7 ms·

The city (and it's defendants) refuse to acknowledge or address the problems that prevent people coming to the city: 1. Unreliable and expensive public transpo

The city (and it's defendants) refuse to acknowledge or address the problems that prevent people coming to the city: 1. Unreliable and expensive public transportation 2. Expensive tolls and parking 3. High number of car break ins 4. Just a general ugliness to the city: trash, feces, homeless encampments, open drug use, graffiti and boarded up storefronts, crime, and mental illness on full display Make it easier for people to come in and make them want to come in. With a budget of billions of dollars for such a small city, you'd think these issues would be addressed quickly.

binarymax 2y ago
Crime and homelessness aren’t areas that can be addressed quickly - unless the method is morally questionable
- Cupertino95014 2y ago
  NYC reduced crime enormously in the 1990's and beyond. Were those methods all "morally questionable" for you?
  - locopati 2y ago
    broken windows policing and stop and frisk were indeed morally questionable strategies as they were primarily used on minority communities
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - asdff 2y ago
      The rub of this is people conflate to race what they should conflate to economic circumstance. A poor white person is no more or less likely to commit a crime of opportunity as a poor black person, but most people don't understand nuance much less statistics or demography or history. It also doesn't help that a lot of police back then as well as today are racist.
    - Cupertino95014 2y ago
      And yet, many minority members are alive today because they were not murdered by those criminals caught by stop-and-frisk, or broken windows policing.
      - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        We are OK with giving up civil liberties when it's the liberties of minorities?
        Cupertino95014 2y ago
        We are OK with these minorities becoming crime victims, because we don't want to inconvenience potential criminals?
        SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        Assuming all they are is "potential criminals", they are, in fact, innocent people.
        Cupertino95014 2y ago
        So, again, you prefer leaving these people alone, despite the police having a reasonable idea that they're carrying a weapon? You know, I suppose, that people carrying a gun walk and carry themselves in a distinctive way. Or people jumping subway turnstiles often have other warrants out agains them. The fact is, the Giulani / Bratton reforms worked. But I guess you prefer more crime. Even if you're the one being mugged?
        SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        > So, again, you prefer leaving these people alone, despite the police having a reasonable idea that they're carrying a weapon? You know, I suppose, that people carrying a gun walk and carry themselves in a distinctive way. "The number of stops increased dramatically in 2008 to over half a million, 88% of which did not result in any fine or conviction, peaking in 2011 to 685,724 stops, again with 88% (603,437) resulting in no conviction. Leading to the remaining 82,287 resulting in convictions. On average, from 2002 to 2013, the percentage of individuals stopped without any convictions was 87.6%." [1] Not terribly distinctive. They got it right less than 1/8th of the time. If that is your argument, that they were only stopping people they think had guns and were going to commit a violent crime, it's a terribly poor one. The vast majority of people were detained by the police with no cause other than looking a particular way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  Crime for one, can be addressed fairly easily at the current levels it exists in a city like San Francisco. The ease with which people are able to smash car windows in SF is ridiculous. The problem exists because of the lack of enforcement at all levels. I can guarantee that 95% of the smash and grabs can be attributed to maybe 200 individuals at best. If you start rounding them up and make sure they don’t get away with a slap on the wrist, you’ll immediately see the difference. And no, heavy fines and jail sentences for repeat petty crime is not morally questionable.
  - binarymax 2y ago
