spending 4 hours a day on a badly-run transit system - the obvious third choice is to move away to a place where commuting is cheaper and faster. This will make labour more scarce and expensive for the local corporates, who will also sooner or later move away to a saner place with cheaper labour. Presto, you've fixed all traffic problems by killing the city.
The alternative transport mode is shared rides. Those are easy today with ride hailing apps. People who don't want to pay the full charge will pay a fraction of it instead.
What's practical and what's cost effective aren't necessarily the same. Subways or really most any commuter train is only close to cost effective in some of the more extreme urban densities, and it is real energy hog if people aren't using it. It would likely make sense to build more subways, but there are a handful of spots in the US where it could be a solution at all.
Options like buses and shared vans/cars are no one's preferred ride, but it is an infrastructure that's already scaled up for all of the US, and it ends up being very cheap. It takes less traffic reduction than you might think to make congested roads fast moving.
It is also worth pointing out that SF essentially is building the infrastructure to replace the BART with buses right now...Buses from the new terminal will have a dedicated ramp on to the bay bridge, and I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting a full lane for the full BRT experience. If you haven't noticed an impact from that construction, versus say the Chinatown subway messing up all of 4th street, then it really speaks to why buses are a pretty easy solution.
> There is absolutely no way to get the same density in an automobile.
How about a double-decker bus? Busses also have the added benefit that they are safer, and since you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can read, crochet, surf the internet, work, sip your coffee, etc., while you commute.
I'm only fine with congestion pricing if the price increases with congestion and after-tax income of the registered owner of the car being driven. I despise the idea of reducing traffic for the rich through financial strong-arming of the poor, unless all are strong-armed relatively equally.
Congestion pricing isn't strong-arming the poor. The poor will just share rides with more people to split the cost. Everyone gets a traffic-free commute. Everyone gets to spend more time with their friends and family.
I don't think there's any reason to subsidize the usage of road space. I'd rather use that money to subsidize food, shelter, and education.
Congestion pricing is absolutely strong-arming the poor, which isn't necessarily bad as it should strong-arm everyone. I just want the economic burden of road usage to be equally felt by all peoples.
Scaling the cost with income is a progressive tax. Congestion pricing is a usage tax, and usage taxes are regressive for reasons that are, if not obvious, easily Googleable. Let the economic burden be applied equally, which cannot be accomplished by flat-rate pricing.
Congestion pricing is a non-starter, as it's a very regressive tax, most usually paid by those who are least able to afford it, and least able to change the time they go to/from work.
Yes, poor people tend to have rigid work schedules. If congestion pricing were implemented, employers would have to be more flexible or pay their workers more. Would those jobs that people couldn't afford to take just disappear? We shouldn't subsidize the usage of road space just because some employers enjoy it.
Congestion pricing isn't a tax. Its intent isn't to raise funds. You could rebate all of the revenue to low income folks and still achieve the goal of eliminating traffic.
Congestion pricing isn't regressive since it's easy to split the cost. If you want to pay less, ride with more people.
>>Yes, poor people tend to have rigid work schedules. If congestion pricing were implemented, employers would have to be more flexible or pay their workers more.
The employer won't be more flexible nor will the salaries go up; what would happen is the employee would complain and the employer wouldn't care because they'd know there's someone out there who's so desperate for a job that they'll take the horrible situation.... e.g., the awful working conditions of a lot of immigrants.
Employers are subject to market forces just like everyone else. If they need workers in order to make money, but workers can't afford to get to work, they will pay more money. Not by choice, by necessity. If you don't believe that, fine. Just raise the minimum wage instead. Subsidizing the usage of road space is a terrible solution to the problem you're describing.
Road space is scarce. Poor people get less scarce goods. Luckily, road space is easy to share, which is what poor people do with scarce things. This is not an affront to the current order. There are plenty of things I want to pay for so poor people can have more of them. Road space is not one of them.
"Employers are subject to market forces just like everyone else."
Much, much less than the people you're targeting with these taxes. "Oh, you can't afford to drive to work now? You're fired. There's a line of people out the door who can and want a job."
" If they need workers in order to make money, but workers can't afford to get to work, they will pay more money"
No, they won't. They'll pick people up from the pile of applications they have, and try again. Rinse and repeat.
" If you don't believe that, fine. Just raise the minimum wage instead."
Or how about we just don't institute an extremely regressive tax scheme?
Seriously, your lack of empathy for the very people you're going to attack with your plan is astounding.
While I'd love to live in a city with an effective government and great mass transit, I just don't have faith in SF city government specifically or in most local governments generally being able to accomplish the largest scale civil works projects successfully.
While some kind of big master plan would, if executed well, produce a better result, I'd prefer to stick to smaller projects with reasonable deliverables which actually happen, and then hack together a less effective than ideal, but still better, end result.
Arguing like this for all-or-nothing is a great way to get nothing, which makes me sad because SFBA transit is such shit today.
