High-Density Housing Near Public Transit Is Aim of San Diego Code Change
timesofsandiego.com
timesofsandiego.com
In addition, downtown San Diego isn't really considered to be a place where the cool kids hang out (and still has a lot of industrial area around). So, there is less fighting going on there right now.
The problem is that the transit in San Diego is lousy. The trains are horrifically slow between downtown and Solana Beach. And the limited number of tracks means that Amtrak regularly has to wait for passenger trains, and, if someone jumps in front of a train, the system shuts down for 4 hours.
Nearby construction can decrease your property values, but upzoning and by-right permitting increase property values by making them more attractive to developers.
I think it's both more correct and more charitable to think that people arguing against things like SB50 are doing it because they don't want the density in their neighbourhoods, and not for financial reasons.
However, San Diego already has a huge traffic problem. Either they really need to scale the major highways, or get people closer to their workplace, which this is a great first step for. San Diego is awesome, but growing pains showing.
Transit-oriented development is the only sensible approach I've seen to scaling a modern city.
I am scared to see what the end result will be in US cities, however, because public transit for almost all of the US means poorly run busing routes that nobody wants to take.
Having lived in San Diego for many years (as well as Denver and MPLS which I think are relevant comparisons) I believe that what will happen is that existing (poorly run, poorly utilized) bus routes will be chosen by developers who will use the "blah blah transit blah blah" designation that was just gifted to them to build high end units for people that will drive their cars.
No actual transit (the kind that runs on rails) will be built, some more car-centric housing units will exist at high end prices (they're not going to build garage-less buildings nor are they going to build low end units).
Oh, and the buses will still be empty.
I want this kind of policy regime to be pursued, but they need to build the transit lines first. And buses don't count.
I love buses as a transit option. They go directly to parking lots of places like grocery stores and ride smoother than a lot of trains/subways/etc I've been on. If the routes are useful then people will use them and they're as simple to scale as buying more buses and very easy to dynamically adjust, unlike train lines.
I think at least in some places in the US, this is a class thing, though few people will admit it. Buses are associated with lower-class people, whereas rail (especially heavy rail) is associated with middle class people.
You often hear that we spend much more on roads than rail, which is true, but we drive much much more than we take the train. For example, the D.C. metro receives about a $0.42 per passenger mile subsidy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/not-a-dime-more-for-.... Meanwhile, state and local governments spend $155 billion on roads, about half of which is paid for by usage fees (tolls and gas tax). Given the 3 trillion miles driven on roads every year, that works out to just $0.024 per passenger mile of subsidy: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pressroom/fhwa1704.cfm.
The cleaning lady who drives 10 miles to work costs the government $0.24 for each trip. When a white collar worker takes Metro 10 miles to work,[1] it costs the government $4.20.
[1] The median Metro rider has a household income of over $100,000 and 80% have a college degree. That's because the people who take Metro can afford to buy expensive housing near a Metro station, and go to white collar jobs downtown. The cleaning lady, and other lower income workers, can't afford to live near a Metro station, and many work the 90% of jobs in the metro area that aren't downtown.
There are transit districts which run entirely different coaches on commute vs. urban or general transit routes. Commute have comfortable seats, overhead briefcase stowage, reading lights, and. often wifi. Urban transit: hard seats, no amenities, often standing-room only.
Don't shoot the messenger.
There is a vicious cycle of under-investment (fulfilling transit goals with half-assed bus routes instead of making real investments in lightrail/subway) poor service, and resulting lack of utilization among middle class voters ... which leads to further under-investment (since none of us are going to take the bus) ...
I am not talking about SF or NYC. I am talking about every other city in the US that matches this description perfectly.
Now, high quality bus services with dedicated lanes can be pretty decent but most bus services aren't like that.
It's turned out to be very politically difficult to establish and (just as importantly) enforce bus lanes in communities in the US. People get very upset at the prospect of giving up either street parking or travel lanes, and local politicians and the traffic enforcement bureaucracy has mostly sided with the people who complain. The result is either no bus lanes, or part-time bus lanes with no effective enforcement, which is basically the same as no bus lanes.
