I've long thought that the bay area's major problem is not necessarily problems with San Francisco proper (though the strong aversion to high-rises while complaining about the increasingly cut-throat and expensive real estate market is hilarious to me), but that the "outer boroughs" are so incredibly unattractive because the transit system is incredibly inadequate.
Living in Queens, Brooklyn, hell even Jersey is an incredibly reasonable option if you live in New York. You trade some commuting time for lower prices, and certainly Flushing doesn't have the same appeal as SoHo. But it's never a question of "oh my god it's after midnight how am I going to get home?" like I experienced when living in the bay area.
It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter.
"It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter."
I've lived in the Bay Area for 30 years and this is my take on it as well. The city of San Francisco (and by that I mean its government) sounds like a 35 year old insisting they are still a teenager. The most interesting thing to watch was that some development "snuck in" in the south of market area and that really really surprised people in terms of people living there. When I moved here SoMa was 'warehouses, drunks, and a train station." Now it is a growing and thriving community of the new executive class. Oops.
"It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter."
You've hit the nail on the head. Something will have to give, as while rents can go up forever, citizen's income won't.
> You've hit the nail on the head. Something will have to give, as while rents can go up forever, citizen's income won't.
Since the income of people who will choose to live in the city places an upper limit on market rents, this is pretty clearly untrue -- either rents can go up forever and so can citizen's incomes or neither can go up forever.
I think that, given sufficient transit infrastructure to allow people who can't afford to live in the city proper to commute in to perform essential jobs to support those who do live in the city, that -- whether it is desirable or not -- the situation is more that both rents and the income of residents of the City and County of San Francisco can go up without bound, as residing in the City itself becomes more and more elite/exclusive.
The income of existing citizens will reach an upper limit, and they'll be pushed out by those with much higher income bounds. In San Francisco's quest to preserve its character, its pushing out the very people who create the character, and its turning itself into London proper, where only the very wealthy can afford to reside.
This. Transportation in the bay area is awful. I lived in San Jose and it would take me 2+ hours to get to SF by public transit, even at peak times. If I was in SF after midnight, I was literally stuck for the night. One time I had to take an airport SuperShuttle back to SJC just to get anywhere near my apt. because I tried to leave SF at 11pm on a Sunday. I can't even imagine what would happen if it was that hard to get between Newark and NYC.
San Jose to SF is, by East Coast standards, a pretty long ways. Newark to New York is about 10 miles. SF to San Jose is about 50 - more comparable to New York to New Brunswick or Trenton or Stamford.
Find me a 50-ish-mile distance in the US that is easier to cover by public transit than SF/San Jose. Boston/Providence? DC/Baltimore? Philadelphia/Wilmington? New York/Trenton? Comparable at best, but in all cases, you're generally talking the absolute far edge of regional rail that runs hourly at best.
Ronkonkoma out in Suffolk County is around 50 miles from Penn Station in Manhattan.
Peak LIRR trains take less than 90 minutes, with at least one express train in each direction less than 70. There are 13 peak (arrive 6-10AM) week day westbound trains and 14 eastbound (arrive 5-9PM). The longest gap between trains during the week is westbound between 1:46AM and 4:06AM, eastbound it's 1:21AM to 3:14AM. Otherwise rarely is the gap more than an hour.
The far-end (~50 miles) of the mainline regional rail line in Philly (used to be the R5, I forget what it's called after they renamed it) has half-hour coverage in the mornings for commutes, settling back on hourly during the day. To be fair that is unusually good coverage, but it is certainly possible to do elsewhere.
Part of the difference may be that several of the communities along the R5 near Philly are affluent for the area (or in general, in some cases (Gladwyne)). Transit to poorer areas like Upper Darby isn't quite as nice.
To Paoli (25 miles) they have twice-hourly coverage during commute times. Stretch it out to Exton (30-something miles) and you're down to hourly coverage peak.
Doesn't mean SF has to ape the East coast. There are enough people making the 50 mile commute everyday that a public transport system is worthwhile and can be profitable.
