10 ms·

> The backlash in recent months against the self-involvement and frivolity of the new guard has actually been a long time coming. Instagram photos of opulent te

by raldi 13y ago

> The backlash in recent months against the self-involvement and frivolity of the new guard has actually been a long time coming. Instagram photos of opulent tech holiday parties have been lambasted, Google buses blockaded In what universe is a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week classified as frivolous?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- melling 13y ago
  We are talking about California where they didn't build an extensively sufficient subway system.
  - stackcollision 13y ago
    It must suck to live in a third-world state.
    - zalzane 13y ago
      oh my god are you being serious? This isnt fucking reddit, take your sensationalism elsewhere. It's really easy to pick on transportation systems when you have absolutely no idea how spread out everything is.
  - jusben1369 13y ago
    Whenever you can land at an airport and take a train (BART) into the heart of the City in under 30 minutes you've got a subway system. BART could always be better (loop the Bay or go across the Golden Gate) but it is a real Subway system.
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      BART is more commuter rail than metro (what is usually meant by "subway"). It provides transport from other cities into the city (SF), but provides little coverage in the city itself. For people living in very specific parts of the city (see: the Mission) the lack of a real metro has made BART into a pseudo-subway, but at the end of the day it's still commuter rail (the seating arrangements in a BART car is telling as to its intended purpose). San Francisco doesn't really have a metro system - it has streetcars that don't have exclusive right of way through the majority of their run.
      - jusben1369 13y ago
        That's a good point.
    - melling 13y ago
      No one said that it wasn't real. There's 100 miles of track. I said that it wasn't extensive enough. It doesn't sufficiently meet the needs of the people who live in the area. Getting to/from the airport is only one use case. If you want to remove cars from the road and have people live in a larger area, mass transit needs to accomodate them.
gtirloni 13y ago
The impact of carpooling is minimal and there are much more efficient ways at public transportation. Carpooling is a band-aid unlikely to reach the critical mass required to turn around the nightmare that public transportation is.
- akgerber 13y ago
  Those more-efficient means of public transportation (commuter trains) only work if the destination is within walking distance of the train station. But Silicon Valley communities make it illegal to build office towers in their downtowns, so the existing rail transport isn't practical to commute from SF to Peninsula office parks.
dalke 13y ago
Have you not been following any of the discussion about this topic? Here are three frequently voiced objections: 1) If the city decided to put a new bus route outside of your house, with a bus every 10 minutes for the morning and evening rush hours, then you would expect there to be public meetings where people can voice concerns about the routing, increase in large traffic, noise, and so on. Why should private companies not be subject to the same sort of democratic decision making on how to use the local public roads and bus stops? 2) Some people moved to the city in part because of the knowledge that the private bus system would be there. Without those buses, they would have chosen somewhere else precisely because the lack of parking would have made the commute impossible. It's hard then to say that each bus replaces a dozen cars, when those people might not be there if there were no buses. 3) If getting cars off the road and reclaiming commuting time were paramount, then why not rezone the areas around Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. for medium density housing, like SF-style row houses, instead of the current preference for suburban detached housing? Then people could walk or bike to work in a matter of minutes. The densities for SF, MV, and C are 17K, 6K, and 5K/sq mile respectively, so there's plenty of opportunity for local population growth. Instead, the local (and democratic) resistance to zoning change in those smaller cities causes increased prices and bus traffic elsewhere, but the people in SF have no way to push back and cause the zoning laws of the smaller cities to change.
- raldi 13y ago
  I think you need to look up the definition of the word "frivolous".
  - dalke 13y ago
    I thought I addressed your "frivolous" criterion directly. 1) It may be "frivolous" if the routing is only made based on the needs of the commuters, and has no input from the people who live on those routes. In an extreme case, if a bus goes down a narrow street in order to save one able-bodied person one block of walking, then that part is definitely frivolous even with the overall savings. Without that local input, neither you nor I have an idea of which parts are frivolous and which are not. And that local input has not occurred. 2) You made assumptions which might not be true. If the net effect of adding buses did not reduce car traffic at all, then your presumed advantages don't exist, and hence the effort is "frivolous." 3) If the goal is to reduce commute time and get cars off the streets, then long-distance bus traffic is not the solution. Improved access to nearby housing is the solution. Instead, long-term busing is a frivolous waste of money which should instead go towards zoning changes. But that involves getting into long-term local politics, which business people don't like doing. Instead, they would rather spend money on a technical solution which is achievable in the short-term, even if it doesn't really help your stated goals.
king_jester 13y ago
The Google bus issue is more about the self-involvement and less about the frivolity. Backlash against Google buses is about gentrification and the fact that a well paid group of workers comes in from a variety of locations and then dominates local politics.
- davidf18 13y ago
  The real issue here is the higher costs of housing caused by the politics of zoning that creates artificial scarcity in housing. In a healthy market, there would be increased construction to offset the increased demand caused by people with higher incomes.
  - 205guy 13y ago
    Except if you have a neighborhood full of nice row houses (almost historic by American standards), friendly local businesses, etc., then the "politics of zoning" by the local residents has tended to the status quo, which they seem to like. In that case, where would you be able to increase construction? People want to live in those nice neighborhoods, not some new high rise in a "redeveloped" area. So the newcomers with google salaries buy up and price out the current residents of those pleasant neighborhoods. This creates friction. Why should all systems be designed for growth?
    - dalke 13y ago
      I've seen that the frequent opposition to zoning changes protests the replacement of single-family or row houses with "high rises", as you did. Why did you chose to use an extreme as contrast? That's not the only alternative. What about if they are replaced with a low-rise, or a mid-rise? These offer higher density than row houses but without the same visual impact as a high rise. Some in Manhattan love their 5-story brownstones. I lived in a city with lots of 4- and 5- story buildings, and think that - if well designed - they have a very nice feel to them. As to the "why", our economics system says that (in general) when there is demand either prices go up or supply expands. If the prices go up, then people who can't afford the new prices must move. Our primary economics system isn't really designed with people's emotions in mind, so this can cause stress and turmoil, leading even to protests and violence. One fix is to enforce rent controls, which leads to a different set of issues. If we don't want to force people to move, then we either must make SF less attractive ("protests and violence" can help!) in order to reduce demand, or build new housing to increase the supply. Not all systems are designed for growth. As a famous example (at least for beer aficionados) the Trappists breweries only serve the purpose of supporting their monastic way of life. The prices aren't raised to match demand, so some people end up buying and reselling the beer for a much higher price. As a remedy, the monks limit how much a single person can buy in a period of time. There are other economics models which may fit SF better. For example, in the co-op system, the residents own a share of the organization which owns the row houses, or the apartment. They can decide as a whole if they want to, for example, add a new floor to the building or gut and replace the building. Because it's a larger organization, with its own financials, it can afford to take on a larger task like that. The residents would want this because the larger number of people in the building would likely lead to a lower rent. While with single family ownership it's a lot harder to make this decision. This is a very different model than SF's row houses. I'm curious about how the choice of economic model affects how a city might transform itself, but can't do more than hypothesize about it like I just did.
lgieron 13y ago
Exactly, in my home town there's a large car factory (Fiat's), which is providing dozens of buses for its workers every day, and yet nobody is calling those workers entitled egoists.

