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New businesses are choosing cities with good public transportation: study
- throwaway1777 7y agoOh, I thought startups were abandoning expensive cities for remote work and cheaper living costs.
- bpodgursky 7y agoThey are. This article doesn't prove, or even show, the opposite. (CityLab does a lot of good stuff, but they are 100% pro-dense-urban development. Independent of whether it's a bias you support, it colors the articles you'll see from them.)
- TulliusCicero 7y agoI really don't think there's much movement on that front, of startups moving away from expensive cities to remote work. I'd like there to be, that'd be rad, but I haven't seen anything to that effect that's significant. Do you have a source for that assertion? And what CityLab is, is pro-making-cities-that-aren't-garbage. There's a reason Americans marvel at how nice European cities feel when they visit, while almost no Europeans say the same thing about any US cities. US cities have nice businesses and people and points of interest within, but the design of the cities themselves is almost always terrible.
- bpodgursky 7y agoI know a lot of startups aggressively hiring for remote roles for devs. I can send you names if you're looking for opportunities (fair warning, most will be limited to US residents).
- thedance 7y agoThere are a lot of cities that seem superficially cheaper based on housing prices, but are more expensive including transportation costs, i.e. two cars per household.
- ghaff 7y agoI was a bit confused by this article, especially given the headline. As I read it, the research was something along the lines of: We looked at cities that are known for having a lot of startups. Some of those cities have decent transit systems. Others don't. Where there were decent transit systems, we saw businesses generally clustering around transit. (Which seems fairly obvious.) Where there wasn't decent transit, businesses couldn't very well cluster around it, could they? I don't actually doubt the general statement that startups are tending to abandon suburban office parks for certain cities--some of which have decent transit systems and commuter rail. And there's probably some connection between transit and attractiveness to young urban-dwellers in particular. But the headline seems only sometimes true.
- clairity 7y agoyah, it seems the overall tide for starting businesses is toward urbanization, and a more minor effect is clustering around transit. they also say migration is more toward commuter rail stations, which seems to indicate workers are still spread out into the suburbs.
- save_ferris 7y agoAgreed, this looks like a classic example of "correlation != causation". It seems like this argument taken to it's final conclusion would be that startups gravitate towards cities with better transit than those that don't, which isn't the case given the Austin and San Jose examples.
- ghaff 7y agoAnd, for that matter, San Francisco is nothing to write home about.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoOf course I haven't lived there in about 30 years, but when I did I think it was better than much of the U.S
- pwned1 7y agoTransit usage has been declining for years in all of the cities listed in this article, except Austin. https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/massachusetts/massachusetts-bay-transportation-authority/ https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/massachusetts/massachuse... https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/pennsylvania/southeastern-pennsylvania-transportation-authority/ https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/pennsylvania/southeaster... https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/california/santa-clara-valley-transportation-authority/ https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/california/santa-clara-v... https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/ohio/the-greater-cleveland-regional-transit-authority/ https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/ohio/the-greater-clevela... https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/texas/capital-metropolitan-transportation-authority/ https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/texas/capital-metropolit...
- Tuxer 7y agohi it's me caltrain, serving santa clara and growing 2x in 15 years https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/california/peninsula-corridor-joint-powers-board-dba-caltrain/ https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/california/peninsula-cor...
- itronitron 7y agoInteresting to note that counting rides by a bounded geographic area is going to miss a lot, as the caltrain data doesn't seem to be represented in the santa clara data. Also, the Austin data doesn't take into account that the city regularly expands its geographic boundaries (typically east and west) which may artificially make it seem as if it is increasing riders when it is simply absorbing them.
- briandear 7y agoIn 15 years, how much has road usage grown and how much has population grown? Just a 2x increase seems like a relative decline.
- rgbrenner 7y agoSF hasn't grown by anywhere near 2x in 15 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland%E2%80%93Berkeley,_CA_Metropolitan_Statistical_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland%...
- duxup 7y agoI'm a little confused. I thought a lot of new businesses were started by immigrants who often do use / need transit and such.... I feel like there's a lot of factors here that aren't being accounted for. I'm not sure if this isn't just "lots of new businesses in cities"...
- chrisseaton 7y ago> Cities With Good Transit ... San Francisco Does not compute. San Francisco has essentially one subway line, one slow local railway line, some horrendous busses, admittedly a good airport. That's it.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoThe sad thing is that this still makes SF one of the better major cities around for public transit in the US.
- swebs 7y agoHave you ever visited the east coast? Here's Boston's metro system for example. https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/maps/2019-04-08-rapid-transit-key-bus-routes-map-v33.pdf https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/maps/2019-04-08-rap...
