Makes me think of how the San Francisco Bay Area could have been an even greater city than New York, the next capital of the world, if not for it's failure to expand and modernize the public transportation system and, obviously, the housing crisis.
I think the two are very related. The Bay Area's biggest problem is there is no Brooklyn or Queens -- meaning large, extremely dense residential areas which are a (relatively) painless commute from the city.
Hell, drop a few BART stations in Alameda you'd be a huge step in the right direction.
Whether the project happens in San Francisco's lip-service to transit NIMBY climate is the bigger question.
BART needs to just go around the Bay Area entirely in a loop, or Caltrain needs to become more efficient. Hopefully electrification will help in this regard.
BART is going to San Jose. It will go to San Jose Diridon thus completing the loop. It will take longer than everybody likes and probably cost more money than was originally budgeted, but it's going to happen.
Caltrain presumably will remain the fastest option from San Jose, at least if regressive enclaves like Atherton don't delay the improvements for the high-speed rail project.
Getting the fiefdoms to coordinate is the Bay's eternal transit problem, however.
OTOH Atherton may well be one of HSR's smallest problems.
I support the project, but part of me wishes that the money could have gone to massive improvements of Los Angeles, Bay Area, Sac, and smaller cities' transit (with density bonuses, value-capture schemes, etc.). No way that wins a statewide ballot though.
In the end, the Caltrain improvements as part of the project will help a lot, which I think include more double-tracking as well as electrification and grade-separation.
I'm not sure there's such a thing as a city that's not vulnerable to at least one climate change or natural disaster threat.
Denver seems pretty safe. No earthquakes, safe from rising seas, no hurricanes or tsunamis.
Portland is ~80 miles inland from the pacific ocean - and the odds of a tsunami coming up the columbia river from the pacific, and still having much destructive power to do more than just flood, is again, basically nil - it would literally need to be a perfect storm for it to work.
So even the biggest tsunami the world has witnessed wouldn't come close.
Plus, houses are already getting quite expensive here, largely due to that UGB you mention. Unless we're willing to compromise on that (and as a long-time resident who appreciates being able to reach something like wilderness pretty easily, I hope we do not) then pretty quickly we are going to have SF-level housing problems.
I honestly love portland, but it doesnt want to be an urban area.
Man, developers always say that, and it's simply never been true. There's so much undeveloped land still within the UGB, and so many opportunities to build densely close into city limits--a lot of which is happening, but a lot more of which could still happen.
Portland does have a big housing problem, it's true, but the solution isn't in opening up the UGB--it's in getting more good jobs, and encouraging more entrepreneurship, so that folks can actually afford to buy the condos going up all over that city.
Of the unpredictable and rapid vertical and horizontal kind?