Traffic-busting $100B Bay Area tax plan taking shape

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/08/mega-measure-100-billion-traffic-busting-tax-plan-for-the-bay-area-taking-shape/

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

84 245 7 years ago

djpilot• 7 years ago

I really like the bendy train in the artistic rendering. What materials would allow for railroad car chassis and bodies which could bend and torque with the curve of the track like rubber? I think you would need lots of wheels or a relatively pointless flex-inducing system on each car to even get it to bend in this fashion.

Perhaps it just made for a pretty picture, and a completely impractical reality :)

https://i2.wp.com/www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

codesnik• 7 years ago

oh man, I've come here to complain about unbelievably small radiuses. But they bent the damn train car!

xyzzy_plugh• 7 years ago

Not quite a bendy train but the Toronto Rocket subway is quite a trip during sharp turns, as it has fully-open gangways, giving the appearance that the train is bending through curves.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangway_connection#/media/Fi...

Tempest1981• 7 years ago

And all of the vehicles are not just driverless -- they're passenger-less!

I still like it. Probably means everyone is finally working from home.

rayiner14• 7 years ago

The artist just doesn't understand physics. Even if it was possible, you'd be losing huge amounts of energy to constant deformation.

dwaltrip• 7 years ago

I don't think this is correct as a general statement. Imagine if the walls were made of canvas fabric with appropriate amounts of slack, just as an example of a material that can easily bend.

You would need a cleverly designed frame, but I'm sure there is something that would work. Perhaps many smaller segments joined together.

adrianmonk• 7 years ago

Alternatively, maybe it has nothing to do with physics, the picture is computer rendered, and the artist found the first of these two alternatives a whole lot easier:

1. model a train that is straight, and then use some tool to bend the entire model to fit a curve.

2. define a curve, then align models of train engine and cars so that they follow the curve.

burfog2• 7 years ago

If the train is elastic, you'd recover that energy.

Going into a curve, kinetic energy from the speed of the train is turned into spring energy by bending the train. Leaving the curve, the spring energy becomes kinetic energy. The flexed train speeds up due to the spring force as the train unflexes.

unsrsly• 7 years ago

I also appreciate the re-used formation of Tesla/van/Tesla next to Smart car/Smart car/Smart car.

heliodor• 7 years ago

The first thing that caught my eye was the gap in the middle of the bridge. A rather rare sight in reality, so the presentation of such a rendering comes across as a form of lying.

I completely missed the curved train cars! Thanks for pointing it out.

the_mitsuhiko• 7 years ago

Steel tracks are transported on trains and they flex: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt6SgeQHA4b/?igshid=1f2ujwjayn8w...

nitrogen3• 7 years ago

This is OT, but it was absolutely impossible to tap the tiny X on the "use our app" banner. It just opened the clipboard overlay no matter what I tried (Firefox Android) -- tap X, "Select All" button appears.

dfilppi• 7 years ago

Or they could mandate remote work. Or tax companies that require employees to commute when it isnt required by the business/role.

zbrozek• 7 years ago

Yeah, then every role will require it and the tax does nothing.

hedora4• 7 years ago

Alternatively, they could stop trying to block companies that run bus networks because the local governments refuse.

rayiner14• 7 years ago

$100 billion sounds like a lot, but note that it'll cost $5-10 billion just to bring Caltrain to a downtown station from its current location: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/9/12/17850744/pennsylvania-avenue.... I think everyone will be shocked at how little new infrastructure San Francisco actually gets for the money.

Consider what it'd take to get a transit system comparable to say Chicago's. (The two areas aren't that dissimilar in size and population. Chicagoland has 9.5 million people in 10,500 square miles; the Bay Area has 8 million people in 7,000 square miles.) Chicago has 500 miles of commuter rail plus 100 miles of rapid transit. San Francisco has 70 miles of light rail (Muni), plus ~180 miles of commuter rail (BART + Caltrain). And it's not clear that Muni even counts as a rapid transit line. Most of it isn't grade separated, so it's got an average speed of 8 miles per hour. (The D.C. Metro, a typical heavy-rail system, averages 33 miles per hour including stops.) The LRVs go about 5,000 miles between failures, versus 200,000 miles for a 7000-series D.C. Metro car.

So even to get to Chicago levels (where most people still drive!), you're talking about building a whole new subway system, plus building hundreds of miles of commuter rail across the Bay Area. It's a trillion dollar project, not a $100 billion project.

So what would it take to finance all that? Let's be charitable and say you can do it for $500 billion. California is currently issuing 25-year general obligation bonds at 5% for 25 year maturity. That's $35 billion per year in annual payments, divided by 2.6 million Bay Area households. Or about $13,500 per household per year.

If that sounds unaffordable, let’s hypothesize we just have “rich people” pay for it. The top 5% of households in the San Francisco metro area make an average of $600,000 per year. Applying that to the whole Bay Area, you’re looking at 130,000 households making $78 billion per year total. So the tax for transit would have to be the other 50% of income that California doesn’t already tax those folks.

Okay, surely billionaires have the money. Last year, US billionaires made $470 billion. So we are talking about less than a 10% billionaire’s tax, right? Well the Bay Area is just 3% of the country’s population. Hardly seems fair to give it such an outsized portion of confiscatory billionaire taxes. 3% of 470 is about $15 billion, not close to enough!

Oh, and here's the kicker. Everyone would pay for that new transit, but most people wouldn't be able to use it! In Chicago, only 12% of commuters take public transit, because the system, as extensive as it is, really only is good for getting people into downtown and back out. Even if San Francisco manages to double that, you're talking about everyone paying what would be in the rest of the country a mortgage on a house for a transit system 75% of people can't use.

jseliger• 7 years ago

New York faces similar cost problems: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/05/29/assume-nordic-.... If the city, in this case cities, manage to tame the cost problems, the infrastructure can and will e built. This is not a funding problem per se, as the money is there, it's just being used ineffectively.

jcranmer2• 7 years ago

San Francisco has 70 miles of light rail (Muni), plus ~180 miles of commuter rail (BART + Caltrain). And it's not clear that Muni even counts as a rapid transit line. Most of it isn't grade separated, so it's got an average speed of 8 miles per hour.