by raldi 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

melling 13y ago
We are talking about California where they didn't build an extensively sufficient subway system.
- stackcollision 13y ago
  It must suck to live in a third-world state.
  - zalzane 13y ago
    oh my god are you being serious? This isnt fucking reddit, take your sensationalism elsewhere. It's really easy to pick on transportation systems when you have absolutely no idea how spread out everything is.
- jusben1369 13y ago
  Whenever you can land at an airport and take a train (BART) into the heart of the City in under 30 minutes you've got a subway system. BART could always be better (loop the Bay or go across the Golden Gate) but it is a real Subway system.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    BART is more commuter rail than metro (what is usually meant by "subway"). It provides transport from other cities into the city (SF), but provides little coverage in the city itself. For people living in very specific parts of the city (see: the Mission) the lack of a real metro has made BART into a pseudo-subway, but at the end of the day it's still commuter rail (the seating arrangements in a BART car is telling as to its intended purpose). San Francisco doesn't really have a metro system - it has streetcars that don't have exclusive right of way through the majority of their run.
    - jusben1369 13y ago
      That's a good point.
  - melling 13y ago
    No one said that it wasn't real. There's 100 miles of track. I said that it wasn't extensive enough. It doesn't sufficiently meet the needs of the people who live in the area. Getting to/from the airport is only one use case. If you want to remove cars from the road and have people live in a larger area, mass transit needs to accomodate them.

gtirloni 13y ago

The impact of carpooling is minimal and there are much more efficient ways at public transportation. Carpooling is a band-aid unlikely to reach the critical mass required to turn around the nightmare that public transportation is.

akgerber 13y ago
Those more-efficient means of public transportation (commuter trains) only work if the destination is within walking distance of the train station. But Silicon Valley communities make it illegal to build office towers in their downtowns, so the existing rail transport isn't practical to commute from SF to Peninsula office parks.

