San Francisco Should Always Have a Subway Under Construction
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For a great example take a look at the new Maryland Governor and one of his first actions coming into office[0][1] This is someone(and his backers) that are ideologically opposed to public transit even when it is overwhelming supported(and paid for) by the regions it directly effects.
[0] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-sun-investig... [1]http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/how-republican-gov-larry...
I live in a dead spot on the South Side of Chicago where, ~80 years ago, the neighborhood association actually had the El demolished over gentrification concerns.
There is little liberal objection to improving public transit in already expensive downtown areas, but plans to improve commute times from the south and west sides of San Francisco will almost certainly be met with vigorous opposition. Even if they wouldn't cost anything.
The opposition to those systems (their expansion, in some cases even just their operation) was universally from the right, because "run gubmint like a business, and if it doesn't make a profit, pull the plug!"
I guess it was all those right-wingers in Marin?
Edit: diction
http://www.marinij.com/general-news/20100807/did-marin-lose-...
At the time, the project was incredibly expensive to build. Every foot of track was scrutinized. The people of Marin would have loved to have BART go through their county, especially the SF commuters.
My father's biggest grip was getting to a job site from Marin to San Francisco. He hated the commute, along with myself years later. I guess we were spoiled? The commute was only 45-60 from Marin to anywhere in the city.
At the time, building BART was really a big deal. The enginneers would load materials into these huge round cylinders. Welders would then run beads around the circumfrence of the cylinders. Once everything was secured to to ocean floor, workers from the SF? side would cut into the new section. As a kid, I was allowed to go to work with my father once a year. I would drive electric golf carts up and down the tube.
Times have certainly changed? For some reason, Electricians drank a lot back then? Actualy everyone drank a lot back then. It was not uncommon to see a Electricain drinking a beer down in those dark, dank, tubes--if they had a stationary boring job to do. I recall my father building a lamp from one of the third rail insulators, and I still can't get rid of a "Danger--3rd rail sign" he lifted. On the sign, right after Danger, they put in Pelligro. They actually debated whether it was necessary to put in any foreign language on the signage. It was a different time; Marin and San Francisco were 90% white, mutt, middle class, and Hispanic people were scarce.
I do miss the man, but we had our differences. He always felt that because I went to college, I would turn into some pompous a-hole? I told him, "Dad, I'm going to a state college. I said, "It's actually kind of a joke, but I do want to graduate." He didn't have to pay a dime for my education, so I still don't know what his problem was? It's almost like he wanted me to be happy, but just not happier than himself? Well he won? I remember a christmas card he gave me that had a bunch of "PhD, Doctor, too many degrees, etc." before my name on a card. I went home, from that Christmas dinner, and had a nervous breakdown, and have never been the same. Thanks Dad! Different parenting skills back then?
The "it'll cause sprawl" narrative apparently did not play much of a role in the actual politics of the planning process.
The richest neighborhoods - in the suburbs - don't want transit. An unreliable once-an-hour bus is seen as a handout for the poors, an impractical feel-good project that cannot earn its way. A large transit development that aligns with a real neighborhood would upset the balance by making the surrounding area denser and busier. This is the position that the the western San Francisco neighborhoods have been in for the past generation - a bit too wealthy and a bit too suburban to break away from car usage, even as they are far denser than most suburbs. Many of the outlying BART stops, similarly, are large parking lots, a way of sealing in car dependence and transit as a last resort for commuters, rather than a benefit that makes the stop a destination.
But then the reverse applies once you're in central cities and you're dealing with luxury condo residents: Anything less than a world-class rail system is deemed unsatisfactory, but the rails should, of course, go from one wealthy neighborhood to another. Getting the poor into the rapid system equates to more "criminals" or "thugs", and so you would get support for saturation coverage of an area that is already well-served, or a neighborhood that has undergone massive gentrification, but not underserved poor areas. This sort of thing contributes to transit system balkanization - a bad system for the poor, and a good one for the rich.
In both density situations, minority political groups will get showcase wins if they can lock in by-the-doorstep bus coverage of their constituents that is too slow and indirect to be truly useful. This is something that SF and much of the East Bay has avoided, but maybe not for the right reasons. The areas that were historically lower-income got access to BART, but are simultaneously now the biggest targets for gentrification. They were intended to be handout zones, and then the rise of real estate prices ultimately flipped that idea upside down and turned BART into a gentrifying mechanism. And now we are in the situation where the system has to be developed for a plurality, rather than a handout - which is probably a good thing.
(Arlington and Lexington, even at that time, were relatively upper income but would also have been fairly liberal--at least by national standards.)
BRT can't move nearly as many people as trains can. It would take many more buses to move the same amount of people. In a dense urban environment, trains make the most sense. In an area that's not dense, trains can allow density to happen. See the development of New York for instance. Plenty of trains went through fields at the time, and the railroads made huge amounts of money off of developing this now useful land (amongst other things). I suppose that's the real reason you get folks in the Bay Area to fight against trains.
The other issue we have in the US is our infrastructure costs are way out of line with the world norm. If the Second Avenue Subway had similar per-mile costs to Tokyo subway extensions (or even the maglev they are building), the funding for the first phase would mostly get the subway the length of Manhattan.
Beverly Hills found a way
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2014/04/beverly_hills_loses_fi...
If you dig a little, it turns out the public "it'll blow up our kids!" hysteria was mostly cover for a desire to have route the subway to benefit the city of Beverly Hills instead of the neighboring mostly-office-space Century City. Blocking the subway entirely was basically political blackmail.
The alternate location is 0.2 miles away, wouldn't even be in Beverly Hills proper, and there aren't any particular commercial developments that would be of better advantage than the current proposal. Heck, the alternate location is adjacent to a golf course.
The distance look close on a map, but the terrain is EXTREMELY unwalkable - what looks like regular roads on the maps of Century City are laid out more like highways, with hundreds of meters between crosswalks, and large blocks without paths to cut across them.
The MTA wanted the Century City route, both because it would have been better placed to catch commuter traffic and because the Wilshire/Santa Monica route would have gone too close to a fault line; Beverly Hills, clearly, preferred the extra commercial activity to contribute to its own tax revenues. So they made up this "oh my god the kids are going to die!" scare; the local congressman, Henry Waxman, backed them by getting the BH route blocked at the Federal level until 2007.
The MTA then brought up the alternative of sending the train through West Hollywood instead, bypassing BH altogether, and the city caved right quick.
God I love local politics.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/@34.0670703,-118.401029,17...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Beverly+Hills,+CA+90210/@3...
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/place/2000+Avenue+of+the+Stars,+...
