Benevolent dictators strike me as the best form of government at any level so long as they are capable, just, and benevolent - a rare combination it seems. National geographic had an article a few years ago on Singapore that provides some perspective on this - http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/01/singapore/jacobson... .

All that aside, I don't see why SF can't move in a more technocratic direction. There was apparently no lack of Google/Facebook/startup engineers and programmers willing to jump in and help out the Obama campaign on a massive scale - do those same people have no interest in local politics?

In my admittedly anecdotal experience, long-term San Franciscans can't stand startup employees -- the dot-com crowd is blamed for gentrification and high rents. Getting involved in local politics would be like hanging a 'vilify me, I'm an oppressor' sign on your back.

Indeed. The local SF Bay Guardian – mouthpiece of the local progressive left – ran this hit-piece against Ron Conway, for his growing involvement, recently:

http://www.sfbg.com/print/2012/11/27/plutocrat

Its ham-handed propagandizing is kind of funny. Look at the rapacious black eyes on the Conway cartoon monster we've drawn! Despite being born and raised in SF, he's a rootless carpetbagger! He's involved in "a long list of other shadowy [investment] businesses, all incorporated in Delaware for its lax tax and regulatory policies"! He supported measure E's tax breaks for tech companies! (Unmentioned: SFBG itself endorsed that same measure.)

In my admittedly anecdotal experience, long-terms San Franciscans can't stand anyone outside SF period. SF does everything it can to make the experience of visiting and doing business in that city as miserable as possible.

1. Affordable short-term housing or hotels? Yeah, you're going to be staying across the bay. 2. Parking is miserable and parking enforcement are total fascists. You can't even refill a meter. 3. Pandhandlers everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I'm not talking about just homeless, I'm talking about scientologists, 9/11 truthers, people raising money for Africa or the cat shelter or whatever. I've never been as harassed on the streets as I've been in SF. Just because I stopped for 3 seconds does not mean I want a pamphlet, dude.

SF loves being a self-imposed alternaculture concentration camp which is fine with me when I don't have to go there on business.

Totally agree on housing and hotels, but not on parking. Do you go to NYC on business and complain about the parking there? No, probably not because it's simply unnecessary. There is no reason that SF can't develop in that same direction.

The dot-com crowd is not the only people to blame. They just provide demand. If the long-term San Franciscans don't allow an increase in supply of housing (something which is totally possible in SF), then they are equally at fault.

I think it is a step in the right direction that the "tech transients", long deplored by the high priests of SF, are starting to talk about this unwarranted animosity toward them.

For too long, tech players - in denial - have swept this under the rug.

I have questions on how this would even work. Engineers played a large role in spreading the word and getting people out to vote via technological innovations.

But how would we apply technology to government? What would we do, technologically, to curb the massive addiction and homelessness problem in the city, and how would you use technology to bust unions down to size?

There are a lot of places technology fits in the world, but this particular one is purely political.

Actually, technology is being used to bust unions down to size. One specific technology is streaming web video, to make underhanded and reprehensible union tactics more visible.

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/busting-philly-unions-pest...

When people compare public transit systems, one thing to keep in mind. The ones you usually compare as world class: NYC, Chicago, London were all originally built by private companies (and later made public), while the crappier ones out there SF, Atlanta, Baltimore were built with public money from the start. The DC subway is one of the few decent ones I can think of that was built with public money from the get-go, but it had an incredible budget, and still fell way short of it's original plan.

I don't understand how you assess the validity of your statement. Since you are talking about London as a world-class system, surely you should include Paris, Hong Kong, and Moscow. These were not "originally built by private companies."

A few days ago, CNN listed Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, London, Paris, Madrid, NYC, Tokyo, and Guangzhou as being in the top list of subway systems. At least some of those were started either by the government or by a government owned/funded company.

The US has a long history of preferring business solutions over government ones. Compare to 1800s France where large-scale engineering projects were seen as part of the government's domain. I therefore suspect that your observation reflects a US-centric view, where the default view seems to be that the government is incapable.