A bus that's able to use bus lanes (and possibly transit signal priority) to bypass traffic is a great thing, and would be appealing to people across the socioeconomic spectrum. A bus that's stuck in the same traffic as the cars has no benefit other than cost, and will only appeal to those who can't afford to maintain a car or are very ideologically committed to transit.
Buses would be amazing with bus lanes in congested areas and automated camera-based enforcement of those lanes. However, the inability of the political system to make that happen even in Manhattan makes me fairly pessimistic for that outcome in other places.
I still think it's worth investing in buses for those who need them, but if they can't bypass traffic they will be stuck at a low mode share almost everywhere.
If you want to make buses actually work, make them work like Uber. You go to the bus stop where there is a screen you can input your destination (or you use your phone), and the nearest minibus going in your direction stops to pick you up, which each carries eight passengers rather than forty. Then it drops you off at your actual destination instead of four blocks from there, and picks you up faster to begin with because there are five times as many buses of a fifth the size and they can be diverted from nearby routes to pick you up as soon as you summon them.
At that point they're almost as good as a car most of the time, only they cost a lot less and only take up an eighth of the space on the road per passenger. And you don't have to operate huge wasteful 40-passenger vehicles during off-peak hours just to carry 3 passengers.
Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive. Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.
Except for all the ones who don't, because one of the endpoints isn't anywhere near the bus route even if part of the path between them goes along it.
> Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive.
Apparently they do, as demonstrated by all the people who use Uber in preference to buses.
> Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.
Unless that requires you to have less frequent service that covers fewer areas, which in turn causes people to choose single passenger cars over your buses.
You can also eliminate the driver cost by doing what Uber was originally billed as -- ride sharing. You're going to drive your car from your home to your workplace and back, but if you get up fifteen minutes earlier you can make a few bucks by picking up some of your neighbors and dropping them off at work. That's a lot less than the cost of a full-time bus driver with benefits but at scale it still results in a fraction of the number of cars on the road during rush hour.
Of course some cities have BRT routes, dedicated lanes, and high service frequency. If you have access to a bus network like that, indeed it can operate as well or better than a rail system (and often at a lower cost). But that is the exception in the US, not the norm. Whereas most commuter and urban rail in the US operates with high frequency and dedicated right-of-way. Hence the presumption that buses "don't count".
People who can afford to buy these new high-end units will move out of their previous, less high-end units and the result is more affordable housing because the supply is closer to meeting the demand.
Build high density around a bus stop, and some of the people will take the bus. Those additional riders mean the bus is making more money and can afford to add more routes. More routes means the bus is useful to more people who start riding the bus... Eventually you have enough people on the bus to switch to a better transit mode. The bus rider levels also show where people want to go which guides where you put the trains instead of a guess and prayer. But this all requires enough density to start the cycle in the first place.
Agreed. Forgive me - what I meant was, build new transit lines on point to point routes that already make sense, then in-fill the intermediate stops as needed.
Those in-fill stations can then be the anchors for transit oriented, high density development which completes the cycle because the line is already in place.
I think they have basically succeeded with this in the University St. Paul <--> MPLS lightrail route. The route already made sense point-to-point and now they can choose the intermediate stops that make sense to organically grow the corridor.
What an arbitrary way to decide what "actual" transit is. There are about a thousand other, very valid, very useful, very modern ways of building transit that have nothing to do with rails. If you're saying rails but meaning grade-separation, you're still wrong about non-grade-separated systems being somehow inherently inferior or unworthy. Look at any list of top transit systems in the world, the majority of modern systems incorporate non-grade-separated systems like trams, busways, or even regular old busses, because they work and they're cheap. People with your mindset are why this country may never have widespread transit systems, because you think insanely expensive infrastructure is the solution to a culture, marketing, and economic problem.
I think you're missing my point - it's not about a fetish for rails ...
In the United States, outside of two or three cities[1], there has been almost zero serious investment in public transportation[2] and that transit infrastructure is always some bullshit sideshow that checks a box but does not provide any kind of meaningful service that would allow car culture to change.
