The City from the Valley - private bus routes SF to South Bay
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Our success and our wealth is failing to float all boats, or even any boats that aren't our own. Instead of tech worker demand driving infrastructure, it has simply created a separate (but equal?), exclusive, mirror transit system.
Also an example of complete and utter urban planning failing on the part of the city of San Francisco. A large part of why companies don't set up shop in SF proper (despite the bulk of their work force wanting to live there), is due to the complete lack of development. Rents, both commercial and residential, are completely out of control and it actively drives away business. Meanwhile SF has completely crossed off new development in large swathes of the city - including pretty much the entire downtown commercial core.
SF is a vibrant, innovative, creative population subsisting on the surface of a government that is firmly hanging onto antiquated notions of the 19th century, not even the 20th, and this conflict has reached epic proportions of ridiculousness. Everywhere you go find vibrant pockets of activity, but you can't shake the feeling that you're walking in a museum, instead of a evolving, changing, adapting city.
Extremely unfortunate but true. SF is one of the few cities that has the unique opportunity of creating a super-city, the technological world capital. How do they respond? By doing nothing. They could expand the reach of public transportation and develop on the outter rims of the city. They could AT LEAST make it easier to go downtown from less-expensive SF districts like the sunset and richmond.
They would rather basque in their position as a second-rate metropolitan area, one step below the likes of NY and Boston.
I find this constant complaining about rents and zoning whenever the Bay Area comes up amusing. Why should SF or the Bay Area strive for growth at all costs?
The rents are presumably as they are because the demand for the space that is available is sky high? It would seem they don't particularly need to change.
The Bay Area also already has a population density that is high. If the people who live there want to keep voting for local governments that wants to restrict increases in density, and it stops you from living or setting up show there, then don't.
Personally to me, the current character of the place is a huge part of what would make the Bay Area attractive if I was to consider relocating anywhere.
The point isn't to grow at all costs. The point is to not let the people who already live in an area restrict growth so much that people who want to move in cannot reasonably do so.
On the list of pros and cons of living in a large state this is listed under "cons". The roads are maintained by the state, not by the municipalities, and however important, tech industry is just one of many voices in the state of California. Paired with the squeaky wheels of agricultural lobby, state employer union, teacher union, prison worker union and film industry, tech lobby basically gets no grease.
Northern California becoming its own state would probably solve a lot of these issues, as tech companies and their employees tend to be pretty significant revenue generators for the state.
Oakland is actually in a better position to do the right thing w/r to growth, even with all its other problems.
1. Caltrain is dog slow, infrequent and doesn't tend to go to places you want. Santa Clara County actually runs what seems to be a fairly decent VTA light rail that will get you from, say, downtown Mountain View to tech companies east of Moffett Airfield (Lockheed Martin, Yahoo, some of Microsoft's buildings, etc) but sadly not to the Google campus (west of Moffett Airfield).
To take public transport from SF would require you going to South SF (say half an hour), 1h 20m to MTV and 15-20 minutes on a shuttle if one is running. It's 2 hours best case scenario or one hour (or slightly less) on the 101 on the shuttle busses.
2. Zoning is a disaster for commerce in the valley. Most land is reserved for ("zoned") single family residences on large blocks of land such that density is very low. Public transit just doesn't work at low population density;
3. New development is virtually nonexistent in SF. Rent control is, at this point, an unmitigated disaster to a city that's still clinging to some 60s idyll.
Personally I think NYC is far more attractive than the Bay Area in all ways but two: the weather and the inertia of existing tech companies. You can live 5 minutes walk from work in NYC. There are very few places you could do that (or would want to) in SF.
What surprises me is that there is still no organization that adequately represents technology companies' and workers' interests on the peninsula and in the city. Most cities here seem to have public employees' associations that have a big say in how the city operates and develops. I think a PAC representing pro-density, pro-development, pro-infrastructure, pro-public transit interests that runs candidates for city councils and builds a track record of successful actions can become the prime political force on the peninsula. (At least if it manages to keep the public project costs from ballooning as they're prone to doing in CA.)
