buses and cars compete for the same right of way. improving one mode necessarily comes at the cost of the other, but many more people can be moved with a bus.

trains would be even better, but people don't like to see the price tag.

almost not worth discussing honestly. this has become yet another factionalized holy war over the last decade.

One challenge with your 100% logical reasoning is that it assumes wealthy and powerful people share the same priorities you do. Unfortunately, this is rarely true, and it often takes time to realize just how different those priorities can be.

I’m all for public transit myself, but after 25 years in San Francisco, I’ve only seen it decline. That sentiment isn’t just mine—many longtime SF residents share this cynicism.

Oh, SF, the home of both some of the most powerful NIMBYs and the most outlandish "social justice" experiments. I feel for this once wonderful, poor city.

As a consolation, I must say that e.g. NYC was also handled miserably, say, in 1980s. Despite that, it rose from the filth, and is now fine, even outright enjoyable here and there.

I think that SF will also shake off its current insanity, and will turn back into a flourishing, living, and thus changing city.

It takes time, thoughtful voting (of many, many people), and likely a bit of luck.

> Despite that, it rose from the filth, and is now fine

Well, except for the people being pushing in front of subways to their death, or lit on fire in stations. The subways stations are getting dangerous enough, even in "not bad" areas, that people are avoiding them.

What are they doing instead? Driving on the roads? Staying home?

Out of about 3.5 million riders a day. Meanwhile, nobody pays any attention to the roughly 250 people who die in car crashes every single year in the NYC metro area. If you're so worried about safety, we should ban cars entirely instead of just taxing them a little.

Oh, ffs. I was replying the comment that the subways stays are "fine". They're not fine, they're more dangerous than they were 20 years ago; more dangerous than they should be. The subway system in NYC is of great benefit to the city and it's residents. But it could certainly stand a fair amount of improvement.

And banning cares from the city completely would be moronic, causing incredible harm to pretty much every aspect of it. I'm not "so worried about safety" that I would want to destroy the city, and your putting forth a strawman argument implying I am adds nothing to the discussion.

It was snarky and ridiculous, yes. But then, so is the implication that subways aren't sufficiently safe due to emotional appeals to incidents that happen a single-digit number of times a year versus the millions of riders every day.

Getting rid of cars entirely may not be practical, but it is objectively true that many more people are killed and injured in car accidents in the same area over any particular length of time you could name compared to subway crime. What is the objective reason why subways are "scary" but cars aren't?

For that matter, what is the objective source for such statements as that stations are "getting dangerous enough" or that "people are avoiding them"? Is any of that backed up by actual crime statistics or ridership numbers, or just sensationalized headlines?

If you look at basically any subway station now, and compare it to 1980, it's a huge improvement. If you want a reminder, visit Chambers St station (it's heavily affected by leaks from the buildings above it).

I don't live in SF, so could definitely be some local nuances I'm missing. in NYC, there is a pretty clear partisan split on the new congestion tax. the (relatively) red leaning areas are the loudest opponents. I guess having so many high earners already taking public transit might change the discussion.

Those areas are the poor areas. The rich areas in NYC are the most democratic.

I wish we had more trains where it's still possible to route them in shallow tunnels that are cheap to build by excavations, say, in many parts of Brooklyn. (The 2nd Avenue extension had to pierce rock at rather serious depths.)

The problem is political not technical. People don'tewant thair streets block by construction for a couple years and so make up reasons against it. New york is easy as nothing archeolorical evists to worry about (north america generally lacks minerals to make things of interest from they used things that decayed long ago.

I thought that was only possibly because in there wasn’t so much in the way of buried utilities back then

> buses and cars compete for the same right of way. improving one mode necessarily comes at the cost of the other

This is not true at all. Some ways of increasing throughput for both: Build higher density housing which allows more people to take the bus/train and reduces congestion even for the people who still have to drive, add more lanes that either can use (e.g. by building parking garages and then converting street parking to travel lanes), make streets one-way on alternating blocks (reduces congestion at intersections), build pedestrian catwalks above busy intersections to reduce pedestrian-induced congestion and keep pedestrians safer, etc.

> but many more people can be moved with a bus.

The "can" is really the problem. If you do the numbers for a full bus the bus seems very attractive, but then to run buses to everywhere that everyone travels in cars without an impractical amount of latency, many of the buses would end up having only one or two passengers -- and sometimes none -- while still requiring three times the space and fuel of a car and on top of that requiring a separate driver at significant expense.

So instead there is no bus that goes to those places at those times. And since you can't get those people on a bus, they're reasonably going to demand a solution that doesn't make their life miserable when they have to drive a car.

> trains would be even better, but people don't like to see the price tag.

Trains (especially subways) work great in the areas with the population density to justify them. But now you're back to needing higher density housing.

Suppose a non-rich person needs to use the highways for work and can make twice as many stops during the day because of congestion pricing.

Imagine a group of non-rich people who decide to carpool because of congestion pricing and end up spending half the time in traffic every day and as a result get more leisure time.

Considering that a parking spot in Mahnattan costs close to $1K per month, most of the cars are driven by people who are not poor.

Free/cheap street parking exists in Manhattan. A lot of it.

then why do people pay over $600 per month for a spot?

> The goal is straightforward: make driving more pleasant for wealthy people.

And spy on everyone, all the time, because now it “““has to””” track every vehicle's every move — Total Information Awareness