I think you’re painting a lot of people with very broad strokes.
I lived in Oakland for 10 years. I’m familiar with the trend, which is why I find the complaints from Artisinal San Franciscans so misguided.
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I think you are either unclear about the meaning of “tendency” or feeling a little bit defensive.
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I’ll be more blunt: you’re engaging in the same kind of stereotyping that you would probably, in other circumstances, be very critical of.
I’m not defensive. I’m realistic about the fact that all of the complaints about housing prices are the natural outcome of market dynamics. A feature, not a bug. I’m not defending it, I’m saying that it is inevitable. Further, I’m saying the alternatives are ones you would probably object to (e.g. government control of who can live where).
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It’s estimated that MUNI transports more than half a million people around SF, per day.
BART transports just a little under half a million people per weekday, not including weekends.
About how many people would you say all the tech companies in the Bay Area combined, (including whichever one that you work for) transport each day?
Don’t even bother to answer; that was rhetorical just to make my point.
I get it; nobody likes hearing that they’re a part of a problem they didn’t even mean to create… but I’m sorry, just by virtue of where you are employed:
Ya’ are, ‘Blanche’; ya’ are.
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Why is the absolute number relevant?? Shouldn’t the metric be how many cars are replaced by a single vehicle, with the ability to scale up or down as needed?
The answer is about 50. There are about 50 people on the single-decker buses, if full. They’re not always full, but I would wager they are closer to full than empty.
No, that’s not it. Nobody likes being accused of being part of a problem that isn’t actually a problem. Riding mass transit to work (private or otherwise) is not a crime. Unless you can articulate – precisely – WHY the tech buses are bad, in objective, non-prejudicial terms, you don’t actually have an argument.
The tech buses are private vehicles. So is almost every car on the road. In order to single out the tech buses, you have to articulate what makes them different from every other vehicle. “The people on them make too much money” is not an objective argument.
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The point that you seem so intent on missing is that the buses tech companies use are not fucking mass transit, because they don’t transport anyone but people who work for those companies and only limited hours, yet they still use the same roads, routes and stops in an already overly congested area.
Says YOU. It seems to me that there are plenty of people living in the Bay Area who feel quite differently.
Have a nice day; I’m tired of talking in circles with you.
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Their size is the main issue. If they were filled to capacity and used hubs as stops and had the passengers use last-mile transport I would be less put off. Maybe even walk or take a scooter or muni instead of door-to door service down tiny streets. Meet your community half way, that what I meant by personal responsibility, give a shit about the state of your neighborhood.
Also when any vehicle, especially a behemoth bus double-parks (sometimes in a bike lane) it can become a shitstorm pretty quickly, the drivers treat parking rules like they don’t give a shit when the company pays for the violation.
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I’m not missing that point. The tech buses are clearly private. It just doesn’t seem relevant. Private cars are private, too – but you probably don’t object to them using the same roads. The places where the tech buses are allowed to stop is regulated by the city. If you don’t approve of those locations, shouldn’t your argument be with the city? What, precisely, are the tech buses doing that is legally objectionable?
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I count about 5 or 6 on average in the buses I see stalking around the corner of 16th and Valencia circa 6pm weeknights. Granted the windows are tinted but they have lights on inside so one can make out the empty seats. They are more like carpool stretch limos.
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Smaller buses would imply more buses, no? Is that actually better? Why?
“Last-mile transport” is a term that entered the common parlance, what, five weeks ago? Rentable scooters didn’t exist until very, very recently, and in any case SF has already banned them.
Lots of tech workers do use bicycles to get to and from the bus, though.
This is a complaint better addressed to the city of SF than the tech companies. The buses use the streets that they are regulated to use. They don’t have a choice.
I’m not in favor of this, but this is again a complaint that is probably better directed at the city. If the buses are violating the law, they should be cited. If the fine isn’t a deterrent, than it should probably be more.
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they don’t offer door to door service - there are stops dotted around the city near BART and MUNI stations and central points in various neighborhood. my wife walks 30 minutes to from her stop to catch the nearest bus.
they have never been door to door service but they did have more stops in various neighborhoods before some residents pressured city hall into making them hub and last mile like they are now. anecdotally from various people i’ve talked to this has meant some people have started driving again - so it might have been better congestion wise to keep the greater number of stops.
there is no question they keep cars off the road - the question is whether the mild inconvenience of the buses double parking outweighs the 50 or so extra cars per bus that would necessarily be travelling and parking in that part of the city without the bus
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Please don’t use smaller buses, ban big buses from smaller arteries.
Scooters are not banned in SF but there is going to be a temporary ban on electric scooters. Electric Scooters did not really exist in SF before five weeks ago either, are they irrelevant too? If a solution is relatively new do we throw it away?
