Dense US metro areas are desperately in need of better mass transit, the quality of life increase would be substantial for tons of people.

It's not clear if you're saying mass transit within the metros or also to other metros. It sounds like you're trying to imply the later by a way of using the former as a reason. The distances in the US between major population centers are vast, far more than what the average person from other regions of the world would likely imagine them to be.

I am so bored of people repeating the "but... trains will never work for rancher joe out in North Dakota! The US is too big for mass transit and trains".

Yes there are very empty places in the US, turns out though that the vast majority of people don't live in those places. The dense places in the US are dense and massive like anywhere else in the world, and if suburban sprawl makes them somewhat more spread out that is just pointing out how bad the status quo is with city planning/mass transit.

Also.. ok so the distance between two cities is vast... a highspeed train is far more efficient at transporting people (at absurdly higher volumes) over a distance than aircraft are. If it is a popular route between cities I dont see how distance negates this inherent advantage. Yes, if we we talking hugeeee distances that means a massive infrastructure investment but there would still be a major advantage in the end?

The crime on bay area transit is rapidly getting worse. This is a huge issue to overcome regardless of how fast or slow the train is going

https://www.ktvu.com/news/bart-passenger-nearly-raped-physic...

On one hand I see why you are being downvoted, on the other, for people who haven't lived in San Francisco, crime on public transport is legitimately real. I personally have friends who have had bikes stolen from buses and phones stolen from their hands. A lot of the stations smell like urine. There are signs of drug abuse, and some of the stops don't feel very safe at all. I've watched women be sexually harassed on busses and have had friends groped at bus stops. The public transportation experience in San Francisco is not just about the price or the timing, but about the safety and cleanliness too. Seattle buses have been known to be de facto homeless shelters, particularly the late night bus. On one hand, I understand the "what right do we have to kick homeless people off busses" argument. How are people supposed to get their lives back together in a car country if they don't have a car? On the other hand, I've been on buses with urine smelling seats or urine streaming down the bus and if I am asked to make a sacrifice by tolerating that to support another person, I will just avoid public transportation instead because I have the means to do so.

The vast majority of people in west coast mega cities who can, use uber, bikes, or their own car. Public transportation in San Francisco is often seen as a last resort. In foreign countries everyone rides the public transportation, so there is public demand for quality. Our transportation situation results in the economic classes most able to effect political power uncaring about the infrastructural rot that is occurring since they can afford to avoid it and it's not a better, more predictable offering than just driving yourself.

California and the Bay Area specifically need to seriously look in the mirror and apply some basic logic to the situation.

Public transport being bad and crime filled, is not the fault of public transport. Its a symptom of systematic failure to do even the most basic city planning, in fact maybe the historically worst example of city planning I can imagine.

The solution is to continue to invest into walking, biking and public transport infrastructure. Continue to make it better while at the same time attempt to build real urban environments in the area. You need to build housing for literally millions of people inside of the current boundaries of the cities around the bay. The good news is that there is gigantic amount of commercial zoned land that could be turned into mixed use urban environments. Even better if you can defeat the NIMBY and rezone all the single family housing zones to low density mix use urban.

Given the state of emergency, the city could even build these project and have 15% be public housing.

City planners have been arguing for these basic things for 30+ years. Here is a modern take on some basic things that can be improved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4

"Public transport being bad and crime filled, is not the fault of public transport. Its a symptom of systematic failure to do even the most basic city planning, in fact maybe the historically worst example of city planning I can imagine."

San Francisco is home to some of the most powerful and wealthy tech companies on earth. There is unbelievable, literally unfathomable amounts of money in the city and yet there is a major homeless population that gets treated like shit and swept under the rock.

If the public transit in San Francisco is as full of crime and "dirty homeless" as people say here, that clearly reflects shamefully on the companies and people who have more money than 99.99% of people on earth being incredibly cruel and hoarding it.

I mean.. do rich people have no shame? How are you supposed to have pride about your city and techhub if there clearly people suffering massively right under your feet? What an incredible demonstration of cruelty and violence on that cities part not to use a tiny TINY fraction of its wealth to make sure people have basic support.