I disagree, because robotic transportation is going to make public transportation obsolete long before the debt acquired is paid off.
And by then, robotic construction and material will have advanced so much that it will be much cheaper to build underground in the future than it is now.
But underground is definitely the way to go for transportation, even in earthquake country. The surface should be quiet and safe, our streets converted to bike paths and gardens.
So lets at least make sure that underground construction could also accommodate vehicles other than trains. Because all that track will eventually be ripped out when we are liberated from the tranny of the train schedule.
Public transportation will take up the same advances as private. Eventually. Private is going to jump on that stuff first, of course.
Robocars constitute a percentage improvement at the surface, but don't overcome inherent capacity/land-use/energy tradeoffs between a packed subway car and a congested highway. You cannot get around the problem of automobiles using more space. [0]
You will have robocars, but also robobuses and robotrains. This is a "all over, everywhere, better" improvement, not a "this one wins and crushes the others." Flexibility is important - the city is making some progress on bike paths and can continue doing much better still.
Furthermore, better architecture, land use, and future lifestyle changes hold the potential to keep density at a higher average level while improving the feeling of street life to be more like the "peaceful suburban" ideal - walkable, yet quiet and non-disruptive. Framing transportation as a land-use problem - something built up from prior decisions about what real estate to build and where to build it in order to minimize average trip times and potential disruptions - rather than an engineering exercise of making as many roads and rails and tunnels and bridges as you can so that every vehicle may race along at 200 MPH for the smallest errand - drastically changes what you can do and the budget you can accomplish it with, which makes it more likely to be realized in our lifetimes.
That said, I agree with the article. SF has fallen far behind its housing demand, and the lack of a "virtuous cycle" of transit projects to encourage development in outlying neighborhoods shares some blame in that. It should not be the case that it's harder to go between downtown and the Richmond than to make the same trip to Oakland.
However, replacing road traffic with robots is more appealing. Railways already have an almost-perfect safety record, and the cost of the driver is spread over many passengers.
That last line typo had me chuckling. I really hope you are right about robotic transportation coming soon, but I'm very skeptical. Has anywhere got any robotic system replacing public transportation coming anytime soon?
Trains are robotic transportation already. Most new trains are driverless, and even in the NYC system many lines are automated with the train driver only monitoring and watching the doors.
I would love to see the subways in SF improve but maybe self driving cars changes the calculus? Could this become a tealistic alternative to public transportation? I'm sure some people here have thought about this a lot more than I have - want to weigh in?
Self driving cars still require a significant amount of surface area that could better be utilized for: housing, bike transit, pedestrian areas, parks.
And though coordination by autonomous vehicles could cut down on highway congestion, speeds within the city are unlikely to match what a subway system could offer. You don't want cars rushing through your neighborhood at 60 mph, no matter if it's a machine or a human behind the wheel.
If gridlock is a major issue now, self-driving vehicles won't help in a major way, since you still need X square feet to move Y people (up to a maximum M, as defined by the size of a vehicle) Z miles. Pushing more individual cars onto buses would help in this situation, but not as much as a dedicated subway line that is less impacted by vehicular traffic flows.
Self-driving cars would help by removing some drivers not paying attention and causing additional congestion (eg: not moving on green lights or causing accidents).
Self driving cars would allow minibus routes that just go between a neighborhood to a local grocery/retail center. This would make carless living more possible.
At first, sure. Eventually, though, self-driving cars really blur the line between public and private transportation.
You could have a large network of self-driving cars that you simply hail on your phone and quickly pick you up. It won't look like a 4-door car, but more likely a small bus like you find in many parts of the world. People going in similar directions travel together, only picking up and dropping off with minimal interruption. In lower periods of demand, these are stored in lots with no wasted space as only a LIFO 'stack' is needed.
Furthermore, self-driving cars could be programmed to move in caravans with minimal following distance and aerodynamic efficiency to boot. Not terribly helpful in an urban situation (probably some minor traffic density increase), but wonderful for commutes which could dramatically decrease density.
So, you'd not only increase occupancy (easily 8 people in a car-sized footprint, presuming electric cars), you could also increase traffic density. All told, an order of magnitude capacity increase seems within reason, and in a reasonable amount of time.
That said, I think subways are still a good investment for the time being.
The thing is, all that stuff is a long ways off. Something to work towards for sure, but we still need mid-term solutions. Self driving cars that are empty and come pick you up will, if anything, lead to more traffic on the roads initially since now you've got more vehicles than people.
Yes, pools and lines are rapidly changing the options here and allow you to pay a premium for convenience and rapidity - to potentially reduce the number of cars on the road.
These might be helping to encourage last mile usage, the questions are whether it's A) available B) successfully reducing car ridership.
BART and Muni improvements are part of the billions being spent on improving existing local and intercity transit systems as part of the High-Speed Rail program you are complaining about.
And the major population centers of California aren't, exactly, "nowhere".
This. Regional and state-wide transit is all connected. The high speed rail project also includes regional upgrades like the electrification of Caltrain.
