Amazing, a path opening for a west coast city to develop additional housing! We need more of this. I bet there are NIMBY heads exploding in San Diego, probably on Nextdoor.
San Diego still has lots of areas that are gentrifying from being really crappy, so the NIMBY's aren't up in arms yet. San Francisco has the problem that all those crappy areas got gentrified and now everybody is trying to protect their "investment".
In addition, downtown San Diego isn't really considered to be a place where the cool kids hang out (and still has a lot of industrial area around). So, there is less fighting going on there right now.
The problem is that the transit in San Diego is lousy. The trains are horrifically slow between downtown and Solana Beach. And the limited number of tracks means that Amtrak regularly has to wait for passenger trains, and, if someone jumps in front of a train, the system shuts down for 4 hours.
> everybody is trying to protect their "investment"
Nearby construction can decrease your property values, but upzoning and by-right permitting increase property values by making them more attractive to developers.
I think it's both more correct and more charitable to think that people arguing against things like SB50 are doing it because they don't want the density in their neighbourhoods, and not for financial reasons.
Nah, most of these areas are already relatively dense. All the nimbys live in places like rancho santa fe or La Jolla, which are almost exclusively homes and have some truly insane houses.
However, San Diego already has a huge traffic problem. Either they really need to scale the major highways, or get people closer to their workplace, which this is a great first step for. San Diego is awesome, but growing pains showing.
I live in San Diego and just waited 30 minutes in bumper to bumper traffic to drive 7 miles. Until better traffic infrastructure is installed, more people sounds like a nightmare.
That's the entire point of this zoning change - moving the higher density housing near to public transportation, with integrated restaurants and stores so they're walkable. The current five zone types (explained in the article) separate commercial and residential, requiring people to drive to businesses and work. (also a San Diegan)
How often do you use public transportation in San Diego? I'm guessing you don't, because you'd know that it's nearly impossible to exist in San Diego and only use public transport. More people will invariably mean more cars. I know this might come as a shock, but this policy might not translate to the real world as intended.
Already in some places in Hillcrest you can walk to restraunts/shops. In UTC you can get around on busses (well, because UCSD spurred more public transport density).
Right now San Diego feels like an overgrown suburbia. If we transform into a real urban city I welcome it. The increased housing density will also presumably decrease housing prices, further making a more equitable city.
All those 'light rail/trolley/MTS' tracks going in around UCSD back and forth across I-5 definitely create one MTS platform in UCSD itself and other ones close by. At least one platform in the center of Genesee between the two major malls. Not up and running yet. UTC/UCSD is one of the major asparagus patches of skyscrapers in San Diego.
I remember 20 years ago when I was a UCSD student hearing a discussion on the local NPR station about extending the trolley to UCSD. I believe university leadership opposed it at that time. I recall one of the counterarguments was that it would bring more crime to campus. (I believe the term "rapists" was used by the person on-air representing that position. I don't recall if that person was a spokesperson for the university.)
In any event, classic Nimbyism. Memory still pisses me off. Glad to see at least the University has come around, even if I imagine most La Jolla residents haven't.
For reference, if I'm not mistaken, it was a La Jolla resident who invented that cheap clicker device that you can click to instantly report plane noise complaint to FTA. Cool little project but, well, yeah.
The clicker guy / plane noise guy was in real La Jolla, this is just going to affect UCSD area zip code La Jolla, and the rest of UTC.
There was a spike in UTC area visible homelessness last summer, making the area Starbuckses uninhabitable, and the transit line will certainly make quality of life even worse.
I lived in Banker's Hill in 2010 and even then you could get to everything you needed via walking and bus. With ridesharing, scooters and better public transit it is possible to go sans-car.
You lived in perhaps the most central part of San Diego so I'm not sure your experience is really representative. People in Escondido and vista cannot ride a bus or take a scooter to downtown because it would easily take half their day.
If they are making a choice of having a longer commute when a shorter one is available then it's hard for me to feel bad for them when their commute becomes even longer. Mixed use zoning makes commute shorter for most people, if someone chooses to live far away and gets punished for it then that's fair game.
Escondido to Downtown has gotten a lot better in the last couple years. There's a bus that runs from Escondido Transit to Downtown via the HOV lane, making only (I believe) two stops along the way. Google maps says it takes just over an hour, if you want to arrive at 9am. Esco to UTC takes a few minutes longer, but adds a transfer and an 8 minute walk.
Given that's pretty close to the driving commute times anyway, it's not that bad.
I think some people actually don't understand what southern California is like.
Sure, there are some walkable neighborhoods, but most people don't live in one of them. And even if you do, almost everyone needs to commute out of it or leave regularly for activities or socialization. And if you need to do that, 95% of the time the trolley is not anywhere near it, and a bus could take an extra hour and a half and is occupied almost exclusively by poor people and children in most areas.
It's like this because everything is sprawled out over a very large area. San Diego is like a 500 square mile area and stuff can happen all over it. And there are freeways everywhere rather than trains (which could not cover the area) because the whole thing is designed for cars.
I actually lived in San Diego without a car for years. But I was one of very very few people who go without a vehicle and are not homeless. And the only reason I could do that was because I only took 100% remote jobs and literally had zero social life.
I mean it is great that they are taking some kind of action on housing. It's still going to cost $1400 for an apartment in the ghetto though. Which is why I moved to TJ and live on the beach for half of that.
I think people understand very well that SoCal is designed for cars. That's why SoCal needs to change pretty dramatically, and this is part of that effort.
I was a little sad when car2go pulled out of SD, it solved my last mile problem when I didn't have a car in San Diego.
I agree you can live in some places in SD and survive without a car, however you cannot really get to more than half of the places you want to get to. Most of the tech companies are up north, so working in tech you really need a car unless you are at one of the few shops downtown / Mission Valley.
I moved to San Diego from the East Coast and used public transportation (trolley and bus) for over a year before I even got around to purchasing a car. It is absolutely possible, you just need to change the city's culture around cars, which your comment makes obvious. High-density housing is part of changing that culture. It increases demand for better public transit options and gets people comfortable and familiar with what living in an Actual Big City is like.
Frankly, San Diego has terrible civic planning and I suspect it comes from a combination of apathetic/uninformed citizenry and corruption w/r/t the real estate industry. But the problem is certainly not "too many people." There are many cities much larger than San Diego that have figured this problem out much better.
San Diego is much more like Ft. Worth than NYC, I'll grant you that. But the reason why San Diego is the way it is, is due to 40-50 years of uncontrolled and unplanned housing construction combined with uncontrolled and unplanned road building. The city (let alone the county) has nearly _doubled_ in population in this time, and while civil planners around the world have known for decades that road building increases rather than solves congestion, San Diego's response to congestion has consistently been to build new roads and widen existing ones. Why? Because that's what greases palms in San Diego. It's a toxic mix of developers, contractors, and their bought politicians running the show.
The situation will continue to grow more intolerable until that changes. People in SD are beginning to wake up to this, and to understand that civic pride requires civic participation, but it's an uphill battle with attitudes such as yours.
"Unplanned" is actually - to some degree - closer to what got us older, denser cities on the east coast and Europe.
Places like San Diego absolutely had "plans": build a shitload of big, wide roads, zone mostly for single family units, and separate uses so that it's virtually impossible to live without a car.
The plan you're describing is "make a ton of money building shit and make sure all the right people get their piece of the action." I mean, yes, it's a plan. But it's not really a plan for a city.
I think you're dramatically understating the extent to which pre-automobile city building was a negotiation between local and regional plans, rules, and regulations, just as it is today. And large civil plans and projects were enacted well before the automobile, too. New Haven, Connecticut was one of the first planned cities in the US, and predates the car by centuries. It has a modern grid system. Boston's largest neighborhood, the Back Bay, was created out of a massive land-filling project decades before the invention of the automobile. Much of Paris, France, was built in the 19th century according to modern civil planning principles.
The whole "the roads used to be cowpaths" thing with old cities is really only true when you're talking about really old cities that still have medieval quarters and things like that.