Meanwhile, the public is subjected to mind-boggling pieces like http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2012/09/20/is-tech-destroying-sa....
SF residents are their own worst enemy here. Everybody loves the rows of cutesy Victorians, and everybody has a death-grudge against high-rises, or even mid-density low-rises. Every time the issue of development is brought up, people scream foul and act as if the sky is falling. Everyone has a knee-jerk opposition to building things, even though their all-time favorite thing to moan about (rent) is their own damned fault.
Indeed, it makes no sense to blame this particular thing on unions and public employee's, and every sense to blame it on San Francisco's famously myopic citizenry (of which many are techies).
I agree with you, I don't think they are. What I said is that the tech workers are not represented as a class the way public employees are.
> and everybody has a death-grudge against high-rises, or even mid-density low-rises. Every time the issue of development is brought up, people scream foul and act as if the sky is falling
That's the thing: there's a huge segment of the population who really like high-rises and mid-density buildings, as evidenced by the wild popularity of that kind of housing. But there's a smaller, apparently more vocal segment who hate it (and perhaps have more time on their hands to make themselves heard). So the trick is to organize people who are OK with development to the point where we can repeal laws that preclude it, as well as make things like this possible: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/1-dissenting-vo...
This is a general problem in local governments all over America. The people who already own real estate wield more influence, and their self-interest is in keeping prices high.
There may be many more people who favor denser development and who would become residents / property owners if increased development made it affordable. But potential residents don't get to vote, only actual residents do.
While it's hard to prove, I would not be surprised if local zoning laws are one of the biggest impediments to social mobility. Part of the growing split between rich and poor in America is geographic. If you can make the leap into the richer places, there's much more opportunity.
Interesting. Can you tell me what kind of cycling routes compare to what's available in the bay area in NYC? As someone who's lived in both places, there's no comparison, but since those are the only two things you can think of...
http://www.nycbikemaps.com/maps/manhattan-bike-map/
There are actually a lot of bike lanes and trails (trails are generally along the Hudson or East River).
Some of this is relatively recent thanks to the controversial transportation commissioner:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/top_right/2011/08/j...
who has, amongst other things, closed off Times Square to traffic and added bike lanes to 8th (and other) avenues.
I'm not an avid cyclist but I have done some limited cycling in the Valley and it's frigging dangerous. I simply won't go on anything other than back roads and even there you're in constant danger of being wiped out by a car pulling out of a parking lot of a car turning right at a red light (worst road rule ever; it's illegal in the the five boroughs but some people are ignorant of this).
I know someone who bikes in most days from Brooklyn but I think you need to be attentive. Then again, as a cyclist on roads, I think that is universally true.
In Norcal you can probably bike almost year round. In NYC less so. In winter you do get issues with snow and ice. Overall it probably rains more in NYC than in the Bay Area but I'm just guessing there.
Manhattan on the other hand is just one gigantic traffic clusterfuck - and that's for cars. The risk of taking a bicycle through the streets of Midtown is IMO many, many times of doing the same in downtown SF.
Sure, Manhattan has a great selection of bike trails (better than SF, IMO), but cycling as a commuting or general transportation option? No fucking way.
This is a poor excuse. The Bay Area has a population density many times larger than a long list of places with vastly better public transit. Both San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have populations that put them in the same ballpark as the metro area of Oslo for example, yet have population densities that are several times higher. Somehow it works well in places with substantially lower density than Oslo too.
Well of course the distribution matters greatly too (indeed, maybe it's all that matters).
If the overall population density is the same, but the population is mainly clustered around specific nodes (towns, neighborhoods) and routes (streets), providing good transit will be vastly easier than if the population is evenly distributed as seems to be the goal of 1950s American suburbia.
The clustering of population, of course strongly follows the structure of the dominant transportation method, so such effects also tend to be self-perpetuating.
Sure, the US car centric model isn't ideal for public transport, but the Bay Area does have substantial high density clusters by the standards of e.g. Norway where I'm from.