Also, there's a possible selection error. If all of the worst systems were "originally built by private companies" and only 40% of the world-class systems were done that way, then wouldn't that suggest that early government involvement leads to better systems?

Without that information, it's very hard to use your observation to make any sort of informed decision.

I don't think that the issue should be between public and private companies building these systems. I believe the lack of engineers in the public sector is more likely to blame for the incompetence of public engineering projects. How many scientists and engineers are in congress? Its hard to hire for a job you have never done.

We were talking about a US city (my fault for bringing in London), so yes, I'm not sure you can compare the type of government owned organizations that are common in Asia to how our governments and infrastructure work.

It's pretty fallacious to claim that the lines in NYC were built by private companies. They were built by the government and leased to private companies for administration.

I suspect the same is true for your other examples as well.. how do you "private sector" build something like a subway? The closest you could conceivably get would still be quasi-public, once you get done with all the right-of-way and eminent domain concerns.

You're oversimplifying. The original rail lines in nyc were largely built and run by private companies. Most of these lines were (and many still are) above ground. Later there was a lot of consolidation - smaller lines were bought up by larger lines that connected them together - prior to the era in which the government subsidized and then came to control the whole system. Part of why the subway system still works pretty well today is that these original routes - connecting the heart of the city to the outer boroughs - were designed to go where the demand was so they could pay back the investment quickly. Whereas when rail lines are built with too much government control often they end up ignoring or even deliberately avoiding the most useful and profitable routes in favor of politically motivated ones. (For instance, the monorail in Las Vegas didn't initially go to the airport because the cab companies don't want it to. And buses in San Francisco go through chinatown to please the chinatown merchants rather than the commuters trying to get past that area.)

BTW, you "private-sector" build a subway the same way you do an oil pipeline or a transcontinental railway (eg, Hill's Great Northern Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_%28U.S.%... )

> The ones you usually compare as world class: NYC, Chicago, London

I wouldn't call the CTA Rail world class. Compared to NYC or London it has limited stops and doesn't touch large chunks of the city.

CTA: http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/maps/P19_2012_CTA_Rai...

Tube:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/standard-tube-map.gif

Chicago's bus system doesn't really make up for the lack of stops. Lots of people consider a car mandatory here, unlike London or NYC.

The CTA train system does a very good job of connecting the places people actually want to commute through in Chicago. If you don't live here, the map might be misleading; you need to compare it to a population density map of the city. For instance, large parts of the southwest side of the city that appear to have minimal coverage are also heavily industrial. The red and green lines serve very large swathes of the poorest areas in the city, too.

The parts of the city that aren't directly served by train are served by a relatively effective bus system. I wouldn't say the CTA buses are beloved of anyone, but they're night and day compared to SF.

I don't think this is because private companies are inherently more competent. I think the reason for the discrepancy is that private companies aren't going to build in places where there isn't a very good chance of the project turning a profit.

The public ends up funding projects that might be valuable to society, but that won't turn a profit. Of course, this tendency needs to be monitored to make sure that the projects actually are of value, but I would say that public transit in San Francisco-- if nothing else, it brings down real estate prices-- is clearly in that category.

I do not intend to say that public projects are always well-managed, because that's demonstrably false. However, there are a large number of badly-managed private projects as well. In terms of turning a profit, though, the private sector almost always has better material to work with, because it takes the projects that are visibly likely to be profitable.

Yep, that's definitely part of it. Also government funded systems are still built by private companies, but instead of figuring out the best way to save money (as they would do if self-funded) they pad their margins and make the systems incredibly expensive to be built with public dollars.

Also, with publicly funded systems, there are always questions about alignment. Some local rep wants it to go thru her neighborhood, another thru theirs so they end up all sinuous/cicuitous (ala Seattle) whereas private entities don't have this issue.

