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- Path: sparky!uunet!wupost!spool.mu.edu!agate!boom.CS.Berkeley.EDU!lazzaro
- From: lazzaro@boom.CS.Berkeley.EDU (John Lazzaro)
- Newsgroups: ba.transportation
- Subject: Re: Cars as "something better"
- Date: 2 Jan 1993 21:52:50 GMT
- Organization: University of California, Berkeley
- Lines: 38
- Message-ID: <1i52riINNemr@agate.berkeley.edu>
- References: <1hvfruINNdlm@agate.berkeley.edu> <1993Jan1.234547.26104@ads.com> <ucoafj4@sgi.sgi.com>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: boom.cs.berkeley.edu
-
- In article <ucoafj4@sgi.sgi.com> jeremy@classic.asd.sgi.com (Jeremy Higdon) writes:
- >
- >I don't know. The financial district is at one edge of the city.
- >It makes for a pretty indirect route for most travellers. If I'm
- >going from the Marina to the Sunset, I don't want to have to go
- >through the financial district.
-
- The 28 starts connects the Marina and the Sunset directly.
-
- To make a more general point, the layout of San Francisco naturally
- fits with mass transportation, and this is the real reason MUNI and
- BART have high ridership compared with other systems. Take a swatch
- through Silicon Valley that represents the same number of residents
- and employees as San Francisco, and you have an area that is very
- difficult to service with mass transit, an area where the freeways are
- hell at rush hour (with no earthquake excuses to fall back on), an
- area with higher smog than the rest of the Bay Area, an area where
- jobs are leaving. As the head of Cypress Semiconductor said as he
- announced the closing of a chip plant in San Jose (paraphrased)
- "people here think R&D jobs will be safe, but those jobs are the
- easiest to move of all".
-
- San Francisco, on the other hand, has a downtown vacancy rate that is
- the envy of other cities on the West Coast. Companies large and small
- are moving their headquarters and R&D into San Francisco from the
- suburbs (Oracle is moving an R&D division to the Financial District,
- Supercuts is moving headquarters from Santa Rosa, The Gap is breaking
- ground for their new headquarters, many small multimedia companies are
- grouping around SOMA). And good mass transit is one piece of the
- puzzle for these people; if BART and MUNI were as anemic as Caltrain
- and SSCTA, SF would be uncommutable and shrinking.
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