
Where San Francisco Wants New Subway Lines - jseliger
http://www.citylab.com/weather/2016/10/san-franciscos-most-wanted-nonexistant-subway-lines/504599/
======
pdx6
I've been involved in San Francisco transit planning in various capacities for
11 years now. I'm here to tell you, in my opinion, these plans will never
happen for our generation.

San Francisco suffers from too many small town self-inflicted political
wounds. While the Central Subway will open in a couple of years with it's new
subway and light rail cars, it'll likely be the last one for us, perhaps even
for our children. Political power brokers, such Willie Brown and the late-Rose
Pak, only rolled in their power to give Chinatown a replacement for the
Central Freeway that was torn down after the 89 quake.

Existing SFCTA members, which are also the Board of Supervisors, constantly
squander transportation funds. Millions have been poured into funding pet
political projects, such as free muni rides for youth and seniors, making Muni
a system of handouts instead of pulling free ride funding from the Feds or the
general fund. The latest axe swing was to delay the DTX, the Caltrain subway
to the Transbay Tower, which the voters prioritized in 1999.

The existing anti-transit, anti-growth cabal of Kim, Peskin, Campos, Yee, Mar,
and Avalos have been able to grab too much power, and will always vote to side
with NIMBYs (Not in My Back Yard) over modern urban growth and planning. Even
the next cohort of supervisors will hold the same values, because the voters
will put similar people into power once they term out, cutting more into the
city's progress as a metropolitan powerhouse.

My educated predictions on this chart are: We'll see Geary BRT, Geneva BRT,
19th Ave Rapid, and the M extension to Park Merced. Maybe some new signals and
bike lanes. That's it.

The SFMTA's 20 year vision does not include any subway or rail extensions
otherwise. I have asked Nick Josefowitz, who's district would include a
theoretical BART extension under Geary, and he says BART is too far behind on
maintenance to even consider such an idea.

~~~
gameshot911
>The existing anti-transit, anti-growth cabal... have been able to grab too
much power, and will always vote to side with NIMBYs over modern urban growth
and planning. Even the next cohort of supervisors will hold the same values,
because the voters will put similar people into power once they term out...

Seems like the people of SF are getting a board that represents their desires.
Is that not an example of functioning government? Seems to me it would be far
worse if the board consistently voted _against_ the wishes of the populous.

~~~
mahyarm
They are responding to incentives. If they had to pay the property taxes that
prop 13 protects them from, they would start to self-modulate and allow things
to reduce their house assessment value.

~~~
rtpg
the thing I don't get: wouldn't subway lines increase house value?

In Tokyo, being a 3 minute walk from a train/subway station easily adds a
couple percent in housing value.

~~~
liotier
> In Tokyo, being a 3 minute walk from a train/subway station easily adds a
> couple percent in housing value.

"Couple percent" ? More than that - from what I saw in most large cities, home
value is pretty much directly proportional to distance from railbound mass
transportation nodes.

------
hindsightbias
If SF had been a little less NIMBY, we'd have been covered in freeways a few
decades back and it would be lovely.

[http://hoodline.com/2015/03/panhandle-freeway-
revolt](http://hoodline.com/2015/03/panhandle-freeway-revolt)

The only reason BART exists is because of the NIMBYs:

"Lost in the story of the Freeway Revolt is the role it played in helping BART
get institutional support. After the 1959 Supervisorial defeat of freeway
plans, BART advocates got surplus Bay Bridge tolls allocated to the proposed
transbay tube. After the 1961 vote against the Western Freeway, Mayor George
Christopher and the influential Bay Area Council both endorsed the proposed
BART system."

The Geary line would be something akin to Boston's Big Dig in complexity and
scale.

~~~
raldi
The freeway revolts had nothing to do with NIMBYism. NIMBYs say, "I agree that
people need a place to live -- they just shouldn't live near me" or "I agree
that we need prisons -- just not near me."

The freeway protesters believed that freeways shouldn't cut through _any_
municipality. Not just theirs -- _nobody 's_.

If you think something shouldn't exist _at all,_ you're not a NIMBY.

~~~
dionidium
This is why the term NIMBY doesn't really capture what's happening now. The
modern NIMBYs oppose city-oriented development _in cities_. They, too, seem
not to be saying "not near me," but, rather, "not anywhere." It's a
conservative impulse against _any_ change.

~~~
epistasis
IMHO, there's no more self-destructive tendencies than those that oppose
cities being cities.

More people want to live in cities than there is space in the cities. Given
that high-density living is more environmentally friendly than low-density
sprawl, it's particularly bad for those in cities to not allow more people to
live there.

But there's two things that everybody hates in city planning: sprawl and
density.

