I really like the bendy train in the artistic rendering. What materials would allow for railroad car chassis and bodies which could bend and torque with the curve of the track like rubber? I think you would need lots of wheels or a relatively pointless flex-inducing system on each car to even get it to bend in this fashion.
Perhaps it just made for a pretty picture, and a completely impractical reality :)
Not quite a bendy train but the Toronto Rocket subway is quite a trip during sharp turns, as it has fully-open gangways, giving the appearance that the train is bending through curves.
Alternatively, maybe it has nothing to do with physics, the picture is computer rendered, and the artist found the first of these two alternatives a whole lot easier:
1. model a train that is straight, and then use some tool to bend the entire model to fit a curve.
2. define a curve, then align models of train engine and cars so that they follow the curve.
If the train is elastic, you'd recover that energy.
Going into a curve, kinetic energy from the speed of the train is turned into spring energy by bending the train. Leaving the curve, the spring energy becomes kinetic energy. The flexed train speeds up due to the spring force as the train unflexes.
I don't think this is correct as a general statement. Imagine if the walls were made of canvas fabric with appropriate amounts of slack, just as an example of a material that can easily bend.
You would need a cleverly designed frame, but
I'm sure there is something that would work. Perhaps many smaller segments joined together.
Canvas can bend more easily than rubber or steel, but deforming it still requires some energy. And while canvas would work for the walls, it wouldn’t work for the bogey, and anything rigid enough to work as a bogey would take lots of energy to bend.
To some extent you can say a regular multi-bogey train is undergoing deformation by changing the angular configuration between cars via the linkages. This could technically be extended to have the linkages have every few inches along the bogey instead of between 20-foot segments. We just need a way to transfer energy reliably between deformations and change in acceleration.
This is OT, but it was absolutely impossible to tap the tiny X on the "use our app" banner. It just opened the clipboard overlay no matter what I tried (Firefox Android) -- tap X, "Select All" button appears.
The first thing that caught my eye was the gap in the middle of the bridge. A rather rare sight in reality, so the presentation of such a rendering comes across as a form of lying.
I completely missed the curved train cars! Thanks for pointing it out.
Seattle is actively removing places for cars to drive, including lanes on streets and parking at curbs, to make way for transit. It’s positively, magnificently car hostile, and precisely the model I would like to see in the Bay Area
Seattle has a functioning local government that does things like approve building permits, an idea considered insane in the BA. I'll never understand how restricting building is meant to "preserve neighborhood character," when it actually results in pushing out long-term residents.
Honestly, I don't know why the transit politics are working so well here. Partly because Sound Transit has been unusually courageous for a political entity. They have successfully stared down the two richest areas in the region Bellevue and Mercer Island when faced with opposition.
Maybe it just comes down to propaganda. Quite a bit of money was spent to market ST3 to voters. Which is the most recent and most expensive transit oriented ballot initiative.
The whole time there has been a tremendous amount of work done to oppose the improvements. Many in the area will be familiar with the near constant efforts of Tim Eyman to defund transit projects
You might chock it up to uber lefties in Seattle but other liberal priorities have not faired nearly as well on ballot initiatives.
They talk briefly about housing at the end, but that strikes me as absolutely core to the success of any initiative to decrease congestion. People tolerate absurd commutes because the jobs are better here, increasing transportation bandwidth in isolation will just increase the distance people are willing to travel. Only solution is either more housing here or better jobs elsewhere, and we can't control the latter.
Actually I think tying anything housing related to the measure is a great way to ensure it'll be a total clusterfuck. There's way too much disagreement on the matter, and any spending on it quickly devolves into an endless money pit.
Not that that's not the case with transit in CA anyways given the national embarrassment that is the high-speed rail project. But having two massive issue like that in the measure is going to make it exponentially more likely to be a disaster.
It also works to transport people in narrow corridors across geographic barriers. Like the Bay itself, or the fact that both sides of the Bay are long and narrow.
Density can be deceptive. Medium-density housing works just fine at one end of a public transit system, the critical issue is how often transit stops and how often people need to swap from one mode of transit or train to the next.
More housing doesn't really solve the problem, because people don't necessarily even want to live next to where they work, and in a household with multiple workers everyone living near where they work is almost an impossibility.
Tokyo has lots of housing and jobs everywhere, but that mostly results in average one-way commute time of an hour.
The lack of housing here could be taken as a sign that moving here or locating a business here could cost more by way of taxes and such. If it did cost more the flow of people and debt into the area might slow and some of the good jobs here would go elsewhere.
All of said money should be spent on public transport. Spending on single-occupant personal transport, mostly SUVs, commuters act like a gas: it will expand to fill the container: more traffic, more commuters, and more climate change. It won't do any net good to waste money on more highways.
Keep in mind that every one of those trips has some economic purpose, so more commuters means more workers and more money in the area, even if individual travel times remain unchanged.
Without coming down on either side of this, because I'm not familiar with the proposals...
> 3) The trip will happen if the economic value is greater than the cost of suffering in traffic (Otherwise, it is not worth it & will not)
This is true, but doesn't really account for the fact that most categories of trips fall into this bucket in the aggregate. That is, people could skip any one of them, but skipping all trips in a category due to persistent traffic would extract a very real cost. (So in general, people bias toward taking all the trips in that category instead.)
Examples: commutes to work, where the cost of not going could be losing one's job. People will sit in a lot of traffic to keep a roof over their heads. That doesn't make it a good civic planning choice.
Others: lots of trips will involve healthcare, which is ~20% of the economy. Those have potentially high costs to skipping. Education-related trips are the same, as long as people are generally required to be physically present at their classes. After-school congestion is filled with children going to swim classes & track meets.
For many of these classes, the cost should be measured in terms of how many people would just leave the area if they couldn't afford the traffic cost of e.g. taking their kid to piano class.
What happens in the case of commutes, school, and so forth is that people choose where to live based on the cost of suffering in traffic, thus determining what trips will happen. So in net, because traffic is bad, "commutes from <exurb> sixty miles away" do not happen and instead "commutes from <suburb> ten miles away" happen.
Then if you improve congestion, people move to <exurb>, creating trips from <exurb>. Thus it would be an example of a trip that was of low economic value.
> because traffic is bad, "commutes from <exurb> sixty miles away" do not happen and instead "commutes from <suburb> ten miles away" happen.
On the topic of traffic cost in congested areas, distance is only loosely related to travel times. If we reword using 1 mile = 1.5 minute
> because traffic is bad, "commutes from <location> ninety minutes away" do not happen and instead "commutes from <location> fifteen minutes away" happen.
This is obviously false for congested metro areas. As another commenter notes, people live where they can afford to do so.
Bringing it back to schools etc. For excellent teachers, it may be lower economic value for them to live in a congested area versus one where they can live closer to school. But the metro area lost an excellent teacher, presumably in favor of one with fewer other employment options.
Congestion, like air quality, is a tax on every activity. It's not useful to only model it at the individual trip level.
Then the metro should have paid the teacher more to make those congested commutes worth it.
And, there is definitely a distribution of commute times. Some very long. But your average commute is not two hours one way; the center of the distribution normalizes around some level of bearability, around 50 minutes in the US. Which, with bad congestion, might allow you to go 10 miles. But with no congestion, might allow you to go 60.
The reason I quoted distance is because commute times are relatively stable, the product of travel speed (congestion) times distance. And that's the point; if travel speed is increased, many people will choose to live further away, e.g. for a bigger house.
People choose to live based on where they can afford to live. Traffic is a secondary concern, and plenty of people commute from 60 miles away because that's the closest they can afford to rent/buy a place to live, despite the horrible commute that comes with it.
You'd think so, but this is where we hit problems: zoning, real estate transaction cost, 2-income households, property tax rates that reset if you move...
Fixing those problems would fix the traffic problems.
You could also look at it another way. Consider metropolitan areas as a sort of economic watershed, where the city receives workers and money from the surrounding areas. Improving transportation throughput and latency expands a city's economic area to more people at greater distances.
Are you assuming that trips with a negative value don't exist? That would require people to always be able to assess the value of a trip before they make it, which is obviously not going to be true.
Bay Area just needs an underground centralized subway and interconnected light rail. It's so simple and so ridiculous how power NIMBYs just always shut any progress down. Would be such a boon to the quality of living here, it's absurd we can't make this happen.
There are only a few places in the Bay Area as dense as the European and Japanese cities that have mass transit.
I've been to a number of cities in Europe and Japan with the population density of the Bay Area. They don't have subways. They have a couple of train stations that link them to major cities. Most people who live in these places drive cars, ride bicycles, or take the bus.
The kind of public transit you want is only sustainable in very dense cities. Outside of downtown San Francisco and Oakland, the Bay Area is a suburb. The amount of money it would take to subsidize a reasonable subway system would bankrupt the state.
But the density is being suppressed by zoning limits on building heights, parking requirements, mandated road improvements to handle additional traffic, and a building permit process that is heavily influenced by NIMBYs. Pass SB50 and watch the upper peninsula become viable for subways.
Take 3 quarters of a hundred billion and you can probably substantially reshape land use in even the Bay Area. Take the other quarter and you can probably substantially reshape BART.