There are a few problems, first of all, the government in a democratic place doesn't necessary directly reflect the rich cooperation there. Specially when it comes to things like land use policies.

Rich companies or people don't necessary understand how to solve these issues, they have very little understanding of city planning, land use and so on.

These rich people have a lot of things going on, if somebody could convince a group of rich people and companies what the right solution is, and you could get past the broader NIMBY community then you might get somewhere. But this is hard to do even for those with the right answer.

I was there and I did feel shame, but what can really be done? While I agree in spirit, I have to believe the problem is more complicated than "apply money."

Depression, drugs, debt/money based homelessness, abuse derived homelessness, and psychosis are probably a subset of archetypes each with very different solutions. Chronic vs Temporary homelessness are probably entirely different problems, and my understanding is Chronic homelessess surprisingly isn't the main problem in SF. Then you have the questions of creating an institution of some sort to deal with it, which involves staffing it and fighting corruption within it. Then you have the NIMBY's. Then there are DA's willing to tolerate entirely unacceptable behavior. Historic abuses of vulnerable people in homeless addressing systems. Historic underfunding, understaffing, and lack of safety policy for workers in that area. Homeless immigration. We don't like to be around homeless people, but homeless people don't like to be around other homeless people either which makes scalable solutions harder. Then there are entire policies around requiring homeless to "make progress" or not use drugs or other things like that which has shown to fail. Then it's downright unamerican (not to me) to have the government do something rather than contract out to businesses. Then there is how the tax burden falls. Does San Jose pay into SF's homelessness fund? How do you design and execute outreach or policy or funnel people into your "remedy"?

American culture is biased towards "if you don't help yourself, then you don't deserve help." There are probably a significant number of people who need help adopt that mindset and don't believe they deserve help themselves. How do you make cultural progress? Do we even have any idea how many people are homeless and trying vs homeless and hopeless?

So funding, employment, research, policy, culture, laws, and a potential "homeless industry," all have elements that need to be addressed.

Then there are the straight alignment problems: Who wants to work on that problem when they could be studying engineering and making the big bucks? Who wants to get payed government wages for low reward probably unsafe jobs that probably suck?

Where would the ambition to solve, not hide, the problem come from?

Google "why is homelessness still a problem in San Francisco." There isn't even any kind of consensus on where the root of the problem is. There's not even an authoritative or high quality source or organization explaining the problem or explaining policy in the results, it's all news which is beholden to engagement, not problem solving.

I kind of think you need to address the root problem first, once you clear that up, the symptoms, like homelessness, would actually be far more solvable.

We know what the root problem is, housing supply. We know how to make cities far better and reduce total cost of living in them.

There would still be many homeless left, but at that point you might actually have a hope of actually dealing with that specific problem.

>> There isn't even any kind of consensus on where the root of the problem is.

> We know what the root problem is, housing supply.

How do we know that is the root problem?

If we knew the root problem is housing supply, and we haven't been able to address housing supply, then clearly housing supply isn't the root problem and it's something like entrenched interests (NIMBY's) or alignment problems regarding people not wanting to be taxed. Clearly there is some more "5 why's" work to be done.

I think it's hubris to think you have the answer for a problem that's been around for 3 decades+ worth of administrations.

> We know how to make cities far better and reduce total cost of living in them.

This also needs citation. I don't think we do. It's not "build better public transportation" or "build more housing", it's build more under the American legal system, under American culture and American politics.

These problems require systemic thinking. Why is the website down? Because we don't have enough web servers (not enough housing?)? No, because the databases are overloaded slowing down requests, because we haven't increased the number of database shards, because the database team is understaffed, because our hiring pipeline has problems, because recruiting is understaffed... etc.

I wonder why buses in NYC feel safe, as are subway trains, shoplifting is a very rare sight, and it's pretty hard to find excrement on the streets.