I largely agree with your points but the 'Think of the children' aspect wasn't just contained to that aspect; they had fears of ISIS attacks as recently as last year.
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2014/09/bev_hills_paper_warns_...
That said an above ground system up and down over and across Van Ness, Geary and maybe Judah/Taraval and taking over for Caltrain down the peninsula would be great.
Speaking of the peninsula, it could exploit a system going down the camino real corridor. That alone could alleviate congestion and housing, if only they developed that long corridor and put in mass transit along the line and allow mixed use mid-rises five blocks on either side of it.
So don't discount bus service and other alternatives. This romance with rail, either above or below ground, sucks up way too much funding for what it delivers.
Hong Kong has the best subway system I have experienced.
But that's in a perfect world where the local govt cares or has been properly incentivized. (Bribed.)
And then people complain that homeless folks do their business on the streets. Well, what the fuck else are they gonna do? Eeesh.
What sickens me is that people look at ludicrous phenomena like locked bathrooms, or like putting fucking spikes on public benches, and go "Oh, well, you know, those homeless are why we can't have nice things." As if hordes of crazy homeless people are some sort of irresistible natural phenomenon, like locusts, and not something that anyone could possibly do something about. Especially not something that might conceivably have to be paid for with tax money.
They exist because there isn't mental health funding to house and manage them. It's a tragedy of the commons problem.
In the downtown districts of San Francisco that aren't FiDi, there are usually-operational free public toilets. There aren't enough of them, and they too-often out of service, but they do exist.
There aren't as many public toilets as there used to be, but there are still enough (I'm sure homeless people know where they are), and it's rare for there to be a lock on the toilets in larger businesses.
Railway stations in London generally change 20p.
https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/big-money-big-bui...
Adding more housing tends to exacerbate all the problems they're already facing.
Change zoning restrictions and make it a lot easier to build denser housing everywhere. One lot that currently supports a single house could easily support a five-floor, ten-unit building with much higher aggregate rent than the house.
I don't understand how anyone can say with a straight face that adding more housing exacerbates the problem of not having enough housing. It's not like there's infinite demand, and if you add ten million houses then eleven million people will instantly move to San Francisco. You don't say that giving a starving man food will only make his problems worse.
Just curious, do you own real estate in San Francisco?
Say you have a building with 3 units all of a type that do not appeal to foreign investors and wealthy people looking for pied-a-terres, and thus are occupied by people who live and perhaps work in San Francisco. Tear it down and replace it with a building with 10 units, all of which do appeal to the aforementioned investors and wealthy people. Then say 8 units get sold to investors who leave the units unoccupied most of the time, and 2 units get sold to people who want to live in the neighborhood. You've now reduced the amount of housing stock available to San Franciscans, even though you've increased the total number of units.
We've had discussions here on HN relatively recently where people discuss housing price inflation in London caused by foreign investors. Vancouver also has a large number of condo high-rises that sit mostly empty most of the time, because they're not occupied.
That can just as easily happen in San Francisco.
Obviously that won't happen if we build 10 million units. But we're not going to build 10 million units. The danger is that San Francisco builds enough units to attract additional investor demand, but not enough to satiate that demand. Which could leave actual San Franciscans worse off.
Look at New York. People are paying thousands a month to live in crappy 19th century tenements that used to be in dangerous and poor neighborhoods.
Really, you can't win by not building housing. "Them Chinese are buying our housing! Let's stop building housing! That'll show them! Now instead of owning 0.1% of housing, they'll own 10%!" How does that make sense?
The foreign investors aren't going to buy 100% of a city. They can't afford it; the total property value of NYC alone is over $800 billion. As they buy, value goes up. If we let builders respond to this demand, they will keep producing new units to make up for foreign investors. They don't have infinite money, so stop pretending they do.
In these discussions here on housing in San Francisco a pretty strict dichotomy seems to taken hold. A lot of people believe that either you're a fan of The Rent is Too Damn High, and believe that the problem is just zoning and if you just get rid of zoning then all the housing problem in San Francisco will be solved by the power of the free market. Or if you don't believe that, then you're a NIMBY who wants to see zero construction and either doesn't believe in free-market economics, or who wants to restrict construction so as to increase the value of their own property.
It's a tiresome bit of groupthink not worthy of the intelligence of the folks here. Just because I think the situation is more complicated than a simple supply/demand equation doesn't mean I'm anti-growth.
And for the record, I'm a home owner in Mountain View, and in the last city council election I voted for the pro-housing-construction slate of candidates. I also think The Rent Is Too Damn High is a rather stupid book.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158180
Here's a couple articles on the situation in Vancouver:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-and-garden/real-est...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouv...
If you Google "Vancouver empty condos" you'll get an entire page of links.
London and Vancouver are created by loose investor immigrant laws and tax incentives for the rich. You could get Canadian citizenship as an 'investor' by basically buying a house until very recently. On top of that, you get special tax treatment for the first several years of citizenship if your rich by Canada. Canada's real estate bubble never popped.
China has a large amount of ongoing capital flight, Vancouver is nice and stable, and a relatively quick flight back to China. Vancouver has a huge Chinese immigrant community. All of this combined plus the general Canadian real estate bubble & laws creates Vancouver.
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London is even worse. In the UK they have a nom-dom resident tax law, where you basically just pay a flat tax of ~$40k/yr and have no taxation on your foreign income as a rich person. London is a hub city for the world too. The UK also has very low property tax rates. All of these facts combined create London.
If the UK wants to reverse London, then getting rid of non-dom tax laws, adding wealthy-only property taxes and treating them as normal tax residents will reverse the trend fairly quickly.
--------------
The USA is not an attractive place to be rich resident, unless your wealth comes from a US corporation. The USA has a high relative tax load, citizenship based taxation (only place in the world!), harsh anti-corruption / anti-money laundering laws, a very powerful, wealthy and motivated tax collection agency, a global financial surveillance apparatus, estate tax, a long and annoying immigration process and so on. All of this puts a damper on the super wealthy making another London.
Also the state of a place doesn't really matter, the 'investors' would be interested in molding crack houses. They have the money to turn it into whatever they want. You can do a total rebuild in SF as long as you keep the same square footage. One ancedote is a heavily molded crack shack in my neighborhood listed at ~$600k and sold for ~$900k. Like I was getting an allergy attack just walking into this place for a few minutes. Also see the same thing in Vancouver with this comedy game: http://www.crackshackormansion.com/
In summary: Build more, build tall, we need more 30 story residential apartment complexes! The laws of supply and demand do work! Ideally right beside BART and Muni tunnel stations. The mission became overpriced despite being a bad part of town because of BART.