It’s going to take $5-10 billion just to move SF’s Caltrain station over by like five inches. You’re being wildly optimistic about what you can do with $100 billion.
But you have to have enough coverage to make the system usable. Building one subway line through Palo Alto doesn’t do you much good because people will still have to drive to get to the stations (and because jobs in the area are so spread out, drive on the other end to get to jobs).
In Manhattan, there are 4-5 lines across a strip 2.5 miles wide. Half a mile is about the most people will walk to the subway at each end. You could cover the core of most of the South Bay cities with 5-6 lines. That’s 240 miles of track for the South Bay. At a billion dollars per mile for the subway, that’s a quarter trillion.
That gets you the physical infrastructure to make transit feasible. On top of that you need to topple the local governments so you can massively upzone the strip around the subway lines.
From the article, "Meanwhile, traffic congestion, measured as the time people spend slogging along freeways at speeds of 35 mph or less, grew 80 percent from 2010 to 2016".
I'm all for increasing mass transit speeds and convenience. We need to think really hard about SUVs, and freeways, and commuters, (and commercial trucks). Heck, even a pure electric Tesla Model X is MASSIVE: its gross vehicle weight is 6,500 lbs, and can go up to 130 mph! Good for climate change, not so good for commuting on crowded roads.
But I'm also optimistic: batteries and electronics are improving rapidly, and I expect a $10,000, battery-powered, 2-person, 45mph, 1000 lb, 100-mile runabout coming along in the next 5-10 years. A (much nicer) Renault Twizy-like vehicle would make a dandy Richmond to SF commuter, ASSUMING you could maintain 45mph the whole way.
How to maintain 45mph in these small commuters? Well, each would be shorter and narrower, and slower (assume design top speed 45mph). Thus we could simply restripe a new lane or two onto our freeways. Better yet: electronics/radio (V2V) will allow semi-autonomous platooning (and crash detection/avoidance), thus increasing vehicle density and allowing drivers to relax more on their commute.
What to do with the SUVs and trucks? Not much, other than tax them at 1/2 m v^2.
> Heck, even a pure electric Tesla Model X is MASSIVE: its gross vehicle weight is 6,500 lbs, and can go up to 130 mph! Good for climate change, not so good for commuting on crowded roads.
Weight does not take up space. The Model X may be heavy, but it is only about 6 inches longer and 7 inches wider than a Toyota Camry. I'm not going to mention height because it does not matter within a reasonable range. The Camry can carry 5 people and the Model X can carry 7, plus a lot more stuff, for only a small increase in total size. It also uses no gas. How is that not a net positive?
I want more transit too, but I think transit faces the same effect - add more capacity, and if there’s demand it will fill the capacity. Plenty of very very built out transit systems in the world that are constantly pushing full capacity.
But I think a difference is that since car traffic tends to get inefficient when congestion increases (traffic jams, etc) its a pretty inefficient way to handle large amounts of traffic. You can just fit so many more people onto a train than into personal cars, and they don’t gum up in the same way. Plus, it’s conceivable that mass transit capacity can be expanded to match demand, with sufficient investment, whereas we already devote like 60% of the land in our cities to cars and it’s still not enough.
IMO people will use any method of transportation up to the point where the pain of using it overcomes the value the person gets out of making the trip. The pain can come from operational issues like frequency of delays, fare cost, proximity of stations to destinations, ease of transferring - but can also come from overcrowding
I think that there ought to be increased transit but also much much better utilization of the land that transit goes to. It makes no sense that if you ride BART, you’ll notice that for all of the stops except for those in the most central parts of SF, they shuttle millions of people into giant parking lot wastelands with no shopping and few apartments. Make the stops worth going to and living in! You’re already sending people there and having people live nearby work reduces their transit usage.
If you like that idea, tell state senators to call for a vote on SB50 today. It got blocked undemocratically but that’s the best shot we have for well utilized transit stops in the foreseeable future.
> IMO people will use any method of transportation up to the point where the pain of using it overcomes the value the person gets out of making the trip.
The problem is that some trips -- like getting to work -- have effectively "infinite" value. Most people can't opt out of that trip.
By this logic, we should completely disband public transit, and also tear out the roads because stranding everybody will reduce the impact of commuting more than also offering transit.
Electric self driving vehicles are right around the corner, and will greatly reduce the environmental and parking issues that come with freeways.
If widening roads leads to more cars, that’s a sign that an inadequate transit network is holding the region’s economy back.
At this point, the bay area has comically underbuilt the road and the transit network, and is also intentionally blocking high density construction near public transit.
Mass transit is much more efficient to scale up because people are taking up less space and moving in a frequent coordinated pattern. Cars have a huge footprint: they take up extra space on the highway around a single occupant, they take extra space and time while the driver searches for parking, and they are left parked on some street or garage 90% of the time.
> asked registered voters, among other questions, whether they would support a 1-cent sales tax to fund transportation projects in the Bay Area. Seventy-one percent of respondents answered, “Yes.”
facepalm
Please stop with the regressive sales taxes. These things should be paid for in property or progressive income taxes instead of a tax on being poor.
> Any tax that Person A supports but Person B is paying is a predatory tax.
Why should Person A, who earns 100% of their income through honest labor that benefits society, suffer the same pain of tax as Person B, who got it by the luck of coming through the right birth canal? Or because they own land that was made more valuable because of the government's investment and protection?
That's not the point. Regressive in this context means that everyone pays the same percentage, regardless of their means to do so. A simple test is "whose spending will have to increase the most percentage-wise to cover the extra tax?" If the answer is "poor people", then it's regressive.
The average person doesn't matter. If a new tax pushes a borderline low-income person below the poverty line, that's a problem.
Generally, given a fixed population, I think that improved transportation doesn't increase property values, but rather redistributes the value of property from areas near jobs to areas further away along the improved transportation. For example, starting in the 50's highways were built which allowed people to live outside of the city and commute in. Property values in the suburbs went from very low value farmland to hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre today. As these commuting routes became saturated property value in cities has recovered, since it is less and less possible to commute in a reasonable amount of time.
They don’t benefit until after they sell the property. They pay capital gains on that windfall. The people who buy the high value property also pay taxes.
No property owner benefits from land value increasing until after they have sold said property.
> No property owner benefits from land value increasing until after they have sold said property.
People take loans against their assets all the time and having valuable houses makes that a lot easier. Such loans can be used as leverage to buy more property.
Consider a million dollar property in the Bay Area. ( as an example)..property taxes approximate to $12k/year. It costs 9-14k/year per student in the Bay Area depending on the city. With one child, they benefit. With two children, they are still good value for money. But in 12 years, they don’t have kids in public school but they continue paying the property tax. Maybe they will subsidize others’ kids or maybe it will go to infrastructure.
On the other side, someone in an affordable home is getting subsidized by higher value home owners property taxes. If they own the affordable home and the best deal is for the renters. They get the most bang for their rent bucks.
But consider an aging couple with property taxes capped by prop 13, have no more kids in public school and are on a fixed income. What benefit do they gain? There is a more stressed resource pool of law enforcement, $$ for infrastructure improvement, essential services and likely no community benefit like elder day care(in my town, they are converting them to homeless transition centers)...so owning a home is a really bad deal and renting is better.
The only return is the windfall when they sell. But the taxes are also appropriated for the gains. Contrary to popular opinion, home ownership is a burden and not a comfort. It doesnt matter to those who inherit or to those who are in higher income brackets, but those higher income nimbys rightly demand their due and expect a certain quality of life for which they pay dearly.
If productive members of a society are not incentivized to keep producing and supporting the less fortunate, it will be like killing the golden goose instead of just collecting the golden eggs everyday. They will simply leave. Bay Area prosperity bubble will burst sooner than we expect because we treat the productive $$ contributors badly..shaming them for their ‘privilege’. You have to give something back when you are the state with insanely high taxes.
That’s speculative activity. Loans have to be repaid and have interest. It’s not free money.
Home ownership doesn’t always imply assured appreciation of property. Even those with second homes have to pay property taxes and rental income is also taxable.
Many people do NOT take more loans to buy a new home. Home ownership does give a sense of security that the down payment guarantees...it’s 30 years of mortgages and interest. And even the down payment is a result of hard earned or saved $$. People assume that property is a privilege. It’s debt. It’s a higher risk but highly rewarding risk.
Sounds like a benefit to me. Debt is a tool that can bring huge benefits to people who know how to use it.
Most people who own homes have used debt to buy them. Almost everyone who owns more than one home has borrowed against equity in homes they already own to buy the others. The ability to do that is a clear benefit of property ownership.
And a lot of them don’t. Debt is not a strategic play for most householders. Maybe when one is young, but most people seek stability when they have kids and as they get older.
You are generalizing. I know more people who are only single home owners. Perhaps you know wealthier or younger people than I do.
Also: you can’t penalize people for the benefit to get into more debt with more taxes. Then it no longer is a benefit.
They mean we can stop worrying about those homeowners who oppose an apartment building being built near them on the basis that it reduces property values. Because if the drop in values doesn’t hurt them until they sell then they have no right to complain about property values today when the apartment is built.
