New analysis of the impact of tech buses in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

New analysis of the impact of tech buses in San Francisco

citylab.com

43 pointsrobotcookies77 comments

The bus is a symptom of the problem: people don't want new people joining their group. This isn't specific to San Francisco or even housing. Get rid of the buses (which by their nature cut down on pollution and traffic congestion) and people would find some other topical to complain about.

You see this all the time in New York. After living here a few years, I'm pretty sure the only way to deal with this is to ignore it. People are going to complain loudly about new people moving into their neighborhood. They can't stop inevitable (people are going to continue to move to urban centers) any more than I can.

The article hits it - it's easier to complain about the buses and tech gentrification than it is to fix the actual problems - high rents brought upon by the same anti-new-development, nimby attitudes trying to keep the tech buses out.

The other issue this is a symptom of is the terrible public transportation in San Francisco, where it takes an hour to go 4 or 5 miles and three hours to go from the west part of San Francisco to Silicon Valley, plus being packed in like sardines for the entire standing-room-only trip.

The cushy tech buses thus incite further outrage from those who are forced to take public transport to work every day.

Is there any plan to improve the public transport? In a large city in the Midlands UK we have new 'platinum' express buses with larger seats, wifi and rather swish branding. Same price as standard if you have a travel pass but more if you pay for an individual journey. Getting closer to the train service slowly. Metro coming on line soon as well.

Regionally? Not really. The only thing coming is electrification of Caltrain, which has been under design for close to 20 years at this point and all they have to show for it is an environmental impact report. They haven't even put out the project for bidding yet.

Even with electric Caltrain getting from San Francisco to places like Facebook, Apple, and Google will be a pain. Their major campuses are not well-sited for transit service. It's 3.5 miles from Palo Alto Caltrain to Facebook, and not a very nice walk at all.

There will be self driving cars by then.

There's always lots of talk from the politicians about plans to improve it, but so far few concrete results. Within the city, the only thing that's actually under construction is a very expensive new subway to ferry tourists from the city center to Chinatown and back. There is also a segment of a high speed train intended to run from San Francisco through Silicon Valley and to Los Angeles, but much of that has been tied up in court by the many Silicon Valley municipal governments, who imagine that it will ruin the (non-existent for 60 years) quaint small town semi-rural character of the area.

A major problem is that there's no political unit of the correct size: San Francisco is too small and California is too big.

Exactly. The local economy long ago outgrew the municipal structures. The state should do what New York City did a century ago and merge all of the tiny local governments into a single unified entity. San Francisco is a big city that hasn't yet realized it's not a small city anymore.

Hmmm.

Well, we managed to do it in the Minneapolis metro area. I live on a farm (obviously in a rural area) and I work in downtown Minneapolis about 40 miles and two counties away. I take an express bus to work every day after driving about 15 miles to a Park & Ride (free parking). Since it can use the HOV lanes or drive on the shoulder when necessary, the bus consistently gets me there in less than half the time of driving and I don't need to pay for downtown parking or deal with the stress of bumper to bumper traffic. The actual bus ride costs a little less than I would have to spend on gas to drive there.

Minneapolis has made some streets in downtown bus-only in one direction so there is little intermingling of bus & automobile traffic.

I have to say it works very well.

> A major problem is that there's no political unit of the correct size: San Francisco is too small and California is too big.

If only there was a political unit -- say, maybe, a "district" -- of larger geographical scope than San Francisco, but smaller than California, focused on providing rapid transit for the San Francisco Bay Area...

The BART system you refer to was gutted. It met with heavy resistance from the local governments in the Marin and Peninsula suburbs who feared it would "alter the character" of their quaint semi-rural villages (which haven't been that for a very long time.) They got away with it and effectively blocked most of the planned system from ever being completed.

Original plan: http://www.jakecoolidgecartography.com/regional-rapid-transi...

> Is there any plan to improve the public transport?

Yes, including, among others, the Silicon Valley BART Extension (which will provide a BART/Caltrain/Amtrak connection), and the Transbay Transit Center development (which ultimately is planned to provide a BART/Caltrain/Cal High Speed Rail/Many Bus systems connection in downtown SF.

Yes, they are now, in 2015, talking about completing part of the southern loop of the system that was planned in 1956: http://www.jakecoolidgecartography.com/regional-rapid-transi...

Slower than that. I used to regularly walk from IIRC chestnut and Mason to CalTrain through Chinatown at around 6pm and regularly beat the 30.

Basically bikeshedding real life.