    The same problems exist in lots of cities. Enforcement and recidivism prevention is not easy. You need competent staff and big budgets at all levels. For instance - what if 20 of those 200 are minors. Family court might just release them back to their parents. But if they’re unsupervised then they just do it again. And for adults what level of sentencing do you recommend for a misdemeanor? You can’t put them in prison. So they go to jail then get released and perpetrate again. Seriously, if crime were easy to solve we would be close to solving it, but we’re not.
    - dmitrygr 2y ago
      Russia solved this problem long ago. Parents are criminally liable for behavior of minors. Either they control them or they answer for their actions.
      - darth_avocado 2y ago
        And societies like Japan solved it by making it unacceptable as a society and a culture.
    - darth_avocado 2y ago
      I am not arguing for “solving crime”. If you read my comment, I specifically addressed the current levels of crime in SF. The current level of law and order in the city is below what is acceptable and achievable by a normally functioning city. Your car will be broken into within minutes of you leaving it, if you have anything at all visible in it. That is NOT the norm cities across the country, except a few. We don’t need to solve crime, we just need to not normalize it.
Tiktaalik 2y ago
Vancouver also has an enormous amount of visible street homelessness, numbering in the thousands, driven by a housing crisis and lack of mental health supports. The city is also severely experiencing the consequences of toxic drugs flooding the illegal street drug market, as 6+ people are killed by toxic drug overdoses Province wide every day. The vacancy rate downtown? A mere 14% and only 10% in the Metro Region. Low during an era when other cities such as Calgary and SF are experiencing double that rate. https://www.biv.com/news/real-estate/metro-vancouver-office-vacancy-holds-steady-as-industrial-rises-8543542 https://www.biv.com/news/real-estate/metro-vancouver-office-... So I don't think it's homelessness etc that is causing any of these problems. After all, both SF and Vancouver had a severe homelessness and drug problems well before the pandemic. It is likely that SF's especially tech oriented economy may be a factor, as tech is particularly WFH friendly and may be keeping WFH going on longer than other places. Vancouver's excellent public transit system may have helped in return to office efforts. When I hear people talk about how great WFH his, they often talk about how miserable their old commutes were. Fix the commute and maybe RTO is more appealing. But fixing the commute problems is not really something SF can do alone. I do not believe at all that a city alone can move the needle on public transportation, unless we're talking about affordable projects like bike lanes. Vancouver's rapid transit system is only possible due to significant funding from both the Province and the Federal government. The Feds just bailed out Vancouver to prevent service cuts. TransLink set to receive $825M from federal gov’t funding over five years https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2024/07/03/translink-canada-government-825-million-funding/ https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2024/07/03/translink-canada-go...
- ttul 2y ago
  Vancouver’s office sector has a higher fraction of occupants who cannot work from home, such as digital animation and effects companies and video game developers, who have special on-site tech and extreme confidentiality requirements that preclude WFH. San Francisco’s typical firm is more likely to be WFH-friendly. I’d say another factor in Vancouver’s favor here is the concentration of people who live downtown amongst the office towers. San Francisco’s downtown is relatively empty by comparison. So when the office workers left, it hollowed out entirely. These are just some anecdotes. But I would tend to agree with your comment that it’s unlikely just the drugs and crime keeping offices empty in SF.
asdff 2y ago
Also the fact that they've permitted like 16 new homes across the entire city this year so far which certainly doesn't help the housing price situation. Plenty of people want to live in SF but are priced out, and clearly the people who are priced in aren't numerous enough to sustain the city from seeing population and job loss.
solardev 2y ago
