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Comment by maym86 | Hacker News Reader

Investing in better public transportation is important too so that people can live further away from the city and commute in a reasonable time.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/14/bay-area-cities-...

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better public transportation would only alleviate the problem if it goes to places where additional supply gets built. otherwise it will just drive up prices in the places to which it adds accessibility. imagine a teleporter in stockton that goes anywhere in the bay. unless stockton allows additional housing near the teleporter, it will just become even more expensive than san francisco.

> better public transportation would only alleviate the problem if it goes to places where additional supply gets built.

You have to have zoning that allows density around transit hubs, which NIMBYs oppose. So, I think you have to have the housing fight regardless.

Who said anything about teleporters?

Edit: My point is that a train is not a teleporter. A train spreads population density over a larger area, with multiple stops and takes more time to move people than an imaginary sci-fi device. The comparison is not fair and pointless. Why not just talk about how trains would work instead of using an imprecise analogy.

A teleporter is the spherical cow of transportation - it allows for simplified thought experiments.

Replace with "a bus line to"/"a train to", the outcome is the same. Unless places with connection to the public transportation system build more housing, prices there will just be driven up as well. (Housing shortage in the Bay is that bad)

My point is that a train is not a teleporter. A train spreads population density over a larger area, with multiple stops and takes more time to move people than an imaginary sci-fi device. The comparison is not fair and pointless. Why not just talk about how trains would work instead of using an imprecise analogy.

Not sure what is left to explain.

In the ways that a system of teleporters/portals is different from a system of train stations, the former are entirely superior to the latter; if the former can't solve a problem neither can the latter. The idea is: no transportation solution (even a perfect, immediate one) provides a supply of anything; it can only connect a market with a demand to a market with a supply.

You would need to argue that on the other side of a hypothetical transportation investment that there is a supply, or that it's easier to create a supply in those market(s).

"the former are entirely superior to the latter" and that trains have more downside than teleportation is exactly why Stockton wouldn't become as expensive as SF and the analogy is bad in the first place.

But why would op choose to talk about teleporters when train suffices and is the actual thing we are talking about. No simplification is required and a conversation about public transportation is better if it's actually about public transportation that exists.

Also people seem to have not seen the word 'too' in my original post.

Teleporter was used as a literary device. No one was actually supporting a teleporter. The point was that unless additional housing is built around the transit hubs, the problem still remains.

You can get slow teleporters. Teleporters on dial up.

Everything has to make sense financially. Currently, we have huge investments in transit going out to huge surface parking lots in the middle of single-family detached housing. Expanding this model of development is economic suicide.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/30/transits-chick...

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