6 ms·

Car culture forms a positive feedback loop and perpetuates itself just like many other things. Everyone has a car. So you build a lot of parking and don't wor

• TillE 9y ago
  Haven't a bunch of companies relocated from Silicon Valley to SF specifically because employees preferred to live in SF and not commute for hours? I think people are "voting" for that as a priority, to the extent they can.
  • tachyonbeam 9y ago
    I left Silicon Valley and went back to my home country because I couldn't stand suburbia, and couldn't stand the idea of commuting from SF either. I now make 1/3 as much money, but live a comfortable lifestyle and commute to work in 25 minutes of public transit.
  • ghaff 9y ago
    Some employees do. While making it totally untenable for many others. Which may be fine depending upon the demographic you're targeting.
    • santaclaus 9y ago
      > While making it totally untenable for many others. Howso?
      • khuey 9y ago
        If you want a large house, a backyard, or good public schools living in SF can be tough.
        • kylec 9y ago
          Or a car. Some people like living a car-centric lifestyle, and it's no fun in SF.
          • closeparen 9y ago
            One of the things you're paying rent for is the vast amount of nature sites within a few hours' driving. Living in SF and never using a car is a huge waste, though if you go infrequently enough it can make more sense to rent as needed.
        • santaclaus 9y ago
          That is what BART is for though, yea? I have friends with nice houses and driveways and all that in Berkeley and it is only a few stops into the city.
  • greglindahl 9y ago
    No, it's mainly because the best parts of Silicon Valley ran out of space. If historical norms had been followed, Palantir would have moved away from Palo Alto a long time ago.
• ams6110 9y ago
  The article does point out that the vast number of parking spaces at these offices is dictated by zoning requirements, and the remote locations away from transit are mostly a result of NIMBYism.
• losteric 9y ago
  Effective public transit can kill the auto feedback loop. The problem is BART fell into (poorly managed) maintenance-only mode for too long. Now they're trying to maintain and incrementally expand the system in disparate directions, which doesn't leverage economies of scale. Plus the bay has to deal with multiple inefficient overlapping agencies managing transit. Tech companies should be actively lobbying for pro-density/pro-transit political candidates and vocally encouraging constituent employees to campaign/vote at all levels - a high-density highly connected Bay Area would save the companies millions in salary alone. * Job density near Sunnyvale: http://imgur.com/a/C0Xl9 http://imgur.com/a/C0Xl9 (via https://www.slideshare.net/alevin/sunnyvale-peery-park-presentation https://www.slideshare.net/alevin/sunnyvale-peery-park-prese...) * Bart stations: https://www.bart.gov/stations https://www.bart.gov/stations * Hypothetical "BART 2050" map: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*f5wofXsD8WNqPOZSUPjXFg.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*f5wofXsD8WNqPOZSU... (proposed, planned, and under-construction projects via https://futuretravel.today/bay-area-2050-the-bart-metro-map-ab83b22d3d8b https://futuretravel.today/bay-area-2050-the-bart-metro-map-... - good read) 2050 is an unacceptably long timeline - especially if the biggest issues are purely politics and bureaucracy. The engineering side is not a bottleneck and the political system can be fixed if we just helped the existing pro-density/pro-transit groups get elected.
  • kspaans 9y ago
    And hopefully they will finally finish those empty apartment buildings in Downtown Sunnyvale soon. http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/13/sunnyvale-downtown-to-finally-resume-construction/ http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/13/sunnyvale-downtown-to-...
  • dnautics 9y ago
    Part of the problem is that pro-transit usually is synonymous with "pro-transit subsidy". That's not a sustainable system. With expensive prices on systems like the BART, even this subsidy is going disproportionately to certain tax brackets and not others. There are certainly for profit public transit operators with higher uptime, higher QOS, better safety record, and dramatically lower prices, one wonders what the hell is wrong with BART.
• oddthink 9y ago
  But even in the US, there are other options. I'm in the Google NYC office, which occupies most of a building that's a full city block and 15 stories high (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue) and that sits on top of a major subway station. We also have floors in a few of the neighboring buildings (Chelsea Market, etc.). It seems to work really well. The density means that it's not that physically far to go to meet with another team, and that you hear what's going on with completely unrelated divisions. I'm a little surprised that Silicon Valley overall has stuck with these relatively low-rise, sprawling campuses.
  • closeparen 9y ago
    Manhattan is the one place in the US where urbanism is allowed, and even then, there's a pretty strong instinct towards preserving the parts of it built at lower density. Building Manhattan-like environments even a few miles over in Brooklyn is vehemently opposed, though not very successfully.