Property taxes get redistributed in the state of California. The way it works now is that property taxes goes to county and then state and it gets redistributed throughout the state. It is no longer true that wealthy towns get more $$ for better schools.
Further, over 45% of California budget is for schools. A lot more than property taxes goes towards public school. The teachers union is very powerful in CA. There are a lot more factors involved. Not a lot comes to infrastructure. Even tax measures and bond measures for infrastructure improvements gets diverted into affordable housing and usually this is high density. High density degrades existing infrastructure as more resources are spread thin for larger number of people and has the opposite effect of improving infrastructure.
Infrastructure should be in place before high density housing measures are put into action. Right now, the opposite is happening..or infrastructure is not happening. It’s just not rational problem solving.
When those taxes pay for services and amenities that make your city more attractive and it grows you get two broad benefits: network effect, and quality of life. Network effect is largely your property value going up. Quality of life is from things like more goods and services located closer to you as density increases. If you don’t want either of those things you probably don’t want to live in a city.
What about traffic? The more prosperous Bay Area becomes, more traffic woes, more homelessness, more demand for affordable homes and otoh, no infrastructure improvements, no new public transport system, no new schools, congestion everywhere and higher cost of living.
Everything declines with high density. Medium density is better than low density. Networked public transport systems is better with medium density. More housing stock is good to reduce sprawl but the answer isn’t always high density housing and not subsidized housing. Example: senior affordable housing is good..shared housing is good..affordable micro homes is good for single working people. But affordable housing that crams a lot of working adults and children that go to public schools is not really good. Etc.
Sure put the tax on those who'd be commuting on this new infrastructure. However for those that live within a few miles of their job, what exactly are they gaining?
It's the same reason Bridges have a toll vs getting funds directly from property / income tax.
Not everyone is privileged enough to be able to afford to live close to their job. This is about raising quality of life across the board. People who have the "I've got mine, so fuck you" attitude are a blight on society.
The big one is an increase in the value of their land. And is this initiative purely about commuting? Maybe the new train will allow people to more easily socialise or receive healthcare or any other part of their non-work life.
Also, trains/buses are not usuualy free in the same way that some bridges have tolls.
“The farther people travel, the more demand there is for bigger solutions,” he said. “There is no question this region has to address housing, but how we do that, that is still to be discussed.”
No, it's a prerequisite to solving the transportation problem. How else would you know what to design the system for?
When jobs disappear and we have more automation/AI filling in for people..what are we doing to do with congested cities with decaying infrastructure.
I think the govt should focus on what will happen when we reach a post-jobs future instead of ways to tax people more now. Invest in technologies and some form of universal basic services(like food, medical) and take care of infrastructure and schooling etc. they should particularly come clean and fix the unfunded pension liabilities of public sector employees in CA which is where most of the taxes are going.
The biggest expense is public schools and education. Figuring how to deliver education effectively to young minds(likely with parents who won’t work because there will be fewer jobs) by disrupting education is better than trying to appease unionized teachers who are focused on inflating pensions rather than their students who suffer during strikes and walk outs.
Ever been to a city? There is a reason NYC has everything one could ever want to experience because it takes very few interested people to have a lot of people in NYC interested in a thing.
Couldn't agree more! Banning single car garages and mandating that all construction include two garage stalls per dwelling would free up massive amounts of street parking and all us to add desperately needed lanes on many streets.
It's not even that. Even if the governments could use it effectively, they'll get hit with lawsuits by NIMBYs not wanting rail or a new station too close to their house, which eats up valuable funding.
$100 billion sounds like a lot, but note that it'll cost $5-10 billion just to bring Caltrain to a downtown station from its current location: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/9/12/17850744/pennsylvania-avenue.... I think everyone will be shocked at how little new infrastructure San Francisco actually gets for the money.
Consider what it'd take to get a transit system comparable to say Chicago's. (The two areas aren't that dissimilar in size and population. Chicagoland has 9.5 million people in 10,500 square miles; the Bay Area has 8 million people in 7,000 square miles.) Chicago has 500 miles of commuter rail plus 100 miles of rapid transit. San Francisco has 70 miles of light rail (Muni), plus ~180 miles of commuter rail (BART + Caltrain). And it's not clear that Muni even counts as a rapid transit line. Most of it isn't grade separated, so it's got an average speed of 8 miles per hour. (The D.C. Metro, a typical heavy-rail system, averages 33 miles per hour including stops.) The LRVs go about 5,000 miles between failures, versus 200,000 miles for a 7000-series D.C. Metro car.
So even to get to Chicago levels (where most people still drive!), you're talking about building a whole new subway system, plus building hundreds of miles of commuter rail across the Bay Area. It's a trillion dollar project, not a $100 billion project.
So what would it take to finance all that? Let's be charitable and say you can do it for $500 billion. California is currently issuing 25-year general obligation bonds at 5% for 25 year maturity. That's $35 billion per year in annual payments, divided by 2.6 million Bay Area households. Or about $13,500 per household per year.
If that sounds unaffordable, let’s hypothesize we just have “rich people” pay for it. The top 5% of households in the San Francisco metro area make an average of $600,000 per year. Applying that to the whole Bay Area, you’re looking at 130,000 households making $78 billion per year total. So the tax for transit would have to be the other 50% of income that California doesn’t already tax those folks.
Okay, surely billionaires have the money. Last year, US billionaires made $470 billion. So we are talking about less than a 10% billionaire’s tax, right? Well the Bay Area is just 3% of the country’s population. Hardly seems fair to give it such an outsized portion of confiscatory billionaire taxes. 3% of 470 is about $15 billion, not close to enough!
Oh, and here's the kicker. Everyone would pay for that new transit, but most people wouldn't be able to use it! In Chicago, only 12% of commuters take public transit, because the system, as extensive as it is, really only is good for getting people into downtown and back out. Even if San Francisco manages to double that, you're talking about everyone paying what would be in the rest of the country a mortgage on a house for a transit system 75% of people can't use.
It would be much cheaper to just widen the congested roads by 25% instead. (And before you say “induced demand”—removing cars from the road will also create induced demand. Induced demand results from the fact of reduced road congestion, not the specific means by which you reduce congestion.)
More broadly, urban congestion is something that only affects a subset of people. The average American commute is 26 minutes, but a staggering 16 miles. People are cruising to work! The US has among the fastest commutes in the OECD: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commu....
And when we have another 200 million Americans, we just make the roads wider again?
Because we didn’t build the proper mass transportation systems 50 years ago, it’s incredibly expensive to build now. It won’t be easier in another 50 years with millions of more people
> And when we have another 200 million Americans, we just make the roads wider again?
Yes! The takeaway from the OECD report is that we didn't build proper mass transportation 50 years ago, and we still have among the shortest commutes in the OECD. Over the next 50 years the population will grow even less, as the population growth rate now is half of what it was in the 50s and 60s.
(We're having this debate in Maryland now. People are upset that Hogan wants to widen the highways instead of building transit in the counties near D.C. They invoke the same rationale--we'll just have to widen the roads again in 50 years. Except they ignore that population growth in the area has slowed dramatically. Montgomery County tripled in population between 1960 and 2010, but is expected to grow just another 15% by 2045. Prince George's County grew by a factor of 4.5, but will grow only another 10% by 2045.)
Widening roads will not fix the problem. There is still a fixed number of road capacity in urban cores, which will inevitably lead to huge problems. Highway-widening is short-sighted.
You need to solve the right problem. For example in Maryland, the problem is not getting people into the “urban core” (i.e. DC). There is actually a surplus of rail capacity from Maryland into DC. You’ve got six separate rail lines going from the Maryland suburbs into DC (two regional rail, four metro).
The problem we have in Maryland is moving people from suburban population centers to suburban job centers. People commute from Bowie to College Park, or Frederick to Bethesda, or Waldorf to Alexandria. Indeed, none of the highways being widened (270, 495, and 295) even go near the urban core. 270 and 295 bring people from the outer suburbs to 495, which passes through the inner suburbs.
You couldn’t build a rail line that would solve that problem. I mean you could, it would just cost a ton. Widening 270 and 495 is going to cost about $100 million per mile (or $6.4 billion if you did the entire beltway). The silver line serves just 17,000 riders per day. The beltway serves ten times that in the bush portions.
The problem in less dense areas will always be the last-mile problem. You can implement park-and-ride schemes with ample parking at transit stations, but then what do people do at the destination station? They're still 5-10 miles from their job, and they left their car at the station closest to their house (which still might have been a 5-10 mile drive, or more).
If I can drive 60 minutes to go 20 miles door-to-door home-to-work (basically what my dad used to do from Ellicott City to Silver Spring every day), but it takes me 2+ hours to drive to transit, park, wait for transit, take transit, transfer to a bus, etc., then I'm probably just going to buckle down and drive. And of course that wasn't even an option for my dad since the Metro didn't go far enough north, but I imagine this scenario comes up a lot for people who live closer to DC.