Or people could actually have a point when they think there are other parts of the bay area that are more suited for large scale development. What's ridiculous is to have buses running from the most developed area in the region through wast areas of sprawling suburbia and back again day after day. Then make simplistic statement how if you just build more SF will over night become like NY or Paris that had a 100 years to build their infrastructure. I don't know of any city outside China that manage to handle this level of growth by building in established areas, it just doesn't happen.

Lots of high growth cities accomplish this, look at singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, India, etc. Not just China, but, no, we want to preserve character while at the same time remain affordable, two opposing forces. And truth be told, change should be the only constant. I understand we have a bit of envy vis a vis Europe, given their thousand plus year histories of cities, but I prefer the more pragmatic eastern philosophical take and action. When you need housing and transit, you promote it and build it.

The not so funny thing is that when results from studies commissioned by a supe don't meet their expectations, the supes commission new studies hoping the new study gets the hint and brings results in line with their presumptions.

Looking at you supe campos.

A lot of people are afraid, from every walk of life and demographic around the Bay Area.

The poor and working class who are the lifeblood of the city are realistically worried about being priced out if they don't own already. New tech workers are completely unable to break in to even moderate land ownership to lock in cost-of-living, and experience the same. And forget about our critical social contributors like teachers, who are forced to depend on another income to fund their work.

I know several Googlers fleeing the bay out of fear. It doesn't matter how much money they have or don't have, they have come to the conclusion they can't and don't want to fight an infinitely growing market that absorbs every raise, bonus, or stock grant back into rent. Got a new RSU grant? Great, your landlord just raised the rent by $20,000 over the year. Got a big bonus? Sorry, that down payment now needs to be double what it was last year... try again next year!

What I sense is fear everywhere, that is driving greed. A runaway market means you can never have enough to overcome a future where you will be priced out. This feedback loop drives land owners and workers into and endless cycle of misery thats making the Bay a very undesirable place to live.

The tech buses are the most visible thing to blame, but ironically these are liking making commutes slightly more tolerable than they would be without them.

Yup. I really just wish someone was politically savvy enough to bring the tech workers and working class together into a political coalition against the rentiers.

The large number of people from all walks of life who already own land in the bay area aren't afraid. They think this is great.

It might not be obvious right away, but San Francisco is really tolerant and open minded. That picture looks like yet another hate rally targeting a specific demographic, but it's really a welcoming party for new arrivals to the city.

Edit: Yes, yes, I know I'll get some downvotes for this. But hate and prejudice are disgusting, even when they are popular or politically correct.

It's not hatred, merely open minded progressive concern about newcomers with a different culture immigrating, changing the ethnic balance of SF and (indirectly) causing job loss. /sarcasm

San Francisco is nowhere near as tolerant and open minded as it claims to be. It's still far better than almost everywhere else though.

I mostly agree. Although I'd say it's radically tolerant in some ways and very intolerant in others. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that most inhabitants are very tolerant and a few extremists are not.

It's not hard to come up with other places that are vastly more tolerant of newcomers.

Consider, for example, Houston. Houston issued permits to build 64,000 new homes in 2014. SF issued permits for 3800, and California as a whole issued 83,000.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/hou...

http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/files/publications_reports/20...

In fact, Texas issued more new housing permits than CA, NY, NJ and MA combined.

http://www.census.gov/construction/bps/txt/tb2u2014.txt

Or did you just mean abstract tolerance of certain socially approved groups as opposed to the real humans who want to move in?

You gotta imagine it from an old-time SF residents perspective, though.

A lot of people have seen their friends get pushed out by the rent situation, and slowly, places like the Castro are becoming less beacons of the gay pride community and more like another up-and-coming hip place to be.

It's not intolerance to be annoyed by it, a lot of the residents of the city loved the city for its culture but now there's so many tech bros in the land that the culture is being displaced.

The world's in flux, so tough shit, but as both a native to the area and a tech worker, in my opinion, this city is becoming less open minded.

We should just adopt the Japanese zoning system and tell NIMBYs to pound sand. Housing is a matter of regional and national impact and we shouldn't allow small, well-organized groups to freeze housing in our most productive regions.

What is the Japanese zoning system?

Zoning is set by Tokyo, very little or no local control.

To quickly summarize, zoning is of course what you can or can't build on a given space. In the US, this is almost exclusively controlled at the local level. In Japan, it's mostly at the national level.

