[panda_person]

Part of the problem is that affluent tech workers want to have their cake and eat it too-everyone wants to live in cool, trendy neighborhoods in SF, and commute to their fancy jobs in the Valley. The problem is, its often a pain to get from those neighborhoods in a time efficient manner to a Caltrain station. Which...I"m not sure is a problem, since public transit in San Francisco (MUNI and BART) exists for more than just getting tech workers to a Caltrain station.

There's also the radical suggestion of people actually living near where they work, or (horror of horrors) people living near public transit and taking that, rather than fancy private buses.

[capkutay]

"Part of the problem is that affluent tech workers want to have their cake and eat it too-everyone wants to live in cool, trendy neighborhoods in SF, and commute to their fancy jobs in the Valley."

It's a little unfair to make it seem like tech workers are spoiled for wanting to live in areas they'd enjoy living in. I know several people who tried to live in the south bay (burlingame, san mateo, mountain view) close to where they worked. It can be nice, but it can also be lonely and depressing. If you live in the south bay, it's likely all the places you frequently go to will at least be a 10-18 minute drive away from eachother (work, grocery store, your friends house, your favorite bar/restaurant).

San Francisco is one of the only places in the Bay Area where everything you want is in walking distance.

Disclaimer, I've lived in both SF and Palo Alto.

[prodigal_erik]

This. I live in the city because my favorite club nights and shows are here and I don't need a designated driver to get home. When I lived in Mountain View, going out was such a hassle that I pretty much didn't bother. Even though I have to commute now, I'm sort of glad so many employers are in the 'burbs and giving homebodies good reasons to stay there; it slows down gentrification.

I'm sort of amazed the regional transportation system is so dysfunctional that five private busses on the same route with no shared capacity is the solution everyone settled on. But then I remember what a farce MUNI has become; I routinely see busses and trains so overloaded that riders literally can't squeeze into the doors, and sometimes nothing shows up at all.

[vidarh]

I've stayed in Palo Alto and Menlo Park in hotels a lot, and while I can't speak for lots of other areas, what I can say is that despite the fact that I don't even have a drivers license (lived primarily in Oslo and London, so not really needed one), I had no problems getting around on foot.

Was it less convenient than what I'm used to? Yes. It'd have been great with more buses and trains. But it worked. I could get to the grocery store. I could get to plenty of shops. I could get to dozens of restaurants - I know this from making a point out of trying new restaurants every time I was in town - as well as bars etc. I'd even go in to SF now and again, though Caltrain's schedule is just atrocious (and for the record: years ago, I did go out clubbing in SF while staying in Santa Cruz without having a car to get me back - if you want it bad enough, even that works).

Once I stayed in Atherton, right on the edge near Redwood City, while the office I was visiting was in downtown Menlo Park, and I walked to/from most days. That's the only time when I thought things were a bit too inconvenient for my liking. Not so much the distances - it was only a 30-35 minute walk or so from what I remember - but due to the large plots in Atherton, the fastest walking route is along El Camino, and part of that stretch was pretty much without light or sidewalk or decent shoulder.

Sure, there are plenty of locations you could live in that area which would make managing on foot too inconvenient, and finding somewhere in the middle of Atherton or similar might not be great if you want to get to lots of stuff without a car, but there are plenty of parts of the Bay Area outside of SF which are viable on foot, and far more that are viable with short car journeys now and again

So, yes: Spoiled. Large parts of the worlds population - including in developed countries - are living places where getting to stuff they want or need takes far longer on average.

[magicalist]

> I had no problems getting around on foot

sure, when you're only visiting, you don't have kids, etc. Many people aren't amenable to having a minimum half hour walk to get anywhere, and if your grocery store is anything but close by, you're in trouble if you don't go shopping every few days (having a grocery store every few blocks is one of my favorite things about high density living situations).

> Yes. It'd have been great with more buses and trains

and even where there are a few, it can take you two hours to get to friends only 10 or 15 miles away (this is more due to the design of their interlinks). If you want to encourage people to take public transit and walk more, you can't make cars so convenient for most of the ways they travel around the bay area.

> I could get to the grocery store. I could get to plenty of shops. I could get to dozens of restaurants - I know this from making a point out of trying new restaurants every time I was in town - as well as bars etc.