You even see this in the Bay Area, though the distances can be short enough for workarounds. Before electric scooters were the fad they are now, a friend of mine bought a 35mph folding one so he could ride to the 22nd St Caltrain in SF, take the train to Santa Clara, and ride his scooter from there to work, and stash it under his desk to charge. If he can catch the bullet train, the total commute can be a little over an hour and a half, which is at worst comparable to some of the drive times, and at best a bit shorter. (Ultimately, he still often drives for flexibility, but has to leave by 6am to avoid the worst of the morning traffic.)
In SF itself, the issue is the abysmal slowness of the Muni buses. When I lived near Alamo Square, my commute was less than 3 miles, but could take 40 minutes by bus (even with home and work within a few blocks of bus stops), if I timed it perfectly and didn't have to wait 10 minutes for the bus. And that 40 minutes is effectively wasted; I can't sleep in another 40 minutes and expect to work on the bus because it's just not the right environment for that. Muni gives time scales that look like commuter rail, but over much shorter distances and with much less comfort than commuter rail. Also a kicker: I could do that walk in a little over 50 minutes.
Then what do you do at the other end? Say you work at Apple as an administrative person. You can’t afford to live in Cupertino. So you drive from Fremont. The new BART extension will go from Warm Springs to Sunnyvale. Let’s say you extend it a bit further to Cupertino. So you drive to Warm Springs. Then park. Then you get off in Cupertino. Then what? There is no place you can put a station in Cupertino that even puts you walking distance to both Apple campuses, much less the other job centers in the city.
This is the problem all across the country. Most of the jobs in our metro areas are in the suburbs. Which means you’re talking about commutes that start and end in a car dependent area. There might be a reasonable rail route for a large part of the way, but you’d need to drive at both ends.
In addition to transporting people within an urban core itself, transit systems historically supported a hub and spoke model where people living in the suburbs took a train into their downtown job at the bank, ad agency, etc.
With relatively few exceptions, transit doesn't work terribly well for either travel from a suburban home to a suburban office park or, for that matter, out to the office park from a city apartment.
Where there are real clusters of offices in suburban locations, you can set up shuttles from train stations. But it's generally hard to service jobs that aren't either in the city or right next to a rail station.
Freeways are mass transportation, it might not be the kind you like, but they are pretty effective at getting large numbers of people from origin to destination.
The peak capacity of a mile of track will always be less than that of a mile of highway. But we don't have anywhere to put either because we refuse to build up and ruin a bunch of NIMBYs views.
Not sure I agree with this. Freeways carry about 2K cars per hour per lane [0], which in the USA translates to about 2-3K people per hour per lane. Rail transit systems can serve much, much more than thas -- typically 20K to 30K per hour per track in Europe and upto 54K in NYC and 81K in Hong Kong [1].
These are actual competent train systems that run trains every couple of minutes, not the idiotic once-per-hour Caltrain.
Where are you getting your numbers? Are you making them up?
How many passenger cars can you get down a mile of highway per hour?
I love freeways. It’s just that during rush hour (and holiday weekends), they’re extremely congested. We’ve got local lanes, express lanes, and Waze to help figure out which one to take.
Roads don’t scale very well.
Mass transit would more acceptable if we can increase the speed. China has low-medium speed maglevs, for example, that will travel 100-120 miles per hour.
To use some example numbers. VA7, which goes from the Dulles area where many DC-area data centers are located, through Reston where many tech companies' offices are located, to near DC, carries 50,000-100,000 vehicles per day, and is congested pretty much all day. The Metro Silver line, which follows roughly the same route, theoretically destroys that. An 8-car Metro train carries 1,400 people. With 8-minute headways, that's 7.5 trains per hour, 90 trains over a 12-hour commuting day, or 126,000 people.
Except the actual ridership of the Silver Line is just about 17,000 people per day, and declining. Why? Because it's useless for most people. It takes you to DC at one end, and the airport at the other, and a few places that happen to be on the way. But most people who live in that area don't commute to DC. People take VA7 to go from say Sterling (where there is no metro station) to Tyson's Corner. They have to get in a car to use Metro anyway, and by the time they do that, it's faster to just drive to Tysons instead of getting on the Metro for the segment of the trip Metro covers.
On the other side of DC, the Maryland suburbs are served by no fewer than 37.5 trains per hour (15 on the Green/Yellow, 15 on the Blue/Silver, and 7.5 on the Orange). That's 50,000 people per hour! But the cars are pretty much empty in Maryland, because few people commute into DC. In the height of irony, Metro is moving one of its main employment centers to Lanham Maryland, located on the terminus of the orange line. That means it's not actually commutable by Metro for most part. Folks who work for WMATA aren't living in DC and doing a reverse commute. They're living in Bowie or Largo or College Park or Hyattsville (the surrounding towns). Taking Metro would involve going all the way to DC, switching from the Green/Yellow or Blue/Silver to the Orange, then going back all the way.
“How much highway would you need to move 5.5 million people into and through a dense downtown core” is a question almost no city in the US besides New York needs to ask.
NYC is uniquely dense: https://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2012/09/th.... The weighted population density (the density in the parts of the metro area where people live) is 30,000 people per square mile. LA and SF, the next most dense, are less than half as dense, at 12,000. DC, at 6,400, is about 1/5 the density of New York. Portland and Seattle are even less dense, at 4,000-5,000, which is about the national average.
The Silver Line example is much more illustrative of a typical place in the US. In these places, the higher theoretical capacity of rail is irrelevant, because the commuting pattern isn’t about bringing a large number of people along a few major paths to a downtown job center. It’s about shuttling people between job clusters spread out among the suburbs: http://www.robertmanduca.com/projects/jobs.html (scroll over to Northern VA, west of DC). There might be heavily used corridors like VA7, but the commutes both start and end in suburban locations. You couldn’t pick out a few key paths where being able to move 100,000 people a day from point A to point B and intermediate points would really be all that helpful.
“The peak capacity of a mile of track will always be less than that of a mile of highway. ”
All we’re doing is arguing by examples.
Clearly, depending on the population it’s simply not true. I don’t know the specifics in each case. I’ve been stuck in huge traffic jams in Seattle, New York/New Jersey, Washington DC, Virginia, Philadelphia, etc. I’d say we need more mass transit in those places.
Yes, mass transit needs to go where a certain number of people want to go. However, we’ve ignored mass transit in the US and we complain that it doesn’t work, when it seems to work everywhere else in the world.
So, we’ve mostly build minimal mass transit and lots of roads in the US and are using that as an example that mass transit doesn’t work.
It’s not just SF. 85% of the Bay Area lives outside SF. The area’s key industry is not only outside SF, but mostly scattered among random suburban office parks in the South Bay. Densifying SF won’t do it. You have to get the jobs out from the big suburban office parks into downtown, or at least in transit accessible locations in a handful of South Bay cities.
I really want to agree with you, but I don't think that's the case.
Most of the US isn't dense enough to avoid the same DC metro area problem. In most places, you're transporting people between suburban areas, not between the suburbs and the city, and not between different places in the city. If you have hundreds of suburban areas that are spread out over thousands of square miles, the amount of rail necessary to adequately service that area without stranding people at one end or the other is just massively infeasible.
Even look at the Bay Area. Say you live in SF and work somewhere in the peninsula or south bay. If you don't live near one of the Caltrain stations in SF, you're probably going to spend 30-60 minutes just getting there on Muni. Then you ride for 45-90 minutes on Caltrain. But what if your job isn't along the Caltrain corridor, which is most of the area? Ironically, some of the companies which are within a reasonable distance from Caltrain (walkable, or the company could provide a frequent shuttle bus) provide their own buses to and from SF. Clearly, the preference is just not to have to deal with the mess of Caltrain. And people who don't have shuttle buses still find driving a better use of their time.
Given that the Bay Area is (on either side of the bay, anyway) relatively long and narrow, another one or two parallel trains might solve the problem, though it'd be prohibitively expensive and I doubt the NIMBYs would yield right of way. I think this is an example of the opposite problem: cherry-picking examples that just happen to work out due to favorable land shape and suburb clustering.
No, I think that Maryland pretty much proves that public transit doesn't work. You better tell London and Hong Kong and Tokyo and Paris and Beijing and New Delhi to shut down their systems.
Who said public transit doesn’t work? It clearly works some places. But what transit advocates ignore is that there is just one city in the entire US like London or Tokyo: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/10/americas-truly-denses.... In terms of weighted density, New York stands apart, 2.5x denser than SF or LA, and 5-6x denser than Seattle or DC.
The situation in Maryland illustrates what happens when you try to impose transit in a place that doesn’t have that kind of density.
You must have posted at least a dozen comments about the Maryland subway system in a thread about the Bay Area. Either you think the Maryland example is relevant to other areas, or you think it is irrelevant, and are just posting random anecdotes.
Don't forget about buses, which use highways but are much more efficient. Buses with dedicated bus lanes and high frequency service (every few minutes) is the way to go.
The Caltrain downtown extension (DTX) is going to cost $10 billion (or more) because the planners have no real incentive to control costs, not because it has to.
First, note that the "Pennsylvania alignment" has little to do with bringing Caltrain from 4th and Townsend (where it currently ends) to the Transbay Terminal. Pennsylvania Avenue is not between those two points! No, the city wants to redo the entire line between 22nd St. station and 4th and Townsend, to increase grade separation for Mission Bay.