~~~
ghaff
More people want to live in specific cities than there is space in those
cities. There are plenty of cities with available real estate at reasonable
prices.

~~~
epistasis
Taking SF as an example, there is a huge amount of space left. Paris has about
20k /sq. km, whereas San Francisco is about a third of that. And Paris'
skyline is not dominated by highrises.

There's more than enough room in SF proper, and there's absolutely tons of
room down the peninsula. It just happens that current residents don't want
their city to be more like a city, and don't want to improve the
infrastructure so that more people move in.

~~~
ghaff
That would seem to be their choice to make, rightly or wrongly. And, to my
point, there's plenty of space for people around the US and even in cities--
just not in some specific places today as they're currently built out and
provisioned for infrastructure.

~~~
epistasis
Well, it would be their choice to make if it was their property. But is it
their choice to stop any development anywhere?

That's the reality that many California cities live with: people who moved
there a decade or more ago want their place to not change at all from the
moment they moved in, not realizing that their own arrival also disturbed
those who were there before.

Because the problem isn't so much people not building stuff on their own
property, it's a small number of highly motivated people that can stop any
change at all, or interfere with others use of their land to the extent that
they can not build, even within existing permitted use.

~~~
ghaff
>But is it their choice to stop any development anywhere?

Any development. Anywhere? No. But they can vote to influence the type of
development allowed in the community where they're a voter. This isn't
unlimited. Other property owners have rights based on the rules that were in
place when they bought.

>interfere with others use of their land to the extent that they can not
build, even within existing permitted us

Which in many cases should not be allowed.

------
BurningFrog
San Francisco doesn't like to hear it, but it's a very conservative city.

~~~
irrational
But what kind of conservative? Obviously not socially conservative. Do you
mean fiscally conservative?

~~~
enraged_camel
[https://twitter.com/crushingbort/status/463132110006784000](https://twitter.com/crushingbort/status/463132110006784000)

~~~
enraged_camel
The downvotes are pretty hilarious. I guess many people don't realize that
"fiscally conservative but socially liberal" is not an internally consistent
political stance.

~~~
oldmanjay
I suppose if you feel like your downvotes are for sophisticated reasons, it
saves you from having to confront the possibility that your post isn't very
interesting.

------
NickC_dev
The favored candidate in the D1 supervisor race (Marjan) fielded a question on
a Geary subway line about an hour ago.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/58i5wa/hi_red...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/58i5wa/hi_reddit_im_marjan_philhour_a_candidate_for/d90lsnb)

She confirms the general sentiment in this HN thread, that nimbyism is to
blame for poor infrastructure.

We have a facebook group of Richmond District residents who support housing
and infrastructure. [http://growtherichmond.com/](http://growtherichmond.com/)

------
niftich
Oh, the irony!

Geary had fixed-guideway transit from 1880 until 1956 when it was replaced by
buses [1][2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary_Street,_Park_and_Ocean_R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary_Street,_Park_and_Ocean_Railway)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary_Boulevard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary_Boulevard)

~~~
et-al
I can see why they switched. Above ground, busses are better than rail transit
for a number of reasons:

* if a bus ahead breaks down, the bus behind can still go around it, so the line's not totally clogged up

* busses are quieter going through neighborhoods (have a friend who lives by Duboce Park and it rumbles)

* you can share the road with regular automobiles, whereas rails depend on the implementation (yes most of the ones in SF do as well)

* easier to turn a bus around than a train at the terminus

An actual subway could be quicker, but again that requires money, cooperation
from the neighborhood, and time.

~~~
rsync
"I can see why they switched. Above ground, busses are better than rail
transit for a number of reasons"

There is nothing worse than buses.

I, and many others, will do _almost anything_ to avoid riding a bus.

There is very little I can think of in our built, urban environment that is
more aesthetically terrible and ill mannered than big, dumb (and in most
cities, black exhaust spewing) buses bonking their way around city streets.

Steve Jobs said it best:

"If you see a (bus), they blew it."[1]

[1] [https://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-
stylus...](https://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus-or-a-
task-manager-they-blew-it/)

~~~
et-al
Having a bunch of taxis (or Lyft/Uber) is worse than busses. They're
definitely less efficient and cause more congestion. Yes, for the riders of
the cabs, it's a more pleasant experience, but at the cost of the collective
whole.

And which city does not utilize a bus system? Tokyo is the only one where the
busses don't stand out in my memory, but I'm sure they still have busses. It's
impossible for a city to be served completely by rail.

I agree that the bus experience in general is substandard to rail, but the
reality is that when transit planners need to service a new area, they can
just route a bus in a few months as opposed to building out a rail line.