It seems that the problem is not in density, not in the large difference of wealth levels, not in ethnic / cultural composition, etc. Maybe it's somewhere around law enforcement, maintenance of public places, etc. Something that could be even changed by voting.

Uber subsidized tech/finance employee commute trips for many years. Uber was frequently twice the price of public transportation anywhere in the city for a point to point trip. It was irrational not to use Uber. Many businesses (facebook/google) provided private company only commuter buses, which meant tech employees never had to face the realities of public transportation and could easily avoid it.

NYC has a functioning subway system that can land you 2 blocks from just about anywhere. There are entire areas of San Francisco you have to navigate bus transfers, bus transfers that were not predictable, to get to. Bus transfers nearly always inflate trip time significantly and are subject to the unpredictable force of traffic.

New York benefits greatly from economies of scale by use of NYC transportation. A subway that runs every 5 minutes is vastly vastly different from one that runs every 20 or 30. How much parking does New York provide? Because if you can pay, parking in San Francisco is not too hard.

So while it wasn't difference in wealth levels directly, different wealth levels opted into different forms of transportation, leaving the public options woefully less used, and particularly less used by those with power (those with money).

Since I didn't edit it in time, I'll follow up with:

  There are entire areas of San Francisco you have to navigate bus transfers, bus transfers that were not predictable, to get to. Bus transfers nearly always inflate trip time significantly and are subject to the unpredictable force of traffic.

Oh come on. You've identified a great red herring. There are 9 Muni subway stations in San Francisco. The rest of the rail system operates in mixed traffic making it subject to the exact same delays and uncertainty that the buses deal with. In fact because there are no metro lines that run entirely underground (or are otherwise completely grade separated) delays on the street spill over into the subway service.

The best example of this is the 4th and King intersection. SFMTA explicitly prioritizes automobile traffic. During peak hours it's often faster to walk to Market street than to wait in a crowded Muni train while automobile after automobile drives by. Every time you choose to drive you make things like this demonstrably worse. In fact if your only concept of the Muni Metro is the subway that means when you drive your car you're doing so in some of the most densely populated parts of San Francisco and creating the most negative impact.

I can't speak to the NY MTA's standards but in San Francisco Muni's goal is that every resident lives within 1/4 mile of a Muni stop (see the SRTP I linked to in the sibling comment). What's not covered in that SRTP are the finer points. Stops are much closer together on steep grades, and specifically the stops are supposed to be served around 18 hours a day. The standards are a bit more relaxed after hours, but Muni does run 24x7. I lived within a stone's throw of an Owl (1-5AM bus routes) stop and it was great.

  NYC has a functioning subway system that can land you 2 blocks from just about anywhere. There are entire areas of San Francisco you have to navigate bus transfers, bus transfers that were not predictable, to get to. Bus transfers nearly always inflate trip time significantly and are subject to the unpredictable force of traffic.

To put it politely: that's a load of crap unless you equate Lower Manhattan with all of New York City. There are huge swaths of New York that are inaccessible via the subway (primarily the outer boroughs). Go to the more suburban parts of Brooklyn or Queens for instance. Here's a Bloomberg article on what they call "subway deserts" or the "plight of the outer boroughs"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-05/mapping-n...

   A subway that runs every 5 minutes

No subway runs every five minutes all day. Late night NY is every 20-30 (same as Muni), there's a wiki page for it. Per Muni's SRTP the light rail headways are b/t 12 and 20 minutes depending on the time of day. And before you complain Muni doesn't meet those standards, the New York subway is subject to human and mechanical delays just like San Francisco.

  Because if you can pay, parking in San Francisco is not too hard.

Eh? There are roughly 500,000 vehicles registered in San Francisco and about 275,000 on street parking spots. There are residential permits in some areas to ensure turnover because, yes, it can be extremely difficult to find a spot.

https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

Large parts of outer NYC boroughs are inaccessible by subway. But other large parts of outer boroughs are very much accessible by subway, mostly those with high enough density to make it economically viable. But even Rockaway Beach is accessible by subway, of all places!

Trains go every 10-15 mins even some time past midnight. They go every 30 minutes at time like 3 am; so do some buses.

