3 ms·

What would need to be true for SF to replicate this? Would we need alignment at the mayor, state assembly and SFMTA levels?

by neil_s 4mo ago

hnav 4mo ago
- Figuring out NIMBY-ism. Anywhere you run a tunnel you're gonna have people suing you and stalling for decades. Less so if you use a tunnel bore machine, but cut and cover is pretty much a non-starter. - Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing. Short of jumping straight back into the 19th century, setting up temporary housing and bringing in guest laborers this is pretty much non-negotiable. - Not a ton of expertise left in the country since there's 2 new subway tunnels a decade AFAIK. - The grift has got to be worse here than in Spain. There if you get $40k in kickbacks that's a nice bonus, here that barely covers your rent for the year. And then even if you bring the costs down, you have to figure out the taxation. Several billion per mile is the running rate and you may be able to bring that down but then you have ongoing costs. Muni's farebox recovery is only 1/4 of its budget so unless you're making existing lines redundant, there's new ongoing cost. Obviously the choices there will be to go into the pockets of the middle class or not do it at all.
- pibaker 4mo ago
  > Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing This is not the reason. Labor is expensive even in parts of the US with low housing costs. The real, simple reason is the US has a more prosperous economy where the average worker has more opportunity than their Spanish peers. Just look at unemployment rates. The US is at 4.3% right now compared to Spain's 10%. Even at the peak of the GFC the US barely had over 10% unemployment. In the meanwhile Spain has had over 10% employment almost the entire time the past four decades. Of course labor is cheap when that many people are jobless.
  - jaggederest 4mo ago
    U-6 is 8.1%, but spain uses a pretty comparable base employment rate (u-3 equivalent), so fair cop that US unemployment is easily less than half. Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect - drives a lot of effects in the US where automation paradoxically makes non-automated industries insanely expensive (though not the whole story for certain niches e.g. healthcare and education)
  - BrenBarn 4mo ago
    I mean, if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life, maybe that suggests unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies.
    - joe_mamba 4mo ago
      >if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life How are you having a great quality of life if you're unemployed? >unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies. IDK man, being unemployed is not great. Not having money sucks. What metrics do you think are better?
  - presentation 4mo ago
    So does that imply that there is a Goldilocks zone of prosperity where society are wealthy enough to afford good infrastructure but not too wealthy so as to become unable to build infrastructure cost effectively? Interesting that too much prosperity would actually lower living standards.
nextos 4mo ago
It is difficult. I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. They plan all projects with great detail and then oversee their execution. Agile regulations against NIMBYism and a world-class civil engineering industry with HQs in Madrid also help. A good analogy is to ask what would need to be true for Madrid to replicate the AI hub in SF? Great VC, top engineers, certain risk-taking mentality, etc. So, it's not easy. The environment that creates a fabric for radical innovation is quite different from a statist mentality, although hopefully, both are not mutually exclusive.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  The sibling comments explain the regulatory differences. But another factor is that competent engineers and executives have much lower opportunity costs to work for the government in Spain because private sector opportunities are far less lucrative than in the U.S. An ironic downside of America’s leadership in tech and finance is that there is tremendous brain drain out of the public sector.
- saguntum 4mo ago
  > I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.
JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
Aggressive deployment of eminent domain and exemption from CEPA and all the other “think of the children” NIMBY rules.
- anovikov 4mo ago
  I understand housing construction, but why would a NIMBY be against metro construction? Being close to a metro station means real estate prices skyrocket and that's what NIMBYs are after.
  - gavinsyancey 4mo ago
    * Disruption while it is being built * Fear that a metro will bring in "undesirables" (i.e. poor / lower-class people) * Concerns about noise (whether real or imagined) * Some people just hate change
    - frollogaston 4mo ago
      The "undesirables" they're concerned about are robbers, teenage gangs, or people on drugs who loiter around train stations. The lower-class people don't want to be around them either.
  - gene91 4mo ago
