1. The problems it highlights can be reduced to low tax revenues. Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it. Things like roads and trains cannot (and should not) pay for themselves---they are a public good. The train might be empty at night, but the ability to take a train home prevents drunk driving, for example. One cannot put a monitory value on services like that, they speak to our collective quality of life. The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth.
2. Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is density. We need to value density as it allows for more compact living. Instead, municipalities in places like the Bay Area consistently vote against new construction and against zoning laws that would allow for taller, more densely populated buildings/neighborhoods. The law of supply and demand says increase the supply of housing to make something affordable. This is not some mysterious process: there's simply no political will on the part of existing inhabitants to "devalue" their residences by increasing the supply in the housing market.
> Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it.
That's just not true.
We have crumbling infrastructure because we refuse to prioritize it due to political dysfunction.
If youre a surgeon or a lawyer living in San Francisco, your marginal tax rate is 39.5% federal + 11% state. Over 50%. You also pay 8.75% VAT on a lot of common purchases and 1% property tax.
This is not a low tax environment.
Hong Kong has a 15% flat tax and yet they have vastly better infrastructure than we do. Singapore is a similar story. Even Istanbul, with per capita income and tax collection thats a small fraction of ours, has a great light rail system that puts Bart to shame. Istikal Street is incredible--imagine Market and Mission put together, and pedestrian only. It is a beautiful city.
So how do these places do it?
* They respect and prioritize infrastructure
* Their governments are less gridlocked
* They value density and walkability
* They have fewer NIMBYs, with much less power to obstruct
* They're less lawsuit-friendly. In the Bay every big infra project spends time and money fighting lawsuits.
* They have leaner bureaucracies. BART has tons of six figure salaries on the payroll for random adminstrative positions.
> Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is density. We need to value density as it allows for more compact living.
Another thing that perhaps needs to be valued more is sound insulation. I currently live in an apartment in a dense, walk-able city in Europe. However, I'm tempted to buy myself a house and a car, because I'm so sick and tired of all the noise that comes from living in an apartment in a dense area (neighbors, construction nearby, drunk people late at night etc.). Without good sound insulation, I don't think density works, although maybe it's just me who are more sensitive to this than other people.
>The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth.
I'm not sure this is true.
The city budget has grown substantially, now ~$9B [1].
The problem is we don't spend it on transit infrastructure, and when we do invest, we get financially mismanaged projects like the central subway [2].
I agree it's a tax revenue problem. However, as a CA resident living in the bay area with a tech salary, I can attest that _taxation_ isn't the problem. An unfortunate reality is that our budgets are not being spent well. In particular, BART has some serious high-cost issues. For one, the automated trains have operators whose total compensation is an average of $130k yearly. [1] There are terrible, ineffective managers, directors, and executives that are guilty of mismanagement and greed [2].
> Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is density.
It does require density, but not so much that you need buildings more than a few stories high. Much more important is zoning that allows shops and restaurants to be mixed in with housing, and not wasting those few square blocks within walking distance with parking lots and private yards.
1.
The ability to take a taxi or uber home also prevents drunk driving. Responsible drinking or having a designated driver also prevents drunk driving.
Even if you were to insist the government subsidizes "get home late from a bar without driving", Empty night trains are probably one of the least cost effective ways of doing that.
Personally, I just walk home from a bar. That prevents drunk driving since I don't need cars, taxis or trains just to get a beer.
2. Density indeed helps increase walk-ability. But it's also about mixed used development. Jane Jacobs talks a lot about this in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". If zoning laws divide the city into a "business area", a "living area" and "an entertainment area", Density isn't going to save you from having to drive between those areas.
Around 20% of the motor fuels tax ends up in the general fund, and not the highway trust fund. Your legislators can increase highway/transit infrastructure spending by that amount, but won't pull funding from other programs that have grown dependent on it. You should talk to them about this.
The article briefly touched on it, but as car owners transition to non-petroleum powered vehicles, the motor fuels revenue has nowhere to go but down. So the current taxation basis of gallons consumed will become unworkable. Taxing based on miles traveled has privacy implications (they will need to monitor your driving to assess the tax). A monthly road-tax based on vehicle size/weight/capacity might be the only way to keep highways funded.
To keep transit systems like BART funded, they will have to support it by taxing the local population, whether they own a car or not (remove the dependence on the highway trust fund).
> The problems it highlights can be reduced to low tax revenues. Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it.
This is a double whammy, because so many urban areas basically came close to the brink of death during the mid 20th century and have only revitalized in the last 30-ish years or so. That means there's a massive infrastructure and services "debt" in most cities, so they have the burden of playing catch up as well.
