
High-Density Housing Near Public Transit Is Aim of San Diego Code Change - DoreenMichele
https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2019/07/29/high-density-housing-near-public-transit-is-aim-of-san-diego-code-change/
======
koverda
Amazing, a path opening for a west coast city to develop additional housing!
We need more of this. I bet there are NIMBY heads exploding in San Diego,
probably on Nextdoor.

~~~
bsder
San Diego still has lots of areas that are gentrifying from being really
crappy, so the NIMBY's aren't up in arms yet. San Francisco has the problem
that all those crappy areas got gentrified and now everybody is trying to
protect their "investment".

In addition, downtown San Diego isn't really considered to be a place where
the cool kids hang out (and still has a lot of industrial area around). So,
there is less fighting going on there right now.

The problem is that the transit in San Diego is lousy. The trains are
horrifically slow between downtown and Solana Beach. And the limited number of
tracks means that Amtrak regularly has to wait for passenger trains, and, if
someone jumps in front of a train, the system shuts down for 4 hours.

~~~
repsilat
> _everybody is trying to protect their "investment"_

Nearby construction can decrease your property values, but upzoning and by-
right permitting increase property values by making them more attractive to
developers.

I think it's both more correct and more charitable to think that people
arguing against things like SB50 are doing it because they don't want the
density in their neighbourhoods, and not for financial reasons.

------
examancer
Denver is taking the same approach, and, really, it's the only tool we have
for preventing huge increases in traffic as population increases and actually
getting people to rely on public transit. I live in a transit-oriented
development zone near train+bus stop and love how easy it is to walk to
anything I want.

Transit-oriented development is the only sensible approach I've seen to
scaling a modern city.

------
rsync
I am very much in favor of the _idea of_ building high density housing
centered around public transit. It sounds like a perfect solution to a large
set of related problems.

I am scared to see what the end result will be in US cities, however, because
public transit for almost all of the US means poorly run busing routes that
nobody wants to take.

Having lived in San Diego for many years (as well as Denver and MPLS which I
think are relevant comparisons) I believe that what will happen is that
existing (poorly run, poorly utilized) bus routes will be chosen by developers
who will use the "blah blah transit blah blah" designation that was just
gifted to them to build high end units for people that will drive their cars.

No _actual_ transit (the kind that runs on rails) will be built, some more
car-centric housing units will exist at high end prices (they're not going to
build garage-less buildings nor are they going to build low end units).

Oh, and the buses will still be empty.

I want this kind of policy regime to be pursued, but they need to _build the
transit lines first_. And buses don't count.

~~~
jimmaswell
Why do buses not count? Because you don't like them? Your definition of
transit is not shared with most people.

I love buses as a transit option. They go directly to parking lots of places
like grocery stores and ride smoother than a lot of trains/subways/etc I've
been on. If the routes are useful then people will use them and they're as
simple to scale as buying more buses and very easy to dynamically adjust,
unlike train lines.

~~~
alexhutcheson
[I'm a bus proponent, but...]

It's turned out to be very politically difficult to establish and (just as
importantly) enforce bus lanes in communities in the US. People get very upset
at the prospect of giving up either street parking or travel lanes, and local
politicians and the traffic enforcement bureaucracy has mostly sided with the
people who complain. The result is either no bus lanes, or part-time bus lanes
with no effective enforcement, which is basically the same as no bus lanes.

A bus that's able to use bus lanes (and possibly transit signal priority) to
bypass traffic is a great thing, and would be appealing to people across the
socioeconomic spectrum. A bus that's stuck in the same traffic as the cars has
no benefit other than cost, and will only appeal to those who can't afford to
maintain a car or are very ideologically committed to transit.

Buses would be amazing with bus lanes in congested areas and automated camera-
based enforcement of those lanes. However, the inability of the political
system to make that happen even in Manhattan makes me fairly pessimistic for
that outcome in other places.