Which is probably a good thing to do in its own right, but it doesn't have to mean "let's just bore a huge tunnel through the whole thing", which is the most expensive option. See here for a much cheaper alternative that was summarily dismissed: https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2014/01/focus-on-mission-b...
New York faces similar cost problems: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/05/29/assume-nordic-.... If the city, in this case cities, manage to tame the cost problems, the infrastructure can and will e built. This is not a funding problem per se, as the money is there, it's just being used ineffectively.
> San Francisco has 70 miles of light rail (Muni), plus ~180 miles of commuter rail (BART + Caltrain). And it's not clear that Muni even counts as a rapid transit line. Most of it isn't grade separated, so it's got an average speed of 8 miles per hour.
Light rail systems are generally counted as rapid transit, even though the grade separation tends to reduce travel time a lot. Boston's Green Line on the T is also a light rail system, and is generally about 7-9 mph.
Furthermore, BART is generally counted as a heavy rail transit line, although like DC's Metrorail, the system is a bit of a hybrid between commuter rail and heavy transit.
Years ago I thought of going there, a friend did seriously consider an academic position, even interviewed. It's great there in many ways if you like big city life but Chinese citizens face the possibility of kidnap if they are too politically pushy. I feel so sorry for them but don't know how to help. Some people from grad school who were from there immigrated to Canada and the US, but what will happen to the mass of people.
Rentals are cheaper. I can get a nice 1br in mid-levels for ~20k HKD (i.e. $2.5k). In SF these days, I'm not getting a decent 1br in a desirable location under $4k. My $3.5k rent was considered way under market.
This feels so misguided to me. This is going to cost ~$35k/household and the govt is generally terrible at spending money.
It also dodges the real issue in the bay area, which is housing. Commutes are long because most people can't afford to live next to their jobs. If we stopped restricting new housing and taller building, then the number of cars on the road would decrease.
Furthermore, there are innovations coming that might shorten commuting (e.g. things like Hyperloop, although I have no idea if that's viable) and self-driving cars (which let you read/work/etc while commuting). The government is not going to be able to deploy $100b better over the next few decades than the private market.
Finally, the rise of remote work might mean a lot of professions commute less in the future. My prediction is this just going to be an exercise in setting $100b on fire.
> Furthermore, there are innovations coming that might shorten commuting (e.g. things like Hyperloop, although I have no idea if that's viable)
It's not.
> and self-driving cars (which let you read/work/etc while commuting)
Self-driving cars won't make it better. Induced demand is a well-studied phenomenon and as I and others have pointed out, cars waste absurd amounts of space per person, whether moving or parked.
> The government is not going to be able to deploy $100b better over the next few decades than the private market.
There's a difference here between the well-studied problems of public choice and the well-studied problems of public goods. The former predicts that governments will face a constant battle not to become captured by special interests that drain away public funds. The latter predicts that private industry will never provide these things to a level that maximises net utility.
> Finally, the rise of remote work might mean a lot of professions commute less in the future. My prediction is this just going to be an exercise in setting $100b on fire.
A lot of work is not remote and won't be, plus a lot of folks greatly prefer to leave their homes so that it is only home and not some never-not-working hybrid. There's also the small problem that Star Trek style matter replicators don't exist and it remains necessary to deliver things to people, wherever they choose to be. And it remains necessary for those same people to sometimes go to other places to collect them.
> If we stopped restricting new housing and taller building, then the number of cars on the road would decrease.
Assuming that public transit could support the increased demand. I'm not an expert on Bay Area transit, but my sense is that there is not enough extra supply right now to support the extra density without modifications.
> Furthermore, there are innovations coming that might shorten commuting (e.g. things like Hyperloop, although I have no idea if that's viable) and self-driving cars (which let you read/work/etc while commuting).
Of all the arguments against transit, this is one of the shallowest and least effective. Large infrastructure projects takes years, perhaps as long as a decade, before construction starts--and it doesn't matter if they're public or private, because they have to go through the same mandatory delay processes. What you're proposing is that the government does absolutely nothing in the intervening times, in the hope that new technology comes out that makes things magically better. If the new technology miraculously comes out in time, you're going to have the exact same long delay before any benefits actually can be enjoyed, and indeed longer because new technology has inevitable teething problems. More likely, the new technology will turn out to not be worth the hype (PRT, monorail), or will be perpetually just over the horizon (self-driving cars).
There is nothing to be gained by waiting to solve problems that already exist today.
> What you're proposing is that the government does absolutely nothing in the intervening times.
I'm not quite proposing that, but actually you're not far off. I think the government is generally very bad at long-term planning, budgeting, and execution. So if the choice is them doing nothing or them collecting and figuring out how to spend an extra $100 billion, I would go for the former. What I would prefer is that they delegate as much as possible of budgeting and execution to private industry. For example instead of spending tens of billions on BART and Caltrain, what if they offered some fraction of that amount in tax incentives for either multi-family housing developers, or for companies that open offices in areas where most people have to commute out for work? Or even tax incentives for people who have a sub-X mile commute?
What makes me skeptical about government spending are things like the California rail project. It seems like a shit show that is going way over budget, and when it's built it's unlikely to even be competitive with alternative modes of transport.
Things like building restrictions are just hampering the free market. Maybe some developer wants to build a bunch of $2k/mo apartments in SF, and they can make the economics work out for themselves, but the city doesn't allow it, so residents of the city have to pay $3k/mo or commute long distances. Everyone loses.
There doesn't need to be more transit for it to be true that shorter commutes mean fewer cars on the road, even for the same rate of car ownership / transit ridership.
(1) 100 billion over 7 million people is 15k over say twenty years for roughly 750 dollars per year. If the outcome was effective, that sounds like a worthwhile investment.
(2) We definitely need increased housing, but that will only make the traffic problem worse. Can you imagine Tokyo or Paris (cities that have built density) without public transit?
(3) there will always be something new on the horizon - if you always wait for what is next (I.e. hyper loop) you will never improve infrastructure. Unless you think that hyperloop is the absolute end of public transit?
(4) I agree with your skepticism that our governments will spend the money wisely. Since this appears to be some sort of community effort, maybe they will find a way to turn it over to the free market.
... which is an argument for why this shouldn't be a regressive sales tax, but as something along the lines of a parcel or income tax, both of which tend to remove most of the burden from more financially vulnerable folks.
If we stopped restricting new housing and taller building, then the number of cars on the road would decrease.
But didn't you hear? GDP was recently replaced with VMT (vehicle miles traveled) as the measure of a country's economic vitality. So anything that decreases the number of cars on the road, or how far they travel, is right out.
There is so much demand for more housing that a building boom would occur if restrictions were eased. Look at population charts of Texas cities like Austin, San Antonio and Houston where building is easier. Then compare to the relatively flat San Jose and San Francisco population charts.
Has there ever been a time in modern history where building new housing in a large city like SF or SEA has actually decreased housing prices with evidence that no other economic factors at the time played a role?
This doesn't directly answer your question, but here are a few links that discuss the estimated increase in housing costs due to regulated development.
Who exactly do you think the government is? The government is the people when it comes to things like this. The government will not get out of the way of housing in SF because the existing landowners -- regular people -- like it that way. And they currently hold a voting majority.
One key benefit that self-driving brings is the eliminating the need for curb-side parking. Your car can drop you off and go park itself in a hole somewhere. That opens up space for many more bike lanes where light motorized vehicles like Segways can also operate.
A lot of positive development can occur with the right regulations. That's what governments should focus on. As we've seen though with the fiasco that's the taxi market in US cities, public officials aren't too keen on doing their job proper.
Where, though? So do we now have to have dedicated self-driving-car parking farms? Where would you put one of those in SF such that it wouldn't increase wait times to 15-20 minutes?
Regardless, self-driving systems like this are at best decades away. Do we just sit here and do nothing in the meantime as the already-terrible situation continues to get worse?
> Commutes are long because most people can't afford to live next to their jobs.
I'd love to see studies by traffic coordinator. Highways in the outer suburbs are affected by this (101 south of Santa Clara, 580 east of Castro valley, 680, etc.), but not necessarily the inner core (e.g. 101 on Peninsula, 880 in the East Bay, etc.) which traverse similar priced markets.
Engineers that work in the South Bay aren't living in SF because they can't afford the South Bay.
you can’t just build more houses without infrastructure. And even with it, people already living here will and do oppose building more (and, alas, they have a right to their opinion)
We should not have job singularities like Bay Area or NY, we should have much (an order of magnitude) more centers like that and more remote work for professions where it makes sense.
The Bay Area is so sparsely populated it makes me depressed. Honestly, someone told me a few months ago he didn't want any more building in Cupertino because it was "overcrowded already". I was speechless. The people here are absolutely nuts.
yes, it is overcrowded. I lived in European capital which is much more densely populated. I still remember people jams in subway during rush hours with horror
Yikes that sounds bad. Will need to see the details to be sure though.
