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Comment by lquist | Hacker News Reader

If you want SF to have a bright future long term, we need to build and not just housing but infrastructure as well.

San Francisco needs to accept that you can’t declare entire neighborhoods historic. You need to be able tear things down to make taller buildings, bigger roads, more expansive public transit networks.

But they refuse because of “historic significance”. That’s one sure fire way to get your city to be historically insignificant in the long run.

Or for it just to become a theme park for the ultra-wealthy. Other cities have struggled with this as well, see Venice for example.

I'm with most of your points, but "bigger roads" stands out to me. Is there a need for bigger roads anywhere in the city? I would say that most of the city has pretty big roads already, if anything I'd like to see road slimming, or turning two lane roads into 3 lanes with dedicated bus lanes or segregated bike lanes.

Most of the roads are effectively single lane, two at most, once you subtract the taxi/bus lane.

One truck parked in the middle of the road to deliver something, or one car blocking the box at an intersection and it’s a standstill.

Also, Highway 101 turns into a residential street with stoplights for several miles.

A better subway system that goes along more than one route would be more worthwhile.

I'm pretty happy with the dedicated bus lane that goes for most of Geary after divisadero, but it saddens me how it was fought tooth and nail by vocal people on the neighborhood.

Two thirds of the city can have cars parked off street and double parked right across from each other and still have enough space for people to drive by. That is too wide in my mind, it encourages speeding at a subconscious level.

I've noticed this tendency for vehicles to be stopped in very inconvenient, like right at an intersection instead of a few meters back to allow for people to drive around and properly stop at a stop sign or attempt to cross an intersection at rush hour when it is obvious that there won't be enough space and will block cross traffic, but these are things that we can slowly improve by actually enforcing the laws already on the books or designing streets in a way that nudge against that behavior.

Widening highways doesn't improve throughput.

Resident of LA here: if you think more or bigger roads will solve your traffic problem then you’re being delusional.

Should we make rules for the people who live in a suburb, or the people who don’t?

And bigger roads are not a solution to anything.

Entire cities are historic in Europe. You don't need glass and steel towers to cope with growth. Just build more densely populated suburbs and have good public transport infrastructure to connect people.

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