In the US, the zoning process isn't simple. We can have hundreds of different zones that attempt to micromanage even what kind of stores go on which block. In most of America we have exclusionary zoning: only this kind of thing can go here, everything else is disallowed.

In addition to zoning, we have lots of other planning rules. How far a house is set back from the street, minimum acreage, maximum height, parking requirements, floor area ratio (FAR).

The net effect is that much of America is unwalkable. Your closest grocery store, gym, office, etc. is in another zone. Your house has to sit on at least half an acre, so that would mean longer walking distances and a smaller customer base. Buildings can't front the sidewalk due to setbacks.

You have to navigate a sea of parking because the urban planners said that your store must build enough parking to handle Black Friday, even though most of it is unused every other day of the year. Oh, and it must be free.

When you build, you must navigate all of these complicated rules. Because it's all at the local level, your neighbors are empowered to protest and stop the process, because your neighborhood council has the power to stop it for arbitrary reasons, mostly codewords to keep "others" out.

All of these things have an environmental and economic cost.

In Japan, it's much simpler. There are way fewer zones to choose from. Most zones that include anything other than residential only will include all uses considered to be lesser nuisances in addition to whatever new uses it allows. For instance, a commercial zone also allows residential. A light industrial zone allows commercial and residential activity. Some zones, like heavy industry, only allow that single use. This is due to fire and safety needs.

Japan also has FAR limits, setbacks, etc., but most of these are based on something rational: shadows. The idea is that, without special exemption, casting shadows on neighboring properties is bad and heights, setbacks, etc. are all based on this. Japan as far as I know doesn't push things like parking minimums, so builders build however much parking they think they'll need.

The net effect is that much of Japan is denser than America. There are way less tall buildings than you'd imagine, but it's uniformly medium density until you get out into the countryside.

A lot of errands can be accomplished with a quick walk or bike ride. Because of the density, public transit can actually be run at a profit by private companies, who make money on real estate as well as transportation. That is, incidentally, the reason why systems like the New York subway were built: to make money, especially via real estate.

While Japanese megacities like Tokyo are expensive, they are actually fairly affordable as compared to other megacities like London or New York. The ratio between median income and housing price means that it's possible for your median household to get something. Japan builds a ton of housing, way more than NYC does.

What's great is that if you're priced out of Tokyo, most Japanese cities are going to be fairly walkable given the good planning, so there isn't the "I must live in New York to live in a city" issue we have in America where places like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, DC, etc. all have huge demand because they are the few walkable cities.

The negative to the Japanese system is lack of local control over most things. Japanese localities have some levers, but mostly the national government controls everything. Lots of Japanese buildings are IMO ugly, but there is some architectural experimentation that would be difficult to do in America. For instance, this (close) restaurant: http://okinawahai.com/naha-harbor-diner-aka-the-treehouse-re...

Imagine that restaurant in downtown $AMERICAN_CITY.

Was the protest ever _specifically_ about buses or the influx of tech workers with the ability to push up rental prices? Protesting infront of the bus is the most visible expression of that frustration, but it doesn't mean that people attribute the bus itself as the problem.

Not so much, but the long bow they drew relied pretty heavily on the existence of the buses. The buses were a centralised point in SF that had all the Tech companies and tech workers so they could make a showing. Otherwise you've just got a lot of people who are fairly indescript. (then it looks really racist and anti-immigration when you're protesting foreign people).

There was a part of me that really hoped the buses stopped just because the problem wouldn't. Then everyone who's up their own arses about SF's progressiveness would actually be in the position of Shut the fuck up or protest immigrants and look like racist douchebags.

Mind you, also the latter isn't strictly true either. SF does have a housing problem, but when one of your major cities won't build over two stories high and have high density housing, well... no shit right?

The building restriction is ridiculous. I don't know enough about the players and their motivations, but could it be that landlords don't want to lose that 4200$ median rent? Has this been put up to referendum?

I don't know much about it as well to be honest other than bits I've seen and I opted for avoiding the area pretty soon after.

If it is, its ultimately self-limiting. Other cities around the world have happily embraced urban density and its done wonders for all concerned. Nice new affordable housing. Landlords make more in quantity not necessarily margin. Commercial ventures have more customers and employees.

SF is really weird to me and I can't quite grasp the motivations for not densifying in a meaningful way other than a rather simplistic "Keep the charm" kind of motif. That seems to trivial as an explanation to me, but other stories always invoke long circuitous logic that boarders wayyy to heavily on the Immigrants=bad speak without actually invoking it for my tastes.