> Things like roads and trains cannot (and should not) pay for themselves---they are a public good. The train might be empty at night, but the ability to take a train home prevents drunk driving, for example. One cannot put a monitory value on services like that, they speak to our collective quality of life. The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth.
I strongly agree with this and wish it was more of a priority (sadly, our political system is so broken everyone is focused on other sideshows and wedge issues). Public transit is really a strong societal good, and an equalizer. Good public transit is a big factor in enabling the poorest and least advantaged to find jobs wherever they exist while keeping their housing costs low and also enabling things like continuing education and so on. It's a major component in that whole "lifting yourself up by your bootstraps" thing that people think is so important.
Whether or not something is a public good is a matter of technology. Trains are definitively a private good - they are rivalrous (you and I can't simultaneously occupy the same seat) and excludible (don't pay, they don't let you ride).
Roads are also rivalrous (you and I can't simultaneously occupy the same piece of pavement) and excludible (don't pay gas taxes, you get no gas, you can't ride).
If gas taxes were impractical, roads might be a public good.
We also collect plenty of taxes for transit. Our taxes just buy us 1/5-1/100 as much as every other country in the world, because our transit systems are incredibly inefficient.
The glorious state of California has the highest taxes in the nation and is the home of the tech industry. If wealth isn't trickling down, it's because it is being wasted.
> We need to value density as it allows for more compact living.
rack em and stack em, eh?
recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all.
> One cannot put a monitory value on services like that
You sure as shit can. Budgets are fixed. Budget consumption is zero sum. Maybe in fantasy land we could spend unlimited resources on trains and unicorns, but in the real world we have to measure the cost-benefit of all expenditures.
"Things like roads and trains ... are a public good."
No, they're not.
From Wikipedia (which matches what I learnt in economics class):
"... a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others."
Trains are definitely excludable (can't get on without a ticket) and rivalrous (the train can get full, meaning no space for additional passengers).
Roads are obviously rivalrous (gridlock!) but you could argue the extent to which they are excludable. Sure, there are toll roads, but it would be hard for you to exclude me from using the road in front of my house. With technology, though, you could make me pay for usage according to some arbitrarily-designed tariff, though, which would force me to self-exclude if I weren't willing to pay the price.
This is not at all illuminating and is just a typical advocacy piece for more transit funding.
Like most of these pieces, it compares road spending and transit spending as though this is somehow a useful comparison. It isn't. For rail transit systems, spending includes all labor and capital expenses--train operators, cars, electricity, etc. Road spending does not include the enormous capital investment that citizens and businesses spend for motor vehicles.
Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road.
Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.
To top it off the piece says nothing about "why traffic is awful".
> Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.
Building roads encourages people to drive in their cars to places. The problem is that automobile infrastructure is woefully inefficient, expensive and doesn't scale.
If you want to create the ability for people to go to places, there's more efficient and cheaper ways to do this than building more roads. One of these methods is public transit.
Yeah, the article points out that only 20% of our federal and state transit budgets go to transit, implying that it's underfunded. But it lacks the context that only 5% of Americans use transit...
> Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road.
If you're going to use the argument that roads are more useful than transit because they cover the whole nation, then you're making the same argument the article is making for transit, just with different parameters. Rather than paint it black and white, both systems are needed to increase overall transportation efficiency as a whole. Transit is effective in dense areas like large cities. Roads are effective in smaller less dense areas where space isn't a premium.
Additionally, everyone likes to gloss over the fact that you mention where public transit in the US is largely government owned and operated, therefore the expenses include all costs associated with the entire system. For roads, however, only the road cost is covered. This is a different kind of unfairness. It makes roads and auto travel look cheap because costs are dispersed over different parties and items: government pays for the road, drivers pay for their car and maintenance, buildings hide the cost of private parking.
Meanwhile transit systems look expensive because the numbers include all associated expenses. To fix the problem, I actually think transit systems should be allowed to be privatized and treated on the same level as roads, that is just like roads, the government allocates land use for mass transit and private companies operate the system. Additionally most of the recent laws surrounding (free) parking and the interstate highway systems require additional roads and parking for every new development. So ridiculous things start happening like low-income housing in a dense area having unused parking spaces being built to satisfy minimum parking requirements. Downtown road improvements requiring unnecessarily large intersections and allocations to satisfy level of service requirements.
> Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.
The problem is roads are a 2D system with limited scalability while cities are 3D environments that often scale in 3 dimensions. Furthermore automobiles most of the time are used to inefficiently carry 1 person but they have a large footprint. So at a certain point, traffic congestion measures actually do not increase throughput linearly based on investment. So if you want "people to go places" you start finding yourself with ridiculously expensive projects that actually just end up making the problem worse.