Which increases infrastructure demands, which increases labor requirements, which increases housing demands ...
> I don't understand how anyone can say with a straight face that adding more housing exacerbates the problem of not having enough housing.
Why is it so hard to understand that ecosystems have equilibriums, and that changing one variable never occurs in isolation, and doesn't magically maintain a balanced system?
> It's not like there's infinite demand, and if you add ten million houses then eleven million people will instantly move to San Francisco. You don't say that giving a starving man food will only make his problems worse.
There's also not infinite supply. Not of resources, not of land, not of infrastructure.
It's not like you can add "ten million houses" and expect that you'll somehow solve affordability in isolation.
That's just naive 5th grade economics.
> Just curious, do you own real estate in San Francisco?
No, I moved away from San Francisco, and bought something elsewhere.
If I owned real estate in San Francisco -- and didn't care about quality of life -- density would be good for my pocket book.
Now, does adding a small amount of housing have any appreciable effect on average price? No.
Therefore, the solution is massive construction of new housing.
The obvious answer is yes, but the obvious answer is often wrong. Adding more freeway can create more demand, meaning no progress is made. [1] [2]
Right now the major constraint on having a larger tech industry in SF is the real estate expense; both offices and apartments are through the roof. It's so bad that established companies are opening or expanding offices elsewhere, and even many startups are trying other things. They wouldn't be doing that if they could keep expanding here, so no, adding lots more housing might do nothing but create more demand.
Also, saying "massive construction of new housing" so glibly suggests that there is a lot of empty land just waiting for construction. Take a look at a map of San Francisco: there are buildings almost everywhere, and the people in them are generally pretty happy where they are. Where there are no buildings, we mostly have parks, which people are also quite fond of.
Mencken wrote: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." As here, an number of those answers come from applying Econ 101 in a way where one might as well be saying, "Assume a spherical cow..." [3]
[1] http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
http://www.sf-planning.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documen...
You could easily rezone and up the density by a factor of 4 or 5.
Not so easy to upgrade the infrastructure (transit and otherwise) to handle 4-5 times as many people living in (and traveling out of and back into) the city, OTOH.
And if you do that, best case, you've got 4-5 times as many people living in the city, at similar costs, in smaller living spaces. Where's the gain?
Actually, this is the part where cities shine: infrastructure costs in cities are lower per-person than they are in suburbs. It's much more efficient to have a dense enough city that people can reasonably get around on foot or bike, for instance, than a suburb that requires driving everywhere. It puts way less wear and tear on the roads and requires fewer of them.
The suburban cul-de-sac generates traffic by making everyone take the same big roads. Cities can redirect traffic in any number of ways given a well-connected road network. With a mix of uses the need for heavy infrastructure decreases, as many trips that might in the suburbs require a car merely require a body healthy enough to move. Less driving can actually save lives, given how dangerous driving is. And those who drive in cities are probably less likely to die, given that speeds are much lower.
In large cities, transit becomes more efficient than building highways. For example, the DC Metro just got an expansion for ~$3 billion. Meanwhile, a single highway interchange in Virginia was redone with a cost of $.25 billion. A railroad can move way more people than 12 interchanges.
> And if you do that, best case, you've got 4-5 times as many people living in the city, at similar costs, in smaller living spaces. Where's the gain?
You've got lower infrastructure costs per-person than if 1x the people lived in the city and the other 3x-4x people lived in the suburbs, ultimately saving money. A lot of suburbs are long-term financially unstable as growth occurs because their infrastructure costs grow faster than economic growth grows the tax base to pay for said infrastructure.
Loudon County, Virginia, for instance, has drastically lowered its willingness to approve single family housing because it's realized that each new SFH actually gets a large net tax subsidy unless its value is above a certain threshold. More SFHs = budget death.
Apart from infrastructure cost savings due to the economy of scale, the other huge benefit is actually to economic growth: denser cities are more economically productive than less dense cities. In cities with good human capital, the effect is even stronger with higher density.
It's easy to see why this might be. For starters, for people and jobs in a given area means every person has access to more jobs than they would otherwise. In a spread out region, more jobs would be outside of reasonable commuting distance, meaning a good portion of workers would not be willing to take the jobs, due either to time or cost concerns (especially for the poor who will be less likely to afford a car, bus / train fare, etc.).
So yeah, the benefits are large. We founded cities for a reason thousands of years ago.
Now some might _choose_ to move because they could sell their single-family home for a much higher price to someone who would then build a multifamily building on the lot. But that's obviously their business.
But to the main point of your argument, about happiness: it's a general truism that people in low-density-zoned areas are happy there and oppose any sort of upzoning anywhere nearby. Upzoning nearby but not on their actual lot is particularly bad, because it would reduce the value of their real estate; people fight _that_ tooth and nail.
The result is that everyone who is already there is fine; it's people who are trying to enter the market, either via moving to the area or by growing up and trying to move out of their parents' house, who get screwed. But since by and large those people don't vote (the young for demographic reasons; the not-yet-residents because they're not yet residents), it's the incument residents who get to control the zoning rules to their exclusive (perceived, at least) benefit.
Which is all fine, but then prices get out of hand and people panic and start introducing things like rent control and whatnot, which makes prices get even more out of hand anytime someone actually moves. And then we see the current San Francisco real estate market.
People fight upzoning because they like where they live, and upzoning would destroy what they like about it.
As for "people trying to enter the market", upzoning makes it that much harder; condos are generally a worse investment, so most high-density developments are rentals. If you think housing prices are high, try the cost of a buying a rental building.
Lastly, the "incumbent residents" bit is hilarious. I believe that's called "a citizen", or "a community member" -- as in, the people who are paying the taxes and electing representative leadership to serve in the interests of their established community.
You didn't read what I said carefully enough. People fight _nearby_ upzoning because it reduces the value of their real estate. Upzoning of their actual land increases its value, of course.
Agreed on people fighting upzoning of their own land because it would change the surroundings in a way they find undesirable.
By "people trying to enter the market", I mean the housing market, not the real estate purchase market. That is, people trying to find a place to live. It's quite rare for people first moving out of their parents' house to do so by buying a house themselves; they typically rent. The result is that there are tons of places in the US (including San Francisco) where people have to move far away from their relatives when they move out on their own because there is nowhere nearby that is a viable place to live.