Is it like this everywhere? What are other cities doing right that SF isn't doing? Of the big cities I've visited (in CA, OR, WA, IL, DC, NY, CO, NV) and in other developed countries, I think SF is by far the worst, with Seattle a close second and Portland not far behind. There's a bazillion variables to consider when discussing the livability of a city, but it seems like there is something in particular going on with the major West Coast cities, especially the ones with a lot of income inequality like San Fran and Seattle, where all the nice places are owned by rich tech people and there's not much left for anyone else. On paper they all claim to be solidly leftist, but their realities on the ground are much harsher, with people shitting and shooting up and dying left and right and no real feeling of community or solidarity. They to have very car-dependent cultures too and inferior public transit, which seems to decrease the likelihood of seeing "regular" people walking on the streets. It was a very different feeling from, say, Chicago, where, yes, there's also crime and mental illness, but most parts of the city felt incredibly safe and warm and neighborly. I felt much more uncomfortable and unsafe in SF than I ever did in Chicago or DC or Denver. I grew up spending much of my childhood in the SF Bay Area, but it's gotten so much worse in recent years, seemingly in line with the tech booms and then especially the COVID exodus (towards rural communities and WFH). I don't know whether this is a failure of policy or planning or politics or something else, but it's so sad that a city with so much money can fail so badly at being livable. I don't know how the richest state with all these amazingly smart and wealthy people can just turn a blind eye to all the suffering there, unable to provide even basic shelter to so many thousands. Every time I visit Europe or Asia, I become ashamed of the US (and myself). Are there no objectively testable and verifiable "best practices" for city management? How do other states and countries manage these same issues? We can't be the only ones facing drug use, homelessness, etc. But we are definitely one of the richest societies, so it's not just a problem of budget. What sorts of successful implementations have been done elsewhere?
ProfessorLayton 2y ago
Just a heads up: Muni is quite cheap and fairly reliable, with most of the city being within a few minutes walk to a stop. While cheap, I believe it should be 100% free, especially since fares are ~70% tax-funded anyway. BART is quite expensive, I agree, however it stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit and is not actually managed by the city of San Francisco, but rather the multiple SFBAY counties it serves. That's the one that's used the most by workers coming into and out of the city and there's little SF can do about BART's pricing. BART itself is facing a funding crisis, and there's a lot of chaos on the trains regularly, unfortunately, which deters a lot of people from taking it. The solution isn't to subsidize driving + parking even more than it already is, but to fund public transport properly so that more people can take it easily.
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  I agree. I was more referring to BART, Caltrain, AC Transit etc that brings people in. Considering the fact that majority of the office workers live outside the city, that public transportation needs to be affordable. And safe.
  - jwagenet 2y ago
    Bart and Caltrain are reasonably priced when you compare them to LIRR or Metro-North. All 4 are long distance commuter rails, not local public transit. Edit: White Plains to Grand Central costs $13 on peak while Mountain View to 4th and King is $8. Both are about the same driving distance
    - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
      4th & King is not comparable to Grand Central, which is a prime location. One needs to add the additional cost and time needed to take muni to where most of the offices are actually located. They're working on extending Caltrain into SF's transit center, but that's currently a ways off.
      - Animats 2y ago
kkfx 2y ago