Many cities in the world have found solutions to traffic problems and they involve one of 2 things:
1. Introduce a toll or congestion fee thereby encouraging only those that truly want to use the road to use it.
2. Remove high capacity "arterial" roads thus causing traffic to be more evenly distributed across multiple low throughput paths.
The first item operates on the concept that even a relatively small fee will cause standard supply and demand rules to apply rather than users aggressively trying to take advantage of a "free" resource.
The second item operates on the concept that traffic distributed across more direct paths will lead to less overall system traffic compared to a system that encourages everyone to take the perceived fastest and highest throughput path.
The best method of transit is walking.
A lot of the problems with traffic and public transport are solved when we invest in walk-able cities. Cities where you can live close enough to work to walk there, close enough to your friends, close enough to the grocery store, your neighborhood bar or your kid's school.
No discussion of Mass transit or "giving up your car" is completely without discussing the walk-ability of cities.
Being a Brit, who walks to the corner shop, or even supermarket if I just need a few bits, I tried walking a few times while in the US. The US makes it hilariously impractical. Pavements (sidewalks) will just randomly stop. Crossing the road is sometimes a crime, depending on state! Even convenience stores are inconveniently far away.
You've spread your infrastructure out so wide in some places that walking becomes more like a hike. It's little wonder that you end up driving for anything beyond going next door. :)
Unless all cities concurrently advance in this area, this simply becomes a factor that drives home purchase / rental prices up.
San Francisco has neighborhoods with a WalkScore of 100, but the baristas and cooks and other laborers in those neighborhoods, including construction workers who build the homes, largely drive and transit in.
IMO it basically carries that you worsen the Effective WalkScore of other people's lives, even if they live in neighborhoods that are walkable to desk-sitting professionals, because the wage-paying jobs in those areas (e.g. Oakland / East Bay) doesn't pay as well as the wage-paying jobs in neighboring cities with stronger economies (e.g. SF).
This is absolutely happening right now and the reverse impact is that SF's cost of living is creeping over Oakland's and driving the folks who live in Oakland and work in SF to further reaches of the bay as people, giving up on walkable life in SF, try it out in Oakland.
Bicycles help this, but I'm here to tell you that nobody has any fucking sympathy that you've chosen a car-free life and it's El Nino and why are you late because your coworker who drives an SUV 100 miles is already here and how is your life possibly harder?
Anyway .. it's complex AF. Believing another world is possible is for sure a great first step.
Not everyone wants to live downtown, though. In fact, most people don't. More often than not schools in suburbs and rural areas are head and shoulders above their urban counterparts.
I used to live in a downtown area and it was nice being able to walk 6 blocks to work. But I would never want to raise a family in an apartment or with those terrible schools.
There's a fairly low ceiling in terms of walkability within cities though. Once you exceed a certain distance, no amount of walkability is going to convince people to walk, and rent/housing prices within the walking distance tend to be much higher than those outside, thus exacerbating the issue of public transportation.
I live in SoCal, and I can't get my head around the car culture mentality. Of all the places that should be walkable, one that is 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the entire year should rank very high on the list. But nooo.... the walkable cities are in places that get run over by a glacier every six months. Go figure.
Buses are terrible. They are terrible functionally, they are terrible aesthetically, and they are terrible logistically.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that across a broad spectrum of preferences, you would be very hard pressed to find anything worse in the urban, built environment than some big, loud, lumbering, clumsy (and usually) sooty bus bungling about the place.
I love good public transit. I love light rail. I love the subway. I will do anything not to ride a bus. I am reminded of that quote from steve jobs about the touchscreen phones and the stylus:
Costs are a major part of the problem. US rail construction costs are by far the most expensive in the world [1]. Other countries are able to build rail at costs in the $100-250 million per km range (even in dense cities). The East Side access project in NYC has costs around $4 billion per km. Los Angeles has much better costs in the $400-500 million per km range [2]. Its hard to imagine the US will be able to build much transit at those costs.
From 2012[3]: "When asked by transit blogger Benjamin Kabak about its high construction costs, Michael Horodniceanu, president of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital construction division, gave a two-word answer: “work rules.” Citing the example of the city’s revered sandhogs, he said the MTA employs 25 for tunnel-boring machine work that Spain does with nine."
There's problems on the operations side too. The same agency that is building that East Side Access (LIRR) still does fare collection by sending well compensated employees walking up and down every train to punch paper tickets twice per ride.
I don't know if it's an urban legend or not, but I've been told that one of those conductors punching tickets on every train is technically designated and paid as a "fireman" i.e. person responsible for shoveling coal into a boiler because the collective bargaining agreement forbids them from eliminating the position.
