The Immobile Masses: Why Traffic Is Awful and Public Transit Is Worse | Hacker News Reader

The Immobile Masses: Why Traffic Is Awful and Public Transit Is Worse

motherboard.vice.com

169 pointssageabilly397 comments

Two footnotes on this article:

1. The problems it highlights can be reduced to low tax revenues. Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it. Things like roads and trains cannot (and should not) pay for themselves---they are a public good. The train might be empty at night, but the ability to take a train home prevents drunk driving, for example. One cannot put a monitory value on services like that, they speak to our collective quality of life. The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth.

2. Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is density. We need to value density as it allows for more compact living. Instead, municipalities in places like the Bay Area consistently vote against new construction and against zoning laws that would allow for taller, more densely populated buildings/neighborhoods. The law of supply and demand says increase the supply of housing to make something affordable. This is not some mysterious process: there's simply no political will on the part of existing inhabitants to "devalue" their residences by increasing the supply in the housing market.

I'm assuming you're from the US... The problem isn't a lack of taxes, it's where you guys spend it all.

fully agree with this (US native)

And when it is spent on infrastructure, the US leads most of the world in being the most expensive place to build public transportation, with projects often taking far longer. I blame corruption, poor governance and deep cultural disdain for organization and order.

Don't even get me started on the California decision to build HSR between SF and LA. What a joke that one is.

More amazing—a half century ago, the U.S. was undertaking some incredible public works projects.

Edit: sorry, I was continuing from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11356350

We spent four billion dollars for a train station. And then we raised ticket prices on the path train for a beautiful station nobody wants. Why?

> To win these concessions, Larry Silverstein took advantage of the Port Authority’s eagerness to show some progress on the site. He played hardball with the government from 2004 to 2006, a period of acrimonious negotiations between Silverstein Properties and the Port Authority over who would be responsible for what aspects of the site.

> His lobbyists were the best of the best. He hired Global Strategy Group, whose clients have included Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo, to lobby for him, along with David Samson, who would go on to become the chairman of the Port Authority.

> Given the choice between making Larry Silverstein pay his way and trying to get the site finished as quickly as possible, the Port chose the more expensive option. (Whether it worked is debatable—3 World Trade Center is a stump, and 2 World Trade Center is nonexistent; both are awaiting tenants to restart construction, with delivery now slated for 2015 and 2016.) The feds were throwing even more money at the Port Authority—nearly $2.9 billion—and it was the path of least resistance.

http://observer.com/2013/05/pathfail/

It is mind boggling that a seat on a train to cross the hudson river costs as much as a ticket on the MTA. I don't have any inside information and I don't know who to blame for this (perhaps there is no point in blaming anyone other, everyone did what was in their personal best interest) but this does bring a point that we can't just throw money at infrastructure problems. We have to be judicious about it.

The twitter feed of @pathtrain https://twitter.com/pathtrain is littered with problems of signal failure on a bridge on the Newark World Trade Center line. I bet they could use some of that four billion dollars to fix that issue. But of course, the federal money is not for trivial things like that. They have a monument to build!

I guess this is something we need to think about in many government projects, not just at the federal level. We say that we spend more than $12k? per child in our school system and raise pitchforks and say the teachers aren't performing well enough for all the money we pour into the school system. Well, perhaps we are not pouring money at the right places. And no, I'm not advocating we get rid of public funding and make school administrators or teachers start a go fund me for their salaries or costs. That would not solve anything. These are difficult questions for me. I don't think our politicians and bureaucrats are making the right call here but I don't think it is right to leave these questions up to a ballot measure either.

A half century ago, the federal and state civil services weren't, I think, unionised, which means that politicians couldn't be bought by unions to give civil servants more benefits to increase union dues to buy more benefits to increase dues to buy more benefits.

The federal employee's union goes back to the thirties, and was officially recognized by the government in 1962. So, no.

Interestingly, Wikipedia says AFSCME was not really interested in collective bargaining until the late 1960s/1970s, when it had a period of rapid growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Federation_of_State,_...

> it's where you guys spend it all.

http://www.businessinsider.com/gross-fixed-investment-2013-8 . Infrastructure-schmustructure, none of these guys can afford a program like F-35!

If only we had a transit-industrial complex instead

We do. Look at the cost of the WTC PATH Station.

We need to invent some defense-related shibboleth that would build us some infrastructure. It worked for the interstate highway system...

And not just stupid spending (ie not on r&d or infrastructure), but also loads of government friction, costing yet more.

Probably right, but we are talking about municipal taxes.

Sure, but isn't that part of the issue? Infrastructure is a national issue, not just a local one. It should draw from the tax pot as such.

It's more like how the money is being spent. The political landscape is totally binary so the only question allowed is whether something gets done or not. Once the decision has been made it gets done in the least efficient way and no further questions are asked. Or it gets stopped.

Just look at Obamacare: There is no public discussion about the details that could use improvement. Either it's all in or people want to totally cancel it. Nothing in between.

You've got to separate federal taxes from state taxes to understand how the US spends its money. In general the federal government is well funded and squanders its money on wasteful and unnecessary defence projects, such as having more aircraft carriers than conventional military wisdom says that they need. Such things don't enhance the US's defensive situation. The F-35 is another great example.

But states are generally underfunded, because lowering taxes is always popular and easy to do in state politics. State budgets are dominated by boring things such as education which an aging electorate often cares little about. And states are always in competition with their neighbours with regards to taxes, so raising sales tax might actually push more shopping across the state line to your neighbour. Couple that with the situation in California where any tax increase has to be voted on by the general public as a "proposition", and you get a scenario where adequate state funding becomes almost impossible.

We should put a proposition on the ballet to repeal that anti-tax-increase proposition, once and for all.

Don't equate spending with good governance.

New York figured out the tax collection thing, and our schools and other infrastructure cost more and work poorly.

Also, the Feds fund a wide variety of state operations, especially in social services and transport.

> Also, the Feds fund a wide variety of state operations, especially in social services and transport.

And education too. Money supposedly ear-marked for special education and free-and-reduced lunch floats many rural school districts; maybe there's a similar story for urban districts, but I wouldn't know about those.

80% of the federal budget is stuff other than military and VA benefits.

Specifically about 60% of the total budget is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, ACA subsidies and safety net programs. Then we have your 20% (16% DoD and 4% VA), then 6% goes to interest on the debt, and the remaining 14% is everything else.

Though FWIW the percent of the budget spent on the military was (for somewhat obvious reasons) quite a lot higher during the Iraq war.

http://whatwepayfor.com/

Also, most if not all US states are required to run a balanced budget. This can result in cuts when forecasted revenues don't match actuals. The Federal government simply borrows more money and kicks the can down the road.

"Also, most if not all US states are required to run a balanced budget. This can result in cuts when forecasted revenues don't match actuals. The Federal government simply borrows more money and kicks the can down the road."

This is a misnomer that I see quite frequently: "states must run a balanced budget" and it leads to the exact terrible conclusion you came to: "only the federal government kicks the can down the road".

This is totally wrong. State governments can and do assume debt (generally issue municipal bonds) to cover short term deficits. They play funny money all over their budgets so they can mask what they're doing, but when states like Kansas cut hundreds of millions of highway funding to plug budget deficits, then repeal laws on debt caps and make the department of transportation issue record levels of debt to continue those projects, that's what they're doing. They're taking debt (issuing bonds) to plug deficit holes caused by lowering taxes.

That doesn't prevent them from becoming deeply in debt:

http://www.treasurer.ca.gov/graphs/go.asp

Actually, we spend quite a bit on education. From The National Center for Education Statistics:

> In 2011, the United States spent $11,841 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, an amount 35 percent higher than the OECD average of $8,789. At the postsecondary level, U.S. expenditures per FTE student were $26,021, almost twice as high as the OECD average of $13,619. (see [1])

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

1. The ability to take a taxi or uber home also prevents drunk driving. Responsible drinking or having a designated driver also prevents drunk driving.

Even if you were to insist the government subsidizes "get home late from a bar without driving", Empty night trains are probably one of the least cost effective ways of doing that.

Personally, I just walk home from a bar. That prevents drunk driving since I don't need cars, taxis or trains just to get a beer.

2. Density indeed helps increase walk-ability. But it's also about mixed used development. Jane Jacobs talks a lot about this in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". If zoning laws divide the city into a "business area", a "living area" and "an entertainment area", Density isn't going to save you from having to drive between those areas.

It's far more expensive to take a taxi/uber or to leave near bars than it is to take public transit home. Those are not realistic options for everyone.

That's because you're comparing only the cost paid directly by the passenger. Not the total cost of operating a train line that gets heavily subsidized by tax payers.

Mass transit makes a lot of sense. It can even be profitable when you have a lot of people going in the same direction at the same time. But whenever you're on a really empty bus or train - someone else is footing the bill for your very expensive ride home.

When properly supported mass transit is much cheaper than individual cars. BART is under $5/passenger trip. http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/transit-system-efficiency

Mass transit can make sense, but it isn't profitable. Very few public transit systems in the world are profitable. Bus systems are more likely to be profitable. https://www.quora.com/Which-public-transportation-systems-ma...

Interestingly this is the exact same argument which was made when most of the San Francisco cable cars were ripped out. But it wasn't true.

Nor should they be profitable. Public goods are an expenditure, like clean air or public libraries. We want to spend money on them, that is the point.

Not profitable by fares charged, sure. Definitely profitable if they were credited with the gain in property taxes/values that their presence facilitates.

I think you're forgetting the cost of operating a road, and in particular, freeway network, which is entirely paid for by tax payers.

You need the road anyway. Keeping it open during the night doesn't add up to the costs. Having an empty train running during the night does.

You might not need the road anyways. If a major fraction of the population doesn't need to drive, you can make human-sized (instead of car-sized) roads and have higher density and lower upkeep.

And you can have trains that come much less often (like, say, once an hour) to collect the stragglers. Less wagons in the trains.

Hello, Tokyo has no trains from 1-5AM. So you can simply plan around it (either going home before 1 or knowing you'll be out til 5).

No, it's not going to go back to human-sized roads

There are deliveries to be made, buses to ride (even with a good train infrastructure), people who can't take public transport, etc

It's simply naive to think otherwise

Human sized roads can still have cars, just not as many as a 4-lane road Plus if you can shrink parking lots to 1/2 of what they are you'll reclaim so much space downtown

Electric trains are really efficient. I don't have the numbers in front of me but the per-passenger-mile cost is almost certainly lower than Uber.

The freeway network is mostly paid for by the folks who drive on it, through the gas tax and other user fees.

Actually (and surprisingly, at least for me), this is not the case... The Vice article mentions a US PRIG study that showed that "user revenue only covered 48 percent of the costs of roads". [1]

[1] http://www.uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Who%20Pays%20...

Sorry I'm late coming back to this, but there's a reason I said "freeway network" and not "roads". For a variety of political and economic factors, local roads are maintained out of localities' general revenue. But they could easily be covered by an expanded gas tax, particularly if 1/6 of gas tax revenue wasn't redirected to transit.

> Not the total cost of operating a train line that gets heavily subsidized by tax payers.

A few extra late-night runs don't particularly move the budget. It's a bit like manufacturing - once you've designed your product and set up the production line, doing a run of 4000 items isn't much different to doing a run of 5000 items.

If you cannot afford whatever method is available to get home when hammered, the solution is not drunk driving, the solution is NOT DRINKING.

You guys are framing this debate as if going out and getting drunk in a bar is a necessity for life, it isn't.

Abstinence! Yeah that works really well.

Maybe we can compromise with drinking at home? I'd hate to suggest that anyone shouldn't be drinking...

Sin taxes make the world go round.

Hey if you want to explain that to the masses, go ahead. I don't think it will go over very well though.

Not everybody gets drunk within walking distance of their house and many (most?) cities have laws against public intoxication (eg walking drunk). Public transportation is one of those things that people shouldn't have to think about, it should just be available all the time (with varying service intervals).

Mixed-use amazing and the US is incredibly backwards in that sense. I think we have a stigma against mixed-use because apartments used to have shitty sound insulation. That's not really a problem anymore...

Is anyone cited for public intoxication merely drunk while in public, or are they instead drunk while causing a problem in public? I ask because in various cities I've had a fair amount of police contact while intoxicated, and never been cited. Typical exchange:

  "What are you doing?!"
  "Goin' 'ome, off'cer!"
  "You're too drunk to ride your bike. Get off and walk."
  "Ooookaaayyy..."

If being drunk makes one an asshole, then one is in fact an asshole, and one should drink at home.

Besides, train stations and bus stops are also public places. How is that supposed to work?

We often get instances of US police using the public intoxication laws as a cart blanche means to arrest people:

http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/stroke-victim-and-son-arr...

This also happens with drunk passengers in cars. Police will order drunk passengers to get out of a car, to then immediately charge them with public intoxication.

http://www.tahlequahdailypress.com/news/sheriff-s-beat-deput...

Nebulous laws like public intoxication statutes are rife for abuse by power hungry megalomaniac cops with no accountability or oversight.

> Police will order drunk passengers to get out of a car, to then immediately charge them with public intoxication.

In some states (e.g., Texas) a car counts as "public place" when it comes to intoxication. The passenger wasn't charged because he left the car, but he already violated the law by being intoxicated inside the car.

Which is a catch 22 on anyone drinking. You go to the bar, get drunk, and then cannot legally leave the bar to go home by any means, because where in every other state the correct action is to have a sober friend drive you home, in states like Texas you are still "public" despite being in someones private motor vehicle.

> Is anyone cited for public intoxication merely drunk while in public, or are they instead drunk while causing a problem in public?

Uh, YES. I am a quiet drunk, yet cops regularly hassle me to get in a cab just because I'm a little stumbly...

I remember Austin, Texas making headlines several years ago when cops started going into bars specifically to find drunk people to arrest, even if they were calm and were staying overnight in the same building.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find clear substantiation of specific cases other than this article, which only talked about the danger of how the law made it possible to do what you're describing:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/texas-racist-law...

>>Arrested for drinking in a bar? Sounds like the ultimate catch-22. Since 2006 ... cops ... have used a 1993 law as a pretext to enter any bar and arrest its patrons on the spot. The public intoxication standard, backed by the Texas-based Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is so broad that you can be arrested on just a police officer's hunch, without being given a Breathalyzer or field sobriety test. State courts have not only upheld the practice but expanded the definition of public intoxication to cover pretty much any situation...

