Traffic-busting $100B Bay Area tax plan taking shape
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
Perhaps it just made for a pretty picture, and a completely impractical reality :)
https://i2.wp.com/www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangway_connection#/media/Fi...
I still like it. Probably means everyone is finally working from home.
You would need a cleverly designed frame, but I'm sure there is something that would work. Perhaps many smaller segments joined together.
1. model a train that is straight, and then use some tool to bend the entire model to fit a curve.
2. define a curve, then align models of train engine and cars so that they follow the curve.
Going into a curve, kinetic energy from the speed of the train is turned into spring energy by bending the train. Leaving the curve, the spring energy becomes kinetic energy. The flexed train speeds up due to the spring force as the train unflexes.
I completely missed the curved train cars! Thanks for pointing it out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_process
Honestly, I don't know why the transit politics are working so well here. Partly because Sound Transit has been unusually courageous for a political entity. They have successfully stared down the two richest areas in the region Bellevue and Mercer Island when faced with opposition.
Maybe it just comes down to propaganda. Quite a bit of money was spent to market ST3 to voters. Which is the most recent and most expensive transit oriented ballot initiative.
The whole time there has been a tremendous amount of work done to oppose the improvements. Many in the area will be familiar with the near constant efforts of Tim Eyman to defund transit projects
You might chock it up to uber lefties in Seattle but other liberal priorities have not faired nearly as well on ballot initiatives.
We need more housing. But better transportation alone would spread the problem out and alleviate some of its worst symptoms, e.g. congestion.
Public transportation only works to connect high density areas. It's critical to take that into account or systems will fail.
Not that that's not the case with transit in CA anyways given the national embarrassment that is the high-speed rail project. But having two massive issue like that in the measure is going to make it exponentially more likely to be a disaster.
Tokyo has lots of housing and jobs everywhere, but that mostly results in average one-way commute time of an hour.
In Manhattan, there are 4-5 lines across a strip 2.5 miles wide. Half a mile is about the most people will walk to the subway at each end. You could cover the core of most of the South Bay cities with 5-6 lines. That’s 240 miles of track for the South Bay. At a billion dollars per mile for the subway, that’s a quarter trillion.
That gets you the physical infrastructure to make transit feasible. On top of that you need to topple the local governments so you can massively upzone the strip around the subway lines.
I've been to a number of cities in Europe and Japan with the population density of the Bay Area. They don't have subways. They have a couple of train stations that link them to major cities. Most people who live in these places drive cars, ride bicycles, or take the bus.
The kind of public transit you want is only sustainable in very dense cities. Outside of downtown San Francisco and Oakland, the Bay Area is a suburb. The amount of money it would take to subsidize a reasonable subway system would bankrupt the state.
1) Each trip has an economic purpose
2) Thus each trip has an economic value
3) The trip will happen if the economic value is greater than the cost of suffering in traffic (Otherwise, it is not worth it & will not)
4) Ergo the trips that will be added by reducing congestion must be the trips of the lowest economic value.
> 3) The trip will happen if the economic value is greater than the cost of suffering in traffic (Otherwise, it is not worth it & will not)
This is true, but doesn't really account for the fact that most categories of trips fall into this bucket in the aggregate. That is, people could skip any one of them, but skipping all trips in a category due to persistent traffic would extract a very real cost. (So in general, people bias toward taking all the trips in that category instead.)
Examples: commutes to work, where the cost of not going could be losing one's job. People will sit in a lot of traffic to keep a roof over their heads. That doesn't make it a good civic planning choice.
Others: lots of trips will involve healthcare, which is ~20% of the economy. Those have potentially high costs to skipping. Education-related trips are the same, as long as people are generally required to be physically present at their classes. After-school congestion is filled with children going to swim classes & track meets.
For many of these classes, the cost should be measured in terms of how many people would just leave the area if they couldn't afford the traffic cost of e.g. taking their kid to piano class.
Then if you improve congestion, people move to <exurb>, creating trips from <exurb>. Thus it would be an example of a trip that was of low economic value.
Fixing those problems would fix the traffic problems.
On the topic of traffic cost in congested areas, distance is only loosely related to travel times. If we reword using 1 mile = 1.5 minute
> because traffic is bad, "commutes from <location> ninety minutes away" do not happen and instead "commutes from <location> fifteen minutes away" happen.
This is obviously false for congested metro areas. As another commenter notes, people live where they can afford to do so.
Bringing it back to schools etc. For excellent teachers, it may be lower economic value for them to live in a congested area versus one where they can live closer to school. But the metro area lost an excellent teacher, presumably in favor of one with fewer other employment options.
Congestion, like air quality, is a tax on every activity. It's not useful to only model it at the individual trip level.
And, there is definitely a distribution of commute times. Some very long. But your average commute is not two hours one way; the center of the distribution normalizes around some level of bearability, around 50 minutes in the US. Which, with bad congestion, might allow you to go 10 miles. But with no congestion, might allow you to go 60.
The reason I quoted distance is because commute times are relatively stable, the product of travel speed (congestion) times distance. And that's the point; if travel speed is increased, many people will choose to live further away, e.g. for a bigger house.
Electric self driving vehicles are right around the corner, and will greatly reduce the environmental and parking issues that come with freeways.
If widening roads leads to more cars, that’s a sign that an inadequate transit network is holding the region’s economy back.
At this point, the bay area has comically underbuilt the road and the transit network, and is also intentionally blocking high density construction near public transit.
All three of those problems need to be fixed.
You can never build "enough" roads, it just encourages more people to travel from further away. See induced demand: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-unive...
I'm all for increasing mass transit speeds and convenience. We need to think really hard about SUVs, and freeways, and commuters, (and commercial trucks). Heck, even a pure electric Tesla Model X is MASSIVE: its gross vehicle weight is 6,500 lbs, and can go up to 130 mph! Good for climate change, not so good for commuting on crowded roads.
But I'm also optimistic: batteries and electronics are improving rapidly, and I expect a $10,000, battery-powered, 2-person, 45mph, 1000 lb, 100-mile runabout coming along in the next 5-10 years. A (much nicer) Renault Twizy-like vehicle would make a dandy Richmond to SF commuter, ASSUMING you could maintain 45mph the whole way.
How to maintain 45mph in these small commuters? Well, each would be shorter and narrower, and slower (assume design top speed 45mph). Thus we could simply restripe a new lane or two onto our freeways. Better yet: electronics/radio (V2V) will allow semi-autonomous platooning (and crash detection/avoidance), thus increasing vehicle density and allowing drivers to relax more on their commute.
What to do with the SUVs and trucks? Not much, other than tax them at 1/2 m v^2.
Weight does not take up space. The Model X may be heavy, but it is only about 6 inches longer and 7 inches wider than a Toyota Camry. I'm not going to mention height because it does not matter within a reasonable range. The Camry can carry 5 people and the Model X can carry 7, plus a lot more stuff, for only a small increase in total size. It also uses no gas. How is that not a net positive?
