New businesses are choosing cities with good public transportation: study
citylab.com
citylab.com
I don't actually doubt the general statement that startups are tending to abandon suburban office parks for certain cities--some of which have decent transit systems and commuter rail. And there's probably some connection between transit and attractiveness to young urban-dwellers in particular. But the headline seems only sometimes true.
It seems like this argument taken to it's final conclusion would be that startups gravitate towards cities with better transit than those that don't, which isn't the case given the Austin and San Jose examples.
A more accurate headline would be "More businesses are started in cities that have good public transit".
But even then they are implying a causation which is a huge stretch.
It's amazing to me how many people feel that anything less than 99% of resources going to car-based transportation constitutes some sort of vile political agenda. "How dare anyone try to give people choices for how to get around?? Walking? With my legs?!"
Their writings hardly treat cars as one viable option as the majority of their writing is specifically against cars. How often do they criticize bicycles? Yet cars are criticized every chance they get.
It isn’t about agreeing about cars or not, but to suggest they treat cars as just another “viable” option is to admit not having spent much time reading their writings. When have they ever proposed improving anything relating to cars? Their idea of an improvement is elimination.
With the Wuhan virus, having good car infrastructure sounds pretty good right now. Yes, public transport, for sure, but the idea of ending cars is ridiculous — and CityLab promotes exactly that, albeit in couched terms. But ending cars completely would make them very happy.
In most parts of the country, the car is literally the only viable way to make most trips. That's how much they've dominated every aspect of our transportation system.
Taking the 'position' that such a monoculture is bad, is about as political as asserting that lack of racial or gender diversity in workplaces is bad.
Do you feel bothered by sites that don't argue the other side too, that we should keep homogeneous workplaces around? Does it count as a pro-diversity 'bias' when they don't do that?
> the idea of ending cars is ridiculous
So wait, did you accuse me of not reading them because you haven't read them yourself? You see, they've never actually promoted this, and yet here you are, asserting that they have.
Reducing the use of cars in favor of other, less harmful modes sure, and car bans in some select areas, yeah. You can't walk on the freeway usually either. It's the height of absurdity to equivocate that with a total ban, anymore than saying that people who don't want me biking on the interstate don't want me biking anywhere ever.
Maybe this is the case because cars have far more negative externalities than other forms of transit.
Like, can you even think of a legitimate thesis for an article about the negative externalities of a bike friendly community?
> When have they ever proposed improving anything relating to cars?
I find this ironic because many things they promote, such as improving transit and bike infrastructure, will actually make driving easier and more pleasant because there will be fewer cars in the road to create traffic
Right now everyone who can should be at home, so the streets shouldn't need particularly good infrastructure to handle the rest.
https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/massachusetts/massachuse...
https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/pennsylvania/southeaster...
https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/california/santa-clara-v...
https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/ohio/the-greater-clevela...
https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/texas/capital-metropolit...
https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/california/peninsula-cor...
Also, the Austin data doesn't take into account that the city regularly expands its geographic boundaries (typically east and west) which may artificially make it seem as if it is increasing riders when it is simply absorbing them.
Since the current expansion started in 2010, the San Francisco tech industry has more than quadrupled in size to 100,644 tech jobs as of year-end 2018.
https://www.globest.com/2019/11/13/san-francisco-has-second-...
Does not compute. San Francisco has essentially one subway line, one slow local railway line, some horrendous busses, admittedly a good airport. That's it.
https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/maps/2019-04-08-rap...
Anyway, the data doesn't lie: transit usage within SF is among the highest in the country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_hig...
> 5. San Francisco, California – 33.1%
Now, things are skewed a bit by SF being an unusually small principal city relative to its metro population. That pumps up its numbers compared to if the city boundaries included 1.5m or 2m of the metro pop, rather than ~900k.
Still though, 33% puts it near the top, and I can think of no single better metric of how useful transit is than how many people actually use transit to get around.
