5 ms·

One of the interesting side-effects of Sen. Fienstien's quest to keep high-rises out of San Francisco is that _all_ real estate is more expensive. There are man

One of the interesting side-effects of Sen. Fienstien's quest to keep high-rises out of San Francisco is that _all_ real estate is more expensive. There are many people here with similarly narrow ideas about how to protect what is "theirs." A great example would be the people who throw rocks at Google busses. Everyone on that buss can afford a car and would drive to work alone (maybe carpool) if they didn't have the busses to reduce congestion.

software_radio 11y ago
A better example is the Police who didn't arrest and prosecute the rock-throwers for "assault with a deadly weapon." They're also part of the problem.
DannyBee 11y ago
FWIW: A lot of those rock throwers were probably not in bad shape. That is because the real people being hurt were probably working their first or second job at the time that was happening, and didn't have time to throw rocks at buses because they'd get fired for not showing up to work.
- xur17 11y ago
  Serious question: Who is getting hurt by Google driving people to work on buses. It seems like this reduces congestion, and helps the environment, which is good for everyone. What am I missing here?
  - jonknee 11y ago
    The issue was they're using public bus stops. It's not hard to picture why it's demeaning to be standing at the public infrastructure and see a fancy shuttle come and pick up "Google People" while you're left waiting to ride with the proletariat. Especially demeaning when the shuttle is in the way of the real bus. Imagine if the NYC subway had a special car for Wall Street workers that was much more comfortable.
    - fluxquanta 11y ago
      How is this any different from someone driving a 2017 Lexus versus a 1990 Toyota? Both may be a reflection of the income one receives. Both take up the same public infrastructure of the road and parking spaces.
      - rosser 11y ago
        I'm sorry, but no. Private busses using public bus stops — and blocking public bus traffic — is not an income issue.
        tptacek 11y ago
        Are the private busses in any way holding up public bus service? Is there a serious reported story somewhere establishing this?
        pvg 11y ago
        SFMTA's most recent evaluation: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2015/Evaluation%20Report%20-%20Oct%205%202015.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2015/Eval...
        rosser 11y ago
        TL;DR: Of an average of ~3000 "stop events" per day, 2.7%, or 80-ish, resulted in a shuttle blocking MUNI. Shuttles were also seen to block travel and/or bike lanes in some 35% of their stops.
      - jonknee 11y ago
        I don't get your point, but if you park your car in a public bus stop you're an asshole regardless of its value.
        fluxquanta 11y ago
  - rosser 11y ago
    In that respect — traffic congestion — I think the buses are a good thing. But there's definitely a down-side. Gentrification, for example, though usually regarded as a net, long-term win, is short-term very painful for many people. Families that have lived somewhere for years, and communities that have grown up over generations, are being shredded as property-owners rent-seek. Now, yes, it's their property to do with as they will (subject to their remaining in compliance with the law), but I will continue to point out that there are some very interesting discussions to be had in the areas where the sets "things that are legal" and "things that are moral" don't intersect. I was on a date with a woman — a high school teacher — Sunday night who lives in a rent controlled building in the Mission. (Aside: I'm not looking to start a debate over rent control, so please don't go there.) She told me that her landlord has been delaying depositing her rent checks until after their due date, in order to "establish" a pattern of habitual late-payment, which, presumably, he hopes to use in some later eviction action. Does that kind of behavior — apparently increasingly common — qualify as hurting people? Because, if her landlord were able to kick (or buy) her out, he would be raising the rent on her apartment by over $4000/month, based on the price her new neighbors are paying for an identical unit (again, please don't turn this into a debate over rent control), and pretty much the only people who can afford that are making Silly Valley tech salaries — and probably doing so with roommates, at that. A teacher, who teaches the children of San Franciscans, certainly can't afford ~$6000/month, not at SFUSD pay, so let's favor a couple of kids who work in Mountain View or Palo Alto, and have no expenses except rent and leisure activities? How does that make sense, again?
