
Traffic-busting $100B Bay Area tax plan taking shape - pseudolus
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/08/mega-measure-100-billion-traffic-busting-tax-plan-for-the-bay-area-taking-shape/
======
djpilot
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...](https://i2.wp.com/www.mercurynews.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/ebt-l-2ndtube-12xx-11.jpg)

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

~~~
dwaltrip
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.

~~~
rayiner
Canvas can bend more easily than rubber or steel, but deforming it still
requires some energy. And while canvas would work for the walls, it wouldn’t
work for the bogey, and anything rigid enough to work as a bogey would take
lots of energy to bend.

------
intopieces
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
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
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](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.

------
dasil003
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.

~~~
phkahler
>> 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.

~~~
bobthepanda
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.

------
dfeojm-zlib
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.

~~~
randycupertino
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.

~~~
twblalock
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.

~~~
maccam94
But the density is being suppressed by zoning limits on building heights,
parking requirements, mandated road improvements to handle additional traffic,
and a building permit process that is heavily influenced by NIMBYs. Pass SB50
and watch the upper peninsula become viable for subways.

------
mullingitover
> 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.

~~~
cobookman
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.

~~~
kelnos
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.

~~~
cobookman
Sounds like it should be funded by Sales Tax / Income tax vs Property Tax.

Property Tax should be about using the land & making improvements to nearby
areas. Not about funding things far away.

------
kyledrake
“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?

------
jakozaur
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.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
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.

~~~
wbl
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.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
It’s really not helpful to enquire if I have ‘ever been to a city?’

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

~~~
dsl
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.

~~~
CPLX
Very funny.

------
Camillo
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.

~~~
kelnos
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.

------
rayiner
$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...](https://sf.curbed.com/2018/9/12/17850744/pennsylvania-avenue-route-
caltrain-extension-transbay-high-speed-rail). 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.

~~~
melling
“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

~~~
rayiner
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...](https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commuters).

~~~
melling
That’s what people said 50 years ago.

And when we have another 200 million Americans, we just make the roads wider
again?

Because we didn’t build the proper mass transportation systems 50 years ago,
it’s incredibly expensive to build now. It won’t be easier in another 50 years
with millions of more people

~~~
dsl
Freeways _are_ mass transportation, it might not be the kind you like, but
they are pretty effective at getting large numbers of people from origin to
destination.

The peak capacity of a mile of track will always be less than that of a mile
of highway. But we don't have anywhere to put either because we refuse to
build up and ruin a bunch of NIMBYs views.

~~~
melling
Where are you getting your numbers? Are you making them up?

How many passenger cars can you get down a mile of highway per hour?

I love freeways. It’s just that during rush hour (and holiday weekends),
they’re extremely congested. We’ve got local lanes, express lanes, and Waze to
help figure out which one to take.

Roads don’t scale very well.

Mass transit would more acceptable if we can increase the speed. China has
low-medium speed maglevs, for example, that will travel 100-120 miles per
hour.

[https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-
maglev-t...](https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-
trains/index.html)

~~~
rayiner
To use some example numbers. VA7, which goes from the Dulles area where many
DC-area data centers are located, through Reston where many tech companies'
offices are located, to near DC, carries 50,000-100,000 vehicles per day, and
is congested pretty much all day. The Metro Silver line, which follows roughly
the same route, theoretically destroys that. An 8-car Metro train carries
1,400 people. With 8-minute headways, that's 7.5 trains per hour, 90 trains
over a 12-hour commuting day, or 126,000 people.

Except the actual ridership of the Silver Line is just about 17,000 people per
day, and declining. Why? Because it's useless for most people. It takes you to
DC at one end, and the airport at the other, and a few places that happen to
be on the way. But most people who live in that area don't commute to DC.
People take VA7 to go from say Sterling (where there is no metro station) to
Tyson's Corner. They have to get in a car to use Metro anyway, and by the time
they do that, it's faster to just drive to Tysons instead of getting on the
Metro for the segment of the trip Metro covers.

On the other side of DC, the Maryland suburbs are served by no fewer than 37.5
trains per hour (15 on the Green/Yellow, 15 on the Blue/Silver, and 7.5 on the
Orange). That's 50,000 people per hour! But the cars are pretty much empty in
Maryland, because few people commute into DC. In the height of irony, Metro is
moving one of its main employment centers to Lanham Maryland, located on the
terminus of the orange line. That means it's not actually commutable by Metro
for most part. Folks who work for WMATA aren't living in DC and doing a
reverse commute. They're living in Bowie or Largo or College Park or
Hyattsville (the surrounding towns). Taking Metro would involve going all the
way to DC, switching from the Green/Yellow or Blue/Silver to the Orange, then
going back all the way.

~~~
melling
Hang on...

you’re giving me confirmation bias.

You’re cherry picking one example that confirms your bias. No first principles
reasoning.

You’re giving some specific example about a setup in Washington DC.

This has _absolutely nothing_ to do with how well mass transit can do versus
cars. It’s one specific implementation.

In NYC, for example, 5.5 million people take the subway per day. How much
highway will you need to carry that many people?

