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by tizzdogg 4368 days ago
I believe the author meant that a bit more metaphorically than you are taking it. Scrubbed clean in the sense of removing the hard edges and character.. whitewashing so to speak. That said, the tech industry has definitely cleaned up areas of the city. Compare the area around the Twitter office today to how it was even a few years ago.

Also this comment is pretty harsh, and you clearly are not spending time in the right parts of San Francisco if you think its all littered with garbage and smells like piss. I will grant you that muni isnt great compared to cities 10x the size like New York or London.
3 comments
donmcc 4368 days ago
I think San Francisco's tolerance of diversity and oddity correlates to a greater tolerance of civic disorder than you see in other places. That said, it's often a much different city at the top of the hill than at the bottom.
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ido 4367 days ago
It compared badly also to cities smaller than it: compare SF (metro population: 4.5m) to Vancouver (2.5m), Vienna (2.4m), Zurich (1.8m) or Prague (1.2m).
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tizzdogg 4367 days ago
The population of San Francisco is 800k, so it is significantly smaller than any of those cities.

If you are talking about the entire Bay Area that is a different thing, but not really a valid comparison. The infrastructure problems in San Francisco tend to be due to it being a small city surrounded by lots of even smaller cities which dont want to play along for the greater good of the region (eg by expanding BART or shouldering the burden of homeless services). If the Bay Area as a whole was governed as a single unit a lot of these problems would be improved. But it's not.

It's a small city in an earthquake area with large hills, and uncooperative neighbors, all of which make it very difficult to build massive subway or streetcar systems.

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ido 4367 days ago
The populations I mentioned for the other cities are also metropolitan (urban populations are smaller in all of them).

Zurich's city-proper population for example is just less than 400k: half of SF's.

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tizzdogg 4366 days ago
Well that may be true. Of the cities you list I'm only familiar with the metros in vancouver and vienna, both of which are very nice. My point was not that muni doesn't have issues, but that they mostly stem from regional political problems which presumably those other regions dont have to the same extent. If the whole bay area would get on board with bart, things would be a lot better.

In any case comparing it to a third world country like the parent comment is a bit of a stretch.

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Bahamut 4367 days ago
It does not compare favorably to Washington, D. C. either.
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enraged_camel 4367 days ago
>>Also this comment is pretty harsh, and you clearly are not spending time in the right parts of San Francisco if you think its all littered with garbage and smells like piss.

Last time I checked, homeless were pissing and defecating on sidewalks in the heart of SF's financial district, as well as many others.

http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/3758-why-is-there-so-m...

(I don't say that to diss homeless people. Often times they have no choice because shops and businesses don't allow public usage of their restrooms.)

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tizzdogg 4367 days ago
>> SF's financial district

See "not spending time in the right parts of San Francisco"

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