Cities need to prioritize walking, biking and transit. What this means is that, these modes of transportation need to be made safer and faster. Currently walking through a major city is bogged down by the number of intersections you have to wait at. One idea would be to make intersection movement faster for pedestrians and transit during all hours except the morning and evening rush hour, during which vehicle movement should be prioritized to get cars off the roads as quickly as possible.
Traffic is awful because road owners aren't charging for access.
From an Economics standpoint, congested traffic is the same phenomenon as the old Soviet bread lines. A underpriced good is inaccessible in practice, since supply is way lower than demand at that price.
The solution is "Road Pricing", where drivers pay to drive. The price varies depending on what road, time of day etc. Maximum revenue should coincide with maximum throughput, giving everyone (ready to pay) a smooth and fast commute. It also provides incentives to build more roads where they are mostly needed.
To expand upon the specific discussion of the OP, I feel we are witnessing a historical pattern: urban-flight -> under-valued urban real-estate -> then urban renewal and economic opportunity -> influx of homeless and criminals since high-population density is good for both -> then public criticism that the cops are too heavy handed -> cops less likely to enforce + strain on infrastructure and services (like mass transit) + urban unrest due to economic disparity -> urban-flight -> ...
If the problem is that the BART is operating beyond capacity, adding capacity might not matter if the population is set to decline for the other reasons stated.
The declining gas tax problem is going to get worse as electric cars increase in popularity. The solution is comprehensive road pricing, where a larger share of the real costs of road infrastructure and parking infrastructure are borne by the users.
The added benefit of correctly pricing driving is that people will make more informed decisions about where they live and how they get to work, that will result in more compact communities and less urban sprawl.
I live in Minneapolis, we have the light rail in the downtown area that runs all the way down to the Mall of America and the airport. It also runs to St. Paul. We subsidize it heavily, but it is also an honor system for paying for it (no turnstiles). We also have a pretty decent bus system.
Problem is the further away you get from the city center the worse it gets. They've talked about putting in a light rail line to the southwest suburbs at a cost of billions of dollars, meanwhile the core roads don't get additional help and are perpetually bad because of the winter.
It's a balancing act, and at some point everyone needs to decide who's lifestyle is more important from a priority perspective IMO. If I decide to live in the suburbs, and commute an hour a day, is a dollar more important for that person? Or the person closer to the city core that wants more mass transit options?
Honestly I can go both directions. I currently have a 10 minute commute (by car). But I've also had the 60+ minute commutes for jobs. I also use the light rail to get to the airport pretty frequently. However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work.
Are Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore all massively subsidizing their mass transit? Do they have enough riders that they're profitable? Are they more or less efficient in how the manage them?
How about Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Antwerp, Koln, Barcelona, etc... which are all an order of magnitude smaller than the previously mentioned cities but all have pretty good public transportation.
These last cities are all on the same order of size as SF. About 1 million people each and yet they have vastly better public transportation than SF
One of the biggest issues is that we force businesses and housing to have ridiculous amounts of free parking, which means that instead of dense areas where buildings can be next to each other we have a sea of asphalt with a building sprinkled here and there. In central areas these minimums amount to parking welfare for suburbanites.
People say to me "but it takes 90 minutes to go 15 miles on transit!!" - the problem isn't that transit should be faster, it's that you shouldn't have to go through 15 miles of primarily asphalt hellscape to get to basic amenities!
The core of Dublin is less than two miles across. I used to live in the middle of it and never missed a car. The core of San Diego.. well it's not really a core, and even then it's routine to have to travel several miles for basic errands, even if you live fairly close to downtown. A downtown that is prevernted from growing by parking minimums. Of course, if you ask a potential employer about transit access they look at you like you're from Mars (and, of course, choose to move on to a less hippie-ish applicant)
article is written in absolutes (talking about public transit and traffic in general) but happily ignores the fact that there is a world outside of america. maybe looking at places that are better commute-wise than sf despite being a lot poorer would be a start?
Nearly perfect for me are (1) a city with great light rail, and (2) a Brompton folding bicycle for the first & last miles. I realize that this combination isn't available to all, but it's awesome.
We created this wonderful thing called the Internet that allows us to work and collaborate with each other from anywhere in the world, yet we all still cling to the silly idea that we need to continue to expand and repair our physical transit infrastructure so we can all travel two ways every day to sit next to somebody in some office to... stare at a computer connected to the Internet for 8 hours. It becomes even more absurd in areas like San Francisco where there literally isn't even enough housing to fit everyone.
We could solve our transit infrastructure woes overnight with policy. Give a tax break to companies who have remote workers. Either that or charge people to use public transportation infrastructure on a supply/demand basis. If more people use a freeway to get to work, the cost to use it goes up, and if you don't use it at all, you don't pay a dime. This would force companies who require their workforce to be physically present to pay higher salaries to cover the cost of commuting, which may cause them to re-evaluate remote work.