    - briandear 11y ago
      Maybe teachers shouldn't take jobs in areas they can't afford. Serious point. The market would then have to raise the prices for that labor due to the shortage until the rate equals the amount a teacher would need to afford the area. But the real issue is that supply and demand is distorted in the area: no new supply, increasing demand. It doesn't take an engineer to see where that equation leads. Add rent control on top of that and you have modern San Francisco. Time to open the floodgates and build. What would be wrong with Korea style 60 story housing? The problem is that people want quaint B&B style neighborhoods yet they complain about everyone wanting to live there; rather than addressing the supply issue, they want to address the demand issue. You can't even replace a toilet without having to go through regulatory and permitting hell. I am not sure what people in San Fran actually want. It seems like they want an amazing place that's affordable while lamenting that everyone else wants to live there too. I do take some comfort in the fact that this is one thing that can't be blamed on Republicans.
  - Florin_Andrei 11y ago
    I'm guessing it's just hostility towards high-tech people in general. My old Honda Civic eventually died one day. I had to take it to the scrapyard, fixing it would have cost thousands of dollars. The old guy at the scrapyard gave me a good look and said something like "so, you guys went public today, eh?" I could tell he was not in good shape (financially or otherwise), and he had some level of resentment towards what he perceived as entitled tech workers addicted to "easy money". I didn't even try to explain that I'm by no means rich, I had to scrap the car because it was solidly dead, and yes, I was going to get a new car, but it was going to be a Civic, just like the old one. Not a Lamborghini. But there was a divide there, a whole set of wrong assumptions, that didn't seem I could bridge in a few minutes of conversation. There are a whole lot of people in this area who are scraping by on tiny wages, and a lot of them don't think very highly of the high tech industry.
  - DannyBee 11y ago
    From what i can tell, they see it as symbolic of tech people "taking over".
  - ktothemc 11y ago
    For the nth time, it's not really about that. It's politics. It was an effective symbol for tenants rights activists to latch onto to get attention for eviction protections, which weren't going to momentum otherwise without a nice, sexy controversial symbol that would attract national media.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  Or they have plenty of time to throw rocks at buses because they can't find work at all. I mean, yeah, throwing rocks is stupid and useless and counterproductive as a protest strategy, but declaring that protestors can't be victims and victims can't be protestors seems like a convenient Catch-22 for dismissing anything anyone says. Edit: Tell me why I'm wrong, please.
rootedbox 11y ago
The city can't support the 30k cars that would be needed for the people taking tech busses (no room to park that many cars).. so if we stopped the tech busses some of those people would move closer to work without busses; others would take Caltrain. Both of those things would reduce congestion, and pollution more than tech busses. We don't know the exact number that this would reduce because the tech bus legislation passed without the environmental study that is required (hence why there is a lawsuit right now).
- the_watcher 11y ago
  That's a major assumption to make. Plenty of people who work in the South Bay or East Bay without access to a tech bus already drive.
- chrischen 11y ago
  What you just said is that it would increase congestion to the point where they would move closer to work. They wouldn't move closer to work if they could still drive their cars to work. They can't drive to cars to work because there are no busses and there is massive congestion.