But I am addressing it to the tech workers. If you feel no moral obligation good for you but don’t project that onto others.
We are in complete agreement on this.
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This “problem” yo describe – is it that the market economy we live in leads to prices going up when supply can’t meet demand? Because if participating in the market economy makes one part of the problem, you, too, are part of the problem. Or maybe you’re plotting a socialist revolution? If so, count me in!
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You are trying to put words in my mouth that don’t belong there.
I’m not stereotyping, I’m generalizing based on observed behavior. Yes, that really is different.
At no point did I complain about housing prices. And I think local government has a duty to be involved in housing, like I believe that unfettered capitalism is nearly as bad as mercantilism.
This sort of arguing against points your interlocutor did not make is known as the Straw Man rhetorical fallacy, and is why I suspect you of being defensive. Do you work in tech?
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Seems misguided and pointless – they don’t have a choice as to which streets the buses use. But hey, it’s a free country. If you want to complain pointlessly, you are free to do so.
I don’t actually ride the tech buses, but even if I did, the “moral obligation” you seem to refer to isn’t something that can be objectively defined. You don’t like the buses, or maybe the people on the buses, or maybe the money in their pockets. Those aren’t objectively definable, though. You probably don’t like the gentrification (which I get) but that’s a function of the market economy we live in. As pointed out elsewhere, you’re part of that market economy, too. Your claim to San Francisco (or even to speak for San Franciscans) is no more or less than any other San Franciscan.
More directly, who are you to define the morals for everyone else?
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You know, I don’t think I could add anything better to that statement. I’ll leave it to stand on its own merit.
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Ah my beloved Bay Area. I lived there between '96 and late 2000. And it was a fucking nightmare.
I got a job in Belmont down on the peninsula which doubled the salary I was earning in New Mexico. For whatever reason we ended up living in Berkeley (which I must say is my favorite town EVER for many different reasons). That commute was nuts. I combined my bike with 4 different transit agencies (AC Transit, BART, Muni, and CalTrain) to get to and from work. Company gave me a couple of work at home days which was fantastic.
Then we moved to San Mateo which is a town away from Belmont. That simplified my life. Then the company decided to move to the Valley proper – Campbell. Once again, I was on bike and Caltrain. So we upped and moved again while I was also interviewing with lots of other places down to Campbell (to an expensive apartment next to the Pruneyard). The traffic was incredibly bad and awful and stupid.
Anyhow, we had friends in S.F. who were renting apartments in the Mission. A decent (i.e. not a fire hazard) 3 bedroom apartment was about $3000/mo, and as most of my friends were young techies in the dot-com era, they had traded big salaries for useless stock options. Some of them had six or seven housemates just to get by.
My older friends had bought houses in the Valley a decade before I arrived there when an Apple engineer’s salary could easily buy a small 2 bedroom house, and they were in. My friend Ed owned a 3 bedroom condo which he bought for $125k and then listed for $500k, and which sold for $750k after a bidding war.
Now the two things about tech – in particular large software companies – I NEVER understood is this:
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We had saturated the landscape with the most “brilliant” people on the planet, folks who solved problems constantly for their jobs and who enjoyed building things and solving things etc. And yet at the end of each day we’d all hop in our cars and drive in stop and go traffic for 2 hours just to go 10 miles, which if you ask me is the stupidest form of idiocy imaginable.
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We were sitting on the Internet Boom! We were enabling people to do all kinds of things remotely on a scale which humankind has never done before. And yet for whatever reason tech people who work for a company have to become concentrated in this overly congested overly inflated high-cost-of-living shit hole. Why don’t we locate our offices in pretty town like Des Moines or elsewhere, where the cost of living is affordable, where techies would contribute to local communities rather than drive poorer people out? It never made sense and still doesn’t make sense.
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I’ve been thinking and saying for a few years now that I think the future of urban life in America is in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Take Baltimore, where I’ve lived for ~22 of my 40 years. It’s 45 mins. from DC, less than 2 hours from Philly, less than 4 from NYC (and closer to 2.5 by train).
Baltimore is a bit rough, but it’s also pretty awesome. Very funky, weird, creative. Good music scene. And you can easily buy a house here for $150K to $250K. Easily. Hell, you can buy a house for a dollar, if you feel like gutting it.
Why don’t more companies move to Baltimore, or get founded here? Well, some do. I’m lucky – I have a great job with a firm I like, where I’ve been working for years. I get to spend a healthy amount of time in neighboring cities, especially NYC, which is a lot of fun. Honestly, it’s a pretty great lifestyle. But living full-time in NYC, or San Francisco? Eh, no thank you. The mortgage on my funky green row-home will be paid off in 2 years. That’s a pretty nice feeling!
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No one in the Bay Area has put their own bodies on the gears since 1996. RIP Mario Savio.