~~~
rsync
"And which city does not utilize a bus system? Tokyo is the only one where the
busses don't stand out in my memory, but I'm sure they still have busses. It's
impossible for a city to be served completely by rail."

Zurich comes to mind. While there are indeed buses in Zurich, they're somewhat
superfluous and only used in (rare) edge cases. Contrary to your assumption,
Zurich is almost entirely served by rail.

~~~
et-al
If I understood your original argument correctly, you believe that if transit
planners have to resort to using busses, they've failed ("blew it").

In the case of Zürich, how did they not fail your metric? If the busses are
truly superfluous, then why doesn't the transit agency discontinue those
lines? I'd like to think they're there for a reason other than paying bus
drivers and lining some pockets.

The reality is that cities, because they're changing, will always need busses
alongside rail. As new areas become popular and need access, it's far quicker
and cheaper to route a new bus line there. Today's bus route might become
tomorrow's rail.

------
sfblah
Implement tolls to drive in SF and route the money to building this. Cities'
implicit subsidies for roads are insane.

~~~
BurningFrog
I'd rather route some of the existing $9.6B budget to useful purposes.

That said, Road Pricing, properly implemented would solve a ton of problems!

~~~
blendo
Biggest problem: personal cars are built for safe freeway travel at 60-80mph.
So they're heavy as hell (often 4000+ lbs), and physically large. But
incredibly wasteful in the city, on 0-35mph urban roads clogged with bikes and
peds.

Low speed/neighborhood electric vehicles might point the way.

------
cylinder
The infrastructure investment is not worth it at all if you remain with low
density along these lines. A land tax surcharge should be assessed on all
properties that will benefit from this infrastructure.

~~~
spoonie
Absolutely! The Gold Coast region in Australia has some studies about how they
used Land Value Tax to fund infrastructure development. Namely the land value
increases around new transit stops that were built could be captured by the
city rather than going into the pockets of private owners. This idea is called
"Value Capture".

[http://www.afr.com/opinion/columnists/following-the-act-
land...](http://www.afr.com/opinion/columnists/following-the-act-land-tax-
approach-boosts-growth-and-state-budgets-20161018-gs4om9)

[http://theconversation.com/gold-coast-light-rail-study-
helps...](http://theconversation.com/gold-coast-light-rail-study-helps-put-a-
figure-on-value-captures-funding-potential-65084)

~~~
honkhonkpants
Value capture is explicitly unconstitutional in California.

~~~
kspaans
Fascinating! I just moved to SF so I didn't know that. I assume you're
referring to Prop 13? My understanding is that it's about property taxes, not
land taxes. Possibly there is some legal wiggle room in there? Anyway, looks
like there are other forms of value capture that may not run afoul of Prop 13!
Thanks for pointing that out I learned something new today. :)

[http://iff.scag.ca.gov/Pages/ValueCapture.aspx](http://iff.scag.ca.gov/Pages/ValueCapture.aspx)

[http://www.transitwiki.org/TransitWiki/index.php?title=Value...](http://www.transitwiki.org/TransitWiki/index.php?title=Value-
capture_finance)

~~~
dragonwriter
LVT are a form of property tax on real property; they differ from traditional
ad valorem real property taxes in that they do not apply to the value of
improvements, but were one to try to implement them in California, the
Constitutional limits on real property taxation (Prop 13) would apply to them
in the same way as it does to other real property taxes.

------
encoderer
How much of SF nimby psychology comes from the over leverage this city forces
on you? Even with 200k down and a 200k salary an $800k mortgage can turn you
fairly conservative I think.

~~~
kspaans
IMO, it's rational economic thinking (if perhaps a little selfish): 90% of
your net worth is in a single asset (either due to poor financial planning on
your part, or because one asset has ballooned in value), so you will use your
municipal voting power to protect that asset.

~~~
sfaf
Unfortunately this is a negative feedback loop. Essentially you are saying
that because housing prices are expensive and people are over-leveraged, they
will vote for any legislation that will protect and increase housing prices.
This legislation increases prices further, which means even more over-
leveraged housing owners.

We need something to break out of this negative feedback loop.

