Subways make sense in dense urban areas - When a lot of people are within walking distance from the subway station.
For SF to justify extensive subway infrastructure, it needs to start building higher density neighborhoods.
For SF to justify extensive subway infrastructure, it needs to start building higher density neighborhoods.
Hilariously, I wrote my highschool senior thesis on this exact topic. It was a case study on Seattle, Houston, and New York and how density changed before/after transit was added. You can see the pattern pretty clearly, transit leads to density and not the other way around. Which makes sense, right? Because density can be increased one building at a time, but generally subways need a huge investment to put in an entire line at once and benefit from having an extensive network.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Moraga/Lafayette/Orinda is my favorite example of this in the Bay Area. I sympathize with the complaint that they aren't building enough, but I think the SFBARF/Lafayette lawsuit is stupid. Building more in those places wouldn't help us, because the transit capacity doesn't exist. Have you taken BART, or the Bay Bridge, or the Caldecott tunnel at rush hour? If 20,000 people move from the city to Lafayette, how do they get here for work?
But you can even find this in the city. Yeah, it'd be great to increase density in the Sunset. But have you actually commuted from the Sunset to downtown? It's a disaster. Muni is at capacity, and driving isn't an answer. You can cycle to work (I used to from 48th Ave), but that's a 7+ mile ride with a few hundred feet of elevation: it's not an easy casual ride for most people.
The idea that SF doesn't have the density to justify this stuff is... it's just not true.
I think that depends on your definition of "just about." Every borough in NYC aside from Staten Island is much denser than San Francisco. Additionally, many parts of where I'm from – northern NJ – are even more so: Hoboken, West New York, Union City (the densest city in the country), Guttenberg (the densest township in the country), and more.
If you're talking about cities larger than a certain size, then perhaps, but even then, I personally think it's a bit misleading to single out just Manhattan.
This is why having fast rail, uncongested highways, and always expanding to meet demand are always worth the cost. Unless you can accurately forecast a downturn in regional economic growth irrespective of whether or not you meet transit demands, it is never rational from the perspective of long term city planning for maximum economic throughput to not grow the system and increase density.
I agree, however, that SF needs to build at a higher density (outside of FiDi and downtown) regardless of future subway infrastructure.
This isn't even close to being true.
It's likely only true if you only count cities with populations over a certain amount. Please see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12754395
11,176
66,455
49,708
50,005
4,724
8,175,133
23,594
2,406
27,395
69,781
6,707
7,137
23,805
20,832
58,114
75,754
34,399
53,926
362
146,199
805,235
So yea, it's NYC, then SF, minus a couple pockets of LA. And these are all dense places that need subways. It takes a special sort of something to claim, as the top comment did, that SF is not dense enough to warrant a subway, let alone massive large-scale investment in all modes of mass transit as NYC has.
Consider that NYC covers 302.6 sq/mi to SF's 46.69, which means that NYC isn't merely double the density, it's double the density over a much, much larger area.
This is why most serious comparisons are conducted at the level of the MSA (which would fold every one of the cities you're putting ahead of SF in density into a larger metro). Often, when laypeople compare cities, they're thinking about the MSA while quoting numbers they've found for cities-proper. That's why nobody in this conversation is thinking about Guttenberg, NY (and why mentioning it is almost a non sequitur).
For example, the Los Angeles metro area has a higher density than both NYC's and SF's (which is higher than NYC's), but it's obvious – to me at least – that in reality, considering only areas that most people would agree are remotely close to being in/near "the city," the density order of these three would be more like: 1) NYC 2) SF 3) LA.
But yeah, at the end of the day, I'm mostly being pedantic :)