[HN Gopher] New businesses are choosing cities with good public ...
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New businesses are choosing cities with good public transportation:
study
Author : jseliger
Score : 155 points
Date : 2020-03-12 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.citylab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.citylab.com)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Cities With Good Transit ... San Francisco
|
| Does not compute. San Francisco has essentially one subway line,
| one slow local railway line, some horrendous busses, admittedly a
| good airport. That's it.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| My Indian coworker says he's never seen a worse public transit
| system than SF.
|
| I have no conflicting data to offer.
| jyounker wrote:
| Muni sucks, and it simply seems to be a matter of miss-
| management. Timed stops? What are those?
|
| On the other hand BART is fairly effective, and once you're
| in the city a bicycle will get you from one end to the other
| in forty-five minutes.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Counterpoint: almost every other US city.
| monadic2 wrote:
| Ok so it's like... third in the country with those qualifiers.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Wrong!
|
| It's...fifth, actually: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_
| of_U.S._cities_with_hig...
|
| > 1. New York City, New York - 56.5%
|
| > 2. Jersey City, New Jersey - 47.6%
|
| > 3. Washington, D.C. - 37.4%
|
| > 4. Boston, Massachusetts - 33.7%
|
| > 5. San Francisco, California - 33.1%
|
| As I noted in another comment, SF's numbers are pumped up a
| bit by its unusually small population size relative to its
| metro population size. But yeah it's still one of the top
| cities in the country for public transit, sad as it is.
| gok wrote:
| This is in fact an excellent demonstration of how utterly
| meaningless commute transit mode share of a city is as a
| proxy for the quality of a transit system.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| "How much people use public transit is meaningless when
| judging how useful that transit is" is certainly a hot
| take if I've ever seen one.
|
| If you can think of a better single metric, by all means,
| let loose. I know this one's not perfect, but it's a hell
| of a lot better than "miles of light rail" or anything
| else I've come up with before.
|
| Something like the Paris mayor's 15-minute city -- a
| metric that encapsulated how reachable basic errand
| points are by public transit in a limited amount of time
| -- could be better, but would probably be fairly
| challenging to calculate. I'm quite confident that SF
| would still do pretty well using that metric, though, at
| least by US standards.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Huh. Visiting San Francisco from Dublin (a city with a
| notably _bad_ system by European standards, with 53%
| ridership by this metric) it would never have occurred to
| me it was even in the top ten. Not a great system at all.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Well, driving in SF is also pretty painful, honestly.
| That definitely impacts things.
|
| I think SF still has more rail than Dublin though, right?
| When I visited Dublin seemed like it had almost nothing,
| even less than SF.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I think the DART and Luas trains are roughly equivalent
| to BART. However when I was in Dublin as a tourist I was
| impressed with how thorough their bus network was. Part
| of it was that there were lots of lines and stops, but
| the buses were also fairly frequent. Getting rid of the
| "Oops, I missed my bus by 5 seconds so I have to wait 30
| minutes for the next one" factor probably does a lot to
| increase ridership.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Coming from Munich, I was deeply disappointed by Dublin's
| buses. Munich's buses are actually fairly reliable,
| Dublin's bus timetables don't even qualify as
| suggestions. Often buses just wouldn't show up, period.
| We'd have to give up and find some other entirely
| different bus line going in the same general direction.
| ska wrote:
| A thing to note is that there are major metros in the US
| without anything resembling a functional system at all
| (hi, Houston).
| ghaff wrote:
| That's an interesting set of data in that, as you suggested
| upthread, doesn't really correspond to other measures of
| mass transit "goodness" that are more along the lines of
| what people think of.
|
| Boston and SF are essentially tied--yet, the many faults of
| the MBTA especially in bad weather aside, it's got a pretty
| decent transit system. Indeed, one that isn't really that
| terrible relative to many European cities. And Chicago is
| lower, in spite of again having an even somewhat iconic
| transit system.
|
| And Jersey City I would never have guessed even though it's
| adjacent to NYC. I wonder to what degree that reflects
| income levels in a dense urban environment.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| That Chicago represents 28% of its metro population vs
| SF's 11% definitely hurts Chicago and helps SF here, if
| you normalized that I'm sure Chicago would come out on
| top (but SF would still be above average for the US,
| probably significantly above average).
|
| For Jersey City, these metrics are specifically measuring
| commutes to work, and obviously commuting via transit to
| NYC there for your job is extremely common; its numbers
| would undoubtedly be lower if you were measuring public
| transit in general (though this may be true for basically
| all cities, honestly, so I'm not sure if that would
| affect the rankings).