Oy, I forgot about Texas. Things work differently there. It's clear, though, that my original statement was one of privilege: I'm not part of any of the more targeted communities. Still, can we expect intoxication to be more tolerated at the bus stop than it is anywhere else on the block? Perhaps the problem isn't so much giving LEOs discretion in writing citations, but rather it's having entirely too many LEOs in the first place. When they're busy with actual public safety work they won't have time for commemorative Stonewall Inn reenactments.

"Is anyone cited for public intoxication merely drunk while in public, or are they instead drunk while causing a problem in public? "

The legal term is usually drunk AND DISORDERLY.

Though for some cops, "I don;t want to have to scrape his sorry carcass off the next crosswalk with a spatula" is disorderly.

1. Yes, that was just an example of potential beneficial effects of public transit. My point was that some things in the "public good" just cost money, and should not be expected to monetize themselves.

2. True. Upvote for Jane Jacobs. Properly diverse density.

> One cannot put a monitory value on services like that

You sure as shit can. Budgets are fixed. Budget consumption is zero sum. Maybe in fantasy land we could spend unlimited resources on trains and unicorns, but in the real world we have to measure the cost-benefit of all expenditures.

I just mean that some things do not need to turn a profit. Of course you are right about budgets being fixed and priorities weighed with specific numbers attached.

>The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth.

I'm not sure this is true. The city budget has grown substantially, now ~$9B [1].

The problem is we don't spend it on transit infrastructure, and when we do invest, we get financially mismanaged projects like the central subway [2].

[1] http://modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/san-franciscos-i... [2] http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/covering-their-tracks-t...

The market more than doubled since 2005. An increase in the city budget from $5.3b to $9b is not that impressive in that context. They would get that if they simply held an unmanaged index fund. You would expect more growth in the bay area and better redistribution of the tax revenue.

Mismanagement of public funds is bad, agreed.

The city budget is a yearly flow of cash. You can't directly compare that to equity markets, when equity pricing is at its simplest the discounted future cash flow for eternity.

Good point. Still, the city budget is in some sense tied to the market. The unemployment rate almost halved since 2010. Per capita income almost doubled since 2000. Apple revenues alone tripled in the last five years. You'd expect the local municipalities to cash in on the taxes.

Cities can't impose local income taxes as it is politically difficult.. Prop 13 means they can't get money from increases in rents, and they don't want to build more anyway. As a result cities don't see the gains from booms in the way they would in other regions of the country.

Wow, the San Fransisco budget is around double the entire state budget for Oklahoma. If San Fran can't keep up its infrastructure with about 2x the budget per capita in around .3% of the land area, they're doing it wrong.

Salaries. Low in Oklahoma. High in San Francisco. Come back with the budget number in terms of median employee salary, and we might be able to start to compare the two.

Whether or not something is a public good is a matter of technology. Trains are definitively a private good - they are rivalrous (you and I can't simultaneously occupy the same seat) and excludible (don't pay, they don't let you ride).

Roads are also rivalrous (you and I can't simultaneously occupy the same piece of pavement) and excludible (don't pay gas taxes, you get no gas, you can't ride).

If gas taxes were impractical, roads might be a public good.

We also collect plenty of taxes for transit. Our taxes just buy us 1/5-1/100 as much as every other country in the world, because our transit systems are incredibly inefficient.

https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...

https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...

Looking into the links you sent. Not sure if I am on board with "whether or not something is a public good is a matter of technology." I would say it is a matter of shared values and ideals. When you describe trains, you are talking about individual seats which are rivalrous, right? The train as a whole is a public good: it benefits everybody, has large positive externalities, and without subsidies it is not likely to be supported for profit. It is not rivalrous as a whole.

It's true that politicians talking about shared values and ideals can turn simple private goods into nightmarish public ones (e.g. US medicine). Have politicians created dumb laws like "the conductor may not kick someone off the train even if they don't pay" or "long trips must cost the same as short ones"?

The train is merely an intermediate capital good used to provide train seats. It's private at the level of capital goods which is also the level at which it's paid for - only one railway can use a piece of rolling stock (rivalrous) and that railway can prevent other railways from using it (excludible). You might as well say that a house or a car is a public good, since they are merely capital goods that provide a stream of an underlying consumer good (space to live, road trips).

What are the positive externalities of a train? If anything, it's externalities seem to be negative - it creates pollution and noise. (It might be less negative than driving but that's a different claim.)

A train seat is not the thing I am paying for. A transit company is typically chartered around provision of service regions and schedules, and it has the power to divert passengers to alternatives like buses if problems arise preventing use of some existing infrastructure. The customer is not there to "ride the train" but to reach a destination - the transit is judged upon how well this demand is satisfied.

Private property law allows owners to enforce their own rules(to a point). This both explains the private control over the train and tracks and lends weight to the possibility of being kicked off the train, as it is justified in terms of disruption to service and resulting monetary losses. To wit, a positive externality of transit service is economic gain from the population having improved market access(more goods, services, workplaces within reach). The transit company does not realize these gains, the public does. The company's enforcement of rules is guided by the premise that some amount of security and order is necessary to achieve its service goals.

Reaching your destination via whatever mechanism is still a private good.

To wit, a positive externality of transit service is economic gain from the population having improved market access(more goods, services, workplaces within reach).

This is a positive externality of any transit method, including privately owned cars.

Ultimately what you've stumbled across is the fact that nearly any good or service will create gains from trade that are not captured by the producer. E.g., video games, cakes and pies, pornographic videos, and kindles all make people happier and nicer to those around them. This is why encouraging economic activity is generally considered beneficial.

Does this make cakes, pies, video games, pornos and kindles public goods?

What is a public good by this standard? You and I can't breathe the same air at the same time. We can't drink the same water at the same time.

Physical reality is rivalrous--in general, matter excludes other matter. Seems like the concept of a "public good" needs to be more refined than whether the thing permits simultaneity.

Not being invaded by communists is neither rivalrous nor excludible. Similarly for not being killed by ebola, eaten by cannibals, or inhaling toxic nuclear waste.

Roads would be a public good in an era or country where gas taxes/odometer taxes/similar mechanisms were not feasible.

Lots of things are public goods.

So basically the absence of things, and things which have no user fee? If a subway system was 100% tax-funded with no user fee, would it become a public good in your eyes?

No, it would be a private good that was subsidized.

Something is a public good if it's not possible (or extremely difficult) to exclude non-payers from receiving it (as well as being rivalrous). The subway just doesn't qualify - turnstiles exist.

Public goods aren't just the absence of things. Basic research, public art, and similar things would be public goods. Or going back to my previous example, roads in a country where gas/odometer taxes are impossible to collect would be a public good.

Why do people have such a strong desire to attach the word "public good" to things which are rivalrous and excludible?

So if we take the turnstiles off the subway (which was implied in my comment above about no user fee), does it become a public good?

> Public goods aren't just the absence of things. Basic research, public art, and similar things would be public goods.

Oh ok, so everyone can benefit equally from basic research? There are no user fees for, say, cancer therapies based on government-funded research?

Everyone can view public art? There's no limit on how many people can be in a park or museum at once?

The reason I'm belaboring this point is that there is no difference in how we finance, build, maintain, or use mass transit and roads. Heck quite a lot of mass transit is based on roads, like city buses.

Basically I suspect you just prefer driving, and are trying to create a tortured definition of "public good" to give your preference a veneer of objective rationality.

No, just as sandwiches don't become a public good if I leave my kitchen door unlocked. Please just read the standard economic definitions of the terms.

Basically I suspect you just prefer driving, and are trying to create a tortured definition of "public good"

You sure got that one wrong. I haven't owned a car since 2000 and I hated it for all 6 months. The fact that I prefer mass transit and walkable cities doesn't mean that this preference deserves subsidies. (I'd be happy with eliminating the laws that make such things illegal and insanely expensive when legal.)

I understand the standard definition fine--what I'm pointing out is your inconsistency in applying that definition, like listing as examples research, public art, and free roads despite the fact that none of them satisfy the characteristics of non-excludable and non-rivalrous.

Even the wikipedia page is hilariously mixed up, listing a public lighthouse as a public good, even though a person needs to own a ship to benefit from the lighthouse (excluding most people), only so many ships can pass through a section of the sea at one time (making it rivalrous), and of course the government can just turn off the light whenever it wants (excluding everyone).

Edit to add: if a road or a park or a lighthouse can be a public good, then so can a subway. If a subway can't be a public good, then neither can a road, a park, or a lighthouse, since they all violate the definition in similar ways.

The government can't exclude people who don't pay for the lighthouse from using it. It's all or nothing - hence not excludible.

A subway can exclude anyone who doesn't pay while including anyone who does. To take the example of several subways I've been on recently (NYC, Delhi, Amsterdam, Boston), if you don't pay the turnstile won't let you through.

If you scroll up, you'll find me explicitly agreeing that roads are a private good which should be paid for via user fees (either gas or odometer taxes), and those who refuse to pay should be excluded.

Okay, I'll think about this. Thanks for the discussion. Have a good weekend.

You are using public good a bit unusually; a public good is a positive externality (and the term is sometimes extended to things that produce positive externalities), it's the opposite of a public (or social) cost, a negative externality.

Roads aren't a source of public good because odometer taxes are impossible, they are sources of public good because and to the extent that creating them provides benefits beyond those who make the choice to use them, whether or not those making the choice to use them pay directly for that use in accordance with their dirct, private benefit from the transaction.

I'm using the terms as defined in standard economics. Public = non rivalrous, non-excludible, private = rivalrous and excludible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_good

Suppose we attach the label "public good" to roads or trains. What implications - if any - do you believe follow from this?

Certainly the implication that the government should subsidize it does NOT follow. A good which is rivalrous and excludible is one that the market can provide adequate quantities of, in contrast to goods which are non-rivalrous and non-excludible which will be underprovided by the market.

> Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is density. We need to value density as it allows for more compact living.

Another thing that perhaps needs to be valued more is sound insulation. I currently live in an apartment in a dense, walk-able city in Europe. However, I'm tempted to buy myself a house and a car, because I'm so sick and tired of all the noise that comes from living in an apartment in a dense area (neighbors, construction nearby, drunk people late at night etc.). Without good sound insulation, I don't think density works, although maybe it's just me who are more sensitive to this than other people.

It's interesting that you say that. In an earlier conversation on density and walk-able neighborhoods, I seem to recall a number of people from Europe saying that noise wasn't as much of a problem as in dense parts of the US because of different construction traditions. (Europe is a diverse place, of course, so it might just be down to regional differences.)

That could be. It's especially renovations in the same building where I live that has been the problem here. I'm guessing this is a bigger problem (more renovations!) in a large building, than a small one.

Regarding renovations: whenever someone takes a rotary hammer to concrete, it will be fairly noisy no matter how good the sound proofing is. That sound will travel in the entire structure even if the building is 400 feet wide.

Any apartment or house old enough to have plaster walls will be much more soundproof. That stuff is dense and heavy and it's usually at least an inch thick, more than sheetrock/drywall.

Europe is a big place, I think the construction norms can differ too.

I was in some appartments in Nantes, France, and the windows could let you hear outside (so things like buses going by in the day). In my Tokyo apartment I hear police cars go by (actually, every Sunday I get the black cars from the fascists[0]).

I think there's some better sound isolation in France rather than Tokyo (at least in smaller appartments), but Japan also knows that making too much noise is pretty rude. Usually you're not allowed to play instruments in your place unless you got explicit permission when signing the contract (usually implies that the unit has better isolation). And you try not to hit the walls too often.

I think it's part "don't be a dick", and part "get used to it". It's likely possible to isolate better but it's likely expensive on smaller units (because of the space required).

Though honestly, even when I was in Texas suburbs, there's still noise from traffic and neighbors. It was easier to get peace and quiet though.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyoku_dantai

Yes please. As someone who is the one making the noise and feels bad for neighbors, I really want better sound insulation.

I am renting a house which is much larger than I need just because I practice piano and don't want to disturb my neighbors. If not for this I would rent a place closer to work.

They make sound insulating and deadening foam. Put the piano in a small internal room and line the room with acoustic foam: http://amzn.to/1o9CGjb Living closer to work must be worth 2 of these for $160?

An electronic piano with headphones may even be an acceptable alternative.

No. Just no.

There are full acoustic/electric hybrid pianos with mechanical actions that have the ability to be used with headphones only.

http://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical-instruments/keyboards...

I actually had one of these and can tell you that unfortunately the technology just isn't there.

The action is the same but the way it reacts and sounds isn't, and at least for classical music, learning the nuances of the sound (and pedal!) is the hardest part..

That's a shame :-(. I've never played one myself but I definitely imagine it to be superior to most/all keyboards.

Why not? In a former life, I used such pianos.

The "make it sound like a wood-and-felt-and-wire piano" issue is solved. The "make the key action feel like a physical piano" is (based on my extensive side-by-side testing) close enough to solved that -if one's concerned about bothering the neighbors with the sound of your playing and one has the money- purchasing a good model is a no-brainer.

Yeah, things like http://www.rolandus.com/products/v-piano/ are absolutely competitive with acoustic pianos. Multiple acoustic pianos, in fact.

Sorry for accidental downvote. I have an electronic piano in my flat; it works well for managing noise levels outwith acceptable hours.

I actually have an electric piano as well and even though it has a mechanical action but it still doesn't come close unfortunately.

I guess I am relatively serious for an amateur but the piano is a very difficult instrument to master and so I just feel like since I have such a limited time to practice I rather make that time as effective as possible. That means playing on an acoustic and thus making a lot of noise sadly..

Yeah, foam doesn't really "soundproof" anything. Foam is normally for sound treatment, so you get less interference when making music for mixing / mastering / recording purposes. You need extra drywall / more insulation / sheetrock / mass loaded vinyl / wall decoupling to actually block sound.

This sort of foam isn't for soundproofing, but for reflection-proofing. If you treat your room with this and make noise, your neighbors will still hear it just as loudly as before, but inside your own room, the sound will have less reverberation and echoes, making it sound more focused.

