Two Urbanists Visit an Iconic American City 

I know right? They visited so much so fast!

San Fran is a dense walkable city with housing that is unaffordable. Other cities are not as dense or walkable but are very affordable. Go figure.

@@gumbyshrimp2606 Only the city proper is dense, the metro area is a different story.

@@rileynicholson2322 The metro area is densifying too. BART has TOD in the works at literally all of its stations. Some is already fully built out. And Caltrain, VTA light rail, and even Muni are following suit. We've been moving in a very positive direction in terms of housing production lately. It's only been a couple of years, but even the early results are very promising. The Bay looks more and more like a series of dense main streets/walkable areas connected by pretty high quality and fast transit. San Leandro and Redwood City were the most surprising case studies for me. Redwood City is now basically a clone of Hill Valley from Back to the Future. It's like a walkable pre-war main street + tech offices! And San Leandro is not only building a cute downtown next to BART but is also adding office and other commercial space.

As a resident, I find it quite "cohesive [and] convenient" - granted, I'm in a great location, right by the intersection of a MUNI metro line and a bus line, an easy walk downhill to BART, and a short walk to yet another major bus line. So I can get pretty much anywhere from here. The thing that makes it work is the *Clipper Card,* which works on _every_ transit mode and agency in the Bay Area (including the ferries!), and conveniently deals with passes and discounts as well. It's my absolute favorite innovation to the transit experience, having come up in the era of having to hunt for exact change to drop into the farebox. (My second favorite - the new BART trains; I've been riding the old ones since the system first started; we're both quite old by now, and they should have been replaced a decade or two ago. The new ones are _really_ nice!)

@@dwc1964 And therein lies the rub. If you're close to one of the Muni Metro lines then it's very hard to even understand what the critics are on about. You have perfectly good access to the rest of the city via Muni Metro. It links to BART, Caltrain, the ferries, and the Marin County busses. You're fully connected to the whole regional transit network and can go anywhere you please in a two-three hops. But the northern and northwestern parts of the city (where the rich people live) shot themselves in the foot by killing all of the high quality rail lines that used to run in that part of SF. They wanted to keep "the poors" out so they cut themselves off from easy transit access. Now that whole part of the city is pretty inaccessible via train, and the busses are just too slow and bumpy to be enjoyable in many cases. The Cable Cars can actually be used as a pretty reasonable substitute for electric rail. But they are constantly overrun by tourists. So if you live there then your SOL on transit and might have to drive or take some pretty slow busses to connect to Muni Metro and BART. The residents in that part of town did a ton of silly things like that. They almost turned themselves into a suburb. For example, the Russian Hill locals lobbied the city to cancel mechanized street cleaning so that they don't have to move their cars. Now a lot of those areas have pretty crazy issues with street trash. It's not everywhere, but it tends to get blown by the wind and piles up in certain spots. If you park in one of those for a few days then your car gets buried in all kinds of street debris. And after 40 years, returning that service is turning out to be a non-trivial issue.

as another former Marinite I do have to complain about the transit into the city, with only the 130 and 150 bus serving a stop within walking distance (and only once every hour, never past midnight afaik). GG bridge was meant to have light rail under the car traffic, but Marin and I think San Mateo county vetoed it I think circa 1962, and so it was never built. It'd be amazing to see a BART extention into the north bay at some point in the future, maybe even connecting up to SMART as well. One can only dream :P

How do you get to Muir woods without a car? Is there a bus that could take you there?

Not worth visiting anymore. It’s a cesspool now.

@@AlexCab_49 yes...

@@RebekahCurielAlessi So what bus will take me there cus I doubt Muni has a bus line that goes all the way there

@@AlexCab_49 either ferry to sausalito or ggt route 130, then transfer to route 61

the New York City subway isn't too dangerous, some parts can be sus i know, but from what I heard people get into physical fights and other crap a lot more on BART

It could be because much more people use the subway in NYC so there are more "eyes on the street" as Jane Jacobs said. In most other cities, especially out west, transit can be kinda barren so they become a low key place to hang out. The sketchiest parts of the NYC subway are also the most barren.