Light rail systems are generally counted as rapid transit, even though the grade separation tends to reduce travel time a lot. Boston's Green Line on the T is also a light rail system, and is generally about 7-9 mph.

Furthermore, BART is generally counted as a heavy rail transit line, although like DC's Metrorail, the system is a bit of a hybrid between commuter rail and heavy transit.

Camillo2• 7 years ago

The Caltrain downtown extension (DTX) is going to cost $10 billion (or more) because the planners have no real incentive to control costs, not because it has to.

First, note that the "Pennsylvania alignment" has little to do with bringing Caltrain from 4th and Townsend (where it currently ends) to the Transbay Terminal. Pennsylvania Avenue is not between those two points! No, the city wants to redo the entire line between 22nd St. station and 4th and Townsend, to increase grade separation for Mission Bay.

Which is probably a good thing to do in its own right, but it doesn't have to mean "let's just bore a huge tunnel through the whole thing", which is the most expensive option. See here for a much cheaper alternative that was summarily dismissed: https://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2014/01/focus-on-mission-b...

pteredactyl6• 7 years ago

Dang $10B, for how many mile(s)? Where does the City have these discussions?

melling5• 7 years ago

“Oh, and here's the kicker. Everyone would pay for that new transit, but most people wouldn't be able to use it!”

You are being a bit shortsighted. Even if you don’t use it, you’ll benefit from less road congestion. The average speed on roads keeps decreasing.

Remove 25% of the cars and driver’s commute times will also improve. Fewer accidents, etc

rayiner14• 7 years ago

It would be much cheaper to just widen the congested roads by 25% instead. (And before you say “induced demand”—removing cars from the road will also create induced demand. Induced demand results from the fact of reduced road congestion, not the specific means by which you reduce congestion.)

More broadly, urban congestion is something that only affects a subset of people. The average American commute is 26 minutes, but a staggering 16 miles. People are cruising to work! The US has among the fastest commutes in the OECD: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commu....

wbl11• 7 years ago

12٪ of commuters is not a good measure. Chicago's urban areas have more transit usage for all sorts of things.

jakozaur• 7 years ago

Lack of affordable housing near work is creating a lot of traffic in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of cities are adding more offices than housing.

To eliminate congestion: Either you have to fix housing or add more toll to roads.

bufferoverflow2• 7 years ago

Or do more work remotely.

Or build more roads.

Or build multi-level roads or tunnels.

randycupertino2• 7 years ago

Building more roads just increases traffic: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/06/21/the-science-is-clear-...

jelliclesfarm24• 7 years ago

When jobs disappear and we have more automation/AI filling in for people..what are we doing to do with congested cities with decaying infrastructure.

I think the govt should focus on what will happen when we reach a post-jobs future instead of ways to tax people more now. Invest in technologies and some form of universal basic services(like food, medical) and take care of infrastructure and schooling etc. they should particularly come clean and fix the unfunded pension liabilities of public sector employees in CA which is where most of the taxes are going.

The biggest expense is public schools and education. Figuring how to deliver education effectively to young minds(likely with parents who won’t work because there will be fewer jobs) by disrupting education is better than trying to appease unionized teachers who are focused on inflating pensions rather than their students who suffer during strikes and walk outs.

wbl11• 7 years ago

Ever been to a city? There is a reason NYC has everything one could ever want to experience because it takes very few interested people to have a lot of people in NYC interested in a thing.

Scene_Cast2• 7 years ago

I'm personally excited about two transit projects in the bay area - CalTrain electrification and the Dumbarton Rail Corridor.

cjensen2• 7 years ago

The Dumbarton Rail Corridor seems like a good idea, but it's not going to work. The problem is that Dumbarton commuters have a large "fanout"; that is, they come from all directions in the east side, and commute to locations in all directions in the west side. A single point-to-point link between Redwood City and Union City isn't very useful because of all the connections that would need to be made. Yes, there are connections to Caltrain, BART, and Amtrak, but those services are also linear and don't fan out well.

Two easy fixes to the Dumbo would do a lot more to reduce idling in traffic: (1) direct connection to 101 on the west side which was originally blocked by the city of Palo Alto, and (2) increase the capacity. But while there is plenty of appetite to charge bridge commuters exorbitant tolls, there is no appetite to do anything that helps them.

kyledrake• 7 years ago

“The farther people travel, the more demand there is for bigger solutions,” he said. “There is no question this region has to address housing, but how we do that, that is still to be discussed.”

No, it's a prerequisite to solving the transportation problem. How else would you know what to design the system for?

dasil003• 7 years ago

They talk briefly about housing at the end, but that strikes me as absolutely core to the success of any initiative to decrease congestion. People tolerate absurd commutes because the jobs are better here, increasing transportation bandwidth in isolation will just increase the distance people are willing to travel. Only solution is either more housing here or better jobs elsewhere, and we can't control the latter.

JumpCrisscross• 7 years ago

increasing transportation bandwidth in isolation will just increase the distance people are willing to travel

We need more housing. But better transportation alone would spread the problem out and alleviate some of its worst symptoms, e.g. congestion.

acpetrov• 7 years ago

Bay area traffic would see a decent improvement just by using more left turn yields at traffic lights

phkahler• 7 years ago

> They talk briefly about housing at the end, but that strikes me as absolutely core to the success of any initiative to decrease congestion.

