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Facebook's Bridge To Nowhere (nytimes.com) 58

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The tech giant had already remade the virtual world. For a brief period, it also tried to make it easier for people in the Bay Area to get to work. Then it gave up. From a report: In the early summer of 2017, Warren Slocum walked into a warehouse in Menlo Park, Calif., to meet with members of Facebook's staff and was mesmerized. Sitting before him was a 3-D model of the neighborhoods surrounding Facebook's headquarters. On a nearby white board, one of Facebook's real estate strategists had mapped out what had to be one of the company's most unusual bets yet: a plan for restoring a century-old railroad that's been sitting unused for about 40 years. Since he became president of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors in 2016, Mr. Slocum had been publicly advocating the rebirth of the Dumbarton Rail Corridor.

This largely deserted 18-mile route runs from Union City on the east side of San Francisco Bay and crosses over the long-abandoned Dumbarton Rail Bridge before cutting straight up the back side of Facebook's sprawling Frank Gehry-designed office complex in Menlo Park and continuing up the San Francisco Peninsula to Redwood City. The tech industry's enormous growth had clogged the roads around this route, with rush hour speeds on some major arteries creeping along at an average of 4 miles per hour in 2016. [...] Traffic to Silicon Valley from other parts of the Bay Area had long been a mess, of course, but what was new was Facebook's apparent interest in fixing it. The company's leaders thought revitalizing the rail line could be a "win-win," said Juan Salazar, Meta's current director of local policy and community engagement, who also met with Mr. Slocum that day.

Over the next three years, according to Mr. Salazar, Facebook spent nearly $20 million on plans to revive the rail corridor, hiring staff with experience in rail projects and contracting with a fleet of consultants to study the feasibility of things like electrified commuter rail and autonomous vehicle pods that looked like something out of Disneyworld. If all went according to plan, one January 2020 estimate projected, parts of the rail line would be operating by 2028. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Facebook's employees went home. Traffic died out, and the future of offices themselves became uncertain. Before long, Facebook abandoned its plans for the railroad. Interviews with more than a dozen people who worked on the project both inside and outside Facebook, as well as hundreds of pages of public records, suggest that the project was coming undone long before Covid-19 hit, buckling under a combination of political dysfunction in the region and Facebook's own waning patience.
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Facebook's Bridge To Nowhere

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  • This is CA, and not just CA but the Bay Area. Of course the project was never more than a vehicle ( ha! ) for enriching "others".

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      This is CA, and not just CA but the Bay Area. Of course the project was never more than a vehicle ( ha! ) for enriching "others".

      Why does this seem to require quoting for visibility? Against what kind of censorship? It isn't showing any negative moderation here? Some kind of contagious karma thing?

      Anyway, on the story, why should I care who kills Facebook or who killed me on Facebook? Or how it was done? Facebook was already basically dead to me and now the situation is official and mutual? (Well, because Facebook was the only link I had to some old friends, but I have email addresses for most of my closer friends... And I feel like

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        Political Dysfunction is the most common reason for projects hitting a wall.

        It's not the idea that's wrong, it's just that the idea was coming from the wrong person.

    • Building "trains to nowhere" is CA specialty.

      • Right?

        More accurately, we claim we will...then never do, but in the process we "waste" billions upon billions.

      • Indeed. The tradition goes way back to the 1960s when billions were spent on BART and Caltrain, yet for 40 years, they didn't go to any of the three international airports in the Bay Area.

        • that's not true, SFO and OAK both have BART stops. The biggest fuckup was SanJose rejecting BART from the onset so it was never able to circle the whole bay.

          • that's not true, SFO and OAK both have BART stops.

            SFO and OAK have BART stops, but for 40 years, they didn't.

      • If the route is properly designed and planned, transit-oriented development may occur. This has happened even in somewhat transit-unfriendly locales such as my own (Cleveland, Ohio area).

        It is an instance of the "induced demand" phenomenon most frequently associated with highways. Build a highway, and new development will eventually make it as busy as the old ones were. Except we are building a railway, whose capacity is likely MUCH more than what an equivalent road could carry.