It probably wouldn't have been if your population density had been comparable. But the Oslo metro region for example, outside of a tiny city core, consists largely of tiny little towns with mostly single or dual residency houses, terraces and a few low apartment buildings. Larger apartment blocks are found some places too, but most commonly in the centre of Oslo. There are large stretches of pretty much empty space - forest or farms. Density for the region as a whole is driven up substantially by the city of Oslo itself.
The Bay Area on the other hand, at least has most of the population clustered around a handful of major transport links, even though the towns spread out more than a similarly sized city usually would in Europe. Increasing frequency of Caltrain, running it later, and adding a handful of extensions to Caltrain and Bart, coupled with a properly unified bus network, would make all the difference, I think.
So you're probably still looking at an hour and a half, but maybe not quite as bad as you describe.
Of course, this isn't a problem if you just work in SF too, and there's more and more great companies in the city. As awful as Muni is, it should offer you a <= half hour commute in most cases.
This and the outlandish anti-development bent in SF that potatolicious describes.
40% of Caltrain's daily passengers. Makes you wonder what Caltrain could do with that money (I know, probably not invest it as efficiently as private companies do) But at what point does it become cost effective to build a people mover at this scale?
And something joked about but never implemented inside Google was the idea that the busses in SF load up on a hovercraft ferry in SF and then jet down the bay to the 'plex. Figured they could come ashore near the Palo Alto Airport and disgorge busses that would take the Frontage road down to Charleston.
The 'smart trains' envisioned as the original people movers were a much better solution (dynamically adapting to traffic they would auto-exit at your chosen stop and ride on the through traffic center rail while expressing) but building that even on the existing right of way would be expensive.
(oh and the hovercraft could come up at Crittendon but it would have to go over the sanctuary and that would cause some resistance to its arrival)
There's also the radical suggestion of people actually living near where they work, or (horror of horrors) people living near public transit and taking that, rather than fancy private buses.
But I agree on the last point; but offices should be built where people want to live, not the other way around. Twitter is in SF for a reason. But then people don't all want to live in the same place; some have kids and prefer suburbs, some are younger and prefer the city.
Edit: facebook -> twitter. (face plant)
The problem in SF isn't that people want to live in different areas. The same is true in NYC or Chicago. The problem is that there isn't proper zoning. To make transit feasible, you need an extremely dense central business district with a ton of office space. You need employers to be mostly in the same core area. Then, you need to zone things and lay out transit stations so they're approachable for pedestrians. Too many systems make transit stations into these isolated intimidating affairs.
This is a neighborhood in Chicago with a lot of young families: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Paulina,+Chicago,+IL&hl=en...
Tree lined streets and small yards. Just a couple of minutes walk from the train stations. Just pan around and you can see the train tracks passing right through.
Train stations in Chicago are extremely easily accessed from street level. No parking lots, no elaborate station house, just stairs and a platform: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Sedgwick,+Chicago,+IL&hl=e...
Most of Europe (and some of Asia) is beautiful with respect to transit, density, and quality of life. I hope we (as a country) move in this direction, but it really requires a change in our value system.
It's a little unfair to make it seem like tech workers are spoiled for wanting to live in areas they'd enjoy living in. I know several people who tried to live in the south bay (burlingame, san mateo, mountain view) close to where they worked. It can be nice, but it can also be lonely and depressing. If you live in the south bay, it's likely all the places you frequently go to will at least be a 10-18 minute drive away from eachother (work, grocery store, your friends house, your favorite bar/restaurant).
San Francisco is one of the only places in the Bay Area where everything you want is in walking distance.
Disclaimer, I've lived in both SF and Palo Alto.
I'd bet that a large percentage of working Americans would love to mix the great job with atmosphere of city living. Unfortunately most workers have to accept the trade offs and settle for the dull suburban life.
I'm sort of amazed the regional transportation system is so dysfunctional that five private busses on the same route with no shared capacity is the solution everyone settled on. But then I remember what a farce MUNI has become; I routinely see busses and trains so overloaded that riders literally can't squeeze into the doors, and sometimes nothing shows up at all.