As for that last.... that's true if you exclude the interests of the children of the community (which are nearly always excluded; once the kids finish college they're on their own and typically shut out of the community). It's also true if you ignore the fact that some of these communities (and the Bay Area is particularly bad about it) try to create lots of employment opportunities but without the corresponding housing. This leads to hellish commutes for everyone, including the members of the community in question, lots of complaining, and poorer quality of life than you would have otherwise.
There are some unpleasant tradeoffs here, for sure. The problem is that some people refuse to acknowledge that the tradeoffs even exist and to discuss what the right tradeoff is. They insist that nothing must ever change, period, and it never occurs to them that this means that their commute will suck more and more and their kids will not be able to live near them.
Note that I say this as someone who lives in a suburb. I like it here. I would not be terribly happy with upzoning myself. And yet I'm watching a lot of the resulting problems play out (including people who grew up in the town being completely priced out of it). It's not pretty, and upzoning sure would help some of those problems.
Many such people would be pretty happy to have an independent one bedroom apartment in a 5 story building in the same neighborhood at a similar price, assuming some improved transit.
Personally, I also think a lot of land west of Twin Peaks is underutilized. But I think it's important for people not to be glib about the fact that a lot of the people living there think it's just fine, and that even for those who want something different we're talking about incredibly disruptive and expensive change.
How are you finding that has worked out for SF overall?
And two, I think things are working out reasonably well for SF. The US has a history of absolutely terrible attempts at grand redevelopment. Read up on our "urban renewal" waves, for example. San Francisco has mostly avoided or repaired that sort of urban planning idiocy, and I think it would be monumentally dumb to let another bubble lead to big "solutions" to problems that are transitory.
If you and others would like to indulge that third-world dictator tendency to dramatic urban planning, might I suggest finding someplace else in the Bay Area? San Francisco is less than 1% of the land; there's no particular reason to do it here. Or, better, show us how it's done in, say, Texas, which has plenty of space to develop that nobody is currently occupying.
If you think that then I have a bridge to sell you. A nice International Orange one.
SF is a hive of planning idiocy, from dumb height laws, to 1:1 parking requirements, to terrible permit application processes. It's practically a model for planning idiocy at this point.
Assuming you do, then I guess this is just more spleen venting. Anonymous spleen venting of course; I imagine you wouldn't act this way in person: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
If you want to see the cause for "the problem SF has had for nearly 30 years now", look in the mirror.
I wrote this more than a year ago: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-some-San-Francisco-residents-a...
As far as I can tell, the willful obliviousness is just as bad as then, and maybe worse.
It's not true, but it sounds right if you don't look too close.
The tech industry isn't the cause of anything but growth. Growth isn't bad. Growth is totally manageable. It's not like these issues magically showed up in the tech boom of the 90s - it just made them worse.
However what DID cause this: bad urban planning, lack of ability to change, being systemically unable to fix the housing issues over the last 40 years.
Plenty of places cope with growth periods better than SF, but SF doesn't want to cope with them: it wants to have it's cake and eat it too. It can't, but it's been trying for a long time and failing horribly.
This is not a new development. It's not a new problem. The solutions have been the same for a long time but no-one wants to change to fix them.
It appears we both agree that rapid growth is a proximate cause of the problem, and the tech industry is the main cause of that rapid growth. Where we differ is that you think a bunch of other people should immediately change to accommodate you, while you simultaneously refuse to acknowledge their perspective, which is that their previous system was working well enough for them until tech people came along in overwhelming numbers. And that maybe they were perfectly happy with how things are, and feel no particular need to change to suit you.
The rest looks like dickish handwaving to me. If you'd like to just keep yelling at people, stop bugging me. If you'd like to have an actual discussion, then start behaving respectfully.
IIRC, one of the notable things about SF in the .com burst was that housing prices did not drop significantly (as they did in outlying areas of the Bay Area), the rate of increase just dropped, as the people who still had good-baying SF jobs moved in from the peripheries and replaced the people who could no longer afford SF because they fell off the gravy train.
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/san-franciscos-fluctu...
My recollection is that housing rental was in between.
It's worth noting that the dot-com bust hit tech hard, but didn't do anything to housing nationally. So it's hard to separate the effect of the dot-com bust with the housing bubble that was starting to inflate at the time. And thinking about who I know who bought property right after the bust, it was people who made money in the previous bubble, which would also have a masking effect.
Just conservative and regressive selfish fools with no ability to look at the bigger picture to help their fellow man (and themselves)
What is true is that traffic flow does not depend on e.g. number of lanes. The problem of traffic flow has to be addressed on a system level rather that a individual street level. So e.g. variable speed limits can overall keep traffic flowing more smoothly than adding a lane to a freeway/motorway would.
In any case, the use of the analogy is correct. People are currently moving to the Bay Area because of the concentration of tech jobs and talent and investor money here. More people moving here means a greater concentration of the things that make people move here. For years this could be seen as a virtuous circle, but I think it has gone well past that. Especially if, as is widely felt, that we are in another bubble fueled by cheap investor money.
Short term, sure.
Long term, less clear. More people living in the city = more demand for various goods and services = more businesses competing for space with residences and more jobs and, thus, housing demand = higher market clearing prices for housing.
> Adding housing absolutely decreases the average price of housing. This is supply and demand.
You are assuming that the you can increase the supply without affecting demand. This is naïve.
If you re-zone some significant portion of the western and southern 3/4 of San Francisco by zones that allow for e.g. the construction of 4–5 story low-rise apartment buildings (ideally allowing ground floor retail), there will be room for dramatically more housing units to be built.
Developers are currently rushing to build on every bit of available land in SF that allows medium density construction (all the bits of that map that aren’t pale yellow). All of the parking lots, warehouses, and little one-story buildings in such areas are being converted to luxury condos at maximum speed.
With better transit and municipal planning throughout the Bay Area, there are many places where it would be possible to dramatically expand housing stock and bring housing rent down to more reasonable levels.
You can't increase housing supply without affecting demand. You also can't increase housing supply to meet demand ... unless you actually make the area so undesirable that demand itself drops, meeting you halfway.
In fact, interesting yet flawed theories of supply and demand are seldom used to justify some sort of "protect existing restaurateurs' oligopoly" law. That isn't to say that it isn't valid to limit the number or type of restaurant in any particular area for e.g. safety reasons. But that has to be process-based, not just a declaration that this neighborhood has enough.
You can't argue that allowing single-family structures to be replaced by e.g. townhomes in a reasonable fashion is somehow beyond us as a society.
That's not a change in demand, that's a change in market clearing quantity.
Conversely, increasing residential capacity increases people which increases demand for services for the people which creates jobs which creates demand for residential capacity.
> If more people go out to eat, restaurants will make more money.
