Transport in the Bay is so, so hilariously bad. I'm in St. Petersburg, Russia right now and the subway here doesn't actually have a schedule. Instead, there's a clock on the wall. If the next train doesn't arrive within 2 minutes and reset the counter, something's not right. The stations cover basically the entire city, and as a result, venturing 5 miles across town feels about the same as going down a set of escalators and then coming right back up on the other side. This sort of thing is par for the course in Europe. (NY too, for that matter.)

How did one of the richest areas in the world go so catastrophically wrong in this regard?

Much of the infrastructure was built when (1) the country was so rich that most of the people with any influence at all had cars and (2) the country was less populated so traffic and parking were less severe problems.

Everybody builds the infrastructure that the then-state-of-the-art calls for. That was roads and freeways for most of the US. It's an accident of history, not an idiotic mistake. Not doing anything about it for the past ten years is the possible mistake, but from the perspective of the people who already live somewhere, and like having relatively lower density, they have just as much right to doing things how they want as the new tech crowd interlopers do.

Much of the transit infrastructure was torn down and replaced with roads. The bay area had a great rail system, but it was removed.

The Key System is one notable example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System

The new Bay Bridge span was specifically not designed to carry rail, so rail over the bridge is not coming back.

I actually sympathize with the NIMBY-ers quite a bit when it comes to housing. But in terms of transportation, it depresses me to know from first-hand experience how much better things could be. Better public transit is simply a win-win for almost everyone: far fewer cars, more pedestrian areas and access, an increased number of people willing to live outside the city, and streets that don't feel like DMZs. City life is categorically improved when you no longer have to shuffle streetcar schedules or chase the bus around. (Or sit in traffic for 3 hours to go across town.)

This is what bothers me whenever I hear people rave about the future that driverless cars will finally make possible. They basically list your win-win list: far fewer cars, more pedestrian areas, etc. That might all be true, but we don't to wait for self-driving cars for that! Just build reliable public transportation just like countless cities have already done.

>the future that driverless cars will finally make possible

I tend to think these are further away than most people think. But I also have a lot of trouble seeing how they don't massively increase traffic. Maybe you need less parking and maybe inter-car communications can make traffic move more smoothly. But does anyone seriously believe that people will drive less when they effectively have a personal driver at their beck and call?

>Better public transit is simply a win-win for almost everyone

No it isn't. Many neighborhoods are quiet and/or cheap because they're difficult to access. Their residents have a vested interest in keeping it that way. You don't vote for a new subway stop if you'll be priced out or have your perception fo quiet and safety ruined by the people it brings.

They only have that right if we believe that it's ok for some people to shrug off the fact that they're contributing several times the amount of carbon into the atmosphere than they would otherwise.

the way they want to do things causes ends up causing massive suffering for really no good reason.

Mass transit in America is terrible, period (outside of maybe Manhattan, despite the fact that our subway has been getting worse and is in dire need of upgrading). America sucks at mass transit, but for whatever reason Americans don't seem to care. I think it's because they're complacent, don't know any better, and have this toxic "everybody for themselves" mentality that makes it impossible to improve anything that's in the general public welfare.

Even IF there was a desire among politicians to fix the transportation issues in San Francisco I doubt they'd find a means to do so. It would cost a ton of money and congress has no idea where to get that money from.

The middle class is taxed to capacity. When ~30-40% of your paycheck is taxes (including federal), and another 30-40% is exorbitant rent costs, you're left feeling quite squeezed. I myself for example, simply mark NO on all tax supported programs on the ballot, regardless of their merit.

It sucks because many of those programs are so desperately needed. But asking me to raise my taxes any further is a non-starter. If you include property tax and sales tax in your estimation of how much you're getting taxed the number is astonishing. Yet look around and witness what that buys - failing infrastructure, skyrocketing housing prices, terrible roads, healthcare prices spiraling out of control, an educational system in decline, the list goes on, and on...

It's not that I have an "every man for them self" perspective, it's just that I have believe there are deeper issues with our country that we can't tax ourselves out of.

One thing I wish I understood better is where the hell does the money go?

The federal budget is to a first approximation is 2/3 medicare/medicaid/social security/defense. In California across state and local has it's 2/3 being spent on health care/education/pensions. The Golden Gate Bridge cost $1.5B in today's dollars to build. Today-ish it took $6.4B to rebuild the east span of the Bay bridge.

How have things gotten so expensive, where does that money go, it just seems like despite paying a fair amount in taxes we're just not getting very much for our money.

It's more expensive everywhere than it used to be, but the construction cost inflation is vastly greater in the US than in other developed countries. Construction is getting less efficient over time.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/05/16/us-rail-constr... https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726714-american-bu...

I have the same damn question - where is all the money going?

Put another way, why is my dollar buying exponentially less than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago? Don't even try to tell me it's inflation.

I don't know the answer. We pay politicians to know those things and to work on finding solutions. Funny how they don't seem any better at understanding the problem and finding a solution than you and me.