And this shows the real reason behind your post: you were staying in a hotel on El Camino :) Head up into one of the neighborhoods nearby and suddenly nothing is nearby. This is less of a problem in a city like Palo Alto, which is centered around El Camino and has a decent bus service, but for many of the towns along the 101, a car is pretty much the only way you can live there.

Meanwhile, take a look at the correlation between housing prices with the more walkable cities (like Palo Alto and Menlo Park that you mentioned). I won't be buying a house in any dense part of Palo Alto any time soon.

> years ago, I did go out clubbing in SF while staying in Santa Cruz without having a car to get me back - if you want it bad enough, even that works

No, it won't work unless you're paying hundreds for a cab, you get a friend to drive you, or you head home at like 6 in the evening. AFAIK, there's really no other way to do that (and transit on google maps isn't coming up with anything short of "wait 6 hours for transfer to bus").

I would say Caltrain having its last train at midnight is an even worst feature than its operating schedule.

> So, yes: Spoiled. Large parts of the worlds population - including in developed countries - are living places where getting to stuff they want or need takes far longer on average.

Sure, but that's a pretty useless definition of spoiled; essentially any non-utilitarian aspect of living would fall under it.

City planning and public transit exist to encourage good behavior and serve the public. Building walkable neighborhoods is good, building around public transit to make it accessible is also good. When you haven't done these things, "well, you should walk more" isn't going to fly when "buy a car" is so easy, and probably necessary anyways for those few times when the thing you need isn't accessible by public transit.

You're not going to make living in SF seem less cool or convenient any time soon, so all the current system is doing is encouraging car use and this private bus system.

-- non-car-owner considering moving up to SF because he's sick of using zipcar so often and commuting all weekend to see friends up in the city

[vidarh]

I don't know what you're replying to, really. I was pointing out that when GP found it unfair for people to be called spoiled for wanting to live in the centre of SF because the rest of the Bay Area is somehow a desolate wasteland where you'll need to "endure" the horros of 10-18 minute drives, that was pretty much demonstrating exactly why some of us thinks people complaining about that are spoiled.

As such I won't address most of the points of your reply, as I happen to agree with most of them - they just aren't very relevant to the point of comment. Again: I'm not arguing it wouldn't be better with more public transport, nor that Bay Area's public transport is good enough, nor that it's not more convenient if you have a car. I am arguing, however, that there are large areas of the Bay Area outside of SF that are perfectly liveable even for someone like me without a drivers license, and that a large part of the reason why people whine about the cost of living in SF is exactly that they are spoilt. If it's possible to live in these areas without a car, it is certainly possible to live very well in these places with one.

> sure, when you're only visiting, you don't have kids, etc. Many people aren't amenable to having a minimum half hour walk to get anywhere, and if your grocery store is anything but close by, you're in trouble if you don't go shopping every few days (having a grocery store every few blocks is one of my favorite things about high density living situations).

Some points to this:

While there are certainly parts of the Bay Area where I'd be far more isolated, I don't live within a short walk of a big grocery store or a train station or most other amenities. I have 15 minutes to the nearest proper grocery store, 20 minutes to the nearest train station, though there is a bus route reasonably nearby that is faster if I hit it on time. This is in one of the most densely populated parts of England, in a London suburb that is indeed zoned not all that differently from many Bay Area towns, with huge areas of single residence houses or terraced houses (so one or two shared walls, but still one resident per plot of land). There are huge areas of the Bay Area that are no worse to live in in terms of amenities. Sure, you're more likely to have to resort to a car for commuting.

In terms of kids, we have a 3 year old son. To pick him up from nursery after work, it takes me about 2 hours to get home: Two trains + two buses to get to the nursery, plus two buses to get home. I know how much effort having a kid adds to any kind of transport situation. We frequently take him to a part 20-25 minutes walk away. On foot, again, meaning when he gets too tired to walk, we carry him. I might get a drivers license. No so much for my day to day situation, but to be able to take day trips etc. to places that are a pain to get to by public transport. But living this way works perfectly fine.

So yes, some people might not be "amenable" to living this way, but unless they're old or disabled, the are perfectly able to to do so and still have an enjoyable life. I'm not saying people should opt to live the way I do, but I am saying that complaining about the cost of living if they instead choose to live somewhere with ridiculous house prices just to avoid having to walk, cycle or drive a bit longer to get places does make them seem spoiled to me.

