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That’s not how I read his comments at the December tunnel demo - and others have also mentioned how he didn’t talk about pods at all. He talked about 4-5 passenger vehicles using the tunnel... modified Teslas, basically.

https://la.curbed.com/2018/12/...

He's probably talking about the supplemental poverty measure, which takes into account things like the local cost of living, including cost of housing, rather than your measurement which considers someone in rural Mississippi and NYC as being on the same dollar scale, when $X/year in one is a great living, while scraping by in the other.

In terms of education quality, you're referencing their US News and World Report ranking. If you take another look at that page, you may notice that's entirely driven by their 4th in "higher education", which includes educating a lot of people who are just visiting to go to college, while Pre-K-12 they're listed as 44th, right between South Carolina (43rd) and Louisiana (45th). In the interest of fairness, a quality only metric (not using spending as a proxy for quality, but rather just based on test results and adjusting for demographics, including race), CA moves all the way up to 34th.

Um, no. -50 in Chicago is news. Coldest weather in all time for those days, coldest in many decades overall.

https://chicago.curbed.com/201...

Only written by someone who knows nothing about Seattle transit. What kind of misleading comment is "Seattle has won accolades for its transit system, where 93 percent of riders report being happy with service" Right all few thousand of them?

You claim to be familiar with Seattle but obviously aren't. Transit use is popular - and growing. Fewer people drive to work in Seattle than take transit, bike, or walk - and that's been true for a number of years.

As of February 2018:
48% of Seattle workers are taking transit
25.4% are driving solo
10% car or van pool
8% walk
3% bicycle to work
6% "other"

Back in February 2013:
43% of Seattle workers rode either the bus or the train
34% drove solo
9% car or van pooled
6% walked
4% telecommuted
3% biked

I've been taking transit to work in Seattle since 2003 - And absolutely LOVE having light rail to UW (since 2016)!

I see a million of these articles, none of which even mention the obscene amount of unnecessary overhead in many of these systems. The politicians bullshit about there not being enough taxes or fees, but they (and their media lapdogs) ignore the egregious amount of waste involved. A starter....

https://ny.curbed.com/2017/12/...

Here's a common design where the strategy would fail: https://www.curbed.com/2017/5/...

A large central courtyard with a building wrapped all the way around it. You walk in the front door, turn right and explore all the outside-facing rooms in the building. But, so long as it's possible to go all the way around the building "ring" inside (say, there's a single circular hallway through the middle of the ring), you'll never reach any of the rooms facing the courtyard, nor the courtyard itself.

If they don't have a motor they can use the bike lanes.

It looks like Seattle is currently permitting electric bicycles with power assist up to 15 MPH not only in bike lanes (where it seems they were already permitted) but also on sidewalks and trails . (Apparently you can also have bikes assisted up to 20 MPH, but they're not permitted on sidewalks, and you have to be 16.)

No, they're not going to shut down the subway, they're just not going to arrest people who don't pay because that's racist (the majority of fare evaders are black): https://dc.curbed.com/2018/10/...

Ride sharing is also having a substantial impact on the system, especially as the system enters the death spiral. In the past, people may have put up with poor service since there were no good alternatives, but now that ride sharing has significantly improved access to and reduced the price of hiring a private car, people are simply opting out. Unfortunately, this is just going to accelerate the spin downward.

In San Francisco, where rents are sky-high , a developer has been trying to build 75 new housing units since 2014. He has been battling the city and local activists: More info

Berkeley throws roadblock on developing a parking lot into 260 units: More info

"From 2007 to 2014, San Francisco only approved half of the building permits necessary to accommodate its growth, the San Francisco Business Times reported." Source

Serious question. why would you say driver's wages are not that significant? They have to do shifts, vacations, covering, redundancy, overtime...

I would imagine they'd be among the largest operational costs of running the transit. What else is there? fuel?

Capital and Maintenance costs would be there as well.

I just did a quick google.
https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/3...

https://www4.uwm.edu/cuts/utp/...