Compared to some other large cities around the world where I've been, NYC is pretty well connected, and Manhattan (all of it) is superbly connected.

The NY MTA does an admirable job, the issue I take is pretending that they're perfect. New York is pretty well connected, sure, and I can't think of another city that runs a subway 24x7. Even Tokyo shifts to buses eventually.

  Trains go every 10-15 mins even some time past midnight. They go every 30 minutes at time like 3 am; so do some buses.

Right, but OP was going on about rail service (with some key facts wrong). Buses stuck because they get in traffic… well all Muni Metro routes operate in traffic for most of their length (and one operates entirely in mixed traffic).

Muni schedules Owl (1–5 AM) bus service every 30 minutes. They run some regular bus routes 24x7 (not-Owl), Owl buses along the light rail routes, as well as a couple mega Owl routes to make up for the local routes that don't run late night. Except for Treasure/Yerba Buena Island (and the uninhabited islands), you can get within about 1/4–1/2 mile of anywhere in San Francisco on Muni. Evening rail service is like every 20–30 minutes on each line which equates to 10–15 (or better) underground since five of the lines run along the same subway tracks.

  Compared to some other large cities around the world where I've been, NYC is pretty well connected, and Manhattan (all of it) is superbly connected.

Yeah, New York City is generally well connected if you take into account the bus service. But so is San Francisco. I'd argue that the outer lands are better connected than the outer boroughs, but SF is so much smaller geographically that's not a fair comparo.

And yea I've done the subway bus shuffle in Queens (both because of subway maintenance and because of the distance to the subway) in the middle of winter. It's doable but OP was going on about not needing buses in NY. I've also done the late night subway thing and caught an earful from some natives who were real unhappy about all the transferring they had to do.

It's not that NY transit is bad or that San Francisco transit is particularly good. The idea that public transit in San Francisco is uniquely bad and grimy is just frustratingly wrong. That said, BART really shit the bed today when someone walked into the transbay tube. The mind boggles.

Also lets not forget that the NYC metro moves more people daily than the entire air travel network in the US does. It moves an incredible amount of humans at a scale that cars and airplanes just can't even begin to approach in a million years.

New York has an astonishing number of police per capita compared to the west coast. That seems like the biggest, most obvious structural difference.

Yeah you are gonna need to cite your sources on way more cops = increased public safety. Further you are going to need to prove that the astronomical amount of money spent on police departments wouldn't better reduce crime if spent on caring directly for the needy.

At the end of the day the only real correlation between the amount of homeless people in a place I have noticed in my visits to different cities in the US is how easy it is to survive outside without a home. NYC gets incredibly, brutally cold in the winter. Many homeless probably either die (not directly from cold most of time, but the hardship makes other problems way worse) or are forced to move south. Yes there are plenty of homeless in NYC obviously but it must be a brutally hard life trying to get through the really cold nights of the NYC winter (whether thats trying to find a shelter or just holing up on a grate spewing out steam somewhere).

San Francisco you can probably survive in pants and a tshirt for most of the year and be ok.

All the BART stations have public restrooms, but they closed them after 9/11 for "security" reasons.

It might finally be time to consider reopening them.

They did refurb and reopen a public rest room at the Powell Street muni/bart station in February at enormous expense https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/02/02/bart-reopens-bathroom...

They are now used extensively by homeless for a variety of activities.

"They are now used extensively by homeless for a variety of activities."

Good, everytime a homeless person uses a public bathroom it is a net savings on health, safety and environmental impact because many of those people are denied access to anywhere to go take a shit and turns out people shitting everywhere isn't a great idea.

If some of the homeless are out of control and trash the bathroom... ok fine we are talking about people in the most tumultous and vulnerable positions in our society here. Make the bathroom like portlands public bathrooms; design them so they are hard to break and you can hose them down.

Which is good right? Cause everyone needs to use the restroom and people are complaining about people urinating/defecating in non restroom areas?

Nobody is not using the restroom by choice.