It was what protesters had claimed. There's a vocal NIMBY demographic in the bay area that blame tech workers for the current property bubble, even though most of the tech workers can't afford property either.

I don't think anyone took it seriously though. Most viewed the shuttles as doing what this study confirms.

I find this whole thing quite funny. One of the 'best cities' is missing basic infrastructure such as public transport, bike lines or high rise buildings. But there is a debate if buses are privileged or not.

Why don't we just move everyone out of SF and close it. If you're going to fight over it, we'll just take it away.

>But moooom! The poor started it!

We should have an open competition for ideas to fix the disconnect between all public transport;

Bart and Caltrain don't connect and don't schedule together.

Amtrak and Bart and Caltrain don't connect.

Muni and Bart connect physically but their schedules suck (muni schedules 6 consecutive inbound trains to all dump off and go off line at the same time in the peak of rush hour backing up people in the station)

Tickets between Bart and muni have no discount, so you may take muni for five minutes and lose your "85 remaining minutes of paid travel time"

Bike support on all systems is abhorrent - even on Caltrain the bike cars often fill up completely leaving many bikers awaiting another train, even though there is technically space on the full ones.

Bart has many stretches of track where they can only drive and very slow speeds, as does Caltrain, muni as well...

All agencies operate in a seemingly uncooperative manner, both with each other and their riders. (Bart employees are some of the rudest, least connected people I've encountered. Telling the Bart station agent about sanitary issues I. The elevator and escalators replies with "it's not my job")

The list goes on and on

> Tickets between Bart and muni have no discount, so you may take muni for five minutes and lose your "85 remaining minutes of paid travel time"

Actually you get $0.50 off the cash fare if you transfer from BART to Muni, and on certain transfers (e.g. from BART to Muni 14L in Daly City) you pay nothing.

I've never once seen this happen on my clipper card loaded with "cash value"

Do you have a youth pass? I get the discount every time. It reads out right on the screen when I tag onto a Muni bus or streetcar.

> Bart and Caltrain don't connect and don't schedule together.

Not sure about scheduling, but BART and Caltrain they connect at the Millbrae Transit Center.

> Amtrak and Bart and Caltrain don't connect.

As noted above, BART and Caltrain do connect. Amtrak and BART connect at the Richmond and Oakland Coliseum stations. Amtrak and Caltrain connect at San Jose Diridon Station (which is planned to also get BART service with the Silicon Valley BART extension.)

BART, Caltrain, Muni, and eventually California High Speed Rail -- among other transit systems -- are all planned to connect at the new Transbay Transit Center in SF, as well.

> Tickets between Bart and muni have no discount

Untrue; BART to Muni transfers have a discount (or, in some cases, are free): https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/muni/fares.do

I dont find those connections to be practical. Further they are scheduled very poorly.

If you take Bart to Millbrea, the logistics of getting from Bart to the train can at times be difficult to make. The scheduling is that Bart will arrive either two minutes too late - or twenty minutes early... Then, you even run the risk of the bike car being full if you're attempting to get the <9AM train...

Overall, to get to Mountainview by 10AM from Alameda on public transport I'd have to leave my house at 6:30AM

So - while achievable - the experience is piss-poor.

Ill have to look at the transfer discounts - as I had not noticed them ever hitting my card as I have to take Munit to bart, then bart to work...

If there was YC best comment ever award, I would nominate this.

Thanks! I was worried because it's not really up to HN standards. However, I'm just so tired of all the bickering about SF.

As long as everyone wants to build tech businesses only in the SF area, you are going to have problems with too many people and not enough (desirable/affordable) places to live. I lived there 20 years ago for a year and never wanted to go back, even less now. Thankfully I am moving to a city with lots of room and very pleasant choices for places to live. No latter how denimbyed you want to make SF, there isn't enough land to deal with even more people.

Where are you moving to?

I tend to doubt their methodology of surveying people who are already riding the buses. I think many of those who claim they would drive or take public transportation would pretty quickly realize that both options pretty much suck for getting from SF to Menlo Park, Cupertino, or Mountain View. I'd guess that "live closer to work" would be the dominant option once people were exposed to the reality of their choices.

Your first sentence goes real well with the last sentence.

There's also option 3: Google further expands its presence in San Francisco until everyone who lives in the city can work there too.

Did they do an analysis of the tech buses in comparison to actually creating new municipal transportation open to all residents? That's what always seemed to be the real problem with them to me.

What do you envision such an agency would look like? "Tech buses" is a thing that hauls thousands of people from all over six counties to a small area. The only thing similar in scope is BART, and we already have BART, and it's not that good.