So while I don't honestly have any solid understanding, I can only posit that it may have something to do with wealth consolidation [1]. I'm no proponent of socialism or artificially redistributing wealth but I look to the growing divide between the rich and poor in the U.S. (and globally) and can't help but notice it correlates quite strongly with my dollar buying less, and less. Yes, correlation != causation, but you gotta start somewhere.

If you can get past the 90s era cinematography "The Money Makers" is a fascinating documentary which illuminates some of the issues with our monetary system.

https://youtu.be/XbEu-OLMKLQ

[1] The top 0.01% of households, with net assets of over $40m, short-changed the taxman by a whopping 30%.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/06/daily-...

> where does that money go

Contractors and sub contractors. The more layers in the supply chain, the harder it is for that money to be tracked.

Chicago is decent.

A big factor in the USA that we only have a few major cities with a built up core like New York.

We have many major cities built like LA or Houston where it's spread out and makes public transport less of a priority.

The bus arrives on time: Yes

But it's so crowded and stinky, it's not worth it. That's my educated guess about why so many people use car sharing services

Also, why do they keep doing so many new buildings?

Those buildings are going to need people, and people need transportation, and a house...

Nobody uses buses anymore. They're too crowded.

(apologies to Y.B.)

ahh, nice :)

Honestly, having lived in both NY and SF for years, you need both - a highly dense urban core, and effective transportation from the outlying regions.

If you just add transport, what will happen is what's now happening in Brooklyn - you'll just see rents pushed up further away from the center as the wealthy utilize mass transport to buy up housing a bit further from the core. It ends up with everyone else just being pushed further away until they're again facing a 60-90 minute commute.

Manhattan is able twice as many residents as San Francisco, which means it can absorb a lot of people before they start to spread outwards. It also helps unburden the mass transit system by reducing the distance that the average resident is traveling to work - helping make room for people commuting from the edges. (And to be fair, anyone in NY now will tell you that their mass transit system is having serious problems, too.)

The Bay definitely needs better mass transit - but I'm not holding my breath waiting for Marin, or Palo Alto, to jump on board with the idea of both better transit and more housing.

In the meantime, SF should be doing everything it can to increase housing stock if it wants to remain affordable - and yes, that might mean high rises in the sunset, or near GG park, despite what the author says. That kind of "build housing, but not in a place I have to see it" attitude is a big part of why we have a housing crunch.

Build more places to live, and the cost of living will come down. It's that simple.

I'll have to disagree with you on that one. It's really about transportation and housing density.

The article seems to ignore the idea of the denser urban core gives more places for the wealthy to live and possibly damping the sprawl of medium wealthy house.

Also one of the central ideas of the article is that there needs to be one governing body to make everything work together, but at the same time ignores the fact that half of the color coded map contains housing from a different state.

Furthermore, while public transportation in NYC (and the North east corridor in general) is better, it is still kind of slow. While I couldn't find a great example of 10 miles being an hour in NYC my closest was Astoria queens (relatively cheap) to Wall Street is about 10 miles and takes around 45 minutes on the subway (one transfer).

Manhattan is more affordable. There are plenty of 1-bedrooms available right now under $2000: https://streeteasy.com/for-rent/nyc/area:102,139,135%7Cbeds:...

Brooklyn is still twice as dense as SF, and much more affordable.

When I looked into moving to New York, I saw similar rents and figured something was up.

Are these sub $2k places across from a public housing complex, rat infested, or just scam listings that magically have a new price once you call>?

Public housing is not available to you. Some are probably rent-stabilized. Many are high-floor walkups in tenements. Many buildings in Manhattan have rats. Craigslist has scams but Streeteasy usually doesn't as ads there are paid, though it usually doesn't have the cheapest apartments either.

Just curious -- why did you exclude midtown from your StreetEasy search?

(I happen to live in a $2.5k studio just a couple minutes away from Byrant Park. I picked it because it made my commute to work a 9 minute walk.)

Tried to list all of short-commute Manhattan and just missed it.

If you read the article, it's not actually about transportation. He's talking about making a political region around the Bay Area that can break NIMBYism by making decisions that affect the Bay Area as a whole.

Interesting idea, but ultimately a fairy tale. It won't happen.

It won't happen because no one really wants it. You need only look at San Jose and LA, both of which grew by swallowing neighoring municipalities, to realize bigger is definitely not better

We are already seeing that Uber/Lyft are causing declines in the usage of public transit, and there could actually be decreasing appetite for public transit investment. Compared to the rest of the US, the Bay Area is actually already pretty good when it comes to fraction of workers commuting by transit (#2 or #3 after New York City and possibly Washington, D.C.). Unfortunately, I find that most people are all in favor of other people using public transportation so that they can drive where they want to go faster. Transit only gains massive adoption for particular commutes where it is substantially faster than driving.

  Uber/Lyft are causing declines in the usage of public transit

Are there studies that confirm this causation? They've certainly caused declines in the usage of taxicabs, but they compete at very different price points from public transit.

Agree. And people who want density first - how do those people get to work without transit. Transit comes first.