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| The sad thing is that this still makes SF one of the better
| major cities around for public transit in the US.
| swebs wrote:
| Have you ever visited the east coast? Here's Boston's metro
| system for example.
|
| https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/maps/2019-04-08-rap.
| ..
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yes, that's why I said one of the better, not the best.
| There's a handful that are clearly better: NYC, DC, Boston,
| Philly, Chicago come to mind.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's probably worse than that though as there are quite a
| few US cities with a bit of light rail plus buses that
| are at least as good as SF. There's reasonable transport
| into and out of SF via Caltrain and BART but the transit
| within the city is pretty limited.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Part of why transit within SF is better than average is
| simply that SF is very dense by American standards, so
| even when buses are running slowly for raw speed, the
| _effective_ distance traveled in terms of possible points
| of interest is still pretty good. This is important,
| because it means the number of things reachable within a
| 10 or 20 or 30 minute "transitshed" is high.
|
| Anyway, the data doesn't lie: transit usage within SF is
| among the highest in the country: https://en.m.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_hig...
|
| > 5. San Francisco, California - 33.1%
|
| Now, things are skewed a bit by SF being an unusually
| small principal city relative to its metro population.
| That pumps up its numbers compared to if the city
| boundaries included 1.5m or 2m of the metro pop, rather
| than ~900k.
|
| Still though, 33% puts it near the top, and I can think
| of no single better metric of how useful transit is than
| how many people actually use transit to get around.
| ghaff wrote:
| Fair enough. I was just in Phoenix and, even though the
| transit system doesn't look bad on paper, in practice you
| quickly see that everything is so spread out that it's at
| least somewhat hard to get around in a reasonable time.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yes, judging by their 2% transit mode share, I'm guessing
| Phoenix's transit is pretty average for the sunbelt,
| which is to say absolutely awful, and near-useless for
| most trips.
|
| Another example of "don't just look at what's on paper":
| Dallas has more light rail laid down than any city in the
| country, at 93 miles. Which gives it a massive transit
| mode share of...2%. Wow. Think about how badly everything
| must be designed to have so much light rail _that hardly
| anyone actually uses_.
|
| For Dallas' case, you can go to Google Maps, turn on
| satellite mode, and inspect some train stations, and it's
| pretty obvious what the problem is. The land use is
| horribly unconducive to walking + transit. E.g. go out a
| bit from the city center and you'll find stations with
| exclusively single-family home neighborhoods right
| beside, meaning almost no one can walk to/from that
| station to get around.
|
| Such a waste. It's not like the government has to really
| build anything itself to fix that issue: only a change of
| rules is necessary to allow denser development in the
| area adjacent to the station. But America's culture
| around zoning is so fucked up that this is usually
| impossible, even after a city has invested hundreds of
| millions of dollars into infrastructure, we still insist
| on crippling it.
| ghaff wrote:
| It does vary but I was in Dallas for an event a few years
| back. I identified a restaurant about a quarter mile from
| the hotel/venue. Turned out I literally could not walk
| there. I've had the same thing happen to me in a couple
| other places.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yup, common in the US, either that or "I technically
| could walk there, but it looks painfully unpleasant and
| possibly even dangerous to do so".
|
| Now that we live in Munich, my wife and I joke about how
| we used to drive from one strip mall's parking lot to go
| to the parking lot for the other strip mall across the
| street. Except, when we visit the US we still do this,
| because in those situations, walking across the 'road'
| (more like a small freeway) is incredibly awkward.
| ravenstine wrote:
| This article is confusing. How are they determining what's a
| "startup"? If you count a small retail, food, or tech business as
| a startup, then it's going to appear like there have been a lot
| of startups in suburbs. But more people don't consider mom and
| pop operations to be "startups".
| trothamel wrote:
| I prefer to get places in my Coronavirus-ready Autonomous Rover
| (CAR, for short).
|
| Being in it alone or with a few friends, family members, or co-
| workers means that there's an innate means of social distancing.
| That's also improved by the way it doesn't require hubs where
| many people are forced to congregate - for moderately long
| journeys, I can stay in my CAR all the way from my house to
| walking distance of my destination.
|
| And of course, while not as fully autonomous as the name might
| suggest, my CAR only requires refueling every three hundred and
| change miles, and maintenance every five thousand or so. This
| provides some robustness if the infrastructure is compromised,
| whether by disease or other issues.
|
| It looks like CARs might have a place in the 2020s.
| Symbiote wrote:
| These features are useful approximately what, once a century?