> No, it won't work unless you're paying hundreds for a cab, you get a friend to drive you, or you head home at like 6 in the evening.

Well, it did work for us, so clearly it does. And no, we did none of those. Instead we did what I've done in many other cities in the world out of "necessity" if you want to stay out late: Stay out long enough to have a reasonably short wait to take the bus home, which is what we did. (Incidentally, if you don't want that, it's still far cheaper to find a cheap motel near public transport in SF and sleep it off until things start running than it is to take a cab to places even much closer than Santa Cruz).

The Greyhound ride to Santa Cruz was obnoxiously unnecessarily long and a bizarre experience (checking in to a bus?!? and a half hour break in the middle... wow). It sucked, other than for the novelty. But so does the alternatives in a lot of other places including many with substantially higher population density than the Bay Area. Again, the point is that expecting quick and short transit to everywhere and everything is being spoiled. There are few places you can do that outside of major world cities like London. Even London isn't all that great in this respect if you don't live "just right" (I'm "lucky" - there are hourly night buses to within about 20 minutes walk from where I live). I grew up outside Oslo, and frequently ended up spending 30-40 minutes to walk to the station followed by 3+ hours in sub-zero temperatures after clubs closed in Oslo before the first trains started to run. That was normal, unless you wanted to spend extortionate amounts on a cab (far higher rates than in the Bay Area for similar distances) which I couldn't afford then.

> Sure, but that's a pretty useless definition of spoiled; essentially any non-utilitarian aspect of living would fall under it.

No, it's a definition of spoiled that compares your expectations with the expectations of people in similar situations elsewhere, where these kinds of obstacles are just as common, yet somehow wast amounts of people manage just fine. When people complain that they pay far too much despite being able to afford to live somewhere most people can't and opt to do that rather than moving to somewhere that's still vastly better than what most people can afford to free up spare cash, then, yes, that's being spoilt.

> And this shows the real reason behind your post: you were staying in a hotel on El Camino :) Head up into one of the neighborhoods nearby and suddenly nothing is nearby.

I know perfectly well that there are places in the Bay Area where a car is a perfect necessity. An ex manager of mine lived in the middle of the forest near Santa Cruz, for example. That there are places that are extremely hard to live in without a car is entirely besides the point.

I stayed in hotels on El Camino a couple of times, yes. But most of the times I did not. You might argue that if I just had a bit further to walk to get to El Camino, I'd change my mind. Maybe I would. But that still leaves a few million people who live in areas within walking distance from enough stuff. Even so, walking distance was not the main point, as note above. The main point was that seemingly considering it a pain to live in these kind of places is being spoilt.

[underwater]

People who work for the big tech companies are spoiled. I've worked for a bunch of companies around the world and none come even close to what Bay Area companies provide.

I'd bet that a large percentage of working Americans would love to mix the great job with atmosphere of city living. Unfortunately most workers have to accept the trade offs and settle for the dull suburban life.

[jrockway]

I don't really see the problem. Private shuttles are probably more efficient than public transportation because the private shuttles go exactly where its passengers want them to. Public transit is not the alternative to private shuttles, driving is. Private shuttles are not taking commuters off CalTrain, they're taking drivers off the road. (Should people live closer to work? Yes. Give them some incentive other than one train an hour from the middle of nowhere to some other middle of nowhere.)

In New York City and its suburbs, nobody needs private shuttles because public transportation actually runs where people live and work. California made the decision many years ago to build roads instead of transit. The current system exists the way it does because of that.

[rayiner]

It's the result of layers of dysfunction. In NYC and Chicago, the commuter rail not only runs to where people live, but also the municipalities involved have no problem with high-density residential/commercial development near transit, which makes it easier to justify the expenditures on the commuter rail. The SF Caltrain station is across the interstate from anywhere you might want to go, while Metro North and LIRR in NYC drop you off right in Midtown. My office in NYC is literally on the same block as Grand Central Station. What's on the same block as the Caltrain station in SF? Nothing. If you look towards downtown from the station, you don't see anything: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=San+Francisco+Caltrain,+4th+St...