For soundproofing you need dense materials with lots of mass. Things like mass loaded vinyl, rockwool sheets, or even full-on room in a room. It can get pretty expensive [0]

I agree with the other commentor, a nice digital piano with headphones, or speakers you can adjust the volume out of would be the best option.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Loaded-Vinyl-Square-Acoustic-Barrier/d...

There are two broad categories of approaches you use when dealing with sound. One is controlling sound transmission, and the other is shaping/controlling diffusion. In general these types of foams act as diffusers, which influences the sound inside the room, but have very little impact on sound transmission, which is what most people think of when they say 'sound proofing'. Dealing with sound transmission generally requires lots of mass, isolation, and careful attention of air-tightness. Think about how a thermos is constructed and you start to get the idea.

Honest question: can't you just get a high-quality digital piano and use headphones?

I'm not a pianist but I can tell the difference between the best sampled piano synths and a real piano so there's no doubt a pianist can too. Of course it's better than nothing but a musician could prefer living far from work than not having a real piano at home.

I actually have a high quality digital (Yamaha N1). It even has the same action as a grand piano. Unfortunately, every time I went to my lessons to play on a real grand I had practically no control. The pedal especially is completely different on a real piano.

Also there are just so much more sounds you can produce on a real piano. I know it's weird since it's a percussive instrument but for whatever reason the way you hit the keys makes a difference.

I use ear plugs, but that's not ideal of course. I used to live in a 200 year old brick building on the 4th story in a dense, walkable area and surprisingly it wasn't too bad. Now I live in a second story apartment in a much lower density city and the traffic noise is far worse than the human noise I used to hear.

Suburbia has the incessant sound of lawnmowers, leafblowers, and barking dogs.

As well as denser cities. In LA, it's daily. Each small patch of grass between sidewalk and street cut or weedwhacked and the blower comes out even if a broom would be quieter and only slightly less efficient.

Leafblowers are vile. I would take plenty of drunks walking by at 2 AM over a horde of leafblowers at 7 AM.

I used to live in Santa Monica, and it was only upon leaving that I realized how utterly wonderful their leafblower ban was. Of course, the diesel pickups in the alley behind my apartment were less fun, but I guess you have to choose your battles.

I agree it's a tax revenue problem. However, as a CA resident living in the bay area with a tech salary, I can attest that _taxation_ isn't the problem. An unfortunate reality is that our budgets are not being spent well. In particular, BART has some serious high-cost issues. For one, the automated trains have operators whose total compensation is an average of $130k yearly. [1] There are terrible, ineffective managers, directors, and executives that are guilty of mismanagement and greed [2].

soyiuz, you are absolutely right: BART needs more money. It also needs new people and a radical overhaul to update a system operating on 40 year old designs and assumptions. ---- [1] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/07/are-bar... [2] http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23416601/barts-top-paid-worker...

Agreed! The cure for mismanagement should be more transparency and more algorithmic government (along with testing)---a topic for another conversation.

high cost issues are endemic to the bay area, not just to BART

About half that money is in their healthcare and other benefits plans. Worth keeping that in mind. They're not walking home with $130k.

Around 20% of the motor fuels tax ends up in the general fund, and not the highway trust fund. Your legislators can increase highway/transit infrastructure spending by that amount, but won't pull funding from other programs that have grown dependent on it. You should talk to them about this.

The article briefly touched on it, but as car owners transition to non-petroleum powered vehicles, the motor fuels revenue has nowhere to go but down. So the current taxation basis of gallons consumed will become unworkable. Taxing based on miles traveled has privacy implications (they will need to monitor your driving to assess the tax). A monthly road-tax based on vehicle size/weight/capacity might be the only way to keep highways funded.

To keep transit systems like BART funded, they will have to support it by taxing the local population, whether they own a car or not (remove the dependence on the highway trust fund).

The glorious state of California has the highest taxes in the nation and is the home of the tech industry. If wealth isn't trickling down, it's because it is being wasted.

Twelfth-highest, as it happens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_tax_levels_in_the_United...

Actually California has the 4th highest taxes in the nation behind New York, New Jersey, and Conneticut. It has the highest income tax, but that's because its other taxes are relatively low, in particular property taxes which were evicerated by Prop 13. California's current tax system is actually regressive, with the poorer section of society shouldering more of the tax burden than the richer segment.

https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/Taxes-101/Sta...

Also the tech industry holds an awful lot of wealth outside the US, in tax havens such as Ireland. And while taxes in California are high by US standards, many European countries (with excellent public transport systems) tax at higher rate still, for example sales tax in the UK is 20%.

The state of California is chronically underfunded because it does a poor job of taxing the people who actually have money. Not because the money isn't well spent (some 40% of it goes on education alone).

>The state of California is chronically underfunded because it does a poor job of taxing the people who actually have money.

So does everyone else. The reason it's so hard to tax the wealth of the rich is not because they're masters of political manipulation but because they're -- as you note -- much better at (legally) restructuring their activities so that the wealth does not pass through a nexus that a given jurisdiction controls.

To be fair, Ireland is just used as a stop on the wayto the Bahamas/Caymans, for most tech company money. It does pump up our GDP though, which makes people think we are doing well, so at least we get that.

Source: Irish person who works in tech.

> We need to value density as it allows for more compact living.

rack em and stack em, eh?

recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all.

http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11673

We can promote more "compact living" but the data shows it degrades human happiness.

Serious question, why do rural areas have higher suicide rates per capita?

Arguments presented without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. The guy you're responding to cited his, please cite yours.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/04/rural-suicide.aspx

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/the-growin...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/16/rural-youth-suicide...

http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=21950...

That wasn't an argument. It was an uncontroversial factual statement. Citing things is nice, but you can also just google 'suicide rural'.

Just saw this comment, and it looks like other people chimed in, it isn't really controversial, the CDC has good number on it. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6414a9.htm

I'm going to speculate wildly, and I have no basis for these assertions. If any of this is objectively wrong, please correct me.

1. Easier access to firearms, and other suicide methods. Gun ownership in rural areas is higher than in cities, and I'd wager that gun suicides by gun are a lot more likely to succeed than other methods (e.g., jumping off a building.)

2. People in rural areas may socialize less, and may have less of a support network. I live in New York, and if I want to see my friends after work, it's an extra 5 minutes on the train for us, and an easy way to get home after having a few rounds at the bar. If I were back in Dallas, it might be 45 minutes out of my way in traffic, and it would be much more difficult to get home and then back to work again if I couldn't drive my car home. In a more isolated area, your friends might live two hours from you, or two states over.

3. Some suicide attempts are actually cries for help, and in a dense city, more people may notice that cry.

What pavel_lishin said, but also:

1) further distance from hospitals mean more people die.

2) great access to means and methods - guns, vet meds, etc.

3) more high risk jobs (farmers, vets, and rural workers are high risk jobs (because means and methods, and also because economic uncertainty)

4) more stigma around suicide and mental health.

The data show no such thing. Correlation != causation.

People self-select where they live. It could easily be that happy people choose to live in the country instead of the city, or people in cities have more stressful jobs, etc

Exactly. I live in a big city. It's already dense enough that transit congestion is a major problem. One coworker bought a house a couple of years ago, and in the last year told me that his commute essentially doubled.

Further increasing the density of my city (especially if we do it before putting adequate transit in place to prevent congestion from becoming worse) is not something that I want to happen. Why would I vote for it? I'm happy for density to stay at the same level it's at now, or only gradually increase. I haven't heard a convincing argument for why I should be in favor of increasing density at more than a relatively slow rate.

Cities should look after their current residents. If the residents don't want density to increase, then who is to say that's the wrong policy?

It's a factor of poor public transit. Imagine walking out of your house, walking 3 minutes to the nearest bus stop, waiting at most 5 minutes for the next bus, and then not worrying about any congestion until you're at work.

If you miss the bus, the next one will be there in 10 minutes. If you don't want to wait for 10 minutes, another bus that will take a slightly different route and cause you to walk an extra 7 minutes from bus stop to your destination, will be there in 3 minutes.

Unfortunately most Americans have never experienced anything close to that level of public transit, and cannot imagine cities functioning like that.

Toronto has a transit system that works like you describe (~10 minute waits), however, most still find it easily worth $600 a month to drive a car so you don't have to spend 20 minutes every day outside in -30 weather walking and waiting for transit.

Furthermore, even if you wanted to take transit occasionally, it's not worth it because the fare ($3 one-way) is almost always more than the marginal cost of driving (gas).

Then you have the signaling aspect (there's a perception that only poor people take the bus).

I don't think anything will change unless car ownership triples or more in cost.

Yeah, Toronto is much better than most North American cities, but it's not perfect by any means, at least if one is to believe r/toronto. :)

Regarding car ownership, yes, you can always tax car registrations and gasoline way higher and spend the extra money to add more frequent service, retrofit car lanes into bus-only lanes/streets, add bike lanes, and lower fares.

This what it's like if you live and work near BART in San Francisco. You don't plan your commute. You just show up and wait on average five minutes.

Weekend service is much less frequent, though.

> walking 3 minutes to the nearest bus stop, waiting at most 5 minutes for the next bus,

Yup, welcome to Japan. How a good mass transit system changes how you live your life is hard to explain until you experience it.

The data shows correlation not causation. Maybe people in urban centers on a whole would be more happy if there was better public transit, and thus, less traffic congestion. Or maybe people in urban areas would be happier if there was a better balance between real estate supply and demand such that price curve wasn't so steep as one gets closer in? Or maybe it's that concentrated poverty in big cities drags the happiness index down? Who knows, it's probably some combination of all of those things.

I know that when I hear people complain about living in the DC Metro area, the two complaints are traffic and real estate prices. We have the metro but it is literally teetering on crisis as they had to shut the whole system down for a day recently. Improving the operation of metro should be a very high priority for the DC, MD, and VA governments, and the feds for that matter.

> recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all.

Anecdata, but that one year I lived in suburbia was terrible from just about every perspective I care about. Couldn't even walk to the corner store to grab milk because there was no such thing as a corner store. Wanna go party in the evening? City is an hour train ride away. Terrible. Wanna grab drinks somewhere close? Choice of 3 bars. Ugh. Wanna party past 10pm? Can't. Everything closed. (this was in the US)

As for rural ... I have a lot of family who comes from rural lands. They all fled into the cities as soon as they were old enough to do so. The infrastructure to support modern life just isn't there in ruralandia. Even my grandparents moved from super rural to slightly less rural with the wave of post-ww2 modernization in the 50's. (this was in Europe)

I'm probably the odd one out here, though. I will never understand the American fetishization of suburbia. Even now I keep arguing with my girlfriend (grew up in US) cause she wants to move from SoMa to the more outskirt parts of SF like Portrero.

Never is a strong word. Maybe if I ever have kids the same sort of salmon-like instinct that Americans have will kick in and I too will want to move back to my spawning grounds.

edit: Actually, this might be cultural. As a European, I think that the closer you live to downtown, the higher your social status. This is a bias that is hard for me to escape even though in the US the social signal is inverted.

> Wanna grab drinks somewhere close? Choice of 3 bars.

And then you either leave your car there, and pay more to take a cab home, and then back again in the morning to pick the car up - or risk driving drunk.

The study you cite didn't bother surveying or measuring anything non-American. Americans show the correlation you've described because Americans are indoctrinated to dislike cities and in fact to restructure cities into low-quality-of-life settings, even while everyone else on the planet understands just fine how to live happily in cities.

Are people who live in low-density suburbs generally well off financially? Aren't people who are well off financially happier?

That might be true. However, suburban living comes at a cost that is highly subsidized. The cost of infrastructure per person in the suburbs is much higher than in a dense city. There is just so much more roads and pipes and cables per person. However, the cost gets carried by everyone evenly. If that cost had to be paid by the people in the suburbs (like me) than living there would all the sudden be quite a bit less attractive. This was covered in a great episode of Econtalk: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html

There is no reason that roads cannot pay for themselves. Gas tax revenue comes close to paying for roads when it is spent on roads.

Define "comes close". In California the fuel tax covers less than half the maintenance cost and none of the capital costs of the roads.

You aren't including federal gas taxes.

> The problems it highlights can be reduced to low tax revenues. Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it.

This is a double whammy, because so many urban areas basically came close to the brink of death during the mid 20th century and have only revitalized in the last 30-ish years or so. That means there's a massive infrastructure and services "debt" in most cities, so they have the burden of playing catch up as well.

> Things like roads and trains cannot (and should not) pay for themselves---they are a public good. The train might be empty at night, but the ability to take a train home prevents drunk driving, for example. One cannot put a monitory value on services like that, they speak to our collective quality of life. The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth.

I strongly agree with this and wish it was more of a priority (sadly, our political system is so broken everyone is focused on other sideshows and wedge issues). Public transit is really a strong societal good, and an equalizer. Good public transit is a big factor in enabling the poorest and least advantaged to find jobs wherever they exist while keeping their housing costs low and also enabling things like continuing education and so on. It's a major component in that whole "lifting yourself up by your bootstraps" thing that people think is so important.

Also, public transit is by no means terrible.

The premise is just fatally flawed.

> Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is density.

It does require density, but not so much that you need buildings more than a few stories high. Much more important is zoning that allows shops and restaurants to be mixed in with housing, and not wasting those few square blocks within walking distance with parking lots and private yards.

10) And THAT is because of the systemic starving of government by the ultra-rich.

20) That would probably require a sprawl tax. The wannabe rich in suburbs ... well goto 10

> Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it.

That's just not true.

We have crumbling infrastructure because we refuse to prioritize it due to political dysfunction.

If youre a surgeon or a lawyer living in San Francisco, your marginal tax rate is 39.5% federal + 11% state. Over 50%. You also pay 8.75% VAT on a lot of common purchases and 1% property tax.

This is not a low tax environment.

Hong Kong has a 15% flat tax and yet they have vastly better infrastructure than we do. Singapore is a similar story. Even Istanbul, with per capita income and tax collection thats a small fraction of ours, has a great light rail system that puts Bart to shame. Istikal Street is incredible--imagine Market and Mission put together, and pedestrian only. It is a beautiful city.

So how do these places do it?

* They respect and prioritize infrastructure

* Their governments are less gridlocked

* They value density and walkability

* They have fewer NIMBYs, with much less power to obstruct

* They're less lawsuit-friendly. In the Bay every big infra project spends time and money fighting lawsuits.