You can't have "universal collective transportation" simply because it's hyper-inefficient. A bus is more efficient than a car if at least half-loaded, but to cover any possible people needs you need to travel nearly empty or empty most of the time. Collective transport was born to bring workers back and forth to/from the factory, and that's efficient because you have a 99% full scenario. For political reasons it got extended to general population move in an era where owning a car was a thing only for very few. It was a nice idea for a time where we were at the dawn of a big abundance of resources. Then it became a business and that's the reason it's a fail. As a business it grab subsidy and tickets but still can't offer more than sub-par experience. The point the defendants of the city model fails to accept is that the city have had many reasons to exists, nowadays the sole left is financial capitalism, than need "the sharing economy" where 99% own nothing and have to share scarce resources piloted by the social score imposed by the 1% who rule. This model is untenable environmentally, humanly and practically, see from Neom to Arkadag, Innopolis, ... failures as a proof. The new deal is technically only possible in a spread society of small semi-autonomous buildings where there is room to evolve, room to relocate to livable areas (landslides, wildfires, floods etc) for the present and future time when for instance we can pump water so we do not need to live in the deepest part of a valley to get clean water every days knowing we will be flooded occasionally like before. Cities have finished all others economical reasons to exists and nowadays having buildings occupied less than 12h/24 commuting between them so see ads (shop windows) and casually click on them (consume what they sell) it's a waste of resources we can't afford for all.
- fragmede 2y ago
  How do streetcars in downtown areas prior the arrival of cars factor into your narrative?
  - kkfx 2y ago
    I do not understand the question, trying to speculate I can say that the "downtown" model was needed in the past, where anything was on paper so it's useful to have a specific place where all paper works are done, while others for specific activities like commerce, factories producing various goods and so on. A "zoning" mandated by the need of physical proximity. As an example you file your revenues declaration than you go to the bank nearby and pay what's due, since you are there you also go to your carrier to ask for another contract etc etc etc, similarly before supermarkets you go to a specific place where anyone commercializing food go so in the same area you can buy meet, fruits, bread, ... You can see this model as the "universal city factory". This model need density, not too much but enough and it's not only not needed anymore, but it's now incompatible with current tech and climate change. Since the '80s logistic became cheap and quick enough that delocalizing became a better option then being nearby your customers, with modern TLCs/IT we do not need the office anymore because we do not need to work with paper physically walking around. We need websites/APIs as "the office where you need to go to file tax, make a payment etc", a desktop as a tool to act instead of walking around. Modern logistic also demand space: delivery anything in a dense city is a nightmare delivery in a sparse area, not too low dense but still sparse, it's a pleasure, there is room to park everywhere, no issues reaching the nth floor with potentially heavy and big package and so on. Oh, yes you need to travel a bit more, but hey, there is plenty of space for p.v. and your delivery van fleet might have quick replace batteries like Renault QuickDrop at yours warehouses. Similarly those who not WFH still have parking places where they work in a fixed location to plug their EV and recharge from local p.v. being not anymore artificially spread for the sake of car makers like USA suburbs but being intermixed like EU Rivieras you still do not made too much distance to have recharging issues. Having a bit of space around and small buildings allow for cheap constructions and evolution. This is the new "right density" for the economy of scale. Only there are some looser: in this model we all own, so no market for Uber, we eat in fixed locations with plenty of space, not while commuting so, no market for Just Eat, room at home for anything so no various services like public washing machines and so on. The financial capitalism loose dramatically while a new spread, quickly evolving, in a constant change without the need for much revolutions, of SMEs etc flourish. Not everything can be done at this scale, like steel production but hey, even Apple have planted a small foundry hidden nearby some homes. We definitively can work in most cases at small scale. Unfortunately the big losers are also much powerful and disagree.