Maybe, freeway should add tolls, with discount for no. of passengers.
But I think a difference is that since car traffic tends to get inefficient when congestion increases (traffic jams, etc) its a pretty inefficient way to handle large amounts of traffic. You can just fit so many more people onto a train than into personal cars, and they don’t gum up in the same way. Plus, it’s conceivable that mass transit capacity can be expanded to match demand, with sufficient investment, whereas we already devote like 60% of the land in our cities to cars and it’s still not enough.
IMO people will use any method of transportation up to the point where the pain of using it overcomes the value the person gets out of making the trip. The pain can come from operational issues like frequency of delays, fare cost, proximity of stations to destinations, ease of transferring - but can also come from overcrowding
I think that there ought to be increased transit but also much much better utilization of the land that transit goes to. It makes no sense that if you ride BART, you’ll notice that for all of the stops except for those in the most central parts of SF, they shuttle millions of people into giant parking lot wastelands with no shopping and few apartments. Make the stops worth going to and living in! You’re already sending people there and having people live nearby work reduces their transit usage.
If you like that idea, tell state senators to call for a vote on SB50 today. It got blocked undemocratically but that’s the best shot we have for well utilized transit stops in the foreseeable future.
https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler/status/1130497688581967872?...
The problem is that some trips -- like getting to work -- have effectively "infinite" value. Most people can't opt out of that trip.
facepalm
Please stop with the regressive sales taxes. These things should be paid for in property or progressive income taxes instead of a tax on being poor.
The average person doesn't matter. If a new tax pushes a borderline low-income person below the poverty line, that's a problem.
Everything declines with high density. Medium density is better than low density. Networked public transport systems is better with medium density. More housing stock is good to reduce sprawl but the answer isn’t always high density housing and not subsidized housing. Example: senior affordable housing is good..shared housing is good..affordable micro homes is good for single working people. But affordable housing that crams a lot of working adults and children that go to public schools is not really good. Etc.
No property owner benefits from land value increasing until after they have sold said property.
People take loans against their assets all the time and having valuable houses makes that a lot easier. Such loans can be used as leverage to buy more property.
Home ownership doesn’t always imply assured appreciation of property. Even those with second homes have to pay property taxes and rental income is also taxable.
Many people do NOT take more loans to buy a new home. Home ownership does give a sense of security that the down payment guarantees...it’s 30 years of mortgages and interest. And even the down payment is a result of hard earned or saved $$. People assume that property is a privilege. It’s debt. It’s a higher risk but highly rewarding risk.
Sounds like a benefit to me. Debt is a tool that can bring huge benefits to people who know how to use it.
Most people who own homes have used debt to buy them. Almost everyone who owns more than one home has borrowed against equity in homes they already own to buy the others. The ability to do that is a clear benefit of property ownership.
You are generalizing. I know more people who are only single home owners. Perhaps you know wealthier or younger people than I do.
Also: you can’t penalize people for the benefit to get into more debt with more taxes. Then it no longer is a benefit.
On the other side, someone in an affordable home is getting subsidized by higher value home owners property taxes. If they own the affordable home and the best deal is for the renters. They get the most bang for their rent bucks.
But consider an aging couple with property taxes capped by prop 13, have no more kids in public school and are on a fixed income. What benefit do they gain? There is a more stressed resource pool of law enforcement, $$ for infrastructure improvement, essential services and likely no community benefit like elder day care(in my town, they are converting them to homeless transition centers)...so owning a home is a really bad deal and renting is better.
The only return is the windfall when they sell. But the taxes are also appropriated for the gains. Contrary to popular opinion, home ownership is a burden and not a comfort. It doesnt matter to those who inherit or to those who are in higher income brackets, but those higher income nimbys rightly demand their due and expect a certain quality of life for which they pay dearly.
If productive members of a society are not incentivized to keep producing and supporting the less fortunate, it will be like killing the golden goose instead of just collecting the golden eggs everyday. They will simply leave. Bay Area prosperity bubble will burst sooner than we expect because we treat the productive $$ contributors badly..shaming them for their ‘privilege’. You have to give something back when you are the state with insanely high taxes.
Further, over 45% of California budget is for schools. A lot more than property taxes goes towards public school. The teachers union is very powerful in CA. There are a lot more factors involved. Not a lot comes to infrastructure. Even tax measures and bond measures for infrastructure improvements gets diverted into affordable housing and usually this is high density. High density degrades existing infrastructure as more resources are spread thin for larger number of people and has the opposite effect of improving infrastructure.
Infrastructure should be in place before high density housing measures are put into action. Right now, the opposite is happening..or infrastructure is not happening. It’s just not rational problem solving.
Great, so we can stop worrying about things that might hurt property values?
You don't understand what a regressive tax is.
It is a tax that disproportionately affects the poor, due to their much higher marginal utility of money.
This usually amounts to $20-$100 per house / apartment / unit per year.
Still regressive because it isn’t income or value dependent, but it is a tax on property.
-COUNTY WIDE GO BOND
-CITY OF OAKLAND 1
-SCHOOL UNIFIED
-SCHOOL COMM COLL
-BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT
-EAST BAY REGIONAL PARK
-MOSQUITO ABATEMENT
-CSA PARAMEDIC
-CSA VECTOR CONTROL
-CITY EMERG MEDICAL
-CITY PARAMEDIC SRV
-CSA LEAD ABATEMENT
-SCHOOL MEASURE G
-PERALTA CCD MEAS B
-OUSD MEASURE N
-OUSD MEASURE G1
-VIOLENCE PREV TAX
-CITY LIBRARY SRV-D
-SFBRA MEASURE AA
-FLOOD BENEFIT 12
-HAZ WASTE PROGRAM
-CSA VECTOR CNTRL B
-MOSQUITO ASSESS 2
-AC TRANSIT MEAS VV
-CITY LIBRARY SERV
-EBMUD WETWEATHER
-EAST BAY TRAIL LLD
-EBRP PARK SAFETY/M
They range from $1.74 for mosquito abatement to $991.28 for City of Oakland. the average is around $100 at quick glance.
Indeed I should've said $20-100 EACH, not total. It adds up to lots annually.
Any tax that Person A supports but Person B is paying is a predatory tax.
The main reason more citizens don't demand that their government be more efficient is because they aren't paying the bulk of the operating costs.
Why should Person A, who earns 100% of their income through honest labor that benefits society, suffer the same pain of tax as Person B, who got it by the luck of coming through the right birth canal? Or because they own land that was made more valuable because of the government's investment and protection?
It's the same reason Bridges have a toll vs getting funds directly from property / income tax.
Also, trains/buses are not usuualy free in the same way that some bridges have tolls.
Property Tax should be about using the land & making improvements to nearby areas. Not about funding things far away.
My concern is government too worried about losing its grip on the area. Which stifles progress.
No, it's a prerequisite to solving the transportation problem. How else would you know what to design the system for?
To eliminate congestion: Either you have to fix housing or add more toll to roads.
Or build more roads.
Or build multi-level roads or tunnels.