~~~
zanny
The break out should be that, in terms of metrics of the physical world, SF is
a horrible city to establish a business in. There are plenty of bubbles going
around, but the "Bay Area or Bust" in tech is certainly one of them. The cost
of living is so preposterously high, and the infrastructure so bad, in a
rational world businesses would be throwing money at moving thousands of
people out of the area to much cheaper cities instead of sucking up the
ludicrous costs.

~~~
swuecho
finally, I find someone has the same opinion with me.

------
jorblumesea
I really hope ST3 passes in Seattle and we avoid being San Fran. I love this
city and would hate to see it devolve into NIMBY power plays and endless
traffic jams. Things are bad enough here as it is.

------
gns24
Isn't asking people where they would like a new subway line a case of asking
people what they think the solution is rather than what problem they would
like to have solved? Wouldn't a survey of what journeys people want to make be
better? Sure, processing the results is hard, but in the grand scheme of
building new transportation in SF it's trivial.

------
dekhn
I totally agree with the Geary line, although I'd prefer an alternative line:
one that goes all the way from downtown to ocean beach under Golden Gate Park,
with stops at the major museums and other tourist attractions in the park.
From the middle of the park, you can reach both Irving/Judah (major Sunset
street) and Geary (although Geary is a hike from the center of the park).

~~~
capkutay
I think it makes a lot more sense for the Geary line to terminate in GG Park
or somewhere in the inner Richmond. The density in the area around Ocean Beach
does not justify a 3 mile extension from inner Richmond to the beach. A 1 mile
subway line from Chinatown to the Marina would serve almost the same amount of
people.

~~~
abritinthebay
This is why you build for the future - not the present.

~~~
capkutay
Then build a subway to Hunters Point it that's your logic. Ocean Beach is
entrenched in hard line Nimbyism and any sort of high density vision for the
area is nothing short of a pipe dream. Paying billions for a subway all the
way to ocean beach is very low priority based on where jobs and housing are
being built.

~~~
abritinthebay
I hate to meme.. but... why not both?

------
donretag
"Expect it to be built, along with that line running under the Golden Gate
Bridge, almost certainly not in your lifetime."

Los Angeles has a very bullish agenda for subway/metro expansion, with some
lines already under construction. Even those currently being built, the
timelines are extremely long. Purple line extension is due to be finished, if
everything goes to place, by 2035.

------
dkopi
Subways make sense in dense urban areas - When a lot of people are within
walking distance from the subway station.

For SF to justify extensive subway infrastructure, it needs to start building
higher density neighborhoods.

~~~
timanglade
San Francisco[0] proper has a higher density than London[1], and slightly
lower density than Paris[2] — two cities that have thriving subway + commuter
rail systems.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris)

~~~
karim
I think you mixed up imperial and metric systems --- San Francisco has 18,451
people/sq mi. Paris has 55,000 people/sq mi. It's almost three times as much.

~~~
timanglade
Good catch on Paris, and I should know better I’m from there! Perhaps it’d be
more interesting to compare the greater urban Paris area to San Francisco
proper as Paris is an exceptionally/abornally tiny town for historical
reasons. Too late for me to edit though, thanks for the note!

------
r0m4n0
Commuting from my place on Geary/Broderick to Chinatown on a bus takes around
30 to 40 minutes and costs $2.25 one way. Taking an Uber pool takes 15 min for
$4.50.

SF is riddled with Uber and Lift drivers for this very reason. I bet at any
given moment, 80% of the cars downtown are rides for hire. The city should
just subsidize with a few billion a ride as a service platform and stop
wasting time and money on something that will always be sub par.

~~~
kalleboo
If nobody rode public transport, traffic would quickly go to shit. Cars just
take up too much space/rider

------
tedunangst
MUNI planners respond: Good news everyone, we're extending the T line all the
way down to San Mateo!

------
rubicon33
> "Expect it to be built, along with that line running under the Golden Gate
> Bridge, almost certainly not in your lifetime."

What a buzzkil.

~~~
dasil003
Meanwhile London builds a new high speed rail line tunneled under central
London in 10 years [http://www.crossrail.co.uk/construction/crossrail-
constructi...](http://www.crossrail.co.uk/construction/crossrail-construction-
programme)

It's sort of pathetic how bad the US has become at public infrastructure
projects over the past 40-50 years. Take a clue from cities with 1000+ years
of history: you still have to keep upgrading your infrastructure, even if it
means bringing in the archaeologists to sort out what you find every time.

~~~
beamatronic
I'm starting to think that it is going to take some heavy-handed application
of eminent domain to bust the logjam of NIMBYism.

~~~
bronson
That would have the opposite effect from what you want. It's hard to think of
anything that would grow the ranks of the NIMBYs any faster.

------
hannob
Funny, I've been to SF twice in my life, but I could've guessed which line is
probably the most obvious public transport line missing in this city. I
couldn't name Geary Boulevard, but I would've been able to point it out on a
map.

