It’s something of a running joke in San Francisco that there are so many startups designed to meet the needs of twentysomething, freshly dropped out of college wannabe startups: food delivery to your door (SpoonRocket, DoorDash, Instacart), laundry delivery to your door (Rinse, Sudzee, Instawash), marijuana to your door (Eaze, MediThrive, the Green Cross), car parking from your door (Luxe, ZIRX). A rich variety of chores outsourced to some poorly paid service worker. Does this sound like the future?
Given how many niche startups there are for this shut-in generation, and how many entrepreneurs and developers move to San Francisco, it’s slightly surprising there isn’t a service to help with the move itself. Ever since some Europeans got lost a few hundred years ago and controversially claimed parts of North America, there has been a westward drift, culturally and economically.
According to the US Census Bureau, 49,256 people moved to San Francisco city between 2007 and 2012 (though 69,268 moved out, with well-reported overpriced housing largely to blame). Search for information about moving here and you find evangelists describing it as “like being an artist in Florence during the Renaissance”, which says all you need to know about the inflated vision of self and nothing you need to know about the realities of relocating.
The emotional, physical and bureaucratic upheaval is some kind of rite of passage, perhaps, part of the price of moving to the hallowed west coast. That may explain the lack of willingness to ease the process for anybody else, or perhaps it’s just not possible to create an app for culture shock. But before the next 1,000 dropout entrepreneurs set up yet more Uber/Instacart/Airbnb rivals, there are a few other issues to consider. Before we get too excited about how clever we are, let’s a look at these.
Walking
This is dangerous and highly frustrating. Pedestrians account for 14% of all fatalities on US roads and, with the exception of Texas, California is the most dangerous state for pedestrians. In 2013, 4,743 people were killed while walking or running next to roads and 76,000 injured. Most accidents happen on urban roads at night, and alcohol – imbibed by pedestrian or driver – is involved in half of them. More prosaically, it’s impossible to get any kind of momentum going when you walk in a city because just as you get your pace up, you have to stop and wait at lights which always prioritise the flow of traffic over pedestrians. You’re not allowed to cross the road, even if it’s safe and traffic free, unless you’re on a “crosswalk”. Autonomous cars will go a long way to fixing this, but until then?
Cheques
Americans love what they call checks. “Only” 20bn were used in 2012, down from 40bn in 2000, and for utilities and domestic bills, a piece of paper written out in promise of future payment is more widely accepted than the equivalent of direct debit. If you want to pay electronically, you pay extra, presumably because someone at a bank will read your “electronic payment” off a screen and write out a check to send to your payee. See also: very limited use of pin numbers with payment cards. This also explains the interest, tempered with scepticism, of newly public payment service Square (current market cap $3.88bn) – at least one long overdue upgrade to America’s antiquated transaction technologies.
Leafblowers
Every suburban home of note has someone who comes round to blow their leaves around the garden using a very resource-intensive, petrol-powered machine. That such a device exists defies logic. My neighbour’s gardener blows them into our garden. A slightly more scrupulous gardener typically blows them into a pile and puts them into the compost bin, which is collected by whatever they call the council here and, presumably, taken out of the bin and put in a pile somewhere. Wind then blows around and…
No, San Francisco is not the future. This is not a good use of resources. Let the leaves decompose. Leafblowers, along with electric hand-towel dispensers, electric salt cellars and their ilk, should be consigned to the useless, energy-wasting technology bin of history.
There are many mundane delights to moving: Experimenting with 220v British household appliances through an adaptor in a 110v US socket just to laugh at the literally half-arsed attempt of the Nutribullet and kitchen blender. The atrocious broadband service delivered, or rather sold, by ComCast that is so highly contended we can’t watch video online in the evening. The fact that my first grader comes home singing the US national anthem (his teacher had to tell him what the British national anthem was, which was heartwarmingly republican in the British sense). Part of my soul yearns for thedamp Morrissey melancholy of a rainy British Sunday, crossing muddy fields. then having roast potatoes for lunch. There’ll never be an app for that.
