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A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her To Work by 7 AM (nytimes.com)
From a report on The New York Times: Sheila James starts her Monday, and the workweek, at 2:15 a.m. This might be normal for a baker or a morning radio host, but Ms. James is a standard American office worker. She is 62 and makes $81,000 a year as a public health adviser for the United States Department of Health and Human Services in San Francisco. Her early start comes because San Francisco is one of the country's most expensive metropolitan areas. Ms. James lives about 80 miles away in Stockton, which has cheaper homes but requires her to commute on two trains and a bus, leaving at 4 a.m. Plenty of office workers get up at 5 a.m. or a bit before, but 2:15 is highly unusual. "Two-fifteen is early enough that some people are still having their evening," she said on a (very) early morning. But she likes to take her time and have coffee. She keeps the lights low and the house quiet and Zen-like. "I just can't rush like that," she said. When the second alarm goes off at 3:45 -- a reminder to leave for the train in 15 minutes -- her morning shifts from leisure to precision. It is a seven-minute drive to the station, where she catches the Altamont Corridor Express train.
The one time I took a city bus, it made a half hour drive into a 3 hour adventure, never even considered public transportation ever again.
The solution to the problems is really simple: build more housing. How do you get more housing built? Well, for starts not having some of the most restrictive zoning laws in the country, and having people fight back at any housing that is less than ideal would be a major aspect. Unfortunately, there are people who are advocates for the poor who don't get this and have gone out of their way to block housing that doesn't have affordable housing built into it, which just results in total fewer housing.
On the other hand we wouldn't exist if someone didn't "have" us.
You know, having children does benefit the childless as well. Or would you like to live in an area where everyone chose to be childless and now that everyone's retired there's no staff for... well.. anything? No hospital staff, cops, restaurant workers, store workers, etc. Just look at Japan and their oncoming worker-to-retired ratio slow motion train wreck.
That's one of the reasons that responsible governments understand people having children is vital to society's health and encourage the choice to do so with services and financial incentives. Other governments... not so much.
The Earth has plenty of humans on it. Indeed, perhaps too many and a reduction in population (rather then a continuing increase in population as we are experiencing) would be best in the long term. Of course, the only way to have a reduction in population is either via some "pruning" process (probably politically infeasible) or people just having less kids. Yes, in the short term it causes some economic imbalances, but in the long term it's probably a good thing.
Few people propose that society move to a situation where the birthrate is 0 (well, perhaps the Shakers do, but that's not working out so well for them).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
1 - Proposition 13. An anti-tax measure that may have been necessary at the time, but went way too far to the point where Bay Area cities are incentivized to approve more business developments but less housing because of the amount of revenue they bring in. The result is a massive jobs-housing imbalance as cities gain more jobs but not enough housing to keep up, resulting in long commutes from out of town.
2 - A strong NIMBY lobby. Established residents are vocal in their opposition to more housing in "their" town. Councils feel pressured to resist new developments.
3 - Induced demand. Caltrans has an unbelievably wasteful policy of widening highways in the hope that it'll alleviate traffic congestion despite a mountain of evidence that this does not work and that more highway lanes just causes more traffic as people move out to cheaper suburbs to get a bigger house for the same price and a (temporarily) reasonable commute time. By the time everyone has the same idea, highways are jammed again.
4 - Anti-transit sentiment. Roads are less efficient than rails, but it's a lot easier to get funding for them.
5 - Single-use-zoning. Putting daily needs out of walking distance of each other forces nearly everyone to drive throughout the day. The result is massive car ownership and demands for more facilities to accommodate private cars.
6 - Fragmented local government. It's very hard to get region-wide transit developments done when each city is only focused on its own interests.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
And we (the United States) want to cap legal immigration at ~50,000/year, so good luck making that argument while avoiding a long slide into depopulation, as currently exists in Japan and Russia.
SOME economic imbalances? Have you actually thought about the social and economic circumstances of depopulating midwestern cities and towns, or is that beyond your attention horizon, living in California as you are? Ah yes, the reason why you favor "less people" is certainly apparent... you want less people where you are. As if people are going to stop migrating there due to a drop in birth rate.