Was it less convenient than what I'm used to? Yes. It'd have been great with more buses and trains. But it worked. I could get to the grocery store. I could get to plenty of shops. I could get to dozens of restaurants - I know this from making a point out of trying new restaurants every time I was in town - as well as bars etc. I'd even go in to SF now and again, though Caltrain's schedule is just atrocious (and for the record: years ago, I did go out clubbing in SF while staying in Santa Cruz without having a car to get me back - if you want it bad enough, even that works).
Once I stayed in Atherton, right on the edge near Redwood City, while the office I was visiting was in downtown Menlo Park, and I walked to/from most days. That's the only time when I thought things were a bit too inconvenient for my liking. Not so much the distances - it was only a 30-35 minute walk or so from what I remember - but due to the large plots in Atherton, the fastest walking route is along El Camino, and part of that stretch was pretty much without light or sidewalk or decent shoulder.
Sure, there are plenty of locations you could live in that area which would make managing on foot too inconvenient, and finding somewhere in the middle of Atherton or similar might not be great if you want to get to lots of stuff without a car, but there are plenty of parts of the Bay Area outside of SF which are viable on foot, and far more that are viable with short car journeys now and again
So, yes: Spoiled. Large parts of the worlds population - including in developed countries - are living places where getting to stuff they want or need takes far longer on average.
sure, when you're only visiting, you don't have kids, etc. Many people aren't amenable to having a minimum half hour walk to get anywhere, and if your grocery store is anything but close by, you're in trouble if you don't go shopping every few days (having a grocery store every few blocks is one of my favorite things about high density living situations).
> Yes. It'd have been great with more buses and trains
and even where there are a few, it can take you two hours to get to friends only 10 or 15 miles away (this is more due to the design of their interlinks). If you want to encourage people to take public transit and walk more, you can't make cars so convenient for most of the ways they travel around the bay area.
> I could get to the grocery store. I could get to plenty of shops. I could get to dozens of restaurants - I know this from making a point out of trying new restaurants every time I was in town - as well as bars etc.
And this shows the real reason behind your post: you were staying in a hotel on El Camino :) Head up into one of the neighborhoods nearby and suddenly nothing is nearby. This is less of a problem in a city like Palo Alto, which is centered around El Camino and has a decent bus service, but for many of the towns along the 101, a car is pretty much the only way you can live there.
Meanwhile, take a look at the correlation between housing prices with the more walkable cities (like Palo Alto and Menlo Park that you mentioned). I won't be buying a house in any dense part of Palo Alto any time soon.
> years ago, I did go out clubbing in SF while staying in Santa Cruz without having a car to get me back - if you want it bad enough, even that works
No, it won't work unless you're paying hundreds for a cab, you get a friend to drive you, or you head home at like 6 in the evening. AFAIK, there's really no other way to do that (and transit on google maps isn't coming up with anything short of "wait 6 hours for transfer to bus").
I would say Caltrain having its last train at midnight is an even worst feature than its operating schedule.
> So, yes: Spoiled. Large parts of the worlds population - including in developed countries - are living places where getting to stuff they want or need takes far longer on average.
Sure, but that's a pretty useless definition of spoiled; essentially any non-utilitarian aspect of living would fall under it.
City planning and public transit exist to encourage good behavior and serve the public. Building walkable neighborhoods is good, building around public transit to make it accessible is also good. When you haven't done these things, "well, you should walk more" isn't going to fly when "buy a car" is so easy, and probably necessary anyways for those few times when the thing you need isn't accessible by public transit.
You're not going to make living in SF seem less cool or convenient any time soon, so all the current system is doing is encouraging car use and this private bus system.
