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Comment by cgiles | Hacker News Reader

I visited the Bay Area for the first time (as an adult) a few weeks ago and was astonished by the difference between what I was expecting based on HN comments, and reality.

All I saw of the city made it seem like a giant suburb. BART stations were miles apart and therefore practically useless. It is really not that dense and traffic is not bad.

I am sure some areas are different. I was mainly in the area around SFO, and my conference was not hosted in downtown because apparently the homeless problem is bigger there, but at that level of low density and congestion, I fail to see how public transit is much of a win. People will not realistically take public transit if it doubles their travel time. And this case applies doubly to medium-sized suburbanized cities in the central US.

On the other hand, I can see what people mean about a housing problem when there are virtually no buildings taller than 3 stories except hotels in such an urban area.

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> All I saw of the city made it seem like a giant suburb. BART stations were miles apart and therefore practically useless.

While there are multiple BART stations in the city, it is not the main public transit in the city, Muni is. BART is the regional rapid transit connecting suburbs to the city.

> I was mainly in the area around SFO

Then you quite possibly didn't actually see any of the City and County of San Francisco. SFO is operated by the San Francisco International Airport Commission, which is a body subordinate to the government of the City and County of San Francisco, but is not actually within the geographical boundaries of the City (or County, the two being one and the same.)

> Then you quite possibly didn't actually see any of the City and County of San Francisco.

Very possible. I got a good sampling of a 5 mile radius around SFO and sporadic sampling elsewhere. I wouldn't claim to know 1/100th of what a resident does about the area.

However, I was interested in testing to the extent I could the implicit hypothesis often floated on HN, "the Bay Area is borderline uninhabitable". If an area 15 miles away from downtown seems quite low-density, and assuming a 15 mile commute is reasonable (assisted by BART, whose analogue doesn't exist in many comparable cities), I concluded complaints on HN are overblown, especially considering everyone doesn't commute to downtown. For example, YouTube headquarters were pretty close to SFO. Stanford is not near downtown either. Not sure where all the other headquarters are located.

I don't have high confidence in that conclusion obviously because my information is very limited. But I am comparing to cities I know better like DC and NYC.

> it is not the main public transit in the city, Muni is

I assume "Muni" means buses or cable cars, and I will only say that during wandering around for ~20 hours, I didn't see a single bus, so I conclude Muni doesn't service suburbs.

> However, I was interested in testing to the extent I could the implicit hypothesis often floated on HN, "the Bay Area is borderline uninhabitable".

I've seen lots of people claim that about (especially downtown) SF; the normal claim about the rest of the Bay Area is that it's unaffordable because of the people that want to keep it habitable, not that it is uninhabitable.

> I assume "Muni" means buses or cable cars

The San Francisco Municipal Railway operates busses and cable cars, sure, but also surface and subway trains which share several of BARTs dowtown underground stops, but also have a lot more stops in the city that are not shared with BART.

> and I will only say that during wandering around for ~20 hours, I didn't see a single bus, so I conclude Muni doesn't service suburbs.

It doesn't (that I know of, there may be some lines that go out of the city, certainly many non-SF operated lines go into the city); there are many other transit agencies in the Bay Area, many of which have bus lines in the suburbs, including lines that run into the city. The area right around SFO (excluding the airport itself) may be a relative dead zone, I haven't really spent much time there.

I wouldn't generalize about the Bay area from a few days in a particular corner of San Mateo County, though.

> I wouldn't generalize about the Bay area from a few days in a particular corner of San Mateo County, though.

I'm very wary about it too, but the persistent claims that SF/Bay Area has some peculiar kind of dysfunction, rendering it hard to live in, that doesn't exist in other major metros has always piqued my curiosity. It seems like an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.

The only real evidence I've seen supporting this idea is very high housing prices. I sat next to a woman on my flight who paid $5K/mo for a 2-bedroom apartment, shared with 2 others. Sounds insane. And of course I've seen more systematic evidence of this.

But after my visit, I wonder whether she, and perhaps others on this board, don't consider the SF suburbs as worthy for a potential living space. Or alternatively whether the claims are true that there is very high demand and these suburbs would be demolished and replaced by high-rise apartments but for zoning restrictions.

SFO is quite far out of the city - SF itself is on the other side of the range of hills SFO is south of, about 15 miles all told.

If you have that big hill between you and SF, all you're going to see is the northern end of the south/west bay, particularly San Mateo.

> I was mainly in the area around SFO

This seems like a bizarre data point to extrapolate from. Aren't airports often specifically put away from dense population centers (for obvious reasons)? It's not as if Charles De Gaulle is on the Seine.

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