------
grogenaut
Who cares where people are drawing their lines, use the transit data to see
where they're actually going and derrive them. Better yet come up with a good
way to find their actual destination, not destination stop and draw those
lines. like pay a % of them to let you sample their locations via their smart
phones or "trick" them into it with a transit app.

------
trothamel
Does it make sense to make a large capital bet on mass transit at this time?
Yesterday, Telsa released a video of their new car self-driving, including
dropping a passenger off and getting into a parking lot.

It strikes me that a personal rapid transit system - think something like
Uber, operating on lanes dedicated to self-driving cars - could provide much
of the functionality of this, and be ready a lot sooner.

~~~
jseliger
Short answer: Yes.

I don't have time to dig up the studies or articles at the moment, but even
optimistic-case self-driving car systems aren't going to more than double or
triple existing road capacity. Good rail systems already, today, have about 5
– 10x the capacity of road systems. Self-driving cars and medium- to long-
distance urban transit system are actually likely to be complements, not
substitutes, especially if/when cities continue to get denser.

~~~
alooPotato
What about shared self driving cars + dedicated express bus lanes? The idea
being we tax cars for usage of the road and the buses become effectively free
(and faster) while self driving shared ubers are $2/ride.

Making roads better and taxing them right (so we can do dynamic pricing) seems
so much better than huge chunky capital costs of digging tunnels and
installing subway infrastructure.

We already have roads, people get to go door to door, and deploying a usage
based tax model on roads is just software. Seems so much better than decade
long projects.

~~~
tajen
There's a lot of added value for the community in mass transport. It costs
less per fare than car systems you can think about (even ridesharing & co),
consume/pollute less, but more importantl it allows lower-class and middle-
class citizen to move around the city. All the cleaning personel, food,
assistance personel can afford coming to the city to provide for high-value-
added workers. All high-value-added can afford to live farther away along the
lines, in better appartments than the constricted downtown space. And the new
density created by gathering more people in the same place during the day
allow the collaboration of more people.

~~~
eru
> All high-value-added can afford to live farther away along the lines, in
> better appartments than the constricted downtown space.

Just build up. There's plenty of room in downtowns. The elevator can be the
most important form of `public transport'.

~~~
closeparen
There seems to be unlimited appetite for high-rise apartments at luxury to
extreme luxury prices. Particularly from people who will never live in them.

Is there any evidence that high rise apartments (say more than 10 stories)
affordable at middle incomes can exist or ever have existed?

~~~
niftich
I wonder about this a lot in major cities -- whether the seemingly massive
number of apartments in luxury high-rises are actually occupied full-time by
those with high incomes, or are they actually more affordable than I suspect?
Or are most of them empty, and just used to park monetary value?

~~~
closeparen
>In a three-block stretch of Midtown, from East 56th Street to East 59th
Street, between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, 57 percent, or 285 of 496
apartments, including co-ops and condos, are vacant at least 10 months a year.
From East 59th Street to East 63rd Street, 628 of 1,261 homes, or almost 50
percent, are vacant the majority of the time, according to data from the
Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey. [0]

I'm going with "used to park value."

It's been mentioned elsewhere that real estate is the last place you can
easily park a literal suitcase full of cash without being subject to any KYC
rules.

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/realestate/pieds-terre-
own...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/realestate/pieds-terre-owners-
dominate-some-new-york-buildings.html)

------
andirk
Sim City subways did nothing. I heard it from one of the developers.

That said, if it's people that need to move around, let's make fast moving
sidewalks high above the city streets. Or tram type of technology like the
zoo, but without imprisoning animals.

~~~
rsync
"let's make fast moving sidewalks high above the city streets. Or tram type of
technology"

This exists, sort of, in Hong Kong:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central%E2%80%93Mid-
Levels_esc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central%E2%80%93Mid-
Levels_escalator_and_walkway_system)

People literally commute to work via escalator.

------
sfblah
Question: Is it possible that self-driving cars will make this kind of
infrastructure less important? I've thought about this a bit, and I wonder if,
outside of high-speed rail and airplanes (where you can go faster than a car
can drive), self-driving cars may make mass transit outmoded. I'm curious what
people think.

~~~
SilasX
No, they're far less person-dense than rail transport on dedicated lines.
Having a human operator is not the bottleneck to the scale-up; the high space
requirement is. (Also, the need to yield to all the other traffic.)

They can, however, supplement rail infra, by covering last-mile in the suburbs
for commuter lines, or off-hour transport when it's too noisy or unprofitable
to run the lines.

