Where San Francisco Wants New Subway Lines
citylab.com
citylab.com
San Francisco suffers from too many small town self-inflicted political wounds. While the Central Subway will open in a couple of years with it's new subway and light rail cars, it'll likely be the last one for us, perhaps even for our children. Political power brokers, such Willie Brown and the late-Rose Pak, only rolled in their power to give Chinatown a replacement for the Central Freeway that was torn down after the 89 quake.
Existing SFCTA members, which are also the Board of Supervisors, constantly squander transportation funds. Millions have been poured into funding pet political projects, such as free muni rides for youth and seniors, making Muni a system of handouts instead of pulling free ride funding from the Feds or the general fund. The latest axe swing was to delay the DTX, the Caltrain subway to the Transbay Tower, which the voters prioritized in 1999.
The existing anti-transit, anti-growth cabal of Kim, Peskin, Campos, Yee, Mar, and Avalos have been able to grab too much power, and will always vote to side with NIMBYs (Not in My Back Yard) over modern urban growth and planning. Even the next cohort of supervisors will hold the same values, because the voters will put similar people into power once they term out, cutting more into the city's progress as a metropolitan powerhouse.
My educated predictions on this chart are: We'll see Geary BRT, Geneva BRT, 19th Ave Rapid, and the M extension to Park Merced. Maybe some new signals and bike lanes. That's it.
The SFMTA's 20 year vision does not include any subway or rail extensions otherwise. I have asked Nick Josefowitz, who's district would include a theoretical BART extension under Geary, and he says BART is too far behind on maintenance to even consider such an idea.
It will happen and NIMBYs won't stop it.
At least you're thinking about future residents of SF and not yourself, because no one here is going to see any of the proposed changes to drive transit progress for at least 20-30 years.
The problem is that in the SF legal system, NIMBYs are given enormous power to stop changes. The system defaults to "let's not do anything, to be safe".
As indicated earlier, Kim is not pro-transit. I have tried to collaborate with her on transportation advocacy and been unsuccessful. I'm not sure if that disqualifies her for Senate but it makes me unhappy.
I'm not going to pretend to have a solution other than education and community outreach. Get organized. Voting isn't enough -- that's not exactly how this city works under the hood. Researched, practiced, trained, and available citizens need to show up to city meetings and be as loud as possible. How can we do this if we are bootstrapping our startup and working 12 hour days? Who is going to show up while we are at home making dinner for the kids? Something to noodle over.
I'd honestly be surprised if this has ever been uttered out loud in America. San Francisco's governance problems are well-known across the country.
http://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/the-worst-run-big-...
The bay area economy is the envy of every city worldwide -- but the governance of SF sure isn't.
Things that other cities copy:
Our classic street car system.
Our bicycle network.
Our fire suppression network.
Our seawall system.
Our water treatment system.
How to get startups like San Francisco does!
Failings aside, setting an example for other US cities should be San Francisco's goal. We have a lot of smart people here, and have historically (the TV was invented on Green St! SF has a history in avionics, oddly enough too).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Streetcar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosha_Electric_Streetcar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPTA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_Trolley
SF's sewer system has won awards from the federal government:
http://www.sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=392
I was referring to US bicycle network and cities. SF implemented many bike lane programs, inspired by European cities, that have been replicated in other US cities.
As for bike lanes, nobody is looking to San Francisco to see how they implemented Amsterdam's bike lanes.
- technological uptake (uber, variety of sharing options eg scooter sharing, new developments proposing to pay ongoing uber rather than provide parking)
- using technology to measure and understand transit issues
- Your cycleways are also a good example of implemntation in a western country. One thing i particularly like is the categorisation system of cycleway quality.
- a little futher back the tearing down of the embarcadero freeway
Of course thats not to say there arent issues as well. Central SF seems far more progressive than other areas from a governance perspective.
My personal understanding is there is a lot of local politics at play. Here in Sydney Australia the state government has taken a lot of power away from local governments on these issues (with strategic gain but also ignoring real local issues). The uk 'city deals' model is another strategy aimed at the same issues
> I'd honestly be surprised if this has ever been uttered out loud in America.
I've witnessed one such instance: when I lived in Seattle (since moved to SF 5 years ago) I heard people there draw parallels between the Alaskan Way Viaduct and the Embarcadero Freeway, speaking favorably about what happened when the latter was torn down.
These events, in general, are weak politically to voice opinions. Showing up to daytime meetings is very effective, but would probably require some sort of community organization to find people who can take the time off.
http://blog.buildllc.com/2015/10/what-seattle-can-learn-from...
"Often criticized for having an overly involved building department with constricting permitting procedures, San Francisco is like looking into the crystal ball of Seattle’s future if measures aren’t taken."