I think the govt should focus on what will happen when we reach a post-jobs future instead of ways to tax people more now. Invest in technologies and some form of universal basic services(like food, medical) and take care of infrastructure and schooling etc. they should particularly come clean and fix the unfunded pension liabilities of public sector employees in CA which is where most of the taxes are going.
The biggest expense is public schools and education. Figuring how to deliver education effectively to young minds(likely with parents who won’t work because there will be fewer jobs) by disrupting education is better than trying to appease unionized teachers who are focused on inflating pensions rather than their students who suffer during strikes and walk outs.
I don't believe for a second that our ruling class will be able to do anything useful with it. And I say this as a mass transit user and supporter.
Consider what it'd take to get a transit system comparable to say Chicago's. (The two areas aren't that dissimilar in size and population. Chicagoland has 9.5 million people in 10,500 square miles; the Bay Area has 8 million people in 7,000 square miles.) Chicago has 500 miles of commuter rail plus 100 miles of rapid transit. San Francisco has 70 miles of light rail (Muni), plus ~180 miles of commuter rail (BART + Caltrain). And it's not clear that Muni even counts as a rapid transit line. Most of it isn't grade separated, so it's got an average speed of 8 miles per hour. (The D.C. Metro, a typical heavy-rail system, averages 33 miles per hour including stops.) The LRVs go about 5,000 miles between failures, versus 200,000 miles for a 7000-series D.C. Metro car.
So even to get to Chicago levels (where most people still drive!), you're talking about building a whole new subway system, plus building hundreds of miles of commuter rail across the Bay Area. It's a trillion dollar project, not a $100 billion project.
So what would it take to finance all that? Let's be charitable and say you can do it for $500 billion. California is currently issuing 25-year general obligation bonds at 5% for 25 year maturity. That's $35 billion per year in annual payments, divided by 2.6 million Bay Area households. Or about $13,500 per household per year.
If that sounds unaffordable, let’s hypothesize we just have “rich people” pay for it. The top 5% of households in the San Francisco metro area make an average of $600,000 per year. Applying that to the whole Bay Area, you’re looking at 130,000 households making $78 billion per year total. So the tax for transit would have to be the other 50% of income that California doesn’t already tax those folks.
Okay, surely billionaires have the money. Last year, US billionaires made $470 billion. So we are talking about less than a 10% billionaire’s tax, right? Well the Bay Area is just 3% of the country’s population. Hardly seems fair to give it such an outsized portion of confiscatory billionaire taxes. 3% of 470 is about $15 billion, not close to enough!
Oh, and here's the kicker. Everyone would pay for that new transit, but most people wouldn't be able to use it! In Chicago, only 12% of commuters take public transit, because the system, as extensive as it is, really only is good for getting people into downtown and back out. Even if San Francisco manages to double that, you're talking about everyone paying what would be in the rest of the country a mortgage on a house for a transit system 75% of people can't use.
Light rail systems are generally counted as rapid transit, even though the grade separation tends to reduce travel time a lot. Boston's Green Line on the T is also a light rail system, and is generally about 7-9 mph.
Furthermore, BART is generally counted as a heavy rail transit line, although like DC's Metrorail, the system is a bit of a hybrid between commuter rail and heavy transit.
First, note that the "Pennsylvania alignment" has little to do with bringing Caltrain from 4th and Townsend (where it currently ends) to the Transbay Terminal. Pennsylvania Avenue is not between those two points! No, the city wants to redo the entire line between 22nd St. station and 4th and Townsend, to increase grade separation for Mission Bay.
Which is probably a good thing to do in its own right, but it doesn't have to mean "let's just bore a huge tunnel through the whole thing", which is the most expensive option. See here for a much cheaper alternative that was summarily dismissed: https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2014/01/focus-on-mission-b...
You are being a bit shortsighted. Even if you don’t use it, you’ll benefit from less road congestion. The average speed on roads keeps decreasing.
Remove 25% of the cars and driver’s commute times will also improve. Fewer accidents, etc
More broadly, urban congestion is something that only affects a subset of people. The average American commute is 26 minutes, but a staggering 16 miles. People are cruising to work! The US has among the fastest commutes in the OECD: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commu....
And when we have another 200 million Americans, we just make the roads wider again?
Because we didn’t build the proper mass transportation systems 50 years ago, it’s incredibly expensive to build now. It won’t be easier in another 50 years with millions of more people
Yes! The takeaway from the OECD report is that we didn't build proper mass transportation 50 years ago, and we still have among the shortest commutes in the OECD. Over the next 50 years the population will grow even less, as the population growth rate now is half of what it was in the 50s and 60s.
(We're having this debate in Maryland now. People are upset that Hogan wants to widen the highways instead of building transit in the counties near D.C. They invoke the same rationale--we'll just have to widen the roads again in 50 years. Except they ignore that population growth in the area has slowed dramatically. Montgomery County tripled in population between 1960 and 2010, but is expected to grow just another 15% by 2045. Prince George's County grew by a factor of 4.5, but will grow only another 10% by 2045.)
The problem we have in Maryland is moving people from suburban population centers to suburban job centers. People commute from Bowie to College Park, or Frederick to Bethesda, or Waldorf to Alexandria. Indeed, none of the highways being widened (270, 495, and 295) even go near the urban core. 270 and 295 bring people from the outer suburbs to 495, which passes through the inner suburbs.
You couldn’t build a rail line that would solve that problem. I mean you could, it would just cost a ton. Widening 270 and 495 is going to cost about $100 million per mile (or $6.4 billion if you did the entire beltway). The silver line serves just 17,000 riders per day. The beltway serves ten times that in the bush portions.
If I can drive 60 minutes to go 20 miles door-to-door home-to-work (basically what my dad used to do from Ellicott City to Silver Spring every day), but it takes me 2+ hours to drive to transit, park, wait for transit, take transit, transfer to a bus, etc., then I'm probably just going to buckle down and drive. And of course that wasn't even an option for my dad since the Metro didn't go far enough north, but I imagine this scenario comes up a lot for people who live closer to DC.
You even see this in the Bay Area, though the distances can be short enough for workarounds. Before electric scooters were the fad they are now, a friend of mine bought a 35mph folding one so he could ride to the 22nd St Caltrain in SF, take the train to Santa Clara, and ride his scooter from there to work, and stash it under his desk to charge. If he can catch the bullet train, the total commute can be a little over an hour and a half, which is at worst comparable to some of the drive times, and at best a bit shorter. (Ultimately, he still often drives for flexibility, but has to leave by 6am to avoid the worst of the morning traffic.)
In SF itself, the issue is the abysmal slowness of the Muni buses. When I lived near Alamo Square, my commute was less than 3 miles, but could take 40 minutes by bus (even with home and work within a few blocks of bus stops), if I timed it perfectly and didn't have to wait 10 minutes for the bus. And that 40 minutes is effectively wasted; I can't sleep in another 40 minutes and expect to work on the bus because it's just not the right environment for that. Muni gives time scales that look like commuter rail, but over much shorter distances and with much less comfort than commuter rail. Also a kicker: I could do that walk in a little over 50 minutes.
