Urban Density and Transit

It's not possible without essentially destroying the entire city and rebuilding it with more dense buildings. Public transit would be intolerably bad, because the parking lots are too big. The buildings are too far apart, and too far from the roads. You would have to have stops so frequent that it would take too long to get anywhere that was far away, and you would still be dropped off a significant walk from any building.

Seems like the answer is no. A growing city needs 1) housing and 2) public transit. Unfortunately NIMBYs: "The city is trying to enact a change to its zoning code to make it easier to increase density, but residents sued; the case is still making its way through the court."This sentence from the article seems telling as well - "Billions of dollars are being spent expanding public transit and widening a major thoroughfare." The public transit is good, but if a city continue

Traffic is irrelevant for trains. It has some effect on buses, which can be mitigated with HOV lanes. (Usually the problem there is frequency and a lack of express service). At the distances most people need to travel to reach their workplaces from affordable housing, walking and cycling are never going to be pleasant.Banning cars from a city is a straight-up transfer of quality of life from the suburban masses to the richest in the center.Drastically increasing high-rise housing supply in

A city doesn't have space restrictions. It has transportation restrictions.If you manage to make people travel around faster, you increase the housing supply by a much higher amount than you can by converting local land into housing.So, everybody would be better by increasing the reach and area for train tracks, even if you convert a reasonable amount of nearby area into parks, if also, while you are at it, you provide some way for local transit to integrate with the long-distance one

It could but they would have to expand the public transport infrastructure. If you look at the "cheap" areas one of the many issues is that they have poor transportation links to the downtown area.However expanding public transport in SF is almost a difficult an issue as building skyscrapers. See the central subway as an example of the other end of NIMBYism.

Public transit sucks. It has always sucked. And it's necessary if you want dense cities.The fix? Don't do dense cities. 80-85% of the US population prefers single-family houses to apartments.We need to promote remote work and BUILD NEW SPARSE HOUSING. Do not do the nonsense "upzoning", instead build new suburbs.Remote work can be promoted by giving tax breaks for remote positions or by taxing dense office space.

Build more density in the cities you want rather than bussing people in. That's the best answer.

Higher density housing. You can turn parts of the bay into a modern city, with highrises. That way folks won't have to commute to work.Or you can massively increase transportation capacity, not just with roads but (more effectively) with trains and subways and other forms of fast, efficient public transportation.Of course none of this will ever happen, SFBA residents and government will continue to exclusively focus on slaughtering their golden geese until they all gone.

You can only fit so many real houses in a given area, after which you're building high density housing and a lot of (I'd even argue most) people don't want to live in.Public transport is key, especially trains that can bypass traffic at high speeds. In my city in Australia I live about 25km out from the CBD, but I can get there in under 30 minutes via train if I ever need to - it works very well and I don't have to live in a tiny shoebox on top of 100 other people.

LA has good public transport but then builds low density around it