  • There's already a plan (Score:3)

    by Ichijo ( 607641 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:55PM (#63197192) Journal

    ...to fix [ca.gov] traffic congestion on the concrete-road bridge.

    • Re:There's already a plan (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @05:37PM (#63197330) Journal

      ...to fix [ca.gov] traffic congestion on the concrete-road bridge.

      And it's a useless plan, because it boils down to "we're going to ban cars from one of the lanes and try to force people onto a bus instead":

      Dumbarton Forward encourages commuters to use transit instead of driving in personal vehicles, which improves commute times for all travelers in the area.

      This is going to fail because it does nothing to address the total amount of travelers. It's a volume issue. How many, not how you're getting there. Buses and bike paths are not going to change either the congestion or speed problem: they use the same roads as the cars, and as the proposal noted, you're basically imposing a cap on cars by restricting lanes. Capacity-wise, it's robbing Peter's car to pay Paul's bus and bicycle. Even if they bought radically greater numbers of buses... which they aren't going to do... it's still slower getting around that way. The whole point of the rail project was to repurpose an unused rail line to make additional capacity on a different travel path. If done, this could have helped some.

      The linked proposal is nothing but a feel-good measure designed to please the Granola Set, appearing to Do Something!, while not actually fixing the problem. Because that would take real money.

      • Re:There's already a plan (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Ichijo ( 607641 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @06:10PM (#63197376) Journal

        And it's a useless plan, because it boils down to "we're going to ban cars from one of the lanes and try to force people onto a bus instead":

        People don't take buses when it's faster to drive. You know that, right?

        This proposal fixes that. When buses no longer get stuck in the same traffic as cars, they will be faster than cars and people will take those buses instead. [youtu.be]

        And because buses are MUCH more efficient than cars in terms of travelers per lane per hour, they also solve the volume issue. And because bus-only lanes take cars off the road, they also set an upper limit on traffic congestion.

        If you're curious, here [wikipedia.org] is some more reading, with references, about how it all works.

        • Re:There's already a plan (Score:5, Insightful)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @07:04PM (#63197496) Homepage Journal

          And it's a useless plan, because it boils down to "we're going to ban cars from one of the lanes and try to force people onto a bus instead":

          People don't take buses when it's faster to drive.

          It's always faster to drive.

          A bus has to stop every so often to pick people up. Each of those stops takes time that could have been spent driving. There is simply no plausible way for a bus to be faster than point-to-point cars unless you completely break the road system to the point where nobody can get anywhere on any road, and we aren't anywhere close to that level of density in the Bay Area.

          Even if you shave off several minutes from the time along the slowest stretch (e.g. a bridge), you still have all those stops on both ends, plus transfers (typically, unless you just happen to be lucky enough to live on a route that also passes by your office), plus travel time to and from the transit endpoints. And the more stops you make, the slower the bus is, but the fewer stops you make, the longer your walk is at each end. You really can't win.

          In my experience, if you're less than a twenty-minute drive from the office, unless you can drive to a park-and-ride, you'll usually spend more time walking to and from the nearest transit endpoint than you would have spent driving to work.

          Add it all up, and buses usually start at twice the point-to-point drive time with zero bus changes, and go up from there. Even if they shave off ten minutes by giving them their own lane on bridges, you're still not likely to make up as much time as you lose on the rest of the journey.

          Elevated trains and subways at least make some sense. They take traffic off of the roads and don't have to wait for the surface traffic, they can run at speed that greatly exceed the speed of traffic, they don't interfere with traffic, automation can let you run as many of them as needed, their capacity is massively higher than a bus, they are better in terms of energy efficiency than buses, and people build stations for them, so you typically have parking at the transit endpoints, unlike random bus stops. Buses should be limited to spoke-and-hub setups branching out a short distance from rail stops.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Ichijo ( 607641 )

            A bus has to stop every so often to pick people up.

            Technically, a bus only needs two stops, one where people get on and another where they get off.

            There is simply no plausible way for a bus to be faster than point-to-point cars unless you completely break the road system to the point where nobody can get anywhere on any road

            "Nobody drives on the road anymore. There's too much traffic." --Yogi Berra

            So your suggestion that a road could devolve to the point where "nobody can get anywhere" is funny!