Get BARTs average speed and frequency up to modern standards, police + expand the lots, and widen the roads that access them.
Problem solved.
This is the problem all across the country. Most of the jobs in our metro areas are in the suburbs. Which means you’re talking about commutes that start and end in a car dependent area. There might be a reasonable rail route for a large part of the way, but you’d need to drive at both ends.
With relatively few exceptions, transit doesn't work terribly well for either travel from a suburban home to a suburban office park or, for that matter, out to the office park from a city apartment.
Where there are real clusters of offices in suburban locations, you can set up shuttles from train stations. But it's generally hard to service jobs that aren't either in the city or right next to a rail station.
The peak capacity of a mile of track will always be less than that of a mile of highway. But we don't have anywhere to put either because we refuse to build up and ruin a bunch of NIMBYs views.
I'd be interested to hear why you think this.
How many passenger cars can you get down a mile of highway per hour?
I love freeways. It’s just that during rush hour (and holiday weekends), they’re extremely congested. We’ve got local lanes, express lanes, and Waze to help figure out which one to take.
Roads don’t scale very well.
Mass transit would more acceptable if we can increase the speed. China has low-medium speed maglevs, for example, that will travel 100-120 miles per hour.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-t...
Except the actual ridership of the Silver Line is just about 17,000 people per day, and declining. Why? Because it's useless for most people. It takes you to DC at one end, and the airport at the other, and a few places that happen to be on the way. But most people who live in that area don't commute to DC. People take VA7 to go from say Sterling (where there is no metro station) to Tyson's Corner. They have to get in a car to use Metro anyway, and by the time they do that, it's faster to just drive to Tysons instead of getting on the Metro for the segment of the trip Metro covers.
On the other side of DC, the Maryland suburbs are served by no fewer than 37.5 trains per hour (15 on the Green/Yellow, 15 on the Blue/Silver, and 7.5 on the Orange). That's 50,000 people per hour! But the cars are pretty much empty in Maryland, because few people commute into DC. In the height of irony, Metro is moving one of its main employment centers to Lanham Maryland, located on the terminus of the orange line. That means it's not actually commutable by Metro for most part. Folks who work for WMATA aren't living in DC and doing a reverse commute. They're living in Bowie or Largo or College Park or Hyattsville (the surrounding towns). Taking Metro would involve going all the way to DC, switching from the Green/Yellow or Blue/Silver to the Orange, then going back all the way.
you’re giving me confirmation bias.
You’re cherry picking one example that confirms your bias. No first principles reasoning.
You’re giving some specific example about a setup in Washington DC.
This has absolutely nothing to do with how well mass transit can do versus cars. It’s one specific implementation.
In NYC, for example, 5.5 million people take the subway per day. How much highway will you need to carry that many people?
NYC is uniquely dense: https://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2012/09/th.... The weighted population density (the density in the parts of the metro area where people live) is 30,000 people per square mile. LA and SF, the next most dense, are less than half as dense, at 12,000. DC, at 6,400, is about 1/5 the density of New York. Portland and Seattle are even less dense, at 4,000-5,000, which is about the national average.
The Silver Line example is much more illustrative of a typical place in the US. In these places, the higher theoretical capacity of rail is irrelevant, because the commuting pattern isn’t about bringing a large number of people along a few major paths to a downtown job center. It’s about shuttling people between job clusters spread out among the suburbs: http://www.robertmanduca.com/projects/jobs.html (scroll over to Northern VA, west of DC). There might be heavily used corridors like VA7, but the commutes both start and end in suburban locations. You couldn’t pick out a few key paths where being able to move 100,000 people a day from point A to point B and intermediate points would really be all that helpful.
“The peak capacity of a mile of track will always be less than that of a mile of highway. ”
All we’re doing is arguing by examples.
Clearly, depending on the population it’s simply not true. I don’t know the specifics in each case. I’ve been stuck in huge traffic jams in Seattle, New York/New Jersey, Washington DC, Virginia, Philadelphia, etc. I’d say we need more mass transit in those places.
Yes, mass transit needs to go where a certain number of people want to go. However, we’ve ignored mass transit in the US and we complain that it doesn’t work, when it seems to work everywhere else in the world.
So, we’ve mostly build minimal mass transit and lots of roads in the US and are using that as an example that mass transit doesn’t work.
The situation in Maryland illustrates what happens when you try to impose transit in a place that doesn’t have that kind of density.
Most of the US isn't dense enough to avoid the same DC metro area problem. In most places, you're transporting people between suburban areas, not between the suburbs and the city, and not between different places in the city. If you have hundreds of suburban areas that are spread out over thousands of square miles, the amount of rail necessary to adequately service that area without stranding people at one end or the other is just massively infeasible.
Even look at the Bay Area. Say you live in SF and work somewhere in the peninsula or south bay. If you don't live near one of the Caltrain stations in SF, you're probably going to spend 30-60 minutes just getting there on Muni. Then you ride for 45-90 minutes on Caltrain. But what if your job isn't along the Caltrain corridor, which is most of the area? Ironically, some of the companies which are within a reasonable distance from Caltrain (walkable, or the company could provide a frequent shuttle bus) provide their own buses to and from SF. Clearly, the preference is just not to have to deal with the mess of Caltrain. And people who don't have shuttle buses still find driving a better use of their time.
Given that the Bay Area is (on either side of the bay, anyway) relatively long and narrow, another one or two parallel trains might solve the problem, though it'd be prohibitively expensive and I doubt the NIMBYs would yield right of way. I think this is an example of the opposite problem: cherry-picking examples that just happen to work out due to favorable land shape and suburb clustering.
These are actual competent train systems that run trains every couple of minutes, not the idiotic once-per-hour Caltrain.
[0] http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/circulars/EC018/08_52.p...
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=NbYqQSQcE2MC&pg=PA136&lpg=...
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong-Hong_Kong-Macau_Gr...
It also dodges the real issue in the bay area, which is housing. Commutes are long because most people can't afford to live next to their jobs. If we stopped restricting new housing and taller building, then the number of cars on the road would decrease.
Furthermore, there are innovations coming that might shorten commuting (e.g. things like Hyperloop, although I have no idea if that's viable) and self-driving cars (which let you read/work/etc while commuting). The government is not going to be able to deploy $100b better over the next few decades than the private market.
Finally, the rise of remote work might mean a lot of professions commute less in the future. My prediction is this just going to be an exercise in setting $100b on fire.
(2) We definitely need increased housing, but that will only make the traffic problem worse. Can you imagine Tokyo or Paris (cities that have built density) without public transit?
(3) there will always be something new on the horizon - if you always wait for what is next (I.e. hyper loop) you will never improve infrastructure. Unless you think that hyperloop is the absolute end of public transit?
(4) I agree with your skepticism that our governments will spend the money wisely. Since this appears to be some sort of community effort, maybe they will find a way to turn it over to the free market.