In total, sure. Individually? No reason to expect that.
> You can't argue that allowing single-family structures to be replaced by e.g. townhomes in a reasonable fashion is somehow beyond us as a society.
Maybe one could could argue that (or argue that doing so "in a reasonable fashion" is self-contradictory), and maybe one couldn't. But its irrelevant, because that's not what any in this thread did argue.
What has been argued is that the naïve analysis of its effects on affordability considering it only as a supply change in housing without considering the less-direct effects that has on residential demand, demand for (and price of) essential infrastructure and services which factor in to cost of living, etc., is foolishly overoptimistic.
You are responding to a comment that didn't address your argument, because it's not actually a response to anything that you wrote.
The argument says "you can't argue" a point nobody argued for in the subthread it was responding to (or, AFAICT, anywhere else in the thread, or, for that matter, anywhere else ever.)
1) Allow non-local demand? Do people fedex overnight the food?
2) Significantly increase infrastructure load? Do people live at the restaurants when they're not serving food, and thus require schools, police, parking, roads, jobs, etc?
Even then, restaurants do create demand on the city, and they are managed via zoning laws.
A more accurate analogy -- claiming that high density development will bring more restaurant patrons, resulting in more restaurants opening, resulting in restaurant prices dropping.
In the long term: rent rises.
In DC proper, rents rose.
What do you call this, the Lewis Carroll school of economics?
* Generally, in CA, unless a property changes hands, its annual property tax increase is capped at 2% per year.
* AIUI, SF could waive any property tax increases for residential properties that would have been triggered by flattening the existing structures in order to build much more rental housing. [0]
[0] I'm not convinced that there would be any if the property didn't change hands, but it has been years since I read Prop 13.
I think you are referring to the maximum increase in tax basis value (which is only equal to the maximum property tax increase if it is taxed at the maximum value already, though that's probably the case, given the low cap on property tax rates also in Prop 13.)
And you are oversimplifying in a way which is misleading in this discussion: new construction triggers full cash value assessment not limited to the annual 2% increase.
> AIUI, SF could waive any property tax increases for residential properties that would have been triggered by flattening the existing structures in order to build much more rental housing.
To the extent that they could, where would the sense be in that? Accommodating more people, but reducing the public available to provide services needed by those people?
1) That's why I listed two points, rather than just one. :)
2) According to the Alameda County Assessor's office, the situation is not as grim as you seem to paint it (for every situation except the "building flattening" situation):
"Only the portion of the property which was newly constructed is subject to reassessment at market value. For example, if a family room is added to an existing home, only that portion is reassessed and the existing home will retain its previously established Proposition 13 base year value." [0]
This might partially explain all the damned San Francisco apartments with funky vintage 1970's-era single-paned windows. :P
> To the extent that they could, where would the sense be in that?
To encourage the build-out of housing in an area that has roughly between three and ten new people move in for each new housing unit constructed annually?
1) It's not like SF is currently starving for cash.
2) In the -very, very unlikely- scenario that only the ultra-wealthy, pensioners, and property "investors" occupy San Francisco, what happens to the tax base? What happens to the character of the city?
[0] https://www.acgov.org/assessor/about_property_assessment/new...
Maybe one day Jerry Brown will find enough money to adopt Narendra Modi style initiatives to end open defecation.
Hell, aside from the fact that it becomes a ghost town after regular business hours, many parts of FiDi are really attractive places.
If I recall correctly, only 9% of police officers that work in Manhattan live in Manhattan -- and Manhattan boasts an average density of 70k people per square mile.
NYC has a housing availability problem. It's the same one as San Francisco: new denser construction is near impossible to get a permit for. If NYC permitted lots more housing to be built, the cost of housing would become affordable.
Tokyo does not have a housing availability problem. The vast majority of families in Tokyo live in single family homes they own close to parks and rail transit. The ratio of housing cost to family income in Tokyo is more like affordable Dallas or Atlanta than nightmarishly expensive NYC or SF.
How did Tokyo do it? It permitted lots and lots of by-right building on small lots, issued permits automatically for new homes, didn't require any parking at all for every unit, platted out narrow streets, and built lots of rail transit at reasonable prices. There are few skyscrapers -- Tokyo's density is 150 (people/hectare), only double SF's average density and similar to North Beach, Pacific Heights, or Russian Hill.
It's too late for SF to build narrow streets, but permitting multi-story rowhouse construction throughout the city could easily add a few hundred thousand units and substantially reduce housing prices. A full solution will require other Bay Area cities to also permit reasonable density construction.
"Japan’s sluggish economy caused price gains in Tokyo to trail those in other urban centers like New York, London and Hong Kong since the 2008 global credit crisis."
"Homes are unlikely to become more affordable, with the yen’s 41 percent decline over two-and-a-half years and investment yields higher than in some major cities abroad propelling foreigners to buy. While Japan remains small by total transaction value compared with the U.S., Canada and Australia, it’s now “comparable” to those markets in terms of the number of clients seeking deals, said Gui of SouFun realty."
"It’s not as tolerable to Japanese. Prices in Tokyo have become “seriously unaffordable,” the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey shows."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-02/salarymen-...
New York City also does still have lots of opportunities to build upwards, many of which are being taken. A huge amount of housing inventory is coming online each year. The city is accommodating large influxes of new people. It could be doing even better with less restrictive air rights, but things could always be improved. San Francisco isn't doing as well by comparison.
And keep in mind, it's not like there's an infinite number of people living on the planet. Nor does building denser cities cause more people to be born that otherwise would (if anything, it's less). Housing demand thus isn't infinite, and it doesn't logically follow that addressing housing demand by building lots more housing is a self-perpetuating problem.
> Plus, in your fantasyland, demand would plummet. Who would want to live there?
I assumed that pbriet was making a claim that went something like "Cities that are packed with skyscrapers are barren hellscapes that noone wishes to live in.". To address that claim, I provided my subjective opinion of a section of San Francisco that is packed with skyscrapers, and reported what appears to be the community reaction to a new high-density high-rise apartment building in SoMA.
Meanwhile, those cities have high density (but nothing as ridiculous as +10M apartment archeologies) and haven't solved the problem.
Housing prices in cities are going to be more expensive than housing prices in the countryside. They shouldn't be so expensive that they exclude families and middle-to-lower-income households.
"Partly as a result of nascent Chinese buying, Tokyo apartment prices have reached the highest levels since the early 1990s, up 11 percent over two years, according to the Real Estate Economic Institute Co."
"It’s not as tolerable to Japanese. Prices in Tokyo have become “seriously unaffordable,” the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey shows."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-02/salarymen-...