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/the-real...
“Will the city change for the worse, that’s the tension,” she said. “Everybody is wondering: Are we going to create another San Francisco?”
I agree with the OP and have also seen it over the years. I had and ex that got her urban planning degree from Columbia and worked for NYC planning dept. I learned alot from her degree via osmosis.
There is an overarching theme here though that doesn't just permeate things like transportation, but frankly, many aspects of city residence: ivory tower power grabs. The political system here is broken in my mind and like the op said, controlled by these little groups of, really, anti-progress people. Look no further than transportation and education.
Not to change the subject, but we're going through the 'school lottery' now for our first child and it's fucking ridiculous. We're touring 15 schools and have talked to people that have said "you need at least 30 so they know you're serious..."! We live 3 blocks from one of the best schools in the city and probably won't get in. Hacks that people richer than us are doing? Move across town to increase your chances of getting into the school 3 blocks from us!
I first moved to SF in the 90's from southern california and it was amazing. Mostly because I came to a 'real' city. But, many things have not changed much. Homeless is worse than ever, I never knew how shitty the school situation was, transportation still sub-par, police brutality about the same but more documented.
I've also lived in NYC and Chicago, traveled all over the world and have seen how real big cities work. I've never seen a subway in Japan, the UK, Paris, Berlin, even India, that is like ours. Bart passengers deal with a lot of transient people in the cars directly, while muni has that plus some of the stations are so awful that you get close to puking because of the filth. Powell muni exit at 4th is fucked up.
Honestly, I have no idea what will fix any of this. Every mayor since I moved here has had a homeless program and it hasn't done much. I think rent control has backfired, permitting process and nimbyism are still a joke, edu system is ridiculous, etc. It seems like there are these 'educated' people that love experimenting with ideas that have no basis in reality.
I never used to really get why families would leave. "Who would leave the city?!" But, once you get trapped in any of these things, it's a grind. And nobody cares much.
There are a lot of great things about the city and I have a lot of history here, but it's only been in the last few years that I seriously thought about leaving. I have a good friend that's lived in the east bay for over a decade now (they bought their house when it was _only_ $700k). We would get into heated discussions about suburbia vs. the city and I'd always defend the virtues of the city. My spiky ideals have been ground down to nubs and now it's just like, get me past the everyday garbage to work and back home.
So now I ask myself, do I really want to raise a family in a place where high minded idealism rules over common sense and reality? Or do we flee like countless others?
Homeless or not, there should never be a law singling out a group of people and limiting their fundamental rights.
Then select one or more organizations that you trust, and when each election approaches, google their "slate cards", which will tell you how to vote.
Obviously, you should feel free to investigate the specifics of any ballot measure or candidate if you have the time to do so, but if you don't, you're better off going with the slate cards than not voting.
Or to put it another way - in what capacity have you been involved in transit planning (as a lobbyist perhaps) and why should I treat your lengthy comment as anything more than heavily biased opinion?
RescueMuni Board - 2005 - Now
SFMTA Citizen's Advisory Council - 2011 - Now (Appointment: Mayor Lee)
SFMTA Customer Service and Operations Committee Chair - 2012 - Now
Those are orgs I am active in. From time to time I participate in SPUR, Market Street Railway, and SFTRU.
Impressive. The OP gives a well thought-out comment and you basically respond with an accusation of being a shill because he/she wants more public transit.
As an aside, one grant that the SFMTA didn't get, but you might think is a shoe-in, was the Smart Cities grant (http://smartcitysf.com/). This would have created a program to increase cycling by innovating around car and bus automation. With the saved space from the eliminated parking, the city could convert those areas to housing, community centers and parks.
SF lost the grant and the funds went to Columbus, Ohio. The videos of the presentations are online if you search for them.
So sad ... so sad and lame. BRT is such a half-assed, half-cracked solution.[1]
What's even more lame is the fact that the one new subway built in 40 years is very short and doesn't extend to its obvious, natural limits - fisherman's wharf.
Billions of dollars and 40 years later, you can finally walk downstairs, buy a ticket, wait a few minutes, ride a train, walk back upstairs all to avoid walking 6 blocks.
[1] To be fair, I have seen it work in Boulder (hop/skip) and in the roaring fork valley (Aspen) but these are low density places where real public transit (subway and light rail) are not workable. Unlike San Francisco.
Don't get me wrong. I think transit here in Denver/Boulder is pretty good, but we don't have BRT (despite what RTD tells us).
My other example - VelociRFTA in the Roaring Fork Valley (Glenwood to Aspen) also does not have dedicated lanes, but the state of CO and local agencies specifically refer to it as BRT ...
Caltrain's DTX (Downtown Rail Extension) doesn't connect to the Central Subway either.