    In metropolitan areas, people want to be close but not too close to train/metro stations or railroad/tunnels. 5-10 minute walk is ideal. Anything closer, people have vibration/noise and crowd/security concerns. In US suburbs, a lot of people are going to drive even if they live next to a train station. So there’s no convenience or property value benefits. To them, they only see downsides.
    - pjerem 4mo ago
      > vibration/noise That’s not true of most modern metro lines that are generally bored and not cut and covered. Bored metro lines create no noise on the surface and are preferred nowadays because there is barely any constraint on the routes you can create. Cut and covered are only used when creating whole new districts.
thelastgallon 4mo ago
San Francisco Tried to Build a $1.7 Million Toilet. It’s Still Not Done: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.h...
- arkits 4mo ago
  It opened in 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet
  - frollogaston 4mo ago
    Hm so at least they scaled the cost down to $200K, which suggests that the bad press did something, but that also relied on the whole prefab toilet being donated.
ak217 4mo ago
For many years, I observed the San Francisco Caltrain DTX (Downtown Extension, recently rebranded "The Portal"). This is the most important transit missing link in Northern California that is expected to connect two of the highest ridership transit arteries in the Bay Area and eventually unlock single-seat rail transit between Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and points south. DTX is a two-mile tunnel planned to connect the rail line terminus south of San Francisco downtown to Market Street, where the BART subway has the 4 highest ridership train stations in Northern California. The combined project (DTX and Transbay Terminal, the already built train station it's supposed to connect to) is about 15 years late and many billions of dollars over budget. What struck me is a complete lack of urgency and accountability, combined with out-of-control meddling by politicians pursuing completely unrelated goals. The project spent several years in EIR and initial planning, which is to be expected. Then for over a decade, San Francisco's board of supervisors held the project hostage because they wanted to demolish a freeway south of where the actual project is, while bolting on an unrelated and unrealistic tunneling project (the "Pennsylvania Avenue alignment") and taking over the governance of the Caltrain board (Caltrain is the least dysfunctional transit system in the Bay Area, so the Caltrain board was not too keen on this proposal). Eventually, after wasting many years and tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, the balance of power on the BoS shifted and they agreed to stop holding the project hostage, restructure the board (TJPA), and re-hire staff to actually plan the tunnel. I've seen multiple project managers/directors come and go, and countless community input meetings happen discussing completely hypothetical project concepts. The money set aside for the project from the original Transbay budget is long gone, and numerous funding opportunities have passed by because the TJPA and its stakeholders were not ready to plan and submit a viable proposal in time. Here are some things I would want to change going forward: - Transit projects should be centrally planned by the state government (i.e. a regional subdivision of an agency similar to Caltrans) with structured opportunities for resident feedback and authority to override most input from local governments. This should include exemptions from CEQA and other review, and strong eminent domain powers. - The Caltrans-like agency should have independent regional metro divisions (i.e. Bay Area, LA area, etc) with dedicated sources of regionally collected funding as well as a mandate to own and lease out land adjacent to transit stations as part of its funding. The divisions should have budgets to retain project management staff who accumulate long-term experience and manage multiple projects. They should have the independent authority to issue bonds and be required to publish construction efficiency and ridership statistics. - Labor unions should be systematically prevented from influencing the course of planning, construction, and project execution. Unions meddle and cause many delays and project complications. Unfortunately, even a structure like that is not a panacea. If you look at CHSRA, it actually has some of the features that I listed above. When CHSRA was first started, the planning process fell victim to meddling from state legislators (most famously the one who forced the route to go through Palmdale), followed by many wasted years fighting NIMBYs and doing useless planning. Ultimately, the only hope I see is to insulate the planners from political interference, set them up with independent funding, have one agency head who is responsible and accountable, and reduce the veto powers that California grants to citizens and governments.

