21–30 of 80 posts
"I met a guy who lives at 24th and Valencia [Street]. He says the Wi-Fi signal on the buses is so powerful that when the Google bus pulls up in front of his house, it uses all the broadband and his Wi-Fi signal crashes." That's not really how WiFi works. Chances are his router is on the same frequency as the buses and he can fix this by changing to a different frequency. Even more likely (since one SSID shouldn't mak…
I think she's on to something here... A smart community activist in conjunction with a pro-active real estate developer with a really long term vision could 'organically' help create neighborhoods ready for gentrification (and profit handsomely) and help create great places for artists, writers and activists to live at the same time.
All that's needed is a website that organizes groups of artists, writers and activists to tell them where to go live next, flash mob style. Once the artists, writers and activists have sown the seeds of gentrification, the developer can then provide the members some financial (or non-financial) reward to move on to the next neighborhood and start the process anew.
Basically it'd be comp'ing the group for all the work they have done to create a live-able, dynamic neighborhood which is not happening today.
Isn't this just another argument for the innovative promise of remote work? That both the old centralized model of the company town, and the hub-and-spoke suburban campus model, impose all kinds of costs and limitations on employees and the community as well as the company? It's surely impressive that certain companies have become cultural forces in their region, but it's not always eventually a good thing (see the Great Lakes area), and the inevitable cultural conflicts are bloody and never-ending.
Also, I wonder if other parts of the continent (whom would probably buy Google the buses to transport people in or out of their city) laugh or cry when they read about these first-world-economy problems.
"I met a guy who lives at 24th and Valencia [Street]. He says the Wi-Fi signal on the buses is so powerful that when the Google bus pulls up in front of his house, it uses all the broadband and his Wi-Fi signal crashes." That's not really how WiFi works. Chances are his router is on the same frequency as the buses and he can fix this by changing to a different frequency. Even more likely (since one SSID shouldn't mak…
But why should he have to fix it? Who was there first?
His setup is defective. He can either complain and live with it, or he can fix it.
The people that gentrified the neighborhood 20 years ago, are upset that younger, richer people are moving in on their territory. The NIMBYs are responsible for the complete lack of new market housing in SF, and have hilariously priced themselves out of the market.
http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2013/08/all_48000_san_fra...
I'd guess that there are NIMBY building costs that prevented housing construction until the rent got so high, but it does look like an end is in sight.
> Caltrain does run down there. We could have beefed up that system and had a tremendously efficient train system, with trains leaving every 15 minutes or so for the peninsula The problem is that Caltrain (and BART outside SF proper) has its stations along the periphery instead of the heart of town. You can't jump on Caltrain in the Mission or Noe Valley or even Market St, and on the southern end, it's not going to d…
The problem is really, that the train tracks were built in the 1860's when all these places were little towns linked by farms and fields. Then the automobile took over and there was just not seen the need for branch lines. Now it's solid industrial/suburbia all the way up and eminent domain would be way too expensive both in terms of money and politics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outside of SF proper, Oakland, Berkeley and at least a few other stations...
That's true, but just take a look at this BART map: http://ctchouston.org/blogs/christof/wp-content/bart_row.jpg The purple lines are the tunnels. The yellow lines are the stations built along freeways. Only the tiny non-purple, non-yellow fragments were built where the actual demand is. (Source: http://www.ctchouston.org/intermodality/2006/05/06/tale-of-t... )
Per the legend, that's "existing right-of-ways" which include freeways and existing railways.
> Only the tiny non-purple, non-yellow fragments were built where the actual demand is.
Well, except for much of the East Bay (certainly the two northern lines, which I'm most familiar with), where the freeways BART follows (including the tunnels that follow them) also run right through the heart of the main cities.
Just because they had existing right of way of leverage doesn't mean that it wasn't where the actual demand is.
The author writes about how corporate shuttles insulate tech workers from transit problems, and how if this weren't the case, there'd be powerful forces pushing to make public transit better. She misses an opportunity to make a similar point about antidevelopment San Franciscans being insulated by their rent control, but she comes close to it when talking about the Ellis Act. What makes this law so terrifying to long…