Places that smell like urine or excrement clearly don’t have enough restrooms and/or don’t get cleaned enough

>On one hand, I understand the "what right do we have to kick homeless people off busses" argument.

Every right, take them to shelters or drug abuse centers, living like this a choice you made

I think there are a lot of people who would have trouble with that knowing that person could be their own child, an ex, a parent, a friend, or themself. Even if you personally believe retribution or comeuppance, I there are good faith arguments that can be made. My dad smells like he's rotting due to a degenerative condition and can no longer drive, does he not deserve the ability to get to the hospital or bank on public transportation despite an offensive odor, occasional incontinence, and a somewhat homeless look? Should family be responsible? What if the rest of the family died in a car crash?

The opiod epidemic alone showed significant numbers of people trusting a corrupted system being over prescribed addictive medications leading to the destruction of their lives so some billionaire can make a few extra dollars. Situations like that mean I don't find the people in bad situations deserve their fate argument very compelling.

I personally don't want them on public transportation myself, I'm even ok with banning them, but I do think society owes the unfortunate transportation, even if it is comped uber. I think good faith people can disagree on that and respect arguments otherwise.

This isn’t about unfortunate people’s access to transportation, it’s about unsanitary and unsafe abuse of the public transportation system, including public substance abuse and sleeping on the bus overnight.

>I think there are a lot of people who would have trouble with that knowing that person could be their own child, an ex, a parent, a friend, or themself

Every downward-spiraling addict has had parents, friends, and maybe children. How would they feel watching their loved one rot away on the street (or a bus) in the grip of addiction? It is inhumane to watch people shoot up heroin and drink themselves to death day after day in public spaces without intervention.

FWIW, the standard argument is that once we can hide people from our view, we forget about them and fail to invest resources in them, resulting in de facto prison sentences or abusive situations with under resourced institutions. The direct implication of intervention is taxation, and most people don't want homeless people around AND they don't want to be taxed, which creates a pretty hazardous set of incentives.

I agree that non intervention is inhumane, but also worry about how humane the intervention is.

It sounds like we're more or less both pro intervention, but arrive at that conclusion in different ways and likely with different caveats.

@hayst4ck we lost a family member to opioids in early 2019. He died in a Richmond bay area airbnb with his girlfriend, they were found by the owner several days after they died. He alternated living on the street and staying in airbnbs - he had to be narcan'd in homedepot (ironically while boosting power tools), and on the streets before finally dying.

Many addicts prefer to be on the street and not behind a door so they can be seen and revived when they OD. This is a fundamental flaw in governor Newsom's project homekey 'housing first' logic. What we are desperately short of are paths to sobriety as Shellenberger and others have pointed out. what we are not short of are 'non profit' bay area homeless industrial complex operations that facilitate street living. There are rumors the cartels donate massively to keep freshman clientele flowing. It is a very grim situation. In most european countries a junkie self harming in public will be given a choice of prison or some form of rehab. We do not have those options in a lot of north America, just open air drug scenes openly operating 24 hours a day. Obviously addicts steal to get their fixes...this is not viable on multiple societal levels.

That's why group housing a la "wet houses" makes sense.

This idea that San Francisco (or California or the whole west coast) shouldn't build transit because it doesn't meet some idealized version of transit in some other hip city is one of the worst takes I've seen. It's naive at best disingenuous at worst.

The last time I checked (which was pre-pandemic) Muni carries around 750,000 riders daily – it's waaaay lower now. It's the last resort for privileged, antisocial techie types who've never lived in a city before, but is in fact the primary transit for a whole lot of people (including bicyclists). BART saw closer to 500,000 daily. Honestly I can't remember the last time I thought a station smelled overwhelmingly like urine.

Seattle? Waiting in a vomit soaked line to clear immigration at the airport was up at the top of my list of unpleasant travel experiences.