So here is how Santa Clara County handles the same issue already: every 10 years, they put on the ballot a one-cent sales tax. Along side it, they put a list of the projects to be funded. There is a clear link between the tax and projects, local control, a deadline, and a 10-year reckoning. Alameda County has also started a similar project.
Consider the alternative: the new Bay Bridge eastern span. It cost way more than it should have. Why? Because the mayors of Oakland and Berkeley demanded a pretty bridge instead of a simple one. It was paid for not by Oakland and Berkeley, but by the state which charges tolls on all the bridges -- including the Dumbarton, San Mateo, and Antioch bridges which were of the exact same "simple" type that Oakland and Berkeley complained about.
When the projects are paid for out of big, faceless funding, then there is no incentive to make it work for the people paying the tax. For example, link up Caltrain closer to downtown? That's not really a benefit to anyone other than SF and the Penninsula.
Seriously, the VTA is the absolute poster child for worst return on infrastructure investment in USA history. Its operating costs (alone!) are 85% subsidized with nothing going to fixed costs.
The responses to this post illustrate perfectly why California has the infrastructure crunch it does. As it turns out, constantly making Utopian proposals and decrying anymore who disagrees doesn't actually solve any problems. But that's all anyone does in California, which is why the state can barely manage to allow the owner of an obsolete laundromat to turn it into a modest apartment building.
But that has no beneficial effect unless you limit access to those residences to people who work there (including evicting them upon job change) and limit jobs to those who live locally. Neither is legal.
Well you need both. Where people work in the SF Bay is distributed heavily through the area. You'll always have commuters, especially in two income households
Do you live in the bay? The transit agencies have territorial fiefdoms rather then compete. BART and Muni force customers of both to go up and down to transfer at the stations they share.
BART uses wider than standard gauge, Muni uses standard gauge. They don't share track because it's physically impossible (though it would be logistically problematic even if it was possible, given the pack frequency for each at those stations), not because of “territorial fiefdoms.”
> It is true that Bart doesn’t use standard width track.
> However, Caltrain, Muni, VTA, ACE and Amtrak all use standard width track, and none of them cooperate with the others in a meaningful way.
Part of the reason it might seem that way is different federal regulatory regimes between the light (Muni, VTA) and heavy (Amtrak, ACE, Caltrain) rail lines, which makes many naively simple kinds of cooperation difficult in practice.
> These agencies need to be combined under an umbrella organization with the authority to make unilateral decisions for the subagencies to implement.
Yes, the best way to make bureaucracy more efficient and responsive is to make it larger and more distant from the community served.
> It's not about sharing track. It's about having to go to mezzanine level to transfer vs going out the landing after one flight of stairs.
You can only have two tracks at a level without either (1) people walking on the tracks, which is a safety issue even without the electrified third rail, or (2) people going up and down, or vice versa, to transfer between tracks at the same level. Unless each system has only one track through the station (which complicates traffic control for two-way traffic), or unless you split levels by direction instead of system (which still requires changing levels for some transfers), you are stuck with what they have.
You're still missing my point. Why can't people walk one flight of stairs instead of three, two up and one down? Have you literally never looked through the bars on the Muni level or on the stairs?
> Why can't people walk one flight of stairs instead of three, two up and one down?
Presumably because the management of at least one of the two systems thinks that the initial and ongoing cost (and therefore, ceteris paribus, fare) increase of either system integration or additional fare gate infrastructure (the latter of which may not be practical due to space constraints on the platform level) isn't worth the convenience increase, at least compared to other improvements they could make to their systems at the same cost.
Building and maintaining more entry/exit gates doesn't have an upfront and ongoing cost? Integrating Muni and BARTs entry, exit, and ticketing systems wouldn't have upfront and ongoing costs?
I suspect an solicitation of bids for either of those would not have any $0 bids.
I live in San Francisco. The method of transferring you describe is reasonable to me and congruent with my opinion. It's good they share the station is my main point.
Imagine if the stairs to BART weren't separated by a cage from MUNI. How on earth is it reasonable to force someone to the ground floor when going between floors 1 and 2?
1. Assuming you're correct (which is certainly up for debate), what do we do for the next 50 years? Suffer?
2. Service jobs will always exist. Restaurants, bars, shops, museums, schools, etc. need people present to make them work. Even in cases where people aren't strictly required, people will still want people around. People will always need stuff that will need to be delivered to wherever they are. People also don't want to just stay in their homes all day; transit demand is not solely shaped by work commutes.
3. You draw the line in one place, other people draw it in others. Such is life.
4. There are quite a few cities in the world that will disagree with you, and be right.
5. We need people who will actually cooperate for the greater good. In the US that seems to be a rarity, as our culture is centered around individualism and competition, unlike many other places in the world. If we leave it up to a bunch of local governments cooperating we... oh, right, end up in the exact situation we're in now.
(I agree with you in principle on #5, but a solution that has as a prerequisite, "change the deep-seated culture of millions of people over a relatively short period of time", isn't something I see as doable.)
1. We don’t have to suffer. We also don’t have to hand over 100 billion $ to the govt because they want it. Many of us may not even be around in 50 years. It is essentially paying for the next generation and also agreeing to pushing them into debt.
Millennials will then be blamed not unlike baby boomers are blamed by millennials for ‘messing up the next generation future’. Where in fact, it’s agreeing to unrealistic long term plans like this and signing carte blanche whenever the state decides that we need to shell out without them being accountable.
2. I disagree that we will need to have service jobs. Or that people need to travel to be ‘around other people’ who want them around.
Having said that, we do need public transport. We don’t need to lump affordable housing with public transport costs. Just like part of the gas tax was set aside to train prisoners to make them employable. It’s necessary but what’s with the shifty shenanigans?
The public are lured into supporting housing and affordable housing imagining that it benefits them but that’s a marginal side effect. The real purpose of random and especially questionable rezoning to keep building is to create a stream of income through property taxes. Ditto with job creation. Jobs have an inflationary effect.
An unemployed person in the rural area can still have avocado toast if he has a garden. He doesn’t need $10.00 to buy an avocado toast. However he can’t participate in the same economy as a 6 figure earning Silicon Valley resident of CA. However do note that all of them will be paying the same tax for public transport. As will their children over 50 years.
3. Sure. I will vote as inspired by my line.
4. I disagree. I literally don’t know any affordable city that is high density. If you include Mumbai’s slums or Hong Kong’s coffin apartments or NYC rent controlled and subsidized projects, I reject them. It’s not affordable. The cost of expensive living morphs from currency to something else that can be quantified in currency terms. There is a cost to cramming people in resource restricted areas which is also a fixed land area.
5. It’s such a general statement to say ‘ we need people to cooperate for a greater good’. It’s a feel good statement that means nothing unless we get down to specifics.
The US is a better place to live in than most parts of the world. We don’t have tribal wars or bloody religious uprisings or bomb threats everyday. I disagree with you. I don’t know what cooperation you are talking about in ‘other parts of the world’.
Admittedly there are other parts of the world where people cooperate and set aside individualism, but I am willing to bet that they are low density population areas where people have enough space. Cooperation thrives when everyone has the opportunity to make things work for everyone without just one group shouldering the burden. It is another way to make sure everyone carries equal responsibility. Cooperation is NOT co dependency.
I have never seen a highly populous city be affordable. It becomes a pressure cooker of market forces with the initial subsidized affordable housing ending up costing more and resources being redistributed to the point of infrastructure failing leading to more taxes leading to more unaffordability. It’s a vicious cycle.
Affordable houses pay less taxes than market rate. High density still absorb more infrastructure.
Where one house used stand, if there are 10 apartments..it’s that many x 2 cars on the street. It’s almost that many more children in public schools. It’s that many more households consuming water, power and need for general services. But schools don’t multiply..fire stations and police stations don’t increase to cater to the increase in population. Roads are not built to take care of the traffic nor is public transport improved.
More housing = more taxes. That’s why the govt encourages. Affordable housing actually fatten up the funds for the care and feeding of big Gov more because what they don’t offer in high per household tax, they make up in volume.
Net net, govt gets more $$ and the public gets less services. These 20 and 5@ year old multi billion projects never translate because they never see the light of day as they get obsolete quickly. That’s why the Bay Area looks so run down and unaffordable housing and traffic woes only keep increasing and never finds solutions.
Bay Area isn’t NYC. We are earthquake country with dismal public transport. We are more people and more sprawl. And definitely more jobs. Not comparable.
Do you think NYC is affordable for those earning 51k? Really?
The dismal public transport is what the proposal on the table will be taking aim at.
What makes you think NYC is unaffordable to households making under $51k, and how do you explain the fact that half the populace is doing exactly that?
What do earthquakes have to do with it? Half the megacities of Asia are in earthquake country.
On NYC: NYC is affordable to them only with rent control. Most people don’t have cars due to its public transport network that we lack in the Bay Area. The city has entertainment, easy access so people don’t have to leave their boroughs..never mind the city.
We have land in California and can provide housing IF we improve public transport. Sacramento takes money earmarked for public transport and channels it for affordable housing. It is a pattern of deception.