One of the reasons subways cost so much money is because stations are so expensive. And stations are so expensive because everybody nit-picks. In the the United States today large public works projects only happen after near unanimous consensus. The result is that when these projects do happen, they're incredibly expensive in order to satisfy each and every desire.
Just like the OP said--we'll never see another subway line in San Francisco for the foreseeable future because there's too much "community involvement". Everybody wants to criticize and nobody wants to compromise. It's a large problem in the US on the whole, and it's led to paralysis.
Can you expand on this part, please? Are you saying that some of this is an accounting issue?
What I am saying is the programs to help those in need (low income, teens, low income seniors) come out of the budget to run the transportation network, but it would make more sense to take the money out of social services and school district funds.
As an aside, the free Muni for youth program was paid for via a grant from Google for 2 years. After the grant expired, the SFMTA picked up the tab from their budget.
When faced with 2 BART related measures on the ballot this year, this thought kept haunting me.
If they're asking for bonds to simply maintain the existing infrastructure, what are they doing with the operating capital? Bonds should be reserved for expansion.
SF Ballot measures are J and K and only apply to the SFMTA (in terms of the transportation portions). See http://www.sfcta.org/revenue-measure
In my opinion, these bond measures would benefit bay area transportation projects.
Seems like the people of SF are getting a board that represents their desires. Is that not an example of functioning government? Seems to me it would be far worse if the board consistently voted _against_ the wishes of the populous.
I don't see that anyone has a right to live in any particular place, and much of what people like about the city is a result of "Real Estate NIMBY-ism". Also, it's hard to see how "a few entitled people" control what people are doing with their property, unless that's become new slang for "the majority of voters".
In this case, that's exactly what it's slang for. The only people who can vote for these things are the ones already entitled enough to live in the city. Everyone else that was forced to the east bay and down south has no voice.
For a primer on the philosophical reasons behind government, I recommend _Leviathan_ (1651) by Thomas Hobbes.
We have different levels of government for a reason.
EDIT: To other points occur to me: 1) I've never found Hobbes very compelling. And 2) If "these other people affect me" is your (not you you, but the general you) idea of a casus belli, you will perpetually be at war no matter how large or small your government.
I think there's merit in this, but when you expand it to the bigger problem of the landed and the landless, you see how it fails to scale: a Coasean solution to landlessness is equivalent to a Coasean solution to slavery-- but slaves can't exactly afford to buy themselves out of their situation...
In Tokyo, being a 3 minute walk from a train/subway station easily adds a couple percent in housing value.
"Couple percent" ? More than that - from what I saw in most large cities, home value is pretty much directly proportional to distance from railbound mass transportation nodes.
There are many processes in place to disapprove of something, but none to approve to counteract them.
So, in total, I don't really get how it could get any worse for large public projects. And yet Switzerland in general and Zurich in particular is opening up new tunnels, streetcar lines, local train lines, viaducts, you name it, every other year or so. Zurich's public transit network in particular is crazy dense. When I first saw SF main station I thought I must have gotten off by accident in some local backwater, that's how disparate the situation is. Honestly, my 10'000 people hometown's train station probably almost sees about as much foot traffic as SF main station. And that's not even talking about Japan, which is another level of crazy.
Anyways, it still remains a mystery to me.
The Alpine tunnels and motorways are a part of this, as they ensure that Switzerland will remain an attractive option for cross-EU freight (instead of going around) but so are more local initiatives that improve conditions in the cities and cantons.
EDIT: In many ways, the same applies to Japan. Meanwhile SF feels no such pressure. Plenty of people (and companies) are all-too willing to move there regardless. If/when at some point SF experiences a decline, these skipped investments will begin to be sorely missed.
The thing is though, the US was by far the best nation at this just 50 years ago. The interstate system, the moon landing, Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, MIT... the US is still basically running on top of these efforts from back then. Was it just Reaganism that destroyed it, with later democratic presidents asleep at the wheel? (e.g. Bill Clinton pushed through and signed the money-for-work social program, destroying the old safety net)
This is basically every USA public project, and it forms a vicious circle. Because some highway was built some time with an inadequately-compacted roadbed, highway inspectors have to sign off on the compaction of every quarter-mile of roadbed. Because highway inspectors can never be fired, they all eventually succumb to the "inspect from the pickup truck" method. Because inspectors are nominally responsible for quality control, no road builder can ever be held accountable for inadequately compacted roadbed.
The result is that vehicles with inadequate dampening often leave the road surface entirely at e.g. each end of every interstate bridge.
The thing is though, the US was by far the best nation at this just 50 years ago. The interstate system, the moon landing, Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, MIT... the US is still basically running on top of these efforts from back then.
