I agree that it requires political will and good governance. Bus lanes aren’t easy most places. However, I don’t think one should ever generalize about municipalities from examples set by San Francisco.
While I'd love to live in a city with an effective government and great mass transit, I just don't have faith in SF city government specifically or in most local governments generally being able to accomplish the largest scale civil works projects successfully.
While some kind of big master plan would, if executed well, produce a better result, I'd prefer to stick to smaller projects with reasonable deliverables which actually happen, and then hack together a less effective than ideal, but still better, end result.
Arguing like this for all-or-nothing is a great way to get nothing, which makes me sad because SFBA transit is such shit today.
Look at the last paragraph. A good city government will not just aim to meet business easy, they'll also have criteria for ensuring good impact on other policy fields, eg here low income residents.
This whole "hands off" approach has proven a failure many times,. Look at how Uber and Lyft are exploiting their drivers, which end up working below minimum wage and 100% on own risk - in the big scheme/long term these have no insurance, no pension benefits, might lose everything through an accident, and will mostly end up dependent on handouts.
In some cities bike rental schemes failed and the city is left to clean up broken bikes, stations, etc once the provider disappears. Sure, it was easy to get in, but the taxpayer foots the bill.
Yes, an application process makes things a bit more intransparent and slow, but (if done well) it also assures that the average citizen is not left holding the sticky end.
There’s a difference between government being too weak to address and the voters not wanting something. It comes up a couple times a decade in Atlanta and the suburbs vote against public train expansion. I see parallels with the housing issues in SF and California.
How does a local government do something if their constituents flat out refuse it?
This is difficult to do, since many policies that affect cities are still decided at the national level. It's only recently become fully kosher to have physically protected bike lanes, for example.
Totally agree. However, that doesn't absolve us of trying to find solutions that are feasible within our cultural and political landscape. At least in SF, for the moment, that primarily seems to mean getting more units built within the city, since we're not going to improve transit to other towns soon, nor are neighboring communities willing to build more units to help SF.
Some of those things are not entirely within SF's power to fix, though, or are complex beyond belief to solve.
I don't think anyone has good solutions for homelessness, for example, and transit is complicated by the fact that all the neighboring counties have to agree to most changes/upgrades to transit systems, and some have a history of vetoing or refusing to participate.
One size does not fit all. Each state, city, town should adopt local policies that make sense. I think that was missed in the article, since the "city" they talk about in question seems to be an abstract generalization.
One major downside not mentioned is that corruption at scale becomes easier. If you’re looking to influence political policy for the entire Bay Area, it’s easier, cheaper, and more likely to succeed if you only have one set of politicians to negotiate with.
I feel like all the problems mentioned have better solutions.
For the “single purchaser” efficiency argument, I would instead like to see collective bargaining agreements where the cities agree to participate and be bound to the agreement. That way it doesn’t even need to be limited to neighbors.
For things like managing transit, I think a regional transit authority needs to be established by the state that works with cities within some framework but cities have no power to otherwise interfere.
Housing is being solved through state level legislation that’s forcing cities to build a realistic plan for increasing residential capacity or lose zoning privileges alltogether.
Sure the government could do it. But any city council that tried to do this would likely find themselves voted out.
Case in point: it was a tough push to get AB 2923 through the CA legislature. It allowed BART to build dense housing on their own parking lots. Thankfully common sense prevailed. The bill was approved and BART is now using their power to plan for more transit oriented development.
But it has been done. It’s a matter of will. Not saying it’s de facto a good idea. But cities can be refactored.
See : Haussmann.
Are you from the US? I find the kind of passive statement about the state of systems prevalent here.
( be it public transportation, internet infrastructure, political framework )
I start to doubt the capacity of this country to adapt.
You’re talking about SF and I’m talking about small and mid sized towns. Big difference. If a small town wants to move a bus stop 1 block, it doesn’t take 10 years...
EDIT: Rate-limited, so read response to request to elaborate below
San Francisco has multiple entities involved in the process of policy relating to transit. So, while the SF MTA and Jeffrey Tumlin may want more rail (perhaps underground), more buses, and fewer car thoroughfares there are also supervisors in charge of local districts who may oppose construction on grounds that they will hurt constituents.
As an example, supervisors David Campos and Hillary Ronen at different times opposed the bus-lanes along Mission St. on various grounds including (paraphrasing) "speeding up transit does not improve things for the local community", "the transit lanes lead to gentrification", "local merchants will see decreased foot traffic".
That's just an example and the details are too numerous to list here but consider also that the SFFD opposes Vision Zero.
Cool man. Thanks for being civil as I was probably too heated in my response. I'd say that many regulations, like many political policies, sound good in the abstract. But the devil is in the details. It's the execution, not the idea! :) And I think the execution is where city government is lacking, perhaps in part due to poor incentives (i.e. not getting paid in proportion to the extent that the ideal is actually achieved).
If only there was a way to decide on what local governments should do based on certain topics. In most cities where public transport is in the hands of the local government, the direction things should take is decided by voting and governments that fuck up public transport, are voted out. This is how it works on a city level in many european cities at least.
Towns can easily control for these things using taxes, zoning, and traffic rules, but they often don’t have the political will to do so. We’ve been here before with Silicon Valley, and thirty or forty years later it’s still a major problem .
One major challenge in the Bay Area often boils down to the lack of a government with the authority to collect taxes and impetus to spend them on Bay Area infrastructure. You either need three city governments and a pile of local ones to get on the same page, or persuade a state government that is not particularly keen on Bay Area spending and hamstrung by ballot initiatives.
I didn’t mean for my comment to come off as a defence of the status quo there. I think it’s obviously a very stupid way to run a city. But fixing it requires very large capital expenditures, a decent amount of rather complicated planning, and taking on some big projects that could go wrong in any number of ways.
In addition to not being as simple as the only having to solve the stupid zoning problem, it presents a number of risks that you’d expect certain types of politicians to be averse to.
It also takes a long time for the benefits of any of those changes to manifest, which doesn’t really align with political incentives either. “If you elect me 2-3 more times then things will start to improve over the next 10 years or so” isn’t a very compelling campaign slogan.
> lobby for cohesive regional zoning and transportation planning that meets growth
I agree that this is the right answer in theory. The challenge is that, in practice, by the time the critically important rail line or subway or high speed bus lane (or whatever) is built and put into operation, you're halfway to retirement and your kids are out of high school.
So, practically speaking, a lot of people conclude that the only effective voting is the kind done with the feet.
Too often state and local governments are not capable of doing their jobs quickly enough to solve the problems.
This assumes you can pass all the things you want, which empirically hasn’t worked out so well. Riling people up to demand 1 policy is different than getting 5-6 policies that have to all work together the right way to achieve your change.
In practical terms, a suburb HAS to be build with new infra — nobody will move into a community without roads and plumbing.
Conversely, it’s pretty easy to clear legal obstacles to various developments. You don’t have to spend, plan, organize anything to achieve that. But adding lanes, adding terminals, fixing roads, upgrading transit systems, connecting deeply-struggling with services that exist for them… all these things take human effort and non-trivial resources.
If we don’t have a political climate where you can pass your comprehensive raft of urban reform (each of which will have a variety of entrenched interests fighting back), passing JUST housing reform to open the floodgates to developers seems like far less of an obviously-good idea. It seems like it will make things net worse.
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