Public transportation only works to connect high density areas. It's critical to take that into account or systems will fail.

Retric• 7 years ago

Density can be deceptive. Medium-density housing works just fine at one end of a public transit system, the critical issue is how often transit stops and how often people need to swap from one mode of transit or train to the next.

bobthepanda2• 7 years ago

It also works to transport people in narrow corridors across geographic barriers. Like the Bay itself, or the fact that both sides of the Bay are long and narrow.

kenneth3• 7 years ago

Actually I think tying anything housing related to the measure is a great way to ensure it'll be a total clusterfuck. There's way too much disagreement on the matter, and any spending on it quickly devolves into an endless money pit.

Not that that's not the case with transit in CA anyways given the national embarrassment that is the high-speed rail project. But having two massive issue like that in the measure is going to make it exponentially more likely to be a disaster.

kelnos15• 7 years ago

Absolutely agree. Housing is a related, but separate, problem that should be handled directly with its own plan.

DataWorker• 7 years ago

The lack of housing here could be taken as a sign that moving here or locating a business here could cost more by way of taxes and such. If it did cost more the flow of people and debt into the area might slow and some of the good jobs here would go elsewhere.

bobthepanda2• 7 years ago

More housing doesn't really solve the problem, because people don't necessarily even want to live next to where they work, and in a household with multiple workers everyone living near where they work is almost an impossibility.

Tokyo has lots of housing and jobs everywhere, but that mostly results in average one-way commute time of an hour.

CPLX2• 7 years ago

Start by getting rid of the street level single car parking garages that literally define every single residential neighborhood in San Francisco.

dsl2• 7 years ago

Couldn't agree more! Banning single car garages and mandating that all construction include two garage stalls per dwelling would free up massive amounts of street parking and all us to add desperately needed lanes on many streets.

CPLX2• 7 years ago

Very funny.

cjensen2• 7 years ago

Yikes that sounds bad. Will need to see the details to be sure though.

So here is how Santa Clara County handles the same issue already: every 10 years, they put on the ballot a one-cent sales tax. Along side it, they put a list of the projects to be funded. There is a clear link between the tax and projects, local control, a deadline, and a 10-year reckoning. Alameda County has also started a similar project.

Consider the alternative: the new Bay Bridge eastern span. It cost way more than it should have. Why? Because the mayors of Oakland and Berkeley demanded a pretty bridge instead of a simple one. It was paid for not by Oakland and Berkeley, but by the state which charges tolls on all the bridges -- including the Dumbarton, San Mateo, and Antioch bridges which were of the exact same "simple" type that Oakland and Berkeley complained about.

When the projects are paid for out of big, faceless funding, then there is no incentive to make it work for the people paying the tax. For example, link up Caltrain closer to downtown? That's not really a benefit to anyone other than SF and the Penninsula.

masonic3• 7 years ago

  they put a list of the projects to be funded

... which is not legally binding.

Seriously, the VTA is the absolute poster child for worst return on infrastructure investment in USA history. Its operating costs (alone!) are 85% subsidized with nothing going to fixed costs.

purplezooey• 7 years ago

Glad to see Delta Coves finally being built.

mullingitover4• 7 years ago

asked registered voters, among other questions, whether they would support a 1-cent sales tax to fund transportation projects in the Bay Area. Seventy-one percent of respondents answered, “Yes.”

facepalm

Please stop with the regressive sales taxes. These things should be paid for in property or progressive income taxes instead of a tax on being poor.

Apocryphon• 7 years ago

It's in the numbers. A penny increase doesn't sound so bad. So you'd have to break it down to how much cost it would add to the average person.

kelnos15• 7 years ago

That's not the point. Regressive in this context means that everyone pays the same percentage, regardless of their means to do so. A simple test is "whose spending will have to increase the most percentage-wise to cover the extra tax?" If the answer is "poor people", then it's regressive.

The average person doesn't matter. If a new tax pushes a borderline low-income person below the poverty line, that's a problem.

option4• 7 years ago

this is not a tax on being poor, this is a tax on everyone. It is also to be used by everyone, so why only property owners should pay?

spoonie5• 7 years ago

Because property owners are the ones who directly benefit from the value of their land increasing.

enraged_camel• 7 years ago

> this is not a tax on being poor, this is a tax on everyone.

You don't understand what a regressive tax is.

It is a tax that disproportionately affects the poor, due to their much higher marginal utility of money.

ip265• 7 years ago

Property tax is, at least in California, the sacred lamb.

mullingitover4• 7 years ago

I mean, fine, just charge a utilities connection fee on a sliding scale in relation to the market value of the land.

zamfi2• 7 years ago

Prop 13 is. But parcel taxes are extremely common in California. There are many on the ballot every election cycle, and they pass shockingly often.

This usually amounts to $20-$100 per house / apartment / unit per year.

Still regressive because it isn’t income or value dependent, but it is a tax on property.

malandrew• 7 years ago

When everyone feels the pain of a tax, they are all involved.

Any tax that Person A supports but Person B is paying is a predatory tax.

The main reason more citizens don't demand that their government be more efficient is because they aren't paying the bulk of the operating costs.

mullingitover4• 7 years ago

Any tax that Person A supports but Person B is paying is a predatory tax.

Why should Person A, who earns 100% of their income through honest labor that benefits society, suffer the same pain of tax as Person B, who got it by the luck of coming through the right birth canal? Or because they own land that was made more valuable because of the government's investment and protection?

cobookman2• 7 years ago

Sure put the tax on those who'd be commuting on this new infrastructure. However for those that live within a few miles of their job, what exactly are they gaining?

It's the same reason Bridges have a toll vs getting funds directly from property / income tax.

grogenaut• 7 years ago

You're getting a massively connected area with larger amount of commerce further stoked by the people who take the train.

kingosticks• 7 years ago

The big one is an increase in the value of their land. And is this initiative purely about commuting? Maybe the new train will allow people to more easily socialise or receive healthcare or any other part of their non-work life.