            Anyway, he [wikipedia.org]

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dgatwood ( 11270 )

              A bus has to stop every so often to pick people up.

              Technically, a bus only needs two stops, one where people get on and another where they get off.

              That's pedantically true, but in practice, apart from long-distance express busses, point-to-point bussing is rarely realistic. And even for long-distance express busses, you'll end up taking some other transit at both ends, which will still run at a fraction of the speed of driving point-to-point, so any time savings in the long-distance bussing would have to exceed the time losses from the multi-stop busses used in the fan-out and fan-in from the transit hubs at each end.

              There is simply no plausible way for a bus to be faster than point-to-point cars unless you completely break the road system to the point where nobody can get anywhere on any road

              "Nobody drives on the road anymore. There's too much traffic." --Yogi Berra

              So your suggestion that a road could devolve to the point where "nobody can get anywhere" is funny!

              You misunderstand. I didn't say

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Ichijo ( 607641 )

                What I said was that you can't get there unless the road system is comically broken... San Francisco is trying its best, largely because their pedestrian management sucks.

                Ok so buses are faster than cars in San Francisco because pedestrian management sucks. But why aren't cars affected the same way as buses?

                The speed of a bus in an urban area is ultimately limited more by pedestrians than other cars.

                Ok, so now buses are at a disadvantage compared to cars because of poor pedestrian management.

                You appear t

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by dgatwood ( 11270 )

                  What I said was that you can't get there unless the road system is comically broken... San Francisco is trying its best, largely because their pedestrian management sucks.

                  Ok so buses are faster than cars in San Francisco because pedestrian management sucks. But why aren't cars affected the same way as buses?

                  I didn't say buses are faster than cars in San Francisco. I said San Francisco is approaching the point where the road system is comically useless.

                  That said, not all roads in San Francisco have that problem, and busses generally run on roads that either don't have too many pedestrians or are wide enough to have separate left and right turn lanes or a separate bus lane so that a single turning car doesn't block the lane that the bus is in. Thus, they aren't likely to be forced to wait behind a long line of

          • It's always faster to drive.

            No it's not. That's only a symptom of dumb city design that puts no effort into prioritisation of various modes of movement. And by faster something needs to be significantly faster, not just within a rounding error.

            I live 8.5km from the city centre. Right now without any traffic on the road it would take me in order of decreasing speed: 26min to cycle, 25min to drive, 22min to catch the metro and 16min to catch the train. Oh and I need to find parking in the city centre making driving the slowest option. .

            • Driving (and parking) is only slow if you design your city poorly.

              • Fitting 40 people (half full bus) in the space of 6 (3 half full cars) is going to improve efficiency and throughput of the route. Designing a city around car efficiency *is* designing the city poorly.

                • You are begging the question: is improving the efficiency and throughput of the route the primary consideration for designing a city? (hint: the answer is no. Your conclusion is based on an unsupported premise).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by pjt33 ( 739471 )

            There is simply no plausible way for a bus to be faster than point-to-point cars unless you completely break the road system to the point where nobody can get anywhere on any road

            There is, because the car doesn't just need to get to the destination. It also needs to park, and cities which weren't designed for cars don't necessarily have enough parking spaces. Where I live, I've seen people take 20 minutes to find a parking space.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            unless you completely break the road system

            Or more commonly the road system simply fills up. There is only so much space to add more lanes, and an a 10 lane highway comes with its own problems. Not to mention the pollution.

            Tokyo is a good example of a city where trains are faster than cars, despite needing to stop. The same principal can be applied to busses with a bus lane. The stops aren't enough to make cars faster with congestion, and you can also have express trains/busses that only stop at the most popular destinations.

        • The busses only have more carrying capacity if they are sufficiently frequent-- like every 15 seconds maximum-- 50-person bus vs 1-person car travelling at 4mph.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 )
        London has bus lanes. They work. It also has light rail. That works too. Public mass-transport not only works, it tends to make returns around 10-15% in the form a increased tax revenues because of the increases in economic activity.