I live in SF and my experience has been that I've had sketch experiences, say, every other time I take BART in the east bay. Almost all BART rides I've taken on the west side of the bay (anywhere between Millibrae and Embarcadero) have been calm and uneventful-but I have so many stories about my rides in east bay. Sucks that it deters people from going there, because east bay has so many cool places and things to do.

Surprising, because the latenight TV hosts are always painting NYC transit as being overrun with drugs, violence, masturbators, and other assorted craziness. But I guess that's just the limited and skewed information we get about the system out here in flyover country.

@@Zalis116 That's what you see on SEPTA

I probably have to mention here that you can actually take any BART line from Berkeley to get to either San Francisco or San Jose. You may have to do a cross-platform transfer at MacArthur station to the other line. But the transfer is across the platform and timed so you lose zero seconds on it. It's a tiny inconvenience that can speed up your trip.

You should be happy. The vote went the way you wanted.

It's interesting to see so many people fall into this same trap. BART is not really a subway, although it can look like one in SF-Oakland-Berkeley. It's an S-bahn system. Subways don't usually go 80 mph, nor do they cover 94 km distances in one go. SF's actual metro/subway is the Muni Metro. It's a light rail system that's in transition to a full light metro. Some of the lines are more grade separated and some still have more streetcar flare. But in the city center they're all underground and plenty fast for local SF travel. BART being a longer distance, S-bahn/RER style system means that it's priced by the distance. That also explains the singular line is SF. BART is there to connect you to the rest of the region. Once you're in the rough area that you need to go to you're supposed to switch to local transit. BART is not really meant for local trips. Within SF you're supposed to take the Muni Metro for that. The regional Bay government is working on tighter zone-based fare integration between Muni Metro, BART, Caltrain, VTA Light Rail, the ferries, and the bus agencies. So in the future this won't matter. The fares will be homogenized, the transfers will be free to/from all modes within each zone, and the maps will reflect all the rapid rail options on all the systems. For now, you basically need some local knowledge to navigate this bureaucratic mess. It's still doable, but you need to spend some time studying the systems.

Potrero Hill and Dogpatch are amazing. Definitely a hidden gem

Lol, I remember that too! It was in the Haight-Ashbury, I think. An extremely lefty, even socialist part of town. And the housing that was supposed to go there was a 100% affordable senior housing building. They fought it tooth and nail for over a decade. But I think it did get built eventually. Our housing politics seems to have started to shift into a more positive direction. It's surprising to say this, but the Bay Area is actually starting to build quite a bit of housing. And if you really want to be shocked - Berkeley is leading the charge! Yep, the same mayor that opposed anything above single story SFRs is now the chair of the regional government board that is forcing the cities to build a ton of housing at all affordability levels. And him being on that regional government forced him in turn to make Berkeley "the positive example" city. So now there's an enormous amount of new housing being built in Berkeley of all places! This is weird, but I hope that they keep going😁😁😁

I grew up and spent most of my life in Vancouver and have just left for Montreal due to affordability reasons (I'm 22 for context). It certainly does. My own theory is they are all of similar age and along the various fault lines that make up the west coast. The mountainous terrain of the western seaboard prevents these cities from sprawling the way cities in the Midwest and east can, and they are younger and have spent more of their development time under post war american style development patterns. Plus the milder climates make living on the street slightly less deadly.