software_radio 11y ago

A better example is the Police who didn't arrest and prosecute the rock-throwers for "assault with a deadly weapon." They're also part of the problem.

DannyBee 11y ago

FWIW: A lot of those rock throwers were probably not in bad shape. That is because the real people being hurt were probably working their first or second job at the time that was happening, and didn't have time to throw rocks at buses because they'd get fired for not showing up to work.

xur17 11y ago
Serious question: Who is getting hurt by Google driving people to work on buses. It seems like this reduces congestion, and helps the environment, which is good for everyone. What am I missing here?
- jonknee 11y ago
  The issue was they're using public bus stops. It's not hard to picture why it's demeaning to be standing at the public infrastructure and see a fancy shuttle come and pick up "Google People" while you're left waiting to ride with the proletariat. Especially demeaning when the shuttle is in the way of the real bus. Imagine if the NYC subway had a special car for Wall Street workers that was much more comfortable.
  - fluxquanta 11y ago
    How is this any different from someone driving a 2017 Lexus versus a 1990 Toyota? Both may be a reflection of the income one receives. Both take up the same public infrastructure of the road and parking spaces.
    - rosser 11y ago
      I'm sorry, but no. Private busses using public bus stops — and blocking public bus traffic — is not an income issue.
      - tptacek 11y ago
        Are the private busses in any way holding up public bus service? Is there a serious reported story somewhere establishing this?
        pvg 11y ago
        SFMTA's most recent evaluation: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2015/Evaluation%20Report%20-%20Oct%205%202015.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2015/Eval...
        rosser 11y ago
        TL;DR: Of an average of ~3000 "stop events" per day, 2.7%, or 80-ish, resulted in a shuttle blocking MUNI. Shuttles were also seen to block travel and/or bike lanes in some 35% of their stops.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      I don't get your point, but if you park your car in a public bus stop you're an asshole regardless of its value.
      - fluxquanta 11y ago
- rosser 11y ago
  In that respect — traffic congestion — I think the buses are a good thing. But there's definitely a down-side. Gentrification, for example, though usually regarded as a net, long-term win, is short-term very painful for many people. Families that have lived somewhere for years, and communities that have grown up over generations, are being shredded as property-owners rent-seek. Now, yes, it's their property to do with as they will (subject to their remaining in compliance with the law), but I will continue to point out that there are some very interesting discussions to be had in the areas where the sets "things that are legal" and "things that are moral" don't intersect. I was on a date with a woman — a high school teacher — Sunday night who lives in a rent controlled building in the Mission. (Aside: I'm not looking to start a debate over rent control, so please don't go there.) She told me that her landlord has been delaying depositing her rent checks until after their due date, in order to "establish" a pattern of habitual late-payment, which, presumably, he hopes to use in some later eviction action. Does that kind of behavior — apparently increasingly common — qualify as hurting people? Because, if her landlord were able to kick (or buy) her out, he would be raising the rent on her apartment by over $4000/month, based on the price her new neighbors are paying for an identical unit (again, please don't turn this into a debate over rent control), and pretty much the only people who can afford that are making Silly Valley tech salaries — and probably doing so with roommates, at that. A teacher, who teaches the children of San Franciscans, certainly can't afford ~$6000/month, not at SFUSD pay, so let's favor a couple of kids who work in Mountain View or Palo Alto, and have no expenses except rent and leisure activities? How does that make sense, again?
  - briandear 11y ago
    Maybe teachers shouldn't take jobs in areas they can't afford. Serious point. The market would then have to raise the prices for that labor due to the shortage until the rate equals the amount a teacher would need to afford the area. But the real issue is that supply and demand is distorted in the area: no new supply, increasing demand. It doesn't take an engineer to see where that equation leads. Add rent control on top of that and you have modern San Francisco. Time to open the floodgates and build. What would be wrong with Korea style 60 story housing? The problem is that people want quaint B&B style neighborhoods yet they complain about everyone wanting to live there; rather than addressing the supply issue, they want to address the demand issue. You can't even replace a toilet without having to go through regulatory and permitting hell. I am not sure what people in San Fran actually want. It seems like they want an amazing place that's affordable while lamenting that everyone else wants to live there too. I do take some comfort in the fact that this is one thing that can't be blamed on Republicans.
- Florin_Andrei 11y ago
  I'm guessing it's just hostility towards high-tech people in general. My old Honda Civic eventually died one day. I had to take it to the scrapyard, fixing it would have cost thousands of dollars. The old guy at the scrapyard gave me a good look and said something like "so, you guys went public today, eh?" I could tell he was not in good shape (financially or otherwise), and he had some level of resentment towards what he perceived as entitled tech workers addicted to "easy money". I didn't even try to explain that I'm by no means rich, I had to scrap the car because it was solidly dead, and yes, I was going to get a new car, but it was going to be a Civic, just like the old one. Not a Lamborghini. But there was a divide there, a whole set of wrong assumptions, that didn't seem I could bridge in a few minutes of conversation. There are a whole lot of people in this area who are scraping by on tiny wages, and a lot of them don't think very highly of the high tech industry.
- DannyBee 11y ago
  From what i can tell, they see it as symbolic of tech people "taking over".
- ktothemc 11y ago
  For the nth time, it's not really about that. It's politics. It was an effective symbol for tenants rights activists to latch onto to get attention for eviction protections, which weren't going to momentum otherwise without a nice, sexy controversial symbol that would attract national media.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
Or they have plenty of time to throw rocks at buses because they can't find work at all. I mean, yeah, throwing rocks is stupid and useless and counterproductive as a protest strategy, but declaring that protestors can't be victims and victims can't be protestors seems like a convenient Catch-22 for dismissing anything anyone says. Edit: Tell me why I'm wrong, please.

rootedbox 11y ago

The city can't support the 30k cars that would be needed for the people taking tech busses (no room to park that many cars).. so if we stopped the tech busses some of those people would move closer to work without busses; others would take Caltrain. Both of those things would reduce congestion, and pollution more than tech busses. We don't know the exact number that this would reduce because the tech bus legislation passed without the environmental study that is required (hence why there is a lawsuit right now).

the_watcher 11y ago
That's a major assumption to make. Plenty of people who work in the South Bay or East Bay without access to a tech bus already drive.
chrischen 11y ago
What you just said is that it would increase congestion to the point where they would move closer to work. They wouldn't move closer to work if they could still drive their cars to work. They can't drive to cars to work because there are no busses and there is massive congestion.