Commuting to and from work really only makes sense if you are interacting with things you can't take home with you.
And before you jump in and start spreading FUD about remote work, consider this: if it suddenly became illegal to require employees who could do their work remotely to come into a physical office every day, would businesses simply shut down? Or would they figure out a way to make it work? I'm guessing they would figure out a way to make it work.
Beside everything else, i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here. Thus i have to have a car. In Russia, when i wasn't able to afford car, my cat rode bus, train, subway with me when we had to get him somewhere. Of course, i'd get a car there too the moment i could afford it, yet public transit was a feasible alternative when i didn't have a car.
The money that funds mass transit [...] comes from a mix of four sources: [...] On the federal side, most of that money comes from the federal gas tax: 18.4 cents on a gallon of regular gas 24.3 cents on the gallon for diesel, [...] 19 percent going to mass transit. That’s right—mass transit depends on people driving cars for a significant portion of its federal funding.
I don't find this counterintuitive: the more people use their car, the more the mass transit system is strengthened and more capable to ease car traffic. Maybe it's far fetched, but it's like tax on cigarettes to finance lung cancer research.
I find it interesting that the article points out that neither mass transit riders nor automobile drivers pay the full cost of their trips. Yet it never asks the obvious question: couldn't that be the main reason why both forms of transportation are inefficient?
The fact that we don't have a couple operators instead of a driver for each individual train on BART is beyond me. Look at all the private companies (Magic Bus, etc) that are sprouting up because of how terrible our public transportation is.
BART essentially holds a monopoly on our transport. I believe their contract states even during a strike, new drivers have to be trained for 6 months before they are allowed to drive BART trains. There is absolutely no way that it takes 6 months to learn how to drive an AUTOMATED train. There should be public bids submitted from private companies to run on these railways, which would lead to better service and lower costs.
[+] [-] soyiuz|10 years ago|reply
1. The problems it highlights can be reduced to low tax revenues. Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it. Things like roads and trains cannot (and should not) pay for themselves---they are a public good. The train might be empty at night, but the ability to take a train home prevents drunk driving, for example. One cannot put a monitory value on services like that, they speak to our collective quality of life. The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth.
2. Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is density. We need to value density as it allows for more compact living. Instead, municipalities in places like the Bay Area consistently vote against new construction and against zoning laws that would allow for taller, more densely populated buildings/neighborhoods. The law of supply and demand says increase the supply of housing to make something affordable. This is not some mysterious process: there's simply no political will on the part of existing inhabitants to "devalue" their residences by increasing the supply in the housing market.
[+] [-] dcposch|10 years ago|reply
That's just not true.
We have crumbling infrastructure because we refuse to prioritize it due to political dysfunction.
If youre a surgeon or a lawyer living in San Francisco, your marginal tax rate is 39.5% federal + 11% state. Over 50%. You also pay 8.75% VAT on a lot of common purchases and 1% property tax.
This is not a low tax environment.
Hong Kong has a 15% flat tax and yet they have vastly better infrastructure than we do. Singapore is a similar story. Even Istanbul, with per capita income and tax collection thats a small fraction of ours, has a great light rail system that puts Bart to shame. Istikal Street is incredible--imagine Market and Mission put together, and pedestrian only. It is a beautiful city.
So how do these places do it?
* They respect and prioritize infrastructure
* Their governments are less gridlocked
* They value density and walkability
* They have fewer NIMBYs, with much less power to obstruct
* They're less lawsuit-friendly. In the Bay every big infra project spends time and money fighting lawsuits.
* They have leaner bureaucracies. BART has tons of six figure salaries on the payroll for random adminstrative positions.
[+] [-] jensen123|10 years ago|reply
Another thing that perhaps needs to be valued more is sound insulation. I currently live in an apartment in a dense, walk-able city in Europe. However, I'm tempted to buy myself a house and a car, because I'm so sick and tired of all the noise that comes from living in an apartment in a dense area (neighbors, construction nearby, drunk people late at night etc.). Without good sound insulation, I don't think density works, although maybe it's just me who are more sensitive to this than other people.
[+] [-] jkimmel|10 years ago|reply
I'm not sure this is true. The city budget has grown substantially, now ~$9B [1].
The problem is we don't spend it on transit infrastructure, and when we do invest, we get financially mismanaged projects like the central subway [2].
[1] http://modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/san-franciscos-i... [2] http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/covering-their-tracks-t...
[+] [-] malcolmgreaves|10 years ago|reply
soyiuz, you are absolutely right: BART needs more money. It also needs new people and a radical overhaul to update a system operating on 40 year old designs and assumptions. ---- [1] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/07/are-bar... [2] http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23416601/barts-top-paid-worker...