* They have leaner bureaucracies. BART has tons of six figure salaries on the payroll for random adminstrative positions.

if you're a surgeon or lawyer (or any other kind of high end services professional) living in SF and making any kind of significant money, most of your earnings are probably not coming on a W2 in the form of a salary. you're probably a partner or a shareholder in a business and get a dividend or a distribution from the business as a K-1 or a 1099-DIV/INT, and your effective tax rate is going to be way, way lower than 50%, probably closer to 20% or below.

because you own part of the businesses a huge amount of your expenses are either deductible or simply covered by the business, which then deducts it from its earnings (which are probably getting passed through to you directly). lunch and some dinners, ambiguous trips to major cities, car lease, laptops, phones, christmas gifts, etc. also, a lot of people just straight up buy shit for their house on the business dime like nice TVs, furniture, etc. field audit? move it to the office.

sales (you call it VAT .. okay) tax is probably high, but it's optional, you don't have to actually buy anything. also, you can buy stuff in cheaper places, especially if you and own a second home in a lower tax area (which many people do).

Can you please share this magic method for lawyers and surgeons to somehow get paid at an effective tax rate of 20%?

uh, i just did. be a partner in a firm, not some guy on the payroll.

If you're a partner, you're either getting profit distributions that are taxed at ordinary income rates, or you're getting dividends that are taxed lower, but the corporation paid 35% tax on profits (plus state), which makes it much worse than just ordinary income rates.

The only real ways I'm aware of to get taxes much lower is capital gains, or perhaps real estate where depreciation "losses" defer a lot of taxes on your income.

But neither of those would really be available for partners in a law firm or medical practice.

So again, please elaborate on how partners get taxed at 20%?

Dividends and other distributions are taxed at normal income tax rates. You are likely thinking of long term capital gains taxes, which are something else entirely.

no, i'm not. distributions are taxed at 'normal' rates, but if you are receiving non-w2 income, the amount of things you can deduct from that income are far and away more varied and comprehensive.

Do you know how the operating costs for BART compare to comparable systems in the US and internationally? And how cost of new construction compares? My guess is that both costs are on the high side, but I don't know any details.

US infrastructure construction is routinely 3 - 10x more expensive [1][2][3] on a like-for-like basis compared to other developed nations. This is one of the biggest facts that even well educated people seem completely unaware of, despite it foundationally shaping the debate around infrastructure investment.

The primary cause appears to be the way the US solicits and manages infrastructure projects which leads to massive bloat and inefficiency.

[1] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...

[2] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...

[3] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-26/u-s-taxpaye...

> US infrastructure construction is routinely 3 - 10x more expensive on a like-for-like basis compared to other developed nations.

> The primary cause appears to be the way the US solicits and manages infrastructure projects which leads to massive bloat and inefficiency.

This is depressing. What can we, as voters or political donors or investors or entrepreneurs, do to fix it?

The US has well organized and effective political advocacy groups for a number of causes. For example, there's one whose sole focus is maximizing people's gun rights.

We need one for ending bureaucratic bloat, corruption, rent seeking and pork. A group whose sole goal is to fix government so we can get projects done cleanly and on time and at reasonable cost.

The problem is this is one of those issues that democracy has a hard time handling because it affects many people diffusely but almost nobody acutely.

Where do you get 11% state tax from? Every California state income tax calculator I've seen for $150k-200k puts it at around 7.4% - 8% (sliding scale due to how California state taxes work).

Not the lowest taxes still, but I'm bewildered as to where does some of this myth of the 10+% state income tax comes from.

Presumably he says 11% because the tax bracket for California incomes for $300K to $500K is 11.3%, and because he assume this is how much a surgeon in San Francisco makes. This does ignore the brackets, but he does note that he's discussing the marginal rate: https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2015_California_Tax_Rates_and_E...

At a glance, this seems like a very reasonable estimate:

  How much does a Surgeon in San Francisco, CA make?

  The median annual Surgeon salary in San Francisco, CA is   
  $435,890, as of February 22, 2016, with a range usually 
  between $368,625-$517,331 not including bonus and benefit 
  information and other factors that impact base pay."

http://www1.salary.com/CA/San-Francisco/surgeon-salary.html

Where you do get your $150K-$200K estimate from?

I was just using it as an example where the effective rate ends up nowhere near the rates people temd to talk about - I've seen a lot of prior talk about state taxes for engineers mentioning rates like that too, and did a quick lookup on online income tax calculators to make the point that effective state income tax rates in California are not as straightforward as looking up a % and quoting it.

Top marginal CA state tax rate appears to be 12.3%. $150-200k income is not surgeon/lawyer money in CA... think 400+.

The average lawyer doesn't make anywhere near 400+, even in San Fransisco.

And you're thinking star lawyers. Think countless thousands who also work as such...

>Hong Kong has a 15% flat tax and yet they have vastly better infrastructure than we do.

First, Hong Kong has such low taxes because the government makes most of their money by leasing and selling land. They don't need much to bring in as much tax revenue because of this. Their low tax rate has little to do with being more efficient or "prioritizing infrastructure."

Second, why are you using the marginal tax rate for San Fransisco? You should be using the effective tax rate which is much much lower than 50%.

The local government should institute a land value tax, then. That would bring in revenue, and have positive impact on the economy. (As opposed to almost all other taxes.)

Land value taxes are interesting, but if you look at the communities that implemented them in the era of Henry George, most of those communities have abandoned them because it's difficult to administer over the long term a taxation system that's quite different from the norm, and the benefits may be fairly mild.

Also, I think it taxes should try to be uniform across the nation. I find it smelly for Texas to try to attract business from California it worse, Kansas to steal businesses from Missouri by promising not just lower tax rates but effectively zero tax.

Why is it not OK for China PR to manipulate the RMB but it is OK for Texas to lower worker rights to attract business? And no, I don't believe in this "laboratories of democracy" bs. There are things in which uniqueness is good but there are other times when we need a standard (you know like the Constitution and the bill if rights).

Now, I'd be all for a low tax, maybe 0.1% (due annually) of property value so that someone who owns one million dollars of land and building will pay $1000 extra each year. I'd go further and say no exceptions (not even non profit or charity) just to illustrate a simple problem: we don't know how to do any redistribution.

Should this new tax go directly to the county government to spend as they wish? Should it go to the state so they can take money from Lawrence and spend it in Kansas City, KS? Should it go to the federal government so it can spend more in Iowa than the tax raised from Iowa? I am just bringing this up because I've thought about the fetish among some people that everything would be OK if the federal government just backed off and let the state governments take charge. The problem is it wouldn't really fix the problem. I don't think Divide and conquer really works like this because we haven't divided the problem enough. Our States are too big themselves.

I guess my main point is that as long as the tax rate is uniform across the whole system regardless of location, I could live with a small land/house tax not exceeding 0.1% of property value so that a person with a million dollar house pays $1000 each year. The problem is in how we spend this money. Does the money have to be spent in the same neighborhood? Town? County? State? Country?

On my street of 11 houses, three are occupied by people that had their companies relocated to Texas because it was a more business friendly state. (Two from Los Angeles area and one from New York City.)

At my company there was talk of moving it to Boston, but I refused to consider doing it.

The competition between states gives all of us more liberty to choose places that govern their states differently.

Yes. Though they should not have a race to who can give the biggest special flavours to well connected companies. It would be better if regulations higher up (eg federal level) could be set up in such a way that states would compete to who can give the best business environment for everybody.

Even 30-40% effective tax is A LOT. It hurts... and hurts more when I see how it's spent.

>BART has tons of six figure salaries

Six figures is table stakes for living in the Bay Area, and I certainly don't want to see the BART staffed by people who live so far away they don't even ride it.

Now that's an interesting question. How many (six figure) employees of BART ride the BART to work?

Singapore's income taxes are low, but they tax newly purchased vehicles at significantly over 100%.

Seems reasonable to me. They might come close to recouping the huge costs that cars actually cost.

"Things like roads and trains ... are a public good."

No, they're not.

From Wikipedia (which matches what I learnt in economics class):

"... a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others."

Trains are definitely excludable (can't get on without a ticket) and rivalrous (the train can get full, meaning no space for additional passengers).

Roads are obviously rivalrous (gridlock!) but you could argue the extent to which they are excludable. Sure, there are toll roads, but it would be hard for you to exclude me from using the road in front of my house. With technology, though, you could make me pay for usage according to some arbitrarily-designed tariff, though, which would force me to self-exclude if I weren't willing to pay the price.

Those a mucky definitions. Roads are excludable in just the same way as trains... you don't have a car, you can't get on roads. That's economic exclusion, and a bigger excluder than transit fares in most urban settings (not to mention requiring a license, no DUIs, etc).

A good transit system has very low fares, as they try to include everyone even the poorest people. A good transit system also has very rarely full trains, and more coming along in 5min if that one's full.

If you're arguing that roads are a public good, then you absolutely must accept that transit is one... and any rational person would agree that they are a far greater good than roads and highways (at least, within the urban centers).

"Those a mucky definitions."

There was exactly one definition in my comment: that of a public good. The remainder was my reasoning for why roads and trains do not fit that definition of a public good. With which part(s) do you disagree?

"If you're arguing that roads are a public good..."

I'm not arguing that. That's why I started my comment with "No, they're not".

I'm not sure how to respond to the rest of your comment, as your main point (that public transit is good) is orthogonal to mine.

Mucky definitions: excludable and rivalrous.

> Roads are obviously rivalrous (gridlock!) but you could argue the extent to which they are excludable

That sounds like you're arguing that roads are in some way a public good, or more of a public good than trains, to me...

Living in the suburbs is also highly subsidized since the suburbs have enormous infrastructure costs that are hidden. See http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html

That's interesting, how do you explain Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan? Lower taxes but better public transport?

This is not at all illuminating and is just a typical advocacy piece for more transit funding.

Like most of these pieces, it compares road spending and transit spending as though this is somehow a useful comparison. It isn't. For rail transit systems, spending includes all labor and capital expenses--train operators, cars, electricity, etc. Road spending does not include the enormous capital investment that citizens and businesses spend for motor vehicles.

Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road.

Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.

To top it off the piece says nothing about "why traffic is awful".

To your last point, I noticed that too... including that in the title was total clickbait.

Yeah, the article points out that only 20% of our federal and state transit budgets go to transit, implying that it's underfunded. But it lacks the context that only 5% of Americans use transit...

It is a chicken and egg problem:

Transit sucks, so no one uses transit. No one uses transit, so funding is sub-optimal. Funding is sub-optimal, so transit sucks.

This cycle can be broken by funding transit properly. I have been to plenty of cities where transit was cheap, convenient, and useful. And before someone trots out the density problem, I have been to plenty of places that are far less dense than LA and have far better transit.

I'm curious about the sparse places that have good transit... Where do you mean?

Europe, mostly, where what are essentially small towns and villages are often connected by good train or bus service to each other. You may consider it inter-urban rather than intra-urban, but the distances would easily fit within LA, and the density is clearly lower (because there are farms in between).

You wouldn't know it, but LA has a pretty decent transit system, in terms of one that can get you most places you'd want to go. It's largely bus-based, and can take a while, but it is effective. Compared to some mid-western and southern cities, it's worlds better.

I'll grant that it may be good by US standards, but that is sort of damning it with faint praise. Yes, it is good in the sense that you can get anywhere you want to go, eventually. When I say good, however, I mean comparable to driving in time and convenience.

Spending money on transit is a much better way to alleviate road congestion than building more roads. If you drive, you should be in favor of transit spending.

That's a fat tail issue, though. What percent of Americans who live in an urban environment use public transportation?

In Dallas, I was one of the 95% who almost never used transit, because it didn't go to 95% of the places I needed to go.

> Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.

Building roads encourages people to drive in their cars to places. The problem is that automobile infrastructure is woefully inefficient, expensive and doesn't scale.

If you want to create the ability for people to go to places, there's more efficient and cheaper ways to do this than building more roads. One of these methods is public transit.

Over certain distances, I would agree. For medium/long distance, it can be woefully time inefficient.

For time efficiency, the implementation is far more of the problem than the actual idea of public transportation (i.e. Philly to Pittsburgh, or DC to Pittsburgh). For traveling distances of ~120-400 miles or so, I'd much rather take a train than drive if the implementation isn't terrible (anything between DC, Philly, and NYC, Barcelona to Madrid, Florence to Rome), largely because the time isn't wasted (I can read a book, do some work, or take a nap).

I'm curious how things are going to pan out over the next 20 years, however, as some of these advantages held by not being responsible for piloting the vehicle become available to cars, and how different transportation methods are going to evolve around this. Rail has nasty failure modes due to the inherent sparse graph.

Yeah, to your point, that is why some people like to fly these days. It's almost literally the last place you can go and work uninterrupted! Haha.

Used to be a fairly quick way to get around, but since 9/11 the unpredictable security delays and increasingly cramped seating have made it far less tenable. Even a 1 hour flight involves a ~45 minute trip to the airport - including time to park and walk to the terminal; a 2+ hour wait through security because it could take three quarters of that; the hour flight itself; time to disembark at the terminal - bare minimum we are talking a solid 4 hours which could easily turn into 5+ with a not-infrequent delay. You are no longer much ahead of the curve for an equivalent drive of less than 350 miles, at the end of which you would have a car. The expense of flying is prohibitive, and I can't even open my work laptop in the plane because it's a behemoth.

Yup. I would much rather take a 4-6 hour train to a city here in the Northeast US, even if the flight is a quick one-hour jaunt - which comes with an hour-long ride to the airport, anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour (or more) dealing with security, and crappy expensive internet in-flight while my knees are jammed up against my chin. (Unless the person in front of me decides to recline their seat, in which case I have to store them in my cheeks like a chipmunk.)

I live in Japan now and domestic flights here are amazing. Airlines recommend you buy your ticket 30 minute before departure and be at the airport 15 minutes before when they start boarding. There's never more than 2-3 people in line in front of you at security. There are no liquid regulations - they have a sniffer for drink bottles. Of course airports all have good public transport connections.

> Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road.

If you're going to use the argument that roads are more useful than transit because they cover the whole nation, then you're making the same argument the article is making for transit, just with different parameters. Rather than paint it black and white, both systems are needed to increase overall transportation efficiency as a whole. Transit is effective in dense areas like large cities. Roads are effective in smaller less dense areas where space isn't a premium.