It's not at all an argument for not doing it.
https://www.cato.org/publications/research-briefs-economic-p...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer...
We should not have job singularities like Bay Area or NY, we should have much (an order of magnitude) more centers like that and more remote work for professions where it makes sense.
I've lived in a European capital too. London? Where were you?
Assuming that public transit could support the increased demand. I'm not an expert on Bay Area transit, but my sense is that there is not enough extra supply right now to support the extra density without modifications.
> Furthermore, there are innovations coming that might shorten commuting (e.g. things like Hyperloop, although I have no idea if that's viable) and self-driving cars (which let you read/work/etc while commuting).
Of all the arguments against transit, this is one of the shallowest and least effective. Large infrastructure projects takes years, perhaps as long as a decade, before construction starts--and it doesn't matter if they're public or private, because they have to go through the same mandatory delay processes. What you're proposing is that the government does absolutely nothing in the intervening times, in the hope that new technology comes out that makes things magically better. If the new technology miraculously comes out in time, you're going to have the exact same long delay before any benefits actually can be enjoyed, and indeed longer because new technology has inevitable teething problems. More likely, the new technology will turn out to not be worth the hype (PRT, monorail), or will be perpetually just over the horizon (self-driving cars).
There is nothing to be gained by waiting to solve problems that already exist today.
> What you're proposing is that the government does absolutely nothing in the intervening times.
I'm not quite proposing that, but actually you're not far off. I think the government is generally very bad at long-term planning, budgeting, and execution. So if the choice is them doing nothing or them collecting and figuring out how to spend an extra $100 billion, I would go for the former. What I would prefer is that they delegate as much as possible of budgeting and execution to private industry. For example instead of spending tens of billions on BART and Caltrain, what if they offered some fraction of that amount in tax incentives for either multi-family housing developers, or for companies that open offices in areas where most people have to commute out for work? Or even tax incentives for people who have a sub-X mile commute?
What makes me skeptical about government spending are things like the California rail project. It seems like a shit show that is going way over budget, and when it's built it's unlikely to even be competitive with alternative modes of transport.
Things like building restrictions are just hampering the free market. Maybe some developer wants to build a bunch of $2k/mo apartments in SF, and they can make the economics work out for themselves, but the city doesn't allow it, so residents of the city have to pay $3k/mo or commute long distances. Everyone loses.
But I agree with you about the building restrictions.
But didn't you hear? GDP was recently replaced with VMT (vehicle miles traveled) as the measure of a country's economic vitality. So anything that decreases the number of cars on the road, or how far they travel, is right out.
It's not.
> and self-driving cars (which let you read/work/etc while commuting)
Self-driving cars won't make it better. Induced demand is a well-studied phenomenon and as I and others have pointed out, cars waste absurd amounts of space per person, whether moving or parked.
> The government is not going to be able to deploy $100b better over the next few decades than the private market.
There's a difference here between the well-studied problems of public choice and the well-studied problems of public goods. The former predicts that governments will face a constant battle not to become captured by special interests that drain away public funds. The latter predicts that private industry will never provide these things to a level that maximises net utility.
> Finally, the rise of remote work might mean a lot of professions commute less in the future. My prediction is this just going to be an exercise in setting $100b on fire.
A lot of work is not remote and won't be, plus a lot of folks greatly prefer to leave their homes so that it is only home and not some never-not-working hybrid. There's also the small problem that Star Trek style matter replicators don't exist and it remains necessary to deliver things to people, wherever they choose to be. And it remains necessary for those same people to sometimes go to other places to collect them.
Who exactly do you think the government is? The government is the people when it comes to things like this. The government will not get out of the way of housing in SF because the existing landowners -- regular people -- like it that way. And they currently hold a voting majority.
I'd love to see studies by traffic coordinator. Highways in the outer suburbs are affected by this (101 south of Santa Clara, 580 east of Castro valley, 680, etc.), but not necessarily the inner core (e.g. 101 on Peninsula, 880 in the East Bay, etc.) which traverse similar priced markets.
Engineers that work in the South Bay aren't living in SF because they can't afford the South Bay.
A lot of positive development can occur with the right regulations. That's what governments should focus on. As we've seen though with the fiasco that's the taxi market in US cities, public officials aren't too keen on doing their job proper.
Regardless, self-driving systems like this are at best decades away. Do we just sit here and do nothing in the meantime as the already-terrible situation continues to get worse?
So here is how Santa Clara County handles the same issue already: every 10 years, they put on the ballot a one-cent sales tax. Along side it, they put a list of the projects to be funded. There is a clear link between the tax and projects, local control, a deadline, and a 10-year reckoning. Alameda County has also started a similar project.
Consider the alternative: the new Bay Bridge eastern span. It cost way more than it should have. Why? Because the mayors of Oakland and Berkeley demanded a pretty bridge instead of a simple one. It was paid for not by Oakland and Berkeley, but by the state which charges tolls on all the bridges -- including the Dumbarton, San Mateo, and Antioch bridges which were of the exact same "simple" type that Oakland and Berkeley complained about.
When the projects are paid for out of big, faceless funding, then there is no incentive to make it work for the people paying the tax. For example, link up Caltrain closer to downtown? That's not really a benefit to anyone other than SF and the Penninsula.
they put a list of the projects to be funded
Seriously, the VTA is the absolute poster child for worst return on infrastructure investment in USA history. Its operating costs (alone!) are 85% subsidized with nothing going to fixed costs.
Why handing over $100 billion dollars to these ‘authorities’ would be an ill advised move.
I'd prefer many independent agencies (public and private) working together (See: Tokyo) than one big monolith. We need competition.
You can only have two tracks at a level without either (1) people walking on the tracks, which is a safety issue even without the electrified third rail, or (2) people going up and down, or vice versa, to transfer between tracks at the same level. Unless each system has only one track through the station (which complicates traffic control for two-way traffic), or unless you split levels by direction instead of system (which still requires changing levels for some transfers), you are stuck with what they have.
Presumably because the management of at least one of the two systems thinks that the initial and ongoing cost (and therefore, ceteris paribus, fare) increase of either system integration or additional fare gate infrastructure (the latter of which may not be practical due to space constraints on the platform level) isn't worth the convenience increase, at least compared to other improvements they could make to their systems at the same cost.
I suspect an solicitation of bids for either of those would not have any $0 bids.
However, Caltrain, Muni, VTA, ACE and Amtrak all use standard width track, and none of them cooperate with the others in a meaningful way.
When I gave up on the train commute, they didn’t even bother to arrange timed transfers where they happened to have adjacent stations.
These agencies need to be combined under an umbrella organization with the authority to make unilateral decisions for the subagencies to implement.
> However, Caltrain, Muni, VTA, ACE and Amtrak all use standard width track, and none of them cooperate with the others in a meaningful way.
Part of the reason it might seem that way is different federal regulatory regimes between the light (Muni, VTA) and heavy (Amtrak, ACE, Caltrain) rail lines, which makes many naively simple kinds of cooperation difficult in practice.
