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Comment by pfarnsworth | Hacker News Reader

You can’t just add homes and not worry about traffic. That only exacerbates commute issues which is one of the reasons why houses so far away from business centers get so expensive, because houses even further have exponentially worse commutes.

Public transportation needs to be fixed first so that people from east bay and beyond can get to the Silicon Valley and SF faster.

If I could live in Tracy and get to SF in 30 mins or even 45 mins, I would move there in a heartbeat. But it takes 1.5-2hrs even with BART.

That will do more to lower house prices than cramming a small number of houses or condos in an already crowded area.

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One of the more interesting theories I've seen about traffic is that people respond to traffic the same as any other cost. Meaning that if it takes longer to get to the city due to more homes in the area, fewer people will be willing to make the drive. So the theory is that infrastructure use will always expand to meet capacity.

I'm not saying I buy this idea to the extreme, but I think it's a pretty accurate model for how I make my travel decisions.

  If I could live in Tracy and get to SF in 30 mins

Heh.

I had a couple of co-workers in Sunnyvale who moved that way (to Ripon and Manteca) to settle their families in single family homes. They formed a vanpool. Result: each had to drive only one way, and they made enough from the vanpool to more than pay for all their commute costs.

This was in 1985.

Paving over San Joaquin County with detached single family homes on quarter-acre lots will never fix our housing problems and certainly runs against our climate change goals. We have to build walkable neighborhoods a sensible distance from job centers, along existing transit corridors.

lol With all these disparate opinions, the problem will never be solved. People are going to have to agree on a sub-optimal but better plan otherwise the status quo will continue to win. Keep in mind that the NIMBY powers that be are a lot stronger, and as the house prices go up, every new home owner becomes more and more disinclined to support new housing in the SF Bay Area. The ONLY chance for lower house prices is better, more efficient public transportation and moving people further away from their jobs.

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