I really like the bendy train in the artistic rendering. What materials would allow for railroad car chassis and bodies which could bend and torque with the curve of the track like rubber? I think you would need lots of wheels or a relatively pointless flex-inducing system on each car to even get it to bend in this fashion.
Perhaps it just made for a pretty picture, and a completely impractical reality :)
Not quite a bendy train but the Toronto Rocket subway is quite a trip during sharp turns, as it has fully-open gangways, giving the appearance that the train is bending through curves.
I don't think this is correct as a general statement. Imagine if the walls were made of canvas fabric with appropriate amounts of slack, just as an example of a material that can easily bend.
You would need a cleverly designed frame, but
I'm sure there is something that would work. Perhaps many smaller segments joined together.
Canvas can bend more easily than rubber or steel, but deforming it still requires some energy. And while canvas would work for the walls, it wouldn’t work for the bogey, and anything rigid enough to work as a bogey would take lots of energy to bend.
To some extent you can say a regular multi-bogey train is undergoing deformation by changing the angular configuration between cars via the linkages. This could technically be extended to have the linkages have every few inches along the bogey instead of between 20-foot segments. We just need a way to transfer energy reliably between deformations and change in acceleration.
Alternatively, maybe it has nothing to do with physics, the picture is computer rendered, and the artist found the first of these two alternatives a whole lot easier:
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.
If the train is elastic, you'd recover that energy.
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.
The first thing that caught my eye was the gap in the middle of the bridge. A rather rare sight in reality, so the presentation of such a rendering comes across as a form of lying.
I completely missed the curved train cars! Thanks for pointing it out.
This is OT, but it was absolutely impossible to tap the tiny X on the "use our app" banner. It just opened the clipboard overlay no matter what I tried (Firefox Android) -- tap X, "Select All" button appears.
$100 billion sounds like a lot, but note that it'll cost $5-10 billion just to bring Caltrain to a downtown station from its current location: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/9/12/17850744/pennsylvania-avenue.... I think everyone will be shocked at how little new infrastructure San Francisco actually gets for the money.
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.
New York faces similar cost problems: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/05/29/assume-nordic-.... If the city, in this case cities, manage to tame the cost problems, the infrastructure can and will e built. This is not a funding problem per se, as the money is there, it's just being used ineffectively.
> 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.
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.
The Caltrain downtown extension (DTX) is going to cost $10 billion (or more) because the planners have no real incentive to control costs, not because it has to.
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...
It would be much cheaper to just widen the congested roads by 25% instead. (And before you say “induced demand”—removing cars from the road will also create induced demand. Induced demand results from the fact of reduced road congestion, not the specific means by which you reduce congestion.)
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
> And when we have another 200 million Americans, we just make the roads wider again?
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.)
Widening roads will not fix the problem. There is still a fixed number of road capacity in urban cores, which will inevitably lead to huge problems. Highway-widening is short-sighted.
You need to solve the right problem. For example in Maryland, the problem is not getting people into the “urban core” (i.e. DC). There is actually a surplus of rail capacity from Maryland into DC. You’ve got six separate rail lines going from the Maryland suburbs into DC (two regional rail, four metro).
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.
The problem in less dense areas will always be the last-mile problem. You can implement park-and-ride schemes with ample parking at transit stations, but then what do people do at the destination station? They're still 5-10 miles from their job, and they left their car at the station closest to their house (which still might have been a 5-10 mile drive, or more).
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.
Then what do you do at the other end? Say you work at Apple as an administrative person. You can’t afford to live in Cupertino. So you drive from Fremont. The new BART extension will go from Warm Springs to Sunnyvale. Let’s say you extend it a bit further to Cupertino. So you drive to Warm Springs. Then park. Then you get off in Cupertino. Then what? There is no place you can put a station in Cupertino that even puts you walking distance to both Apple campuses, much less the other job centers in the city.
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.
In addition to transporting people within an urban core itself, transit systems historically supported a hub and spoke model where people living in the suburbs took a train into their downtown job at the bank, ad agency, etc.
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.
Freeways are mass transportation, it might not be the kind you like, but they are pretty effective at getting large numbers of people from origin to destination.
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.
