Really interesting article. I don't live in the Bay Area but I would seriously consider moving there if I knew, for example, that the transit plan mentioned in the article were being adopted:
Even though SF is the cultural capital of the region, the majority of the population and economy resides in Santa Clara County (San Jose, Apple, FB, Google, Stanford, SLAC), Contra Costa County (Cheveron, Toyota, ATT), Alameda County (UC Berkeley, LLNL, LBL, Port of Oakland), and San Mateo County (South San Francisco, the entire biotech industry).
All those counties are working with the State Govt to build a unified mass transit system connecting Sacramento, Modesto, East Bay, and South Bay into a single public transit region [0][1][2], especially because most of the labor class lives in the Sacramento region and the Modesto/San Joaquin Valley region.
Furthermore, the City and County of San Francisco often jeopardizes Bay Area unity by threatening to withhold funding to Caltrain or BART due to SF Supervisors internal conflicts. Given the (relative) lack of major private employers in San Francisco after the 2008 economic crisis, all the other counties prefer to make their own deals together and independent of SF. This is why Livermore pulled out of the BART Extension project which caused the entire system to teeter financially because Half a Billion dollars were reallocated to a separate project.
And honestly, even though I have lived in SF for a massive portion of my life, it could die and no one would care less in the Bay Area. San Jose has always been the primary engine for the Bay Area, especially after the Port of SF, the SF Financial Industry, and most non-tech companies left by 2010.
Thank you so much for that overview and explanation!
The single public transit region sounds exciting; I had no idea there was such a project. I hope they can get it to completion and that it's functional (I'm so unimpressed with most transit in the U.S.).
Given how long they take to implement, transit plans should not be the biggest factor in where you move.
The biggest transit things actually taking place locally are CA HSR(which is happening, and Caltrain is currently shovels-in-ground electrifying track which will improve speeds and frequencies in the next year or two) and the continued expansion of the ferry system, which was displaced by the Bay Bridge and BART and then rediscovered after 1989 as emergency transport following the Loma Prieta earthquake. WETA, the "Water Emergency Transportation Authority" has some exciting projects that they are able to deploy relatively quickly and cheaply.
The X-factor is the robotaxis. They are currently "just" taxi, and priced like one, but people are using them to get around the city successfully. Cutting down the price and scaling access, which Cruise is set on doing, will have dramatic effects on transport as a whole, and not necessarily in a bad way, because the profitability of a robotaxi system, unlike private auto sales and cab drivers, converges with transit's goals - energy use, vehicle size, availability, etc.
While SF city and county is now actively fighting against them, the potential is there for every city where they're being deployed.
The interesting part will be when parked cars start being removed as people give up car ownership. That will introduce much more space for interesting options like pedestrian streets and bike infrastructure.
I get London, but having seen a cyclist die before in Beijing, I’m going to disagree and raise an eyebrow on that claim. Yes, congestion means drivers go more slowly, but there are plenty of roads in Beijing that aren’t congested enough (eg Dongzhimen wai on a Sunday afternoon), and drivers tend to have no inhibition against speeding if they can. You are 10x more likely to die in some sort of auto accident (as a pedestrian, cyclist, or car occupant) in China than in the USA, and Beijing by Chinese standards is pretty bad (Shanghai and most southern cities have better traffic). Given a lack of guns, safety in china for tourists centers mostly around avoiding getting hit by a car.
https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/vision-map
I'd love to hear peoples' thoughts who actually live or have lived in the Bay Area.
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