Driver cost is a very large expense.
"Here, there are several reasons, one of which is labor; the biggest single cost on buses is the driver, who is paid by the hour. (The other major costs are fuel consumption and maintenance.) "

Caltrans has plans for all kinds of things. Right now, we're seeing them focus on hundreds of billions of dollars for rail that goes, essentially, nowhere and there is zero plan or even an idea how to reach the biggest population in the State

The biggest population in the State's big problem isn't getting to the rest of the state, but getting around their own home area. There are fully funded plans to address that situation, although I'm skeptical that they can make much of a difference. I think they're going to need elevated PRT, or for Elon to come dig 'em a bunch of tunnels if that's even feasible given the location, to really change the fact that people are stuck in traffic jams.

Amazon has 566,000 employees (source).

A cynic would say that is only a one time payout of ~$3,533 per employee. A realist would understand that only the bottom rungs of the income ladder should get this money, so let's redo the math:

Amazon has "125,000 full-time hourly associates in the U.S" (source).

Now it's a one time payout of $16,000!

A "warehouse associate" earns ~$13/hr (source).

That is a staggering (/s) $27,040 per year.

Does Bezos really think that the overhead of starting, yet another, charity and its administrative costs is cheaper than just giving his lowest level employees a decent living wage?

This announcement says, yes, he does think that. But you say, that's just stupid.

So a then you would say, who benefits?

The Day 1 Academies Fund "will launch and operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos said.

Bezos said that the preschools will be directly operated by the organization and "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon."

"Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession," Bezos wrote. "The child will be the customer."

(source)

"The child will be the customer."...

In the age of DeVos, Bezos is going to open private charter schools, for the youngest among us, and run them like a business, but the difference is that the "child will be the customer".

Smell something?

Would someone learn the likes and dislikes of these children and slowly build an "anonymized" ad profile for that child, following them throughout their life span, knowing exactly what products they are likely and not likely to buy?

Now the decision to pass over that wage increase and open a "charity" makes sense.

2018 - https://ny.curbed.com/2018/3/3...

In the popular history of postwar urban development, blame for the decline of the streetcars and interurbans is often placed at the feet of National City Lines, the company owned by General Motors, Firestone, and others in the auto industry that bought out many local streetcar companies to convert their operations to rubber-tired, GM-made buses. But the main issue was not the technology change—it was the decline in transit service, which happened everywhere, whether or not NCL bought the local company.

A few other good articles:

This accusation [GM killed the streetcar], however, ignores fundamental problems that the streetcar system in Los Angeles had been facing for years. The dirty secret about the streetcar lines: they were wildly unprofitable and were quickly losing riders. In Transport of Delight, Jonathan Richmond points out that the Pacific Electric line managed to turn a profit in only two years between 1923 and the end of World War II. Meanwhile, between 1945 and 1951, the number of riders carried each year fell by nearly 80 million.

Cheaper to operate and requiring less maintenance, buses began phasing out the streetcars very early. In 1926, 15 percent of the total miles traveled by Pacific Electric riders was along bus routes; that number would more than double by 1939.

By the time that National City Lines entered the picture, the dismantling of the streetcar system was well underway. As The Guardian puts it, "one can confidently accuse General Motors and their National City Lines of nothing worse than scheming to profit from a trend already in motion."

Absolutely. In the mean time, the same NIMBYs that have forced SF to refuse to build any new housing are trying to prevent the re-opening of closed restaurants.

NIMBYs have far, far, too much power in this country. They're why we can't have nice things - literally. There's a lot of pseudo-"environmental protection" laws that need reform to cover the real world - you shouldn't need permission to run trains on an existing rail line, and it should be relatively easy to build a block of apartments in an area zoned high density mixed use.

Yes.

You have identified precisely why voting is not enough to solve the problems in society. Not even in a City as great as San Francisco. Our individual vote serves our own self-interest. It is entirely Nimby. It does not scale properly when managing City, State, National, Global resources or others' well being. It never has, and never will until we evolve as human beings. This deficiency in human nature and democracy is amplified by the lobbies and special interests; the results speak for themselves.