Also, trains/buses are not usuualy free in the same way that some bridges have tolls.

kelnos15• 7 years ago

Not everyone is privileged enough to be able to afford to live close to their job. This is about raising quality of life across the board. People who have the "I've got mine, so fuck you" attitude are a blight on society.

pteredactyl6• 7 years ago

Thank you! Can we please think about alternate ways to raise money? How about debt? New privately funded agencies? Refactoring the current budget?

My concern is government too worried about losing its grip on the area. Which stifles progress.

Camillo2• 7 years ago

I believe that, if we work together, the Bay Area has the ability to raise $100B in taxes.

I don't believe for a second that our ruling class will be able to do anything useful with it. And I say this as a mass transit user and supporter.

kelnos15• 7 years ago

It's not even that. Even if the governments could use it effectively, they'll get hit with lawsuits by NIMBYs not wanting rail or a new station too close to their house, which eats up valuable funding.

lpolovets3• 7 years ago

This feels so misguided to me. This is going to cost ~$35k/household and the govt is generally terrible at spending money.

It also dodges the real issue in the bay area, which is housing. Commutes are long because most people can't afford to live next to their jobs. If we stopped restricting new housing and taller building, then the number of cars on the road would decrease.

Furthermore, there are innovations coming that might shorten commuting (e.g. things like Hyperloop, although I have no idea if that's viable) and self-driving cars (which let you read/work/etc while commuting). The government is not going to be able to deploy $100b better over the next few decades than the private market.

Finally, the rise of remote work might mean a lot of professions commute less in the future. My prediction is this just going to be an exercise in setting $100b on fire.

richk4493• 7 years ago

(1) 100 billion over 7 million people is 15k over say twenty years for roughly 750 dollars per year. If the outcome was effective, that sounds like a worthwhile investment.

(2) We definitely need increased housing, but that will only make the traffic problem worse. Can you imagine Tokyo or Paris (cities that have built density) without public transit?

(3) there will always be something new on the horizon - if you always wait for what is next (I.e. hyper loop) you will never improve infrastructure. Unless you think that hyperloop is the absolute end of public transit?

(4) I agree with your skepticism that our governments will spend the money wisely. Since this appears to be some sort of community effort, maybe they will find a way to turn it over to the free market.

rayiner14• 7 years ago

With interest, that’s $1,200 per year for every man woman and child in the Bay Area.

entropea• 7 years ago

Has there ever been a time in modern history where building new housing in a large city like SF or SEA has actually decreased housing prices with evidence that no other economic factors at the time played a role?

lpolovets3• 7 years ago

This doesn't directly answer your question, but here are a few links that discuss the estimated increase in housing costs due to regulated development.

https://www.cato.org/publications/research-briefs-economic-p...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer...

Bahamut• 7 years ago

Tokyo?

bickfordb• 7 years ago

Prices appear to have stalled/dropped in Portland

pertymcpert13• 7 years ago

Yes, Tokyo.

quellhorst• 7 years ago

There is so much demand for more housing that a building boom would occur if restrictions were eased. Look at population charts of Texas cities like Austin, San Antonio and Houston where building is easier. Then compare to the relatively flat San Jose and San Francisco population charts.

option4• 7 years ago

you can’t just build more houses without infrastructure. And even with it, people already living here will and do oppose building more (and, alas, they have a right to their opinion)

We should not have job singularities like Bay Area or NY, we should have much (an order of magnitude) more centers like that and more remote work for professions where it makes sense.

wbl11• 7 years ago

We already have the infrastructure.

pertymcpert13• 7 years ago

The Bay Area is so sparsely populated it makes me depressed. Honestly, someone told me a few months ago he didn't want any more building in Cupertino because it was "overcrowded already". I was speechless. The people here are absolutely nuts.

jcranmer2• 7 years ago

If we stopped restricting new housing and taller building, then the number of cars on the road would decrease.

Assuming that public transit could support the increased demand. I'm not an expert on Bay Area transit, but my sense is that there is not enough extra supply right now to support the extra density without modifications.

Furthermore, there are innovations coming that might shorten commuting (e.g. things like Hyperloop, although I have no idea if that's viable) and self-driving cars (which let you read/work/etc while commuting).

Of all the arguments against transit, this is one of the shallowest and least effective. Large infrastructure projects takes years, perhaps as long as a decade, before construction starts--and it doesn't matter if they're public or private, because they have to go through the same mandatory delay processes. What you're proposing is that the government does absolutely nothing in the intervening times, in the hope that new technology comes out that makes things magically better. If the new technology miraculously comes out in time, you're going to have the exact same long delay before any benefits actually can be enjoyed, and indeed longer because new technology has inevitable teething problems. More likely, the new technology will turn out to not be worth the hype (PRT, monorail), or will be perpetually just over the horizon (self-driving cars).

There is nothing to be gained by waiting to solve problems that already exist today.

xvedejas• 7 years ago

There doesn't need to be more transit for it to be true that shorter commutes mean fewer cars on the road, even for the same rate of car ownership / transit ridership.

lpolovets3• 7 years ago

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

What you're proposing is that the government does absolutely nothing in the intervening times.

I'm not quite proposing that, but actually you're not far off. I think the government is generally very bad at long-term planning, budgeting, and execution. So if the choice is them doing nothing or them collecting and figuring out how to spend an extra $100 billion, I would go for the former. What I would prefer is that they delegate as much as possible of budgeting and execution to private industry. For example instead of spending tens of billions on BART and Caltrain, what if they offered some fraction of that amount in tax incentives for either multi-family housing developers, or for companies that open offices in areas where most people have to commute out for work? Or even tax incentives for people who have a sub-X mile commute?

