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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

SF should reinvent itself along these lines.

I used to live in Paris and believed that this sort of transformation would be impossible.

The main definition set in the article seems to be neighborhoods in "which almost all residents’ needs can be met within 15 minutes of their homes on foot, by bike, or on public transit." The maps in the center of the article ignore biking and only show walking and transit, but the difference is pretty big. If you work from home, or live near work, what parts of the city are more than a 15-min bike ride from "needs"? In a city that we pretend is 7 miles a side, 15 min of biking can take you to a very different neighborhood.

I'm also super skeptical of the transit maps ... b/c even if a route is going where you need it to go, the 15 min should also include waiting times. In some cases, 15 min takes you 0.0 miles on muni buses.

Transit in modern cities like Paris, Tokyo, or Moscow is very rapid and frequent. Don’t be deceived by old fashioned places like SF.

A lot of people can’t bike (I am forbidden from biking for another six months, for instance, due to an injury). Plus biking in SF isn’t the same as biking in Manhattan.

I guess, you've claimed that "SF should reinvent itself along these lines" in response to an article that specifically includes biking as part of its 15-min definition. I've suggested that in SF we probably largely already meet that definition, relying heavily on the "or" in "on foot, by bike, or on public transit". It sounds like you're now discounting a whole mode of transit that was repeatedly discussed in the article, on the basis of not being universally accessible.

I would hasten to point out that not everyone walks or can take all public transit (BART elevators frequently being broken is an issue for wheelchair users, for example).

> Plus biking in SF isn’t the same as biking in Manhattan.

It's true SF has more hills. But why should Manhattan be the baseline? Wrt getting to necessities within 15m, I still think almost all of the city qualifies. We don't mostly put our grocery stores on hilltops, for example.

I'll refine my point: even though SF does have a bunch neighborhoods which are set up to be residential, the city's small footprint means that without trying all that hard, people end up being close in absolute distances to the necessities of life anyway.

I do think it's worth pointing out that Tokyo and Moscow each have literally >10x the population of SF. It's kind of an apples-and-oranges comparison; of _course_ they have more rapid public transit.

Rapid and frequent transit is a matter of planning, investment and demand. You don’t need to have a particularly large population to sustain it.

Madrid for example is a city of about 3 million in a metro area of 6 million. Trains come every few minutes throughout the day.

> I would hasten to point out that not everyone walks or can take all public transit (BART elevators frequently being broken is an issue for wheelchair users, for example).

That is a BART problem, not a “public transit is inaccessible” problem.

In Paris (and other European cities too I guess), wait time for the metro is 2-5min between 2 trains during the day (depending on how busy the line is, and whether you’re at peak hours).

At very low usage hours (at night, or early morning), it can get longer, but it hardly ever gets to 15min

This would never happen in SF. The local store block would be instantly taken over by homeless druggies [1]. To have this sort of transformation, the local culture needs to have little tolerance for disruptive behaviors and peoples.

Ex: in Europe many public bathrooms require payment, in the US you can't even allow stores to require a purchase to use the restroom due to public pressure (not laws, yet).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2CVMCZ6F2M

Wow, what an intolerant, judgmental, and useless comment. At least you live your values...

Intolerant, judgemental, and correct.

Not sure how you can claim that since "correct" only applies to factual claims and above is purely hypothetical. Or do you always assume ideology can stand in place of reality?

I live in a major US city that has expansive "outdoor camping" w homeless who harasse and terrorize(rob) the locals. The progressives live in fear of the homeless AND saying anything about the problem because they don't want to be the bad-guy. It's very interesting. From what I can tell people have become extremely hyper-socialized and are willing to put their safety at risk.

"Over-socialized", one might say.

I also live in a major US city with encampments constructed by the unhoused. My experience does not mirror your anxieties at all, and usually I am at street level, on a bicycle, and not a measly gawker staring from inside a metal box or a cafe.

Do you have any evidence to back up the claims about safety? Every time I've encountered a sentiment like this, even people who live in this city, it's just mere supposition -- an expression of anxiety veiled as fact, like the justifications given for the Boudin recall campaign, or else an extremely subjective (if traumatic) experience that doesn't extend readily to the general public.

Remember, violent crime and property crime are different things, and neither anecdotes nor anxiety count as data.

is it an "expression of anxiety veiled as fact" that my friend was stabbed for his phone by one of these "unhoused"?

I think you would have a different opinion when your property was stolen, your partner assaulted, and your sense of safety destroyed by such behavior. You can't promote the use of bikes if your bike is going to be stolen and chopped up the second you take your eye off it.

I vote my values too, by the way.

It really is a hard problem and a hard policy to advance. I'm pro-pedestrianization but can really understand the concerns of car folks in terms of service availability and business health. There have been plenty of times where car restrictions have been done wrong and ended up killing off city centers - but in terms of safety the availability of safe and secure bike storage seems to require an almost autocratic initial effort. Forcing safe storage and monitoring, along with safe bike lanes, to be rolled out so that the demand can grow - it's very hard for demand to grow organically while bike theft and car-bike accidents are so common that they'll discourage usage.

Ditto for public transit, when public transit is sparsely utilized it tends to be less safe while as dense public transit will certainly have incidents but the increased ridership leads to increased safety funding and just more witnesses making crime less attractive in terms of expected gain.

It is a hard problem even before we get into NIMBYism and other socio-political complications. I definitely disagree with you but I think your comment was quite fair and reasonable.

Most of the city is much more sedate than what was shot on that video (which is extreme. I don’t dispute it, but was next to a treatment center.)

Paid public toilets are all over California and businesses do typically restrict bathroom use to paying customers, yes, in SF too.

Without SF’s tolerance for weirdos due to the gold rush we wouldn’t have had the rule breakers of the valley.

Funnily enough, this sort of behavior is not tolerated in the actual Valley, where things were actually started. You don't see it happening in Mountain View and Cupertino.

The Valley is all suburbs, where people don't like that sort of thing. That being said, Palo Alto used to have a lot more homeless people, and more weirdness too. I can't imagine the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane starting there any more. Yet still I live in PA.

SF has always had a much higher tolerance for weird behavior. Back when the city was a bedroom community for the Valley, people lived there (I did too) for its weirdness and culture. What happened with the dot com boom is that people who didn't appreciate the weirdness showed up, moved to SF, and then complained about it.

Honestly SF is a lot cleaner and safer now. Those whiners would not have tolerated the true weirdness.

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