So, how do we tackle massive social issues in a growth economy social democracy of constitutional "citizen" human beings? We are ineffective at solving most social problems in a voting booth, so far. This is the challenge. Our own well being is threatened by the inadequacy of our corporatist democracy. It won't serve the citizens mutually, fairly, or equally if our values and voice reflect the disparity of the privileged shareholder. There are two basic approaches to fixing social problems on this Ship of Fools. First. a policy that is inclusive of every single human being. The second is an exclusive policy for the shareholders that omits some of the population and throws them off the boat before considering viable options or final solutions.

Social illness is not entirely an economic problem, it is a sociological dilemma of valuing some people more than others, for any reason whatsoever that can be rationalized. How do we be human individuals and also improve humanity overall at the same time?

Money alone won't fix it because money doesn't shit on the street, cause drug abuse, or homelessness. Money simply affords it, at the current prices, and it rationalizes the spending for these very bad results.

We need to approach this with a commitment to make the world a place where people have better options than homelessness and drug addiction and public defecation in one of the most affluent and desirable places on earth. Nobody in their right mind wants or chooses this fucked up lifestyle so why don't we give everyone including ourselves better alternatives? The current "path of least resistance" is actually a hindrance in a punitive society with a puritanical ethos - We need to give people permission to be "deadbeats" without banishing them to failure, hopelessness, disease, and destruction. We are only mistreating ourselves by our willingness to accept disparity from the long end of the stick. Our success need not be celebrated by others' failure.

Human nature, not natural scarcity is the greatest deficiency and impediment to our world. It won't be cured by a municipal policy or NIMBY.

How do we fix it? We start by fixing ourselves and living by the golden rule. Especially when we are not being mistreated or suffering. Just because we are not to blame does not get us off the hook: as long as there is suffering in we must be motivated to end it or else we are resigned to its inevitability. We can do better and give a shit about all people. not just the special.

I know, I'm just preaching to the choir.

Absolutely. In the mean time, the same NIMBYs that have forced SF to refuse to build any new housing are trying to prevent the re-opening of closed restaurants.

NIMBYs have far, far, too much power in this country. They're why we can't have nice things - literally. There's a lot of pseudo-"environmental protection" laws that need reform to cover the real world - you shouldn't need permission to run trains on an existing rail line, and it should be relatively easy to build a block of apartments in an area zoned high density mixed use.

Those scumbags are trying to force people back onto the mismanaged disaster that is the NYC MTA. Funny, a few decades ago, city planners were trying to force people into ridesharing. Somebody figures out how to create genuine market incentives that don't involve government bungling, and the politicians are now looking for ways to stop it for the benefit of the cabbie cartels and the MTA...not commuters. Typical.

The only relevant issue of the Netherlands being smaller then the US is that the economics are different.

Same area as Virginia, twice the population density, population centers more concentrated. The population density and concentration make the economics of any sort of mass transit work better in the Netherlands than in Virginia.

The ability of the Hyperloop to compete with other modes of mass transit will be an open question for a while.

Freight by pneumatic tube has been done before, How pneumatic systems have captivated New York for over 100 years. Sometimes the economics work.

California has areas with serious problems with affordable housing.

And that literally has nothing to do with the cost of the houses themselves but rather their scarce availability.

Not so. California's housing prices are a huge part of their affordable housing problem. In the booming tech cities, housing prices have gone up so much that minimum wage workers can't afford to live in the city they work in.

Here’s how many minimum-wage hours it takes to afford a two-bed in SF
Low-wage jobs are plentiful in S.F., but where can you live?
I tried living on an $8 per hour salary in San Francisco and it was a disaster

This is required for the basic habitability of our planet.