I still think it's worth investing in buses for those who need them, but if
they can't bypass traffic they will be stuck at a low mode share almost
everywhere.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The problem with bus lanes is that they require failure in order to operate.
If you implement bus lanes and they succeed in relieving traffic congestion
but the congestion was the only reason people weren't driving then people go
back to driving and you go back to having congestion. There is no way for them
to actually relieve the congestion because having congestion is the method by
which they operate. But they can make it worse by wasting a travel lane during
the times of day when there would have been enough road capacity if not for
the bus lane.

If you want to make buses actually work, make them work like Uber. You go to
the bus stop where there is a screen you can input your destination (or you
use your phone), and the nearest minibus going in your direction stops to pick
you up, which each carries eight passengers rather than forty. Then it drops
you off at your actual destination instead of four blocks from there, and
picks you up faster to begin with because there are five times as many buses
of a fifth the size and they can be diverted from nearby routes to pick you up
as soon as you summon them.

At that point they're almost as good as a car most of the time, only they cost
a lot less and only take up an eighth of the space on the road per passenger.
And you don't have to operate huge wasteful 40-passenger vehicles during off-
peak hours just to carry 3 passengers.

~~~
VintageCool
If you paint a lane red and make it buses-only, that gives commuters an
alternative to driving. Traffic might still be terrible and congested, but
commuters have the option to skip the traffic and take the bus instead.

Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive.
Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-
size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> If you paint a lane red and make it buses-only, that gives commuters an
> alternative to driving. Traffic might still be terrible and congested, but
> commuters have the option to skip the traffic and take the bus instead.

Except for all the ones who don't, because one of the endpoints isn't anywhere
near the bus route even if part of the path between them goes along it.

> Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive.

Apparently they do, as demonstrated by all the people who use Uber in
preference to buses.

> Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus
> full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.

Unless that requires you to have less frequent service that covers fewer
areas, which in turn causes people to choose single passenger cars over your
buses.

You can also eliminate the driver cost by doing what Uber was originally
billed as -- ride sharing. You're going to drive your car from your home to
your workplace and back, but if you get up fifteen minutes earlier you can
make a few bucks by picking up some of your neighbors and dropping them off at
work. That's a lot less than the cost of a full-time bus driver with benefits
but at scale it still results in a fraction of the number of cars on the road
during rush hour.

------
beowulfey
This is great, and I hope it spurs on more transit development in general down
there. San Diego is one of those cities that I adore, so long as I don't have
to drive anywhere. Right on the ocean, the weather is perfect, it has lots of
great food and beers, and it's generally a pretty cool place. I also
appreciate that a lot of the roads are not very wide, so areas like downtown
feel great to walk around because it's not very busy. But it drives me nuts
that if you want to go literally any other neighborhood it requires a car and
sitting in traffic.

It's not super dense in terms of population now, but with proper
infrastructure growth it could be one of the greats!

------
themark
The trolley extension to UTC will juice a lot of this kind of development.

Maybe this is where the city thinks the scooters will ultimately fit in.

------
buss
I was just in San Diego for GopherCon and, boy, what a beautiful place. This
change will ensure San Diego can keep growing and prospering, meanwhile San
Francisco continues to stand athwart history yelling STOP!