dalke 13y ago

Have you not been following any of the discussion about this topic? Here are three frequently voiced objections: 1) If the city decided to put a new bus route outside of your house, with a bus every 10 minutes for the morning and evening rush hours, then you would expect there to be public meetings where people can voice concerns about the routing, increase in large traffic, noise, and so on. Why should private companies not be subject to the same sort of democratic decision making on how to use the local public roads and bus stops? 2) Some people moved to the city in part because of the knowledge that the private bus system would be there. Without those buses, they would have chosen somewhere else precisely because the lack of parking would have made the commute impossible. It's hard then to say that each bus replaces a dozen cars, when those people might not be there if there were no buses. 3) If getting cars off the road and reclaiming commuting time were paramount, then why not rezone the areas around Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. for medium density housing, like SF-style row houses, instead of the current preference for suburban detached housing? Then people could walk or bike to work in a matter of minutes. The densities for SF, MV, and C are 17K, 6K, and 5K/sq mile respectively, so there's plenty of opportunity for local population growth. Instead, the local (and democratic) resistance to zoning change in those smaller cities causes increased prices and bus traffic elsewhere, but the people in SF have no way to push back and cause the zoning laws of the smaller cities to change.

raldi 13y ago
I think you need to look up the definition of the word "frivolous".
- dalke 13y ago
  I thought I addressed your "frivolous" criterion directly. 1) It may be "frivolous" if the routing is only made based on the needs of the commuters, and has no input from the people who live on those routes. In an extreme case, if a bus goes down a narrow street in order to save one able-bodied person one block of walking, then that part is definitely frivolous even with the overall savings. Without that local input, neither you nor I have an idea of which parts are frivolous and which are not. And that local input has not occurred. 2) You made assumptions which might not be true. If the net effect of adding buses did not reduce car traffic at all, then your presumed advantages don't exist, and hence the effort is "frivolous." 3) If the goal is to reduce commute time and get cars off the streets, then long-distance bus traffic is not the solution. Improved access to nearby housing is the solution. Instead, long-term busing is a frivolous waste of money which should instead go towards zoning changes. But that involves getting into long-term local politics, which business people don't like doing. Instead, they would rather spend money on a technical solution which is achievable in the short-term, even if it doesn't really help your stated goals.

king_jester 13y ago

The Google bus issue is more about the self-involvement and less about the frivolity. Backlash against Google buses is about gentrification and the fact that a well paid group of workers comes in from a variety of locations and then dominates local politics.

davidf18 13y ago
The real issue here is the higher costs of housing caused by the politics of zoning that creates artificial scarcity in housing. In a healthy market, there would be increased construction to offset the increased demand caused by people with higher incomes.
- 205guy 13y ago
  Except if you have a neighborhood full of nice row houses (almost historic by American standards), friendly local businesses, etc., then the "politics of zoning" by the local residents has tended to the status quo, which they seem to like. In that case, where would you be able to increase construction? People want to live in those nice neighborhoods, not some new high rise in a "redeveloped" area. So the newcomers with google salaries buy up and price out the current residents of those pleasant neighborhoods. This creates friction. Why should all systems be designed for growth?
  - dalke 13y ago
    I've seen that the frequent opposition to zoning changes protests the replacement of single-family or row houses with "high rises", as you did. Why did you chose to use an extreme as contrast? That's not the only alternative. What about if they are replaced with a low-rise, or a mid-rise? These offer higher density than row houses but without the same visual impact as a high rise. Some in Manhattan love their 5-story brownstones. I lived in a city with lots of 4- and 5- story buildings, and think that - if well designed - they have a very nice feel to them. As to the "why", our economics system says that (in general) when there is demand either prices go up or supply expands. If the prices go up, then people who can't afford the new prices must move. Our primary economics system isn't really designed with people's emotions in mind, so this can cause stress and turmoil, leading even to protests and violence. One fix is to enforce rent controls, which leads to a different set of issues. If we don't want to force people to move, then we either must make SF less attractive ("protests and violence" can help!) in order to reduce demand, or build new housing to increase the supply. Not all systems are designed for growth. As a famous example (at least for beer aficionados) the Trappists breweries only serve the purpose of supporting their monastic way of life. The prices aren't raised to match demand, so some people end up buying and reselling the beer for a much higher price. As a remedy, the monks limit how much a single person can buy in a period of time. There are other economics models which may fit SF better. For example, in the co-op system, the residents own a share of the organization which owns the row houses, or the apartment. They can decide as a whole if they want to, for example, add a new floor to the building or gut and replace the building. Because it's a larger organization, with its own financials, it can afford to take on a larger task like that. The residents would want this because the larger number of people in the building would likely lead to a lower rent. While with single family ownership it's a lot harder to make this decision. This is a very different model than SF's row houses. I'm curious about how the choice of economic model affects how a city might transform itself, but can't do more than hypothesize about it like I just did.

lgieron 13y ago

Exactly, in my home town there's a large car factory (Fiat's), which is providing dozens of buses for its workers every day, and yet nobody is calling those workers entitled egoists.