Indeed, some of the oldest cities in the world have been built and rebuilt on top of themselves a number of times over the course of their histories, often according to very complicated plans. That's because the oldest cities in the world today are more often than not several orders of magnitude larger than they have ever been at any point in their history.
I guess there's planning and there's modern planning.
Even the Romans did grids, which is a pretty good system. And it makes sense to keep really noxious things like tanneries or smelly factories or whatever away from, say, schools and places people live, where possible.
But modern planning in the US is hyper-detailed to the point where it stifles the natural evolution of our cities.
And developers? They build what they're allowed to build.
> But modern planning in the US is hyper-detailed to the point where it stifles the natural evolution of our cities.
That may be true, but as was pointed out by commenters to a recent Strong Towns article, planners are the least of our problems. It's zoning policies and NIMBYs--which through various public comment and challenge procedures effectively gives them veto power--which are far and away the greatest impediment to healthy, incremental growth.
The days of Robert Moses are long gone. Almost all professional planners subscribe to the religion of Jane Jacobs[1], sometimes to a fault. We don't need to get into the philosophical weeds about top-down vs bottom-up evolution. Our most substantial problems lie along a different axis.
[1] The tenets of the religion vary among the adherents, like any mature religion.
> planners are the least of our problems. It's zoning policies and NIMBYs
Sure, I agree with that. But a lot of that zoning and NIMBYism seems to use the idea that cities can be 'planned' as a crutch. "We have traffic because it's not 'well-planned'" - as opposed to realizing that you have traffic because the modern portion of your city is predicated on automobile ownership for pretty much every facet of your life.
> this policy might not translate to the real world as intended.
Certainly there's no guarantees but it's not as if there is a lack of good examples of success of mixed-use zoning. NYC is a common example in the US but there's similar ones all over the world.
> More people will invariably mean more cars.
If you worked ~ten blocks away from where you lived, would you get in a car to get there (knowing that it would take about the same overall duration or longer via car)? Seems especially nice that you could count on favorable weather most of the time.
Nobody in San Diego wants the city to be like NYC. Also how many people do you really think are going to get a high enough paying job in San Diego within 10 blocks of their residence? That's an absolute fantasy and planning based on an ideal world is why the trolley has an avg of 2000 riders per day instead of the projected 12,000.
NYC isn't the only model for density. Small houses on small lots can and does create lots of housing in places that don't typically come to mind when you think of dense (as this blog points out, Provincetown MA is one example: http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20141104.php#.XUHrGO...)
Until housing prices near the city centers come down I don't see that happening. Plus people want peace and quiet which city centers don't offer (at least in the United States).
40 years ago a typical family was 1 main wage earner and a stay at home mum, or at least a mum with a flexible employment
Now you have two people (a+b) in a career. They start off living 10 miles from their office (A + B), and meet each other at a mutual friend (f) that's 10 miles in the opposite direction
You encourage businesses to put their offices in a similar location, and on major transit routes. Then, even if A or B switch jobs their commute is still easy.
There are lots of employers that can't be centralized in downtown areas, like
- schools
- hospitals
- malls/retail
All of those things need to be close to residents who don't necessarily live downtown or on major transit lines. And they're also all expensive to move. How many of them are well connected to transit today?
Both linear options you show with afb between the workplaces is a significant improvement over current options, as current zoning makes even choosing an in between location impossible for nearly everyone. Typically both workers are required to commute in quite similar directions because development has only been allowed further and further out from existing development.
Also, Moving such that one person can take transit or walk would also be a huge huge improvement in traffic.
Work-life balance? People should not be slaves to their work.
One advantage of both cars and proper mass transit systems is that you don't have to move if your work does, or if you switch jobs, or if a partner moves in...
Studies show that more housing means more traffic, unless there's a plan to demolish housing in the suburbs alongside building up the urban core nothing will improve.
Not building more housing is not an option, they're going to be built somewhere. The question is, will the new housing units be built waaaaay farther out in new sprawling suburbs, or will they be built next to a city train station and have no parking spots? Only one of those two options generates more road traffic.
Even if there are parking spots for everybody, if even a few of those new people actually use the train (as opposed to use it once to say they are green but never again) there are less cars on the road.
We don't need to get everybody to get rid of all cars. We need to make sure that everybody has a reasonable opportunity to not use the car.
Agreed. The public transportation is pretty weak and the highway infrastructure can't handle the current population as it is. San Diego is a pretty linear city with almost everything going N/S and it doesn't lend well to optimization.
However, the fact of the matter is that often times, you need the increased tax revenue from higher density developments in order to be able to justify and afford expansions and improvements to the transportation networks. This includes not just roads and highways, but also _gasp_ public transport.
The only thing low density zoning codes due is force sprawl.
San Diegan here. Why is it that companies only want to be in UTC, downtown, or maybe Carlsbad? Part of the problem is that we don't distribute where people work like we do where they live. Enticing more businesses to operate outside of these 3 locations could do wonders. Even for facilitating public transit.
SD's public transportation issue is that SD is just so spread out and public transportation is typically slower than cars due to stops, waiting, etc. Oceanside to downtown (~38 miles) takes ~75 minutes, or just over 30 mph. The only places where public trans works well is when people don't have to travel that far.
>The only places where public trans works well is when people don't have to travel that far.
This simply is not true. A lot of people in SD think this is true, but it is not. There is nothing structurally unique about SD that makes it a nightmare for transportation. It's just that SD as a city lacks the will and the leadership to make the necessary changes happen. Civic planning is on autopilot from the 1960s: build condos everywhere, and widen roads whenever possible. This is a recipe for continued nightmares.
This is such a ridiculous statement. Increasing density now does not decrease traffic now (or even in the near future). Grocery stores, outdoor recreation, nightlife, and dining are among the things that need to be within walking distance to get people to give up cars. If the office is the only space that anyone desired I'd set up a hammock by my desk and stop paying a mortgage. Increasing density on its own increases traffic and the parking burden.
That's the beauty of mixed zoning. They can now build grocery stores, nightlife, dining, etc next to the high density housing. One Paseo is an example development in Carmel Valley that does this. Hillcrest has these developments as well.
They can, but this moves slow, and there's no guarantee they will do so unless the "mixed-use" code requires it. Grocery stores are also generally not very lucrative -- the margins are small and the lot sizes needed are usually pretty big, and they almost always need parking accomodation. Grocery store owners can't afford high rents. Meanwhile, developers can make a lot more money by stuffing a bunch of tiny condos in a high-rise box compared to accomodating an average market catering to the middle-class family. These kinds of businesses often need special rules in the zoning code to protect their land from being rebuilt as yet another beige/sheet-metal faux-luxury condo complex.
I'm speaking from experience. The developers in Denver are chomping at the bits to buy up another grocery store property in Capitol Hill (a centrally-located walkable dense neighborhood) and tear it down for multi-unit housing, and this has already happened in other neighborhoods (we used to have a walking-distance market before it was torn down for high-rises). I have the joy of living near a multi-unit box that is zoned as "mixed use" and has a total of 0 businesses and 0 parking spots, and they tore down a local medical office to build that. In another location, four blocks down, they're tearing down other small offices to build hundreds of apartments -- again, zoned for "mixed use" and yet, again, the ground floor in their blueprints only has more condos and lobby space. Zero local businesses.
My point is it just takes a while along with quite a bit of pissed-off political willpower until folks can comfortably ditch cars in car-centric communities, and density isn't a magic pill. What would likely happen is several years of increased traffic and parking utilization before everything falls into place. We're talking about bike lanes, public transportation, and walkability.
I don't know how it will work out, but my personal experience in SD with mixed use so far is good.
Where I live in San Diego (UTC) there was significant improvement due to mixed use (they are building high rises within walking distance of Westfield UTC mall, some of the new residential buildings also have office space inside them (looking at plans for Lux, yes, the name is cringy)).
Where I work in San Diego (Carmel Valley) there is a large new development project (One Paseo) that is located next to a mall (Del Mar Highland Center) which is being significantly renovated, and One Paseo itself includes dense residential, office buildings, and restaurants/shops (in fact, the restaurants/shops are already opened while housing will take a few more years to be ready).