This is what it looks like looking towards Chicago's Loop from Ogilvie: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Ogilvie+Transportation+Center,...

This is what it looks like looking towards Midtown from Grand Central: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=grand+central+station,+new+yor...

The same is true for the residential areas. There's almost no high-density development around the Cal Train stations in the Valley. Even in Arlington Heights, IL (a suburb about 25 miles from Chicago) you see substantial high-density development right around the Metra station.

[vidarh]

My first reaction the first time I took Caltrain to SF, was: "This doesn't look like SF. Where's the city?" If it hadn't been a terminus I'd have suspected I'd have left the train too early.

[snogglethorpe]

They're supposedly (if NIMBYs don't succeed in hamstringing CAHSR) going to extend the Caltrain line to the new CAHSR terminal, which is much more centrally located (although chock-full of its own idiocies).

Then if only Caltrain could adopt a not-insane schedule and reasonable frequency, and zoning roadblocks were removed (it looks like most of SV is zoned "parking lots only"), it might actually prove to be a catalyst for development!

Haha... :(

[jrockway]

Pretty much. (Incidentally, I used to work in the building right across the street from Ogilvie.)

[tedunangst]

There's quite a few private park and ride type busses servicing port authority and jersey.

[seanmcdirmid]

Tech workers making $200K+/year, if it takes them an hour to get to the caltrain station on MUNI, that's a lot of money just gone. And again, these guys are coming/going to the same place, why not just give them a bus that is almost point-to-point? That is fairly efficient/environmental if that is your bar.

But I agree on the last point; but offices should be built where people want to live, not the other way around. Twitter is in SF for a reason. But then people don't all want to live in the same place; some have kids and prefer suburbs, some are younger and prefer the city.

Edit: facebook -> twitter. (face plant)

[rayiner]

People don't want to all live in the same place, but you can accommodate them! Just have a high-density commercial business district and sensible long and short range transit. Here in Chicago, within half an hour or so on the El or the Metra, I can live in a downtown high-rise, a condo in a family-friendly in-town neighborhood, a single family home in a family-friendly in-town neighborhood, or a full blown grass and trees suburb, and still never get in a car as part of my commute.

The problem in SF isn't that people want to live in different areas. The same is true in NYC or Chicago. The problem is that there isn't proper zoning. To make transit feasible, you need an extremely dense central business district with a ton of office space. You need employers to be mostly in the same core area. Then, you need to zone things and lay out transit stations so they're approachable for pedestrians. Too many systems make transit stations into these isolated intimidating affairs.

This is a neighborhood in Chicago with a lot of young families: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Paulina,+Chicago,+IL&hl=en...

Tree lined streets and small yards. Just a couple of minutes walk from the train stations. Just pan around and you can see the train tracks passing right through.

Train stations in Chicago are extremely easily accessed from street level. No parking lots, no elaborate station house, just stairs and a platform: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Sedgwick,+Chicago,+IL&hl=e...

[seanmcdirmid]

Definitely. I actually even prefer to live close enough to work to bike it, where transit is just a nice backup. I used to commute to the city from San Carlos on Caltrain; it was kind of nice actually (helps when your office is next to the caltrain station).

Most of Europe (and some of Asia) is beautiful with respect to transit, density, and quality of life. I hope we (as a country) move in this direction, but it really requires a change in our value system.

[rayiner]

I think even our transit-oriented development has messed up value systems. Look at the new Silver Line in DC. Totally pedestrian unfriendly and intimidating. You can't build highly accessible, integrated neighborhood transit around 50' high platforms surrounded by a 3-lane each direction highway.

[seanmcdirmid]

Agreed. You can't do this without buy in from the people, you can't just bolt transit onto sprawl and expect it to magically work.

[mc32]

Twitter remained in sf because the supes and mayor gave them (and workers) a huge tax break -provisionally for workers. Twitter got to stay; the city got to expand its revitalization of mid-market

[enf]

Twitter, you mean? Facebook is in the middle of nowhere by the Dumbarton Bridge.

[zem]

why do you see the private bus fleets as a problem? they move thousands of people quickly and efficiently from where they live to where they work, and are way more ecologically sound and cost-effective than everyone driving their own cars, and way more feasible than expecting to influence the shape of public transit.