What makes me skeptical about government spending are things like the California rail project. It seems like a shit show that is going way over budget, and when it's built it's unlikely to even be competitive with alternative modes of transport.

Things like building restrictions are just hampering the free market. Maybe some developer wants to build a bunch of $2k/mo apartments in SF, and they can make the economics work out for themselves, but the city doesn't allow it, so residents of the city have to pay $3k/mo or commute long distances. Everyone loses.

ip265• 7 years ago

If we stopped restricting new housing and taller building, then the number of cars on the road would decrease.

But didn't you hear? GDP was recently replaced with VMT (vehicle miles traveled) as the measure of a country's economic vitality. So anything that decreases the number of cars on the road, or how far they travel, is right out.

jacques_chester2• 7 years ago

Furthermore, there are innovations coming that might shorten commuting (e.g. things like Hyperloop, although I have no idea if that's viable)

It's not.

and self-driving cars (which let you read/work/etc while commuting)

Self-driving cars won't make it better. Induced demand is a well-studied phenomenon and as I and others have pointed out, cars waste absurd amounts of space per person, whether moving or parked.

The government is not going to be able to deploy $100b better over the next few decades than the private market.

There's a difference here between the well-studied problems of public choice and the well-studied problems of public goods. The former predicts that governments will face a constant battle not to become captured by special interests that drain away public funds. The latter predicts that private industry will never provide these things to a level that maximises net utility.

Finally, the rise of remote work might mean a lot of professions commute less in the future. My prediction is this just going to be an exercise in setting $100b on fire.

A lot of work is not remote and won't be, plus a lot of folks greatly prefer to leave their homes so that it is only home and not some never-not-working hybrid. There's also the small problem that Star Trek style matter replicators don't exist and it remains necessary to deliver things to people, wherever they choose to be. And it remains necessary for those same people to sometimes go to other places to collect them.

pteredactyl6• 7 years ago

I agree. I do not trust $100B in the government's hands. But I do think housing will come naturally (especially if Gov gets out of the way).

kelnos15• 7 years ago

especially if Gov gets out of the way

Who exactly do you think the government is? The government is the people when it comes to things like this. The government will not get out of the way of housing in SF because the existing landowners -- regular people -- like it that way. And they currently hold a voting majority.

usaar3333• 7 years ago

Commutes are long because most people can't afford to live next to their jobs.

I'd love to see studies by traffic coordinator. Highways in the outer suburbs are affected by this (101 south of Santa Clara, 580 east of Castro valley, 680, etc.), but not necessarily the inner core (e.g. 101 on Peninsula, 880 in the East Bay, etc.) which traverse similar priced markets.

Engineers that work in the South Bay aren't living in SF because they can't afford the South Bay.

chungleong• 7 years ago

One key benefit that self-driving brings is the eliminating the need for curb-side parking. Your car can drop you off and go park itself in a hole somewhere. That opens up space for many more bike lanes where light motorized vehicles like Segways can also operate.

A lot of positive development can occur with the right regulations. That's what governments should focus on. As we've seen though with the fiasco that's the taxi market in US cities, public officials aren't too keen on doing their job proper.

kelnos15• 7 years ago

Where, though? So do we now have to have dedicated self-driving-car parking farms? Where would you put one of those in SF such that it wouldn't increase wait times to 15-20 minutes?

Regardless, self-driving systems like this are at best decades away. Do we just sit here and do nothing in the meantime as the already-terrible situation continues to get worse?

theredbox• 7 years ago

100b is a gdp of my country...

usaar3333• 7 years ago

$800b is the GDP of the Bay area..

m0zg• 7 years ago

More like taxpayer-busting plan, like that train to nowhere.

dpc_pw• 7 years ago

At very least increasing taxes is a great way to make more people leave, and thus help with congestion on way or another. ;D

techslave• 7 years ago

interesting. if they can do this then they can create a regional housing authority. then we can fix the density problem.

bufferoverflow2• 7 years ago

Give $100B to Boring company. At $10M/mile, they can dig 10,000 miles of tunnels.

arcticbull• 7 years ago

And not solve transportation at all. Tunnels for individuals with primarily single-occupant vehicles are counter-productive. We need more public transit. Parking is expensive, insurance is expensive, the vast majority of the bay area public will be left out by this plan.

Either way tunnels aren't particularly expensive, stations, on-ramps/off-ramps are.

logiczero• 7 years ago

Why is there an assumption that the tunnels have to be for cars? Create tunnels for bicycles instead: - Tunnels don´t need to be nearly as big, and would still have higher capacity - The friction of ¨I won´t ride a bike because it´s dangerous¨ is reduced or eliminated - Weather as a factor in commuting by bike is eliminated - Like a railway grade, you can basically eliminate any significant elevation ascents/descents

wahern2• 7 years ago

You're conflating Musk's underground highway concept with his proposed solutions for cheaper tunnel construction. The latter is required for the former, but not vice-versa. Musk's 14-foot tunnels are large enough for a traditional subway. See my reply to the parent.

wahern2• 7 years ago

I second this, except I wouldn't put so many eggs in one basket.

To the critics: The viability of Musk's underground highway concept is irrelevant. The basic premise of Musk's original concept was to cut down the cost of tunneling by orders of magnitude. The first optimization is focusing on boring 14-foot diameter tunnels. 14 feet is larger than many subway tunnels in London and Budapest, and about 1 foot shy of some Moscow subway tunnels.

A tunnel is a tunnel--nothing prevents building them as a closed rail network with proper trains. If a Boring Company tunnel couldn't support electrical equipment, then run the trains on batteries. Yes, the basic math of moving people indisputably favors trains, but that doesn't mean you can't apply many of the other engineering and financial concepts from Musk's underground highway concept.

