Tag: sf v nyc

CNN Says San Francisco is Infested with Bedbugs

CNN Says San Francisco is Infested With Bedbugs

Without naming the actual hotel involved, CNN opens this article on urban pests with an anecdote about the creator of a website called BedbugRegistry.com getting bitten in San Francisco.

We’re aware of at least one egregious bedbug mating/feeding zone here in the city, but is it fair to highlight SF in the lede that way? Maybe.

There are 497 San Francisco hotels listed on Yahoo Travel, and 64 in The Bedbug Registry‘s database. There are 85 New York hotels found in the registry, but that’s out of 794 total on Yahoo Travel. That gives NYC an infestation rate of 10.7% and SF a rate of nearly 13%.

Now, I realize my method is less than totally scientific. There may be any number of reasons that cause more bug reports in one city than another, and it’s impossible to know the accuracy rate of the reports that are made. For instance, here’s an entry for the Hotel Verona in SF:

Friend seems to have a number of bedbug bites. Other hotel residents had reported them.

Such diagnoses are not exactly confidence-inspiring. Other considerations: There may be hotels in either city not listed on Yahoo Travel, though that effect probably cancels itself out. And, the math is cumulative, so it doesn’t necessarily represent conditions at any given time.

In any case, WTF? The fact that approximately 13% of SF hotels have had bedbug reports is not good. And NYC shouldn’t be bragging about their rate either.

Go ahead and rip apart my math/logic in the comments.

Lonely Planet Writer Talks San Francisco vs. New York

One Mr. Robert Reid has posted a brief article and video on the Lonely Planet website comparing “USA’s great two cities.”

I’ve never lived in NYC, so I can’t weigh in on this definitively (I’ll leave it to broke-ass stuart), although I’ve done my share of visiting and have always had a great time there. (Also, I’m afraid to say anything bad because NYC will probably overhear me, jump out of an alleyway, and punch me in the face.)

But that won’t stop me from making snarky comments about Reid’s San Francisco analysis. He makes it a little too easy with this summary of his video:

I identified four key ways that the scale of goodness tips to the West Bay, including better coffee, airport transfers and subway maps — plus a far healthier connection to preserving the past.

In the video, he mentions BART’s “cute map.” Man, really? I hope he’s being sarcastic here, but I fear he’s serious. BART can afford to have a cute map because it’s such a sorry excuse for a subway that it hardly even requires one. This empty praise serves only to make BART feel better about itself than it should, prolonging any kind of meaningful improvement. So, thanks LP.

He says “Mission burritos” are “much better” because they have “more foil.” I’m not sure what he’s comparing these to, because, do people eat burritos in NYC? I’m sure they do, but I’ve never heard a New Yorker try to claim theirs are better.

In the end, Reid does what a writer for a travel site predictably must do when comparing two major destination cities: hedges. While spending all his time talking about “positive” SF stuff, his final words are, “but is San Francisco BETTER than New York City? No.”

Maybe I’m not the only one intimidated by NYC’s tough-guy status.