What would need to be true for SF to replicate this? Would we need alignment at the mayor, state assembly and SFMTA levels?

by neil_s 4mo ago

What would need to be true for SF to replicate this? Would we need alignment at the mayor, state assembly and SFMTA levels?

hnav 4mo ago

- Figuring out NIMBY-ism. Anywhere you run a tunnel you're gonna have people suing you and stalling for decades. Less so if you use a tunnel bore machine, but cut and cover is pretty much a non-starter. - Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing. Short of jumping straight back into the 19th century, setting up temporary housing and bringing in guest laborers this is pretty much non-negotiable. - Not a ton of expertise left in the country since there's 2 new subway tunnels a decade AFAIK. - The grift has got to be worse here than in Spain. There if you get $40k in kickbacks that's a nice bonus, here that barely covers your rent for the year. And then even if you bring the costs down, you have to figure out the taxation. Several billion per mile is the running rate and you may be able to bring that down but then you have ongoing costs. Muni's farebox recovery is only 1/4 of its budget so unless you're making existing lines redundant, there's new ongoing cost. Obviously the choices there will be to go into the pockets of the middle class or not do it at all.

pibaker 4mo ago
> Cost of labor is insanely high due to cost of housing This is not the reason. Labor is expensive even in parts of the US with low housing costs. The real, simple reason is the US has a more prosperous economy where the average worker has more opportunity than their Spanish peers. Just look at unemployment rates. The US is at 4.3% right now compared to Spain's 10%. Even at the peak of the GFC the US barely had over 10% unemployment. In the meanwhile Spain has had over 10% employment almost the entire time the past four decades. Of course labor is cheap when that many people are jobless.
- jaggederest 4mo ago
  U-6 is 8.1%, but spain uses a pretty comparable base employment rate (u-3 equivalent), so fair cop that US unemployment is easily less than half. Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect - drives a lot of effects in the US where automation paradoxically makes non-automated industries insanely expensive (though not the whole story for certain niches e.g. healthcare and education)
- BrenBarn 4mo ago
  I mean, if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life, maybe that suggests unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies.
  - joe_mamba 4mo ago
    >if you can have higher unemployment but still build good subways and overall have a good quality of life How are you having a great quality of life if you're unemployed? >unemployment isn't a great metric for evaluating societies. IDK man, being unemployed is not great. Not having money sucks. What metrics do you think are better?
- presentation 4mo ago
  So does that imply that there is a Goldilocks zone of prosperity where society are wealthy enough to afford good infrastructure but not too wealthy so as to become unable to build infrastructure cost effectively? Interesting that too much prosperity would actually lower living standards.

nextos 4mo ago

It is difficult. I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. They plan all projects with great detail and then oversee their execution. Agile regulations against NIMBYism and a world-class civil engineering industry with HQs in Madrid also help. A good analogy is to ask what would need to be true for Madrid to replicate the AI hub in SF? Great VC, top engineers, certain risk-taking mentality, etc. So, it's not easy. The environment that creates a fabric for radical innovation is quite different from a statist mentality, although hopefully, both are not mutually exclusive.

rayiner 4mo ago
The sibling comments explain the regulatory differences. But another factor is that competent engineers and executives have much lower opportunity costs to work for the government in Spain because private sector opportunities are far less lucrative than in the U.S. An ironic downside of America’s leadership in tech and finance is that there is tremendous brain drain out of the public sector.
saguntum 4mo ago
> I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government. I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago

Aggressive deployment of eminent domain and exemption from CEPA and all the other “think of the children” NIMBY rules.