Another example of "don't just look at what's on paper": Dallas has more light rail laid down than any city in the country, at 93 miles. Which gives it a massive transit mode share of...2%. Wow. Think about how badly everything must be designed to have so much light rail that hardly anyone actually uses.
For Dallas' case, you can go to Google Maps, turn on satellite mode, and inspect some train stations, and it's pretty obvious what the problem is. The land use is horribly unconducive to walking + transit. E.g. go out a bit from the city center and you'll find stations with exclusively single-family home neighborhoods right beside, meaning almost no one can walk to/from that station to get around.
Such a waste. It's not like the government has to really build anything itself to fix that issue: only a change of rules is necessary to allow denser development in the area adjacent to the station. But America's culture around zoning is so fucked up that this is usually impossible, even after a city has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into infrastructure, we still insist on crippling it.
Now that we live in Munich, my wife and I joke about how we used to drive from one strip mall's parking lot to go to the parking lot for the other strip mall across the street. Except, when we visit the US we still do this, because in those situations, walking across the 'road' (more like a small freeway) is incredibly awkward.
I thought everyone here said SF wasn’t dense and needed more high-rise building? Most of SF seems just two or three stories to me when I walk around.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
I have no conflicting data to offer.
On the other hand BART is fairly effective, and once you're in the city a bicycle will get you from one end to the other in forty-five minutes.
It's also not run by the city of SF, which to me explains their relative competence.
It only runs through one corner of the city!
It's...fifth, actually: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_hig...
> 1. New York City, New York – 56.5%
> 2. Jersey City, New Jersey – 47.6%
> 3. Washington, D.C. – 37.4%
> 4. Boston, Massachusetts – 33.7%
> 5. San Francisco, California – 33.1%
As I noted in another comment, SF's numbers are pumped up a bit by its unusually small population size relative to its metro population size. But yeah it's still one of the top cities in the country for public transit, sad as it is.
I think SF still has more rail than Dublin though, right? When I visited Dublin seemed like it had almost nothing, even less than SF.
It who? A forty-five minute walk in San Francisco will take you nearly halfway across town (assuming you can walk a 15 minute mile). My break even time was closer to 20 minutes than 45 (if I didn't see a train coming I'd just walk 20 minutes to the subway).
Muni has pretty high coverage standards that allow you to get pretty much within 1/8 mile of anywhere in the city during most hours of the day. The cost is that the density of stops makes it difficult to speed up service.
I'd put my current city, Munich, at a similar level of good-ness to NYC, though it's more impressive, having a smaller population and all. If the S-Bahn didn't have so many problems in the winter, I'd not hesitate to call it good. There'd still be plenty of room for improvement, though.
Boston and SF are essentially tied--yet, the many faults of the MBTA especially in bad weather aside, it's got a pretty decent transit system. Indeed, one that isn't really that terrible relative to many European cities. And Chicago is lower, in spite of again having an even somewhat iconic transit system.
And Jersey City I would never have guessed even though it's adjacent to NYC. I wonder to what degree that reflects income levels in a dense urban environment.
For Jersey City, these metrics are specifically measuring commutes to work, and obviously commuting via transit to NYC there for your job is extremely common; its numbers would undoubtedly be lower if you were measuring public transit in general (though this may be true for basically all cities, honestly, so I'm not sure if that would affect the rankings).
If you can think of a better single metric, by all means, let loose. I know this one's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than "miles of light rail" or anything else I've come up with before.
Something like the Paris mayor's 15-minute city -- a metric that encapsulated how reachable basic errand points are by public transit in a limited amount of time -- could be better, but would probably be fairly challenging to calculate. I'm quite confident that SF would still do pretty well using that metric, though, at least by US standards.
- Looking at MSAs or CSAs rather than cities proper, since cities like SF are tiny and you get a distorted view by ignoring people that work or live outside the city
- Including non-commute usage data. A good transit system has people who use it even for leisure.
- Equitably. Systems disproportionately used by rich or poor people are bad.
- Development patterns. If real estate is cheaper near transit, that suggests the system is bad. If you pay more to be near transit, that suggests the system is valuable.