While I wouldn't deny that there's a lot of bloat in the SF city government, I think it's important to take into account that SF is both a city and a county (a "consolidated city-county".) Hence, the SF budget has to make room for the functions would usually be left to the county, e.g., sheriff+jails, public works, parks, assessor, coroner, etc., and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I'm missing. That could explain some of the apparent budget inflation w/r/t Chicago.

Not quite an apples to apples comparison, though. Chicago is a prime example of purely flat, grid design; whereas SF has to contend with a geography of nightmares for public transit. It is tremendously easier to build transit systems in Chicago.

Almost none of the European city has a flat/grid structure as typical of more 'recent' American cities, yet they most have a much better public transit story, so I doubt that's a factor by itself.

More likely, that's correlated with something else that is the real explanatory variable (history, etc...). John Kay had a good article on a similar topic: http://www.johnkay.com/2013/01/16/london%E2%80%99s-rise-from...

Japan has no problems and look at a map of Tokyo. There are few straight streets in the entire city. It's also got plenty of hills. So does LA and they used to have an amazing transit system. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric_Railway)

So no, you don't need a flat grid to have great public transit.

Whoa, Tokyo is totally flat! No comparison, and also Japan cities spend a lot more money on infrastructure than even American cities do.

Best to compare San Francisco with...Lausanne...or Chongqing (or any city with a bunch of hills that is fairly vertical).

Doesn't Lausanne have pretty good public transport? Here's a live map: http://simcity.vasile.ch/lausanne/

The Lausanne metro is fantastic. The M2 cuts straight through the hills and the M1 runs parallel to Lake Geneva and can get you to, say, EPFL in no time. On top of this there are the commuter trains which can get you to Geneva in about thirty minutes.

How fast can you get from 4th & King to the SJC?

Nevertheless, comparing San Francisco to Lausanne is unfair. Lausanne provides better infrastructure for a smaller population.

They have similar topologies, that was my only point (and that I've lived in both cities to know...).

About as nice as San Francisco, though I biked most everywhere in the latter (small city!) and only took Caltrain in the former.

> Tokyo is totally flat

Tokyo is in no way even close to flat. It has some flat areas (e.g. landfill in Tokyo bay), but there are huge numbers of very hilly areas as well (including many popular commercial hubs and densely populated areas in the city center). Not gentle hills in many cases either, but quite steep.

[... and if you go to the outskirts, there are actual mountains within the Tokyo city limits!]

One difference with with SF, of course, is that Tokyo roads don't form a rigid grid that ignores the topography....

> Japan cities spend a lot more money on infrastructure than even American cities

Tokyo mass transit is overwhelmingly private (owned, run, and financed), especially if you're talking about rail.

I guess we have a different definition of flat since I hiked up and down Tokyo hills all the time. But even if it's not has hilly as SF it's streets are far more curvy.

LA is much flatter than SF. Although some live in the canyons and on the hills, most live on a single plain -- well, two plains if you count the San Fernando Valley as a separate plain.

LA at large may be flat but hello, the Santa Monica Mountains run directly through it. The trains that used to go through LA went all through the hills. The tunnels are still in many of them.

http://goo.gl/wBRSG

The Angel's Flight Train is still there.

http://goo.gl/UMqCB

The worlds oldest Freeway, the 110 goes through a valley.

The 5, 101, 10 and 60 wrap around all kinds of hills within a few miles of downtown LA.

Yeah, but they also did it with 1920's technology...

And labour costs.

wanting SF to be flat but to be able to have the view seems to be a dual view of residents of SF.

Flat cities with a rigid grid are kinda boring and often downright depressing (standing on a street in some of Chicago's neighborhoods, with ticky-tacky little houses marching uninterrupted into the distance as far as you can see, is a soul-sucking experience)...

Limited horizons and change make things interesting. You don't want complete chaos, because things also have to "make sense" to some degree (so complete randomness, like a stereotypical suburban cul-de-sac maze, tends to be bad), but variation is a good thing.