You are dismissing an entirely valid line of thinking. In this specific case, the real goal is to make houses energy efficient, or carbon-neutral, or something like that. There's many ways to do that other than solar panels. Maybe someone wants to use a geothermal energy system, or a wind turbine. Or maybe they don't want to connect to the grid at all. Maybe they want to use a passive cooling design and a green roof. Often times regulations that tell people *how* to solve the problem are really corporations trying to use the regulations to steer people toward their products. Like requiring a particular safety valve, that only one company has a patent on. This prevents other companies from innovating by developing similar products.

Bullshit. Per capita inflation-adjusted government revenue may dip occasionally during a recession, but it's up tremendously over time. Can't blame this on a lack of revenue. The MTA has it's own sources of funds, anyway. It's not supposed to depend on the Federal government.

Even The New York Times acknowledges that this is a political issue, one which Democrat Cuomo is mostly to blame for.

The real scandal is that NY's Subway costs more to build an operate than just about anywhere else. Their labor cost is $140K/year/worker on _average_. They also run two people per train, compared to one pretty much anywhere else and they still manage to have their crews spend less time working vs. deadheading.

Face it, this is the natural result of government worker unions combined with complicit politicians. The politicians and their cronies and allies make money and the public gets screwed as they suck the subway system dry.

If you want to fix it, then remove all the union rules and privatize it. I know, will never happen, because certain folks have too much political power in NYC.

Before the "Citation Needed" post appears, here we go ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign-wealth-flows-to-time-warner-condos.html

https://ny.curbed.com/2014/10/24/10031340/shocker-half-of-midtowns-super-luxury-condos-sit-vacant

http://theweek.com/articles/736313/how-foreign-investors-launder-money-new-york-real-estate

I guess NBC is part of the conservative movement? Or perhaps it's those stalwart conservative professors at Berkeley who make things up... I work a few days each week at Civic Center, and the feces, urine, and needles are quite real.

They are actually rebuilding that section in a big expansion. https://chicago.curbed.com/201...

much of SF believes the rest of the world revolves around their epicenter. The idea that people would not know what "The mission" was probably would not even dawn on people like story author.

If you asked somebody in IOWA where "The Tenderloin" was, they would understandably think you were talking about meat.

Yes, because the entire population of THE MISSION got together to proof the article.

That article was posted on "Curbed San Francisco," at https://sf.curbed.com/.../. If you really want to complain about this, shift your ire to whomever submitted it to Slashdot. They should have provided the additional context because no additional context was necessary in the article itself.

Apparently you've never been to Manhattan, and seen the condos and townhomes of the well-to-do... For example, 15 Central Park West has a starting price around $8 million.

Perfect example is where Uber didn't like the law that Austin Tx passed so bought off the state to override.

https://austin.curbed.com/2017...

At least it's not more gold leaf for city hall.

I, for one, welcome gigabit Internet service to the tents in San Francisco's homeless camps!

https://sf.curbed.com/2017/6/2...

Because roads aren't infrastructure and cars are cheap!

Uber and Lyft do not build their own roads, and do not own the cars.

https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/...

What is your point? This link confirms everything I said. Uber and Lyft left. Competition sprang up immediately (no new roads and no new cars were needed). Uber and Lyft returned (still no new roads needed).

Factors similar to those resulting in not much price competition between cable providers

Totally dissimilar markets. Cable is infrastructure intensive, and has huge barriers to entry. Rides have near zero barriers to entry.

Because roads aren't infrastructure and cars are cheap!

Seriously, I laughed my ass off when I first read your comment.

When Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, local companies filled the void within days

https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/...

And the amount of housing construction in the Bay Area is literally almost zero-bubble. The problem really here is a lack of construction that is coming almost completely from overly strict zoning and building codes.

I have an idea, let's look at the article you just posted a link to: https://www.curbed.com/2016/2/...

Consider that in 2015 the Bay Area added 64,000 new jobs, most of them in the Silicon Valley, but less than 5,000 new homes were constructed, Motter said. The inventory of Silicon Valley housing has declined by 10 percent since 2014, and the region has experienced a shortage of nearly 25,000 units since 2007, according to the Joint Venture Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies.