|
| The cost of infrastructure for cars far, far outweighs the cost
| of a few weeks of no-one working, and the pollution has caused
| many more deaths than Coronavirus will.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yes, but you get to partake of the pollution no matter
| whether you personally operate a car or not. So, drive away!
|
| Externalities are a hell of a drug.
| trothamel wrote:
| I'd think that the social isolation feature has benefits
| whenever communicable diseases are in the air, which seems to
| be every winter. The autonomous nature of the system means
| each CAR can change from road to road to route around
| congestion and construction, in a way that mass transit
| can't.
|
| And of course, the time saved by being able to go from point
| to point rather than through mass transit hubs quickly adds
| up to many lifetimes. I agree that pollution is something
| that needs to be addressed, which is why electric and hybrid
| CARs are being introduced by startups and legacy players in
| the industry.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > each CAR can change from road to road to route around
| congestion and construction, in a way that mass transit
| can't.
|
| Assuming there is a route without congestion. There
| typically isn't at rush hour in large cities. On the others
| hand trains have a dedicated track and thus don't have
| traffic problems.
|
| > And of course, the time saved by being able to go from
| point to point rather than through mass transit hubs
| quickly adds up to many lifetimes.
|
| If your transport system is good enough this isn't a
| problem either. In London, you're rarely more than 5-10
| minutes from a tube station. And they'll likely be buses
| even closer. Public transport is much quicker than driving
| for most journeys. I think I know fewer than 5 people who
| own a car here.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > I'd think that the social isolation feature has benefits
| whenever communicable diseases are in the air, which seems
| to be every winter.
|
| Probably true, there's an advantage there.
|
| But there's also an advantage in walking + transit, in that
| it helps people stay healthier.
|
| Between the car-dominant US vs the more transit-friendly
| countries of Japan, Korea, and western Europe, one side has
| a health and lifespan advantage. And it ain't the US.
|
| > The autonomous nature of the system means each CAR can
| change from road to road to route around congestion and
| construction, in a way that mass transit can't.
|
| And yet, commute times in the US are basically average
| compared to other developed countries. Would you care to
| explain that?
|
| > And of course, the time saved by being able to go from
| point to point rather than through mass transit hubs
| quickly adds up to many lifetimes.
|
| Source on transportation time actually being lower in car-
| dominant areas?
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Oh, I thought startups were abandoning expensive cities for
| remote work and cheaper living costs.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| They are. This article doesn't prove, or even show, the
| opposite.
|
| (CityLab does a lot of good stuff, but they are 100% pro-dense-
| urban development. Independent of whether it's a bias you
| support, it colors the articles you'll see from them.)
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I really don't think there's much movement on that front, of
| startups moving away from expensive cities to remote work.
| I'd like there to be, that'd be rad, but I haven't seen
| anything to that effect that's significant. Do you have a
| source for that assertion?
|
| And what CityLab is, is pro-making-cities-that-
| aren't-garbage. There's a reason Americans marvel at how
| _nice_ European cities feel when they visit, while almost no
| Europeans say the same thing about any US cities.
|
| US cities have nice businesses and people and points of
| interest within, but the design of the cities themselves is
| almost always terrible.
| thedance wrote:
| There are a lot of cities that seem superficially cheaper based
| on housing prices, but are more expensive including
| transportation costs, i.e. two cars per household.
| ghaff wrote:
| I was a bit confused by this article, especially given the
| headline. As I read it, the research was something along the
| lines of: We looked at cities that are known for having a lot of
| startups. Some of those cities have decent transit systems.
| Others don't. Where there were decent transit systems, we saw
| businesses generally clustering around transit. (Which seems
| fairly obvious.) Where there wasn't decent transit, businesses
| couldn't very well cluster around it, could they?
|
| I don't actually doubt the general statement that startups are
| tending to abandon suburban office parks for certain cities--some
| of which have decent transit systems and commuter rail. And
| there's probably some connection between transit and
| attractiveness to young urban-dwellers in particular. But the
| headline seems only sometimes true.
| refurb wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| A more accurate headline would be "More businesses are started
| in cities that have good public transit".
|
| But even then they are implying a causation which is a huge
| stretch.
| clairity wrote:
| yah, it seems the overall tide for starting businesses is
| toward urbanization, and a more minor effect is clustering
| around transit. they also say migration is more toward commuter
| rail stations, which seems to indicate workers are still spread
| out into the suburbs.
| save_ferris wrote:
| Agreed, this looks like a classic example of "correlation !=
| causation".