binarymax 2y ago

Crime and homelessness aren’t areas that can be addressed quickly - unless the method is morally questionable

Cupertino95014 2y ago
NYC reduced crime enormously in the 1990's and beyond. Were those methods all "morally questionable" for you?
- locopati 2y ago
  broken windows policing and stop and frisk were indeed morally questionable strategies as they were primarily used on minority communities
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - asdff 2y ago
    The rub of this is people conflate to race what they should conflate to economic circumstance. A poor white person is no more or less likely to commit a crime of opportunity as a poor black person, but most people don't understand nuance much less statistics or demography or history. It also doesn't help that a lot of police back then as well as today are racist.
  - Cupertino95014 2y ago
    And yet, many minority members are alive today because they were not murdered by those criminals caught by stop-and-frisk, or broken windows policing.
    - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
      We are OK with giving up civil liberties when it's the liberties of minorities?
      - Cupertino95014 2y ago
        We are OK with these minorities becoming crime victims, because we don't want to inconvenience potential criminals?
        SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        Assuming all they are is "potential criminals", they are, in fact, innocent people.
        Cupertino95014 2y ago
        So, again, you prefer leaving these people alone, despite the police having a reasonable idea that they're carrying a weapon? You know, I suppose, that people carrying a gun walk and carry themselves in a distinctive way. Or people jumping subway turnstiles often have other warrants out agains them. The fact is, the Giulani / Bratton reforms worked. But I guess you prefer more crime. Even if you're the one being mugged?
        SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        > So, again, you prefer leaving these people alone, despite the police having a reasonable idea that they're carrying a weapon? You know, I suppose, that people carrying a gun walk and carry themselves in a distinctive way. "The number of stops increased dramatically in 2008 to over half a million, 88% of which did not result in any fine or conviction, peaking in 2011 to 685,724 stops, again with 88% (603,437) resulting in no conviction. Leading to the remaining 82,287 resulting in convictions. On average, from 2002 to 2013, the percentage of individuals stopped without any convictions was 87.6%." [1] Not terribly distinctive. They got it right less than 1/8th of the time. If that is your argument, that they were only stopping people they think had guns and were going to commit a violent crime, it's a terribly poor one. The vast majority of people were detained by the police with no cause other than looking a particular way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
darth_avocado 2y ago
Crime for one, can be addressed fairly easily at the current levels it exists in a city like San Francisco. The ease with which people are able to smash car windows in SF is ridiculous. The problem exists because of the lack of enforcement at all levels. I can guarantee that 95% of the smash and grabs can be attributed to maybe 200 individuals at best. If you start rounding them up and make sure they don’t get away with a slap on the wrist, you’ll immediately see the difference. And no, heavy fines and jail sentences for repeat petty crime is not morally questionable.
- binarymax 2y ago
  The same problems exist in lots of cities. Enforcement and recidivism prevention is not easy. You need competent staff and big budgets at all levels. For instance - what if 20 of those 200 are minors. Family court might just release them back to their parents. But if they’re unsupervised then they just do it again. And for adults what level of sentencing do you recommend for a misdemeanor? You can’t put them in prison. So they go to jail then get released and perpetrate again. Seriously, if crime were easy to solve we would be close to solving it, but we’re not.
  - dmitrygr 2y ago
    Russia solved this problem long ago. Parents are criminally liable for behavior of minors. Either they control them or they answer for their actions.
    - darth_avocado 2y ago
      And societies like Japan solved it by making it unacceptable as a society and a culture.
  - darth_avocado 2y ago
    I am not arguing for “solving crime”. If you read my comment, I specifically addressed the current levels of crime in SF. The current level of law and order in the city is below what is acceptable and achievable by a normally functioning city. Your car will be broken into within minutes of you leaving it, if you have anything at all visible in it. That is NOT the norm cities across the country, except a few. We don’t need to solve crime, we just need to not normalize it.

Tiktaalik 2y ago

Vancouver also has an enormous amount of visible street homelessness, numbering in the thousands, driven by a housing crisis and lack of mental health supports. The city is also severely experiencing the consequences of toxic drugs flooding the illegal street drug market, as 6+ people are killed by toxic drug overdoses Province wide every day. The vacancy rate downtown? A mere 14% and only 10% in the Metro Region. Low during an era when other cities such as Calgary and SF are experiencing double that rate. https://www.biv.com/news/real-estate/metro-vancouver-office-vacancy-holds-steady-as-industrial-rises-8543542 https://www.biv.com/news/real-estate/metro-vancouver-office-... So I don't think it's homelessness etc that is causing any of these problems. After all, both SF and Vancouver had a severe homelessness and drug problems well before the pandemic. It is likely that SF's especially tech oriented economy may be a factor, as tech is particularly WFH friendly and may be keeping WFH going on longer than other places. Vancouver's excellent public transit system may have helped in return to office efforts. When I hear people talk about how great WFH his, they often talk about how miserable their old commutes were. Fix the commute and maybe RTO is more appealing. But fixing the commute problems is not really something SF can do alone. I do not believe at all that a city alone can move the needle on public transportation, unless we're talking about affordable projects like bike lanes. Vancouver's rapid transit system is only possible due to significant funding from both the Province and the Federal government. The Feds just bailed out Vancouver to prevent service cuts. TransLink set to receive $825M from federal gov’t funding over five years https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2024/07/03/translink-canada-government-825-million-funding/ https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2024/07/03/translink-canada-go...