2 hours and 40 minutes from downtown SF to downtown LA by train beats flying once you factor in transport to and from airports, security checks etc. Not to mention that SFO and LAX can't increase capacity to follow demand. The high speed rail project makes a ton of sense.
I keep waiting for train travel to fall into the TSA trap. I used to use Amtrak 'twixt Indy and Chicago a bit, and once in Chicago the TSA did set up for quick checks.
In the case of the Acela, the electrification of the New Haven to Boston segment significantly sped up the non-Acela Northeast Regional service from Boston to New York. In fact, the ~2X price difference between the Regional and the Acela to save ~45 mins usually doesn't make sense when I'm paying out of my own pocket (or when the Acela doesn't run at a convenient time).
I don't have a real opinion on California high-speed rail. It's certainly hugely expensive and probably depends on whether it makes sense for relatively price-insensitive business travelers as the Acela does.
The poorly discussed situation is that California High Speed Rail really is a backbone type service. While SFO<->LAX is certainly the big point, the intermediary cities -- San Jose with a million people, Fresno with a half million people, Bakersfield with 363 thousand people -- are going to see substantial benefits too. Add in the cities that are planned for subsequent phases -- San Diego with a million people, Sacramento with a half million people, Oakland with 400 thousand people -- and the reasons for the project start becoming more obvious.
The one that clinched it for me was an article pointing out that the large airports in California are at capacity and expansion is either expensive, or impossible. You either need to spend couple of billion each to expand those air ports, or throw the money at high speed rail.
Also the big expense is not the high speed rail part of the system, is the commuter rail part through the bay area and LA. That;s the expensive bit. Not the straight high speed sections through the central valley.
I don't think it's about price. I believe it's about capacity. Population is growing -- in SF it's growing a lot -- but SFO and LAX are at capacity. California needs another option for moving people between LA and the Bay Area since it's not possible to fly more planes.
Actually, in NorCal there's also Oakland. And San Jose Airport is not at all busy - they just blew 1.2 billion on Terminal 3 with no airlines committing to use it.
And in SoCal, I normally use John Wayne, not LAX - one of the worst airports in the world due to endless construction.
It's still about price then but presumably the argument becomes that airfares on that route will rise enough that even expensive high speed rail is competitive.
Acela is basically priced so enough business folks who would consider flying take the train
Bart gets its operating and capital improvement money only from fares. A lot of the value that Bart creates by increasing property value around its stations is captured only by landlords, if it were able to capture some of that value it would be able to expand much quicker.
Subways could very well become obsolete by the time they are finished. uber-enabled driverless cars the size of a smart car could drive bumper to bumper door handle to door handle in their own lanes and massively improve transportation, especially for the last miles from door stat to door step. Save the money and speed up adoption of driverless cars and we'd be better off.
Cars, driverless or otherwise, don't scale like subways do. A single BART train can easily carry 500 passengers, and can be loaded in a few minutes. Cars can't compete.
I agree, but I'm not sure we can afford to wait ~5+ years for self driving cars; on the other hand that's probably how long it'll take to build more subways, at a minimum. Whatever is done it needs to be done immediately.
Self driving cars are still subject to congestion in identical ways because they take up just as much space and need safe distances between cars. It also adds noise & pollution, not to mention the fact that the energy to build a car is really really large (and they don't last as long per total miles per person).
I reject the premise that San Francisco should be planning for an ever-increasing population.
At some point I think that San Francisco should look at itself and say "Hey, we're a small, earthquake-prone hilly penninsula, we can't expand outwards. Traffic flow is constrained by planning decisions made a long time ago. We've got a pretty good quality of life as it is, and lots of nice historic buildings. Let's just put a lid on it and declare we're basically full".
Many of the nicest cities in Europe are ones where at some point in the past they've decided to stop building in the historic city centre and just leave things as they were at some particular point in time.
If anything I think San Francisco needs fewer people. San Francisco should focus on quality of residents, not quantity.
San Francisco basically has done exactly what you suggest. Most city residents don't believe that anything should be built (or if it should, it definitely shouldn't be in their neighborhood.) http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/02/04/sfs_population_is_g... As a consequence, it is "focusing on quality of residents, not quantity" (the "quality" that they're looking for is the green stuff).
And San Francisco is a nice place. So what's the problem?
Sure, not everyone who wants to live there can afford to live there, but that's always the way it is in desirable places, otherwise we'd all live in Vanuatu or something.
San Francisco is a nice place. It will probably get nicer, as more and more grubby natives are replaced by nice presentable dot-commers.
It's just that some people object to that process. Including, seemingly, people who live and vote in SF. They believe they can have a city that limits overall housing supply while simultaneously growing housing supply for the homeless, for the working poor, and for everyone else.
I agree with this (no I don't live in SF). We've got a whole giant country to live in; why cram so many into a tip on the far edge? So much of America's economic advantage is derived from its distributed, continental population.