|
| It seems like this argument taken to it's final conclusion
| would be that startups gravitate towards cities with better
| transit than those that don't, which isn't the case given the
| Austin and San Jose examples.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I sort of wonder how much good transportation correlates with
| other good things that mostly young people like in their
| local area.
| ghaff wrote:
| And, for that matter, San Francisco is nothing to write home
| about.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Of course I haven't lived there in about 30 years, but when
| I did I think it was better than much of the U.S
| baddox wrote:
| Probably second in the US to NYC right?
| corybrown wrote:
| DC trounces SF
| servercobra wrote:
| Personally, I think Chicago's is much better than SF. But
| SF's is still alright and certainly better than LA (where
| I am now).
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It's still much better than almost everywhere else in the
| US. There are only a handful of cities that are obviously
| better for public transit in the US.
| luckydata wrote:
| Tallest dwarf in the party.
| dang wrote:
| The study appears to be about businesses that are not startups
| in the sense that that term is used here. We've edited the
| headline.
| TylerE wrote:
| Not at all surprising. Citylab is anti-car propaganda.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| If by "anti-car" you mean "for a balanced mix of modes that
| treats cars as one viable option among several, instead of
| utter car dominance everywhere all the time", then this is an
| accurate statement.
|
| It's amazing to me how many people feel that anything less
| than 99% of resources going to car-based transportation
| constitutes some sort of vile political agenda. "How _dare_
| anyone try to give people choices for how to get around??
| Walking? With my _legs_?! "
| briandear wrote:
| > that treats cars as one viable option among several
|
| Their writings hardly treat cars as one viable option as
| the majority of their writing is specifically against cars.
| How often do they criticize bicycles? Yet cars are
| criticized every chance they get.
|
| It isn't about agreeing about cars or not, but to suggest
| they treat cars as just another "viable" option is to admit
| not having spent much time reading their writings. When
| have they ever proposed improving anything relating to
| cars? Their idea of an improvement is elimination.
|
| With the Wuhan virus, having good car infrastructure sounds
| pretty good right now. Yes, public transport, for sure, but
| the idea of ending cars is ridiculous -- and CityLab
| promotes exactly that, albeit in couched terms. But ending
| cars completely would make them very happy.
| tus88 wrote:
| Why the hell wouldn't you take that into account, alongside a
| raft of other factors?
| eugenekolo wrote:
| Correlation is not causation? A better guess would be that
| businesses are choosing places where the next generation of
| employees wants to live and work... happens to be cities on the
| coasts that also have public transit systems.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Many big businesses are also citing the existence of public
| transit as a reason for relocating to a new city. Of course there
| are usually tens or hundreds of million in subsidies and gifts
| when they relocate so it's hard to know if transit is truly
| important or a bit of obfuscation for their real motives.
| pwned1 wrote:
| Transit usage has been declining for years in all of the cities
| listed in this article, except Austin.
|
| https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/massachusetts/massachuse...
|
| https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/pennsylvania/southeaster...
|
| https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/california/santa-clara-v...
|
| https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/ohio/the-greater-clevela...
|
| https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/texas/capital-metropolit...
| powowowow wrote:
| I didn't fact-check all of your links, but the first two that I
| randomly selected showed transit usage increasing over time.
| gok wrote:
| Right but "good public transit" in the context of a Citylab
| article means "spends a lot of tax dollars on public transit."
| Tuxer wrote:
| hi it's me caltrain, serving santa clara and growing 2x in 15
| years
|
| https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/california/peninsula-cor...
| briandear wrote:
| In 15 years, how much has road usage grown and how much has
| population grown? Just a 2x increase seems like a relative
| decline.
| itronitron wrote:
| Interesting to note that counting rides by a bounded
| geographic area is going to miss a lot, as the caltrain data
| doesn't seem to be represented in the santa clara data.
|
| Also, the Austin data doesn't take into account that the city
| regularly expands its geographic boundaries (typically east
| and west) which may artificially make it seem as if it is
| increasing riders when it is simply absorbing them.
| bluntfang wrote:
| I bet Massachusetts ridership wouldn't be down if they weren't
| experiencing crippling infrastructure atrophy.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| They spent all their money on a tunnel under Boston so their
| infrastructure has 30ish years of deferred upgrades.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm a little confused. I thought a lot of new businesses were
| started by immigrants who often do use / need transit and
| such....
|
| I feel like there's a lot of factors here that aren't being
| accounted for.
|
| I'm not sure if this isn't just "lots of new businesses in
| cities"...
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