- Addressable market. A sprawling metropolitan area with lots of freeways is basically never going to have a high mass transit mode share, but a system can still be ok for the people that do use it.
A simpler and better metric here would just be ridership per capita per CSA, although even that misses a lot of important points.
However another theory was that LA subway expansion is often accompanied by gentrification near stations. This makes the train less accessible for low income people, who are most likely to use it. In this way public transit could increasingly be a luxury good, chosen for the lifestyle benefits (no fighting traffic) rather than economic necessity.
For a very niche audience I think this is true, and this audience has a lot of overlap with startups.
Why would a business start in places that are hard to get to ?
I feel like there's a lot of factors here that aren't being accounted for.
I'm not sure if this isn't just "lots of new businesses in cities"...
(CityLab does a lot of good stuff, but they are 100% pro-dense-urban development. Independent of whether it's a bias you support, it colors the articles you'll see from them.)
And what CityLab is, is pro-making-cities-that-aren't-garbage. There's a reason Americans marvel at how nice European cities feel when they visit, while almost no Europeans say the same thing about any US cities.
US cities have nice businesses and people and points of interest within, but the design of the cities themselves is almost always terrible.
We're trying to slow a pandemic. Until we get a vaccine, public transportation shouldn't be running.
Being in it alone or with a few friends, family members, or co-workers means that there's an innate means of social distancing. That's also improved by the way it doesn't require hubs where many people are forced to congregate - for moderately long journeys, I can stay in my CAR all the way from my house to walking distance of my destination.
And of course, while not as fully autonomous as the name might suggest, my CAR only requires refueling every three hundred and change miles, and maintenance every five thousand or so. This provides some robustness if the infrastructure is compromised, whether by disease or other issues.
It looks like CARs might have a place in the 2020s.
The cost of infrastructure for cars far, far outweighs the cost of a few weeks of no-one working, and the pollution has caused many more deaths than Coronavirus will.
Externalities are a hell of a drug.
And of course, the time saved by being able to go from point to point rather than through mass transit hubs quickly adds up to many lifetimes. I agree that pollution is something that needs to be addressed, which is why electric and hybrid CARs are being introduced by startups and legacy players in the industry.
Assuming there is a route without congestion. There typically isn't at rush hour in large cities. On the others hand trains have a dedicated track and thus don't have traffic problems.
> And of course, the time saved by being able to go from point to point rather than through mass transit hubs quickly adds up to many lifetimes.
If your transport system is good enough this isn't a problem either. In London, you're rarely more than 5-10 minutes from a tube station. And they'll likely be buses even closer. Public transport is much quicker than driving for most journeys. I think I know fewer than 5 people who own a car here.
All it takes, in one tiny little spot anywhere on the line: derailment, flood, suicide, stuck switch, malfunctioning sensor, failed motor, wrong kind of leaves on the rails, wrong kind of snow on the rails, broken signal, street-running car crash, tracks blocked off for a crime scene investigation, bomb threat...
Probably true, there's an advantage there.
But there's also an advantage in walking + transit, in that it helps people stay healthier.
Between the car-dominant US vs the more transit-friendly countries of Japan, Korea, and western Europe, one side has a health and lifespan advantage. And it ain't the US.
> The autonomous nature of the system means each CAR can change from road to road to route around congestion and construction, in a way that mass transit can't.
And yet, commute times in the US are basically average compared to other developed countries. Would you care to explain that?
> And of course, the time saved by being able to go from point to point rather than through mass transit hubs quickly adds up to many lifetimes.
Source on transportation time actually being lower in car-dominant areas?
https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructu...
has a chart on comparative commute times.
> And of course, the time saved by being able to go from point to point rather than through mass transit hubs quickly adds up to many lifetimes
I suppose this depends on where you are, really. This may very well not be the case in a large city with segregated rail/light rail/bus. Also, of course, you'd have to find a place to leave your CAR; no small feat in a large city.