I understand that tunneling, per se, isn't the primary cost of building subways; it's the stations. But if the Boring Company can deliver on just one order of magnitude decrease in tunneling costs, then any public official or engineer who balks at 14-foot tunnels should be booted out of their position.[1] Optimize for the ridiculously cheap 14-foot tunnels and everything else will fall into place. I would expect the engineering and budgeting processes for the more efficient tunnel construction to have a moderating effecting on station design, making it less likely we'd blow so much money on extravagant stations. If tunneling were just 10% cheaper then probably the money would just be shifted elsewhere, but faced with 10x cheaper tunnel construction irresponsible and bloated requirements would stand out.[2]

[1] For example, with an order of magnitude reduction in capital costs then arguments regarding incompatibility with existing equipment (cars, tracks, etc) wouldn't even be reasonable on their face. At those costs just deal with the additional system or, better yet, change everything else! If a Geary Blvd subway in San Francisco could be built so cheaply, then it might make sense to replace and build out the existing MUNI light-rail lines with the Geary technology.

[2] Not an example of bloat, but, for example, with enough cost savings then it may be cheaper to skip elevators and escalators in many stations and simply operate a large fleet (much larger than what exists already) of door-to-door shuttles for the incapacitated.

dfeojm-zlib• 7 years ago

All of said money should be spent on public transport. Spending on single-occupant personal transport, mostly SUVs, commuters act like a gas: it will expand to fill the container: more traffic, more commuters, and more climate change. It won't do any net good to waste money on more highways.

randycupertino2• 7 years ago

Bay Area just needs an underground centralized subway and interconnected light rail. It's so simple and so ridiculous how power NIMBYs just always shut any progress down. Would be such a boon to the quality of living here, it's absurd we can't make this happen.

shereadsthenews• 7 years ago

Most of the Bay Area doesn’t have the built environment to support that. As I always say: transportation cannot solve land-use problems.

twblalock5• 7 years ago

There are only a few places in the Bay Area as dense as the European and Japanese cities that have mass transit.

I've been to a number of cities in Europe and Japan with the population density of the Bay Area. They don't have subways. They have a couple of train stations that link them to major cities. Most people who live in these places drive cars, ride bicycles, or take the bus.

The kind of public transit you want is only sustainable in very dense cities. Outside of downtown San Francisco and Oakland, the Bay Area is a suburb. The amount of money it would take to subsidize a reasonable subway system would bankrupt the state.

nitrogen3• 7 years ago

Keep in mind that every one of those trips has some economic purpose, so more commuters means more workers and more money in the area, even if individual travel times remain unchanged.

ip265• 7 years ago

This is just my theory, but bear with me.

1) Each trip has an economic purpose

2) Thus each trip has an economic value

3) The trip will happen if the economic value is greater than the cost of suffering in traffic (Otherwise, it is not worth it & will not)

4) Ergo the trips that will be added by reducing congestion must be the trips of the lowest economic value.

hedora4• 7 years ago

By this logic, we should completely disband public transit, and also tear out the roads because stranding everybody will reduce the impact of commuting more than also offering transit.

Electric self driving vehicles are right around the corner, and will greatly reduce the environmental and parking issues that come with freeways.

If widening roads leads to more cars, that’s a sign that an inadequate transit network is holding the region’s economy back.

At this point, the bay area has comically underbuilt the road and the transit network, and is also intentionally blocking high density construction near public transit.

All three of those problems need to be fixed.

maccam942• 7 years ago

Mass transit is much more efficient to scale up because people are taking up less space and moving in a frequent coordinated pattern. Cars have a huge footprint: they take up extra space on the highway around a single occupant, they take extra space and time while the driver searches for parking, and they are left parked on some street or garage 90% of the time.

You can never build "enough" roads, it just encourages more people to travel from further away. See induced demand: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-unive...

blendo• 7 years ago

From the article, "Meanwhile, traffic congestion, measured as the time people spend slogging along freeways at speeds of 35 mph or less, grew 80 percent from 2010 to 2016".

I'm all for increasing mass transit speeds and convenience. We need to think really hard about SUVs, and freeways, and commuters, (and commercial trucks). Heck, even a pure electric Tesla Model X is MASSIVE: its gross vehicle weight is 6,500 lbs, and can go up to 130 mph! Good for climate change, not so good for commuting on crowded roads.

But I'm also optimistic: batteries and electronics are improving rapidly, and I expect a $10,000, battery-powered, 2-person, 45mph, 1000 lb, 100-mile runabout coming along in the next 5-10 years. A (much nicer) Renault Twizy-like vehicle would make a dandy Richmond to SF commuter, ASSUMING you could maintain 45mph the whole way.

How to maintain 45mph in these small commuters? Well, each would be shorter and narrower, and slower (assume design top speed 45mph). Thus we could simply restripe a new lane or two onto our freeways. Better yet: electronics/radio (V2V) will allow semi-autonomous platooning (and crash detection/avoidance), thus increasing vehicle density and allowing drivers to relax more on their commute.

What to do with the SUVs and trucks? Not much, other than tax them at 1/2 m v^2.

twblalock5• 7 years ago

Heck, even a pure electric Tesla Model X is MASSIVE: its gross vehicle weight is 6,500 lbs, and can go up to 130 mph! Good for climate change, not so good for commuting on crowded roads.

Weight does not take up space. The Model X may be heavy, but it is only about 6 inches longer and 7 inches wider than a Toyota Camry. I'm not going to mention height because it does not matter within a reasonable range. The Camry can carry 5 people and the Model X can carry 7, plus a lot more stuff, for only a small increase in total size. It also uses no gas. How is that not a net positive?

osdiab• 7 years ago

I want more transit too, but I think transit faces the same effect - add more capacity, and if there’s demand it will fill the capacity. Plenty of very very built out transit systems in the world that are constantly pushing full capacity.

