7 ms·

How about we talk about building infrastructure? The whole Bay Area is building like crazy, and yet the roads are getting worse (more building? more traffic lig

• rjkennedy98 7y ago
  Show the stats that Bay Area is building like crazy. I am so sick of people saying things like New York and Bay Area and California are building like crazy. No they are not. There is not one stat that shows that. Period.
  • bryanlarsen 7y ago
    "In fact, Toronto currently has more cranes in the sky than New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston combined." https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2019/07/toronto-construction-cranes/ https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2019/07/toronto-c... Toronto prices are crazy, so Toronto isn't building enough, let alone the major coastal American cities.
  • wpasc 7y ago
    I don't think new york should be lumped in with california in that measure. This site shows active construction in new york: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/nyc-active-major-construction.html https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/nyc-active-major-...
    • shuckles 7y ago
      New York built fewer new homes per capita than the Bay Area for half the years in the last decade.
    • bobbydroptables 7y ago
      It's really hard to wrap your head around whether a city is building a lot by looking at a raw number. But fewer than 7,000 building permits in a city of 8 million is frighteningly little. You need to compare it to population growth, decades of building backlog, job growth, etc.
      • irq11 7y ago
        New construction in New York can have hundreds of units. I don’t know why you would automatically assume that 7,000 is a “frightening” number.
        • bobbydroptables 7y ago
          I probably could have made my comment clearer. I'm not assuming anything. It's well documented that NYC is building frighteningly little housing per capita. I was just pointing out the the linked post shows how NYC construction is stagnant, not "active". It was unclear if he meant "active" as in "they're building a large quantity" or as in "currently happening".
      • throwaway100773 7y ago
        New York City has been losing residents for some time. This is not a supply and demand thing as much as easy money policy chasing hard assets. I’ll have to dig it up the numbers, but Manhattan many condos are vacant, and have been bought by foreign money who don’t live in nyc or investors looking to park assets.
        • bobbydroptables 7y ago
          It's a complex problem but the value of NYC real estate for foreign investors assumes scarcity of NYC real estate. Foreign money or no, if you have a very desirable city with a growing job market and stagnant construction, prices will appreciate. I would challenge you to find a single counterexample Foreign money doesn't help prices but it's more a symptom of our problems than a cause. Also, NYC population is not declining. I wish. There have been some stagnant years but nowhere near enough to compensate for 50 years of underbuilding.
  • samspenc 7y ago
    I'm not sure about the Bay Area, but at least for New York, it looks like building is picking up: https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-sees-biggest-home-building-boom-in-years-11580654688 https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-sees-biggest-home-buil... "Despite a weak outlook for residential real estate, the number of building permits issued in New York City for new homes surged last year to the highest pace since 2015. It was the second-highest total since the end of the last big building boom in 2008. Permits for 26,547 units of housing were issued in 2019, about 27% more than the year before ..."
    • rjkennedy98 7y ago
      So New York is building a lot because they are building more than any time since 2015? Almost as much as they built in 2008? Is this a joke?
    • KptMarchewa 7y ago
      It apparently has over 8 million units: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=12&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjFgv7S-NHnAhXk-ioKHfCVCI0QFjALegQIBBAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffactfinder.census.gov%2Fbkmk%2Fcf%2F1.0%2Fen%2Fstate%2FNew%2520York%2FHOUSING%2FHOUSING_UNITS&usg=AOvVaw1W-O4aweCQEsUpgCkMaIBs https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... So this is not even 0,5% of overall units.
  • likpok 7y ago
    The bay area is building, but very unevenly. SOMA has a bunch of visible construction, as do certain places along El Camino. That can give the impression of building like crazy even when the reality is different. The other problem is the bay area only does megaprojects, so the little building it does is the extremely disruptive and visible kind.
    • tathougies 7y ago
      > only does megaprojects That's because only megaprojects can afford to overcome all the regulatory and neighborhood hurdles. Do you think the average homeowner trying to become a landlord by converting their home into a duplex has enough money to pay for both sides of a law suit, as this developer had to?
• xvedejas 7y ago
  I'm not sure that the roads really support more peak traffic at this point. Rather, we can reduce the traffic and train crowding by building more housing near jobs so that workers need not embark on 50+ mile super-commutes each day. Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of infrastructure we're most sorely missing.
  • rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    Adding extra lanes to a road just increases the amount of people driving on them, instead of easing traffic. So I would bet the same is true of public transit.
    • xvedejas 7y ago
      Right, so you reduce crowding by shortening trips, not by adding service. Ideally we do both and get lots of people using public transit for short trips.
    • maccam94 7y ago
      True, traveling on public transit is just more efficient in terms of space and energy.
    • rayiner 7y ago
      Yes, but it moves more people. Driving doesn’t need to compete with public transit for speed—transit is immensely slower than driving even in places with excellent transit.
      • bluGill 7y ago
        Transit is much faster than driving if it wants to be. Airplanes normally reach 1000km/h (if you are rich you can do the same but very few are this rich). Even if we limit to ground based transport, most drivers on the autobahn self-limit themselves to around 130km/h, trains routinely go 250km/h (only a few routes, but the ability is there to do it safely).
      • 8ytecoder 7y ago
• thedance 7y ago
  I think you have it backwards. We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART) by surrounding it with dispersed neighborhoods. We need to build dense transit villages around the rail stations we already own.
  • zamfi 7y ago
    > We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART) Out of curiosity, do you ride Bart at commute hours? At 5pm, the platforms at Embarcadero and Montgomery are dangerously packed. I didn’t think there is much excess capacity for commuting. All other times? Absolutely yes.
