I heard it as the wait to get permits. If you have a project funded and then it takes a couple years to get all the permits, that’s a couple years in which your investors can get spooked or lose interest, the economy can go bad, etc.

The Bay Area has lots of the ”needs to be near people” catagories, mostly scattered around San Jose, Santa Clara, and Fremont. The “needs to be near power stuff, which is what everybody is worrying about, goes in Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington, next to hydroelectric dams.

Datacenter use cases include latency sensitive content that needs to go near population centers, corporate stuff for people who like to do their own hardware work, which needs to go near people, and power intensive stuff that often isn’t very latency sensitive, that needs to go near power.

All those cables that go into random parts of the coast continue on into Los Angeles, San Jose, Portland, and Seattle, which is where it’s easy to buy access to them. Historically in telecom centric buildings like One Wilshire or 55 S. Market, although I’ve lost track of the more recent ones.

Sprint had this problem in Downtown Detroit a few decades ago. Calls from near the Detroit waterfront would hit a cell site in Windsor and be billed as international roaming.

San Francisco has gotten better. My intro to this when I moved here 25 years ago was an art fair in Union Square. I wanted to buy a couple photographs, so the artist asked the guy in the next booth to watch his stuff, and walked me over to the sidewalk outside the square to do the transaction.

I'm going to disagree with this a bit, as a broadband provider. It's not that you're likely to use 10 Gb/s of capacity, but if we're building the network today it's easier to give you 10 Gb/s than to give you something slower. Anything less is an artificial rate limit.

Their Concept B looks closest to this, but still doesn't add much in the way of new stations in that area. Or am I missing something more updated than that?

Not to knock Link21. I think their focus is more getting people into SF, while I'm thinking more of getting people around the Oakland.

Frequent service with stops at University, Ashby, Emeryville Amtrak, Bay Street, 40th Street, the stuff around the old West Oakland Amtrak station, a link to West Oakland BART, Jack London Square, Brooklyn Basin, etc. would be transformative.

I hear over and over again that Union Pacific is impossible to deal with, but I'm curious what it would take to get some sort of German-style sprinter service running on those lines.

A question:

More BART sounds great, but it seems most of the big new developments, including Brooklyn Basin, have been built right up against the Union Pacific tracks. If only there were some sort of corridor going through there that rail service could be run on...

Ten years ago we would have said “hipsters.”