-- non-car-owner considering moving up to SF because he's sick of using zipcar so often and commuting all weekend to see friends up in the city
As such I won't address most of the points of your reply, as I happen to agree with most of them - they just aren't very relevant to the point of comment. Again: I'm not arguing it wouldn't be better with more public transport, nor that Bay Area's public transport is good enough, nor that it's not more convenient if you have a car. I am arguing, however, that there are large areas of the Bay Area outside of SF that are perfectly liveable even for someone like me without a drivers license, and that a large part of the reason why people whine about the cost of living in SF is exactly that they are spoilt. If it's possible to live in these areas without a car, it is certainly possible to live very well in these places with one.
> sure, when you're only visiting, you don't have kids, etc. Many people aren't amenable to having a minimum half hour walk to get anywhere, and if your grocery store is anything but close by, you're in trouble if you don't go shopping every few days (having a grocery store every few blocks is one of my favorite things about high density living situations).
Some points to this:
While there are certainly parts of the Bay Area where I'd be far more isolated, I don't live within a short walk of a big grocery store or a train station or most other amenities. I have 15 minutes to the nearest proper grocery store, 20 minutes to the nearest train station, though there is a bus route reasonably nearby that is faster if I hit it on time. This is in one of the most densely populated parts of England, in a London suburb that is indeed zoned not all that differently from many Bay Area towns, with huge areas of single residence houses or terraced houses (so one or two shared walls, but still one resident per plot of land). There are huge areas of the Bay Area that are no worse to live in in terms of amenities. Sure, you're more likely to have to resort to a car for commuting.
In terms of kids, we have a 3 year old son. To pick him up from nursery after work, it takes me about 2 hours to get home: Two trains + two buses to get to the nursery, plus two buses to get home. I know how much effort having a kid adds to any kind of transport situation. We frequently take him to a part 20-25 minutes walk away. On foot, again, meaning when he gets too tired to walk, we carry him. I might get a drivers license. No so much for my day to day situation, but to be able to take day trips etc. to places that are a pain to get to by public transport. But living this way works perfectly fine.
So yes, some people might not be "amenable" to living this way, but unless they're old or disabled, the are perfectly able to to do so and still have an enjoyable life. I'm not saying people should opt to live the way I do, but I am saying that complaining about the cost of living if they instead choose to live somewhere with ridiculous house prices just to avoid having to walk, cycle or drive a bit longer to get places does make them seem spoiled to me.
> No, it won't work unless you're paying hundreds for a cab, you get a friend to drive you, or you head home at like 6 in the evening.
Well, it did work for us, so clearly it does. And no, we did none of those. Instead we did what I've done in many other cities in the world out of "necessity" if you want to stay out late: Stay out long enough to have a reasonably short wait to take the bus home, which is what we did. (Incidentally, if you don't want that, it's still far cheaper to find a cheap motel near public transport in SF and sleep it off until things start running than it is to take a cab to places even much closer than Santa Cruz).
The Greyhound ride to Santa Cruz was obnoxiously unnecessarily long and a bizarre experience (checking in to a bus?!? and a half hour break in the middle... wow). It sucked, other than for the novelty. But so does the alternatives in a lot of other places including many with substantially higher population density than the Bay Area. Again, the point is that expecting quick and short transit to everywhere and everything is being spoiled. There are few places you can do that outside of major world cities like London. Even London isn't all that great in this respect if you don't live "just right" (I'm "lucky" - there are hourly night buses to within about 20 minutes walk from where I live). I grew up outside Oslo, and frequently ended up spending 30-40 minutes to walk to the station followed by 3+ hours in sub-zero temperatures after clubs closed in Oslo before the first trains started to run. That was normal, unless you wanted to spend extortionate amounts on a cab (far higher rates than in the Bay Area for similar distances) which I couldn't afford then.
> Sure, but that's a pretty useless definition of spoiled; essentially any non-utilitarian aspect of living would fall under it.
No, it's a definition of spoiled that compares your expectations with the expectations of people in similar situations elsewhere, where these kinds of obstacles are just as common, yet somehow wast amounts of people manage just fine. When people complain that they pay far too much despite being able to afford to live somewhere most people can't and opt to do that rather than moving to somewhere that's still vastly better than what most people can afford to free up spare cash, then, yes, that's being spoilt.