On Asian mega cities with high density, I am going to assume that you have lived there as you brought it up. Is that the kind of standard of living you think affordable high density housing advocates want in California? I see that you are housing advocate and I assume high density as you are dedicated to building more housing stock in San Francisco.
I have lived in high density Asian cities and have commuted at 20 km/hour. Which is what is happening in the Bay Area too.
How many parts of Asia do you think are earthquake prone? Please name them and their population density. I would like to compare quality of life between them and the bay area.
It is better than many other parts of the world tho’...I do agree that Europe wins in some respects. American comfort and quality of life does come from over consumption. We consume(and are wasteful too) at 350 million people more than the 1.3 billion Indians.
So yea..there is that..but surely we can have a middle ground between wasteful sprawl and high density, bumper to bumper trafficker life style.
Our local art gallery and indie coffee shops have closed down due to no foot traffic as home-office-home commute begins at 6.30 to 9,00 and then 2.00-7.30 pm. They use side streets and clog arterial infra city roads due to various traffic apps suggesting short cuts. The local mission that used to press olives every year from the olive trees in their property won’t do it anymore because they sold the land to build more condos. The community college wants to sell its land to build apartments and they aren’t even student housing. Everyone is in the speculative high density market rate housing game. Cities have no identity and they are nothing but bedroom communities where people come back to eat and sleep before getting up to go back to work again battling traffic. Are high density cities worth this zombie existence? That’s what Bay Area is becoming.. I hope it isn’t so!
You have things 100% backwards. High density should mean improved public transport because the economic incentives will shift to favor it strongly.
Low density sprawl is a huge factor in traffic because it pulls people apart. You can't walk anywhere because you have to live more than half an hour walk from the local shop, the local butcher, florist, cafe, gallery. Zombie existence? The low density shit hole that is the Bay Area is a zombie existence. European lifestyle with its much higher density and much better road traffic is the antithesis of zombie existence.
Right. I agree that it should improve public transport and infrastructure. But it hasn’t in the Bay Area. We vote for propositions and bond measures every election cycle only for the state to disappoint us again and again. The end result is high density without community benefits and infrastructure improvements.
Case in point, I can’t go out to get a bottle of milk between 2.00-7.00 because of traffic. People are cutting through residential roads due to traffic apps diverting them away from freeways which are clogged anyways. There are no shops within a mile of most homes. There are shopping hubs and then there are residential developments. Due to greed, Bay Area cities (ABAG is the name of the org) has zoned everything residential and there are no shops, no green spaces, no parks..no parking and no public transport! Just homes and homes and more high density homes to extract as much property taxes as possible. So these are not even affordable homes but expensive million dollar homes. These tax dollars go to improve other areas in California that is not as well off as Bay Area. Hence the awfulness of our region.
You’d think as a cash cow we would get some benefits for shouldering the economy of this state massively, but no...we are just a place where Sacramento can milk and milk and milk more for taxes. You’d think they’d improve other parts of California.
So obviously something is off..if this is a repeating pattern, then perhaps we must correct our assumptions about the benefits of high density vis a vis sustainability and quality of life. The data doesn’t deliver the promised benefits.
In the Bay Area, we don’t have low density sprawl. We have high to medium density already and most land is built out. We have a public transportation problem with both intra and inter city gridlocks.
The solution is to build outside and developing the public transport system to connect the hubs in the state. They have already wasted millions and millions on this with no impact except creating unsupported high density dwellings leading to more traffic woes.
Fifty years is ridiculous. Most of us won’t be alive and our children would already be burdened with debt before they are born. In China, roads and bridges and homes are built in months. Not even years. Here the bureaucracy of big govt makes any project going like one is rowing a boat through a creek of molasses.
So how do we fix this? Certainly not by handing over more tax dollars to Sacramento every time they come up with another hare brained scheme.
I mean..even this post here..check the article. They only know that they need 100 billion. No plan. No ideas as to how to collect it. No way for us to perform due diligence.
That's the fault of lack of public transport investment, but you will never get that investment if you don't increase density. If you bring the entire Bay Area into the South Bay, people's commute distances will be shorter. You then build much better public transport and the traffic will be alleviated.
"High to medium density". Absolute nonsense. Have you seen the South Bay? What looks high density to you?
In the Bay Area, they merged ABAG with the transport authority last year. It’s like ..how you say..a cartel.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘bring the entire Bay Area into the south bay’? It makes no sense to me.
I see no logic in asking for more and more high density housing developments with NO plans and NO supporting infrastructure. You can’t cram people into a closed and bounded geographical region without providing adequate resources and essential services and infrastructure.
And why should the South Bay bear the burden of supporting the entire inflow? Is it punishment for being successful and productive?
You BUILD infrastructure FIRST and then plan cities around it. That’s common sense.
Yes. South Bay is high density. I believe that. Next?
I am looking at for value for money and quality of life. Bay Area is not a ‘tiny ghost town’. It’s crowded and struggling with a serious deficit in imagination wrt city planning. It’s my town. I have a vote and I intend to use it. Please use yours if you want to change the system.
That’s right. Zoning laws are stupid. Who needs trees in a city? Or parks? Right? Let’s keep building high density homes and let our kids decide if they want to stand in a queue to go to the rest room or have lunch because new schools aren’t being built to accommodate the high density homes. Sounds like a plan.
Why ON EARTH would people work their arses off if they can’t live well and be a proud NIMBY? This is such fundamental human psychology that I am amazed that so many people don’t get it. I have never met a person who is a home owner in the Bay Area who is fighting for high density. Not one. It’s those who want to get in here who wants to build more and more. It’s pretty clear why and once they get a foot in..boom! The transformation to NIMBY begins. And I completely understand that!
Build responsibly. Build infrastructure. Build community benefits. Don’t take tens of thousands of dollars in taxes from high earning zipcodes and distribute it all to lower earning zip codes. The community deserves benefits. Everyone who is productive will QUIT the Bay Area they created if they don’t feel rewarded. And space is a luxury. And omg..do we pay for it through taxes and cost of living!!
Or.
People could move to Copenhagen. It’s a dream, I hear.
Reminds me of the high-speed rail project. They got federal grants but repeatedly failed to comply with the agreement and missing deadlines.
1 billion dollars in funds were canceled, and the state might have to pay back 2.5 billion already paid to them. [1]
I don't think California knows how to use any money they get ahold of. Some of the worst roads in the nation yet the highest gas taxes. People are leaving California in masses for places like Texas. California is one of the most moved out states. People are sick of high taxes and not being able to afford anything. Those taxes get passed down making everything else more expensive too like food and other needed things in life.
I know someone who recently cashed out their retirement investments accounts a little earlier than planned. He mentioned that his advisor was chit chatting while waiting on the computer to process something, and if he would have lived in California it would have been a 10% tax just for California alone, not even counting the fed taxes. They don't live in California luckily as it would have been about $15,000 more in taxes they'd owe than where they currently are.
While if they lived in Texas or Florida they'd save so much money since no state income tax, plus it's warmer and nicer too.
Also some people retire and decide to live in an RV full-time exploring around the US so then South Dakota is a great choice too as no income tax either plus since you still need to be a resident somewhere to have a driver license and registration even if you don't own property anymore so they are a great state to set up a home base as they are friendly to full-time travelers. Some people's former states where they sold their lifelong homes won't let them stay being a resident because they are basically considered homeless even if they own an expensive RV like a diesel pusher, so they risk their license and registration being canceled if they don't change their domicile to a friendly state to travelers. If you own a $100,000 house you aren't homeless but if you live in a $250,000 or half a million dollar RV you are homeless according to most states.
I guess with recognizing full-time RV living it increases South Dakota population count so it helps them get more federal funding and in return, they allow you to be considered a resident after spending one night at a hotel or campground while also renting a mailbox with a mail forwarding company. They even give you a new license the same day too, no waiting for one to be mailed, also no retesting either other than a eye test, walk in the next morning with the receipt for mailbox, hotel/campground, SSN card, birth cert and marriage license if your last name is different without even making an appointment then within a few minutes you are done. Then since full-timers will be mostly on vacation from South Dakota, they pay into the roads they hardly even use too. So another win-win for the state. Very small and efficient government up there.
While if you move to California they make you retake the test again, and you have to wait weeks to even get an appointment while being fined for not changing it without 10 days of signing a lease or buying a house because they're all booked up for over 2 months in advance.
People are getting sick and tired of California, parts of the midwest and the northeast so they are moving to the South. [2] Sadly some people can't really afford to move right now or have a family though but I think it's great people who can vote with their feet to try and better themselves are doing so.
Not only for economic reasons people are leaving California. People are also feeling unsafe due to them harboring illegal aliens. Someone who had been deported 5 times, ended up in the San Francisco County Jail on a drug charge only to be released instead of being turned over to feds... Then after being released the man ended up killing a woman at a popular tourist spot.
I could spend days talking about all the problems in California. California is a huge mess, and I think people who say otherwise are living in a bubble. However, I don't think people like to get into too much politics on here so will refrain from that, but probably enough bad with California I could write an entire book about.
I agree with you that CA has a lot of problems to solve.
I wouldn't want to live in Texas or Florida. Too much culture (and political) clash, different values, and everything is spread out, even in cities. I'll take CA's (and specifically SF's) problems over that.