Here is everything you need to know about public transit in the United States in one quick commercial:
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wy2O/state-farm-backstory-truck-song...
What is special about rail infrastructure is that you can't half-ass it. You can't sort of put the subway in or sort of build a lightrail line. If they are putting down rails there is serious, meaningful work being done that requires a lot of related investment in the entire ecosystem of transit.
In the United States, buses don't count - not because buses are inherently bad but because in our car-centric environment that kind of service will never have the funding or the political backing to actually be useful.
[1] NYC, Washington DC ... places with subways.
[2] Seeing some halting progress in places like Denver and Minneapolis ... and I say "progress" with some qualifiers - after 25 years now has a second lightrail line and MPLS has one rail line that actually makes sense for commuters...
The construction took several years and the trains have just started running, but the city has already transformed. Many dense buildings went up while the rail lines where being built and many more are under construction right now.
It will be many years before the true success and failure of the project is known, but the signs look good to me. I'd like to see general loosening of non-safety related zoning restrictions to help keep housing prices in check, but this program was a good compromise since developers were guaranteed an investment of transit and other city services and could take more risk.
It's not super dense in terms of population now, but with proper infrastructure growth it could be one of the greats!
Maybe this is where the city thinks the scooters will ultimately fit in.
The city has build a lot less housing than office space over the course of the last decade, and that is the metric that counts (jobs-housing balance).
"The SF skyline is completely new" - Salesforce tower (office space), 181 freemont (2/3s office space) etc etc.
"SOMA, East cut, Mission Bay, Dog patch are entirely new neighborhoods", and yet still 77% of the land in SF is zoned for single family homes.
SF recently passed the Central Soma rezoning plan which creates an amazon HQ2 worth of office space (space for about 50k workers) but only housing for about 7k people.
And then I always think it would be best to build a city from scratch. A great one. With good principles. Time-proofed. Collectively we should know how to do it, but it seems that it's incredibly hard to come up with the resources to do it properly. It's still only a dream.
Every time I hear about self-driving cars being just around the corner I roll my eyes. Most of us will be dead before self-driving cars are in effect, and by then our infrastructure will have already moved on.
"All new MRT lines built since the North East line in 2003 were equipped with CBTC from the outset, and have the capability to be completely driverless and automated, requiring no onboard staffing."
p.s. I rode on the driverless line several times in 2011 and 2012.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Rapid_Transit_(Singapore)
Honestly can't tell; is this because you're massively pessimistic about how long it will take the proposals to come into effect, or because you're massively optimistic about the advent of private, automated transportation?
Waterfall projects don't work with cities any better than they work with code. While it's harder to be "agile" with cities, the idea of building a large project correctly in a go is misleading.
There are many future-centric planned city projects which either died before they ever took off, or were completed and are total ghost towns.
There are lots of ways that the imagined self-driving future can either be a terrible non-improvement or simply take an order of magnitude more time to come to fruition.
We have clear and obvious ways to improve things now and we should be building support for that and taking those steps. Not sitting on our hands waiting for a purely technical solution to what's not even remotely just a technical problem.
The tax on space, time, and energy required to move a bunch of people around in individual little containers is far too high.
I'll grant you the space and energy inefficiency of private cars, but the time factor seems wildly in favor of point-to-point random route transport.
The idea of having a dedicated lane with incredibly reliable timing is obviously better than the uncertainty of traffic.
I would be curious to see a breakdown for metro areas, where public transit is actually useful (obviously cars work fine for most of rural America, and add a bus system when necessary). But I have no idea if that analysis is available.
I am heavily biased towards cities with awful traffic, where I would like to see less traffic.
Also, for the most part, driving is just faster, even in cities with bad traffic. I'm pretty lucky--I've got a train station 22 minutes from my house that drops me off an 8-minute walk away from work (with no transfers). Driving in involves fighting through rush-hour traffic from one end of D.C. to the opposite end, but it's still no slower on the way in, and 20 minutes faster on the way out. All those stops just make the train slow.