These projects were completed by the Greatest generation, managed without pity by the Lost generation. When we again have generations so well prepared by their formative experiences to work as they did, perhaps we'll have more successful giant centralizing projects like that. If world wars are the price of such abilities, one might rather we did without.
Right, now you're getting it. What we desperately need is some socialists.
1) Most people's savings are in housing. I do not know if this is the case in Switzerland, but in Anglo countries, the majority of most people's money lies in housing. So right there is an enormous incentive to not increase the supply of housing. This is also heavily influenced by the fact that American schools are funded by local property taxes, so not only does the value of your home determine your savings, but also the quality of your child's education. I think this is the fundamental issue, but not the only one.
2) Strong property rights, etc. covered above. It seems like you have this in Switzerland
3) Now, historical reasons. In the 1950s - 70s there was major development of American "inner cities", which mostly consisted of destroying minority neighborhoods and replacing them with freeways. This was a legacy of the fact that at the time the only urban planners where all transportation engineers, and viscous racism. This is important as it led to minority groups deciding that most "development plans" are actually plans to evict them (historically, not that far off). That things were handled so badly led to the first anti-development movement [1]. See the Fillmore District for such an example, although they didn't build a highway through it. See also [2].
4) The next thing to think about is prop 13. Prop 13 basically limited the amount that property taxes on residential areas to roughly 1~2% no matter what. This also brings up an important distinction between Switzerland and California: to my understanding you have citizen initiatives, but they are consulted on and shaped by the legislator. California's are... not. They are often poorly designed. This had many knock on effects, the most important of which for our story is that now cities have little incentive to build more residential housing, since corporate property tax rates are not so capped.
5) In the '60s and '70s, as alluded the anti-growth movement began. This movement reacted to justifiable worries about the destruction of communities, environmental, and historical damage by demanding little growth.
6) Both the anti-growth movement and Prop 13. came about in the '70s, when rent control was also passed in SF. Rent Control means that there is little incentive to invest in an already owned property, and it means that if a new building is built, it likely won't be affordable for low income people who are on rent control.
7) Racism. This is touchy, but in the 1950s and 1960s, many many white Americans left the cities to live in new suburbs, so called "White Flight", with government loan help which blacks could not receive. This was coupled with laws passed against obvious housing discrimination (such as so called "compacts" which made it illegal to sell to non-whites), so moving to a suburb with high housing prices meant that mostly poorer blacks could not buy houses there. It's difficult to say how much this plays out today, but it had a really strong founder effect in most outlying communities, leading to a culture opposed to mass transit ("it'll bring those people here") and multi-person housing ("I love my community of single family homes. It's not my problem if people can't afford housing here. We're full").
So basically everyone is opposed to more building. Minorities are convinced that more building will price them out (true) and that development is likely biased against them, preservation activists don't want new things built, suburban communities don't want to become any denser, municipalities prefer business over homes for tax reasons, and everyone who owns land has no desire to build more.
[1] http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Freeway_Revolt [2] http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Redevelopment_A-1_and...
This causes long term property owners to pay very minimal property tax bills compared to recent owners and create effective property tax rates of %0.2 or less. Prop 13 also incentives owners to never sell, which causes supply problems and increases the price even more.
There are many US states that have property tax rates lower than california, but do not have the "prop 13" problem. King county in seattle is one example.
- Greater local control over government decision making. This cuts both ways, but there are a couple specific ways it makes transit projects hard to push through. First, it inserts lots of veto points into the process, which a determined minority can use to block the project. If the benefits are diffuse (a more transit accessible city), but the perceived costs are concentrated (they would tear up the street in front of my house, etc.), then it's hard to get the necessary political support to overcome all the vetoes. Second, the politicians making the decisions are accountable to the residents of that area, who aren't always the intended beneficiaries of the project. For example, a rail link that brings commuters to an area might be a huge benefit to the commuteers, but a net negative to the residents.
- Infrastructure decisions are path-dependent. It's hard, both technically and politically, to introduce transit to a community that hasn't been previously dependent on it. Neighborhoods built with cars in mind might not have enough density to support great service, and built-up, expensive neighborhoods (where the jobs are) are often prohibitively expensive to build in. Politically, it's tricky because neighborhoods and regions are going to be mostly full of people for whom the existing infrastructure is already good enough - they wouldn't be there otherwise. New projects are more likely to benefit new people - people who relocate because the new service opens up lifestyle/commuting possibilities that weren't possible before.
- High construction costs. There's ongoing debate about why this is (I won't get into it), but US cities generally have higher construction costs than other developed countries, even for similar projects. 2011 post with some concrete data: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
So... too much veto power and too much corruption (construction lobbying) leading to enormously inflated prices?
