>I sometimes wish I could get Californians to have the same courage as the Swiss do when zoning towns which require only walking.

I would settle for just making pedestrian-only some small bits of San Francisco, ostensibly the most progressive city in the state.

For example: Oh what I wouldn't give to have Third Street shut down from say Folsom to Market. I walk every day most of the length of Third Street and it is an automotive hellscape.

Literally six lanes of cars all going in the same direction. And it's anarchy. At nearly every single light change, someone ends up blocking the intersection because they tried to make it across with no room. Cars nearly mowing down pedestrians as they try to turn into parking lot/hotel access roads. Cars clogging the bus lanes. And the honking, oh the honking.

Just shut it down. From the convention center through Yerba Buena Gardens, the St Regis, MOMA, all the way to Market. Giant outdoor cafes and restaurants and biergartens. Some protected dedicated bike lanes. Nice pedestrian paths. Dedicated spaces for outdoor exhibits from MOMA, the African Diaspora museum (in the St Regis) and Yerba Buena Center.

Earmark the extra tax increment for something nice, maybe for improving mass transit, or the police, or the art scene, as penance for taking away the six-lane artery of transit misery.

Then do it again on some other miserable street. And so on.

For those of us who don't have cars, this seems like a great idea (and honestly, I don't know why they even allow cars on market; as it's set up now, you already have to turn off every few blocks, even though most people ignore that and merge into the bus lane in the intersection often enough).

But really, if a road is completely packed with cars, shutting it down is not going to end the traffic problem. Those cars (and the people in them) have to go somewhere.

Also, speaking of third street, the new muni line from Powell to the caltrain station is already costing ~$1B/mile, so expanding such things is not at all cheap. Or effective, based on ridership estimates.

What might reduce traffic congestion would be throwing up more high rise buildings so people can live in the city and work near where they live. Reduced commutes means reduced traffic, reduced rents means less gentrification in outlying areas...

I am finding the narrative around homeless in SF very odd. Often people compare the situation to places like NYC and then ask why San Francisco can't do that.

Well... If by "that" you mean persecute and push homeless people out of town, state by state until they reach the border of Georgia and Florida and then congregate in shanty towns... I say forget it.

San Francisco has a lot of services, many of them centered in the TL. The weather is a big factor. It also doesn't help that NV has been sending mentally ill folks here with one way bus tickets. The AG is suing them now.

Change the narrative - just because the homeless are invisible like in most areas (did you know about the shanty towns near and around Seattle?), doesn't make the problem go away.

I think there is subtext to the main thesis of the article - that all of these really smart and rich people concentrated in one area can't even solve their own immediate and noticeable problems.

Side note - it sounds like the author is specifically talking about SF proper, not south bay / peninsula.

I don't have big problems with the sidewalk construction (what's on it is another matter), but the state of the roads is pretty shocking sometimes, and very noticeable when cycling - ideally I would be able to trust the road surface and mostly keep my head up looking for people, vehicles and traffic signals but I also have to keep checking for potholes, gratings that can swallow a wheel and cause a nasty crash, and those big metal plates sticking up a few inches that seem to left for weeks at a time covering up a hole in the street. This is particularly bad downtown.

I would disagree with the homeless comment. I live in a Canadian city with a range of -35 - +30C (-31 - +86F) and we have a sizable homeless population. You may argue that the homeless wouldn't cross the border to get to warmer climates, however, Vancouver rarely goes below 0 so I think that argument would not apply.

I found that a very weird thing to say, given that eight people have froze to death in this area during the last month.

I wouldn't assume that surviving the cold is very easy. Hypothermia doesn't even require very low temperatures.

This from 2010: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/winter_weather/... Says 700 annually, 4 of 700 is a bit more than 1/2 of one percent. I believe they got their number from this paper (http://www.bhchp.org/BHCHP%20Manual/pdf_files/Part2_PDF/Hypo...) or its source material.

More recent numbers from this blog entry (http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/12/06/santa-clara-county-...) have the unsheltered homeless population in Santa Clara county (where four people died) at 74% of 7631 or 5647 souls living unsheltered. Four of them dying is a mortality rate of .7 people per thousand. Not a very likely reason for dying.

It isn't that surviving cold is "easy" or "hard", it isn't that unsheltered homeless folks are "ok" or "not ok", it is that death from hypothermia is a function of both exposure and duration, which is minimized in climates such as that of the Bay Area, so that the risk of death from exposure falls below that of death by being hit by a car (http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Jose-Leads-Bay-Area...) for example.

The Bay Area winters are comparatively mild, and if you're going to die of exposure it's most likely to be elsewhere. I don't dispute that.

But I don't think we can say that it is very difficult to freeze here, nor that all one needs is a coat and blanket for protection. It implies the absurdity that the people must have tried very hard to die that way, trivializes the difficulty of obtaining adequate clothing, ignores concerns such as injury/illness/addiction/age which increase risk of freezing, etc.

Incidentally, the 2010 report on homeless deaths in NYC (http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/pdf/govpub/57985th_annual_re...) says that 6 died from exposure to cold. We had a comparable number this year in the Bay Area (http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/12/18/3081571/bay-area...). I don't bring this up to start a contest or anything -- you can't draw very many conclusions from these numbers alone -- only to suggest that the risk should not be trivialized.

San Francisco and East Bay cities like Berkeley, Oakland have historically had very favorable city policies and amenities for homeless people. I think this has more to do with the volume of homeless in the Bay Area than anything else.

If I were homeless, I'd definitely want to be somewhere in that area for sure, if I could make it there. Obviously there's plenty of homeless in the DC area, but some nights it gets dangerously cold and I wonder how they cope.