[1] Average house size in the US is twice as big as in Japan or Western Europe: https://www.elledecor.com/life-culture/fun-at-home/news/a765...
[2] Americans have 50% more cars per capita than the EU average.
If you have fewer passengers per square mile then you either need smaller vehicles or less frequent operation to fill larger ones. People naturally prefer the first option.
But the country isn't a city. It would be possible for an individual US city to have the population density required to support more effective mass transit (at least to the extent that it exists in Europe or Asia). NYC is the highest density major city in the US and largely manages to do that.
To make it work elsewhere would require the same sort of densities as New York, which would require allowing people to build more high density housing there.
Certainly not anything like Kansas City or Tucson, because you have to have enough density pressure around the city to actually require tall buildings. If you can satisfy all the local housing demand with single family homes and still have plenty of empty land within reasonable distance of the city center, there isn't enough reason to compress it into a smaller area just to have taller buildings and put things a little closer together. But those cities also don't have anything near the same traffic problems either.
Where you're really screwed is in places like Los Angeles and Houston, where you have large populations but also so much sprawl and undeveloped land that taller buildings aren't really justified. So they end up in this unhappy medium with enough population density to have bad traffic but not enough to have good mass transit, and weak demand for higher density housing.
But that still doesn't justify the zoning restrictions that exist in a lot of these places. Houston largely doesn't have them while Los Angeles does, and you can check for yourself the difference in rent. Even if without them Los Angeles still wouldn't be New York, because it would at least be better than it is.
Maywood is 23K/mi^2 with several other LA incorporated areas in the 15-20K/mi^2 density. Houston is under 10K/mi^2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Even with that, it seems like zoning isn't what's kept LA rents high. LA has parts that are fairly dense and more free zoning doesn't seem to have made Houston become notably dense.
That's kind of the point. Less restrictive zoning isn't going to make areas like that a lot more dense, because they're huge areas with open spaces and people aren't going to build skyscrapers surrounded by empty lots even if they're allowed to.
The problem LA has is that they have some areas zoned for density, but not enough of them. So you get a section full of skyscrapers and correspondingly a lot of demand for housing near there, but then zoning that requires low density housing in nearby sections, which keeps rents high because that low density housing would otherwise have been replaced by medium density housing.
Whereas with Houston you have some high density areas, but with less zoning the density falls off more organically and it's more of a medium density everywhere than high density in one place and low density right next to it. Which isn't much better for traffic when the average density comes out the same, but it's a lot better for rents, because it makes for a lot less scarcity in the market for land where medium and high density housing can be built.
The road infrastructure is already there, and has been already subsidized. It is my opinion that private autonomous transportation will become more efficient and cheaper than public transportation and therefore will supplant it. I speak not as the world expert, but as someone who did a relatively deep analysis of transportation costs in US cities. The ballpark figure is what I call TCTM, or Total Cost of Transportation per Mile, which doesn't take into account the cost of road infrastructure, simply assuming that it is already there. TCTM for uber/lyft and similar services is going down, and you do not even need fully autonomous, level-5 driverless cars, to have a TCTM lower than that offered by public buses.
Hope this is clearer.
I'll take a tram project that is being implemented ahead of schedule over the promise of automated cars which are always seemingly around the corner.
Right now San Diego feels like an overgrown suburbia. If we transform into a real urban city I welcome it. The increased housing density will also presumably decrease housing prices, further making a more equitable city.
In any event, classic Nimbyism. Memory still pisses me off. Glad to see at least the University has come around, even if I imagine most La Jolla residents haven't.
For reference, if I'm not mistaken, it was a La Jolla resident who invented that cheap clicker device that you can click to instantly report plane noise complaint to FTA. Cool little project but, well, yeah.
Close. Chris McCann lives in Point Loma, directly under the SAN flight path. :)
Edit: Oh, nope. You're right, he is in La Jolla.
There was a spike in UTC area visible homelessness last summer, making the area Starbuckses uninhabitable, and the transit line will certainly make quality of life even worse.
Given that's pretty close to the driving commute times anyway, it's not that bad.
But I welcome it. We need more livable cities in warm/moderate climates.