> These agencies need to be combined under an umbrella organization with the authority to make unilateral decisions for the subagencies to implement.
Yes, the best way to make bureaucracy more efficient and responsive is to make it larger and more distant from the community served.
1. In 50 years, I predict that automation will erase many jobs.
2. The notion that we need to live near where we work is going to become outdated and useless.
3. This is just another way for the govt to get it’s claws deeper into the tax payers wallets.
4. High density is incompatible with affordability. Any affordable housing is subsidised housing with monies that is redistributed.
5. We need more local governance rather than tyrannical regional governance in California with Sacramento dictating everything for everyone.
Could you clarify this? There are countless affordable neighborhoods that are all apartments.
Affordable houses pay less taxes than market rate. High density still absorb more infrastructure.
Where one house used stand, if there are 10 apartments..it’s that many x 2 cars on the street. It’s almost that many more children in public schools. It’s that many more households consuming water, power and need for general services. But schools don’t multiply..fire stations and police stations don’t increase to cater to the increase in population. Roads are not built to take care of the traffic nor is public transport improved.
More housing = more taxes. That’s why the govt encourages. Affordable housing actually fatten up the funds for the care and feeding of big Gov more because what they don’t offer in high per household tax, they make up in volume.
Net net, govt gets more $$ and the public gets less services. These 20 and 5@ year old multi billion projects never translate because they never see the light of day as they get obsolete quickly. That’s why the Bay Area looks so run down and unaffordable housing and traffic woes only keep increasing and never finds solutions.
Do you think NYC is affordable for those earning 51k? Really?
What makes you think NYC is unaffordable to households making under $51k, and how do you explain the fact that half the populace is doing exactly that?
What do earthquakes have to do with it? Half the megacities of Asia are in earthquake country.
We have land in California and can provide housing IF we improve public transport. Sacramento takes money earmarked for public transport and channels it for affordable housing. It is a pattern of deception.
On Asian mega cities with high density, I am going to assume that you have lived there as you brought it up. Is that the kind of standard of living you think affordable high density housing advocates want in California? I see that you are housing advocate and I assume high density as you are dedicated to building more housing stock in San Francisco.
I have lived in high density Asian cities and have commuted at 20 km/hour. Which is what is happening in the Bay Area too.
How many parts of Asia do you think are earthquake prone? Please name them and their population density. I would like to compare quality of life between them and the bay area.
So yea..there is that..but surely we can have a middle ground between wasteful sprawl and high density, bumper to bumper trafficker life style.
Our local art gallery and indie coffee shops have closed down due to no foot traffic as home-office-home commute begins at 6.30 to 9,00 and then 2.00-7.30 pm. They use side streets and clog arterial infra city roads due to various traffic apps suggesting short cuts. The local mission that used to press olives every year from the olive trees in their property won’t do it anymore because they sold the land to build more condos. The community college wants to sell its land to build apartments and they aren’t even student housing. Everyone is in the speculative high density market rate housing game. Cities have no identity and they are nothing but bedroom communities where people come back to eat and sleep before getting up to go back to work again battling traffic. Are high density cities worth this zombie existence? That’s what Bay Area is becoming.. I hope it isn’t so!
Low density sprawl is a huge factor in traffic because it pulls people apart. You can't walk anywhere because you have to live more than half an hour walk from the local shop, the local butcher, florist, cafe, gallery. Zombie existence? The low density shit hole that is the Bay Area is a zombie existence. European lifestyle with its much higher density and much better road traffic is the antithesis of zombie existence.
Case in point, I can’t go out to get a bottle of milk between 2.00-7.00 because of traffic. People are cutting through residential roads due to traffic apps diverting them away from freeways which are clogged anyways. There are no shops within a mile of most homes. There are shopping hubs and then there are residential developments. Due to greed, Bay Area cities (ABAG is the name of the org) has zoned everything residential and there are no shops, no green spaces, no parks..no parking and no public transport! Just homes and homes and more high density homes to extract as much property taxes as possible. So these are not even affordable homes but expensive million dollar homes. These tax dollars go to improve other areas in California that is not as well off as Bay Area. Hence the awfulness of our region.
You’d think as a cash cow we would get some benefits for shouldering the economy of this state massively, but no...we are just a place where Sacramento can milk and milk and milk more for taxes. You’d think they’d improve other parts of California.
So obviously something is off..if this is a repeating pattern, then perhaps we must correct our assumptions about the benefits of high density vis a vis sustainability and quality of life. The data doesn’t deliver the promised benefits.
In the Bay Area, we don’t have low density sprawl. We have high to medium density already and most land is built out. We have a public transportation problem with both intra and inter city gridlocks.
The solution is to build outside and developing the public transport system to connect the hubs in the state. They have already wasted millions and millions on this with no impact except creating unsupported high density dwellings leading to more traffic woes.
Fifty years is ridiculous. Most of us won’t be alive and our children would already be burdened with debt before they are born. In China, roads and bridges and homes are built in months. Not even years. Here the bureaucracy of big govt makes any project going like one is rowing a boat through a creek of molasses.
So how do we fix this? Certainly not by handing over more tax dollars to Sacramento every time they come up with another hare brained scheme.
I mean..even this post here..check the article. They only know that they need 100 billion. No plan. No ideas as to how to collect it. No way for us to perform due diligence.
Fool me once etc.
"High to medium density". Absolute nonsense. Have you seen the South Bay? What looks high density to you?
I don’t know what you mean by ‘bring the entire Bay Area into the south bay’? It makes no sense to me.
I see no logic in asking for more and more high density housing developments with NO plans and NO supporting infrastructure. You can’t cram people into a closed and bounded geographical region without providing adequate resources and essential services and infrastructure.
And why should the South Bay bear the burden of supporting the entire inflow? Is it punishment for being successful and productive?
You BUILD infrastructure FIRST and then plan cities around it. That’s common sense.
Yes. South Bay is high density. I believe that. Next?
Walkability is a key factor, we need to stop using cars. Copenhagen is an absolute dream compared to here.
Why ON EARTH would people work their arses off if they can’t live well and be a proud NIMBY? This is such fundamental human psychology that I am amazed that so many people don’t get it. I have never met a person who is a home owner in the Bay Area who is fighting for high density. Not one. It’s those who want to get in here who wants to build more and more. It’s pretty clear why and once they get a foot in..boom! The transformation to NIMBY begins. And I completely understand that!
Build responsibly. Build infrastructure. Build community benefits. Don’t take tens of thousands of dollars in taxes from high earning zipcodes and distribute it all to lower earning zip codes. The community deserves benefits. Everyone who is productive will QUIT the Bay Area they created if they don’t feel rewarded. And space is a luxury. And omg..do we pay for it through taxes and cost of living!!
Or.
People could move to Copenhagen. It’s a dream, I hear.
It must be, otherwise the people making $51k or less would have been forced to move away, thereby causing the median income to increase.
The fact that they have not done this is proof that they can afford to live there.