New York? Have any of you actually talked to New Yorkers? Or even bothered to look at a NY oriented site like Gothamist? I'm guessing not because otherwise you'd be well aware of the decrepit state of the NY subway (rats, violent crime, constant late night service disruptions, etc). Complaining about the subway is pretty much the city's favorite pastime. God help you if you end up in Penn Station (easily the most aggressively awful public toilets I've ever seen) or Grand Central and have to deal with the various infighting between the transit agencies. Late night service has been a mess for years as they try to prop up the dilapidated infrastructure. And if you want to talk expensive boondoggles there's always the 2nd Ave subway line.

Paris? Plenty of junkies and whatnot when I was in Montmartre. RER out by the Eiffel Tower was equally sketchy.

Frankfurt? Plenty-o-prostitutes and junkies around Frankfurt Hbf. Busted TVMs at the airport station. Want to check out the Lufthansa Technik museum? Good luck catching a train.

Madrid? Easily the worst smelling metro I've ever been on. It's absolutely oppressive during the summer. Hopefully you're able bodied because the Madrid metro stations are pretty dang deep.

Berlin? Graffiti covered trains. My most vivid memory in Kreuzberg was watching a zombie stumble out of the station and into the street only to get clobbered by a motorcycle. They ran away when someone offered to call an ambulance. Don't take my word for it (and, yes, Kottbusser Tor is gross). https://berlinspectator.com/2019/10/31/how-safe-and-comforta... https://www.thelocal.de/20191031/more-people-instead-of-came...

Singapore? Do you know why food/drink are banned? Because people are fucking gross. Ask a Singaporean what they think of the efforts to increase the automation on MRT lines.

Osaka? Homeless guys living out of cardboard boxes.

Public transit is a reflection of the society in which it's located. Unfortunately for all the handwaving, and as it turns out foreign countries are not utopias.

"Public transit is a reflection of the society in which it's located"

Exactly which is why shitting on public transit for revealing the flaws of the society it is in instead of having a conversation about those flaws and the cruelty at the heart of it is absurd. It is like seeing someone break down crying and then yelling at them for being weak and crying while ignoring the reason why the person is crying.

There is less than zero political will to fix it, or even honestly address it.

BART Withholding Surveillance Videos Of Crime To Avoid 'Stereotypes‘ (2017):

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/bart-withholding-s...

Same mentality that is downvoting the comment mentioning crime.. :(

Reality does not conform to the politics du jour, ergo, we must suppress reality.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Our rail systems need to be safe if we want to convince people to use them.

Ok, so public transit is one of the public spaces that the collapse of the US social safety net and absurdly violent socio-economic inequality comes to light in. If you think that is an argument against public transit you don't even remotely understand the problem.

Arguing for or against public transit is irrelevant if using it is unsafe because of lack of law enforcement that will prevent criminals who chose not to abide by laws harming travelers.

The 'US social safety net' has little to do with this - violent, opportunistic thugs use public transport to bring huge quantities of drugs into SF every day using BART, while terrorizing passengers largely with impunity. This may seem like hyperbole but a quick look at local news will confirm this.

"The 'US social safety net' has little to do with this - violent, opportunistic thugs use public transport to bring huge quantities of drugs into SF every day using BART, while terrorizing passengers largely with impunity. This may seem like hyperbole but a quick look at local news will confirm this."

The reason US society is fucked up is largely because of this kind of thinking. The US social safety net has everything to do with crime. The vast, overwhelming amount of crimes aren't committed because people are bored or are disney villains and like being evil. Crime happens primarily when people are desperate and the US is grinding innumerable people into dust right now.

"More cops/Tough On Crime" is a stupid af way to deal with crime because it is a form of reactive violence against the symptoms of a suffering society that doesn't attempt to understand the root causes.

LA to SF is not a "dense metro area". It's inter-city.

I think dumpsterlid is proposing to focus on commuter-dense-metro systems rather than inter-city.

I'm not sure at all if that's what's being proposed. I think both are being advocated and that's why that makes no sense since as the OP suggested there are vast voids in between dense metros in the US.

I wonder what the reality would be?

How much would a ticket cost? Would they be easy to obtain or complicated?

What was the latest projected estimate for this project? 2050?