[+] [-] petewailes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmm6o|10 years ago|reply
It does require density, but not so much that you need buildings more than a few stories high. Much more important is zoning that allows shops and restaurants to be mixed in with housing, and not wasting those few square blocks within walking distance with parking lots and private yards.
[+] [-] dkopi|10 years ago|reply
Even if you were to insist the government subsidizes "get home late from a bar without driving", Empty night trains are probably one of the least cost effective ways of doing that.
Personally, I just walk home from a bar. That prevents drunk driving since I don't need cars, taxis or trains just to get a beer.
2. Density indeed helps increase walk-ability. But it's also about mixed used development. Jane Jacobs talks a lot about this in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". If zoning laws divide the city into a "business area", a "living area" and "an entertainment area", Density isn't going to save you from having to drive between those areas.
[+] [-] chiph|10 years ago|reply
The article briefly touched on it, but as car owners transition to non-petroleum powered vehicles, the motor fuels revenue has nowhere to go but down. So the current taxation basis of gallons consumed will become unworkable. Taxing based on miles traveled has privacy implications (they will need to monitor your driving to assess the tax). A monthly road-tax based on vehicle size/weight/capacity might be the only way to keep highways funded.
To keep transit systems like BART funded, they will have to support it by taxing the local population, whether they own a car or not (remove the dependence on the highway trust fund).
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|10 years ago|reply
This is a double whammy, because so many urban areas basically came close to the brink of death during the mid 20th century and have only revitalized in the last 30-ish years or so. That means there's a massive infrastructure and services "debt" in most cities, so they have the burden of playing catch up as well.
> Things like roads and trains cannot (and should not) pay for themselves---they are a public good. The train might be empty at night, but the ability to take a train home prevents drunk driving, for example. One cannot put a monitory value on services like that, they speak to our collective quality of life. The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth.
I strongly agree with this and wish it was more of a priority (sadly, our political system is so broken everyone is focused on other sideshows and wedge issues). Public transit is really a strong societal good, and an equalizer. Good public transit is a big factor in enabling the poorest and least advantaged to find jobs wherever they exist while keeping their housing costs low and also enabling things like continuing education and so on. It's a major component in that whole "lifting yourself up by your bootstraps" thing that people think is so important.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|10 years ago|reply
Roads are also rivalrous (you and I can't simultaneously occupy the same piece of pavement) and excludible (don't pay gas taxes, you get no gas, you can't ride).
If gas taxes were impractical, roads might be a public good.
We also collect plenty of taxes for transit. Our taxes just buy us 1/5-1/100 as much as every other country in the world, because our transit systems are incredibly inefficient.
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...
[+] [-] ajmurmann|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrrrtttt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowardlydragon|10 years ago|reply
20) That would probably require a sprawl tax. The wannabe rich in suburbs ... well goto 10
[+] [-] PantaloonFlames|10 years ago|reply
rack em and stack em, eh?
recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all.
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11673
We can promote more "compact living" but the data shows it degrades human happiness.
[+] [-] seivan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbd1984|10 years ago|reply
The premise is just fatally flawed.
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|10 years ago|reply
You sure as shit can. Budgets are fixed. Budget consumption is zero sum. Maybe in fantasy land we could spend unlimited resources on trains and unicorns, but in the real world we have to measure the cost-benefit of all expenditures.
[+] [-] barney54|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|10 years ago|reply
No, they're not.
From Wikipedia (which matches what I learnt in economics class):
"... a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others."
Trains are definitely excludable (can't get on without a ticket) and rivalrous (the train can get full, meaning no space for additional passengers).
Roads are obviously rivalrous (gridlock!) but you could argue the extent to which they are excludable. Sure, there are toll roads, but it would be hard for you to exclude me from using the road in front of my house. With technology, though, you could make me pay for usage according to some arbitrarily-designed tariff, though, which would force me to self-exclude if I weren't willing to pay the price.
[+] [-] massysett|10 years ago|reply
Like most of these pieces, it compares road spending and transit spending as though this is somehow a useful comparison. It isn't. For rail transit systems, spending includes all labor and capital expenses--train operators, cars, electricity, etc. Road spending does not include the enormous capital investment that citizens and businesses spend for motor vehicles.
Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road.
Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.
To top it off the piece says nothing about "why traffic is awful".
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|10 years ago|reply
Building roads encourages people to drive in their cars to places. The problem is that automobile infrastructure is woefully inefficient, expensive and doesn't scale.
If you want to create the ability for people to go to places, there's more efficient and cheaper ways to do this than building more roads. One of these methods is public transit.