anovikov 4mo ago
I understand housing construction, but why would a NIMBY be against metro construction? Being close to a metro station means real estate prices skyrocket and that's what NIMBYs are after.
- gavinsyancey 4mo ago
  * Disruption while it is being built * Fear that a metro will bring in "undesirables" (i.e. poor / lower-class people) * Concerns about noise (whether real or imagined) * Some people just hate change
  - frollogaston 4mo ago
    The "undesirables" they're concerned about are robbers, teenage gangs, or people on drugs who loiter around train stations. The lower-class people don't want to be around them either.
- gene91 4mo ago
  In metropolitan areas, people want to be close but not too close to train/metro stations or railroad/tunnels. 5-10 minute walk is ideal. Anything closer, people have vibration/noise and crowd/security concerns. In US suburbs, a lot of people are going to drive even if they live next to a train station. So there’s no convenience or property value benefits. To them, they only see downsides.
  - pjerem 4mo ago
    > vibration/noise That’s not true of most modern metro lines that are generally bored and not cut and covered. Bored metro lines create no noise on the surface and are preferred nowadays because there is barely any constraint on the routes you can create. Cut and covered are only used when creating whole new districts.

thelastgallon 4mo ago

San Francisco Tried to Build a $1.7 Million Toilet. It’s Still Not Done: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.h...

arkits 4mo ago
It opened in 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet
- frollogaston 4mo ago
  Hm so at least they scaled the cost down to $200K, which suggests that the bad press did something, but that also relied on the whole prefab toilet being donated.

ak217 4mo ago

For many years, I observed the San Francisco Caltrain DTX (Downtown Extension, recently rebranded "The Portal"). This is the most important transit missing link in Northern California that is expected to connect two of the highest ridership transit arteries in the Bay Area and eventually unlock single-seat rail transit between Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and points south. DTX is a two-mile tunnel planned to connect the rail line terminus south of San Francisco downtown to Market Street, where the BART subway has the 4 highest ridership train stations in Northern California. The combined project (DTX and Transbay Terminal, the already built train station it's supposed to connect to) is about 15 years late and many billions of dollars over budget. What struck me is a complete lack of urgency and accountability, combined with out-of-control meddling by politicians pursuing completely unrelated goals. The project spent several years in EIR and initial planning, which is to be expected. Then for over a decade, San Francisco's board of supervisors held the project hostage because they wanted to demolish a freeway south of where the actual project is, while bolting on an unrelated and unrealistic tunneling project (the "Pennsylvania Avenue alignment") and taking over the governance of the Caltrain board (Caltrain is the least dysfunctional transit system in the Bay Area, so the Caltrain board was not too keen on this proposal). Eventually, after wasting many years and tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, the balance of power on the BoS shifted and they agreed to stop holding the project hostage, restructure the board (TJPA), and re-hire staff to actually plan the tunnel. I've seen multiple project managers/directors come and go, and countless community input meetings happen discussing completely hypothetical project concepts. The money set aside for the project from the original Transbay budget is long gone, and numerous funding opportunities have passed by because the TJPA and its stakeholders were not ready to plan and submit a viable proposal in time. Here are some things I would want to change going forward: - Transit projects should be centrally planned by the state government (i.e. a regional subdivision of an agency similar to Caltrans) with structured opportunities for resident feedback and authority to override most input from local governments. This should include exemptions from CEQA and other review, and strong eminent domain powers. - The Caltrans-like agency should have independent regional metro divisions (i.e. Bay Area, LA area, etc) with dedicated sources of regionally collected funding as well as a mandate to own and lease out land adjacent to transit stations as part of its funding. The divisions should have budgets to retain project management staff who accumulate long-term experience and manage multiple projects. They should have the independent authority to issue bonds and be required to publish construction efficiency and ridership statistics. - Labor unions should be systematically prevented from influencing the course of planning, construction, and project execution. Unions meddle and cause many delays and project complications. Unfortunately, even a structure like that is not a panacea. If you look at CHSRA, it actually has some of the features that I listed above. When CHSRA was first started, the planning process fell victim to meddling from state legislators (most famously the one who forced the route to go through Palmdale), followed by many wasted years fighting NIMBYs and doing useless planning. Ultimately, the only hope I see is to insulate the planners from political interference, set them up with independent funding, have one agency head who is responsible and accountable, and reduce the veto powers that California grants to citizens and governments.