Where are you getting your numbers? Are you making them up?
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.
To use some example numbers. VA7, which goes from the Dulles area where many DC-area data centers are located, through Reston where many tech companies' offices are located, to near DC, carries 50,000-100,000 vehicles per day, and is congested pretty much all day. The Metro Silver line, which follows roughly the same route, theoretically destroys that. An 8-car Metro train carries 1,400 people. With 8-minute headways, that's 7.5 trains per hour, 90 trains over a 12-hour commuting day, or 126,000 people.
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.
“How much highway would you need to move 5.5 million people into and through a dense downtown core” is a question almost no city in the US besides New York needs to ask.
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.
It’s not just SF. 85% of the Bay Area lives outside SF. The area’s key industry is not only outside SF, but mostly scattered among random suburban office parks in the South Bay. Densifying SF won’t do it. You have to get the jobs out from the big suburban office parks into downtown, or at least in transit accessible locations in a handful of South Bay cities.
No, I think that Maryland pretty much proves that public transit doesn't work. You better tell London and Hong Kong and Tokyo and Paris and Beijing and New Delhi to shut down their systems.
Who said public transit doesn’t work? It clearly works some places. But what transit advocates ignore is that there is just one city in the entire US like London or Tokyo: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/10/americas-truly-denses.... In terms of weighted density, New York stands apart, 2.5x denser than SF or LA, and 5-6x denser than Seattle or DC.
The situation in Maryland illustrates what happens when you try to impose transit in a place that doesn’t have that kind of density.
You must have posted at least a dozen comments about the Maryland subway system in a thread about the Bay Area. Either you think the Maryland example is relevant to other areas, or you think it is irrelevant, and are just posting random anecdotes.
I really want to agree with you, but I don't think that's the case.
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.
Not sure I agree with this. Freeways carry about 2K cars per hour per lane [0], which in the USA translates to about 2-3K people per hour per lane. Rail transit systems can serve much, much more than thas -- typically 20K to 30K per hour per track in Europe and upto 54K in NYC and 81K in Hong Kong [1].
These are actual competent train systems that run trains every couple of minutes, not the idiotic once-per-hour Caltrain.
Don't forget about buses, which use highways but are much more efficient. Buses with dedicated bus lanes and high frequency service (every few minutes) is the way to go.
When jobs disappear and we have more automation/AI filling in for people..what are we doing to do with congested cities with decaying infrastructure.
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.
Ever been to a city? There is a reason NYC has everything one could ever want to experience because it takes very few interested people to have a lot of people in NYC interested in a thing.
The Dumbarton Rail Corridor seems like a good idea, but it's not going to work. The problem is that Dumbarton commuters have a large "fanout"; that is, they come from all directions in the east side, and commute to locations in all directions in the west side. A single point-to-point link between Redwood City and Union City isn't very useful because of all the connections that would need to be made. Yes, there are connections to Caltrain, BART, and Amtrak, but those services are also linear and don't fan out well.
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.
“The farther people travel, the more demand there is for bigger solutions,” he said. “There is no question this region has to address housing, but how we do that, that is still to be discussed.”
No, it's a prerequisite to solving the transportation problem. How else would you know what to design the system for?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Couldn't agree more! Banning single car garages and mandating that all construction include two garage stalls per dwelling would free up massive amounts of street parking and all us to add desperately needed lanes on many streets.
Yikes that sounds bad. Will need to see the details to be sure though.
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.
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.
> asked registered voters, among other questions, whether they would support a 1-cent sales tax to fund transportation projects in the Bay Area. Seventy-one percent of respondents answered, “Yes.”
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.
That's not the point. Regressive in this context means that everyone pays the same percentage, regardless of their means to do so. A simple test is "whose spending will have to increase the most percentage-wise to cover the extra tax?" If the answer is "poor people", then it's regressive.
The average person doesn't matter. If a new tax pushes a borderline low-income person below the poverty line, that's a problem.
When those taxes pay for services and amenities that make your city more attractive and it grows you get two broad benefits: network effect, and quality of life. Network effect is largely your property value going up. Quality of life is from things like more goods and services located closer to you as density increases. If you don’t want either of those things you probably don’t want to live in a city.