Both of these developments involve building multistory parking garages to accommodate parking needs.
You are correct, it will take years. That means we should have started years ago, but failing that we can start now.
Even if the "mixed-use" buildings we create today are all residential, that doesn't mean they will stay that way. They can be remodeled if a grocery store wants in. Or the building that goes up next door in a few years can have a bit of commercial. Right now there is more commercial space than we need, while residential space is lacking, so it is no surprise that what you see today it mostly residential. However we now have the legal means to change that over time which is big.
Increasing housing density should also include more commercial locations, so you don't need to drive as far. For example, in a denser area, grocery stores are geographically closer.
More people living the way you do sounds like a nightmare. Maybe it's time for all those bumper to bumper cars to re-consider their housing location, congestion, and the impacts of their commuting lifestyle, before they prevent others from living in high-density units that are helpful in preventing sprawl and un-necessary congestion. Take a bus, bike, or ride-share, and be part of the solution.
If"transit stop" includes bus stops, this is going to be terrible. Public transit in San Diego is God awful because everything is so spread out. Realistically, you need a car to get anywhere, so more people is going to mean more congested roads.
It is spread out because it is lower density. As you get higher density you won't need to travel as far to get somewhere, therefore decreasing traffic load.
You stated that it's "because everything is so spread out". So the way to fix that is to build new stuff densely. It won't change overnight but you would need to start somewhere. You can't take the status quo as an inevitability.
I was just in San Diego for GopherCon and, boy, what a beautiful place. This change will ensure San Diego can keep growing and prospering, meanwhile San Francisco continues to stand athwart history yelling STOP!
As much as I hate NIMBYs in SF, the City has built a lot of housing over the last decade, and I would say more than San Diego. The SF skyline is completely new, and places like SOMA, East cut, Mission Bay, Dog patch are entirely new neighborhoods. Sure, we need to build more on the West side and iPhone Sunset and Richmond, but we will definitely get more bang for our buck by up-zoning San Mateo, Palo Alto etc
"City has built a lot of housing over the last decade"
The city has build a lot less housing than office space over the course of the last decade, and that is the metric that counts (jobs-housing balance).
"The SF skyline is completely new" - Salesforce tower (office space), 181 freemont (2/3s office space) etc etc.
"SOMA, East cut, Mission Bay, Dog patch are entirely new neighborhoods", and yet still 77% of the land in SF is zoned for single family homes.
SF recently passed the Central Soma rezoning plan which creates an amazon HQ2 worth of office space (space for about 50k workers) but only housing for about 7k people.
Denver is taking the same approach, and, really, it's the only tool we have for preventing huge increases in traffic as population increases and actually getting people to rely on public transit. I live in a transit-oriented development zone near train+bus stop and love how easy it is to walk to anything I want.
Transit-oriented development is the only sensible approach I've seen to scaling a modern city.
I think this is awesome and the path forward. After reading a lot of the comments I think one thing that could help very much with the pain of this transition is encouraging a culture shift in how computer laborers are required to drive to a computer at work every day instead of just using the computer in their house... Seems obvious to me anyway.
I am very much in favor of the idea of building high density housing centered around public transit. It sounds like a perfect solution to a large set of related problems.
I am scared to see what the end result will be in US cities, however, because public transit for almost all of the US means poorly run busing routes that nobody wants to take.
Having lived in San Diego for many years (as well as Denver and MPLS which I think are relevant comparisons) I believe that what will happen is that existing (poorly run, poorly utilized) bus routes will be chosen by developers who will use the "blah blah transit blah blah" designation that was just gifted to them to build high end units for people that will drive their cars.
No actual transit (the kind that runs on rails) will be built, some more car-centric housing units will exist at high end prices (they're not going to build garage-less buildings nor are they going to build low end units).
Oh, and the buses will still be empty.
I want this kind of policy regime to be pursued, but they need to build the transit lines first. And buses don't count.
Why do buses not count? Because you don't like them? Your definition of transit is not shared with most people.
I love buses as a transit option. They go directly to parking lots of places like grocery stores and ride smoother than a lot of trains/subways/etc I've been on. If the routes are useful then people will use them and they're as simple to scale as buying more buses and very easy to dynamically adjust, unlike train lines.
In a word, it's time. If I want to drive somewhere in my town, it takes at most 15 minutes. A bus is easily 30-45. I think over long distances rail allows you to save time, or at least break even.
Highly dependent on where you are in the country. Trains win in highly congested areas due to the dedicated right-of-way. With no congestion, cars almost always win.
I think at least in some places in the US, this is a class thing, though few people will admit it. Buses are associated with lower-class people, whereas rail (especially heavy rail) is associated with middle class people.
Sure, but (1) roads benefit everyone, while rail benefits wealthier people disproportionately; and (2) rail is subsidized much more heavily per passenger mile than driving.
You often hear that we spend much more on roads than rail, which is true, but we drive much much more than we take the train. For example, the D.C. metro receives about a $0.42 per passenger mile subsidy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/not-a-dime-more-for-.... Meanwhile, state and local governments spend $155 billion on roads, about half of which is paid for by usage fees (tolls and gas tax). Given the 3 trillion miles driven on roads every year, that works out to just $0.024 per passenger mile of subsidy: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pressroom/fhwa1704.cfm.
The cleaning lady who drives 10 miles to work costs the government $0.24 for each trip. When a white collar worker takes Metro 10 miles to work,[1] it costs the government $4.20.
[1] The median Metro rider has a household income of over $100,000 and 80% have a college degree. That's because the people who take Metro can afford to buy expensive housing near a Metro station, and go to white collar jobs downtown. The cleaning lady, and other lower income workers, can't afford to live near a Metro station, and many work the 90% of jobs in the metro area that aren't downtown.
Urban busses, yes. Commuter busses (public agency or private "Google Bus" variants) not so much.
There are transit districts which run entirely different coaches on commute vs. urban or general transit routes. Commute have comfortable seats, overhead briefcase stowage, reading lights, and. often wifi. Urban transit: hard seats, no amenities, often standing-room only.
"Why do buses not count? Because you don't like them? Your definition of transit is not shared with most people."
Don't shoot the messenger.
There is a vicious cycle of under-investment (fulfilling transit goals with half-assed bus routes instead of making real investments in lightrail/subway) poor service, and resulting lack of utilization among middle class voters ... which leads to further under-investment (since none of us are going to take the bus) ...
I am not talking about SF or NYC. I am talking about every other city in the US that matches this description perfectly.
Then just fix this and you don't have to spend millions digging up a bunch of land and building train lines/stations. Market the buses better, make them nicer, enforce rules better on them, get things like charging outlets in them.
The single biggest thing you need to do is make bus commutes faster than a car commute. This requires enforced bus lanes and possibly transit signal priority, which has been a hard thing to maintain politically. The buses can be nice and well-marketed, but if driving is significantly faster, then people who can afford it will still drive.
Trains do have the advantage that they don't have to deal with road congestion. Since buses have to use the same streets as cars unless there are bus only lanes it's pretty much always going to be faster to drive than to take a bus because the bus probably won't be doing directly to your destination and will be making stops where you won't in your car.
I wouldn't say they don't count but buses tend to be much slower than driving while trains with dedicated tracks can quite easily be faster than driving if traffic is bad or its hard to find parking at the destination.
Now, high quality bus services with dedicated lanes can be pretty decent but most bus services aren't like that.
It's turned out to be very politically difficult to establish and (just as importantly) enforce bus lanes in communities in the US. People get very upset at the prospect of giving up either street parking or travel lanes, and local politicians and the traffic enforcement bureaucracy has mostly sided with the people who complain. The result is either no bus lanes, or part-time bus lanes with no effective enforcement, which is basically the same as no bus lanes.
A bus that's able to use bus lanes (and possibly transit signal priority) to bypass traffic is a great thing, and would be appealing to people across the socioeconomic spectrum. A bus that's stuck in the same traffic as the cars has no benefit other than cost, and will only appeal to those who can't afford to maintain a car or are very ideologically committed to transit.