You can also compare it to Tokyo. 5-10x cheaper to build their metro lines while their GDP per capita is only 37% less than the US.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durchmesserlinie_Altstetten–Zü...
[2] http://www.sbb.ch/content/dam/sbb/de/pdf/sbb-konzern/ueber-d...
And (please don't take this the wrong way) a lot of places outside the US have been easier to build in because, over the past century, those places had to be completely rebuilt anyway following the massive devastation of two world wars. The US escaped that devastation on its own soil, but is paying an ironic price in that now it's difficult or even impossible to retrofit more modern infrastructure into our cities, because we still have all the old infrastructure that never got destroyed.
This is only a little over twice the SF figure, for an order of magnitude better result.
http://hoodline.com/2015/03/panhandle-freeway-revolt
The only reason BART exists is because of the NIMBYs:
"Lost in the story of the Freeway Revolt is the role it played in helping BART get institutional support. After the 1959 Supervisorial defeat of freeway plans, BART advocates got surplus Bay Bridge tolls allocated to the proposed transbay tube. After the 1961 vote against the Western Freeway, Mayor George Christopher and the influential Bay Area Council both endorsed the proposed BART system."
The Geary line would be something akin to Boston's Big Dig in complexity and scale.
The freeway protesters believed that freeways shouldn't cut through any municipality. Not just theirs -- nobody's.
If you think something shouldn't exist at all, you're not a NIMBY.
More people want to live in cities than there is space in the cities. Given that high-density living is more environmentally friendly than low-density sprawl, it's particularly bad for those in cities to not allow more people to live there.
But there's two things that everybody hates in city planning: sprawl and density.
There's more than enough room in SF proper, and there's absolutely tons of room down the peninsula. It just happens that current residents don't want their city to be more like a city, and don't want to improve the infrastructure so that more people move in.
That's the reality that many California cities live with: people who moved there a decade or more ago want their place to not change at all from the moment they moved in, not realizing that their own arrival also disturbed those who were there before.
Because the problem isn't so much people not building stuff on their own property, it's a small number of highly motivated people that can stop any change at all, or interfere with others use of their land to the extent that they can not build, even within existing permitted use.
Any development. Anywhere? No. But they can vote to influence the type of development allowed in the community where they're a voter. This isn't unlimited. Other property owners have rights based on the rules that were in place when they bought.
>interfere with others use of their land to the extent that they can not build, even within existing permitted us
Which in many cases should not be allowed.
My position on this is undoubtedly going to seem absurd to anyone hearing it for the first time, but it's that, no, in fact, San Francisco does not belong to the people who happen to live there already. The most good could be done for the most people by opening it up to -- unsurprisingly, almost tautologically -- more people.
> Given that high-density living is more environmentally friendly
> than low-density sprawl […]
Silly Valley's housing and commuting nightmare is a consequence of tech companies' management decisions to cram everyone into the same physical space. It doesn't have to be that way; moving bits is far cheaper (in money and energy) than moving bodies.
HANC is still around actively blocks housing projects in the Haight. For example, the Whole Foods on Stanyan and Haight was to be mixed use, but HANC (lead by Calvin Welsh) fought to block it. See: http://www.socketsite.com/archives/tag/690-stanyan
I agree that NIMBYism is a double edged sword, and this is where changing how people think about transportation and growth comes together, not changing who people are.
Most people outside the Bay probably would be surprised, but here? Nah, it's "well.. yeah, duh."
She confirms the general sentiment in this HN thread, that nimbyism is to blame for poor infrastructure.
We have a facebook group of Richmond District residents who support housing and infrastructure. http://growtherichmond.com/
Geary had fixed-guideway transit from 1880 until 1956 when it was replaced by buses [1][2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary_Street,_Park_and_Ocean_R...
* if a bus ahead breaks down, the bus behind can still go around it, so the line's not totally clogged up
* busses are quieter going through neighborhoods (have a friend who lives by Duboce Park and it rumbles)
* you can share the road with regular automobiles, whereas rails depend on the implementation (yes most of the ones in SF do as well)
* easier to turn a bus around than a train at the terminus
An actual subway could be quicker, but again that requires money, cooperation from the neighborhood, and time.
This guarantees that transit will always be worse than driving oneself.
The way the current metro light-rail is laid out is a good idea on paper: underground for the dense urban areas, and above ground where you can have space for a dedicated lane. If a potential Geary Metro was underground from Embarcadero to Japantown (Laguna or Webster), then above ground the rest of the way, I can see see a light-rail system working. Now let's find a politician with the clout to have Geary under construction for 5-7 years (optimistically).
As others have pointed out, there is in fact a BRT project in progress to bring a separated, dedicated-lane busway to Geary [1].
[1] http://www.sfcta.org/geary-corridor-bus-rapid-transit-home
There is nothing worse than buses.