Sure, there are some walkable neighborhoods, but most people don't live in one of them. And even if you do, almost everyone needs to commute out of it or leave regularly for activities or socialization. And if you need to do that, 95% of the time the trolley is not anywhere near it, and a bus could take an extra hour and a half and is occupied almost exclusively by poor people and children in most areas.
It's like this because everything is sprawled out over a very large area. San Diego is like a 500 square mile area and stuff can happen all over it. And there are freeways everywhere rather than trains (which could not cover the area) because the whole thing is designed for cars.
I actually lived in San Diego without a car for years. But I was one of very very few people who go without a vehicle and are not homeless. And the only reason I could do that was because I only took 100% remote jobs and literally had zero social life.
I mean it is great that they are taking some kind of action on housing. It's still going to cost $1400 for an apartment in the ghetto though. Which is why I moved to TJ and live on the beach for half of that.
I agree you can live in some places in SD and survive without a car, however you cannot really get to more than half of the places you want to get to. Most of the tech companies are up north, so working in tech you really need a car unless you are at one of the few shops downtown / Mission Valley.
Frankly, San Diego has terrible civic planning and I suspect it comes from a combination of apathetic/uninformed citizenry and corruption w/r/t the real estate industry. But the problem is certainly not "too many people." There are many cities much larger than San Diego that have figured this problem out much better.
I grew up in San Diego and lived in New York as well as Ft. Worth and I think you don't know what you are talking about.
The situation will continue to grow more intolerable until that changes. People in SD are beginning to wake up to this, and to understand that civic pride requires civic participation, but it's an uphill battle with attitudes such as yours.
Places like San Diego absolutely had "plans": build a shitload of big, wide roads, zone mostly for single family units, and separate uses so that it's virtually impossible to live without a car.
I think you're dramatically understating the extent to which pre-automobile city building was a negotiation between local and regional plans, rules, and regulations, just as it is today. And large civil plans and projects were enacted well before the automobile, too. New Haven, Connecticut was one of the first planned cities in the US, and predates the car by centuries. It has a modern grid system. Boston's largest neighborhood, the Back Bay, was created out of a massive land-filling project decades before the invention of the automobile. Much of Paris, France, was built in the 19th century according to modern civil planning principles.
The whole "the roads used to be cowpaths" thing with old cities is really only true when you're talking about really old cities that still have medieval quarters and things like that.
Indeed, some of the oldest cities in the world have been built and rebuilt on top of themselves a number of times over the course of their histories, often according to very complicated plans. That's because the oldest cities in the world today are more often than not several orders of magnitude larger than they have ever been at any point in their history.
Even the Romans did grids, which is a pretty good system. And it makes sense to keep really noxious things like tanneries or smelly factories or whatever away from, say, schools and places people live, where possible.
But modern planning in the US is hyper-detailed to the point where it stifles the natural evolution of our cities.
And developers? They build what they're allowed to build.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/upshot/developer-dirty-wo...
That may be true, but as was pointed out by commenters to a recent Strong Towns article, planners are the least of our problems. It's zoning policies and NIMBYs--which through various public comment and challenge procedures effectively gives them veto power--which are far and away the greatest impediment to healthy, incremental growth.
The days of Robert Moses are long gone. Almost all professional planners subscribe to the religion of Jane Jacobs[1], sometimes to a fault. We don't need to get into the philosophical weeds about top-down vs bottom-up evolution. Our most substantial problems lie along a different axis.
[1] The tenets of the religion vary among the adherents, like any mature religion.
Sure, I agree with that. But a lot of that zoning and NIMBYism seems to use the idea that cities can be 'planned' as a crutch. "We have traffic because it's not 'well-planned'" - as opposed to realizing that you have traffic because the modern portion of your city is predicated on automobile ownership for pretty much every facet of your life.
Certainly there's no guarantees but it's not as if there is a lack of good examples of success of mixed-use zoning. NYC is a common example in the US but there's similar ones all over the world.
> More people will invariably mean more cars.