Additionally, everyone likes to gloss over the fact that you mention where public transit in the US is largely government owned and operated, therefore the expenses include all costs associated with the entire system. For roads, however, only the road cost is covered. This is a different kind of unfairness. It makes roads and auto travel look cheap because costs are dispersed over different parties and items: government pays for the road, drivers pay for their car and maintenance, buildings hide the cost of private parking.

Meanwhile transit systems look expensive because the numbers include all associated expenses. To fix the problem, I actually think transit systems should be allowed to be privatized and treated on the same level as roads, that is just like roads, the government allocates land use for mass transit and private companies operate the system. Additionally most of the recent laws surrounding (free) parking and the interstate highway systems require additional roads and parking for every new development. So ridiculous things start happening like low-income housing in a dense area having unused parking spaces being built to satisfy minimum parking requirements. Downtown road improvements requiring unnecessarily large intersections and allocations to satisfy level of service requirements.

> Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.

The problem is roads are a 2D system with limited scalability while cities are 3D environments that often scale in 3 dimensions. Furthermore automobiles most of the time are used to inefficiently carry 1 person but they have a large footprint. So at a certain point, traffic congestion measures actually do not increase throughput linearly based on investment. So if you want "people to go places" you start finding yourself with ridiculously expensive projects that actually just end up making the problem worse.

Many cities in the world have found solutions to traffic problems and they involve one of 2 things:

1. Introduce a toll or congestion fee thereby encouraging only those that truly want to use the road to use it.

2. Remove high capacity "arterial" roads thus causing traffic to be more evenly distributed across multiple low throughput paths.

The first item operates on the concept that even a relatively small fee will cause standard supply and demand rules to apply rather than users aggressively trying to take advantage of a "free" resource.

The second item operates on the concept that traffic distributed across more direct paths will lead to less overall system traffic compared to a system that encourages everyone to take the perceived fastest and highest throughput path.

The best method of transit is walking. A lot of the problems with traffic and public transport are solved when we invest in walk-able cities. Cities where you can live close enough to work to walk there, close enough to your friends, close enough to the grocery store, your neighborhood bar or your kid's school.

No discussion of Mass transit or "giving up your car" is completely without discussing the walk-ability of cities.

Tangent but:

I live in SoCal, and I can't get my head around the car culture mentality. Of all the places that should be walkable, one that is 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the entire year should rank very high on the list. But nooo.... the walkable cities are in places that get run over by a glacier every six months. Go figure.

Live in downtown Minneapolis, can confirm walk-ability and presence of seasonal glacier.

Coastal areas are becoming more and more walkable... Minus the lack of density - Santa Monica is the prime example, ask people about walkability and everyone is excited, then talk about making it happen for more people and you get crucified.

In the valleys, walkability runs into the heat problems in the summer. Walking in 100F+ is no fun and can be dangerous to some.

Even in inland CA you have perfect walking weather for around 9 months a year. It's more of a cultural thing in my opnion.

I think you are right.

There definitely is a very strong desire still for wider spaces, bigger yards, etc. As the result, walking in most of inland sprawl take a lot more time and effort.

Because it's large?

I'm all for public transportation and LA used to have the best in the world 80 years ago. But, a large city as large as LA is never really going to be completely walkable unless everyone always moves close to their job. That would mean moving away from friends and family because of a job change rather than just commuting a little further. I suspect most people would chose to stay near their friends and family rather than move closer to their job.

You can compare Tokyo which is large like LA but which has excellent mass transit and yet the average commute is 80 minutes each way. Why? People can't or won't uproot their families for new jobs. Also housing close to a job is probably also often either too expensive (downtown) or undesirable (industrial area).

Also, the popularization of two-income households complicates this quite a bit. How often do you see partners that work near each other?

New York is larger than LA and has very good transit.

I grew up in South Texas. Ain't nobody got time for walkin' more than a block in 100+F heat and people end up spending more than their mortgage payment on electricity and A/C repair because the heat will literally kill you.

A winter ice blanket makes driving less desirable. Pleasant weather makes walking more desirable.

This implies that walking has a hard limit on desirability, which is easily topped by driving, even with the worst traffic. You have to make driving worse to tip the preference toward walking, even if the conditions simultaneously make walking less desirable.

If driving 5 miles is likely to put your car in a ditch, you may opt for a 200m walk, which may only plant your ass on the concrete once or twice. If you have to shovel snow for 20 minutes to drive anywhere at all, you may prefer to just pull on some wellies and hoof it through the drifts. If every mile you drive is rusting away your vehicle's underbody due to road salt, you may prefer to wear away your boot soles instead.

If you could wave a magic wand to install a roof over ever road and highway, the residents would squeal with glee, toss out their tire chains, shovels, and boots, and get right back into their cars.

In places where there's actual winter people adjust to it. Snow in Atlanta is something people perceive as a PITA whereas in Augusta (Maine) it's perceived as no more inconvenient than rain.

Never did I ever adjust enough to stop bitching about shoveling driveways or scraping windshields or hitting patches of black ice or having the plow throw snow back onto your driveway so you have to shovel it again. Snow always has been, and always will be, more inconvenient than rain.

Except freezing rain. That stuff is the worst.

In Maine, people bitch when it isn't cold and snowy enough. This winter was brutal for the ice fishers, snowmobilers, and skiers.

"In Maine, people bitch when it isn't cold and snowy enough."

That's Stockholm Syndrome, is what that is.

Because it is new. Maybe not new in age, but new in being a big city. Founded in 1800s, became second biggest city in 1980, third biggest in 1960, fourth in 1950: http://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-l...

Big cities on the east coast are older, so didn't develop in the age of the automobile and have to conform to its needs. Except cities in the SE, which again, grew due to modern appliances like the air conditioner.

LA was built by people who were escaping the stressful dense urban life of the east coast. Not hard to understand why, when they arrived at empty land by the ocean with perfect weather, they didn't resolve to build a bunch of apartment towers.

This is a great point. Why do so many people in the US live on large lots with huge houses in the suburbs? Because we can.

SoCal was never walkable beyond a local neighborhood - if you look at population density and where the freeways are, they all parallel former lines of the Pacific Electric Interurban system. [1][2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric

[2] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Los_Ange...

There's a fairly low ceiling in terms of walkability within cities though. Once you exceed a certain distance, no amount of walkability is going to convince people to walk, and rent/housing prices within the walking distance tend to be much higher than those outside, thus exacerbating the issue of public transportation.

If you're able to walk for 95% of your needs, public transit, taxis, uber and zipcars solve the other 5%. If you're only able to walk for 5% of your needs, public transit isn't going to help you much.

Rent/Housing does indeed cost more in walk-able areas. That's a great signal telling us that there's a lot of demand for walk-able neighborhoods, and urban planning should allow a lot more of them.

Well going to work is probably 90% of your moving needs.

So if you live 45 minutes by train from where you're working and there is an actual train there, public transit helps you a lot.

That's a woefully inaccurate representation of my life and the life of my friends. Do more things.

Not everyone wants to live downtown, though. In fact, most people don't. More often than not schools in suburbs and rural areas are head and shoulders above their urban counterparts.

I used to live in a downtown area and it was nice being able to walk 6 blocks to work. But I would never want to raise a family in an apartment or with those terrible schools.

>More often than not schools in suburbs and rural areas are head and shoulders above their urban counterparts.

a school in a rural area isn't automatically better than a school in an urban area because its rural.

What you are missing is that "good schools" doesn't actually mean good schools. It's a dog whistle.

When I say "good schools" I mean "good schools." If you want to call me a racist why not just come out and say it?

Or better yet, say something constructive.

Okay. One constructive remark coming up...

What's your definition of "good schools"?

Actually teaching the kids some things. What other definition is there?

"Good schools" mostly means "wealthy students".

If rich people move into the cities, and form little neighborhood clusters to exclude poor families, the schools will become more attractive by all standard measures.

Now, the trick is that it's much easier to build out segregated wealthy communities in the suburbs, than it is in cities, since tight geography works against the informal segregation of suburban development projects.

My sister just moved to Wyoming and has a daughter in school there. They live a few blocks from a school, but she's not able to attend that school because it's in high demand. Apparently parents are able to apply to go to any (public) school in the district, and are accepted based on a lottery with no preference given to proximity to the school. (I could be wrong about these details, this is just what she told me.)

I guess that system is designed in part to account for the effect you're describing - if one school starts to become known as a better school, the kids in the poor parts of town are just as likely to be able to get in as anyone else. I have no idea if it actually works that way, but I do know it's a pain for my sister who now has to drive her kids to school several miles away when they could easily walk to the closer one. Can't please everyone, I guess.

This is how Boston works. Implementing it accelerated white flight in the 60s and 70s.

Yes, we do have a measurement problem. I was going to propose a solution, but it's a hard problem and any solution will necessarily have side effects on the surrounding communities as well.

> "Good schools" mostly means "wealthy students".

Be careful there at teasing out the real motivation. If you want "wealthy students" because poor people are icky, then you're a jerk. If you want "wealthy students" because you want schools to be well-funded, that means you do in fact want good schools.

How to tell the difference? Maybe by putting the person somewhere where all schools in a very large area are funded at the exact same level. I don't know. But assuming it's a dog whistle isn't a good idea.

There are plenty of shit rural schools. I'm saying if you take a random rural school and a random urban school the rural school often performs better in standardized testing. And the suburban school often outperforms both.

In terms of actual quality of education I'll agree with you on the last point. But in my experience -- having spent a lot of time in both urban and rural schools -- the quality of education in urban schools is typically better than or similar to that available in rural schools on average.

Most urban areas have a mix of terrible and excellent schools. The excellent ones rival or exceed the best of the surrounding suburban schools (except with more in-school variance in terms of quality of instruction and background of students), while the terrible ones are truly toxic. Conversely, rural schools are more uniformly "meh" -- generally not toxic, but also pretty underwhelming in terms of instructional quality and available learning opportunities/resources.

Also, IMO, test scores are not great indicators of school quality. Even if you could perfectly control for all confounding factors, test scores probably still wouldn't be great indicators. They're simply, de facto, measuring the wrong things.

I'm not arguing rural/suburban schools aren't often better, I'm arguing that they're not often better just because they're rural/suburban.

You're arguing against a point I never made.

The GP is talking about the need for walkable cities, you said urban schools are bad as if they're bad just because they're urban.

If less people commuted into the city from the burbs urban schools would get better for the exact same reasons the schools are often better in the burbs now.

The suburban/urban school divide is less potent than it was 10 or 20 years ago. For example, this program on a school district that's 99% african american and has huge rates of poverty with terrible failing schools is about a decidedly suburban school: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...

In many cities, poverty is highly concentrated not only in urban areas but also in some of the surrounding suburbs. So the suburban schools -- or at least some of them -- end up as bad or worse than the worst of the urban schools.

So the old surburb/urban school quality divide is slowly breaking down. As a result, affluent urban areas often have high quality schools while impoverished suburbs often have terrible schools.

That said, it's generally true that living in the "good" suburbs is cheaper than living in the "good" parts of urban areas.

City living means pretty much apartment living in the US. It's a problem, because neighbourhoods can be walkable and still feel spacious. There's some fantastic low rise downtowns in Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans,.... Problem is, there's so few of them that they've all become expensive and tourist destinations. If more cities were like this, I think people would like their city centers a lot better. Now, it's either the car wastelands of urban renewal in the middle of the country, or the insanity of massively crowded downtowns on the coasts. No wonder people prefer to move out.

Unless all cities concurrently advance in this area, this simply becomes a factor that drives home purchase / rental prices up.

San Francisco has neighborhoods with a WalkScore of 100, but the baristas and cooks and other laborers in those neighborhoods, including construction workers who build the homes, largely drive and transit in.

IMO it basically carries that you worsen the Effective WalkScore of other people's lives, even if they live in neighborhoods that are walkable to desk-sitting professionals, because the wage-paying jobs in those areas (e.g. Oakland / East Bay) doesn't pay as well as the wage-paying jobs in neighboring cities with stronger economies (e.g. SF).

This is absolutely happening right now and the reverse impact is that SF's cost of living is creeping over Oakland's and driving the folks who live in Oakland and work in SF to further reaches of the bay as people, giving up on walkable life in SF, try it out in Oakland.

Bicycles help this, but I'm here to tell you that nobody has any fucking sympathy that you've chosen a car-free life and it's El Nino and why are you late because your coworker who drives an SUV 100 miles is already here and how is your life possibly harder?

Anyway .. it's complex AF. Believing another world is possible is for sure a great first step.

Being a Brit, who walks to the corner shop, or even supermarket if I just need a few bits, I tried walking a few times while in the US. The US makes it hilariously impractical. Pavements (sidewalks) will just randomly stop. Crossing the road is sometimes a crime, depending on state! Even convenience stores are inconveniently far away.

You've spread your infrastructure out so wide in some places that walking becomes more like a hike. It's little wonder that you end up driving for anything beyond going next door. :)

going next door will probably get you shot. Just drive.

As a Chicago native who has had a gun flashed at me while walking my dog a block from my house, I wish you were joking.

Some americans even get in the car to fetch their mail from the mailbox at the road...

Some Americans have driveways 1/2 mile long. And longer...

That's like 800 m, still very walkable

You still have to walk back.

But not very fun when it's 103 degrees outside.

My parents house (that I used to live at) was a mile from it's mailbox at the end of a long private dirt road. I would walk to get the mail every afternoon (I was homeschooled) to help clear my head and to get some daily exercise.

I really want to believe you're joking, but think you're not :)

He's not. It's very common in rural Texas, and even in some cities where the USPS has implemented mail cluster boxes for 12+ households. Yours might be inconveniently far away from your home.

https://about.usps.com/publications/pub265a/pub265a_006.htm

Hah, my parents don't get USPS mail at all, and they're in a smallish suburb that's not all that sparse.

I worked on a cattle ranch one summer in high school in West Texas and it was easily a 15 - 20 minute drive to get to the mailbox on the highway (the ranch was 11 miles from end to end, all rough dirt roads and gates every quarter mile or so).

Walking to get your mail in 105+ heat and back would have taken(no exaggeration) almost all day.

I have to admit that we drove our trash to the dumpster where we lived in Pittsburgh. It was an apartment complex. We lived at the extreme east end, while the one and only dumpster was 0.3 miles away at the extreme west end.