Unless half of the population plus one person makes exactly $51k (with everyone else above), since... well... that's how medians work.
1 billion dollars in funds were canceled, and the state might have to pay back 2.5 billion already paid to them. [1]
I don't think California knows how to use any money they get ahold of. Some of the worst roads in the nation yet the highest gas taxes. People are leaving California in masses for places like Texas. California is one of the most moved out states. People are sick of high taxes and not being able to afford anything. Those taxes get passed down making everything else more expensive too like food and other needed things in life.
I know someone who recently cashed out their retirement investments accounts a little earlier than planned. He mentioned that his advisor was chit chatting while waiting on the computer to process something, and if he would have lived in California it would have been a 10% tax just for California alone, not even counting the fed taxes. They don't live in California luckily as it would have been about $15,000 more in taxes they'd owe than where they currently are.
While if they lived in Texas or Florida they'd save so much money since no state income tax, plus it's warmer and nicer too.
Also some people retire and decide to live in an RV full-time exploring around the US so then South Dakota is a great choice too as no income tax either plus since you still need to be a resident somewhere to have a driver license and registration even if you don't own property anymore so they are a great state to set up a home base as they are friendly to full-time travelers. Some people's former states where they sold their lifelong homes won't let them stay being a resident because they are basically considered homeless even if they own an expensive RV like a diesel pusher, so they risk their license and registration being canceled if they don't change their domicile to a friendly state to travelers. If you own a $100,000 house you aren't homeless but if you live in a $250,000 or half a million dollar RV you are homeless according to most states.
I guess with recognizing full-time RV living it increases South Dakota population count so it helps them get more federal funding and in return, they allow you to be considered a resident after spending one night at a hotel or campground while also renting a mailbox with a mail forwarding company. They even give you a new license the same day too, no waiting for one to be mailed, also no retesting either other than a eye test, walk in the next morning with the receipt for mailbox, hotel/campground, SSN card, birth cert and marriage license if your last name is different without even making an appointment then within a few minutes you are done. Then since full-timers will be mostly on vacation from South Dakota, they pay into the roads they hardly even use too. So another win-win for the state. Very small and efficient government up there.
While if you move to California they make you retake the test again, and you have to wait weeks to even get an appointment while being fined for not changing it without 10 days of signing a lease or buying a house because they're all booked up for over 2 months in advance.
People are getting sick and tired of California, parts of the midwest and the northeast so they are moving to the South. [2] Sadly some people can't really afford to move right now or have a family though but I think it's great people who can vote with their feet to try and better themselves are doing so.
Not only for economic reasons people are leaving California. People are also feeling unsafe due to them harboring illegal aliens. Someone who had been deported 5 times, ended up in the San Francisco County Jail on a drug charge only to be released instead of being turned over to feds... Then after being released the man ended up killing a woman at a popular tourist spot.
I could spend days talking about all the problems in California. California is a huge mess, and I think people who say otherwise are living in a bubble. However, I don't think people like to get into too much politics on here so will refrain from that, but probably enough bad with California I could write an entire book about.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/05/16/724145472/trump-administratio...
[2] https://www.howmoneywalks.com/irs-tax-migration/
[3] https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/362940-sanctuar... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Kate_Steinle
I wouldn't want to live in Texas or Florida. Too much culture (and political) clash, different values, and everything is spread out, even in cities. I'll take CA's (and specifically SF's) problems over that.
I know the governor here raised the gas taxes, and people on Facebook were commenting saying he isn't even a real Republican... Not sure how true that is or not.
Not sure about the more spread out part. I know a lot of places are designed around the car but I hear that’s even a problem in Los Angeles. Miami is supposed to be a walkable city, then Austin too... but been looking at Austin as an area to move to once I start having some success but it seems only downtown is really walkable. So seems like having a car would be useful unless using Uber or Lyft if you rarely go outside of the downtown area.
If money wasn’t an issue I’m not really sure where I’d want to live... Maybe Austin but not sure if forever would want to live there. One of the largest cities with unsynchronized traffic lights apparently as traffic is really bad there. But I guess they are a growing city with growing pains, some statistic says 100 people a day move there.
Central Florida around Disney would be nice too, and less worrying about hurricanes but you still get a lot of wind. East Tennessee, always thought a cabin in the mountains there would be nice but cold winters. Utah is very nice too but also gets cold. Used to want to move to San Francisco but kinda realized it was a bad idea due to both the costs of living and some politics. However a lot of investors and networking. I know startup communities are growing in other places though like Austin, TX, and is center between both the west and east coasts. So maybe you need to fly to SF for some event only 4-hour flight. Just seems friendlier to businesses. Fewer regulation headaches and get to keep more money in your pocket. However, I guess tech startups don't really have to deal much with permits unless doing something physical like the Hyperloop, recycling, building a new office instead of existing one or dealing in a regulated industry like medical or banking.
I was watching a story about a company who wanted to do a recycling plant... California seems to promote recycling a lot more than other states even with bag bans, etc... Waste Management spent over 10 years trying to get the permits approved to build it at an old landfill site in the LA area, at some point the company decided to move the project to Arizona and got the permits needed approved within a single day then spent 2 years to build it. [1] Los Angeles even has a Freelancer Tax for people who work from home. Sounds like some other cities are catching on and starting to tax people who work at home... Was looking if Austin did a thing, and it looks like nothing special is required but there's a set of guidelines to follow... However, just someone sitting on their laptop coding wouldn't break them it looks. Some cities though don't even mention this though so I guess working from home isn't a problem unless you have like customers visiting that disrupts things. I think places across the country are getting greedier though for some reason and I think it will drive people away.
I know where I am currently, we have a bunch of taxes. There's city taxes, school district taxes, state income taxes, a CAT tax if you make more than $150,000 and of course fed taxes... When I was looking at Utah a few years ago since I have a friend there, I was shocked they didn't have city taxes. I figured that was everywhere so surprised me. There's a site that ranks states as friendly California ranks 49. Looks like Ohio is ranked 42, while Texas is a 15. South Dakota is a 3. I feel like we're turning into the next California or New York.
So I think I have my eyes on Austin, Texas right now. Be nice to be able to work on some code, get frustrated and be able to go on a long walk. Where I live we don't even have sidewalks everywhere, so walking along the street but I even have had people in cars flick me off. Maybe if I was somewhere like Cincinnati maybe would be better as a bit bigger city for someone interested in tech, but hey it's cold and an area hit hard by the heroin epidemic so might have to walk over dead bodies on the sidewalk of people who overdosed. Well maybe not that bad but would seem so if I listen to the news. So If I made enough money to get my own place there since I still live at home and, might as well just leave for Texas. Fly there and get a small apartment and ship the few things I own. Seattle has a huge drug and crime problem too. KOMO did an hour special called "Seattle is Dying" back in March. [3]
I know some people call this the "brain drain". Even the local governments themselves are having trouble hiring people with the skills they need. Young people grow up, and leave to never return. [4] The midwest seems to be suffering the most brain drain. Probably partly school problems too. I remember I used to play online gaming a lot and voice chat with people on them, and someone told me their school had brand new iMac's while our school still had computers that ran Windows 95. Even mentioned they were doing web design stuff too, well sounds like Dreamweaver type of stuff but amazed me hearing that. Seems crazy using an operating system released when you were a 3 year old when you are in middle school.