    • dionidium 9y ago
      San Francisco would have 1.6 million people at Brooklyn's density. Fears of Manhattanization are a distraction. What San Francisco needs are vast tracts of 5 and 6-story apartment buildings where single-family homes now sit.
      • closeparen 9y ago
        Most of San Francisco's single family homes are further from the city (in public transit minutes) than Oakland and Berkeley. The public transit service from single family homes to downtown is already overcrowded and way too frequent (there is an extreme congestion problem among buses and trains themselves, before considering private cars). I'm skeptical that Muni could even maintain current levels of crowding with so many more riders. I'm certain that Muni service to these areas would not get any faster. So the result of this would be to have vast numbers of people wasting vast amounts of time. We're much more likely to get a livable city with a few dozen to a few hundred skyscrapers in and around each downtown (SF, Oakland, etc). People living in them could walk or bike to work reasonably quickly. Vast tracts of 5-6 story buildings would only work if we could blanket them in subway coverage, and even BRT is pushing the upper limit of our capabilities as a human civilization these days.
• rsj_hn 9y ago
  That's a pretty misanthropic, and frankly, uninformed view. People know their interests. The tradeoff is transportation versus land. You want to stop paying rent, but can't afford to buy your own place so you decide to buy farther out and spend more time traveling. We got a middle class in this country due to the Automobile and the suburbs, which let people get out from under the thumb of the landlord and buy their own land. Cars -- and transportation more generally -- is a produced good. Land is not a produced good. For all the complaints about sprawl, an economy in which we substitute produced goods for non-produced goods that are inherited from wealthy families is a better economy. Now you can argue that we should be using more electric vehicles, or fixed track vehicles, and all of that is worthy of discussion. But you cannot argue against sprawl. We continue to spread out as a society so that each person buys their own plot of land instead of paying endless rent to the landlords who monopolize the land in the city center. We continue to try to improve transportation and communication so that those who own key locations cannot extract the same rents from us as they used to. This is a virtuous feedback loop, and those wanting everyone to live as renters in large urban centers don't understand that this creates a permanent rentier class of landlords with unlimited power of taxation, and a permanent underclass of tenants who don't get to keep the gains of their increasing productivity. That's how you get serfs. That's why landlords have always opposed transportation innovation, whether it be opposition to the creation/subsidy of roads or of rail. It is also why we have a history of diffusion. The built up areas of cities house fewer people per square meter of land than they did 100 years ago, and there it's also fewer than 100 years before that, etc. Sprawl has been happening since Roman Times, and landlords have been screaming against it for all of history.
  • losteric 9y ago
    How do condos fit into your model of what "we" want?
    • rsj_hn 9y ago
      Condos are great, but not really relevant in the big scheme of things. They may be relevant in the future, but so far, the technological gains in the area of building construction have lagged the technological gains in the area of transportation and communication. Alternately, you can ask why does density keep declining even though we have the technology to build taller buildings? E.g. the skyline keeps going up but people/square meter in built up areas keep declining? Why is that? One reason is that building up is really inefficient. It costs a lot more in terms of $/sqft as you add another story, and those extra $ have to paid by the lower stories as well. They aren't just paid by the top floors. So even though tall buildings tend to capture our imagination, we don't really build a lot of tall buildings as a percentage of all buildings built. It's too expensive. Another reason is that space per person keeps increasing. We like to build our houses about 6% bigger each year. That number dwarfs any gains in density from taller buildings. E.g. in the past, you'd have 400 people living in a 4 story building and now you have 300 people living in an 8 story building. The building has gotten taller but density has decreased and the need for spreading out hasn't changed.
• Tiktaalik 9y ago
  Yep! It's the cycle of auto dependency. Shown in this diagram: http://imgur.com/a/beqcY http://imgur.com/a/beqcY Tough to break out of without a serious investments in transportation alternatives such as bike lanes and public transit.
  • Spivak 9y ago
    I really don't know why everyone thinks that the way to break out of the car cycle is transportation alternatives. If your city was planned around cars then everything else is going to be inferior. Public transit is costs more in time than a car does in gas and you have to plan your schedule around when they run and where they go. Bikes are only good over short distances but those aren't representative of common trips in a car oriented city -- many destinations are 25 minutes away by car which is not feasible to reach by bike. If you want people to give up their cars then you have to plan dense. All day-to-day needs need to be within walking distance and tight regulation to prevent incumbent owners from taking advantage of citizens with fewer options. Weekly needs need to be within biking distance and small electric vehicles need to be made available for the elderly, disabled, tired, or lazy to get to them on their schedule. Rare needs need to be available remotely, by delivery, or reachable by public transportation for the patient or hired car for the impatient.