The biggest problems exist in areas that don't have any pre-car infrastructure. Our density is fine (if not ideal) in the older east-coast cities, but anything that was build up in (or after) the 20th century is a disaster.

The challenge is that the most walkable areas I've been to are the ones that are thoroughly inaccessible by cars. Building a city to be accessible by cars (and trucks) inherently sacrifices walkability due to the lost density created by larger roads.

I'm curious what a modern city would look like where we were willing to drop the hard requirement of being navigable by Land Rover -- if we were to build something akin to historic Rome or Barcelona using modern technology.

That fits. NYC was fairly walking friendly.

San Diego was not intended to have pedestrians at all as far as I could figure. Most striking was how much space it took up when flying in compared to population. Then you'd see minor residential streets with road an pavement wide enough to be a 4 lane highway.

I don't know how zoning works in the US, but I guess that's the explanation for all the shops and bars being miles away from where people live? Or is that another car-related choice?

Yep. San Diego is largely a post-car creation. Philadelphia is a city of rather similar population, but is basically the same size as it was in 1890[1]. San Diego, on the other hand, grew almost 10-fold from 1890 to 1930, then again from 1930.

I don't know too much about zoning processes, aside from that in the mid-to-late 20th century, mixed use zoning wasn't in fashion. My grandfather was a suburban mayor in the '60s, and when he talked about zoning process, he said it was: "Well, we drew a box and put the residential here, and the commercial district here" -- and San Diego was built up at a similar time, so I expect a similar process existed. A decent representation of this process is SimCity -- that the entire notion of mixed-use zoning was absent is certainly a reflection of 20th-century urban planning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_the_United_S...

[2] http://www.sandiegohistory.org/links/sandiegopopulation.htm

SimCity also got rid of the bane of the US city, massive surface parking, because it made the game boring and the cities unappealing.

from http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par...

"Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity."

I live in a San Diego neighborhood built in the 20's along a street car line. It's about 3 miles from downtown.

(Edit: the streetcar is long gone, though there's a bar called Station nearby and a few other hints of its former existence).

It's not bad for SD, but the streets are wide and drivers blow through stop signs constantly. I can, at least, walk to several great bars, a small Target Express, and a few other amenities.

It's low to moderate density because the homeowners fight all new construction tooth and nail (I go to the planning meetings). There isn't a single bike lane in my community. Any time someone suggests building something they are told they have to build massive amounts of parking, so nothing gets built.

Of course, their charming cottage homes (which would be illegal to build now) are $700k to ~$1.1million, so it's great for the landowners. Not so much everyone else.

The people who live and vote here are mostly owners, so they have a very strong interest to fight any new construction, increasing the scarcity of their asset, and its value. I can't see how this changes so long as any area which is composed primarily of landowners can vote to make sure nobody else is allowed to build there.

It's pathetic here. Where I live, in the suburbs, there are people who rely on public transportation, but I honesly don't know how they pull it off. I tried it, at different points in my life, and it takes all day to do simple tasks. Right now I'm without a car due to emission failure, on a perfectly running, stoichiometric 14:7 to 1, four banger small car, and I'm stuck. I need to get my vechicle going today.

For myself, I use a car, and a bike every day. I drive my vehicle into the city, and park where I legally can. It seems like it's shrinking monthly? I then take my bike out and peddle to a job I detest. A job site that changes monthly.

I don't have an answer, but bicyclists should be given some perks. One--don't require a motorized vehicle as a job requirement, unless the job requires driving. I've seen too many employers slip that one in casually. It's usually some guy exploiting the minimum wage.

Two--If your riding a bike to work, lay off the strict dress code. A little?

Three--Give the bicyclist a credit on their taxes, if they don't have any motorized vechicle. (Guys like me wouldn't qualify. I'm not giving up my driving privilege until they pry the wheel from my cold, dead hand.)

Can we just come out and admit something ?

Buses are terrible. They are terrible functionally, they are terrible aesthetically, and they are terrible logistically.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that across a broad spectrum of preferences, you would be very hard pressed to find anything worse in the urban, built environment than some big, loud, lumbering, clumsy (and usually) sooty bus bungling about the place.

I love good public transit. I love light rail. I love the subway. I will do anything not to ride a bus. I am reminded of that quote from steve jobs about the touchscreen phones and the stylus:

"if you see a (bus), they blew it."

Well the reason light rail and subways are so good isn't because they're on rails, but because they get their own track. If you put a bus on its own street, suddenly they're not as bad anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit

I agree that BRT (which I have a lot of experience with)[1][2][3] does make things a bit better. However, the successful BRT I have seen is always in very specialized circumstances, while the proposals I have seen for BRT in (for instance) San Francisco have been so full of weird compromises and bizarre edge cases that I am not optimistic they will make anything better.

[1] Hop/Skip/Jump buses in Boulder

[2] 16th street mall shuttle in Denver

[3] "VelociRFTA" BRT in Aspen/Basalt/Glenwood

Did they change the Skip? I used to take that and it was just a normal bus in the normal street as far as I recall.

They're also good because of the commitment involved. You can build around a light rail or a subway stop, safe in the knowledge that it will still be there in ten or twenty years. You can't build around a bus route like that. Ironically, the high expense and lack of flexibility are features, not problems.

Yet SF still manages to mess that up. The Geary/O'Farrell corridor gets its own lane for the buses, but the "rapid" ones stop every three blocks.

I used the bus for 2 years. I tried very hard to stick with it.

It was so bad that I went and purchased a car.

The seats in bus are too small, the bus are too noisy (try riding one hour next to a very noisy engine and not get to work with a big headache), they get late, etc.

Long distance bus are okay, but public transit bus are so bad it's not even funny. I would pay double the fare to have access to a bus that is comfortable to ride and is never late.

You perhaps need to convince your public transport agency to pay more for the vehicle itself.

Last time I was in the US, in every city I noticed the buses were rattly, smelly and ugly. Some were old, but not all. Hopefully they're also cheap, they at least appear to be assembled from all the left-over parts of other vehicles.

Compare a Mercedes or Volvo bus -- much bigger windows, a cleaner, smoother engine, low floor (the bus "kneels" at stops if needed). If it's less than a year or two old or in a wealthy city it's probably hybrid, which means a smaller and even quieter engine. Probably the same people that design the cars have designed the bus.

(And US school buses are a joke. This [1] is a modern vehicle?! I'd put it in a museum. Why are there steps? This normal bus [2] is a year older, but far safer on the most basic safety measure: the driver being able to see children around the front of the vehicle.)

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Propane_powered_blue...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-deck_bus#/media/File:Fi...

US school buses are built for different conditions than urban-only buses. A school bus has to be able to handle ice, snow, and poorly maintained dirt roads in a lot of areas. Hence why they look more like a WW2 deuce and a half Army truck.

We have plenty of ice and snow in Sweden... http://www.arriva.se/sites/default/files/styles/469x304/publ...

Well, everything is better in Sweden...

Sadly, all the money goes into the subway cars and not into the buses.

Little of what you've said matches my experience, whether it's on intra-city buses or inter-city ones.

Buses are functionally identical to rail (light or otherwise) with less structural and infrastructural requirements (roads, possibly catenary), buses look just fine, and buses are much more flexible and "denser" (in terms of stops density) than light rail or subway could ever be. Bus stops can be moved around, buses can be surged, buses can be rerouted, buses can temporarily replace light rail or subway if these have to stop, …

You do you, but I certainly have no problem with buses in general, the only issue I have with them is that it's not as predictable as dedicated-way systems since they're sharing the environment with all kinds of unpredictable factors (the best way to improve buses is to remove the cars blocking them)

The actual ride comfort however is very different between road vehicles and rail vehicles (with trams being somewhere in the middle).

In road vehicles I am pretty much limited to listening to music while staring outside if I don't want to get motion sickness. While traveling in the subway or on the train I can read books, use my laptop, etc with no problems whatsoever.

Thus I only take the bus for short trips or when the alternative takes much longer.

That is more than fair, motion sickness is hell and you have my sympathy at least.

I've been on terrible buses and I've been on great buses. I'm not even talking about the local/long distance divide, although the long distance buses have usually been great.

At the time I rode them, DC's Circulator buses were clean, nice looking, and fairly quick. For the rides I used them for frequently they were faster and cheaper than taking the Metro.

"Everybody hates buses and everybody loves trains."

Someone said that on HN one time and it stuck in my head as pretty close to true.

This seems to be somewhat (although not universally) true of buses in the US, which often struggle to be on a par with buses in the UK 25 years ago. Here we tend to have more comfortable seating, cleaner interiors (and exteriors), less engine noise, rapidly decreasing particulate pollution and dammit they've just been designed to look nicer.

Try visiting Brisbane, Australia. Its fleet of busses are all air-conditioned and run on natural gas. There are dedicated bus-ways [1] and a bridge to the university that only busses, cyclists and pedestrians are allowed to use [2]. Brisbane is one of the most spread out cities in the world, but its bus network and smaller rail system make for a decent public transport system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busways_in_Brisbane

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Schonell_Bridge

I agree that most buses are too loud. I've recently seen some buses with hybrid drives, they have additional electric engines for acceleration which makes them a lot quieter.

Costs are a major part of the problem. US rail construction costs are by far the most expensive in the world [1]. Other countries are able to build rail at costs in the $100-250 million per km range (even in dense cities). The East Side access project in NYC has costs around $4 billion per km. Los Angeles has much better costs in the $400-500 million per km range [2]. Its hard to imagine the US will be able to build much transit at those costs.

From 2012[3]: "When asked by transit blogger Benjamin Kabak about its high construction costs, Michael Horodniceanu, president of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital construction division, gave a two-word answer: “work rules.” Citing the example of the city’s revered sandhogs, he said the MTA employs 25 for tunnel-boring machine work that Spain does with nine."

[1] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r... [2] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp... [3] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-27/labor-rules...

Another good overview from Matthew Yglesias: http://www.vox.com/2014/6/2/5771880/us-mass-transit-construc...

There's problems on the operations side too. The same agency that is building that East Side Access (LIRR) still does fare collection by sending well compensated employees walking up and down every train to punch paper tickets twice per ride.

I don't know if it's an urban legend or not, but I've been told that one of those conductors punching tickets on every train is technically designated and paid as a "fireman" i.e. person responsible for shoveling coal into a boiler because the collective bargaining agreement forbids them from eliminating the position.

Cities need to prioritize walking, biking and transit. What this means is that, these modes of transportation need to be made safer and faster. Currently walking through a major city is bogged down by the number of intersections you have to wait at. One idea would be to make intersection movement faster for pedestrians and transit during all hours except the morning and evening rush hour, during which vehicle movement should be prioritized to get cars off the roads as quickly as possible.

With the exception of areas where it's impossible (NYC) IME the majority of pedestrians and cyclists simply do not care about the crosswalks/laws/etc. Jaywalking is constant as is crossing in the crosswalk against the signal.

What I'm saying is outside of structural changes to the roads themselves (like you mention, eliminating some intersections) I don't see much change happening.

The very concept of jaywalking or dedicated crosswalks is a symptom of the car-first mentality.[0] If pedestrians and cyclists had the right of way as they should, this wouldn't be an issue.

[0] http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/...

Crosswalks are awful. Outside of the ones where there is an actual traffic light, they are always placed in terrible locations. Moreover, they are just about the worst place possible to try to cross a street. I've been doing a lot of walking around the medium sized town I live in the past year, and I've had to get very good at looking away from the road when I want to cross, otherwise vehicles that have a quarter-mile of empty space behind them will come to a stop, and make me feel like I have to rush across, when they could have just kept going, and we would have both been able to go about our business at our leisure.

Faster.

That's the functional definition of "rapid transit": faster than a car. This can be because the transit is so fast, or because the car is so slow (gridlock/rush hour traffic).

If you have transit that's faster than a car, and it goes where people want to go, you use the transit. A great example is Chicago's EL. You don't want to drive a car around downtown Chicago, you want to take the EL.

Here in Japan there are a lot of overwalks[0] over busy roads or intersections so people don't have to wait for cars.

[0]Not Japan, but one of these http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/31825728.jpg

Traffic is awful because road owners aren't charging for access.

From an Economics standpoint, congested traffic is the same phenomenon as the old Soviet bread lines. A underpriced good is inaccessible in practice, since supply is way lower than demand at that price.

The solution is "Road Pricing", where drivers pay to drive. The price varies depending on what road, time of day etc. Maximum revenue should coincide with maximum throughput, giving everyone (ready to pay) a smooth and fast commute. It also provides incentives to build more roads where they are mostly needed.

Isn't this the point of the gas tax? For every mile you drive, you use more gas. The more gas you use, the more you pay. Tracking which roads people are driving on would also require massive infrastructure investment, and have significant privacy implications.

The gas tax doesn't take time (or supply and demand) into account. Driving during rush hour should cost a lot more than driving at 3AM on an empty street. Sure, you use more gas sitting in traffic, but it doesn't make that much of a difference.

Tesla can solve this. They know when and where the car was driven, and each time it's charged, the charging station can interrogate the car and compute the appropriate congestion surcharge.

Singapore is now developing a new congestion charge system based on GPS that will have high granularity. We'll see how that works... http://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/default.aspx?scr=yes&keyword...

Only a little bit, since it doesn't differentiate between crowded and empty roads.

IOW, that price is independent of supply, which makes it useless in changing demand.

I think the infrastructure investments would be very cheap compared to what traffic jams and new highways cost. The privacy issues are real, but I'm OK with them. remember that it will make bad traffic a weird memory!

I've seen congestion charges in many cities (personally in Singapore and Stockholm) but it doesn't seem to make any real difference.

Singapore is now developing a new congestion charge system based on GPS that will have high granularity. We'll see how that works... http://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/default.aspx?scr=yes&keyword...

To expand upon the specific discussion of the OP, I feel we are witnessing a historical pattern: urban-flight -> under-valued urban real-estate -> then urban renewal and economic opportunity -> influx of homeless and criminals since high-population density is good for both -> then public criticism that the cops are too heavy handed -> cops less likely to enforce + strain on infrastructure and services (like mass transit) + urban unrest due to economic disparity -> urban-flight -> ...

If the problem is that the BART is operating beyond capacity, adding capacity might not matter if the population is set to decline for the other reasons stated.