But I think a difference is that since car traffic tends to get inefficient when congestion increases (traffic jams, etc) its a pretty inefficient way to handle large amounts of traffic. You can just fit so many more people onto a train than into personal cars, and they don’t gum up in the same way. Plus, it’s conceivable that mass transit capacity can be expanded to match demand, with sufficient investment, whereas we already devote like 60% of the land in our cities to cars and it’s still not enough.

IMO people will use any method of transportation up to the point where the pain of using it overcomes the value the person gets out of making the trip. The pain can come from operational issues like frequency of delays, fare cost, proximity of stations to destinations, ease of transferring - but can also come from overcrowding

I think that there ought to be increased transit but also much much better utilization of the land that transit goes to. It makes no sense that if you ride BART, you’ll notice that for all of the stops except for those in the most central parts of SF, they shuttle millions of people into giant parking lot wastelands with no shopping and few apartments. Make the stops worth going to and living in! You’re already sending people there and having people live nearby work reduces their transit usage.

If you like that idea, tell state senators to call for a vote on SB50 today. It got blocked undemocratically but that’s the best shot we have for well utilized transit stops in the foreseeable future.

https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler/status/1130497688581967872?...

kelnos15• 7 years ago

IMO people will use any method of transportation up to the point where the pain of using it overcomes the value the person gets out of making the trip.

The problem is that some trips -- like getting to work -- have effectively "infinite" value. Most people can't opt out of that trip.

pteredactyl6• 7 years ago

Article sounded good, but I don't agree with sentiment that many small independent agencies providing public transportation is a bad thing.

I'd prefer many independent agencies (public and private) working together (See: Tokyo) than one big monolith. We need competition.

wbl11• 7 years ago

Do you live in the bay? The transit agencies have territorial fiefdoms rather then compete. BART and Muni force customers of both to go up and down to transfer at the stations they share.

dragonwriter5• 7 years ago

BART uses wider than standard gauge, Muni uses standard gauge. They don't share track because it's physically impossible (though it would be logistically problematic even if it was possible, given the pack frequency for each at those stations), not because of “territorial fiefdoms.”

pteredactyl6• 7 years ago

I live in San Francisco. The method of transferring you describe is reasonable to me and congruent with my opinion. It's good they share the station is my main point.

BooneJS2• 7 years ago

Not interested in waiting. We’re moving out of the Bay Area next week.

NotSammyHagar3• 7 years ago

Good luck next in your life. Please don't come to Seattle, we are full. :-)

BooneJS2• 7 years ago

We’re going to parachute into flyover country. Life will be good!

kenneth3• 7 years ago

Just moved from the Bay Area to the Greater Bay Area[1]! Join, it's nice here, except for the weather. There's a real energy here in HK!

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong-Hong_Kong-Macau_Gr...

NotSammyHagar3• 7 years ago

Years ago I thought of going there, a friend did seriously consider an academic position, even interviewed. It's great there in many ways if you like big city life but Chinese citizens face the possibility of kidnap if they are too politically pushy. I feel so sorry for them but don't know how to help. Some people from grad school who were from there immigrated to Canada and the US, but what will happen to the mass of people.

pertymcpert13• 7 years ago

Isn't the property price even worse there?

ageek123• 7 years ago

How about allowing housing construction near where people work, instead of forcing soul-crushing, expensive commutes?

usaar3333• 7 years ago

Well you need both. Where people work in the SF Bay is distributed heavily through the area. You'll always have commuters, especially in two income households

masonic3• 7 years ago

But that has no beneficial effect unless you limit access to those residences to people who work there (including evicting them upon job change) and limit jobs to those who live locally. Neither is legal.

kelnos15• 7 years ago

This ends up not being a problem in practice as long as you just simply have enough housing.

roflchoppa• 7 years ago

Fremont/Newark to Palo Alto Transit line, theres already a rail line out. Can make it stop in Menlo Park near Facebook, take some funds from the Zuck.

jelliclesfarm24• 7 years ago

I really am not confident that the ‘think tanks’ and the govt has even two brain cells behind this idea.

1. In 50 years, I predict that automation will erase many jobs.

2. The notion that we need to live near where we work is going to become outdated and useless.

3. This is just another way for the govt to get it’s claws deeper into the tax payers wallets.

4. High density is incompatible with affordability. Any affordable housing is subsidised housing with monies that is redistributed.

5. We need more local governance rather than tyrannical regional governance in California with Sacramento dictating everything for everyone.

raldi3• 7 years ago

High density is incompatible with affordability

Could you clarify this? There are countless affordable neighborhoods that are all apartments.

jelliclesfarm24• 7 years ago

I have never seen a highly populous city be affordable. It becomes a pressure cooker of market forces with the initial subsidized affordable housing ending up costing more and resources being redistributed to the point of infrastructure failing leading to more taxes leading to more unaffordability. It’s a vicious cycle.

Affordable houses pay less taxes than market rate. High density still absorb more infrastructure.

Where one house used stand, if there are 10 apartments..it’s that many x 2 cars on the street. It’s almost that many more children in public schools. It’s that many more households consuming water, power and need for general services. But schools don’t multiply..fire stations and police stations don’t increase to cater to the increase in population. Roads are not built to take care of the traffic nor is public transport improved.

More housing = more taxes. That’s why the govt encourages. Affordable housing actually fatten up the funds for the care and feeding of big Gov more because what they don’t offer in high per household tax, they make up in volume.

