The relationship between dense housing and effective transit is reciprocal. Well-planned transit facilitates development without congestion, and well-planned development makes transit more useful and effective. This has proven true in practice. When BART built a dense mix of housing and commercial space surrounding two of its East Bay stations, the eventual result was far greater rates of transit usage for both residents and workers at these sites compared to the surrounding areas. Transit-oriented development works and deserves replication across the entire region.

Robot Jesus is Not the Answer

Every persistent human problem has an accompanying dream of technological salvation. Congestion is no different. Many in our industry have high hopes for autonomous vehicles, but it’s important to understand the limits of this technology. No matter who’s in control of these vehicles, they’re constrained by physical space. While widespread adoption will increase the capacity of existing roadways, it won’t increase it to infinity, and it won’t increase overall capacity by as much as well placed mass transit.

Given the technology’s inherent limitations, it’s likely that the first highway-bound vehicles to be automated will be buses or passenger vans running on relatively uniform routes. This leads to the conclusion that no matter what the future of autonomous vehicles holds, it’s still the smartest move to invest in housing development supported by transit systems. This will allow us to shift transit demand from low capacity vehicle use to high capacity mass transit.

In the end, the best possible outcome is a marriage of good transit with automated highway vehicles. Research suggests that self-driving cars could reduce the number of vehicles on the road in a mid-size city by 90% if paired with high capacity mass transit. The question of where to invest is not an either-or question. The answer to our growing transportation demand is not a single technology, it’s a combination of all the best tools at our disposal.

The best argument for continued investment in mass transit over simply waiting for autonomous vehicles, though, is the fact that mass transit already exists, and people already rely on it. By even the most optimistic estimates, autonomous vehicles won’t be commonplace for decades. If we defer our actions to increase capacity for that long, we will doom ourselves to a future of gridlock, no matter how effective autonomous vehicles eventually become.

Eat to Live: Maintenance isn’t Sexy, but it’s Crucial

BART has America’s oldest metro fleet by average car age

Complaining about public transit is a Bay Area pastime, and rightfully so. BART has the oldest fleet by average car age of all domestic transit agencies. Large swaths of Western San Francisco have no rail access. Those areas that have it suffer degraded service as light rail vehicles must yield to traffic. Region-wide, rail service halts altogether while the bars are still pouring drinks.

That said, it’s important to remember that San Francisco is a transit city, boasting among the highest ridership rates in the US. For all its failings, BART has the second fastest average scheduled speed in the country. It also carries more passengers than all but 4 other American subways. Muni offers robust coverage across the entire city, including a healthy network of 24-hour buses. Our systems are at or above capacity at rush hour, but that’s a problem that other cities would kill to have. The alternative is gridlock worse than anything we’ve seen to date.

For this reason, it’s important to maintain and improve the systems we already have. The reality of transit commuters is growing bleak. Just as our systems are breaking ridership records, failing equipment and unplanned maintenance are becoming regular occurrences. These failures slow our systems to a halt and may even make them unsafe. This undermines the utility of our transit systems. It often causes riders to abandon them altogether in favor of reliable, but more environmentally degrading, means of travel. We must break our habit of saying no to maintenance. It amounts to borrowing against our future. Each new line we build isn’t just extra capacity for riders today, it’s a promise to maintain that additional capacity for riders tomorrow. We owe it to them to keep the trains running.

Eating isn’t sexy, but if you don’t do it, you die. Transit maintenance works the same way.

Supporting Development Means Supporting Transit

No housing development in our urban core should be blocked solely for lack of transit, and no transit project should be stalled for lack of dense housing. It’s precisely because we need both of these things so badly that any reason to hold them should be serious and pressing. Our brightest future, though, is one where we build out both of them aggressively and in tandem.

Our primary goal is to get tech workers to support building lots of new housing units in the Bay Area. To take this stance should also mean supporting that growth with smart infrastructure. We need high-quality transit systems to enable denser housing patterns without suffering worsened congestion. This infrastructure takes years to come to fruition, so we must start now. We can’t afford to sit on our hands or gamble on unproven technologies. We can’t afford to allow what infrastructure we have to crumble away. Instead, we have to get moving.