The declining gas tax problem is going to get worse as electric cars increase in popularity. The solution is comprehensive road pricing, where a larger share of the real costs of road infrastructure and parking infrastructure are borne by the users.

The added benefit of correctly pricing driving is that people will make more informed decisions about where they live and how they get to work, that will result in more compact communities and less urban sprawl.

Another option would be pricing by weight. Big trucks currently get giant subsidies from the rest of us, just measuring by how much they damage the roads. Fixing that would probably drive up the costs of many goods that are transported by truck, although it would also probably cause a redistribution of which goods are sold, to favor lighter or more local goods. In any case, it would keep the roads in better condition. On the interstate near where I live, it's often a 10:1 ratio between trucks and cars.

This might become more tenable if long-haul trucking gets automated, as it almost certainly will. Take the expense of hiring a human driver out of the equation, and registration costs for semis could be an order of magnitude higher, and still cost less.

Big trucks do pay a substantial road use tax. I don't know the specifics, but they don't get to drive for the same cost as the passenger cars. On toll roads the trucks pay a lot more too.

They don't pay 40 times what passenger vehicles pay.

I live in Minneapolis, we have the light rail in the downtown area that runs all the way down to the Mall of America and the airport. It also runs to St. Paul. We subsidize it heavily, but it is also an honor system for paying for it (no turnstiles). We also have a pretty decent bus system.

Problem is the further away you get from the city center the worse it gets. They've talked about putting in a light rail line to the southwest suburbs at a cost of billions of dollars, meanwhile the core roads don't get additional help and are perpetually bad because of the winter.

It's a balancing act, and at some point everyone needs to decide who's lifestyle is more important from a priority perspective IMO. If I decide to live in the suburbs, and commute an hour a day, is a dollar more important for that person? Or the person closer to the city core that wants more mass transit options?

Honestly I can go both directions. I currently have a 10 minute commute (by car). But I've also had the 60+ minute commutes for jobs. I also use the light rail to get to the airport pretty frequently. However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work.

> However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work.

But that’s possible in cities with working transit.

Take Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Tokyo.

You can get a bus/train/tram to anywhere from anywhere at any time.

I haven't been to any of those cities, so you might be right. Just working in my own frame of reference.

I worked in Tokyo for a while. If you don't take cabs, you end up doing a fair amount of walking. There are a lot of trains and subways, so there is a limit to how much walking you have to do. Even if your origin and destination were both right next to a subway station, however, you could expect to do a lot of walking underground, since there is a lot of stuff underground in Tokyo around which subways have to be routed.

I think walking is great, and frequently I would figure ways to skip a subway line by walking a bit more, but I thought I'd mention this just to give a more accurate impression.

I live in Kiel, a 280k city in Germany, with a mediocre transit system.

I can get from anywhere to anywhere with, at maximum, 800m walking and 2h by bus, but frequently I walk directly instead of taking transit.

Which is possible, since Kiel is small enough that you can get anywhere within the city walking within of about 5h (one end to the other).

Berlin has a fantastic transit system. I was living almost in Potsdam, and I could get to Mitte in under an hour - and the trains and buses were almost always on the dot on schedule. Before I lived there for a few months, I had only really experienced the Boston T system, which is seemingly about as bad as a transit system can be and still be considered functional...

Bear in mind that Southwest Transit has bus routes to Minneapolis from a bunch of SW locations. The good thing about buses is that they can be responsive in ways a train can't: it's easier to add bus routes than train lines.

I take a bus in to downtown Minneapolis myself and it is far better than driving and dealing with traffic, parking, etc.

Yeah I've had a few friends live south of 494 and they do that as well.

I wouldn't live out there, but my general problem has always been the freedom to go where and when I need to.

In the larger European cities with limited parking options, being able to go where you want after work means leaving the car at home.

It's more likely that there will be public transport, but there won't be a convenient place to park.

I'd really like to know what the true costs are.

Are Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore all massively subsidizing their mass transit? Do they have enough riders that they're profitable? Are they more or less efficient in how the manage them?

How about Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Antwerp, Koln, Barcelona, etc... which are all an order of magnitude smaller than the previously mentioned cities but all have pretty good public transportation.

These last cities are all on the same order of size as SF. About 1 million people each and yet they have vastly better public transportation than SF

In some of those areas you're talking about huge population density as well, so it becomes more effective.

I live in Minnesota, where suburb living is very popular. We don't have very dense areas of population that a typical transit system would cover.

London Underground funding info is here:

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-ar...

About 40% comes from fares. About 25% is government subsidies. The rest is a mixture of borrowing, advertising/rental income, a central London road tax, and 8% is funding for Crossrail (but this represents pure infrastructure investment so does not affect the steady state).

I have to admit, having reviewed the figures, I am a bit surprised and concerned at the level of borrowing involved.

Hong Kong's subway is profitable and is the best subway I've ever ridden. (fast, clean, easy to navigate)

In Sweden, most public transit agencies cover somewhere around 50% of costs through ticket sales, with the rest being paid by local governments.

AFAIK aside from perhaps planning considerations, there aren't really any other hidden subsidies (e.g. while the rail they run trains on may be owned by the public rail agency, they still have to pay usage fees)

In Japan, in addition to public and quasi-public train companies, there are many private train and bus companies which are completely profitable with zero support from taxpayers. This won't work in non-densely-populated areas, but it's feasible in cities.

This article is a wall of words, but describes the details pretty well. The short version is that the private companies diversify their operations by buying land around (and above) their stations and developing it in conjunction with their train and bus lines.

http://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr10/f02_sai.html

One of the biggest issues is that we force businesses and housing to have ridiculous amounts of free parking, which means that instead of dense areas where buildings can be next to each other we have a sea of asphalt with a building sprinkled here and there. In central areas these minimums amount to parking welfare for suburbanites.

People say to me "but it takes 90 minutes to go 15 miles on transit!!" - the problem isn't that transit should be faster, it's that you shouldn't have to go through 15 miles of primarily asphalt hellscape to get to basic amenities!

The core of Dublin is less than two miles across. I used to live in the middle of it and never missed a car. The core of San Diego.. well it's not really a core, and even then it's routine to have to travel several miles for basic errands, even if you live fairly close to downtown. A downtown that is prevernted from growing by parking minimums. Of course, if you ask a potential employer about transit access they look at you like you're from Mars (and, of course, choose to move on to a less hippie-ish applicant)

Interesting observation, is there some data showing this?

There's a book called "The high cost of free parking" by Donald Shoup that's the bible for this subject, but it is more than 700 pages.

One of his popular journalism articles might be a better place to start: http://www.shoupdogg.com/journalism/

RE parking minimums: http://graphingparking.com/2013/01/25/residential-parking-re...

A similar issue is street sizes in the US are much larger than in countries with good transit and walkability. Anecdotal, but compare image searches for "American Street" and "Japanese Street". Not only is the driving area of the streets much narrower, on street parking doesn't really exists in Japanese cities. This contributes alot to the walking experience.

"japan street" https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+street&espv=2&biw=1440...

"american street" https://www.google.com/search?q=american+street&espv=2&biw=1...

We put 25mph signs and crosswalks across ridiculously wide streets that encourage people to do 40+mph and wonder why so many people die.

Of course, auto safety standards that worry only about the occupants of the vehicle, and not whoever they hit, don't help either.

The High Cost of Free Parking is a good start. Meanwhile, minimums also have a terrible effect on the cost of housing, which is explored in more depth here:

http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062

article is written in absolutes (talking about public transit and traffic in general) but happily ignores the fact that there is a world outside of america. maybe looking at places that are better commute-wise than sf despite being a lot poorer would be a start?

Of course. Because no one likes to mention that there are countries with far better infrastructure, free education and health care, better quality of life thanks to higher taxes.

Anything that suggests higher taxes are necessary seems to get ignored in the US.

Nearly perfect for me are (1) a city with great light rail, and (2) a Brompton folding bicycle for the first & last miles. I realize that this combination isn't available to all, but it's awesome.

Counting the days until my b-spoke Brompton arrives.

Folding bicycle is a life changer.

Congratulations on a whole new world of convenient transport!

Bromptons are delightful. For those who aren't able (or keen) to pedal as much they can be made electric as well.

I adore mine, and get a smile any time I see another Brompton rider.

We created this wonderful thing called the Internet that allows us to work and collaborate with each other from anywhere in the world, yet we all still cling to the silly idea that we need to continue to expand and repair our physical transit infrastructure so we can all travel two ways every day to sit next to somebody in some office to... stare at a computer connected to the Internet for 8 hours. It becomes even more absurd in areas like San Francisco where there literally isn't even enough housing to fit everyone.

We could solve our transit infrastructure woes overnight with policy. Give a tax break to companies who have remote workers. Either that or charge people to use public transportation infrastructure on a supply/demand basis. If more people use a freeway to get to work, the cost to use it goes up, and if you don't use it at all, you don't pay a dime. This would force companies who require their workforce to be physically present to pay higher salaries to cover the cost of commuting, which may cause them to re-evaluate remote work.

Commuting to and from work really only makes sense if you are interacting with things you can't take home with you.

And before you jump in and start spreading FUD about remote work, consider this: if it suddenly became illegal to require employees who could do their work remotely to come into a physical office every day, would businesses simply shut down? Or would they figure out a way to make it work? I'm guessing they would figure out a way to make it work.

It's going that way anyway.

I work for a company in London, but I work remotely from Switzerland. Many of the people who live in the UK but work in the London office only come in a few days a week because their commute takes a long time, and if there's any kind of transit disruption at all that automatically means a WFH day.

It's not a big deal. Modern comms tech is really good.

Beside everything else, i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here. Thus i have to have a car. In Russia, when i wasn't able to afford car, my cat rode bus, train, subway with me when we had to get him somewhere. Of course, i'd get a car there too the moment i could afford it, yet public transit was a feasible alternative when i didn't have a car.

"i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here."

Thank God.

it is hard to understand that knee-jerk reaction to animals in US ( personally i think it is rooted in basic Puritan habit of blaming somebody else [government, immigrants, regulations, dogs, ...] for your own problems). I understand that Russia isn't a good example of civilized society. Well, in France you can take your dog or cat into any restaurant, cafe, bar, etc ... pretty much everywhere. The public and personal health situation in France is among the best in the world. Sanitary rules in US prohibiting dogs is just red-herring.

I look at it as choosing to ban animals over choosing to ban humans with allergies.

Do you seriously mean that France thus banned humans with allergies? It is false dichotomy. Completely fits pattern of blaming somebody else.

To the comment below:

"but allowing animals that spread dander everywhere makes the environment hazardous to anyone with serious pet allergies."

unfounded BS (sounds very similar to industrial bread producers propaganda 100 years ago about those dirty immigrants touching your bread with their dirty hands in their dirty bakeries). Until it is a sterile OR, the surrounding environment is full of living matter. Dog or cat in a cafe doesn't change the situation. Or do you seriously mean that France doesn't care about such dangerous hazard to people's health?

I know that France hasn't literally banned humans with allergies, but allowing animals that spread dander everywhere makes the environment hazardous to anyone with serious pet allergies.

Also, if you're going to continue with the ad hominem attacks, could you at least explain how 'blaming other people for your problems' is even applicable? It isn't obvious to me at all.

(parent here)

I have no allergies at all. I was not thinking of allergies at all when I expressed my gratitude that your "dog or cat" is not allowed on public transportation in the US.

You shouldn't bring cats and dogs onto public transportation because it's rude, immodest and impositional. I have the same objective to your bringing a cat on the train as I do to your boarding the train without pants on.

Grow up.

>You shouldn't bring cats and dogs onto public transportation because it's rude, immodest and impositional.

and it doesn't look like you're kidding. Interesting that the people who try to impose their own standards of modesty upon others never feel that such imposing is immodest. Holier than thou.

>I have the same objective to your bringing a cat on the train as I do to your boarding the train without pants on.

such an internal repression! interesting where it comes from (homeschooling? or religious family?). Sounds like there is also some deep-seated phobia that in particular manifests here itself toward cats and probably "germs" and "chaos" in general. Sometimes people do surprise ...

You're against allowing animals because it's "immodest" and you're asking someone else to grow up? Pardon me, I need a moment.

By the way, how do you feel about small children on transit?

You shouldn't bring _children_ onto public transportation because it's rude, immodest and impositional. I have the same objective to your bringing a _small, poorly trained animal_ on the train as I do to your boarding the train without pants on.

FTFY.

Unfortunately, even the pretty unhealthy and disturbing content of the "modesty" standards of those types like the parent isn't the biggest problem here. After all, people do have different opinions. Education, exposition to facts and reasonable discussion are known tools in dealing with it in normal case.

The biggest problem though is the underlying egocentric worldview of the likes of the parent that the other people do something, like in this particular case bring a dog or a cat on a public transit, with the specific goal of offending those "modesty" standards. That immediately makes them feel offended and under attack. It doesn't cross their mind that a dog or especially cat owner would take the dog or cat on public transit with just the goal of getting to some destination (especially when the public transit is the only realistically feasible option in the given situation). It is the same situation like with same-sex marriage - people marry same sex partners because of love or taxes/finances/etc., and not because of the goal to destroy the "marriage must be heterosexual" standard of and thus offend the "modesty"/"values" types. Such deep-gut egocentric worldview - people is out there to get me - naturally drives the aggressiveness with which they attempt to impose their "modesty" standards upon the others and makes the things like education/enlightenment, reasonable discourse, exposition to facts, etc. pretty ineffective, unfortunately.

It's a tradeoff. Personally, I have no problem with well-behaved pets in a store or restaurant. I know people who do (even though they don't have allergies). I think it's fair to say that some subset of the US population believes that pets shouldn't be allowed in restaurants (at least inside) and that is what laws generally reflect. The US has one set of standards; France has another.

US airlines do allow certain pets to travel in cabins with their humans. Nor do airlines etc. routinely ban all foods to which someone may be allergic.

A dog can be a smaller nuisance than many humans, though I do understand a concern about allergies.

That being said, I found it amusing that on a trip long ago to a German speaking place (I forget exactly; it may have been Munich?) where you had to buy a ticket for your dog, but it was at least half price.

Let's not forget that BART also made bad engineering choices, like non-standard tracks and trains that probably cost a lot of taxpayer money...