Even just using those numbers, that is not anything like "literally zero", and it's also "the Bay Area" as whole. If we take a look at what they say about San Francisco:

Some 5,500 apartments currently under construction will provide some relief for the San Francisco rental market.

So, San Francisco is about to add as many units as the entire Bay Area did in 2015. Just using these numbers.

I'm emphasizing that I haven't checked these numbers because this actually looks like junk news to me-- it's a real estate investment rag, quoting building developers. You might as well ask a Hollywood producer about the quality of their upcoming releases.

Boston, New York, Tokyo, and London are all very large cities with big tech sectors without these problems being nearly as severe. The greater Boston area includes Sommervile is literally the densest area by population in New England and is much denser than the Bay Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerville,_Massachusetts but the rental cost is literally more than order of magnitude than it is for the same thing in the Bay. And the amount of housing construction in the Bay Area is literally almost zero https://www.curbed.com/2016/2/24/11102278/bay-area-housing-crisis-bubble. The problem really here is a lack of construction that is coming almost completely from overly strict zoning and building codes. Centralization doesn't enter into it.

Oh no, us international folks already knew lots of rich americans live in disgusting houses. There are plenty of articles about them already, it's just that they say "look at this amazing place" where this guy said "house boner" and whatnot.

I just googled "top ten most expensive houses in la" and found this right at the top of the results: https://la.curbed.com/2017/1/2...

Sadly, no arrows and slagging off, but you can still marvel at just how gaudy the rich seem to like their houses.

Depends... let's consider two "illigal" [sic] businesses:

a) Uber - declare it officially illegal.

b) Mystery food vendors - legalize them

News stories I've found indicate what you said is correct:

Seattle: Together with abusive companies and bad city management, Seattle is a miserable place.

Houses in Seattle are expensive: Seattle bumps Boston as the most expensive U.S. housing market that's not in California.

Rent is expensive: Seattle rent is 5th most expensive in U.S.

Traffic: Seattle one of the worst U.S. cities for traffic congestion, tied with NYC (March 31, 2015) Quote: "An additional 23 minutes a day spent in traffic may not sound like much, but when it adds up over a year it becomes 89 hours." (Whoever wrote that must be accustomed to Seattle misery. An additional 23 minutes a day spent in traffic sounds HORRIBLE.)

Slow internet: Many areas of Seattle have poor internet connections. See the article, These places have the slowest Internet in the country. (June 25, 2015) Quote: "... Seattle ... CenturyLink (CTL) customers trying to access particular sites from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. will have unbearably slow speeds."

Microsoft: Microsoft Is Filled With Abusive Managers And Overworked Employees, Says Tell-All Book (May 23, 2012)

Amazon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers (February 23, 2014)

Amazon: Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace (August 15, 2015) Quote: "The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers..."

Amazon: Amazon Under Fire Over Alleged Worker Abuse in Germany (February 19, 2013)

It must be impossible to devise more sophisticated engineering for taller buildings...

Especially if they're too heavy.

http://sf.curbed.com/2016/8/9/12416702/millennium-tower-tilting-sinking-sf-building

Increase the density allowed and allow building of mid and high rise appartments inside of SF and other bay area suburbs. Not an instant fix, but it would fix it over a decade.

They do build high-rise buildings in SF and SJC, but sometimes it does not all go as planned...

There are no "simple" solutions to this problem.

Rent control doesn't work.

At least for tenants.

Conservative Oprah says hi! http://la.curbed.com/archives/...

Politics aside, the biggest problem with this is going to be the housing. Those "low end" apartments almost certainly didn't spring into existence at $0.96/sqft, but upgrading the 600,000 people from soggy cardboard is going to require a lot of new construction, and people building new things are going to want money for that wood, brick and property, even if the entire structure is built with robots. Terrafoam to the rescue, I guess.