~~~
dmode
As much as I hate NIMBYs in SF, the City has built a lot of housing over the
last decade, and I would say more than San Diego. The SF skyline is completely
new, and places like SOMA, East cut, Mission Bay, Dog patch are entirely new
neighborhoods. Sure, we need to build more on the West side and iPhone Sunset
and Richmond, but we will definitely get more bang for our buck by up-zoning
San Mateo, Palo Alto etc

~~~
tmh79
"City has built a lot of housing over the last decade"

The city has build a lot less housing than office space over the course of the
last decade, and that is the metric that counts (jobs-housing balance).

"The SF skyline is completely new" \- Salesforce tower (office space), 181
freemont (2/3s office space) etc etc.

"SOMA, East cut, Mission Bay, Dog patch are entirely new neighborhoods", and
yet still 77% of the land in SF is zoned for single family homes.

SF recently passed the Central Soma rezoning plan which creates an amazon HQ2
worth of office space (space for about 50k workers) but only housing for about
7k people.

------
dktoao
I think this is awesome and the path forward. After reading a lot of the
comments I think one thing that could help very much with the pain of this
transition is encouraging a culture shift in how computer laborers are
required to drive to a computer at work every day instead of just using the
computer in their house... Seems obvious to me anyway.

------
azinman2
Too bad the public transit is poor and the city/county is very spread out.

------
simonebrunozzi
Every time I read something like this, I roll my eyes - most of these
proposals are dead on arrival. By the time this will be in effect, public
transit will have been transformed (if not removed) by private, automated
transportation.

And then I always think it would be best to build a city from scratch. A great
one. With good principles. Time-proofed. Collectively we should know how to do
it, but it seems that it's incredibly hard to come up with the resources to do
it properly. It's still only a dream.

~~~
vorpalhex
> And then I always think it would be best to build a city from scratch

Waterfall projects don't work with cities any better than they work with code.
While it's harder to be "agile" with cities, the idea of building a large
project correctly in a go is misleading.

There are many future-centric planned city projects which either died before
they ever took off, or were completed and are total ghost towns.

~~~
luckydata
This is a blanket statement that can be easily refuted. The overhaul of
Barcelona for the Olympics comes to mind, and same story with Torino in Italy.
Both cities benefited greatly from a large planned investment in
infrastructure. Same thing with Madrid and the doubling of the metro system
now that I think about it.

------
hart_russell
If"transit stop" includes bus stops, this is going to be terrible. Public
transit in San Diego is God awful because everything is so spread out.
Realistically, you need a car to get anywhere, so more people is going to mean
more congested roads.

~~~
asveikau
You stated that it's "because everything is so spread out". So the way to fix
that is to build new stuff densely. It won't change overnight but you would
need to start somewhere. You can't take the status quo as an inevitability.

------
hart_russell
I live in San Diego and just waited 30 minutes in bumper to bumper traffic to
drive 7 miles. Until better traffic infrastructure is installed, more people
sounds like a nightmare.

~~~
jongalloway2
That's the entire point of this zoning change - moving the higher density
housing near to public transportation, with integrated restaurants and stores
so they're walkable. The current five zone types (explained in the article)
separate commercial and residential, requiring people to drive to businesses
and work. (also a San Diegan)

~~~
hart_russell
How often do you use public transportation in San Diego? I'm guessing you
don't, because you'd know that it's nearly impossible to exist in San Diego
and only use public transport. More people will invariably mean more cars. I
know this might come as a shock, but this policy might not translate to the
real world as intended.

~~~
ivalm
Already in some places in Hillcrest you can walk to restraunts/shops. In UTC
you can get around on busses (well, because UCSD spurred more public transport
density).

Right now San Diego feels like an overgrown suburbia. If we transform into a
real urban city I welcome it. The increased housing density will also
presumably decrease housing prices, further making a more equitable city.

~~~
klenwell
I remember 20 years ago when I was a UCSD student hearing a discussion on the
local NPR station about extending the trolley to UCSD. I believe university
leadership opposed it at that time. I recall one of the counterarguments was
that it would bring more crime to campus. (I believe the term "rapists" was
used by the person on-air representing that position. I don't recall if that
person was a spokesperson for the university.)

In any event, classic Nimbyism. Memory still pisses me off. Glad to see at
least the University has come around, even if I imagine most La Jolla
residents haven't.

For reference, if I'm not mistaken, it was a La Jolla resident who invented
that cheap clicker device that you can click to instantly report plane noise
complaint to FTA. Cool little project but, well, yeah.

~~~
SamReidHughes
The clicker guy / plane noise guy was in real La Jolla, this is just going to
affect UCSD area zip code La Jolla, and the rest of UTC.

There was a spike in UTC area visible homelessness last summer, making the
area Starbuckses uninhabitable, and the transit line will certainly make
quality of life even worse.