Buses would be amazing with bus lanes in congested areas and automated camera-based enforcement of those lanes. However, the inability of the political system to make that happen even in Manhattan makes me fairly pessimistic for that outcome in other places.
I still think it's worth investing in buses for those who need them, but if they can't bypass traffic they will be stuck at a low mode share almost everywhere.
I'd rather a bus driver sit in heavy traffic while I get to use my phone/laptop than be the one driving. For going to conventions I still take the bus even though I have a car now.
The problem with bus lanes is that they require failure in order to operate. If you implement bus lanes and they succeed in relieving traffic congestion but the congestion was the only reason people weren't driving then people go back to driving and you go back to having congestion. There is no way for them to actually relieve the congestion because having congestion is the method by which they operate. But they can make it worse by wasting a travel lane during the times of day when there would have been enough road capacity if not for the bus lane.
If you want to make buses actually work, make them work like Uber. You go to the bus stop where there is a screen you can input your destination (or you use your phone), and the nearest minibus going in your direction stops to pick you up, which each carries eight passengers rather than forty. Then it drops you off at your actual destination instead of four blocks from there, and picks you up faster to begin with because there are five times as many buses of a fifth the size and they can be diverted from nearby routes to pick you up as soon as you summon them.
At that point they're almost as good as a car most of the time, only they cost a lot less and only take up an eighth of the space on the road per passenger. And you don't have to operate huge wasteful 40-passenger vehicles during off-peak hours just to carry 3 passengers.
If you paint a lane red and make it buses-only, that gives commuters an alternative to driving. Traffic might still be terrible and congested, but commuters have the option to skip the traffic and take the bus instead.
Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive. Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.
> If you paint a lane red and make it buses-only, that gives commuters an alternative to driving. Traffic might still be terrible and congested, but commuters have the option to skip the traffic and take the bus instead.
Except for all the ones who don't, because one of the endpoints isn't anywhere near the bus route even if part of the path between them goes along it.
> Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive.
Apparently they do, as demonstrated by all the people who use Uber in preference to buses.
> Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.
Unless that requires you to have less frequent service that covers fewer areas, which in turn causes people to choose single passenger cars over your buses.
You can also eliminate the driver cost by doing what Uber was originally billed as -- ride sharing. You're going to drive your car from your home to your workplace and back, but if you get up fifteen minutes earlier you can make a few bucks by picking up some of your neighbors and dropping them off at work. That's a lot less than the cost of a full-time bus driver with benefits but at scale it still results in a fraction of the number of cars on the road during rush hour.
In the majority of US cities, bus networks are optimized for coverage instead of frequency. A bus route might only run a few times a day at commute times - but city planners can check the public transportation box for all the neighborhoods along the route. With that methodology, it becomes impossible to reach a destination that requires a transfer or get to a job at an off time. Therefore anyone with the means to avoid the bus will.
Of course some cities have BRT routes, dedicated lanes, and high service frequency. If you have access to a bus network like that, indeed it can operate as well or better than a rail system (and often at a lower cost). But that is the exception in the US, not the norm. Whereas most commuter and urban rail in the US operates with high frequency and dedicated right-of-way. Hence the presumption that buses "don't count".
People who can afford to buy these new high-end units will move out of their previous, less high-end units and the result is more affordable housing because the supply is closer to meeting the demand.
That would be a waste of money. Building transit lines without people to ride them means that they reach their end of useful life from old age without serving enough people to be worth them. It would be environmentally sound to build another freeway - at least that somewhat reduces congestion caused pollution (until the city grows and you need a new one).
Build high density around a bus stop, and some of the people will take the bus. Those additional riders mean the bus is making more money and can afford to add more routes. More routes means the bus is useful to more people who start riding the bus... Eventually you have enough people on the bus to switch to a better transit mode. The bus rider levels also show where people want to go which guides where you put the trains instead of a guess and prayer. But this all requires enough density to start the cycle in the first place.
"That would be a waste of money. Building transit lines without people to ride them means that they reach their end of useful life from old age without serving enough people to be worth them."
Agreed. Forgive me - what I meant was, build new transit lines on point to point routes that already make sense, then in-fill the intermediate stops as needed.
Those in-fill stations can then be the anchors for transit oriented, high density development which completes the cycle because the line is already in place.
I think they have basically succeeded with this in the University St. Paul <--> MPLS lightrail route. The route already made sense point-to-point and now they can choose the intermediate stops that make sense to organically grow the corridor.
This is how most successful rail corridors in the northeast US were built. A line was built to connect two cities, then suburbs spread along the existing right of way.
What an arbitrary way to decide what "actual" transit is. There are about a thousand other, very valid, very useful, very modern ways of building transit that have nothing to do with rails. If you're saying rails but meaning grade-separation, you're still wrong about non-grade-separated systems being somehow inherently inferior or unworthy. Look at any list of top transit systems in the world, the majority of modern systems incorporate non-grade-separated systems like trams, busways, or even regular old busses, because they work and they're cheap. People with your mindset are why this country may never have widespread transit systems, because you think insanely expensive infrastructure is the solution to a culture, marketing, and economic problem.
"What an arbitrary way to decide what "actual" transit is. There are about a thousand other, very valid, very useful, very modern ways of building transit that have nothing to do with rails."
I think you're missing my point - it's not about a fetish for rails ...
In the United States, outside of two or three cities[1], there has been almost zero serious investment in public transportation[2] and that transit infrastructure is always some bullshit sideshow that checks a box but does not provide any kind of meaningful service that would allow car culture to change.
Here is everything you need to know about public transit in the United States in one quick commercial:
What is special about rail infrastructure is that you can't half-ass it. You can't sort of put the subway in or sort of build a lightrail line. If they are putting down rails there is serious, meaningful work being done that requires a lot of related investment in the entire ecosystem of transit.
In the United States, buses don't count - not because buses are inherently bad but because in our car-centric environment that kind of service will never have the funding or the political backing to actually be useful.
[1] NYC, Washington DC ... places with subways.
[2] Seeing some halting progress in places like Denver and Minneapolis ... and I say "progress" with some qualifiers - after 25 years now has a second lightrail line and MPLS has one rail line that actually makes sense for commuters...
Here in Kitchener-Waterloo the project approval to build a light rail system included automatic upzoning for a radius around each of the stations and easier approvals for high density development. Tying the rail and zoning together was a deliberate choice to drive density in areas served by transit and prevent as much NIMBY interference as possible.
The construction took several years and the trains have just started running, but the city has already transformed. Many dense buildings went up while the rail lines where being built and many more are under construction right now.
It will be many years before the true success and failure of the project is known, but the signs look good to me. I'd like to see general loosening of non-safety related zoning restrictions to help keep housing prices in check, but this program was a good compromise since developers were guaranteed an investment of transit and other city services and could take more risk.
This is great, and I hope it spurs on more transit development in general down there. San Diego is one of those cities that I adore, so long as I don't have to drive anywhere. Right on the ocean, the weather is perfect, it has lots of great food and beers, and it's generally a pretty cool place. I also appreciate that a lot of the roads are not very wide, so areas like downtown feel great to walk around because it's not very busy. But it drives me nuts that if you want to go literally any other neighborhood it requires a car and sitting in traffic.
It's not super dense in terms of population now, but with proper infrastructure growth it could be one of the greats!
Every time I read something like this, I roll my eyes - most of these proposals are dead on arrival. By the time this will be in effect, public transit will have been transformed (if not removed) by private, automated transportation.
And then I always think it would be best to build a city from scratch. A great one. With good principles. Time-proofed. Collectively we should know how to do it, but it seems that it's incredibly hard to come up with the resources to do it properly. It's still only a dream.
> Every time I read something like this, I roll my eyes - most of these proposals are dead on arrival. By the time this will be in effect, public transit will have been transformed (if not removed) by private, automated transportation.
Every time I hear about self-driving cars being just around the corner I roll my eyes. Most of us will be dead before self-driving cars are in effect, and by then our infrastructure will have already moved on.
fully level-5 cars? Maybe. Autonomous doesn't have to be fully level-5 to exist in cities. e.g. autonomous subways have been operating in Singapore since 2011, and been technically ready since 2003 [0]. You might argue, "that's public, not private transportation", and of course you're right. But are you sure nothing can be done to private cars to become fully autonomous, without requiring a level-5? e.g. many car models currently on the market are "fully autonomous" on highways, for example. Don't underestimate the innovation that can still happen there.