What we need is a S-Bahn-like service running up both sides of the Bay from San Jose to San Francisco and Richmond. The tracks are already there, we just suck at trains. An electrified two-track mainline railroad operating on 5-to-10-minute headways with bi-level cars would completely solve our traffic problems, and bring the Bay Area up to the standards of minor second-tier European cities.

Is there any way any private access to said tracks could be had?

What about designing rail cars based on Teslas open patents for small, semi-autonomous electric rail cars that operate on a very tight automated schedule along a public track.

See, that right there is the problem with Americans. There is NO NEED for some new kind of rail car. Ordinary bi-level passenger trains with 6 cars carry ~2500 people and can run on 2.5-minute headways (1000 people per minute).

Well, to be fair the carrying capacity of Caltrain is immense, but they are slow as hell, poor coverage area and if you want to commute from the east bay simply to mountain view via Caltrain its three hours one way!!!

So while technically you may be correct, they way they have been implemented here in the Bay Area, is, in my opinion, an utter failure.

What's worse, is we knew they were a failure from an efficiency standpoint twenty years ago.

So either we join all the agencies together and fire any schedulers they have and start from scratch. Or we find some way to do what these agencies can't.

I think there's also the US rule that passenger trains sharing the track with freight trains need withstand collisions. That's why they are heavy and less efficient than lighter european trains.

All forms of public transit in the region require subsidies. Why should we spend public tax dollars on a bus to Google, of all things?

Your statement is suspiciously worded, because all forms of motorized transport, public or private, are deeply subsidized around here. Shouldn't the first subsidy to be reduced be the one lavished upon private cars?

I agree that all forms of motorized transport are heavily subsidized. We're already subsidizing the highways, gas, lack of pricing of externalities such as air pollution, etc. Given all that, why should taxpayers further subsidize the vehicle itself and the operator, instead of letting Google pay for all of that?

The history of BART pretty much shows that's politically infeasible. Take a look at the original planned map for BART sometime if you want to get really depressed: http://www.jakecoolidgecartography.com/regional-rapid-transi...

Yep. I live in a county that openly opposed bart expansion.

The only way to get a big transit expansion is if the state or federal government forces it over local opposition.

Only in San Francisco do you get liberals who are virulently anti-immigrant and anti-busses.

Are you using 'immigrant' to describe privileged tech workers who move to the city? This seems a strange misappropriation of the word.

Nothing about the term "immigrant" reserves it to the poor. In what way are people who move into San Francisco from elsewhere in the world not immigrants?

I've long wanted to do a quiz on identifying whether phrases are from San Francisco liberals or Donald Trump.

> Nothing about the term "immigrant" reserves it to the poor

No, but it is generally reserved for people whom have permanently settled in another country. That doesn't include H1B (non-immigration) workers that could be thrown out if fired.

Nowhere near the majority of SV tech workers are on an H1B visa.

Other popular visas aren't immigration visas either. Your point doesn't hold since by large peoples attitudes doesn't differ between immigrants and temporary workers, if people are from outside or inside the country nor relate to immigrants that settle outside the bay area. They are maybe protectionistic, anti-urbanization or anti-development but not anti-immigrant per se.

What? Immigrants are not poor. We need to be careful because a lot of people are strongly against asylum seekers and other migrants saying things like "They've got smart phones, they're not poor". That ignores the fact that asylum seekers are not fleeing poverty but violence and oppression.

Many, if not most of them, are indeed immigrants.

I think you've just uncovered more about your own biases and prejudices than any kind of politically correct idea you were trying to further.

What is a privileged tech worker and how is it not immigration if they change location?

To be fair, the buses actually make the problem worse. Without them, I think a lot of Google employees would think twice about living in SF and commuting to Mountain View.

You didn't even read the article, did you?

The article doesn't ask the question "how many people moved to the city who otherwise wouldn't if there wasn't a free, comfy, Wi-Fi enabled bus available?" It starts from the assumption that everyone commuting from the city would do so regardless.

Yes, it does. There are percentages shown relating how many would (if the shuttle service was gone): drive alone, carpool, move, get a closer job, take public transportation... Granted it is self reported but whatever.

The question "now that you're here, what would you do if the buses disappeared" does not accurately account for people who made the decision to live further away from work because they know there is an employee-sponsored bus to shield them from the economic and time consequences of their actions.

The question that is not asked by this article is "would you have moved to the city if there were no buses?" It's an important distinction.

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