- TulliusCicero 7y agoYes, that's why I said one of the better, not the best. There's a handful that are clearly better: NYC, DC, Boston, Philly, Chicago come to mind.
- ghaff 7y agoIt's probably worse than that though as there are quite a few US cities with a bit of light rail plus buses that are at least as good as SF. There's reasonable transport into and out of SF via Caltrain and BART but the transit within the city is pretty limited.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoPart of why transit within SF is better than average is simply that SF is very dense by American standards, so even when buses are running slowly for raw speed, the effective distance traveled in terms of possible points of interest is still pretty good. This is important, because it means the number of things reachable within a 10 or 20 or 30 minute "transitshed" is high. Anyway, the data doesn't lie: transit usage within SF is among the highest in the country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_transit_ridership https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_hig... > 5. San Francisco, California – 33.1% Now, things are skewed a bit by SF being an unusually small principal city relative to its metro population. That pumps up its numbers compared to if the city boundaries included 1.5m or 2m of the metro pop, rather than ~900k. Still though, 33% puts it near the top, and I can think of no single better metric of how useful transit is than how many people actually use transit to get around.
- ravenstine 7y agoThis article is confusing. How are they determining what's a "startup"? If you count a small retail, food, or tech business as a startup, then it's going to appear like there have been a lot of startups in suburbs. But more people don't consider mom and pop operations to be "startups".
- trothamel 7y agoI prefer to get places in my Coronavirus-ready Autonomous Rover (CAR, for short). Being in it alone or with a few friends, family members, or co-workers means that there's an innate means of social distancing. That's also improved by the way it doesn't require hubs where many people are forced to congregate - for moderately long journeys, I can stay in my CAR all the way from my house to walking distance of my destination. And of course, while not as fully autonomous as the name might suggest, my CAR only requires refueling every three hundred and change miles, and maintenance every five thousand or so. This provides some robustness if the infrastructure is compromised, whether by disease or other issues. It looks like CARs might have a place in the 2020s.
- Symbiote 7y agoThese features are useful approximately what, once a century? The cost of infrastructure for cars far, far outweighs the cost of a few weeks of no-one working, and the pollution has caused many more deaths than Coronavirus will.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoYes, but you get to partake of the pollution no matter whether you personally operate a car or not. So, drive away! Externalities are a hell of a drug.
- trothamel 7y agoI'd think that the social isolation feature has benefits whenever communicable diseases are in the air, which seems to be every winter. The autonomous nature of the system means each CAR can change from road to road to route around congestion and construction, in a way that mass transit can't. And of course, the time saved by being able to go from point to point rather than through mass transit hubs quickly adds up to many lifetimes. I agree that pollution is something that needs to be addressed, which is why electric and hybrid CARs are being introduced by startups and legacy players in the industry.
- nicoburns 7y ago
- eugenekolo 7y agoCorrelation is not causation? A better guess would be that businesses are choosing places where the next generation of employees wants to live and work... happens to be cities on the coasts that also have public transit systems.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoMany big businesses are also citing the existence of public transit as a reason for relocating to a new city. Of course there are usually tens or hundreds of million in subsidies and gifts when they relocate so it's hard to know if transit is truly important or a bit of obfuscation for their real motives.
- tus88 7y agoWhy the hell wouldn't you take that into account, alongside a raft of other factors?
- killjoywashere 7y agoThis just in: people flock to cities, which then have the tax base to justify additional bond sales to fund further construction. Also, positive feedback loops exist. In other news, bread is now available pre-sliced.
- reportgunner 7y agoYeah I don't understand why we needed a study for this. Why would a business start in places that are hard to get to ?
- jackcosgrove 7y agoI remember reading an article in NewGeography (which is often a counterpoint to CityLab, so take both with a grain of salt) discussing the Los Angeles subway expansion. LA actually saw declining use as the subway expanded, and this was mostly chalked up to lower income people being better able to afford a car and therefore not related to the subway expansion. However another theory was that LA subway expansion is often accompanied by gentrification near stations. This makes the train less accessible for low income people, who are most likely to use it. In this way public transit could increasingly be a luxury good, chosen for the lifestyle benefits (no fighting traffic) rather than economic necessity. For a very niche audience I think this is true, and this audience has a lot of overlap with startups.
- nl 7y agoThe title I'm seeing on the article is "Startups Are Abandoning Suburbs for Cities With Good Transit" which seems to more accurately represent the study compared to the current HN title: "New businesses are choosing cities with good public transportation: study"
- burfog 7y agoThat isn't good. We're trying to slow a pandemic. Until we get a vaccine, public transportation shouldn't be running.