[+] [-] nostromo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supergeek133|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teek|10 years ago|reply
If you're going to use the argument that roads are more useful than transit because they cover the whole nation, then you're making the same argument the article is making for transit, just with different parameters. Rather than paint it black and white, both systems are needed to increase overall transportation efficiency as a whole. Transit is effective in dense areas like large cities. Roads are effective in smaller less dense areas where space isn't a premium.
Additionally, everyone likes to gloss over the fact that you mention where public transit in the US is largely government owned and operated, therefore the expenses include all costs associated with the entire system. For roads, however, only the road cost is covered. This is a different kind of unfairness. It makes roads and auto travel look cheap because costs are dispersed over different parties and items: government pays for the road, drivers pay for their car and maintenance, buildings hide the cost of private parking.
Meanwhile transit systems look expensive because the numbers include all associated expenses. To fix the problem, I actually think transit systems should be allowed to be privatized and treated on the same level as roads, that is just like roads, the government allocates land use for mass transit and private companies operate the system. Additionally most of the recent laws surrounding (free) parking and the interstate highway systems require additional roads and parking for every new development. So ridiculous things start happening like low-income housing in a dense area having unused parking spaces being built to satisfy minimum parking requirements. Downtown road improvements requiring unnecessarily large intersections and allocations to satisfy level of service requirements.
> Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.
The problem is roads are a 2D system with limited scalability while cities are 3D environments that often scale in 3 dimensions. Furthermore automobiles most of the time are used to inefficiently carry 1 person but they have a large footprint. So at a certain point, traffic congestion measures actually do not increase throughput linearly based on investment. So if you want "people to go places" you start finding yourself with ridiculously expensive projects that actually just end up making the problem worse.
Many cities in the world have found solutions to traffic problems and they involve one of 2 things:
1. Introduce a toll or congestion fee thereby encouraging only those that truly want to use the road to use it.
2. Remove high capacity "arterial" roads thus causing traffic to be more evenly distributed across multiple low throughput paths.
The first item operates on the concept that even a relatively small fee will cause standard supply and demand rules to apply rather than users aggressively trying to take advantage of a "free" resource.
The second item operates on the concept that traffic distributed across more direct paths will lead to less overall system traffic compared to a system that encourages everyone to take the perceived fastest and highest throughput path.
[+] [-] dkopi|10 years ago|reply
No discussion of Mass transit or "giving up your car" is completely without discussing the walk-ability of cities.
[+] [-] anexprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
You've spread your infrastructure out so wide in some places that walking becomes more like a hike. It's little wonder that you end up driving for anything beyond going next door. :)
[+] [-] justizin|10 years ago|reply
San Francisco has neighborhoods with a WalkScore of 100, but the baristas and cooks and other laborers in those neighborhoods, including construction workers who build the homes, largely drive and transit in.
IMO it basically carries that you worsen the Effective WalkScore of other people's lives, even if they live in neighborhoods that are walkable to desk-sitting professionals, because the wage-paying jobs in those areas (e.g. Oakland / East Bay) doesn't pay as well as the wage-paying jobs in neighboring cities with stronger economies (e.g. SF).
This is absolutely happening right now and the reverse impact is that SF's cost of living is creeping over Oakland's and driving the folks who live in Oakland and work in SF to further reaches of the bay as people, giving up on walkable life in SF, try it out in Oakland.
Bicycles help this, but I'm here to tell you that nobody has any fucking sympathy that you've chosen a car-free life and it's El Nino and why are you late because your coworker who drives an SUV 100 miles is already here and how is your life possibly harder?
Anyway .. it's complex AF. Believing another world is possible is for sure a great first step.
[+] [-] pc86|10 years ago|reply
I used to live in a downtown area and it was nice being able to walk 6 blocks to work. But I would never want to raise a family in an apartment or with those terrible schools.
[+] [-] whorleater|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|10 years ago|reply
I live in SoCal, and I can't get my head around the car culture mentality. Of all the places that should be walkable, one that is 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the entire year should rank very high on the list. But nooo.... the walkable cities are in places that get run over by a glacier every six months. Go figure.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rsync|10 years ago|reply
Buses are terrible. They are terrible functionally, they are terrible aesthetically, and they are terrible logistically.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that across a broad spectrum of preferences, you would be very hard pressed to find anything worse in the urban, built environment than some big, loud, lumbering, clumsy (and usually) sooty bus bungling about the place.
I love good public transit. I love light rail. I love the subway. I will do anything not to ride a bus. I am reminded of that quote from steve jobs about the touchscreen phones and the stylus:
"if you see a (bus), they blew it."