That said, if you're willing to not own a lot of stuff or have a bedroom, it looks like 242sqft is plenty of space. It's probably pretty standard in Tokyo too.

This is exactly right. Others have noted that this agent thing is similar to realtors and there's good evidence to suggest that realtors don't really have much incentive to find the highest bidder for your home (see e.g. http://curbed.com/archives/201...) but have more incentive to get rid of your home quickly.

"it must be affordable, and its neighborhood must be walkable."
"Other top areas included... The Mission District, Lower Haight, and Russian Hill, San Francisco; "

The median 1 bedroom apartment in SF (in the Mission) is now over $3,000 per month.
http://sf.curbed.com/archives/...

It's walkable, but I wouldn't consider that to be affordable.

Because the greens have killed every attempt to do so. Between environmental impact studies, sound issues, displaced animals and other 'green' expenses the costs have increased several fold to the point of not being financially feasible. It's an unfortunate case of the greens being the worst thing for the environment as they keep getting in the way of mass transit. Here's an example of just one section of the proposed track.

In Japan, France, China and other such places you can just build the thing without going through billion dollar power trips. Since they can, they do. America has a history of building incredible rail networks when were able to, but until the environment changes it's going to remain a footnote in history.

For $150k you could buy a nice mansion (or two) in Detroit.

For $150k in Los Angeles or San Francisco, you could probably buy a nice tent or cardboard box.
 

How many of you have heard of the working oil fields underneath Los Angeles?

LA used to be famous for that. (Look at 03:00) There were oil rigs all over town. Beverly Hills High School still has a rig. It brings in about $1 million a year. There used to be hundreds of pumps between LAX and Venice Beach.

The LA basin is mostly pumped out now, and most pumps have been removed. Most of the remaining ones are concealed.

How many of you have heard of the working oil fields underneath Los Angeles?

LA used to be famous for that. (Look at 03:00) There were oil rigs all over town. Beverly Hills High School still has a rig. It brings in about $1 million a year. There used to be hundreds of pumps between LAX and Venice Beach.

The LA basin is mostly pumped out now, and most pumps have been removed. Most of the remaining ones are concealed.

I live in LA, and my coworker has had bears at his house repeatedly. One of them was observed to be checking windows by leaning against the screens and seeing if they popped in so it could raid the kitchens, which it had done on several occasions.

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2010/01/bears_take_monrovia.php

...unless you're the Academy of Art University, in which case you just go ahead and convert the bulding into whatever you like:

http://sf.curbed.com/tags/academy-of-art-university

Spiral escalator? Just talk to NYC's mayor. He put one in his building.

http://www.curbed.com/archives/2004/09/29/bloomber g_lps_death_spiral.php

I highly doubt that, like someone making $20k/year, many people making $1M/year are spending 30% of their incomes in restaurants. Honestly, you think it is _common_ at that level of income to spend $904 PER DAY EVERY DAY on FOOD? Yeah, they spend more, but at a certain point, the restaurants just don't get much more expensive.

for example, Howard Stern likes to eat at Nobu. Dinner at Nobu is about $100. He makes that in 30 seconds (24/7). I pretty routinely eat at places, say, half that expensive at about $50. An average dinner tab for me is thus about one twentieth of one percent of my income. 1/20th of 1% of his income would be $50,000.

That's about 500 plates of Nobu goodness. He must be REALLY hungry.

He must spend much more on housing, though. Oh wait, no, his house cost $20M.

http://www.curbed.com/archives/2005/11/14/celebrit y_real_estate_wrap_howard_owns_the_hamptons.php

That's ONE FIFTH of his annual income. Most people around or below the $100K mark are buying homes worth FIVE TIMES their incomes--and guess what, his was "used." A great number in the $100K mark are forced out into new construction in the 'burbs. So, for a $500k suburban McMansion, I gotta pony up $69k in "Fair Tax." For Howard's $20M manse in the Hamptons, he whistles dixie.

Get it yet?