[A nice city to look at for interesting approaches to urban structure which are both somewhat regular, but more interesting that a grid, is Edinburgh, which has seen successive waves of fairly successful urban renewal over centuries, resulting in one of the most beautiful and fascinating cities in Europe. In the "new" parts (150-250 years old as opposed to the older and more organic medieval parts), Edinburgh streets have such features as small localized grids, sized as to with care to avoid large-scale monotony, occasional "circuses" acting as focal points, streets in gentle arcs which are practical for transportation, and yet maintain a constantly evolving street view and horizon, terraces along the sides of parks, etc.]

In defense of Chicago, its grid is amazing for being able to efficiently travel around the city. The street numbering makes it trivial for any local to find their way to an address like "X00 W Belmont" without a map, and obviously the lack of hills makes for easier biking and public transit. It skews more towards beautiful architecture than beautiful landscapes, and has its share of decrepit neighborhoods (as does SF), but I don't think many people would describe it as a "soul-sucking" place. Different strokes.

I didn't say Chicago was a soul-sucking place, but rather that certain areas in it are (apologies if that wasn't clear), and one of the main reasons they're that way is the incredible sense of monotony due in large part to the regularity of the grid (there are other reasons for monotony in those areas too, of course, e.g. the rather extreme lack of variation in housing stock, the complete lack of anything except houses, and the very flat geography).

It's a localized example of the effect urban structure can have, not a denigration of the entire city. So, please, don't take it as a dig against Chicago; I rather like Chicago in many ways, and much of my family lives there. I used the above example only because it's one of the more extreme cases I've encountered.

As for the "it's easy to find addresses!" argument in favor of large-scale grids, well, yes, but in my experience this is fairly unimportant for the actual residents of a city. Most people don't spend any significant amount of time travelling to completely random locations, and to the extent they do, every city evolves methods of way-finding that suit it. I think it's much more important for the residents that the city actually be a nice place to live, and part of that is being beautiful / interesting.

[For tourists, yeah, extremely simple way-finding can be a significant advantage, but I don't think cities should be designed for tourists over the needs of those who live there...]

It's a bit of a straw man there. The NYC street grid system was meant "to unite regularity and order with the public convenience and benefit and in particular to promote the health of the City ... [by allowing] a free and abundant circulation of air". ("Foul air" was thought to cause disease.)

Salt Lake City grid system was also not designed for tourists. It was designed for travelers, yes, and I believe it was part of the vision that SLC would be looked at as a model city, with a strong Cartesian/classical influence. According to Wikipedia, "In these western cities the streets were numbered even more carefully than in the east to suggest future prosperity and metropolitan status."

Also, a grid system made it easier to subdivide the land which was newly part of the US.

So to say that the grid system is influenced by tourists is a bit of an exaggeration.

Another important part of the New Town of Edinburgh (i.e. the 150-250 year old bit) are shared gardens, which are effectively private parks where locals pay a small amount per year. For example, here is the website for the gardens we use:

http://www.belgravecrescentgardens.co.uk/

I agree that these are nice, but ... I lived in a number of flats in Edinburgh with nice (shared) gardens, but I don't think I ever used them even once. There are soooo many other cool and pretty places within easy walking distance...

[I lived there in the '90s, though, and I'm a bit scared to return for fear that the city has been ruined by its new-found position as a seat of "power" (haha); the sharp-suits crowd, "gotta pave over that park and widen those roads for my flash car!", etc...]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/09/12/160996525/odd-t... is a good read on the topic. very interesting visualisation idea that actually makes some intuitive sense.

Never said I wanted SF to be flat :] just that the comparison is not as black and white as there are circumstances to consider.

I definitely would not trade hilly SF for a flat SF.

You are the worst kind of apologist for San Francisco's colossal dysfunction.

I am aware that you were making an like-to-like comparison with your selection of those Muni and CTA graphics. However, for those who don't know, Muni is more than just the light rail lines shown in that picture.