[+] [-] verg|10 years ago|reply
From 2012[3]: "When asked by transit blogger Benjamin Kabak about its high construction costs, Michael Horodniceanu, president of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital construction division, gave a two-word answer: “work rules.” Citing the example of the city’s revered sandhogs, he said the MTA employs 25 for tunnel-boring machine work that Spain does with nine."
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r... [2] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp... [3] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-27/labor-rules...
[+] [-] bradleyjg|10 years ago|reply
I don't know if it's an urban legend or not, but I've been told that one of those conductors punching tickets on every train is technically designated and paid as a "fireman" i.e. person responsible for shoveling coal into a boiler because the collective bargaining agreement forbids them from eliminating the position.
[+] [-] FreedomToCreate|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|10 years ago|reply
From an Economics standpoint, congested traffic is the same phenomenon as the old Soviet bread lines. A underpriced good is inaccessible in practice, since supply is way lower than demand at that price.
The solution is "Road Pricing", where drivers pay to drive. The price varies depending on what road, time of day etc. Maximum revenue should coincide with maximum throughput, giving everyone (ready to pay) a smooth and fast commute. It also provides incentives to build more roads where they are mostly needed.
[+] [-] louprado|10 years ago|reply
If the problem is that the BART is operating beyond capacity, adding capacity might not matter if the population is set to decline for the other reasons stated.
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|10 years ago|reply
The added benefit of correctly pricing driving is that people will make more informed decisions about where they live and how they get to work, that will result in more compact communities and less urban sprawl.
[+] [-] supergeek133|10 years ago|reply
Problem is the further away you get from the city center the worse it gets. They've talked about putting in a light rail line to the southwest suburbs at a cost of billions of dollars, meanwhile the core roads don't get additional help and are perpetually bad because of the winter.
It's a balancing act, and at some point everyone needs to decide who's lifestyle is more important from a priority perspective IMO. If I decide to live in the suburbs, and commute an hour a day, is a dollar more important for that person? Or the person closer to the city core that wants more mass transit options?
Honestly I can go both directions. I currently have a 10 minute commute (by car). But I've also had the 60+ minute commutes for jobs. I also use the light rail to get to the airport pretty frequently. However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work.
[+] [-] greggman|10 years ago|reply
Are Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore all massively subsidizing their mass transit? Do they have enough riders that they're profitable? Are they more or less efficient in how the manage them?
How about Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Antwerp, Koln, Barcelona, etc... which are all an order of magnitude smaller than the previously mentioned cities but all have pretty good public transportation.
These last cities are all on the same order of size as SF. About 1 million people each and yet they have vastly better public transportation than SF
[+] [-] CalRobert|10 years ago|reply
People say to me "but it takes 90 minutes to go 15 miles on transit!!" - the problem isn't that transit should be faster, it's that you shouldn't have to go through 15 miles of primarily asphalt hellscape to get to basic amenities!
The core of Dublin is less than two miles across. I used to live in the middle of it and never missed a car. The core of San Diego.. well it's not really a core, and even then it's routine to have to travel several miles for basic errands, even if you live fairly close to downtown. A downtown that is prevernted from growing by parking minimums. Of course, if you ask a potential employer about transit access they look at you like you're from Mars (and, of course, choose to move on to a less hippie-ish applicant)
[+] [-] mrfijal|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pklausler|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknutter|10 years ago|reply
We could solve our transit infrastructure woes overnight with policy. Give a tax break to companies who have remote workers. Either that or charge people to use public transportation infrastructure on a supply/demand basis. If more people use a freeway to get to work, the cost to use it goes up, and if you don't use it at all, you don't pay a dime. This would force companies who require their workforce to be physically present to pay higher salaries to cover the cost of commuting, which may cause them to re-evaluate remote work.
Commuting to and from work really only makes sense if you are interacting with things you can't take home with you.
And before you jump in and start spreading FUD about remote work, consider this: if it suddenly became illegal to require employees who could do their work remotely to come into a physical office every day, would businesses simply shut down? Or would they figure out a way to make it work? I'm guessing they would figure out a way to make it work.
[+] [-] trhway|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatfrenchguy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merraksh|10 years ago|reply
I don't find this counterintuitive: the more people use their car, the more the mass transit system is strengthened and more capable to ease car traffic. Maybe it's far fetched, but it's like tax on cigarettes to finance lung cancer research.
[+] [-] pdonis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sna1l|10 years ago|reply
BART essentially holds a monopoly on our transport. I believe their contract states even during a strike, new drivers have to be trained for 6 months before they are allowed to drive BART trains. There is absolutely no way that it takes 6 months to learn how to drive an AUTOMATED train. There should be public bids submitted from private companies to run on these railways, which would lead to better service and lower costs.