> All we do in SF is make car driving worse, we almost never make public transit better.
In the last half decade we've seen the opening of the Salesforce transit center, the Chinatown subway station, the Van Ness BRT, the Caltrain Electrification Project, BART expansion to Berryessa, 800 new BART cars, and hundreds of smaller projects.
While I'm obviously exaggerating by saying "never", the list is much smaller than it needs to be, and you have some misleading things on that list.
Chinatown subway station is great. Better connects SF residents and it's exactly what I want to see more of in SF.
- Van Ness BRT? That project started in 2003. It took 20 years to complete. Not exactly the poster child of solid transit improvements in SF, except if you ignore how it got there.
- The Caltrain electrification project is great for the environment, but doesn't help SF much as far as improving transit availability. It's slightly faster, at least.
- BART expansion to Berryessa is a bit separate from SF transit improvements, which is what I'm talking about.
- Salesforce transit center is fine and has good vision, like expanding caltrain downtown. But doesn't add a massive amount of transit availability that wasn't already nearby (yet).
I provided a list of the biggest ticket items from the past few years. If you want to only look at projects that increase transit availability, reliability, or speed within SF County, check out the Muni Forward projects. Usually half a dozen lines are prioritized each year. https://www.sfmta.com/projects/muni-forward
I live in the Richmond, so I've been positively affected by the improvements to the 38/38R (although I still would strongly prefer a BRT system) and the new-ish-but-not-really 1X. In the next year I can expect transit improvements to the 1 and the 5/5R. Pretty much every bus I take on a weekly basis has seen transit improvements since I've first moved here.
Geary BRT is still not complete. 25 years in the making, and it is just a half assed solution. SF is very inefficient into completing mass transit infrastructure.
- Red painted lanes decrease private car use in bus lane, so bus can go faster
- Speeding fell by 80%, so fewer accidents mean transit is more reliable
There have been a few different projects on different sections of Geary over the years. The bus now runs 10-20% faster depending on direction and variability decreased by 25-40%.
Doesn’t the bus just stop before people board now? Seems to me the issue is the bus isn’t capable of preempting green lights not where it stops and hits the red light on its route. When the police want to get to lunch quicker they are allowed to preempt the lights with the tooling they are given.
How would you imagine one could make driving better, aside from making public transit better? The best thing you could hope for if you feel like you need to drive within SF is to have as few other people feeling the need to drive within SF.
But wait, I have to ask: why do you live in SF?
Practically anywhere else in the US is cheaper and better for people who want to drive.
Very few other US cities are better for people who want to get around by other means.
What do you mean by "the short window when the labor to do so was affordable"? Other cities in the world seem to be able to build underground railways just fine and they have similar labor costs as the US. See Paris or Sydney for cities that have created new underground railways recently.
But my comment was a bit tongue in cheek - it is mostly political dysfunction. Of course the US could find people willing to work for less than $400/hr or whatever, but there is an incentive disalignment.
Much of SF didn't even exist until the 1930s-50s. For example, most of Sunset and Richmond is tract housing built during that era - before then it was sand dunes and chicken farms.
People underestimate how new much of the Western US is. For example, Dallas only began expanding in 1891 after the railways were built, LA was a small town until the 1910s-30s era expansion, modern San Jose only formed in the 1960s-70s after absorbing dozens of farming towns like Alviso and Berryessa, Seattle was mostly sand dunes until they were leveled in the 1900s-30s).
Because of how new it was, most of the cities are planned primarily with cars in mind - especially after the 1930s era Dust Bowl Migration and the 1940s-60s era economic migration. Same thing in much of Canada and Australia as well, which saw a similar postwar expansion.
> before the NIMBYists stepped in
NIMBYism in SF only really began in the 1970s onwards.
While NIMBYism is now elitist, it initially started out as part of the civil rights movement ("urban redevelopment" was often a guise for razing historically Black, Hispanic, and Asian neighborhoods in that era - for example much of Japantown/Fillmore) as well as the early environmental movement (eg. Sierra Movement, Greenpeace), which was opposed to profit motive compared to modern YIMBY+Greentech model.
While that’s true of the outer communities (San Jose, etc) I took the OP’s message as referring to SF core/downtown which was already pretty developed by the 1950s. Unlike LA, SF was a major city far earlier.
Much of SF's core/downtown was rebuilt after the 1906 fire and earthquake, plus there was massive "urban redevelopment" that made the core much more car friendly.
People are forgetting about pasadena. That was the bigger socal city than la for a long time and maybe even bigger than sf (certainly is geographically).
In the last half decade we've seen the opening of the Salesforce transit center, the Chinatown subway station, the Van Ness BRT, the Caltrain Electrification Project, BART expansion to Berryessa, 800 new BART cars, and hundreds of smaller projects.
You can see a full list of SFMTA projects at https://www.sfmta.com/sfmta-projects