Overall though I really feel like the nomadic lifestyle would make me the happiest though if can figure out how to make it work. Live out of a suitcase traveling the world or an RV across America. However, I do want to check out some of the bigger cities but some don't seem to have any or many RV park choices nearby.
There is even some guy who goes by Super Mario who lives on cruise ships full time sailing out of Miami. Interesting lifestyle, I believe he does some type of investments off of his laptop. I think if I made enough from my computer I'd do the same for a while. Reading some stories on HN is inspiring though. Right now been researching blockchain related stuff, got some ideas in that space... So maybe make it big in that area haha. I asked my folks why they didn't move since always talked about Florida but the family was one of the main reason to stick around. Also, I know a lot of people collect so much stuff, looks like junk to others but to them, it has stories and meanings. So I guess if you lived at the same house 30 or 50 years getting up and going for another lifestyle can be a hurtle emotionally. While I'm young without much stuff, so a bit easier.
[1] https://youtu.be/HRQRg3xhehs
[2] https://statetaxindex.org/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw
[4] https://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20190215/column-brain-drain... and https://www.crainscleveland.com/scott-suttell-blog/brain-dra... and https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/4/25/1853221/-Brain-dr... and https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/05/08/middle-a...
2. Service jobs will always exist. Restaurants, bars, shops, museums, schools, etc. need people present to make them work. Even in cases where people aren't strictly required, people will still want people around. People will always need stuff that will need to be delivered to wherever they are. People also don't want to just stay in their homes all day; transit demand is not solely shaped by work commutes.
3. You draw the line in one place, other people draw it in others. Such is life.
4. There are quite a few cities in the world that will disagree with you, and be right.
5. We need people who will actually cooperate for the greater good. In the US that seems to be a rarity, as our culture is centered around individualism and competition, unlike many other places in the world. If we leave it up to a bunch of local governments cooperating we... oh, right, end up in the exact situation we're in now.
(I agree with you in principle on #5, but a solution that has as a prerequisite, "change the deep-seated culture of millions of people over a relatively short period of time", isn't something I see as doable.)
Millennials will then be blamed not unlike baby boomers are blamed by millennials for ‘messing up the next generation future’. Where in fact, it’s agreeing to unrealistic long term plans like this and signing carte blanche whenever the state decides that we need to shell out without them being accountable.
2. I disagree that we will need to have service jobs. Or that people need to travel to be ‘around other people’ who want them around.
Having said that, we do need public transport. We don’t need to lump affordable housing with public transport costs. Just like part of the gas tax was set aside to train prisoners to make them employable. It’s necessary but what’s with the shifty shenanigans?
The public are lured into supporting housing and affordable housing imagining that it benefits them but that’s a marginal side effect. The real purpose of random and especially questionable rezoning to keep building is to create a stream of income through property taxes. Ditto with job creation. Jobs have an inflationary effect.
An unemployed person in the rural area can still have avocado toast if he has a garden. He doesn’t need $10.00 to buy an avocado toast. However he can’t participate in the same economy as a 6 figure earning Silicon Valley resident of CA. However do note that all of them will be paying the same tax for public transport. As will their children over 50 years.
3. Sure. I will vote as inspired by my line.
4. I disagree. I literally don’t know any affordable city that is high density. If you include Mumbai’s slums or Hong Kong’s coffin apartments or NYC rent controlled and subsidized projects, I reject them. It’s not affordable. The cost of expensive living morphs from currency to something else that can be quantified in currency terms. There is a cost to cramming people in resource restricted areas which is also a fixed land area.
5. It’s such a general statement to say ‘ we need people to cooperate for a greater good’. It’s a feel good statement that means nothing unless we get down to specifics.
The US is a better place to live in than most parts of the world. We don’t have tribal wars or bloody religious uprisings or bomb threats everyday. I disagree with you. I don’t know what cooperation you are talking about in ‘other parts of the world’.
Admittedly there are other parts of the world where people cooperate and set aside individualism, but I am willing to bet that they are low density population areas where people have enough space. Cooperation thrives when everyone has the opportunity to make things work for everyone without just one group shouldering the burden. It is another way to make sure everyone carries equal responsibility. Cooperation is NOT co dependency.
Two easy fixes to the Dumbo would do a lot more to reduce idling in traffic: (1) direct connection to 101 on the west side which was originally blocked by the city of Palo Alto, and (2) increase the capacity. But while there is plenty of appetite to charge bridge commuters exorbitant tolls, there is no appetite to do anything that helps them.
100% of this money will be wasted on:
a) rebuilding few dozen graded crossing of rail
b) acquiring land at insane values (same land thats inflated by restrictive zoning)
c) backfilling unfunded pension liabilities of 9 different agencies
Either way tunnels aren't particularly expensive, stations, on-ramps/off-ramps are.
To the critics: The viability of Musk's underground highway concept is irrelevant. The basic premise of Musk's original concept was to cut down the cost of tunneling by orders of magnitude. The first optimization is focusing on boring 14-foot diameter tunnels. 14 feet is larger than many subway tunnels in London and Budapest, and about 1 foot shy of some Moscow subway tunnels.
A tunnel is a tunnel--nothing prevents building them as a closed rail network with proper trains. If a Boring Company tunnel couldn't support electrical equipment, then run the trains on batteries. Yes, the basic math of moving people indisputably favors trains, but that doesn't mean you can't apply many of the other engineering and financial concepts from Musk's underground highway concept.
I understand that tunneling, per se, isn't the primary cost of building subways; it's the stations. But if the Boring Company can deliver on just one order of magnitude decrease in tunneling costs, then any public official or engineer who balks at 14-foot tunnels should be booted out of their position.[1] Optimize for the ridiculously cheap 14-foot tunnels and everything else will fall into place. I would expect the engineering and budgeting processes for the more efficient tunnel construction to have a moderating effecting on station design, making it less likely we'd blow so much money on extravagant stations. If tunneling were just 10% cheaper then probably the money would just be shifted elsewhere, but faced with 10x cheaper tunnel construction irresponsible and bloated requirements would stand out.[2]
[1] For example, with an order of magnitude reduction in capital costs then arguments regarding incompatibility with existing equipment (cars, tracks, etc) wouldn't even be reasonable on their face. At those costs just deal with the additional system or, better yet, change everything else! If a Geary Blvd subway in San Francisco could be built so cheaply, then it might make sense to replace and build out the existing MUNI light-rail lines with the Geary technology.
[2] Not an example of bloat, but, for example, with enough cost savings then it may be cheaper to skip elevators and escalators in many stations and simply operate a large fleet (much larger than what exists already) of door-to-door shuttles for the incapacitated.