Questions from a month in San Francisco
January 29, 2025
This was my first extended trip to the San Francisco Bay Area and I have questions. Some of these have simple answers; others are entire research agendas. I would be interested to talk more about any of these!
What are all the different types of self-driving cars in the city? The Waymo cars are most common, and the Amazon Zoox are labeled, but there were at least five other form factors around the city which I didn’t recognize. I looked for a birder’s-guide to self-driving cars and couldn’t find one.
What is Waymo’s relationship to the city? How did the negotiations to begin commercial operations go here? Was it easier here than Phoenix or LA? Is there a full-time Waymo employee sitting in the SF MTA offices? How closely do they share data?
What does SF (and LA and Phoenix) get from Waymo? Some American cities are using uber data to identify potholes; Waymo data are much richer. I don’t want to give each city hundreds of mobile speed cameras, but increased sensors and visibility into the city would be great.
What’s up with all this housing on public land? We passed a few dozen houses in the Marin Headlands on National Park land; our first thought was that these were for park employees, but at least a few are owned by tech folk commuting to SF.
Similarly, how does the Presidio Trust work? I no longer think that it’s the ideal spot for a freedom city, but this is a unique example of converting National Park land to productive use.
What would the Bay Area look like if the transcontinental railroad had arrived before the Spanish galleons? The Presidio is a natural spot for a military post, but otherwise there would have been little initial attraction to the San Francisco peninsula; the center of economic activity would instead have been in Contra Costa. The Mexican-American War transferred California to American hands in 1848, and the gold rush began immediately after, so we don’t have a chance to examine a Bay Area contested between land and sea.
When and why did the last port facilities close in the West Bay? Was this done with the support of the port workers’ union? Was it driven by the WWII ship-building boom in the East Bay?
What lessons should we take from the East Bay ship-building boom? Of course, the WWII boom was unique, but the largest shipyard in human history was in the San Francisco Bay. That’s worth noticing!
Is port automation more or less likely in Oakland relative to other major ports? More likely: proximity to tech sector which drives both norms and technology; less likely: increased truculence and obstructionism.
Does the San Francisco Bay need another bridge? The Bay Bridge was only rarely congested, so my instinct is no, but two bridges is very few for such a region, and bridges are cool! The logical place (purely my eyeballing a map) is between Bayview and south Oakland, two historically poor and black communities.
Why doesn’t the western span of the Bay Bridge have a bike lane? You can bike from Treasure Island to Oakland, but not San Francisco. It’s odd that this hasn’t been fixed in this era. It would be a glorious ~50 mile loop over the Golden Gate and Richmond Bridges; a nice path there might even get me into cycling.
Is Treasure Island a pleasant place to live? How about the apartment building on Yerba Buena? What’s it like there?
What would the Bay Area be like today if land fill weren’t abolished in 1965? I’m not asking about the Reber Plan; just the modest Oakland/Berkeley/Richmond city master plans of the 60s, giving each of those cities a modest 5-20% increase in land.
Lastly, a question I posed in my post on Berkeley:
How should we reconcile UC Berkeley’s well-earned radical reputation and its ties to military research and production. This question was inspired by a recent trip to Bristol, UK, which is also a radical city (they have a Green MP!), and also produces 4% of the world’s arms. See Gavin Leech’s notes on that city here. Is this a general phenomenon? Do protestors trivially follow weapons manufacture? Is this all a function of education? Does anyone have other examples/counterexamples?