Here's a complete system map: http://transit.511.org/static/providers/maps/SF_122220102111...

The equivalent CTA system maps seem to show just as much bus coverage as Muni's bus coverage. (Now, how many of those bus lines keep running after 23:00 is another question, entirely.)

How do you get from liking Guilliani and Bloomberg to thinking that "benevolent dictators are the way to go"?

You say you didn't like NYC as much pre-1993, which is when Koch left office after 12 years. But didn't the mayor then have much of the same powers as the mayor now? Doesn't that suggest that the 'benevolent dictatorship' then was the source of the problems?

In any case, and quoting Wikipedia: "Most major and large American cities use the strong-mayor form of the mayor–council system, whereas middle-sized and small American cities tend to use the council-manager system." And yes, San Francisco uses a 'strong mayor' system.

Which seems to imply that a benevolent dictatorship system can also lead to disaster.

(You suggest that the alternative is to leave things up to the market. That is not the case. There are other forms of municipal government.)

Therefore, I don't understand how your observations of recent NYC history can be applied to other large cities in the US.

> "But didn't the mayor then have much of the same powers as the mayor now? Doesn't that suggest that the 'benevolent dictatorship' then was the source of the problems?"

His train of thought is consistent. The idea is that benevolent dictatorships can either be a great force for good, or wildly incompetent. As compared to a market or ballot-based governments that are practically guaranteed to be incompetent. Lesser of the evils, if you will.

> "(You suggest that the alternative is to leave things up to the market. That is not the case. There are other forms of municipal government.)"

OP specifically cited North Virginia, with a market-based government, as a failure. How does that interpret as an endorsement of market-based government?

It's not the form of government, it's the willingness and ability of the mayor to rule with singular vision without getting bogged down with the concensus building. Not every mayor uses his power in that way.

Dinkins came between Koch and Giuliani.

What disasters in Northern Virginia? I'm curious to hear what you hold up an example of the failures of markets, being as you're about the most strident statist I can think of here.

Northern Virginia is pretty much all a disaster. There is zero urban planning. The streets are built randomly, not in a quaint way, which makes getting around impossible. The commercial areas are built as far as possible from residential ones, which makes running to the store for milk or going out to lunch a huge time sink. The traffic is horrible as a result, even though the area isn't really that densely populated.

Compare: Westchester County to Fairfax County, roughly similarly sized suburbs. Westchester has all these cute little downtowns with grid streets (ish) built around Metro North stations. Traffic is kept under control because a large fraction of people commute to the city by rail. Fairfax County sucks in comparison. No transit to speak of, awful traffic, etc. Its the result of urban planning that basically consists of (mark of a subdivision and let the developers do whatever they want).

Arlington is tolerable, but only because development sprung up around Metro lines. Ditto Alexandria, which at least has a centrally planned downtown core.

  The commercial areas are built as far as possible from residential ones

This is because of urban planning.

If you call that urban planning, then you can call Fairfax the worst example of "urban planning" I've ever heard of. It's a soul sucking mess of bland corporation towers, and distant developments of cookie-cutter cardboard houses squeezed onto tiny plots of land, with no way to escape to the outside air or to entertainment but by a 30 min drive on a traffic laiden freeway... No wonder their upper-class high-schools are chock full of heavy drugs, the poor kids can't escape.

So your exhibit A of how business and markets can make a mess of things is a county almost entirely dominated by government employers? It almost looks to me like when they have near total control over how an area evolves, they don't bother with much oversight or planning for it..

I've lived in Northern Virginia for most of my life, and have seen it go through a lot of growth. One thing to bear in mind is that, prior to World War II, Northern Virginia was almost all rural. Old Town Alexandria was pretty much the only city. All of the growth in Northern Virginia during and since World War II has been driven by the growth of the federal government, and much of the lousy urban planning has been because the federal government has been growing faster than any of the urban planners expected.