What about traffic? The more prosperous Bay Area becomes, more traffic woes, more homelessness, more demand for affordable homes and otoh, no infrastructure improvements, no new public transport system, no new schools, congestion everywhere and higher cost of living.
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.
Generally, given a fixed population, I think that improved transportation doesn't increase property values, but rather redistributes the value of property from areas near jobs to areas further away along the improved transportation. For example, starting in the 50's highways were built which allowed people to live outside of the city and commute in. Property values in the suburbs went from very low value farmland to hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre today. As these commuting routes became saturated property value in cities has recovered, since it is less and less possible to commute in a reasonable amount of time.
They don’t benefit until after they sell the property. They pay capital gains on that windfall. The people who buy the high value property also pay taxes.
No property owner benefits from land value increasing until after they have sold said property.
> 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.
That’s speculative activity. Loans have to be repaid and have interest. It’s not free money.
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 $$. People assume that property is a privilege. It’s debt. It’s a higher risk but highly rewarding risk.
Sounds like a benefit to me. Debt is a tool that can bring huge benefits to people who know how to use it.
Most people who own homes have used debt to buy them. Almost everyone who owns more than one home has borrowed against equity in homes they already own to buy the others. The ability to do that is a clear benefit of property ownership.
And a lot of them don’t. Debt is not a strategic play for most householders. Maybe when one is young, but most people seek stability when they have kids and as they get older.
You are generalizing. I know more people who are only single home owners. Perhaps you know wealthier or younger people than I do.
Also: you can’t penalize people for the benefit to get into more debt with more taxes. Then it no longer is a benefit.
Consider a million dollar property in the Bay Area. ( as an example)..property taxes approximate to $12k/year. It costs 9-14k/year per student in the Bay Area depending on the city. With one child, they benefit. With two children, they are still good value for money. But in 12 years, they don’t have kids in public school but they continue paying the property tax. Maybe they will subsidize others’ kids or maybe it will go to infrastructure.
On the other side, someone in an affordable home is getting subsidized by higher value home owners property taxes. If they own the affordable home and the best deal is for the renters. They get the most bang for their rent bucks.
But consider an aging couple with property taxes capped by prop 13, have no more kids in public school and are on a fixed income. What benefit do they gain? There is a more stressed resource pool of law enforcement, $$ 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 $$ contributors badly..shaming them for their ‘privilege’. You have to give something back when you are the state with insanely high taxes.
Property taxes get redistributed in the state of California. The way it works now is that property taxes goes to county and then state and it gets redistributed throughout the state. It is no longer true that wealthy towns get more $$ for better schools.
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.
They mean we can stop worrying about those homeowners who oppose an apartment building being built near them on the basis that it reduces property values. Because if the drop in values doesn’t hurt them until they sell then they have no right to complain about property values today when the apartment is built.
> Any tax that Person A supports but Person B is paying is a predatory tax.
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?
Sure put the tax on those who'd be commuting on this new infrastructure. However for those that live within a few miles of their job, what exactly are they gaining?
It's the same reason Bridges have a toll vs getting funds directly from property / income tax.
The big one is an increase in the value of their land. And is this initiative purely about commuting? Maybe the new train will allow people to more easily socialise or receive healthcare or any other part of their non-work life.
Also, trains/buses are not usuualy free in the same way that some bridges have tolls.
Not everyone is privileged enough to be able to afford to live close to their job. This is about raising quality of life across the board. People who have the "I've got mine, so fuck you" attitude are a blight on society.
It's not even that. Even if the governments could use it effectively, they'll get hit with lawsuits by NIMBYs not wanting rail or a new station too close to their house, which eats up valuable funding.
This feels so misguided to me. This is going to cost ~$35k/household and the govt is generally terrible at spending money.
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.
(1) 100 billion over 7 million people is 15k over say twenty years for roughly 750 dollars per year. If the outcome was effective, that sounds like a worthwhile investment.
(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.
... which is an argument for why this shouldn't be a regressive sales tax, but as something along the lines of a parcel or income tax, both of which tend to remove most of the burden from more financially vulnerable folks.