"All new MRT lines built since the North East line in 2003 were equipped with CBTC from the outset, and have the capability to be completely driverless and automated, requiring no onboard staffing."
p.s. I rode on the driverless line several times in 2011 and 2012.
By the time this will be in effect, public transit will have been transformed (if not removed) by private, automated transportation.
Honestly can't tell; is this because you're massively pessimistic about how long it will take the proposals to come into effect, or because you're massively optimistic about the advent of private, automated transportation?
> And then I always think it would be best to build a city from scratch
Waterfall projects don't work with cities any better than they work with code. While it's harder to be "agile" with cities, the idea of building a large project correctly in a go is misleading.
There are many future-centric planned city projects which either died before they ever took off, or were completed and are total ghost towns.
This is a blanket statement that can be easily refuted. The overhaul of Barcelona for the Olympics comes to mind, and same story with Torino in Italy. Both cities benefited greatly from a large planned investment in infrastructure. Same thing with Madrid and the doubling of the metro system now that I think about it.
This stance is infuriating. Stop letting the best the be enemy of the good.
There are lots of ways that the imagined self-driving future can either be a terrible non-improvement or simply take an order of magnitude more time to come to fruition.
We have clear and obvious ways to improve things now and we should be building support for that and taking those steps. Not sitting on our hands waiting for a purely technical solution to what's not even remotely just a technical problem.
This is one of those classic, massively overconfident HN comments. Nothing has proven worse for American cities than massive free public infrastructure devoted to private automobile transportation, and our only hope to make our cities more livable, affordable, and environmentally safer is to massively switch to public transit.
The tax on space, time, and energy required to move a bunch of people around in individual little containers is far too high.
Is there a net tax on time? It's unambiguous that I can get from where I live to where I work at least 40 and often 70 minutes faster in my car than I can on public transportation. (Cambridge, MA to Waltham, MA.) My commute would take me longer if I changed jobs to work in Kendall Sq in Cambridge and took the T across town. (DW worked in Kendall; her T commute was 1/3 the distance of mine and took 1.5-2x the time.)
I'll grant you the space and energy inefficiency of private cars, but the time factor seems wildly in favor of point-to-point random route transport.
The problem is Americans are normalized to terrible public transit. I was amazed how wonderful it was to get around using public transit the last time I was in Europe. It was so much better than the car I had rented for short-medium distance trips. I hear it's even better in Japan and other parts of Asia.
The idea of having a dedicated lane with incredibly reliable timing is obviously better than the uncertainty of traffic.
Even with their “wonderful transit” and our “terrible transit” Americans have some of the shortest commutes in the OECD: https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling.... Japan and Korea (which have fantastic public transit) have the longest.
If your transportation options are shit, then that's true. Of you have a good system like in Madrid for example, then car is always slower. Madrid is dense and invested heavily before public transportation paid off. You also need a little vision which is systematically lacking in American local politics.
Okay, you make some good points. Do you think the problem is cultural or something else?
I would be curious to see a breakdown for metro areas, where public transit is actually useful (obviously cars work fine for most of rural America, and add a bus system when necessary). But I have no idea if that analysis is available.
I am heavily biased towards cities with awful traffic, where I would like to see less traffic.
I think it's economics. The american middle class is richer, and taxed lower than almost any other in the OECD. That means that people can afford big houses in the suburbs,[1] and multiple cars per household,[2]. That means businesses have huge incentives to locate in low-cost suburbs, because they can count on all their workers being able to drive to work.
Also, for the most part, driving is just faster, even in cities with bad traffic. I'm pretty lucky--I've got a train station 22 minutes from my house that drops me off an 8-minute walk away from work (with no transfers). Driving in involves fighting through rush-hour traffic from one end of D.C. to the opposite end, but it's still no slower on the way in, and 20 minutes faster on the way out. All those stops just make the train slow.
Outside of the city center, it's also vastly easier to stop and run a few errands on the drive home without it adding tons of additional waiting for transit time.
There is also the matter of population density. Compare the population density of the UK or Germany to China, then to the US.
If you have fewer passengers per square mile then you either need smaller vehicles or less frequent operation to fill larger ones. People naturally prefer the first option.
But the country isn't a city. It would be possible for an individual US city to have the population density required to support more effective mass transit (at least to the extent that it exists in Europe or Asia). NYC is the highest density major city in the US and largely manages to do that.
To make it work elsewhere would require the same sort of densities as New York, which would require allowing people to build more high density housing there.
It would require both allowing and people pervasively desiring Manhattan level of density of housing. I think that might be workable in San Francisco (with the desire being there). I'm not sure that level of density is desired anywhere else (as measured by people buying land and building such buildings).
There are a few other cities that might manage it in the US. Seattle, Boston, maybe D.C.
Certainly not anything like Kansas City or Tucson, because you have to have enough density pressure around the city to actually require tall buildings. If you can satisfy all the local housing demand with single family homes and still have plenty of empty land within reasonable distance of the city center, there isn't enough reason to compress it into a smaller area just to have taller buildings and put things a little closer together. But those cities also don't have anything near the same traffic problems either.
Where you're really screwed is in places like Los Angeles and Houston, where you have large populations but also so much sprawl and undeveloped land that taller buildings aren't really justified. So they end up in this unhappy medium with enough population density to have bad traffic but not enough to have good mass transit, and weak demand for higher density housing.
But that still doesn't justify the zoning restrictions that exist in a lot of these places. Houston largely doesn't have them while Los Angeles does, and you can check for yourself the difference in rent. Even if without them Los Angeles still wouldn't be New York, because it would at least be better than it is.
This is partially my fault for comparing LA with a city, but what most people think of as "Los Angeles" is really the LA metro area or LA county, so the better comparison would be LA county with Harris county (where Houston is).
That's fair and, being an east coaster, I don't have a good feel for what is/isn't "LA". I wasn't trying to nit-pick or strawman.
Even with that, it seems like zoning isn't what's kept LA rents high. LA has parts that are fairly dense and more free zoning doesn't seem to have made Houston become notably dense.
> LA has parts that are fairly dense and more free zoning doesn't seem to have made Houston become notably dense.
That's kind of the point. Less restrictive zoning isn't going to make areas like that a lot more dense, because they're huge areas with open spaces and people aren't going to build skyscrapers surrounded by empty lots even if they're allowed to.
The problem LA has is that they have some areas zoned for density, but not enough of them. So you get a section full of skyscrapers and correspondingly a lot of demand for housing near there, but then zoning that requires low density housing in nearby sections, which keeps rents high because that low density housing would otherwise have been replaced by medium density housing.
Whereas with Houston you have some high density areas, but with less zoning the density falls off more organically and it's more of a medium density everywhere than high density in one place and low density right next to it. Which isn't much better for traffic when the average density comes out the same, but it's a lot better for rents, because it makes for a lot less scarcity in the market for land where medium and high density housing can be built.
The road infrastructure is already there, and has been already subsidized. It is my opinion that private autonomous transportation will become more efficient and cheaper than public transportation and therefore will supplant it. I speak not as the world expert, but as someone who did a relatively deep analysis of transportation costs in US cities. The ballpark figure is what I call TCTM, or Total Cost of Transportation per Mile, which doesn't take into account the cost of road infrastructure, simply assuming that it is already there. TCTM for uber/lyft and similar services is going down, and you do not even need fully autonomous, level-5 driverless cars, to have a TCTM lower than that offered by public buses.
Even if self driving vehicles are a reality in the next 20 years there's two inescapable realities we need to contend with: mass transportation will always be more ecologically sustainable than a fleet of self driving cars clogging the streets, and that most people don't want to be driving for an hour to go anywhere, even if a computer does the driving. Density will always be a good thing.
You're probably not aware of the fact that San Diego is in the process of building a tram system that is very promising. If you drive along the route like I do, you can see progress every day - it's a huge project and I'm extremely happy to hear that they're pairing it with legislation that will increase it's positive benefits.