    • thedance 7y ago
      A fun fact is that BART has 48 stations.
    • manfredo 7y ago
      You're putting the cart before the horse. More commuters creates more ticket revenue, which gives BART more resources to expand capacity. They're not going to expand capacity until there's more demand.
      • thedance 7y ago
        BART ridership is currently maxed out in the peak direction at peak hour, and carries triple the design number of passengers. They don’t need to expand, they need to profit from the currently underused directions (eg berkeley to Fremont).
        • manfredo 7y ago
          Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun? As I said, pointing out that transit systems are at capacity is not a valid reason to block development. Transit systems always try to operate at capacity because excess capacity means suboptimal allocation of resources. There's no reason to increase capacity until there's demand for that capacity.
• Apes 7y ago
  End the landed gentry by repealing Prop 13, and I'll take arguments like this seriously. Otherwise it just sounds like the priviliged wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
• notJim 7y ago
  Isn't SF building two new subway lines right now? I agree it should be faster and better, but I don't think it's true that nothing is being done. Also, in this case, they have the infrastructure, the NIMBYs are just hoarding it to themselves, as they do in Berkeley as well.
  • xvedejas 7y ago
    SF is building one new subway, and its ride-able underground portion will be just over one mile long. I agree it's something being done, but it's such a small drop in a large bucket of needs. We shouldn't wait for a public transit silver bullet to bring people to jobs, we need more housing near jobs so that people aren't forced to commute across the region.
• ryandrake 7y ago
  Not to mention water, sewer, electrical capacity, schools, parks, police and fire services... You can’t just plop a 100-unit apartment down and then say you helped with the housing problem.
  • thedance 7y ago
    The reason Bay Area cities can't afford their water and sewer and roads is because they are not dense enough. Apartment dwellers demand far less water, and drive on roads much less than people who live in detached homes. Density is the _solution_ to infrastructure funding.
    • bluGill 7y ago
      Long term you are correct, but in the near term the current water system needs to be upgraded to pipes large enough to get water to the new apartment before the apartment can go in.
      • thedance 7y ago
        You can get developers to build the infrastructure and finance it on their future taxes. You wouldn't believe the incremental tax from building real buildings in the Bay Area. In one particularly egregious case a single apartment building replaced several detached homes that were paying a total of $1200/year in the city of Berkeley. The apartment building pays over a million dollars per year.
      • stale2002 7y ago
        How do you even think this stuff gets upgraded in the first place? What happens, in every city, is that more housing gets built, then the infrastructure system starts to get closer to capacity, and then the infrastructure gets upgaded. Saying that they should upgrade all the infrastructure first, before there is any demand, is the same exact thing as saying that it should never be upgraded. Because the infrastructure isn't going to be upgraded if there is no demand for it yet.
• zamfi 7y ago
  > We have the tracks, we have the train... the train just does not go this route on weekends. This is the easy one to fix — when there is demand, they can just run more trains. Much harder is the transbay commute at rush hours. There is almost no spare capacity, and it’s not clear how those extra thousands of people in Lafayette will make it in to SF every morning before we build a second transbay tube for Bart — and that’s at least a decade away. I say this as someone who loves development: for the Bay Area to significantly increase its population, we need a ton more transit and we need to start building it now.
  • skybrian 7y ago
    I generally agree, but it seems like jobs should also be moving away from the center? If there are a lot of commuters in Lafayette going to Oakland then the transbay tunnel wouldn't be relevant for them, but there would need to be capacity for local trains. Or if the jobs were in the other direction like Walnut Creek, it would be a reverse commute.
  • bluGill 7y ago
    The problem is they need to create the demand. Anybody who wants to get around and checks transit knows it isn't an option so they find an alternative. If CalTran wants to be useful transit for more than commuters (My understanding as someone not in the area is CalTran runs only a few trips during rush hour - if I'm wrong that invalidates some of my reply...) they need to run more service for a while so people start to think they can count on it.
    • zamfi 7y ago
      Lots of people take Caltrain to commute, and commute trains are often standing room only. But almost no one takes Caltrain at non-commute hours.
      • bluGill 7y ago
        I just pulled up the schedule, just looking at the schedule I can confidently tell you that the only people taking CalTrain are going to work or have no other choice: From 10-11 am there is 1 stop at most stations/direction. Trains and buses that only run once an hour midday exist only for those who have no choice: those unable to drive (generally disabled - blind). You need to run at least every half an hour to even think about getting people who are not going to work. People going to work generally can adjust their schedule enough to make hourly work and once they figure it out they don't have to think about it again. Also those going to work generally have very heavy traffic as the alternative. If you want a train/bus to be used by people who have a choice you must run not less than ever half hour for 16 hours a day. The more often you run the more people who will ride, up to about 5 minutes where everybody knows you can just show up and get on. (unfortunately the amount of extra riders you get from coming more often isn't linear so you sometimes cannot justify coming more often by the amount of extra riders you get) Note, there is a 2 year lag between changes in routes/schedules and riders figuring out the new routes. I think Caltrain could get a lot more non-commute hour riders by coming more often but if you push them to make sure you make everybody aware that it will be 2 years before there is a change.
• aggie 7y ago
  > The whole Bay Area is building like crazy, I'm wondering what your frame of reference is here. As someone who has lived in the Bay Area for most of my 30 years, and lived in Atlanta for a couple years recently, where they are actually building like crazy, the Bay Area seems to be at a total standstill.
• WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Couldn't people just work remotely and then get together for occasional retreats or all-day meetings? It seems that coders could have their own offices at home and just occasionally use transport to get to work.