NOVA has horrendous traffic because of poor urban planning (e.g. too much sprawl), few successful small businesses (mostly just chains), a barely viable public transit system outside of Arlington County.

I was curious about that too. Having moved from Santa Barbara to Tuscaloosa to Arlington, Northern VA seems OK to me.

Yeah, I was curious about which areas he was referring to as well. Arlington and Alexandria are very well set up. My guess is he is talking about the sprawling surburbian hell-hole known as Fairfax and beyond.

Its not just the suburban aspect though. I was shocked to find that the suburbs in Chicago were a lot less "suburby" than Fairfax. Good commuter transit, walkable downtowns in many places. Grid streets all over.

My wife grew up in a town of 2000 people in Iowa. She hates Fairfax County for being so isolated. Her town was small and rural, but it had a walkable downtown with a little street grid. The town planners long ago made it that way in case it ever became a bustling megalopolis.

The budget comparison is totally not fair. SF is also a county, so I bet say Muni is in SF's budget. OTOH, Chicago is just a city. How much does Cook County spend in Chicago?

Fair point. Cook County's total budget is $3 billion. Half the population of Cook County is in Chicago, so add another 1.5 billion (total 7.8 billion).

> No, benevolent dictators are the way to go. I'm a huge fan of Guilliani and Bloomberg's work in NYC. Love them or hate them, you'd rather live in NYC circa 2013 than NYC circa 1993.

You wouldn't be saying this if you were a person of color living in the Bronx or parts of Brooklyn, because things have gotten worse for those folks due to policies of selectively enforcing vice laws and programs like stop and frisk that have become popular under Guilliani and Bloomberg.

When New York City's murder rate peaked at 2,262 homicides in 1992 (versus 414 in 2012), who do you think was getting killed? It wasn't white people on the upper east side.

That is true, but constantly policing populations of people who are predominantly not white isn't a great solution to lower the homicide rate.

Of course, why crime rates have generally fallen over the last couple of decades in cities like NYC isn't well understood and no one person or administration can claim that they are responsible. However, we do know that NYPD policies are enforced in a way that promotes racism and class disparity and that Bloomberg has been a supporter of those policies.

It is important to realize that a benevolent dictator doesn't really exist and having balance in government is necessary, otherwise the people who do get shafted by any given administration get even less of a voice and support.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Murder rates have declined comparable amounts in lots of cities that aren't systematically targeting minority residents for harassment.

Places like LA, Chicago, etc? All of those places aggressively police poor (predominantly minority) neighborhoods.

Those neighborhoods are where crime happens. A map of violent crime in Chicago (a city that's 65% black or hispanic): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Chicago_v....

A map of Chicago by race: http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots

What do you want the police to do, patrol around Lincoln Park and Lakeview where all the wealthy white people are?

> What do you want the police to do, patrol around Lincoln Park and Lakeview where all the wealthy white people are?

No, but city and state gov't should be responsive to the causes of these issues and be proactive about solving them. Usually that will mean looking at class and race disparity and implementing policy that will provide better opportunities for those people, as well as defeating existing roadblocks that prevent those people from taking control of their lives.

I thought the big gains for NYC were 1970s to end-of-Koch, not 1993 to 2012.

I still am confused how NYC became "escape from NY" in the 1970s and early 1980s.

I didn't visit New York until the early 1990's, so I'm not sure what it was like in the 1980's, but my understanding is that violent crime peaked in 1990.

No one seems to be bothered by the call for dictators. I'm shaking my head.

Perhaps it's a problem with city governments trying to do everything under the moon. Cities that keep to the basics are usually well run and effective.

An occasional dictator is not bad. They are legitimate as long as they rule "by the consent of the governed". Sometimes you just need a Cincinnatus to get things done. I wouldn't generally recommend a hereditary monarchy though :)

Singapore! Best damn country in the world.

Careful. Some in San Francisco might get off on the caning.