I'll take a tram project that is being implemented ahead of schedule over the promise of automated cars which are always seemingly around the corner.
This is the exact same mindset that resulted in our cities and suburbs in the 1960s. Except back then the disruptive new technology was widespread motor vehicle ownership.
150 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadIn addition, downtown San Diego isn't really considered to be a place where the cool kids hang out (and still has a lot of industrial area around). So, there is less fighting going on there right now.
The problem is that the transit in San Diego is lousy. The trains are horrifically slow between downtown and Solana Beach. And the limited number of tracks means that Amtrak regularly has to wait for passenger trains, and, if someone jumps in front of a train, the system shuts down for 4 hours.
Nearby construction can decrease your property values, but upzoning and by-right permitting increase property values by making them more attractive to developers.
I think it's both more correct and more charitable to think that people arguing against things like SB50 are doing it because they don't want the density in their neighbourhoods, and not for financial reasons.
However, San Diego already has a huge traffic problem. Either they really need to scale the major highways, or get people closer to their workplace, which this is a great first step for. San Diego is awesome, but growing pains showing.
Right now San Diego feels like an overgrown suburbia. If we transform into a real urban city I welcome it. The increased housing density will also presumably decrease housing prices, further making a more equitable city.
In any event, classic Nimbyism. Memory still pisses me off. Glad to see at least the University has come around, even if I imagine most La Jolla residents haven't.
For reference, if I'm not mistaken, it was a La Jolla resident who invented that cheap clicker device that you can click to instantly report plane noise complaint to FTA. Cool little project but, well, yeah.
Close. Chris McCann lives in Point Loma, directly under the SAN flight path. :)
Edit: Oh, nope. You're right, he is in La Jolla.
There was a spike in UTC area visible homelessness last summer, making the area Starbuckses uninhabitable, and the transit line will certainly make quality of life even worse.
Given that's pretty close to the driving commute times anyway, it's not that bad.
But I welcome it. We need more livable cities in warm/moderate climates.
Sure, there are some walkable neighborhoods, but most people don't live in one of them. And even if you do, almost everyone needs to commute out of it or leave regularly for activities or socialization. And if you need to do that, 95% of the time the trolley is not anywhere near it, and a bus could take an extra hour and a half and is occupied almost exclusively by poor people and children in most areas.
It's like this because everything is sprawled out over a very large area. San Diego is like a 500 square mile area and stuff can happen all over it. And there are freeways everywhere rather than trains (which could not cover the area) because the whole thing is designed for cars.
I actually lived in San Diego without a car for years. But I was one of very very few people who go without a vehicle and are not homeless. And the only reason I could do that was because I only took 100% remote jobs and literally had zero social life.
I mean it is great that they are taking some kind of action on housing. It's still going to cost $1400 for an apartment in the ghetto though. Which is why I moved to TJ and live on the beach for half of that.
I agree you can live in some places in SD and survive without a car, however you cannot really get to more than half of the places you want to get to. Most of the tech companies are up north, so working in tech you really need a car unless you are at one of the few shops downtown / Mission Valley.
Frankly, San Diego has terrible civic planning and I suspect it comes from a combination of apathetic/uninformed citizenry and corruption w/r/t the real estate industry. But the problem is certainly not "too many people." There are many cities much larger than San Diego that have figured this problem out much better.
I grew up in San Diego and lived in New York as well as Ft. Worth and I think you don't know what you are talking about.
The situation will continue to grow more intolerable until that changes. People in SD are beginning to wake up to this, and to understand that civic pride requires civic participation, but it's an uphill battle with attitudes such as yours.
Places like San Diego absolutely had "plans": build a shitload of big, wide roads, zone mostly for single family units, and separate uses so that it's virtually impossible to live without a car.
I think you're dramatically understating the extent to which pre-automobile city building was a negotiation between local and regional plans, rules, and regulations, just as it is today. And large civil plans and projects were enacted well before the automobile, too. New Haven, Connecticut was one of the first planned cities in the US, and predates the car by centuries. It has a modern grid system. Boston's largest neighborhood, the Back Bay, was created out of a massive land-filling project decades before the invention of the automobile. Much of Paris, France, was built in the 19th century according to modern civil planning principles.
The whole "the roads used to be cowpaths" thing with old cities is really only true when you're talking about really old cities that still have medieval quarters and things like that.
Indeed, some of the oldest cities in the world have been built and rebuilt on top of themselves a number of times over the course of their histories, often according to very complicated plans. That's because the oldest cities in the world today are more often than not several orders of magnitude larger than they have ever been at any point in their history.
Even the Romans did grids, which is a pretty good system. And it makes sense to keep really noxious things like tanneries or smelly factories or whatever away from, say, schools and places people live, where possible.
But modern planning in the US is hyper-detailed to the point where it stifles the natural evolution of our cities.
And developers? They build what they're allowed to build.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/upshot/developer-dirty-wo...
That may be true, but as was pointed out by commenters to a recent Strong Towns article, planners are the least of our problems. It's zoning policies and NIMBYs--which through various public comment and challenge procedures effectively gives them veto power--which are far and away the greatest impediment to healthy, incremental growth.
The days of Robert Moses are long gone. Almost all professional planners subscribe to the religion of Jane Jacobs[1], sometimes to a fault. We don't need to get into the philosophical weeds about top-down vs bottom-up evolution. Our most substantial problems lie along a different axis.
[1] The tenets of the religion vary among the adherents, like any mature religion.
Sure, I agree with that. But a lot of that zoning and NIMBYism seems to use the idea that cities can be 'planned' as a crutch. "We have traffic because it's not 'well-planned'" - as opposed to realizing that you have traffic because the modern portion of your city is predicated on automobile ownership for pretty much every facet of your life.
Certainly there's no guarantees but it's not as if there is a lack of good examples of success of mixed-use zoning. NYC is a common example in the US but there's similar ones all over the world.
> More people will invariably mean more cars.
If you worked ~ten blocks away from where you lived, would you get in a car to get there (knowing that it would take about the same overall duration or longer via car)? Seems especially nice that you could count on favorable weather most of the time.
...that only works if there are viable alternatives (see "public transit" portion of proposal"
> make it so bad that people move closer to work.
Do you really believe it's that easy to move? and then never switch your job?
The proposal is trying to fix the problems you are complaining about, I'm not sure what value your alternatives would bring.
Now you have two people (a+b) in a career. They start off living 10 miles from their office (A + B), and meet each other at a mutual friend (f) that's 10 miles in the opposite direction
A -- a -- f -- b -- B
They then move in equidistant, 20 miles
A -- -- afb -- -- B
Then office A moves 10 miles the wrong way
A -- -- -- afb -- -- B
How do ab move closer to work?
- schools
- hospitals
- malls/retail
All of those things need to be close to residents who don't necessarily live downtown or on major transit lines. And they're also all expensive to move. How many of them are well connected to transit today?
Also, Moving such that one person can take transit or walk would also be a huge huge improvement in traffic.
One advantage of both cars and proper mass transit systems is that you don't have to move if your work does, or if you switch jobs, or if a partner moves in...
We don't need to get everybody to get rid of all cars. We need to make sure that everybody has a reasonable opportunity to not use the car.
However, the fact of the matter is that often times, you need the increased tax revenue from higher density developments in order to be able to justify and afford expansions and improvements to the transportation networks. This includes not just roads and highways, but also _gasp_ public transport.
The only thing low density zoning codes due is force sprawl.
SD's public transportation issue is that SD is just so spread out and public transportation is typically slower than cars due to stops, waiting, etc. Oceanside to downtown (~38 miles) takes ~75 minutes, or just over 30 mph. The only places where public trans works well is when people don't have to travel that far.
This simply is not true. A lot of people in SD think this is true, but it is not. There is nothing structurally unique about SD that makes it a nightmare for transportation. It's just that SD as a city lacks the will and the leadership to make the necessary changes happen. Civic planning is on autopilot from the 1960s: build condos everywhere, and widen roads whenever possible. This is a recipe for continued nightmares.