ttul 2y ago
Vancouver’s office sector has a higher fraction of occupants who cannot work from home, such as digital animation and effects companies and video game developers, who have special on-site tech and extreme confidentiality requirements that preclude WFH. San Francisco’s typical firm is more likely to be WFH-friendly. I’d say another factor in Vancouver’s favor here is the concentration of people who live downtown amongst the office towers. San Francisco’s downtown is relatively empty by comparison. So when the office workers left, it hollowed out entirely. These are just some anecdotes. But I would tend to agree with your comment that it’s unlikely just the drugs and crime keeping offices empty in SF.

asdff 2y ago

Also the fact that they've permitted like 16 new homes across the entire city this year so far which certainly doesn't help the housing price situation. Plenty of people want to live in SF but are priced out, and clearly the people who are priced in aren't numerous enough to sustain the city from seeing population and job loss.

solardev 2y ago

Is it like this everywhere? What are other cities doing right that SF isn't doing? Of the big cities I've visited (in CA, OR, WA, IL, DC, NY, CO, NV) and in other developed countries, I think SF is by far the worst, with Seattle a close second and Portland not far behind. There's a bazillion variables to consider when discussing the livability of a city, but it seems like there is something in particular going on with the major West Coast cities, especially the ones with a lot of income inequality like San Fran and Seattle, where all the nice places are owned by rich tech people and there's not much left for anyone else. On paper they all claim to be solidly leftist, but their realities on the ground are much harsher, with people shitting and shooting up and dying left and right and no real feeling of community or solidarity. They to have very car-dependent cultures too and inferior public transit, which seems to decrease the likelihood of seeing "regular" people walking on the streets. It was a very different feeling from, say, Chicago, where, yes, there's also crime and mental illness, but most parts of the city felt incredibly safe and warm and neighborly. I felt much more uncomfortable and unsafe in SF than I ever did in Chicago or DC or Denver. I grew up spending much of my childhood in the SF Bay Area, but it's gotten so much worse in recent years, seemingly in line with the tech booms and then especially the COVID exodus (towards rural communities and WFH). I don't know whether this is a failure of policy or planning or politics or something else, but it's so sad that a city with so much money can fail so badly at being livable. I don't know how the richest state with all these amazingly smart and wealthy people can just turn a blind eye to all the suffering there, unable to provide even basic shelter to so many thousands. Every time I visit Europe or Asia, I become ashamed of the US (and myself). Are there no objectively testable and verifiable "best practices" for city management? How do other states and countries manage these same issues? We can't be the only ones facing drug use, homelessness, etc. But we are definitely one of the richest societies, so it's not just a problem of budget. What sorts of successful implementations have been done elsewhere?

ProfessorLayton 2y ago

Just a heads up: Muni is quite cheap and fairly reliable, with most of the city being within a few minutes walk to a stop. While cheap, I believe it should be 100% free, especially since fares are ~70% tax-funded anyway. BART is quite expensive, I agree, however it stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit and is not actually managed by the city of San Francisco, but rather the multiple SFBAY counties it serves. That's the one that's used the most by workers coming into and out of the city and there's little SF can do about BART's pricing. BART itself is facing a funding crisis, and there's a lot of chaos on the trains regularly, unfortunately, which deters a lot of people from taking it. The solution isn't to subsidize driving + parking even more than it already is, but to fund public transport properly so that more people can take it easily.

darth_avocado 2y ago
I agree. I was more referring to BART, Caltrain, AC Transit etc that brings people in. Considering the fact that majority of the office workers live outside the city, that public transportation needs to be affordable. And safe.
- jwagenet 2y ago
  Bart and Caltrain are reasonably priced when you compare them to LIRR or Metro-North. All 4 are long distance commuter rails, not local public transit. Edit: White Plains to Grand Central costs $13 on peak while Mountain View to 4th and King is $8. Both are about the same driving distance
  - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
    4th & King is not comparable to Grand Central, which is a prime location. One needs to add the additional cost and time needed to take muni to where most of the offices are actually located. They're working on extending Caltrain into SF's transit center, but that's currently a ways off.
    - Animats 2y ago