Net net, govt gets more $$ and the public gets less services. These 20 and 5@ year old multi billion projects never translate because they never see the light of day as they get obsolete quickly. That’s why the Bay Area looks so run down and unaffordable housing and traffic woes only keep increasing and never finds solutions.

kelnos15• 7 years ago

1. Assuming you're correct (which is certainly up for debate), what do we do for the next 50 years? Suffer?

2. Service jobs will always exist. Restaurants, bars, shops, museums, schools, etc. need people present to make them work. Even in cases where people aren't strictly required, people will still want people around. People will always need stuff that will need to be delivered to wherever they are. People also don't want to just stay in their homes all day; transit demand is not solely shaped by work commutes.

3. You draw the line in one place, other people draw it in others. Such is life.

4. There are quite a few cities in the world that will disagree with you, and be right.

5. We need people who will actually cooperate for the greater good. In the US that seems to be a rarity, as our culture is centered around individualism and competition, unlike many other places in the world. If we leave it up to a bunch of local governments cooperating we... oh, right, end up in the exact situation we're in now.

(I agree with you in principle on #5, but a solution that has as a prerequisite, "change the deep-seated culture of millions of people over a relatively short period of time", isn't something I see as doable.)

jelliclesfarm24• 7 years ago

1. We don’t have to suffer. We also don’t have to hand over 100 billion $ to the govt because they want it. Many of us may not even be around in 50 years. It is essentially paying for the next generation and also agreeing to pushing them into debt.

Millennials will then be blamed not unlike baby boomers are blamed by millennials for ‘messing up the next generation future’. Where in fact, it’s agreeing to unrealistic long term plans like this and signing carte blanche whenever the state decides that we need to shell out without them being accountable.

2. I disagree that we will need to have service jobs. Or that people need to travel to be ‘around other people’ who want them around.

Having said that, we do need public transport. We don’t need to lump affordable housing with public transport costs. Just like part of the gas tax was set aside to train prisoners to make them employable. It’s necessary but what’s with the shifty shenanigans?

The public are lured into supporting housing and affordable housing imagining that it benefits them but that’s a marginal side effect. The real purpose of random and especially questionable rezoning to keep building is to create a stream of income through property taxes. Ditto with job creation. Jobs have an inflationary effect.

An unemployed person in the rural area can still have avocado toast if he has a garden. He doesn’t need $10.00 to buy an avocado toast. However he can’t participate in the same economy as a 6 figure earning Silicon Valley resident of CA. However do note that all of them will be paying the same tax for public transport. As will their children over 50 years.

3. Sure. I will vote as inspired by my line.

4. I disagree. I literally don’t know any affordable city that is high density. If you include Mumbai’s slums or Hong Kong’s coffin apartments or NYC rent controlled and subsidized projects, I reject them. It’s not affordable. The cost of expensive living morphs from currency to something else that can be quantified in currency terms. There is a cost to cramming people in resource restricted areas which is also a fixed land area.

5. It’s such a general statement to say ‘ we need people to cooperate for a greater good’. It’s a feel good statement that means nothing unless we get down to specifics.

The US is a better place to live in than most parts of the world. We don’t have tribal wars or bloody religious uprisings or bomb threats everyday. I disagree with you. I don’t know what cooperation you are talking about in ‘other parts of the world’.

Admittedly there are other parts of the world where people cooperate and set aside individualism, but I am willing to bet that they are low density population areas where people have enough space. Cooperation thrives when everyone has the opportunity to make things work for everyone without just one group shouldering the burden. It is another way to make sure everyone carries equal responsibility. Cooperation is NOT co dependency.

quotemstr• 7 years ago

The responses to this post illustrate perfectly why California has the infrastructure crunch it does. As it turns out, constantly making Utopian proposals and decrying anymore who disagrees doesn't actually solve any problems. But that's all anyone does in California, which is why the state can barely manage to allow the owner of an obsolete laundromat to turn it into a modest apartment building.

intopieces• 7 years ago

Seattle is actively removing places for cars to drive, including lanes on streets and parking at curbs, to make way for transit. It’s positively, magnificently car hostile, and precisely the model I would like to see in the Bay Area

starpilot• 7 years ago

Seattle has a functioning local government that does things like approve building permits, an idea considered insane in the BA. I'll never understand how restricting building is meant to "preserve neighborhood character," when it actually results in pushing out long-term residents.

DubiousPusher• 7 years ago

I wouldn't be so certain Seattle is truly different. It's called the Seattle process for a reason.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_process

Honestly, I don't know why the transit politics are working so well here. Partly because Sound Transit has been unusually courageous for a political entity. They have successfully stared down the two richest areas in the region Bellevue and Mercer Island when faced with opposition.

Maybe it just comes down to propaganda. Quite a bit of money was spent to market ST3 to voters. Which is the most recent and most expensive transit oriented ballot initiative.

The whole time there has been a tremendous amount of work done to oppose the improvements. Many in the area will be familiar with the near constant efforts of Tim Eyman to defund transit projects

You might chock it up to uber lefties in Seattle but other liberal priorities have not faired nearly as well on ballot initiatives.

33MHz-i486• 7 years ago

just upzone where the jobs are and let the capital markets solve the problem. people would rather walk to work anyway.

100% of this money will be wasted on:

a) rebuilding few dozen graded crossing of rail

b) acquiring land at insane values (same land thats inflated by restrictive zoning)

c) backfilling unfunded pension liabilities of 9 different agencies

bestnameever• 7 years ago

I wish they would do this in Los Angeles, or provides incentives for companies to move their companies to where people live. Instead, they are building out more in areas away from the jobs causing more and more congestion as everyone tries to get to work. Its mind boggling.

Mbaqanga• 7 years ago

Hm, another tax? No, thank you.

jelliclesfarm24• 7 years ago

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-... : the high speed bullet train to nowhere that ripped out farms and destroyed business in the Central Valley have still not paid the farmers.

Why handing over $100 billion dollars to these ‘authorities’ would be an ill advised move.

Traffic-busting $100B Bay Area tax plan taking shape

Related Stories