Has there ever been a time in modern history where building new housing in a large city like SF or SEA has actually decreased housing prices with evidence that no other economic factors at the time played a role?
This doesn't directly answer your question, but here are a few links that discuss the estimated increase in housing costs due to regulated development.
There is so much demand for more housing that a building boom would occur if restrictions were eased. Look at population charts of Texas cities like Austin, San Antonio and Houston where building is easier. Then compare to the relatively flat San Jose and San Francisco population charts.
you can’t just build more houses without infrastructure. And even with it, people already living here will and do oppose building more (and, alas, they have a right to their opinion)
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.
The Bay Area is so sparsely populated it makes me depressed. Honestly, someone told me a few months ago he didn't want any more building in Cupertino because it was "overcrowded already". I was speechless. The people here are absolutely nuts.
yes, it is overcrowded. I lived in European capital which is much more densely populated. I still remember people jams in subway during rush hours with horror
> If we stopped restricting new housing and taller building, then the number of cars on the road would decrease.
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.
There doesn't need to be more transit for it to be true that shorter commutes mean fewer cars on the road, even for the same rate of car ownership / transit ridership.
> 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.
If we stopped restricting new housing and taller building, then the number of cars on the road would decrease.
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.
> Furthermore, there are innovations coming that might shorten commuting (e.g. things like Hyperloop, although I have no idea if that's viable)
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.
> Commutes are long because most people can't afford to live next to their jobs.
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.
One key benefit that self-driving brings is the eliminating the need for curb-side parking. Your car can drop you off and go park itself in a hole somewhere. That opens up space for many more bike lanes where light motorized vehicles like Segways can also operate.
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.
Where, though? So do we now have to have dedicated self-driving-car parking farms? Where would you put one of those in SF such that it wouldn't increase wait times to 15-20 minutes?
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?
And not solve transportation at all. Tunnels for individuals with primarily single-occupant vehicles are counter-productive. We need more public transit. Parking is expensive, insurance is expensive, the vast majority of the bay area public will be left out by this plan.
Either way tunnels aren't particularly expensive, stations, on-ramps/off-ramps are.
Why is there an assumption that the tunnels have to be for cars? Create tunnels for bicycles instead:
- Tunnels don´t need to be nearly as big, and would still have higher capacity
- The friction of ¨I won´t ride a bike because it´s dangerous¨ is reduced or eliminated
- Weather as a factor in commuting by bike is eliminated
- Like a railway grade, you can basically eliminate any significant elevation ascents/descents
You're conflating Musk's underground highway concept with his proposed solutions for cheaper tunnel construction. The latter is required for the former, but not vice-versa. Musk's 14-foot tunnels are large enough for a traditional subway. See my reply to the parent.
I second this, except I wouldn't put so many eggs in one basket.
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.
All of said money should be spent on public transport. Spending on single-occupant personal transport, mostly SUVs, commuters act like a gas: it will expand to fill the container: more traffic, more commuters, and more climate change. It won't do any net good to waste money on more highways.
Bay Area just needs an underground centralized subway and interconnected light rail. It's so simple and so ridiculous how power NIMBYs just always shut any progress down. Would be such a boon to the quality of living here, it's absurd we can't make this happen.
Take 3 quarters of a hundred billion and you can probably substantially reshape land use in even the Bay Area. Take the other quarter and you can probably substantially reshape BART.
It’s going to take $5-10 billion just to move SF’s Caltrain station over by like five inches. You’re being wildly optimistic about what you can do with $100 billion.
But you have to have enough coverage to make the system usable. Building one subway line through Palo Alto doesn’t do you much good because people will still have to drive to get to the stations (and because jobs in the area are so spread out, drive on the other end to get to jobs).
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.
There are only a few places in the Bay Area as dense as the European and Japanese cities that have mass transit.
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.
But the density is being suppressed by zoning limits on building heights, parking requirements, mandated road improvements to handle additional traffic, and a building permit process that is heavily influenced by NIMBYs. Pass SB50 and watch the upper peninsula become viable for subways.
Keep in mind that every one of those trips has some economic purpose, so more commuters means more workers and more money in the area, even if individual travel times remain unchanged.
Without coming down on either side of this, because I'm not familiar with the proposals...