I'm speaking from experience. The developers in Denver are chomping at the bits to buy up another grocery store property in Capitol Hill (a centrally-located walkable dense neighborhood) and tear it down for multi-unit housing, and this has already happened in other neighborhoods (we used to have a walking-distance market before it was torn down for high-rises). I have the joy of living near a multi-unit box that is zoned as "mixed use" and has a total of 0 businesses and 0 parking spots, and they tore down a local medical office to build that. In another location, four blocks down, they're tearing down other small offices to build hundreds of apartments -- again, zoned for "mixed use" and yet, again, the ground floor in their blueprints only has more condos and lobby space. Zero local businesses.
My point is it just takes a while along with quite a bit of pissed-off political willpower until folks can comfortably ditch cars in car-centric communities, and density isn't a magic pill. What would likely happen is several years of increased traffic and parking utilization before everything falls into place. We're talking about bike lanes, public transportation, and walkability.
Where I live in San Diego (UTC) there was significant improvement due to mixed use (they are building high rises within walking distance of Westfield UTC mall, some of the new residential buildings also have office space inside them (looking at plans for Lux, yes, the name is cringy)).
Where I work in San Diego (Carmel Valley) there is a large new development project (One Paseo) that is located next to a mall (Del Mar Highland Center) which is being significantly renovated, and One Paseo itself includes dense residential, office buildings, and restaurants/shops (in fact, the restaurants/shops are already opened while housing will take a few more years to be ready).
Both of these developments involve building multistory parking garages to accommodate parking needs.
Even if the "mixed-use" buildings we create today are all residential, that doesn't mean they will stay that way. They can be remodeled if a grocery store wants in. Or the building that goes up next door in a few years can have a bit of commercial. Right now there is more commercial space than we need, while residential space is lacking, so it is no surprise that what you see today it mostly residential. However we now have the legal means to change that over time which is big.
With more housing in high-density areas, people don't have to drive as much and traffic can actually go down.
All of the downvotes to the parent are justified.
Maybe this is where the city thinks the scooters will ultimately fit in.
The city has build a lot less housing than office space over the course of the last decade, and that is the metric that counts (jobs-housing balance).
"The SF skyline is completely new" - Salesforce tower (office space), 181 freemont (2/3s office space) etc etc.
"SOMA, East cut, Mission Bay, Dog patch are entirely new neighborhoods", and yet still 77% of the land in SF is zoned for single family homes.
SF recently passed the Central Soma rezoning plan which creates an amazon HQ2 worth of office space (space for about 50k workers) but only housing for about 7k people.
Transit-oriented development is the only sensible approach I've seen to scaling a modern city.
I am scared to see what the end result will be in US cities, however, because public transit for almost all of the US means poorly run busing routes that nobody wants to take.
Having lived in San Diego for many years (as well as Denver and MPLS which I think are relevant comparisons) I believe that what will happen is that existing (poorly run, poorly utilized) bus routes will be chosen by developers who will use the "blah blah transit blah blah" designation that was just gifted to them to build high end units for people that will drive their cars.
No actual transit (the kind that runs on rails) will be built, some more car-centric housing units will exist at high end prices (they're not going to build garage-less buildings nor are they going to build low end units).
Oh, and the buses will still be empty.
I want this kind of policy regime to be pursued, but they need to build the transit lines first. And buses don't count.
I love buses as a transit option. They go directly to parking lots of places like grocery stores and ride smoother than a lot of trains/subways/etc I've been on. If the routes are useful then people will use them and they're as simple to scale as buying more buses and very easy to dynamically adjust, unlike train lines.
I think at least in some places in the US, this is a class thing, though few people will admit it. Buses are associated with lower-class people, whereas rail (especially heavy rail) is associated with middle class people.
You often hear that we spend much more on roads than rail, which is true, but we drive much much more than we take the train. For example, the D.C. metro receives about a $0.42 per passenger mile subsidy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/not-a-dime-more-for-.... Meanwhile, state and local governments spend $155 billion on roads, about half of which is paid for by usage fees (tolls and gas tax). Given the 3 trillion miles driven on roads every year, that works out to just $0.024 per passenger mile of subsidy: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pressroom/fhwa1704.cfm.
The cleaning lady who drives 10 miles to work costs the government $0.24 for each trip. When a white collar worker takes Metro 10 miles to work,[1] it costs the government $4.20.
[1] The median Metro rider has a household income of over $100,000 and 80% have a college degree. That's because the people who take Metro can afford to buy expensive housing near a Metro station, and go to white collar jobs downtown. The cleaning lady, and other lower income workers, can't afford to live near a Metro station, and many work the 90% of jobs in the metro area that aren't downtown.
There are transit districts which run entirely different coaches on commute vs. urban or general transit routes. Commute have comfortable seats, overhead briefcase stowage, reading lights, and. often wifi. Urban transit: hard seats, no amenities, often standing-room only.
Don't shoot the messenger.
There is a vicious cycle of under-investment (fulfilling transit goals with half-assed bus routes instead of making real investments in lightrail/subway) poor service, and resulting lack of utilization among middle class voters ... which leads to further under-investment (since none of us are going to take the bus) ...
I am not talking about SF or NYC. I am talking about every other city in the US that matches this description perfectly.
Now, high quality bus services with dedicated lanes can be pretty decent but most bus services aren't like that.
It's turned out to be very politically difficult to establish and (just as importantly) enforce bus lanes in communities in the US. People get very upset at the prospect of giving up either street parking or travel lanes, and local politicians and the traffic enforcement bureaucracy has mostly sided with the people who complain. The result is either no bus lanes, or part-time bus lanes with no effective enforcement, which is basically the same as no bus lanes.
A bus that's able to use bus lanes (and possibly transit signal priority) to bypass traffic is a great thing, and would be appealing to people across the socioeconomic spectrum. A bus that's stuck in the same traffic as the cars has no benefit other than cost, and will only appeal to those who can't afford to maintain a car or are very ideologically committed to transit.
Buses would be amazing with bus lanes in congested areas and automated camera-based enforcement of those lanes. However, the inability of the political system to make that happen even in Manhattan makes me fairly pessimistic for that outcome in other places.
I still think it's worth investing in buses for those who need them, but if they can't bypass traffic they will be stuck at a low mode share almost everywhere.
If you want to make buses actually work, make them work like Uber. You go to the bus stop where there is a screen you can input your destination (or you use your phone), and the nearest minibus going in your direction stops to pick you up, which each carries eight passengers rather than forty. Then it drops you off at your actual destination instead of four blocks from there, and picks you up faster to begin with because there are five times as many buses of a fifth the size and they can be diverted from nearby routes to pick you up as soon as you summon them.
At that point they're almost as good as a car most of the time, only they cost a lot less and only take up an eighth of the space on the road per passenger. And you don't have to operate huge wasteful 40-passenger vehicles during off-peak hours just to carry 3 passengers.
Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive. Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.
Except for all the ones who don't, because one of the endpoints isn't anywhere near the bus route even if part of the path between them goes along it.
> Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive.
Apparently they do, as demonstrated by all the people who use Uber in preference to buses.
> Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.
Unless that requires you to have less frequent service that covers fewer areas, which in turn causes people to choose single passenger cars over your buses.
You can also eliminate the driver cost by doing what Uber was originally billed as -- ride sharing. You're going to drive your car from your home to your workplace and back, but if you get up fifteen minutes earlier you can make a few bucks by picking up some of your neighbors and dropping them off at work. That's a lot less than the cost of a full-time bus driver with benefits but at scale it still results in a fraction of the number of cars on the road during rush hour.
Of course some cities have BRT routes, dedicated lanes, and high service frequency. If you have access to a bus network like that, indeed it can operate as well or better than a rail system (and often at a lower cost). But that is the exception in the US, not the norm. Whereas most commuter and urban rail in the US operates with high frequency and dedicated right-of-way. Hence the presumption that buses "don't count".
People who can afford to buy these new high-end units will move out of their previous, less high-end units and the result is more affordable housing because the supply is closer to meeting the demand.