I am pretty sure that if Caltrain went about 10 miles/hr faster, 101 will have fewer cars.
I used to take Caltrain and now drive. The problem is not so much the train being slow, but on reaching your station it's still several miles and a bus ride to your office because the density is so low.
All of those examples except D.C.-Baltimore are from a major city to a suburb or minor city. San Jose is actually a larger city than San Francisco and along the route you'll find half a dozen cities on the scale of Wilmington or Trenton.
San Jose is a bit of a paradox; it's a larger, sprawling city, but it's basically a giant suburb to some extent. It has never been a place for startups, and even most of its resident tech giants are in office parks in suburban areas away from downtown.
That's a little disingenuous, the fastest train from SJ->SF is under an hour at peak times. If you are in Downtown SJ, you can be in Downtown SF in way under two hours, with nothing but your feet and the train ride. San Jose, however, is huge, so its surely possible that a slow bus ride from south San Jose could add 45 minutes to the trip.
It would be nice to have a train leave SF later than midnite, but having taken that train many times, the ridership level is probably break even in terms of costs, at best.
Improving the light rail so that people will actually ride it and that it actually is faster than buses will go a long way towards bettering the situation.
The light rail is way too infrequent, and the worst part is that it doesn't sync up with Caltrain. Why does the light rail not get to Mountain View ~5 minutes before the CalTrain to SF instead of ~30 minutes? The delay is maddening, just synchronize them! It's even worse at night on the way back.
I don't think there's anywhere in the US that has 24/7 public transit that goes 50 miles out from a city. To expect that is unrealistic. You're lucky it even exists, most cities don't even have any transit that goes that far.
I know people who regularly go between NYC and Philadelphia. The distance is about 100 miles, covered in 70-90 minutes (depending on the train). During peak hours trains run every 15 or 30 minutes and even the night-time gap isn't terribly long (stops running at midnight, starts again at 3am). I'm not sure if the Bay Area has comparable density to the DC-Philly-NY-Boston corridor, so maybe achieving the same level of train service isn't possible.
> During peak hours trains run every 15 or 30 minutes and even the night-time gap isn't terribly long (stops running at midnight, starts again at 3am).
BARTs night time gap at the terminus of most lines is, I think, roughly midnight to 4am, so its not all that different.
> I'm not sure if the Bay Area has comparable density to the DC-Philly-NY-Boston corridor
Not even close. The East Coast corridor you name is the most densely populated region of its size in the US, by a wide margin.
That's true, although it's less unheard-of to have 24/7 public transit going ~20 miles out radially, providing about ~40 mile end-to-end coverage. Chicago runs two of its lines 24/7 (Red and Blue), which provide service about 15-20 miles to the N, S, & W. The 24/7 NY Subway, PATH, and LIRR service will take you similar distances.
If BART ran those kinds of distances 24/7, it would at least significantly increase the consistently-reachable zone. There's currently some all-nighter bus service, but it's not a great replacement (slow, nobody knows the routes, etc.).
A guy I work with lives in San Jose and commutes to SoMa every day. He drives on the East side of the bay up to the first BART (Fremont?) and then takes BART to downtown. He says it's never more than 90 minutes.
This is exactly the problem. If people stop thinking of SF as its own city and rather just an expensive neighborhood in the larger "city" of the Bay Area, they wouldn't clamor so much about high costs. It's the lack of good transit connecting all these scattered neighborhoods that is the main problem.
I recently spent some time in SF for the first time, coming from Seattle, and I was amazed to find that the transit is barely on par with Seattle's (which is not a compliment) despite the fact that SF is a much denser, more urban city. Bart is a joke- there's a single line within the actual city.
Living in Queens, Brooklyn, hell even Jersey is an incredibly reasonable option if you live in New York. You trade some commuting time for lower prices, and certainly Flushing doesn't have the same appeal as SoHo. But it's never a question of "oh my god it's after midnight how am I going to get home?" like I experienced when living in the bay area.
It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter.