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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"Brisbane ... is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons."

Good for them. I mean, probably not, but Brisbane is their town and they should determine their own values and courses of action.

The solution to San Francisco needs to occur in San Francisco - not CC county or Marin or Sonoma. There's a lot of very, very distinguished and historic and noteworthy 1-4 story housing stock in San Francisco that I hope stays around ... but there's a lot of 1-4 story housing stock that is complete shit and needs to be rebuilt, in-filled, brought up to 2017 sanitation and earthquake regs and served by new rail lines.

Notice how I didn't say "served by BRT[1]" ? Served by rail.

If you see a bus, they blew it.

[1] Bus Rapid Transit (and related half-assed bullshit)

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Except San Francisco is paying the price for Mountain View and Palo Alto being willing to add jobs but not housing. Arguing "well then those cities should build housing" is true, but misses the point: given that people can commute, city boundaries are sort of irrelevant. It's a regional problem.

This is true, but incomplete.

Strictly, the entire area is paying the price for the entire area being willing to add jobs but not add housing.

San Francisco is no different from Palo Alto and Mountain View in that regard.

Nice to see someone I can agree with. Sure there's plenty of beautiful Victorian homes in San Francisco, but there's a lot of shitty ones that need to be razed too. SF doesn't need all these 3-4 story, 3-4 BR single family homes with tiny unusable garages - it needs taller denser and modern apartment complexes with a nice park in the middle.

All but about 1/8th of the city is just a sprawling suburb.

Hmmm... would you be willing to identify some of the neighborhoods you think should be razed. I personally think there's historical value in many of the marina style houses built in the 1920s, which may (I'm not sure) be what you're referring to here.

Yeah, we have a problem, but razing 7/8ths of San Francisco? Yikes.

Also - there are suburbs and there are suburbs. The excelsior in SF, as an example of a generally SFH neighborhood, has a population density of 17,640/sq mi. Palo Alto has a population density of 2,808.46/sq mi . I think you can make a compelling case that because it is closer to job centers, we should increase density. I don't really object to the use of the word "suburb" to describe the excelsior (or the sunset), but if someone uses "suburb" to refer to a low density neighborhood more typical of what an American thinks of as "suburban" (7/8 of SF is "suburb"), I do think there may be an ambiguity creeping into the argument. The two things are very different.

All the wood houses will end up burning down during the next quake anyways.

>Served by rail. If you see a bus, they blew it.

And if you see streetcars, they blew it worse. Streetcars combine the traffic creation of buses with the inflexibility of a rail line. As an added bonus they make biking extra treacherous.

If you have the budget to build a real buried or elevated rail line, go for it. Otherwise stick with BRT until you do.

You should see the line of tourists waiting to ride the streetcars...

Think those are probably the cable cars? Those are indeed completely absurd, but eh, it's a roller coaster for tourists.

They're very cute. Utterly impractical as public transportation. But cute :-)

We need rocket cable cars. Where's Elon?

> Brisbane is their town and they should determine their own values and courses of action.

Do you feel the same way about other critical shortages that cause massive human suffering?

Not sure you want to go down that path, but if so:

If you are employed in a tech job somewhere in the United States, , you are very likely in the top 20% of Americans in terms of income, and the top 1% in the world. Perhaps much higher.

I take it you are willing to give all that up in the face of the crushing poverty in the rest of the world.

Bay area housing shortages are nothing compared to the critical shortages that cause massive human suffering in the rest of the world.

All problems are relative. By your logic we should all abandon whatever we are doing and move to a third world country to provide humanitarian aid. We can and should simultaneously address resource shortages around the world, whether they are low or high up on the Maslow hierarchy.

That’s not my logic, that is the grandparent’s, taken to a more logical conclusion. You have to be willing to apply the same reasoning to yourself that you apply to others.

What's wrong with buses?

Slow, unreliable due to traffic, difficult to scale with the number of people.

If we added bus lanes they way they do in other countries, it would address the traffic problem. But we always favor the lone-commuter-in-car.

It doesn't help with scaling (you can have multi-car trains but it's much harder to have multi-car busses) or max speed, but it would certainly be an improvement over the current situation!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-articulated_bus

None of our mass transit operates near the speed limit anyway, afaik.

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