~~~
rayiner
“How much highway would you need to move 5.5 million people into and through a
dense downtown core” is a question almost no city in the US besides New York
needs to ask.

NYC is uniquely dense:
[https://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2012/09/th...](https://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2012/09/the-50-densest-
american-metropolitan-areas-by-weighted-density.html). The weighted population
density (the density in the parts of the metro area where people live) is
30,000 people per square mile. LA and SF, the next most dense, are less than
half as dense, at 12,000. DC, at 6,400, is about 1/5 the density of New York.
Portland and Seattle are even less dense, at 4,000-5,000, which is about the
national average.

The Silver Line example is much more illustrative of a typical place in the
US. In these places, the higher theoretical capacity of rail is irrelevant,
because the commuting pattern isn’t about bringing a large number of people
along a few major paths to a downtown job center. It’s about shuttling people
between job clusters spread out among the suburbs:
[http://www.robertmanduca.com/projects/jobs.html](http://www.robertmanduca.com/projects/jobs.html)
(scroll over to Northern VA, west of DC). There might be heavily used
corridors like VA7, but the commutes both start and end in suburban locations.
You couldn’t pick out a few key paths where being able to move 100,000 people
a day from point A to point B and intermediate points would really be all that
helpful.

~~~
wbl
SF should be NYC level density.

~~~
rayiner
It’s not just SF. 85% of the Bay Area lives outside SF. The area’s key
industry is not only outside SF, but mostly scattered among random suburban
office parks in the South Bay. Densifying SF won’t do it. You have to get the
jobs out from the big suburban office parks into downtown, or at least in
transit accessible locations in a handful of South Bay cities.

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

~~~
kenneth
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...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong-Hong_Kong-
Macau_Greater_Bay_Area)

~~~
pertymcpert
Isn't the property price even worse there?

~~~
kenneth
Rentals are cheaper. I can get a nice 1br in mid-levels for ~20k HKD (i.e.
$2.5k). In SF these days, I'm not getting a decent 1br in a desirable location
under $4k. My $3.5k rent was considered way under market.

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

------
lpolovets
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.

~~~
entropea
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?

~~~
pertymcpert
Yes, Tokyo.

~~~
masonic
That's only because Tokyo's long term population trend is _negative_ , unlike
most cities.

~~~
pertymcpert
Uh, no. That's not it at all.

------
cjensen
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.

~~~
masonic

      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.

------
jelliclesfarm
[https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-
train-...](https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-
cash-20190610-story.html) : 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.

------
roflchoppa
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.

------
quotemstr
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.

------
ageek123
How about allowing housing construction near where people work, instead of
forcing soul-crushing, expensive commutes?

~~~
masonic
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.

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

------
pteredactyl
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.

~~~
wbl
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
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.”

~~~
hedora
It is true that Bart doesn’t use standard width track.

However, Caltrain, Muni, VTA, ACE and Amtrak all use standard width track, and
none of them cooperate with the others in a meaningful way.

When I gave up on the train commute, they didn’t even bother to arrange timed
transfers where they happened to have adjacent stations.

These agencies need to be combined under an umbrella organization with the
authority to make unilateral decisions for the subagencies to implement.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It is true that Bart doesn’t use standard width track.

> However, Caltrain, Muni, VTA, ACE and Amtrak all use standard width track,
> and none of them cooperate with the others in a meaningful way.

Part of the reason it might seem that way is different federal regulatory
regimes between the light (Muni, VTA) and heavy (Amtrak, ACE, Caltrain) rail
lines, which makes many naively simple kinds of cooperation difficult in
practice.

> These agencies need to be combined under an umbrella organization with the
> authority to make unilateral decisions for the subagencies to implement.

Yes, the best way to make bureaucracy more efficient and responsive is to make
it larger and more distant from the community served.

~~~
wbl
What regulation forbids timed transfers or unified fares?

------
m0zg
More like taxpayer-busting plan, like that train to nowhere.

------
jelliclesfarm
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.

~~~
kelnos
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.)

~~~
jelliclesfarm
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.

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Scene_Cast2
I'm personally excited about two transit projects in the bay area - CalTrain
electrification and the Dumbarton Rail Corridor.

~~~
cjensen
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.

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

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purplezooey
Glad to see Delta Coves finally being built.

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theredbox
100b is a gdp of my country...

~~~
usaar333
$800b is the GDP of the Bay area..

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33MHz-i486
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
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.

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Mbaqanga
Hm, another tax? No, thank you.

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

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

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

~~~
arcticbull
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
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