I cycled down the west coast last year and passed through most cities on the coast and I didn't feel San Fransisco was disproportionately bad. Pretty much everywhere had a much bigger homeless population than you'd find on the east coast or in eastern Canada. Astoria, Cresent City, Arcata, Garberville, Eugene.... all had a dark side for sure. I suspect that what really draws attention to it in SF is that people are more likely to walk or take transit which puts you in direct contact with these people. In these smaller towns people all drive and can ignore it more easily. This is all just my anecdotal experience but when I hit SF I was kind of underwhelmed with how 'unsafe' it felt. LA on the otherhand was much worse. I was forced to take transit in LA (lol) and sometimes it felt like I was the only uhh paying customer on the bus, if it even came. I think SF gets unfairly singled out for two reasons. The first is that its a more urban environment that creates more contact with other people. And secondly, dysfunctional development patterns that puts the majority of the hotels in Union Square, where visitors see most of the homelessness so residents don't have too. (Sorry this turned into a blog post)

Pretty much it does, except the transit's safer. I take it alot, and rarely see anything disturbing.

@@ericferguson8849 underwhelmed with how unsafe it was, thank you for the input! As an SF resident, a woman of color, and frequent pedestrian, I’m always defensive about it’s reputation of danger. A lot of it feels like it’s coming from people who never visited much less spend their time walking around the city. Shit happens for sure, but gotta remind people they’re more likely to be hit by a car than experience a mugging.

High cost of living, drug use, and homelessness seems to be common along the west coast

Seattle feels wayyyy safer than SF in my experience. You weren't lucky it's just normal I think.

"Uncomfortable things" happen when you have a growing homeless population with little to no access to mental healthcare. Gotta love capitalism and NIMBYs. I've seen plenty in Seattle over the years while up there for soccer matches.

I hope you’re not talking about weed 😅

@@dlazo32696 While weed is legal there, public consumption thereof is not. Maybe that's what the OP meant.

SF Muni Metro, the rail only within San Francisco, is a much friendlier system than BART. I've never felt uncomfortable on it but I have on BART.

The Muni "F" line is made up of historic PCC streetcars painted in a variety of liveries. I don't think they were actually bought from Toronto, rather every streetcar got painted in a different city's livery and I guess Toronto was one of them. It's a fairly cool tourist line, while also being functional transit that brings people up and down fisherman's wharf and market street.

Certainly, but not so much, since space per customer ist quite small. More important would be the cost per employee, because those also have to pay more and demand higher wages.

and i feel like it can be alleviated by other american cities improving by becoming less car dependent, taking away some of the demand to live in san francisco.

Not many RU-vidrs but there are groups like bike east bay

@@kuyshina thank you! I went and followed them on IG.

I like Roy's channel. He's a creative native who shows our town exquisitely. I think it's just under "Roy".. 😊

Yeah, I typed in "Roy San Francisco" and it arrived.....

@@RebekahCurielAlessi thank you 🙏

SF is the 2nd most densely populated large city in the US, and most SF residents are renters who live in multi-unit housing. Many of the "single-family" homes you see actually have multiple housing units within them ("in-law" units on the lower floor, and/or units in a small building in the backyard), and SF's proportion of single family housing is certainly low by US standards. The vast majority of housing along Geary is already multi-unit housing with a population density that most of America could only dream of (and in downtown, the housing along Geary is second only to NYC in density). It's true that things could always be denser, but it's not like it's necessary to line Geary with highrises, in order for SF to build enough housing lol. On that topic though, potential plans for upzoning parts of SF do include options for height increases along much of Geary (up to around 200 feet, i believe). We'll see if it ever happens (that planned Geary/19th ave BART subway would be nice too). That being said, maybe when you say "SF" you're including the suburbs, in which case, yeah, there are an insane amount of single family homes...welcome to America lol (and still, SF/the Bay Area wouldn't be bad by US standards, as it's one of the densest metro areas).

Not to mention crime is certainly the biggest talking point around preventing new transit projects!

@@rossedwardmillersigh

San Francisco transport beats some European places with transport but I’m not saying all

@@abimaellopezmaylord27lopez7facts

@@abimaellopezmaylord27lopez7thanks for saying a nuanced statement

Government restrictions*