kkfx 2y ago

You can't have "universal collective transportation" simply because it's hyper-inefficient. A bus is more efficient than a car if at least half-loaded, but to cover any possible people needs you need to travel nearly empty or empty most of the time. Collective transport was born to bring workers back and forth to/from the factory, and that's efficient because you have a 99% full scenario. For political reasons it got extended to general population move in an era where owning a car was a thing only for very few. It was a nice idea for a time where we were at the dawn of a big abundance of resources. Then it became a business and that's the reason it's a fail. As a business it grab subsidy and tickets but still can't offer more than sub-par experience. The point the defendants of the city model fails to accept is that the city have had many reasons to exists, nowadays the sole left is financial capitalism, than need "the sharing economy" where 99% own nothing and have to share scarce resources piloted by the social score imposed by the 1% who rule. This model is untenable environmentally, humanly and practically, see from Neom to Arkadag, Innopolis, ... failures as a proof. The new deal is technically only possible in a spread society of small semi-autonomous buildings where there is room to evolve, room to relocate to livable areas (landslides, wildfires, floods etc) for the present and future time when for instance we can pump water so we do not need to live in the deepest part of a valley to get clean water every days knowing we will be flooded occasionally like before. Cities have finished all others economical reasons to exists and nowadays having buildings occupied less than 12h/24 commuting between them so see ads (shop windows) and casually click on them (consume what they sell) it's a waste of resources we can't afford for all.

fragmede 2y ago
How do streetcars in downtown areas prior the arrival of cars factor into your narrative?
- kkfx 2y ago
  I do not understand the question, trying to speculate I can say that the "downtown" model was needed in the past, where anything was on paper so it's useful to have a specific place where all paper works are done, while others for specific activities like commerce, factories producing various goods and so on. A "zoning" mandated by the need of physical proximity. As an example you file your revenues declaration than you go to the bank nearby and pay what's due, since you are there you also go to your carrier to ask for another contract etc etc etc, similarly before supermarkets you go to a specific place where anyone commercializing food go so in the same area you can buy meet, fruits, bread, ... You can see this model as the "universal city factory". This model need density, not too much but enough and it's not only not needed anymore, but it's now incompatible with current tech and climate change. Since the '80s logistic became cheap and quick enough that delocalizing became a better option then being nearby your customers, with modern TLCs/IT we do not need the office anymore because we do not need to work with paper physically walking around. We need websites/APIs as "the office where you need to go to file tax, make a payment etc", a desktop as a tool to act instead of walking around. Modern logistic also demand space: delivery anything in a dense city is a nightmare delivery in a sparse area, not too low dense but still sparse, it's a pleasure, there is room to park everywhere, no issues reaching the nth floor with potentially heavy and big package and so on. Oh, yes you need to travel a bit more, but hey, there is plenty of space for p.v. and your delivery van fleet might have quick replace batteries like Renault QuickDrop at yours warehouses. Similarly those who not WFH still have parking places where they work in a fixed location to plug their EV and recharge from local p.v. being not anymore artificially spread for the sake of car makers like USA suburbs but being intermixed like EU Rivieras you still do not made too much distance to have recharging issues. Having a bit of space around and small buildings allow for cheap constructions and evolution. This is the new "right density" for the economy of scale. Only there are some looser: in this model we all own, so no market for Uber, we eat in fixed locations with plenty of space, not while commuting so, no market for Just Eat, room at home for anything so no various services like public washing machines and so on. The financial capitalism loose dramatically while a new spread, quickly evolving, in a constant change without the need for much revolutions, of SMEs etc flourish. Not everything can be done at this scale, like steel production but hey, even Apple have planted a small foundry hidden nearby some homes. We definitively can work in most cases at small scale. Unfortunately the big losers are also much powerful and disagree.