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Comment by lr4444lr | Hacker News Reader

Same problem in NYC. Fortunately, we have relatively cheaper and desirable suburbs within 60 - 90 minutes upstate, on Long Island, northern NJ, and southern CT. (Hence the expression "tri-state area"). People commuting to higher paying jobs in the city are a significant - probably crucial - part of the economy of those places, and what keeps the housing prices rising, even though they are affordable for people making a commute time / space trade-off. I'm not familiar with the Bay Area. You don't have some equivalent communities?

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We do. I used to live in Pleasant Hill which is east of SF and about an hour by BART to SF, and housing is far less expensive.

Now I live in Morgan Hill which is a great place for families. I drive in to SJ, about 45 minutes in rush hour each way. Caltrain is an option as well, although it takes longer. A nice, newer 2k square foot house runs about $1mm so not “cheap”, but 50-70% less expensive than most of the peninsula.

My unscientific opinion is that the Bay Area skews younger (for people on HN who are bummed about housing) and most young people don’t like the ‘burbs. Anything outside the Real Bay Area (bounded on the north by SF, east by Oakland and south by SJ) is out of the running for a lot of people.

Imagine what Manhattan would be like if you didn't have the option of renting in Brooklyn or Queens. That's roughly what the situation in San Francisco is like.

We call ours Berkeley and Oakland. It only works if you commute to San Francisco, but plenty of people do it. (As an amusing sidenote San Francisco was jealous of the NYC merging and tried to annex Oakland: https://www.google.com/amp/s/hoodline.relaymedia.com/amp/201...)

The housing prices are increasing all throughout the bay area of course. Unlike NY however there are not great train connections to Silicon Valley; there is BART to SF and nice areas around Bart stations have also seen substantial appreciation.

There is a perfectly feasible train connection to Silicon Valley (at least the western part of it). Trains are standing-room-only daily.

The area around almost every Caltrain stop has already seen significant appreciation, of course.

Coming back to the Bay Area after a decade in London, the difference is shocking, and it feels difficult to call the Caltrain "perfectly feasible". Coming into on a Sunday afternoon, I had to transfer at Millbrae. It was almost a 2-hour wait for the next train, with literally zero amenities at the station. Just multistory parking lots, surrounded by surface parking lots, surrounded by 8-lane roads, surrounded by freeways.

Utterly dysfunctional and dismal. I don't doubt that the land is appreciating there, but why can't it be put to better uses?

It's commuter rail, not an alternative for tourists.

I agree that the Millbrae station is terrible! That's due to BART - most of the other stations up and down that line are in the downtowns of Burlingame, San Mateo, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc. All of those towns predate the automobile, and are certainly rail-friendly.

Coincidentally, all of those rail-friendly suburbs I mentioned are the NIMBY anti-density insane-housing-price places lamented elsewhere in the thread!

Are you suggesting no one goes to work at the weekend, or that no one who goes during the week goes to the city at the weekend?

Outside the USA, public transport may run a little less often on a Saturday or Sunday, but it's still useful for people to use for shopping, going out and so on.

For example, in Copenhagen the trains run every 10 minutes rather than five, and the rural trains are every 60 minutes on a Sunday, rather than 20. I think the metro is the same at the weekend as during the week.

Certainly not suggesting that - in fact, I ride this particular rail on the weekend every few months. It's never crowded on the weekend, except before and after baseball games.

It runs roughly every hour (with a few additional express trains) on the weekend, very similar to the rural trains you describe in Denmark.

My point is that you can't just show up at a commuter rail station and complain that you have to wait a while at a bare-bones platform. It's built for people who take it at the same time every day, commonly driving to the station.

The CalTrain seems to run about once an hour at the weekend, but there are gaps — there's no train at 13:XX, 16:XX, 19:XX or 22:XX. It's just 30km from San Francisco, and Milbrae has a population of about 21,000.

The "Lokaltoger" on Zealand run every half hour on Saturdays, and every hour on Sundays, with the stations at 40-70km from Copenhagen. The settlements are mostly around 1-2 thousand people, although here we can include children and the elderly as potential users as it's not expected to drive to the stations.

If I use public transport every day during the week, then when going to similar places at the weekend I will certainly complain if the trains are infrequent.

http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/weekend-timetable.html

http://www.lokaltog.dk/media/1179/920r-frederiksvaerkbanen.p...

Is there any reason it's so empty? Wouldn't a small coffee shop make any money?

There are some bare stations in the UK. I'd be interested to know if any of these are used for transfers / changes.

Stonehouse is pretty minimal, but I think any changes would be made at Cheltenham or Gloucester or Swindon.

Yeah I should have mentioned Caltrain but it really just travels from one expensive place to another.

I'd say far from perfectly feasible. I looked at the prospect of commuting from South Bay into San Francisco. In isolation a "Baby Bullet" sounds feasible, (45-60 mins), but there are only so many of those, and they of course don't drop you at the door of your office. So the end result looked something like showing up to the station at 7 AM to get on a standing room only train, then needing to cobble together the rest of your commute via bike/rent-a-scooter/Uber whatever to show up anywhere reasonably close to 9. Then doing the reverse on the way back!

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