BART is the only transit system in North America that uses the Indian gauge. The wider gauge also contributes to the noise it generates and the wear on the track around turns.

Why should the wider gauge do either?

Noise: It's just steel wheels rolling on steel rails. Why should the distance between the rails change the amount of noise it generates?

Wear on the track: Presuming that the turns aren't too tight a radius (which may be larger for the larger gauge), and the superelevation is correct (which probably has to be larger for the larger gauge), why should wider track mean greater wear on curves?

That wasn't an engineering choice, that was a political choice. It went something like this (my memory is a bit vague, some details may be wrong): Southern Pacific Railway had a line up the San Francisco peninsula, and didn't want BART to use it. They were politically somewhat powerful, and opposed BART. BART went with a different track gauge so that their trains could never run on Southern Pacific's tracks, and Southern Pacific withdrew their opposition.

The money that funds mass transit [...] comes from a mix of four sources: [...] On the federal side, most of that money comes from the federal gas tax: 18.4 cents on a gallon of regular gas 24.3 cents on the gallon for diesel, [...] 19 percent going to mass transit. That’s right—mass transit depends on people driving cars for a significant portion of its federal funding.

I don't find this counterintuitive: the more people use their car, the more the mass transit system is strengthened and more capable to ease car traffic. Maybe it's far fetched, but it's like tax on cigarettes to finance lung cancer research.

I find it interesting that the article points out that neither mass transit riders nor automobile drivers pay the full cost of their trips. Yet it never asks the obvious question: couldn't that be the main reason why both forms of transportation are inefficient?

There's a difference though: If it were politically feasible, a marginally higher gas tax could fund all road construction & maintenance. People might drive a little less, but the system wouldn't go into a death spiral.

If mass transit riders had to fund the system purely through user fees, the result for most systems would be a collapse, as fewer riders would require higher prices leading to fewer riders...

At least in the US, the gas tax would need to be substantially higher.

If we accounted for the externalities (dead people hit by cars, mostly, and perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable) the gas tax would rise even more.

If anyone asks I'll dig up the math because citation is important (and I'm not sure I did it right years ago), but I remember doing some calculation a while back that we could pay to remove the carbon emitted by gasoline with a tax that made it around $15 a gallon. That doesn't seem bad, really. Perfectly happy societies function with $8-$11 a gallon gas, and not destroying civilization seems worth it.

Edit - though I realize that by the latter argument, reducing the population is, in a horribly macabre way, a positive externality. It's not one I support, though.

> perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable

The problem with trying to base taxes on something like this is that you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable. I certainly am not convinced that climate science is accurate enough to support such a claim (or economics, for that matter, since part of the claim is really about the economics of adaptation to climate change vs. mitigation of climate change).

"you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable"

Why? Wouldn't we actually need to be really, really sure this consequence was extremely unlikely? If an asteroid had only a 50/50 chance of hitting Earth would we be wise to disregard it?

> Wouldn't we actually need to be really, really sure this consequence was extremely unlikely?

No, because that would imply a level of predictive power that we do not have in climate science and economics. Basically, with the accuracy of prediction we currently have in those fields, it is impossible to be sure that the impact of climate change will be extremely unlikely to cause severe disruption of our civilization. And the key point is that that is true regardless of whether or not we spend trillions of dollars on trying to mitigate climate change.

So the only real choice we have is adaptation; any resources we spend on getting better at adapting to climate change will at least move us in a positive direction, whereas we can't be sure of that with regard to resources spent on attempts at mitigation. In order for adaptation to not be a rational response, we would have to be so sure that climate change was going to cause severe disruption that it was worth trying to mitigate the change even though we can't predict what specific actions would do that. In other words, we would have to be so desperate that it was worth trying whatever mitigations we could think of without even trying to predict their effects. Climate change alarmists would like us all to believe that we are that desperate, but the case for that does not stand up to scrutiny.

> If an asteroid had only a 50/50 chance of hitting Earth would we be wise to disregard it?

If an asteroid had a 50/50 chance of hitting the Earth, we would be able to predict that specific actions we could take could reduce that probability to something negligible, because we have very accurate predictive power with regard to the orbits of astronomical bodies, at least on the relevant timescales (years to decades). Given that, of course we would not be wise to disregard the prediction.

But, as above, that argument does not apply to the climate, because we can't predict the effects of any specific actions well enough to know how, or even if, they will reduce the probability of a severe disruption to our civilization.

> If mass transit riders had to fund the system purely through user fees, the result for most systems would be a collapse

If this is true, doesn't it imply that mass transit is not economically viable?

Weirdly we focus on subsidizing big machines to move people even in situations where making it possible to walk would be a better solution for all parties.

What sorts of situations do you have in mind? I have a commute to work that is about 20 miles each way. How could it possibly be made feasible for me to walk?

Places could be designed where it's uncommon to need to go 20 miles.

I refer to dense, mixed use areas where housing and jobs are close together. This isn't ALWAYS feasible, of course (a coal power plant is ideally nowhere near housing), but it can be done an awful lot more than we do now.

If I may ask, where do you live? How much of that 20 mile commute is through parking lots? Agriculture? Suburban sprawl? Undeveloped land?

> Places could be designed where it's uncommon to need to go 20 miles...

Sure, but that's not the same as saying people will want to live there.

This is really the underlying problem with the whole mass transit discussion: mass transit proponents start with the premise that mass transit is preferable to driving, and then deduce what kinds of living and working arrangements will make mass transit work well. Then they assume that everyone can be forced to adopt those living and working arrangements, whether they want to or not.

Btw, this is also true of proponents of driving: they start with the premise that driving is preferable, and then assume everyone can be forced to adopt living and working arrangements that make driving work well, whether they want to or not. But of course an even better answer would be to let people's preferences for living and working arrangements determine what sort of transportation to build, not the other way around.

> How much of that 20 mile commute is through parking lots? Agriculture? Suburban sprawl? Undeveloped land?

My commute is through fairly densely populated suburbs of a large metropolitan area. Most of the suburbs date from before sprawl became a thing, so they are more compact than most suburbs; but they are also poorly designed compared to more recent suburbs--they are highly suboptimal for driving and walking and public transportation. For that reason, many people (including me) do not want to live in those older, denser suburbs, and are willing to trade a longer commute for more living space and better designed communities. (Other people are starting to move back into the even more densely populated city areas, where walking and mass transit work at least tolerably well. But that requires accepting much less living space for the same money.)

I should also point out another solution to the transportation problem, at least for commuting: telework. I expect that to become more popular as an alternative to large investments in transportation infrastructure. Many jobs do not require physical presence, at least not all day, every day, and the cost of building out high speed internet, while not negligible, is a lot less than the cost of building and maintaining highways, railways, etc.

You choose to live in an auto-dependent place, and that's fine. However, we've made it difficult or impossible to build places that aren't auto-dependent. This is often done at the behest of car owners without regard for the negative impact on those who would rather not be car owners themselves. It also subsidizes driving at the expense of other modes of transport, as well as increasing housing cost.

Enforced density maximums and parking minimums reduce walkability by increasing trip distance, make neighborhoods more dangerous by increasing car speeds, and increase housing costs by reducing the amount of buildings that can exist in a given piece of land. If I want to build a restaurant in downtown LA, I have to add parking even if I only want to serve my local neighborhood, because suburban voters think I should pay for their driving convenience.

Here's one of countless examples - a restaurant opening in LA (near transit, no less!) has been forced to provide 21 parking spots. To do it, they're demolishing housing next door. This is in a city where the mayor says he's doing something about housing costs.

http://planning.lacity.org/caseinfo/casesummary.aspx?case=ZA...

> we've made it difficult or impossible to build places that aren't auto-dependent. This is often done at the behest of car owners without regard for the negative impact on those who would rather not be car owners themselves.

Yes, there are places where this is true. There are also places where planning is done at the behest of mass transit proponents without regard for the negative impact on those who would rather not use mass transit themselves.

The fact that we don't have a couple operators instead of a driver for each individual train on BART is beyond me. Look at all the private companies (Magic Bus, etc) that are sprouting up because of how terrible our public transportation is.

BART essentially holds a monopoly on our transport. I believe their contract states even during a strike, new drivers have to be trained for 6 months before they are allowed to drive BART trains. There is absolutely no way that it takes 6 months to learn how to drive an AUTOMATED train. There should be public bids submitted from private companies to run on these railways, which would lead to better service and lower costs.

I read someplace that a large part of the budget that is allocated to local government agencies in SF goes to pay pensions and very generous benefits of its employees. How true is that?

Public transit sucks because the quality of governance has corkscrewed down as the media gets weaker and dumber. This is literally the best time in history to be an inept and/or corrupt politician -- nobody is watching.

Roads suck because capital is easy to come by, so real estate squatters control central business districts. It's cheaper/easier/more convenient to build commercial space in he burbs.

The solution in the future will be driverless cars, shared driverless vans, etc. These should improve overall commute times, since there will be fewer accidents and denser transportation. Also people will be able to spend their commute time reading books/news, doing work, watching videos, or other recreation, rather than driving the car.

Sure, I mean if you want a WALL-E vision of the future. Personally I'd prefer a Netherlands/Denmark present day kind of future, where people live within 5-10 miles of their place of work and cycle or walk. Less apathetic fat people and psychotic auto-pilots.

where people live within 5-10 miles of their place of work and cycle or walk.

Problem with that idea is if you change jobs, you need to buy a new house. And moving that often can get lame.

Depends on the city I suppose. In London, most tech jobs tend to be clustered within Hammersmith-ish, Soho, and City/Shoreditch, all of which are in cycling distance of East London.

I go by bike from west to east Copenhagen every day, a 25 minute ride, and it's awesome. I wouldn't trade it for any perk.

What do you do when it's raining or snowing? What do you do when it's hot, can you shower at work?

I walk two miles from my house to my office in Philadelphia. When it rains, I wear a raincoat. When it snows, I wear boots. When I first moved to the city, I took the subway during inclement weather, but after about two years, I came to just adapt to walking in all weather. In the summer, I'd take a few minutes to cool down. Other people, who biked, brought a change of clothes - but in our second building, we have a shower, and some guys used that as well.

I think this is like asking a Texan how they cope with rain (turn the wipers on) or heat (turn the A/C on). Imagine getting the same puzzled look.

Rain/snow: wear a coat, optionally overtrousers.

Hot: go slower if you normally race in, and it doesn't get much above 20 degrees anyway.

Problem is, property prices make that non feasible. Most companies tend to cluster around the same locations, so a lot of people want to buy or rent property nearby and eventually the prices simply become unaffordable. You can't build upwards or downwards indefinitely, and you can't build too far outwards because the 5-10 miles thing goes away, so people will always have to commute to their workplace.

The population is too high and the amount of space too limited to make this a reality, at least in countries with a decent sized population.

Driverless vehicles probably do have the potential to decrease accidents and allow better use of travel time, but I wouldn't bet on them reducing commute times. To the extent that they work to lower commute times with a fixed population of commuters, that will draw more commuters until a new equilibrium is reached. Studies of road building usually find that the equilibrium commute time reached is equal to or higher than the old equilibrium.

We may have a fighting chance if we ever get economic short range vtol air travel. Instead of a 20-50% increase in capacity like adding lanes (and probably driverless vehicles would be in this range as well) or a 5-10x increase (like building a highway), that might get us a 1000x increase in capacity. That might be big enough to move the equilibrium somewhere interesting.

>> Studies of road building usually find that the equilibrium commute time reached is equal to or higher than the old equilibrium.

This is braess paradox, right ? the reason for it is non-optimal selection of routes by users, because of lack of information. But Google maps doesn't suspossed to have that problem because it has more(real time, per road) information.

The problem isn't that people choose routes that are strictly non-optimal, it's that they choose routes that are optimal for them - essentially using a greedy algorithm to choose routes. This is why closing roads can actually improve traffic in certain scenarios. Google Maps won't solve this, unless it starts suggesting routes that are optimal for the network instead of the individual, which is unlikely as they cater to individual drivers. Truly optimal traffic would require central route planning of some sort.

That's true. But don't you think Google take into account predictions of heavy load in otherwise optimal routes, guiding users elsewhere, and so avoiding the problem or at least decreasing it?

Why not driverless drones, then there's no need for roads or trains.

I don't really see how driverless cars will change the situation for the better.

Assuming drivers licenses are no longer needed, the amount of people that can drive will dramatically increase, which could result in a huge spike in the amount of cars on the road.

Any gains achieved by smoother traffic flow is likely to be dominated by this fact.

I'm not convinced that's the case. I think smoother traffic flow could make a significantly larger impact than we think. Traffic jams will cease to exist if the flow is consistent.

>> the amount of people that can drive will dramatically increase

Maybe it would double. But a self-driving van could easily(between many passengers/more efficient driving) could increase traffic capacity by 10x,

That's a pretty bold claim. What's your justification?

Traffic is a compression wave. The car in front of you accelerates, then you accelerate, then the person behind you, etc. Same for slowing down. Self-driving cars would presumably synchronize, allowing all of the cars to start moving at almost the same time.

Also, people don't feel safe driving at 60mph in a densely packed road, so they don't. This should be no problem for a computer, so you could have a densely packed highway but traffic still moving at very high speeds. Basically, flow velocity could remain constant as the highway becomes more congested.

Another optimization that comes to mind is that on city streets, your car would route around traffic light timing.

Jitneys today carry 8 people + driver, maybe more with a wider vehicle (safe for self driving). Self-driving had all the efficiencies the other reply talked about.

Provide free public transportation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

More human life-years get wasted every day in Europe's traffic jams than we lost in the Brussels attacks. Maybe we should rethink our priorities.

>Public Transit Is Worse

Depends on the country. In some places it is excellent.

Power assisted bicycles that take minimum effort to go 20mph would be amazing

> In fact, planners and economists call road building “induced demand” because it encourages people to hop into their cars instead of walking or taking mass transit.

In the Bay Area, building transit infrastructure is expensive and time consuming.

Case in point: a five mile extension including one new train station of an existing BART line costs $890 million and took seven years to build. [1] The resulting extension is expected to increase in ridership by 5000 to 7000 daily trips in the next decade. [2]

There are currently 400,000 daily automobile trips from East Bay to and from Santa Clara County. [2]

[1] http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx [2] http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx/chronology

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