Yeah, I guess FL and TX are more conservative which I lean... However, I think my view of what a conservative is and some others differ a bit.. I heard some people are running as Republicans just because they feel that’s what will give them the votes even if they aren’t really truly aligned. Then again I even disagree with a few ideas too. I guess you have to pick a label though. I’m for smaller government, leaving people alone if they aren’t harming anyone else, so personal freedoms and spending where they break even so spending within their means.
I know the governor here raised the gas taxes, and people on Facebook were commenting saying he isn't even a real Republican... Not sure how true that is or not.
Not sure about the more spread out part. I know a lot of places are designed around the car but I hear that’s even a problem in Los Angeles. Miami is supposed to be a walkable city, then Austin too... but been looking at Austin as an area to move to once I start having some success but it seems only downtown is really walkable. So seems like having a car would be useful unless using Uber or Lyft if you rarely go outside of the downtown area.
If money wasn’t an issue I’m not really sure where I’d want to live... Maybe Austin but not sure if forever would want to live there. One of the largest cities with unsynchronized traffic lights apparently as traffic is really bad there. But I guess they are a growing city with growing pains, some statistic says 100 people a day move there.
Central Florida around Disney would be nice too, and less worrying about hurricanes but you still get a lot of wind. East Tennessee, always thought a cabin in the mountains there would be nice but cold winters. Utah is very nice too but also gets cold. Used to want to move to San Francisco but kinda realized it was a bad idea due to both the costs of living and some politics. However a lot of investors and networking. I know startup communities are growing in other places though like Austin, TX, and is center between both the west and east coasts. So maybe you need to fly to SF for some event only 4-hour flight. Just seems friendlier to businesses. Fewer regulation headaches and get to keep more money in your pocket. However, I guess tech startups don't really have to deal much with permits unless doing something physical like the Hyperloop, recycling, building a new office instead of existing one or dealing in a regulated industry like medical or banking.
I was watching a story about a company who wanted to do a recycling plant... California seems to promote recycling a lot more than other states even with bag bans, etc... Waste Management spent over 10 years trying to get the permits approved to build it at an old landfill site in the LA area, at some point the company decided to move the project to Arizona and got the permits needed approved within a single day then spent 2 years to build it. [1] Los Angeles even has a Freelancer Tax for people who work from home. Sounds like some other cities are catching on and starting to tax people who work at home... Was looking if Austin did a thing, and it looks like nothing special is required but there's a set of guidelines to follow... However, just someone sitting on their laptop coding wouldn't break them it looks. Some cities though don't even mention this though so I guess working from home isn't a problem unless you have like customers visiting that disrupts things. I think places across the country are getting greedier though for some reason and I think it will drive people away.
I know where I am currently, we have a bunch of taxes. There's city taxes, school district taxes, state income taxes, a CAT tax if you make more than $150,000 and of course fed taxes... When I was looking at Utah a few years ago since I have a friend there, I was shocked they didn't have city taxes. I figured that was everywhere so surprised me. There's a site that ranks states as friendly California ranks 49. Looks like Ohio is ranked 42, while Texas is a 15. South Dakota is a 3. I feel like we're turning into the next California or New York.
So I think I have my eyes on Austin, Texas right now. Be nice to be able to work on some code, get frustrated and be able to go on a long walk. Where I live we don't even have sidewalks everywhere, so walking along the street but I even have had people in cars flick me off. Maybe if I was somewhere like Cincinnati maybe would be better as a bit bigger city for someone interested in tech, but hey it's cold and an area hit hard by the heroin epidemic so might have to walk over dead bodies on the sidewalk of people who overdosed. Well maybe not that bad but would seem so if I listen to the news. So If I made enough money to get my own place there since I still live at home and, might as well just leave for Texas. Fly there and get a small apartment and ship the few things I own. Seattle has a huge drug and crime problem too. KOMO did an hour special called "Seattle is Dying" back in March. [3]
I know some people call this the "brain drain". Even the local governments themselves are having trouble hiring people with the skills they need. Young people grow up, and leave to never return. [4] The midwest seems to be suffering the most brain drain. Probably partly school problems too. I remember I used to play online gaming a lot and voice chat with people on them, and someone told me their school had brand new iMac's while our school still had computers that ran Windows 95. Even mentioned they were doing web design stuff too, well sounds like Dreamweaver type of stuff but amazed me hearing that. Seems crazy using an operating system released when you were a 3 year old when you are in middle school.
Overall though I really feel like the nomadic lifestyle would make me the happiest though if can figure out how to make it work. Live out of a suitcase traveling the world or an RV across America. However, I do want to check out some of the bigger cities but some don't seem to have any or many RV park choices nearby.
There is even some guy who goes by Super Mario who lives on cruise ships full time sailing out of Miami. Interesting lifestyle, I believe he does some type of investments off of his laptop. I think if I made enough from my computer I'd do the same for a while. Reading some stories on HN is inspiring though. Right now been researching blockchain related stuff, got some ideas in that space... So maybe make it big in that area haha. I asked my folks why they didn't move since always talked about Florida but the family was one of the main reason to stick around. Also, I know a lot of people collect so much stuff, looks like junk to others but to them, it has stories and meanings. So I guess if you lived at the same house 30 or 50 years getting up and going for another lifestyle can be a hurtle emotionally. While I'm young without much stuff, so a bit easier.
The Dumbarton Rail Corridor seems like a good idea, but it's not going to work. The problem is that Dumbarton commuters have a large "fanout"; that is, they come from all directions in the east side, and commute to locations in all directions in the west side. A single point-to-point link between Redwood City and Union City isn't very useful because of all the connections that would need to be made. Yes, there are connections to Caltrain, BART, and Amtrak, but those services are also linear and don't fan out well.
Two easy fixes to the Dumbo would do a lot more to reduce idling in traffic: (1) direct connection to 101 on the west side which was originally blocked by the city of Palo Alto, and (2) increase the capacity. But while there is plenty of appetite to charge bridge commuters exorbitant tolls, there is no appetite to do anything that helps them.
I wish they would do this in Los Angeles, or provides incentives for companies to move their companies to where people live. Instead, they are building out more in areas away from the jobs causing more and more congestion as everyone tries to get to work. Its mind boggling.
I second this, except I wouldn't put so many eggs in one basket.
To the critics: The viability of Musk's underground highway concept is irrelevant. The basic premise of Musk's original concept was to cut down the cost of tunneling by orders of magnitude. The first optimization is focusing on boring 14-foot diameter tunnels. 14 feet is larger than many subway tunnels in London and Budapest, and about 1 foot shy of some Moscow subway tunnels.
A tunnel is a tunnel--nothing prevents building them as a closed rail network with proper trains. If a Boring Company tunnel couldn't support electrical equipment, then run the trains on batteries. Yes, the basic math of moving people indisputably favors trains, but that doesn't mean you can't apply many of the other engineering and financial concepts from Musk's underground highway concept.
I understand that tunneling, per se, isn't the primary cost of building subways; it's the stations. But if the Boring Company can deliver on just one order of magnitude decrease in tunneling costs, then any public official or engineer who balks at 14-foot tunnels should be booted out of their position.[1] Optimize for the ridiculously cheap 14-foot tunnels and everything else will fall into place. I would expect the engineering and budgeting processes for the more efficient tunnel construction to have a moderating effecting on station design, making it less likely we'd blow so much money on extravagant stations. If tunneling were just 10% cheaper then probably the money would just be shifted elsewhere, but faced with 10x cheaper tunnel construction irresponsible and bloated requirements would stand out.[2]
[1] For example, with an order of magnitude reduction in capital costs then arguments regarding incompatibility with existing equipment (cars, tracks, etc) wouldn't even be reasonable on their face. At those costs just deal with the additional system or, better yet, change everything else! If a Geary Blvd subway in San Francisco could be built so cheaply, then it might make sense to replace and build out the existing MUNI light-rail lines with the Geary technology.
[2] Not an example of bloat, but, for example, with enough cost savings then it may be cheaper to skip elevators and escalators in many stations and simply operate a large fleet (much larger than what exists already) of door-to-door shuttles for the incapacitated.
And not solve transportation at all. Tunnels for individuals with primarily single-occupant vehicles are counter-productive. We need more public transit. Parking is expensive, insurance is expensive, the vast majority of the bay area public will be left out by this plan.
Either way tunnels aren't particularly expensive, stations, on-ramps/off-ramps are.
Why is there an assumption that the tunnels have to be for cars? Create tunnels for bicycles instead:
- Tunnels don´t need to be nearly as big, and would still have higher capacity
- The friction of ¨I won´t ride a bike because it´s dangerous¨ is reduced or eliminated
- Weather as a factor in commuting by bike is eliminated
- Like a railway grade, you can basically eliminate any significant elevation ascents/descents
You're conflating Musk's underground highway concept with his proposed solutions for cheaper tunnel construction. The latter is required for the former, but not vice-versa. Musk's 14-foot tunnels are large enough for a traditional subway. See my reply to the parent.
Perhaps it just made for a pretty picture, and a completely impractical reality :)
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