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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

They talk briefly about housing at the end, but that strikes me as absolutely core to the success of any initiative to decrease congestion. People tolerate absurd commutes because the jobs are better here, increasing transportation bandwidth in isolation will just increase the distance people are willing to travel. Only solution is either more housing here or better jobs elsewhere, and we can't control the latter.

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Actually I think tying anything housing related to the measure is a great way to ensure it'll be a total clusterfuck. There's way too much disagreement on the matter, and any spending on it quickly devolves into an endless money pit.

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.

Absolutely agree. Housing is a related, but separate, problem that should be handled directly with its own plan.

>> They talk briefly about housing at the end, but that strikes me as absolutely core to the success of any initiative to decrease congestion.

Public transportation only works to connect high density areas. It's critical to take that into account or systems will fail.

Density can be deceptive. Medium-density housing works just fine at one end of a public transit system, the critical issue is how often transit stops and how often people need to swap from one mode of transit or train to the next.

It also works to transport people in narrow corridors across geographic barriers. Like the Bay itself, or the fact that both sides of the Bay are long and narrow.

More housing doesn't really solve the problem, because people don't necessarily even want to live next to where they work, and in a household with multiple workers everyone living near where they work is almost an impossibility.

Tokyo has lots of housing and jobs everywhere, but that mostly results in average one-way commute time of an hour.

> increasing transportation bandwidth in isolation will just increase the distance people are willing to travel

We need more housing. But better transportation alone would spread the problem out and alleviate some of its worst symptoms, e.g. congestion.

Bay area traffic would see a decent improvement just by using more left turn yields at traffic lights

The lack of housing here could be taken as a sign that moving here or locating a business here could cost more by way of taxes and such. If it did cost more the flow of people and debt into the area might slow and some of the good jobs here would go elsewhere.

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