If you worked ~ten blocks away from where you lived, would you get in a car to get there (knowing that it would take about the same overall duration or longer via car)? Seems especially nice that you could count on favorable weather most of the time.
...that only works if there are viable alternatives (see "public transit" portion of proposal"
> make it so bad that people move closer to work.
Do you really believe it's that easy to move? and then never switch your job?
The proposal is trying to fix the problems you are complaining about, I'm not sure what value your alternatives would bring.
Now you have two people (a+b) in a career. They start off living 10 miles from their office (A + B), and meet each other at a mutual friend (f) that's 10 miles in the opposite direction
A -- a -- f -- b -- B
They then move in equidistant, 20 miles
A -- -- afb -- -- B
Then office A moves 10 miles the wrong way
A -- -- -- afb -- -- B
How do ab move closer to work?
- schools
- hospitals
- malls/retail
All of those things need to be close to residents who don't necessarily live downtown or on major transit lines. And they're also all expensive to move. How many of them are well connected to transit today?
Also, Moving such that one person can take transit or walk would also be a huge huge improvement in traffic.
One advantage of both cars and proper mass transit systems is that you don't have to move if your work does, or if you switch jobs, or if a partner moves in...
We don't need to get everybody to get rid of all cars. We need to make sure that everybody has a reasonable opportunity to not use the car.
However, the fact of the matter is that often times, you need the increased tax revenue from higher density developments in order to be able to justify and afford expansions and improvements to the transportation networks. This includes not just roads and highways, but also _gasp_ public transport.
The only thing low density zoning codes due is force sprawl.
SD's public transportation issue is that SD is just so spread out and public transportation is typically slower than cars due to stops, waiting, etc. Oceanside to downtown (~38 miles) takes ~75 minutes, or just over 30 mph. The only places where public trans works well is when people don't have to travel that far.
This simply is not true. A lot of people in SD think this is true, but it is not. There is nothing structurally unique about SD that makes it a nightmare for transportation. It's just that SD as a city lacks the will and the leadership to make the necessary changes happen. Civic planning is on autopilot from the 1960s: build condos everywhere, and widen roads whenever possible. This is a recipe for continued nightmares.
I'm speaking from experience. The developers in Denver are chomping at the bits to buy up another grocery store property in Capitol Hill (a centrally-located walkable dense neighborhood) and tear it down for multi-unit housing, and this has already happened in other neighborhoods (we used to have a walking-distance market before it was torn down for high-rises). I have the joy of living near a multi-unit box that is zoned as "mixed use" and has a total of 0 businesses and 0 parking spots, and they tore down a local medical office to build that. In another location, four blocks down, they're tearing down other small offices to build hundreds of apartments -- again, zoned for "mixed use" and yet, again, the ground floor in their blueprints only has more condos and lobby space. Zero local businesses.
My point is it just takes a while along with quite a bit of pissed-off political willpower until folks can comfortably ditch cars in car-centric communities, and density isn't a magic pill. What would likely happen is several years of increased traffic and parking utilization before everything falls into place. We're talking about bike lanes, public transportation, and walkability.
Where I live in San Diego (UTC) there was significant improvement due to mixed use (they are building high rises within walking distance of Westfield UTC mall, some of the new residential buildings also have office space inside them (looking at plans for Lux, yes, the name is cringy)).
Where I work in San Diego (Carmel Valley) there is a large new development project (One Paseo) that is located next to a mall (Del Mar Highland Center) which is being significantly renovated, and One Paseo itself includes dense residential, office buildings, and restaurants/shops (in fact, the restaurants/shops are already opened while housing will take a few more years to be ready).
Both of these developments involve building multistory parking garages to accommodate parking needs.
Even if the "mixed-use" buildings we create today are all residential, that doesn't mean they will stay that way. They can be remodeled if a grocery store wants in. Or the building that goes up next door in a few years can have a bit of commercial. Right now there is more commercial space than we need, while residential space is lacking, so it is no surprise that what you see today it mostly residential. However we now have the legal means to change that over time which is big.
With more housing in high-density areas, people don't have to drive as much and traffic can actually go down.
All of the downvotes to the parent are justified.