> And this shows the real reason behind your post: you were staying in a hotel on El Camino :) Head up into one of the neighborhoods nearby and suddenly nothing is nearby.
I know perfectly well that there are places in the Bay Area where a car is a perfect necessity. An ex manager of mine lived in the middle of the forest near Santa Cruz, for example. That there are places that are extremely hard to live in without a car is entirely besides the point.
I stayed in hotels on El Camino a couple of times, yes. But most of the times I did not. You might argue that if I just had a bit further to walk to get to El Camino, I'd change my mind. Maybe I would. But that still leaves a few million people who live in areas within walking distance from enough stuff. Even so, walking distance was not the main point, as note above. The main point was that seemingly considering it a pain to live in these kind of places is being spoilt.
In New York City and its suburbs, nobody needs private shuttles because public transportation actually runs where people live and work. California made the decision many years ago to build roads instead of transit. The current system exists the way it does because of that.
This is what it looks like looking towards Chicago's Loop from Ogilvie: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Ogilvie+Transportation+Center,...
This is what it looks like looking towards Midtown from Grand Central: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=grand+central+station,+new+yor...
The same is true for the residential areas. There's almost no high-density development around the Cal Train stations in the Valley. Even in Arlington Heights, IL (a suburb about 25 miles from Chicago) you see substantial high-density development right around the Metra station.
Then if only Caltrain could adopt a not-insane schedule and reasonable frequency, and zoning roadblocks were removed (it looks like most of SV is zoned "parking lots only"), it might actually prove to be a catalyst for development!
Haha... :(
_______________ For employers wishing to reserve a certain number of seats on specific buses at certain times, RidePal plans to sell subscriptions, starting at $250 a month for companies of up to 50 people. That subscription is credited toward fares, which start at $8 a seat for trips within a 10-mile zone and go up to $589 for a monthly pass within the largest travel zone, which extends up to 75 miles from the pickup location. _______________
Here's an article on these guys: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/ridepal-to-help-b...
Also, if there's a market, why doesn't someone on YC solve this problem?
The GBus was started as a 20% project by a single engineer. He got a group of fellow coworkers together and charted a van to commute to work.
When I was working in Finance in NYC, a bunch of the traders got together and chartered a van to drive them to the office in Stamford, CT.
It's really not a hard problem to solve.
Edit: Here's another: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/business&i...
Has anyone considered starting a subscription based private bus line for employees of start-ups or smaller companies making the same commute? I'd imagine there'd be significant demand for that.
I know it's probably unrelated, but why do so many startups use a ccTLD of a country with such an unstable government? It just doesn't make business sense when there are so many good names out there.
(A somewhat wonkish assessment of what Bard-Down-The-Peninsula would look like: http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2010/05/top-10-reasons-for-...)
Seattle had (has?) express buses to Boeing that worked under the same principle. These were provided by the public transit agencies, however. Then Microsoft came out with the Connector, which is similar to the Google model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train
Unfortunately, once you reach your destination, you'll spend another 20 minutes on a bus.
In Beijing, I taxi to work everyday despite living on the subway route to my office. Taking a taxi is not that expensive while its more comfortable and (not always) faster. This has no relationship to the American situation, I guess, which is tripled screwed by low densities, poorly developed public transit, and high taxi costs.
That seems a pretty big caveat... :]
In Tokyo, it's often faster, and always more reliable, to take a train than a taxi unless you're going someplace way out in the boonies, because although the travel time is roughly equivalent in the best case, a taxi is frequently much slower due to traffic. Thank god for cellphones so one can at least known why one's taxi-using friend is 45min late...!
[The same applies to buses too, of course.]
A private bus line for start-up employees would certainly be feasible solution.
Previously livIng in Noe Valley, I'd see these all here time and often wondered about exactly this.
Note to google if your reading this; tell you damn drivers to stay out of the left lanes on 101 when it is not a commuter lane - your drivers are HORRIBLE and I have seen them cause congestion and near accidents on many occasions.