Build high density around a bus stop, and some of the people will take the bus. Those additional riders mean the bus is making more money and can afford to add more routes. More routes means the bus is useful to more people who start riding the bus... Eventually you have enough people on the bus to switch to a better transit mode. The bus rider levels also show where people want to go which guides where you put the trains instead of a guess and prayer. But this all requires enough density to start the cycle in the first place.
Agreed. Forgive me - what I meant was, build new transit lines on point to point routes that already make sense, then in-fill the intermediate stops as needed.
Those in-fill stations can then be the anchors for transit oriented, high density development which completes the cycle because the line is already in place.
I think they have basically succeeded with this in the University St. Paul <--> MPLS lightrail route. The route already made sense point-to-point and now they can choose the intermediate stops that make sense to organically grow the corridor.
What an arbitrary way to decide what "actual" transit is. There are about a thousand other, very valid, very useful, very modern ways of building transit that have nothing to do with rails. If you're saying rails but meaning grade-separation, you're still wrong about non-grade-separated systems being somehow inherently inferior or unworthy. Look at any list of top transit systems in the world, the majority of modern systems incorporate non-grade-separated systems like trams, busways, or even regular old busses, because they work and they're cheap. People with your mindset are why this country may never have widespread transit systems, because you think insanely expensive infrastructure is the solution to a culture, marketing, and economic problem.
I think you're missing my point - it's not about a fetish for rails ...
In the United States, outside of two or three cities[1], there has been almost zero serious investment in public transportation[2] and that transit infrastructure is always some bullshit sideshow that checks a box but does not provide any kind of meaningful service that would allow car culture to change.
Here is everything you need to know about public transit in the United States in one quick commercial:
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wy2O/state-farm-backstory-truck-song...
What is special about rail infrastructure is that you can't half-ass it. You can't sort of put the subway in or sort of build a lightrail line. If they are putting down rails there is serious, meaningful work being done that requires a lot of related investment in the entire ecosystem of transit.
In the United States, buses don't count - not because buses are inherently bad but because in our car-centric environment that kind of service will never have the funding or the political backing to actually be useful.
[1] NYC, Washington DC ... places with subways.
[2] Seeing some halting progress in places like Denver and Minneapolis ... and I say "progress" with some qualifiers - after 25 years now has a second lightrail line and MPLS has one rail line that actually makes sense for commuters...
The construction took several years and the trains have just started running, but the city has already transformed. Many dense buildings went up while the rail lines where being built and many more are under construction right now.
It will be many years before the true success and failure of the project is known, but the signs look good to me. I'd like to see general loosening of non-safety related zoning restrictions to help keep housing prices in check, but this program was a good compromise since developers were guaranteed an investment of transit and other city services and could take more risk.
It's not super dense in terms of population now, but with proper infrastructure growth it could be one of the greats!
And then I always think it would be best to build a city from scratch. A great one. With good principles. Time-proofed. Collectively we should know how to do it, but it seems that it's incredibly hard to come up with the resources to do it properly. It's still only a dream.
Every time I hear about self-driving cars being just around the corner I roll my eyes. Most of us will be dead before self-driving cars are in effect, and by then our infrastructure will have already moved on.
"All new MRT lines built since the North East line in 2003 were equipped with CBTC from the outset, and have the capability to be completely driverless and automated, requiring no onboard staffing."
p.s. I rode on the driverless line several times in 2011 and 2012.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Rapid_Transit_(Singapore)
Honestly can't tell; is this because you're massively pessimistic about how long it will take the proposals to come into effect, or because you're massively optimistic about the advent of private, automated transportation?
Waterfall projects don't work with cities any better than they work with code. While it's harder to be "agile" with cities, the idea of building a large project correctly in a go is misleading.
There are many future-centric planned city projects which either died before they ever took off, or were completed and are total ghost towns.
There are lots of ways that the imagined self-driving future can either be a terrible non-improvement or simply take an order of magnitude more time to come to fruition.
We have clear and obvious ways to improve things now and we should be building support for that and taking those steps. Not sitting on our hands waiting for a purely technical solution to what's not even remotely just a technical problem.
The tax on space, time, and energy required to move a bunch of people around in individual little containers is far too high.
I'll grant you the space and energy inefficiency of private cars, but the time factor seems wildly in favor of point-to-point random route transport.
The idea of having a dedicated lane with incredibly reliable timing is obviously better than the uncertainty of traffic.
I would be curious to see a breakdown for metro areas, where public transit is actually useful (obviously cars work fine for most of rural America, and add a bus system when necessary). But I have no idea if that analysis is available.
I am heavily biased towards cities with awful traffic, where I would like to see less traffic.
Also, for the most part, driving is just faster, even in cities with bad traffic. I'm pretty lucky--I've got a train station 22 minutes from my house that drops me off an 8-minute walk away from work (with no transfers). Driving in involves fighting through rush-hour traffic from one end of D.C. to the opposite end, but it's still no slower on the way in, and 20 minutes faster on the way out. All those stops just make the train slow.
[1] Average house size in the US is twice as big as in Japan or Western Europe: https://www.elledecor.com/life-culture/fun-at-home/news/a765...
[2] Americans have 50% more cars per capita than the EU average.
If you have fewer passengers per square mile then you either need smaller vehicles or less frequent operation to fill larger ones. People naturally prefer the first option.
But the country isn't a city. It would be possible for an individual US city to have the population density required to support more effective mass transit (at least to the extent that it exists in Europe or Asia). NYC is the highest density major city in the US and largely manages to do that.
To make it work elsewhere would require the same sort of densities as New York, which would require allowing people to build more high density housing there.
Certainly not anything like Kansas City or Tucson, because you have to have enough density pressure around the city to actually require tall buildings. If you can satisfy all the local housing demand with single family homes and still have plenty of empty land within reasonable distance of the city center, there isn't enough reason to compress it into a smaller area just to have taller buildings and put things a little closer together. But those cities also don't have anything near the same traffic problems either.
Where you're really screwed is in places like Los Angeles and Houston, where you have large populations but also so much sprawl and undeveloped land that taller buildings aren't really justified. So they end up in this unhappy medium with enough population density to have bad traffic but not enough to have good mass transit, and weak demand for higher density housing.
But that still doesn't justify the zoning restrictions that exist in a lot of these places. Houston largely doesn't have them while Los Angeles does, and you can check for yourself the difference in rent. Even if without them Los Angeles still wouldn't be New York, because it would at least be better than it is.
Maywood is 23K/mi^2 with several other LA incorporated areas in the 15-20K/mi^2 density. Houston is under 10K/mi^2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Even with that, it seems like zoning isn't what's kept LA rents high. LA has parts that are fairly dense and more free zoning doesn't seem to have made Houston become notably dense.
That's kind of the point. Less restrictive zoning isn't going to make areas like that a lot more dense, because they're huge areas with open spaces and people aren't going to build skyscrapers surrounded by empty lots even if they're allowed to.
The problem LA has is that they have some areas zoned for density, but not enough of them. So you get a section full of skyscrapers and correspondingly a lot of demand for housing near there, but then zoning that requires low density housing in nearby sections, which keeps rents high because that low density housing would otherwise have been replaced by medium density housing.
Whereas with Houston you have some high density areas, but with less zoning the density falls off more organically and it's more of a medium density everywhere than high density in one place and low density right next to it. Which isn't much better for traffic when the average density comes out the same, but it's a lot better for rents, because it makes for a lot less scarcity in the market for land where medium and high density housing can be built.
The road infrastructure is already there, and has been already subsidized. It is my opinion that private autonomous transportation will become more efficient and cheaper than public transportation and therefore will supplant it. I speak not as the world expert, but as someone who did a relatively deep analysis of transportation costs in US cities. The ballpark figure is what I call TCTM, or Total Cost of Transportation per Mile, which doesn't take into account the cost of road infrastructure, simply assuming that it is already there. TCTM for uber/lyft and similar services is going down, and you do not even need fully autonomous, level-5 driverless cars, to have a TCTM lower than that offered by public buses.
Hope this is clearer.
I'll take a tram project that is being implemented ahead of schedule over the promise of automated cars which are always seemingly around the corner.