I, and many others, will do almost anything to avoid riding a bus.
There is very little I can think of in our built, urban environment that is more aesthetically terrible and ill mannered than big, dumb (and in most cities, black exhaust spewing) buses bonking their way around city streets.
Steve Jobs said it best:
"If you see a (bus), they blew it."[1]
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus...
And which city does not utilize a bus system? Tokyo is the only one where the busses don't stand out in my memory, but I'm sure they still have busses. It's impossible for a city to be served completely by rail.
I agree that the bus experience in general is substandard to rail, but the reality is that when transit planners need to service a new area, they can just route a bus in a few months as opposed to building out a rail line.
Zurich comes to mind. While there are indeed buses in Zurich, they're somewhat superfluous and only used in (rare) edge cases. Contrary to your assumption, Zurich is almost entirely served by rail.
In the case of Zürich, how did they not fail your metric? If the busses are truly superfluous, then why doesn't the transit agency discontinue those lines? I'd like to think they're there for a reason other than paying bus drivers and lining some pockets.
The reality is that cities, because they're changing, will always need busses alongside rail. As new areas become popular and need access, it's far quicker and cheaper to route a new bus line there. Today's bus route might become tomorrow's rail.
Interestingly, it's not true of London, where just about anyone will get the bus, especially for journeys where the tube and rail connections are difficult. The buses are extraordinarily frequent in the centre, serve a wide network, and are full of a wide range of citizens.
For all I'm a big fan of rail, bus service can be both excellent and popular. It normally isn't, though.
Also, I believe SF buses are generally electric except to cover excess load.
In any case, how do you expect people in the suburbs to get to the light rail? It's just not realistic to entirely discard busses on aesthetic(!!) bases.
Also, I'm not sure why you're quoting Steve Jobs that way. I'm enjoying using a stylus with my iPad now. It is a perfect example of pragmatism clearly displacing... whatever it was that irked Jobs about a stylus.
Besides the noise right outside my window at midnight, from an empty bus, that regulations require to have the hydraulics to kneel and to pick up wheelchairs; I don’t like navigating around buses because they block the road with their bulk and their dangerous mass. I prefer to ride my bike to the train station.
That said, Road Pricing, properly implemented would solve a ton of problems!
Low speed/neighborhood electric vehicles might point the way.
http://www.afr.com/opinion/columnists/following-the-act-land...
http://theconversation.com/gold-coast-light-rail-study-helps...
http://iff.scag.ca.gov/Pages/ValueCapture.aspx
http://www.transitwiki.org/TransitWiki/index.php?title=Value...
It's only illegal to do it the reasonable way that makes sense.
Letting this value flow from taxpayers to landowners freely is nothing short of injustice.
For me at least, it conjures the image of a patent troll explaining why they deserve millions of dollars for doing nothing, or a PHB explaining how he plans to fleece grandmothers around the country of their pensions.
It just reeks of shady business practices.
We need something to break out of this negative feedback loop.
I'm not sure, but I lean toward increase, because you do own the land beneath your house. If you were the only one who did this, then I'd say yes, almost certainly. However, if everyone did this, supply would increase, so the question is, would that result in a decrease in prices, offsetting the value of converting a single family residence into three units?
Personally, I doubt it. In my neighborhood in SF, nice 3br flats sell for about 85% of the cost of a 3br house. There's a lot of slack here to make up for the reduction in prices that could result from more units, and honestly, I'm not eve sure that increasing density in SF would lower prices in the first place.
I know that last one may seem counter-intuitive, but keep in mind, Manhattan generally has housing costs than SF, so greater density certainly doesn't necessarily mean lower housing costs. A lot of people have pointed out that SF's high housing prices may be impeding further economic growth in the region. It's entirely possible that greater density would attract even more high paying workers to the region, with even greater economies of scale, higher levels of economic activity, and so forth. It's not out of the question that greater density could result in higher, not lower, housing costs.
I'm not convinced that SF nimby-ism is driven by a desire to maximize the dollar value of real estate assets. I'm also not really convinced that it's unique to San Francisco. My guess is that most medium-density neighborhoods that have been in a steady-state for 75+ years are resistant to change, regardless of whether they're located in SF or elsewhere.
A rational but liberal approach would be "I need to protect my home value by ensuring the largest risks to continued success of SFBA economy are handled responsibly."
Both are rational (if selfish), but there is definitely a prevailing economic conservatism. I've felt it myself since levering up a few years ago (at what was then the top).
As a young SF homeowner, that's more important to my quality of life than the price of my home going up.
Now the Green Line in Boston -- that's a glorified bus line.