> 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.
What happens in the case of commutes, school, and so forth is that people choose where to live based on the cost of suffering in traffic, thus determining what trips will happen. So in net, because traffic is bad, "commutes from <exurb> sixty miles away" do not happen and instead "commutes from <suburb> ten miles away" happen.
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.
You could also look at it another way. Consider metropolitan areas as a sort of economic watershed, where the city receives workers and money from the surrounding areas. Improving transportation throughput and latency expands a city's economic area to more people at greater distances.
People choose to live based on where they can afford to live. Traffic is a secondary concern, and plenty of people commute from 60 miles away because that's the closest they can afford to rent/buy a place to live, despite the horrible commute that comes with it.
You'd think so, but this is where we hit problems: zoning, real estate transaction cost, 2-income households, property tax rates that reset if you move...
Fixing those problems would fix the traffic problems.
> because traffic is bad, "commutes from <exurb> sixty miles away" do not happen and instead "commutes from <suburb> ten miles away" happen.
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.
Then the metro should have paid the teacher more to make those congested commutes worth it.
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.
Are you assuming that trips with a negative value don't exist? That would require people to always be able to assess the value of a trip before they make it, which is obviously not going to be true.
By this logic, we should completely disband public transit, and also tear out the roads because stranding everybody will reduce the impact of commuting more than also offering transit.
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.
Mass transit is much more efficient to scale up because people are taking up less space and moving in a frequent coordinated pattern. Cars have a huge footprint: they take up extra space on the highway around a single occupant, they take extra space and time while the driver searches for parking, and they are left parked on some street or garage 90% of the time.
From the article, "Meanwhile, traffic congestion, measured as the time people spend slogging along freeways at speeds of 35 mph or less, grew 80 percent from 2010 to 2016".
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.
> 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.
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?
I want more transit too, but I think transit faces the same effect - add more capacity, and if there’s demand it will fill the capacity. Plenty of very very built out transit systems in the world that are constantly pushing full capacity.
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.
> 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 problem is that some trips -- like getting to work -- have effectively "infinite" value. Most people can't opt out of that trip.
Do you live in the bay? The transit agencies have territorial fiefdoms rather then compete. BART and Muni force customers of both to go up and down to transfer at the stations they share.
BART uses wider than standard gauge, Muni uses standard gauge. They don't share track because it's physically impossible (though it would be logistically problematic even if it was possible, given the pack frequency for each at those stations), not because of “territorial fiefdoms.”
> It's not about sharing track. It's about having to go to mezzanine level to transfer vs going out the landing after one flight of stairs.
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.
You're still missing my point. Why can't people walk one flight of stairs instead of three, two up and one down? Have you literally never looked through the bars on the Muni level or on the stairs?
> Why can't people walk one flight of stairs instead of three, two up and one down?
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.
Building and maintaining more entry/exit gates doesn't have an upfront and ongoing cost? Integrating Muni and BARTs entry, exit, and ticketing systems wouldn't have upfront and ongoing costs?
I suspect an solicitation of bids for either of those would not have any $0 bids.
> It is true that Bart doesn’t use standard width track.
> 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.
I live in San Francisco. The method of transferring you describe is reasonable to me and congruent with my opinion. It's good they share the station is my main point.
Imagine if the stairs to BART weren't separated by a cage from MUNI. How on earth is it reasonable to force someone to the ground floor when going between floors 1 and 2?
Years ago I thought of going there, a friend did seriously consider an academic position, even interviewed. It's great there in many ways if you like big city life but Chinese citizens face the possibility of kidnap if they are too politically pushy. I feel so sorry for them but don't know how to help. Some people from grad school who were from there immigrated to Canada and the US, but what will happen to the mass of people.
Rentals are cheaper. I can get a nice 1br in mid-levels for ~20k HKD (i.e. $2.5k). In SF these days, I'm not getting a decent 1br in a desirable location under $4k. My $3.5k rent was considered way under market.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadPerhaps 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.
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=...
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.
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.
No, it's a prerequisite to solving the transportation problem. How else would you know what to design the system for?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> 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.
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: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong-Hong_Kong-Macau_Gr...