Since the Bay Area has both crappy public transportation and not enough density it is doubly screwed. But incumbent homeowner NIMBYites and rent are happy, so great I guess?
If you meant to say "renters are happy", no, many of us are not. Those of us who were "lucky" enough to score a rent-controlled apartment around the 2008->2010 time frame are now trapped in those apartments; unable to move despite often worsening and/or malicious corporate landlords because of the substantial increase in rent hike that we would have to endure to find a new place.
If you meant to say something else, please disregard my previous 'graph. :)
Edit: Oh hey! Hallo again! I guess you've already heard all I have to say on the topic already. :)
For others: Don't forget that the city's colossal failure to build negatively impacts both those who wish to move into the city and those who wish to move within it.
The part about crappy public transportation is a reflection of our earlier conversation.
The rest is just an extended argument that the international rich are using real estate as a speculative investment vehicle/store of money. True, but that doesn't mean that adding housing exacerbates the problem of rich people bidding the prices of housing higher.
The problem for middle class people being that the domestic luxury condo buyers then get pushed into midrange property market where they outbid the middle class. The middle class then move into the low range property market outbidding the working class etc.
Anyway, the guy seems like he's doing the right thing for the city.
It isn't about cost, it is about willingness to embrace change and move forward.
Anyway, my point being that constant iteration or the use of heuristics have value, but it can also be useful to understand models, and occasionally take a break to think big about the direction you want to move in the long term, with the realization that many of the steps to get there will violate some pet heuristics.
As far as I know the US does not have a very good foundation for public infrastructure projects nor the cooperation between public and private entities. What you need to do is, like China, buy the best proven technology currently available. Then after you've made that work, take all that knowledge and invent the next big thing.
One could say the same thing about agile software development. :)
I moved out of CA, and man alive is it surprising how... corrupt... Caltrans is. I mean, really. In Denver we are building a rail line all the way out to the airport from downtown, something that I got to see start (2011) to finish (granted, spring 2016, but I have no doubts about it) for $1 billion total([2], projected cost) at ~8200 per foot. It's not a subway, so no digging, and the land is cheaper, but all the same. Something like this would be unimaginable in CA to take less than 15 years. The AirBart cost about $29,000 per foot and still costs $6 per ride [0] with a development time of ~30 years([1]data is suspicious though). Yes, it's elevated and in earthquake country, but my god, 29k a foot?! That's 3.5 times the cost per foot than in Denver. I honestly don't see it. Sure, the balance sheets are all likely out there in the public ledger, but honestly, I don't if I can trust them. In the end here, the author of this piece is right, but he misses the issue of corruption that plays into "Showing a willingness to think big." You can think big all you want, but if there is excessive need to 'grease wheels' to get something moving and built, then all the pie in the sky thinking in the world isn't going to do anything without the cash.
[0]http://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/controversial-ba...
[1]https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2014/news20140612-0
[2]
Heh, given that land out there east of the Arsenal refuge is almost free and the cost of building an elevated structure in an earthquake zone... this comparison is the first time the AirBART replacement has sounded cheap!
That's $428k per foot.
All the station numbers make it far too busy and crowd out the actual route lines.
Housing and transport are only a problem if you're going to keep trying to cram more people in there. That's silly.
Part of what makes San Francisco one of the USA's most appealing cities is that it hasn't expanded all that much in the last eighty years or so -- due to its unique geography which prevents outward expansion. (The population in 1930 was 634,000, in 2010 it was 805,000.)
http://www.wired.com/2008/10/five-us-earthqu/
Even Tokyo has most of it's trains above ground. See Yamanote line with 29 stations versus the 16 cumulative underground stations that both the Tokyo Waterfront Area Rapid Transit and Saitama Rapid Railway Line serve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway
Also of note, the New Oakland Bridge that took years to build, went seriously over budget, included a very disappointing design flaw. This bridge was mostly paid for by the State of California not San Francisco by itself.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Bridge-s-troubles-...
If San Francisco wants to have dozens of miles dug beneath its surface ignoring the potential of a "black swan" earthquake event then perhaps San Francisco and not the state of California should pay for it. Or more accurately, San Diego county, Orange County and Los Angeles county should NOT have to pay for it.
We love you San Francisco but you're not that awesome.
Edit: Another fun list: The world's 50 busiest train stations. Guess how many are Japanese [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_count...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_count...
[3] http://en.rocketnews24.com/2013/01/30/the-51-busiest-train-s...
Also, claiming that most of Tokyos subway is above ground is incorrect. The subways, Tokyo metro and Toei, are nearly entirely underground within the city center. This is hundreds of stations. Yamanote line is part of an entirely different set of trains for longer distance transit.
Also, suggesting that state taxes should not be unevenly distributed among the state misses the point of state taxes. It's fine to argue where the funds should best be used, but not that a county should only get the proportion it contributed. Why not just have local governments be the primary collectors/distributors of taxes then?
BTW, I love southern CA and think you're awesome :)
GDP Distribution per Brookings Institute numbers:
Los Angeles: $860-billion San Francisco: $331-billion San Diego: $202-billion San Jose $173-billion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP
I cannot find the numbers for Orange County as a whole.
Infrastructure spending in cities, even with big projects like bridges and subways, is much more efficient per capita than infrastructure spending in the suburbs.
Compared to the cost of cars, parking spaces, roads of all sizes, deaths and medical bills when cars hit each-other or pedestrians, CO2 emissions from gasoline engines, wasted time on long commutes, immobility in car-centric communities for people unable to drive, health effects of a sedentary lifestyle, etc., subways and other types of mass transit are an incredible bargain.
Beyond transit, consider the additional overhead costs of greater distances to get to schools, hospitals, police and fire departments, government offices, libraries, museums, grocery stores and all sorts of other businesses, or the higher per capita cost for electricity/gas/telecom/water/sewage infastructure, trash collection, street sweeping, etc. etc.
It's often said the being in the subway in Tokyo is one of the safest places to be in an earthquake. It might be scary but things are less likely to fall from 10 to 20 stories on your head like they are in outdoors in Tokyo.
http://blogdowntown.com/2012/08/6959-metro-tunnels-are-one-o...
On top of that for a place like SF subways don't have to be deep. It's not like there's 100 meters of earth above the subway. There's the street, under which there's the line. The only thing above your head is effectively a bridge construction except unlike a bridge it's got continuous support instead of a leg every 50 meters.
I've lived in Tokyo for a year, and this comment is grossly ignorant.
First of all, Tokyo Metro is just one subway company in the region. Tokyo Metro according to Wikipedia has 142 unique stations, most of which are underground.