The point of this line would be serve the park and Richmond and Sunset, without the delays of the Irving line.
http://www.sfindicatorproject.org/indicators/view/183
There's a density map. The Geary corridor is quite dense, certainly as dense as any area not already well served by BART.
Los Angeles has a very bullish agenda for subway/metro expansion, with some lines already under construction. Even those currently being built, the timelines are extremely long. Purple line extension is due to be finished, if everything goes to place, by 2035.
For SF to justify extensive subway infrastructure, it needs to start building higher density neighborhoods.
This isn't even close to being true.
It's likely only true if you only count cities with populations over a certain amount. Please see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12754395
11,176
66,455
49,708
50,005
4,724
8,175,133
23,594
2,406
27,395
69,781
6,707
7,137
23,805
20,832
58,114
75,754
34,399
53,926
362
146,199
805,235
So yea, it's NYC, then SF, minus a couple pockets of LA. And these are all dense places that need subways. It takes a special sort of something to claim, as the top comment did, that SF is not dense enough to warrant a subway, let alone massive large-scale investment in all modes of mass transit as NYC has.
Consider that NYC covers 302.6 sq/mi to SF's 46.69, which means that NYC isn't merely double the density, it's double the density over a much, much larger area.
This is why most serious comparisons are conducted at the level of the MSA (which would fold every one of the cities you're putting ahead of SF in density into a larger metro). Often, when laypeople compare cities, they're thinking about the MSA while quoting numbers they've found for cities-proper. That's why nobody in this conversation is thinking about Guttenberg, NY (and why mentioning it is almost a non sequitur).
For example, the Los Angeles metro area has a higher density than both NYC's and SF's (which is higher than NYC's), but it's obvious – to me at least – that in reality, considering only areas that most people would agree are remotely close to being in/near "the city," the density order of these three would be more like: 1) NYC 2) SF 3) LA.
But yeah, at the end of the day, I'm mostly being pedantic :)
I agree, however, that SF needs to build at a higher density (outside of FiDi and downtown) regardless of future subway infrastructure.
Hilariously, I wrote my highschool senior thesis on this exact topic. It was a case study on Seattle, Houston, and New York and how density changed before/after transit was added. You can see the pattern pretty clearly, transit leads to density and not the other way around. Which makes sense, right? Because density can be increased one building at a time, but generally subways need a huge investment to put in an entire line at once and benefit from having an extensive network.
I think that depends on your definition of "just about." Every borough in NYC aside from Staten Island is much denser than San Francisco. Additionally, many parts of where I'm from – northern NJ – are even more so: Hoboken, West New York, Union City (the densest city in the country), Guttenberg (the densest township in the country), and more.
If you're talking about cities larger than a certain size, then perhaps, but even then, I personally think it's a bit misleading to single out just Manhattan.
This is why having fast rail, uncongested highways, and always expanding to meet demand are always worth the cost. Unless you can accurately forecast a downturn in regional economic growth irrespective of whether or not you meet transit demands, it is never rational from the perspective of long term city planning for maximum economic throughput to not grow the system and increase density.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Moraga/Lafayette/Orinda is my favorite example of this in the Bay Area. I sympathize with the complaint that they aren't building enough, but I think the SFBARF/Lafayette lawsuit is stupid. Building more in those places wouldn't help us, because the transit capacity doesn't exist. Have you taken BART, or the Bay Bridge, or the Caldecott tunnel at rush hour? If 20,000 people move from the city to Lafayette, how do they get here for work?
But you can even find this in the city. Yeah, it'd be great to increase density in the Sunset. But have you actually commuted from the Sunset to downtown? It's a disaster. Muni is at capacity, and driving isn't an answer. You can cycle to work (I used to from 48th Ave), but that's a 7+ mile ride with a few hundred feet of elevation: it's not an easy casual ride for most people.
The idea that SF doesn't have the density to justify this stuff is... it's just not true.
SF is riddled with Uber and Lift drivers for this very reason. I bet at any given moment, 80% of the cars downtown are rides for hire. The city should just subsidize with a few billion a ride as a service platform and stop wasting time and money on something that will always be sub par.
What a buzzkil.
It's sort of pathetic how bad the US has become at public infrastructure projects over the past 40-50 years. Take a clue from cities with 1000+ years of history: you still have to keep upgrading your infrastructure, even if it means bringing in the archaeologists to sort out what you find every time.
http://www.crossrail.co.uk/route/crossrail-from-its-early-be... says the idea was first seriously proposed in 1974, and was then raised, dropped and batted around at various levels of politics for another 25 years before getting to "serious funded detailed feasibility study" in 2002, which didn't get the final go-ahead until 2008 (with the construction phase then being the 10 years after that and ending 2018).
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/23/london...
It strikes me that a personal rapid transit system - think something like Uber, operating on lanes dedicated to self-driving cars - could provide much of the functionality of this, and be ready a lot sooner.