        Privately, individually owned cars, on the other hand, clog up cities & eventually drive them into bankruptcy (no pun intended). Cars are like junk-food for cities; very convenient for the here & now, a cheap, easy, popular option for politicians but they'll eventuall

      • because it boils down to "we're going to ban cars from one of the lanes and try to force people onto a bus instead":

        The core of the plan is fixing the stoplights. I've never run into a problem with traffic on the Dumbarton bridge. The nightmare is the long series of traffic lights before getting onto the bridge. Connecting it to the freeway, or even just removing some of the lights, would help considerably.

  • Paywall (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @04:59PM (#63197206)

    Could we please start rejecting stories that offer nothing but paywalled links? I don't even know if it's meant metaphorically and it's yet another Metaverse story or whether they really built a bridge this time around.

  • Dr. Evil doesn't understand that urban rail extensions are measured in billions of dollars.

    • Dr. Evil doesn't understand that urban rail extensions are measured in billions of dollars.

      The idea behind local rail here was re-using an abandoned freight rail path and bridge, which in some circumstances would reduce costs of the project. But this is California, and that doesn't happen. Competing interests have basically left the whole project in limbo. And the bridge is in such bad shape that you wouldn't be able to repurpose any of it because the whole stretch of rail line, bridge included, has basically been rotting and gone mostly untouched for 40 years now.

      • Huge population, terrible traffic.

        Building a new line is impossible. But use an existing corridor? No need to acquire land?

        The other option, big here in Brisbane Qld is dedicated bus ways. They have the advantage of being able to fan out at the ends.

        I was always amazed at how bad the SF peninsular railroad is. Runs infrequently, very slow.

  • Seriously ?
    Facebook moved fast and broke things?

    All Zuck has done is sit on his arse and suck the tit of advertising trackers and bought a couple of companies that actually made new stuff.

    Let me guess: Issie Lapowsky is a lazy journalist who has to drop in cliches and talk about Big Things to hide the fact that doesn't actually understand technology.

    • "even in 1910, as a stunned crowd gathered to celebrate the inaugural passenger train crossing over the bridge and into Newark, traffic was top of mind. One article in the San Francisco Call at the time praised the bridge as “a monument to the skill of the engineer and mechanic” and predicted that with the bridge completed, “the congestion of traffic at Oakland will be a thing of the past.”
      That didn’t exactly pan out. The bridge’s owner, Southern Pacific, decided to use i

  • The project was going to cost an estimated $2.58 billion (probably would cost several times that in the real world), and Facebook wasn't going to fund it. They were just kick-starting the conversation.

    They didn't have much local support, people were concerned about the impact on their neighborhoods

    Any such project would have taken many years because "Admittedly, we remain stuck in the reality that on average, it takes 20+ years to build a significant bridge in the United States. "

    • >They didn't have much local support, people were concerned about the impact on their neighborhoods

      Any such project would have taken many years because "Admittedly, we remain stuck in the reality that on average, it takes 20+ years to build a significant bridge in the United States. "

      NIMBY is pretty much guaranteed to kill any major new transit in the Bay Area.

      • I'm not even sure it required a NIMBY vote. If the idea is to get people from the East Bay a shortcut to Facebook headquarters...how many people is that really? Pre pandemic it would just make sense to put a satellite office in Oakland or where ever and use BART.

        Post pandemic doesn't make sense at all. 1-2 days a week people can tough it out and take the long way (BART + FB commuter bus)

        There's also a small chorus of people who moved out to Tahoe or the foothills who are now complaining about Amtrak ser

        • > If the idea is to get people from the East Bay a shortcut to Facebook headquarters...how many people is that really

          It connects into mainlines on both sides of the Bay and offers a second (wait, third?) connection between them mid-Bay.

          Seems highly valuable to me, given all the companies along the west-side corridor. Yeah, FB is there, but so are lots of other companies.

      • NIMBY is pretty much guaranteed to kill any major new transit in the Bay Area.

        Except the new BART extension to Barryessa, right?

  • political dysfunction in the region

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