For surface trains, the Yamanote loop line circles central Tokyo, with Chuo-Sobu cutting through the center. There are other surface trains that feed into central Tokyo but don't necessarily take you through Tokyo. There are some trains that also run along sections of the Yamanote line like the Keihin-Tohoku line and Saikyo line.
Other than those lines, if you want to travel around central Tokyo (within the area circled by Yamanote, you will most likely ride a Tokyo Metro subway (underground) or a Toei Subway (underground). Toei is the other major subway company in the region.
If anything, Japan and Tokyo is proof that SF and LA have no reason to not build subways despite their seismically active areas. Remember, Japan, including the Tokyo region, was hit with a 9.0 magnitude earthquake recently and many other high magnitude earthquakes in the last century alone. Tokyo is proof that earthquakes can be mitigated.
If there's one engineering failure of Tokyo it would be reclaimed land. A large portion of Tokyo (famously Odaiba, and Haneda Airport) are built on reclaimed land. This type of land shows problems especially due to earthquakes. For this reason residents tend to shy away from purchasing houses in these areas because there's a high risk of issues with the soil and foundations. But this makes perfect sense, reclaimed land is basically dumping dirt into what used to be water to make more land.
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The only way this comment gets remotely close to accurate is if it is counting for the entire Tokyo region and not just Central Tokyo. But this would be the equivalent of comparing the entire Bay area. Outside of central Tokyo, the trains do run on the surface. But Tokyo uses trains as a primary means of transportation so lines can continue for hours as they go into remote areas of Tokyo or connect to other lines despite different ownership of the track. For example it is possible to take a single train (no transfers) from Haneda airport to Narita airport. The ride will take over 2 hours but you will have technically traveled on 3 separate lines operated by 3 separate rail companies. Oh and one of those lines is a subway line.
http://priceonomics.com/what-parts-of-san-francisco-are-buil...
Our roads can move a certain number of vehicles per minute at their maximum throughput. When more cars attempt to access the road, throughput goes down. Set the price of driving on a road at the level that maximizes throughput.
As prices go up, some people won't be able to afford to drive alone. Instead, they'll pick up paying passengers, or pay another driver for a ride. As more people desire to travel in San Francisco, the price will go up, and more people will share a van (or a bus!) to get where they need to go. Traffic won't come back.
Today, San Franciscans pay for their commute by sacrificing time they could spend with their friends and family. Instead, we should pay by sacrificing personal space during our commutes.
Subways are an unnecessary expense when our streets are so poorly utilized. We can triple the capacity of our roads by charging a price that keeps traffic moving.
It terrifies me that you are serious. The best way to better utilize our streets is to dedicate more space for cycling, there is absolutely no way to get the same density in an automobile.
Your idea also presents basically no solutions for people who don't have elasticity in their budget. "Sorry, grandma, you can't go to the doctor today because the market is readjusting the price of transit to optimize for throughput in the future, when you might be dead."
In an ideal situation, we would have good subway systems alongside more promotion of bike use. I personally have a couple disabilities making bike use difficult :( I would kill to have a Seoul Subway-esque system in SF (the best system I've experienced firsthand, I'm sure there are better but it's among the best/biggest).
It's bizarre when people write something like this and then are basically wrong. A van or bus is more space efficient than bikes.
The price doesn't adjust for future optimization. It adjusts for current optimization.
Price-sensitive people like Grandma would go to the doctor for the same price she always does. She'd just share the ride with more people. This is exactly what a subway would do, except without the need for expensive infrastructure.
Arguable, but buses are higher density than vans, trains are higher density than buses, and subways aren't subject to traffic.
The bicycle isn't in competition with the subway, it's in harmony with it.
> She'd just share the ride with more people. This is exactly what a subway would do, except without the need for expensive infrastructure.
I don't think if you extrapolated the current ridership of BART just for people traveling within San Francisco that you would find it practical to run buses for all of them, and when a vehicle on the ground during rush hour (including buses) is rarely moving more quickly than a typical pedestrian, the subway has an obvious advantage.
You can try to traffic engineer all day, but the fastest route between two points on earth is through the earth. :)
Buses move slowly because they're stuck in traffic and they stop all the time. Congestion pricing eliminates traffic. Ride hailing apps reduce the number of stops.
Subways are better than buses. That doesn't mean we need subways. We can eliminate traffic all over the city for a much lower price, then we can build more subways when streets packed with full vans aren't enough to move people around.
Yes, the driver will need to be paid as well, but people often run carpools that only charge for the price of gas. The prevailing rate for a ride will be low because there are plenty of people heading in the same direction who just want to defray their costs. Regardless, the mechanics of congestion pricing guarantee that people will use alternatives to driving. The congestion price will go up until people start choosing to share rides, take transit, or do something else.
Congestion pricing works. It's not an untested idea. It just isn't widely used. It should be, because it eliminates traffic. Ride hailing apps give even cities without great transit a great alternative to driving alone, which makes congestion pricing a universal solution to traffic.
The choice is not between paying $3000 a year in congestion charges (to pick a number that would plausibly dissuade) or spending 4 hours a day on a badly-run transit system - the obvious third choice is to move away to a place where commuting is cheaper and faster. This will make labour more scarce and expensive for the local corporates, who will also sooner or later move away to a saner place with cheaper labour. Presto, you've fixed all traffic problems by killing the city.
Options like buses and shared vans/cars are no one's preferred ride, but it is an infrastructure that's already scaled up for all of the US, and it ends up being very cheap. It takes less traffic reduction than you might think to make congested roads fast moving.
It is also worth pointing out that SF essentially is building the infrastructure to replace the BART with buses right now...Buses from the new terminal will have a dedicated ramp on to the bay bridge, and I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting a full lane for the full BRT experience. If you haven't noticed an impact from that construction, versus say the Chinatown subway messing up all of 4th street, then it really speaks to why buses are a pretty easy solution.
How about a double-decker bus? Busses also have the added benefit that they are safer, and since you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can read, crochet, surf the internet, work, sip your coffee, etc., while you commute.
I don't think there's any reason to subsidize the usage of road space. I'd rather use that money to subsidize food, shelter, and education.
Congestion pricing isn't a tax. Its intent isn't to raise funds. You could rebate all of the revenue to low income folks and still achieve the goal of eliminating traffic.
Congestion pricing isn't regressive since it's easy to split the cost. If you want to pay less, ride with more people.
