Interesting points. I agree that privatization is not the cure-all it's been made out to be. I happen to think SF -- the Bay Area in particular -- is both a public and private success story. It's easy to forget that the rapid advances SF's private sector has made in the last few decades were largely built on the back of public-sector investment in sciences and tech companies in the '50s and '60s. But I digress.
Public transportation can and should get better within the city of San Francisco, and in my mind, the best place to build it is up. It's tough to build an intra-city subway for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the aforementioned seismic issue. Additionally, SF turns out to have been built largely (predominantly?) on landfill and liquefaction. Subways would be pretty susceptible to flooding, and would be massively expensive to keep in operation with all the pumping and maintenance requirements the city would force on them.
I really like the idea of a skyward-developing SF, though, not being a geologist or a structural engineer, I'm not sure how that would be achieved in a city like this one, with its inherent foundation issues. But we're starting to build a lot of giant skyscrapers, evidently, so perhaps someone's figured it out?
I'm sure there are plenty of engineering and architectural solutions to building upwards.
How about instead of putting our resources in to "seasteading" and other libertarian ideologies, we put instead explore more humanistic and social endeavors like Buckminster Fuller's "“Proposed Tetrahedral City"?
The thing with trying to leave and start your own community, be it on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean or in outer-space, is that it will still heavily depend on the rest of humanity for support. We don't have any self-supporting mechanisms for life other than Earth.
The irony is that the idealic hippie communities that were inspired by the musings of guys like Fuller fail from the same basic principles.
I think the lesson here is that at least for time being, we can't achieve true self-sustaining communities. An effort needs to be made to interact with humanity at large, no matter how ideological impure that endeavor is.
Public transportation can and should get better within the city of San Francisco, and in my mind, the best place to build it is up. It's tough to build an intra-city subway for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the aforementioned seismic issue. Additionally, SF turns out to have been built largely (predominantly?) on landfill and liquefaction. Subways would be pretty susceptible to flooding, and would be massively expensive to keep in operation with all the pumping and maintenance requirements the city would force on them.
I really like the idea of a skyward-developing SF, though, not being a geologist or a structural engineer, I'm not sure how that would be achieved in a city like this one, with its inherent foundation issues. But we're starting to build a lot of giant skyscrapers, evidently, so perhaps someone's figured it out?