I don't have time to dig up the studies or articles at the moment, but even optimistic-case self-driving car systems aren't going to more than double or triple existing road capacity. Good rail systems already, today, have about 5 – 10x the capacity of road systems. Self-driving cars and medium- to long-distance urban transit system are actually likely to be complements, not substitutes, especially if/when cities continue to get denser.
Making roads better and taxing them right (so we can do dynamic pricing) seems so much better than huge chunky capital costs of digging tunnels and installing subway infrastructure.
We already have roads, people get to go door to door, and deploying a usage based tax model on roads is just software. Seems so much better than decade long projects.
Subway >> Light Rail ~ Bus Rapid Transit >> Regular Bus >> Cars
And just because a mode of transportation is on wheels doesn't mean it flexible. If you look at a Bus Repid Transit system[1] you would notice that the buses are specialized for driving in separate lanes that go in a straight line and the bus stops are custom built (and are less frequent than a regular bus).
Just build up. There's plenty of room in downtowns. The elevator can be the most important form of `public transport'.
Is there any evidence that high rise apartments (say more than 10 stories) affordable at middle incomes can exist or ever have existed?
I'm going with "used to park value."
It's been mentioned elsewhere that real estate is the last place you can easily park a literal suitcase full of cash without being subject to any KYC rules.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/realestate/pieds-terre-own...
To avoid empty apartments, a land value tax works fairly well.
One of the challenges with things like rail is getting to and from the station, and parking. If you could step out your door, ride to the train, get dropped off, get on the train, get off, and ride to your office- rail could become dramatically more compelling for people who are not very close to the stations.
In short self-driving cars could improve rail's "last-mile" challenge
Do they have that capacity in seats or in hands on the overhead rails with backpacks held in hands and zero personal space? If the latter, that's a fairly disingenuous comparison.
Forcing people out of cars (or previously available train seats) onto standing room only trains because "you still get from A to B" would be roughly the same.
Everything is "more efficient" if people simply accept worse outcomes. That's not an accomplishment. Contrast with actual improvements over status quo like more effiently packed passenger cars, self driving cars, rail service with enough seats, etc.
Upward change is good. Lateral change is fine. Reaching into people's lives and making them worse because "you didn't really need that, and my values are more important than yours" is disturbingly fashionable in these threads.
No need to force people out of cars. But often the limiting factor for road transport happens to be congestion: when people are in effect running an auction with their time, and persons most willing to set in traffic are the highest bidder and `win the road'; then it is economically more efficient to make people pay with money instead of time and introduce a congestion charge or an Certificate of Entitlement system like in Singapore.
The road still gets rationed by an auction, but instead of bidding by wasting your time, you bid with actual money that can be re-used for other things. (And time is, of course, money.)
I hope you forgive me what seems like a digression: what looks like `forcing people out of their cars' might actually just be replacing wasteful time-bidding with money-bidding.
There’s no way that autonomous vehicles running on surface streets gets you the level of capacity that grade-separated high-capacity transit gets you. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone argue that it will. E.g. a 10-car BART train with 119 passengers per traincar running at 24 trains/hour today and 28/hour in the future with ATCS upgrades.
Building fixed-line transit at this point is a massive waste of money. But construction is where the action is in local corruption, so they'll keep doing it.
SDCs are a good last mile solution, particularly in mid density areas and for the disabled. Conventional trains make more sense to delivering large amounts of people to or from a city center as well general regional transportation.
And remote working + VR - say no more!
That said, if it's people that need to move around, let's make fast moving sidewalks high above the city streets. Or tram type of technology like the zoo, but without imprisoning animals.
This exists, sort of, in Hong Kong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central%E2%80%93Mid-Levels_esc...
People literally commute to work via escalator.
So the question really is what kind of architecture do you want? After that question is answered you can talk about whether cars or trains make more sense for that place.
Getting to this world would require much more communal space and stronger neighborhoods with more of a cultural center of gravity so you didn't have people flitting all over the city in rabdom directions in desperate attempts to find a place to fit in socially and professionally.
Imagine small towns, packed as densely as a big city. An arterial subway like San Francisco's is adequate for that.
A grade separated line will carry more people to destinations that are built around that infrastructure faster than self driving cars.
They can, however, supplement rail infra, by covering last-mile in the suburbs for commuter lines, or off-hour transport when it's too noisy or unprofitable to run the lines.
Self-driving rideshare will be great for suburbs, not so much for dense cities.
A good source: http://humantransit.org/2016/08/pushing-back-on-ridesourcing...
It is indefensible to pour billions of dollars into fixed-line transit at this point. But construction is where the action is in local corruption, so they'll keep doing it.