The employer won't be more flexible nor will the salaries go up; what would happen is the employee would complain and the employer wouldn't care because they'd know there's someone out there who's so desperate for a job that they'll take the horrible situation.... e.g., the awful working conditions of a lot of immigrants.
That will never, ever fucking happen. Employers don't give a shit.
"Congestion pricing isn't regressive since it's easy to split the cost."
That has absolutely nothing to do with it being regressive. It's regressive because it disproportionately affects poor people.
Road space is scarce. Poor people get less scarce goods. Luckily, road space is easy to share, which is what poor people do with scarce things. This is not an affront to the current order. There are plenty of things I want to pay for so poor people can have more of them. Road space is not one of them.
Much, much less than the people you're targeting with these taxes. "Oh, you can't afford to drive to work now? You're fired. There's a line of people out the door who can and want a job."
" If they need workers in order to make money, but workers can't afford to get to work, they will pay more money"
No, they won't. They'll pick people up from the pile of applications they have, and try again. Rinse and repeat.
" If you don't believe that, fine. Just raise the minimum wage instead."
Or how about we just don't institute an extremely regressive tax scheme?
Seriously, your lack of empathy for the very people you're going to attack with your plan is astounding.
While some kind of big master plan would, if executed well, produce a better result, I'd prefer to stick to smaller projects with reasonable deliverables which actually happen, and then hack together a less effective than ideal, but still better, end result.
Arguing like this for all-or-nothing is a great way to get nothing, which makes me sad because SFBA transit is such shit today.
What's stopping an extension from San Jose to Millbrae?
And by then, robotic construction and material will have advanced so much that it will be much cheaper to build underground in the future than it is now.
But underground is definitely the way to go for transportation, even in earthquake country. The surface should be quiet and safe, our streets converted to bike paths and gardens.
So lets at least make sure that underground construction could also accommodate vehicles other than trains. Because all that track will eventually be ripped out when we are liberated from the tranny of the train schedule.
Robocars constitute a percentage improvement at the surface, but don't overcome inherent capacity/land-use/energy tradeoffs between a packed subway car and a congested highway. You cannot get around the problem of automobiles using more space. [0]
You will have robocars, but also robobuses and robotrains. This is a "all over, everywhere, better" improvement, not a "this one wins and crushes the others." Flexibility is important - the city is making some progress on bike paths and can continue doing much better still.
Furthermore, better architecture, land use, and future lifestyle changes hold the potential to keep density at a higher average level while improving the feeling of street life to be more like the "peaceful suburban" ideal - walkable, yet quiet and non-disruptive. Framing transportation as a land-use problem - something built up from prior decisions about what real estate to build and where to build it in order to minimize average trip times and potential disruptions - rather than an engineering exercise of making as many roads and rails and tunnels and bridges as you can so that every vehicle may race along at 200 MPH for the smallest errand - drastically changes what you can do and the budget you can accomplish it with, which makes it more likely to be realized in our lifetimes.
That said, I agree with the article. SF has fallen far behind its housing demand, and the lack of a "virtuous cycle" of transit projects to encourage development in outlying neighborhoods shares some blame in that. It should not be the case that it's harder to go between downtown and the Richmond than to make the same trip to Oakland.
However, replacing road traffic with robots is more appealing. Railways already have an almost-perfect safety record, and the cost of the driver is spread over many passengers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
Once cabs are automated, it won't matter if public transit is.
Without human drivers, cabs will be cheaper to use than your own car.
And that's when public transit dies.
A cab will always be much faster and will get a whole lot cheaper once its robotic.
An urban train can only get as fast as it already is.
And though coordination by autonomous vehicles could cut down on highway congestion, speeds within the city are unlikely to match what a subway system could offer. You don't want cars rushing through your neighborhood at 60 mph, no matter if it's a machine or a human behind the wheel.
http://www.wearetraffic.org/sites/default/files/images/Bike_...
Self-driving cars would help by removing some drivers not paying attention and causing additional congestion (eg: not moving on green lights or causing accidents).
You could have a large network of self-driving cars that you simply hail on your phone and quickly pick you up. It won't look like a 4-door car, but more likely a small bus like you find in many parts of the world. People going in similar directions travel together, only picking up and dropping off with minimal interruption. In lower periods of demand, these are stored in lots with no wasted space as only a LIFO 'stack' is needed.
Furthermore, self-driving cars could be programmed to move in caravans with minimal following distance and aerodynamic efficiency to boot. Not terribly helpful in an urban situation (probably some minor traffic density increase), but wonderful for commutes which could dramatically decrease density.
So, you'd not only increase occupancy (easily 8 people in a car-sized footprint, presuming electric cars), you could also increase traffic density. All told, an order of magnitude capacity increase seems within reason, and in a reasonable amount of time.
That said, I think subways are still a good investment for the time being.
These might be helping to encourage last mile usage, the questions are whether it's A) available B) successfully reducing car ridership.
And the major population centers of California aren't, exactly, "nowhere".
2 hours and 40 minutes from downtown SF to downtown LA by train beats flying once you factor in transport to and from airports, security checks etc. Not to mention that SFO and LAX can't increase capacity to follow demand. The high speed rail project makes a ton of sense.
I don't have a real opinion on California high-speed rail. It's certainly hugely expensive and probably depends on whether it makes sense for relatively price-insensitive business travelers as the Acela does.
Also the big expense is not the high speed rail part of the system, is the commuter rail part through the bay area and LA. That;s the expensive bit. Not the straight high speed sections through the central valley.
And in SoCal, I normally use John Wayne, not LAX - one of the worst airports in the world due to endless construction.
Acela is basically priced so enough business folks who would consider flying take the train
1/2 the city is gonna be underwater by 2050, right?
As linked to above, see this gif: http://i.imgur.com/kw8DaST.gif
At some point I think that San Francisco should look at itself and say "Hey, we're a small, earthquake-prone hilly penninsula, we can't expand outwards. Traffic flow is constrained by planning decisions made a long time ago. We've got a pretty good quality of life as it is, and lots of nice historic buildings. Let's just put a lid on it and declare we're basically full".
Many of the nicest cities in Europe are ones where at some point in the past they've decided to stop building in the historic city centre and just leave things as they were at some particular point in time.
If anything I think San Francisco needs fewer people. San Francisco should focus on quality of residents, not quantity.
Sure, not everyone who wants to live there can afford to live there, but that's always the way it is in desirable places, otherwise we'd all live in Vanuatu or something.
It's just that some people object to that process. Including, seemingly, people who live and vote in SF. They believe they can have a city that limits overall housing supply while simultaneously growing housing supply for the homeless, for the working poor, and for everyone else.
San Francisco is a nice place.