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Comment by VictorPath | Hacker News Reader

> restrictive housing

I visited San Francisco thirty years ago and surveyed somewhat the effects of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Collapsed freeways and so forth were still visible. I think of this as I hear the Milennium tower is sinking into the sand - and San Francisco has not been hit by an earthquake for a while. I don't know what the future of building upward in the city will be.

Why not fix up Caltrain? Why not have BART be fixed up and something people find safe and convenient instead of curse?

Decent public transportation is not completely absent in the US. Decent public transport from the East Bay would fix a lot of problems.

I don't think "remove regulation on business" is some stroke of genius, it sounds fairly lazy. Real estate developers are not some oppressed group, they tend to run local politics in most of the country.

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> Real estate developers are not some oppressed group, they tend to run local politics in most of the country.

I think the people who run local politics are often the people who own lots of real estate, not necessarily those who build buildings/improvements on it. Often, they're seeking to maintain or improve the value of their existing estate.

https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Bay-Area-earthquake-l...

Most of the earthquake safe areas in San Francisco aren't zoned for density. Many of the denser areas are in high-risk liquefaction zones. If you don't support building in high-risk areas, then you should support upzoning the low-risk areas, which today are predominately low-density residential areas.

> Real estate developers are not some oppressed group, they tend to run local politics in most of the country.

I don't think they "run local politics" in any major city in the United States. Typically that description belongs to incumbent homeowner NIMBYs.

I have an unpopular answer. Back in the oughts, companies like Google and Facebook started running charter buses that stopped illegally at public bus stops to ferry their employees to the south bay. If those people had taken public transit instead we would have pumped billions of dollars into Caltrain, enough to fund vastly improved services.

There would definitely have been an adjustment period where more people would have driven and made traffic even worse. But that discomfort would have helped create the political will to improve public transit.

> If those people had taken public transit instead we would have pumped billions of dollars into Caltrain

This denies the actual reality of the situation in that there was no public transit that was equivalent, the local political power structure is hostile to improved transit, and the power structure is in particular extremely opposed to transit that might be used by tech workers, much less predominantly used by tech workers. During the recent Caltrain electrification battle, there was a large anti-Caltrain political force because it was seen as "for tech workers."

But you might also think of these private bus fleets as a reaction to the vetocracies delaying or outright preventing significant public transportation improvements. Large corporations might be more willing to fund public transport if they thought it would work?

For example, many of Google's new campuses are have very good connections to public transport, so it's not like they're inherently against it.

They blamed the rising housing costs and changing neighborhoods on the tech workers. They would have opposed public transit alternatives as well. They didn't want those people living in SF and working elsewhere.

If those people had taken public transit instead their commutes would have been twice as long innit.

Your comment just doesn't make any sense in the context of this article. It almost reads like complete gibberish.

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