A computer upgrade shut down BART

These days I fly to the bay area to my office in East Bay. It's 2+ hours commute from either SFO or even OAK because you need to change buses 2 or 3 times. Add 1 more if you count taking the airport shuttle to the BART station. And SJC does not even have a BART connection.

There's fundamental design flaw in public transportation in the US, they almost never connect the population centers. Part of the reason why people are discouraged from using them and they don't get the funding to stay up to date.

People are constantly being encouraged to take public transpo, but once they finally do, they realize why they hadn't before.

I find the Bay Area very difficult to get around. The roads are jammed with commuters who live far from their workplaces due to the housing situation. There is not enough housing near job centers, which bids up the prices of available housing to very high levels that requires FAANG-level salaries to clear unless one wants to have an army of roommates. Thus, many people have to commute, some from far-flung exurbs and even from Central Valley cities like Stockton and Modesto.

Public transportation in the Bay Area is better than most American cities, but it’s still underpowered for the size of the metro area. Not all residences are served by trains, and bus service is often infrequent and subject to delays. Missing a connection can lead to major inconveniences (such as a long 30-60 minute wait) or even being unable to reach your destination without an über-expensive Uber or Lyft ride. There’s also matters of safety and cleanliness on public transportation; every now and then I smell unpleasant odors like marijuana and urine, and occasionally I see sketchy people.

It’s a major step down from Tokyo, where public transportation is ultra-convenient, reliable in non-emergency situations, impeccably clean, and generally safe.

The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues. If it were merely technology, we’d have solutions by now.

And the Bay Area, largely, eats its own dogfood.

There is no faster, more powerful public transportation system than a city that allows Uber to offer mototaxi service. Uber was allowed to turned that on in Rio at some point in the last couple years and it puts busses and subways to shame. The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero.

Nu then - having 37 mio people just in one city, Tokyo, does require you to get the logistics in order (all of Denmark is just around 6 mio…)

It costs almost a billion dollars to build a mile of BART, due to political corruption 65% of all MUNI service lines are to/from Chinatown, we keep the "iconic" cable car lines going even though they have the highest rate of accidents per mile and per vehicle in the country.

We just need to double or triple down on roads and let things like Waymo and Uber save us from ourselves.

Bikebrains rant about things like "induced demand" without actually understanding that building additional infrastructure simply serves pent up demand. They point to things like the Katy Freeway which was expanded to 26 lanes but "traffic got worse" - ignoring the fact that travel speeds increased by 60% for almost a decade until Houston's population ballooned to what it is today.

https://i.redd.it/rviipp7czy131.jpg

And the rail fatalities are only that high because of people using it for suicide.

Maybe it's a matter of breaking down the costs for everyone to see, or maybe it's a matter of the city providing bus wifi so you can get some guaranteed access to the internet while riding, or maybe it's a matter of putting a police officer on every train.

But busses, aside from rush hour in probably the 10 largest cities in the nation, are always going to be way less convenient than a car. It has to stop a million times, there's no good way to guarantee you'll arrive on time (it's impossible to create a bus route where they stay evenly spaced like a train might handle better), and they never actually get you where you're going - just kinda nearby. Maybe you can transfer onto a bus now, but that's two modes of transportation. And God forbid there's a number of people combining their bus usage with a bicycle. Gotta wait for them to walk around front, unhook it, and hopefully put the bike rack back up so the driver doesn't have to get out and do it himself... etc, etc, etc.

Plus, I'm too busy to find it at the moment, but there's a study showing most people just want public transit so some other people use it and get off the highway. As in, they just want public transit so their car commute improves.

This will almost certainly never get major support; it's just too miserable of a system to overtake our already-crazy-convenient cars.

I might argue that the bay area focuses on transportation technology that is flashy and gets around existing regulations because it is new, with hardly any regard at all for how it scales.

Enjoy the return of 80s era San Francisco.

First off, you're not too busy to find it. Because you're probably not used to doing it. All you have to do is to tell your favorite map app where you want to go, then switch to the public transit tab. You should try it.

Right now if I look at routes from Newark to OAK or SFO, it shows around 40 minutes by car and 1:40 hour by public transportation. If I had a plane to catch in 2 hours, I'd never take the bus. Here's why.

About 40 minutes of that 1:40 involves walking to the nearest bus stop. You could take an Uber instead and cut it down to 10 minutes. But that's problem A, public transportation doesn't have enough coverage.

There are 2 bus changes involved. The first one, Newark to Union City or Palo Alto, depending on whether you're going to OAK or SFO, runs every 30 minutes. That's problem B, the routes are not frequent enough.

The last bus change, very close to OAK/SFO, are design flaw- problem C. You really should be able to get off BART and take a short walk or shuttle to terminal. Instead, it's another bus ride that'll take 40 minutes.

From a regular commuter's pov, problems A/B/C are the issues that'll discourage someone from taking public transportation. Like other comments mentioned, it's not really a resource, infra or tech issue. It's a social/political issue that's preventing public transportation from expanding, both in coverage, frequency and in terms of connecting big population centers where it matters. All the issues that you mentioned, like stopping million times, guarantee of arriving on time, bicycles, and even safety and cleanliness, will go away if you solve the problems I mentioned- speaking from my experience taking public transportation for 30+ years in the US and abroad.

Well and population / population density.

China is similar - the big 15-20m+ metros have crazy good subway systems. But SF bay area is half the low end? 7.5m or so? Harbin is 10m and its subway is kinda meh. Down at 5m metro population in e.g. Changchun or Jinan and it's a pretty piddling subway/city rail system.

I’ll expound on the first point. European countries and East Asian countries generally have a stronger sense of cultural cohesion, while America has many deep divisions such as:

1. Social liberalism versus social conservatism, which also correlates to a secular versus cultural Christian worldview.

2. Racial and ethnic divides with sometimes centuries of bad blood

3. Class divides between the poor, the working class, the middle class, and the wealthy.

These divisions make it harder for people to come together to work for the common good. There are some politicians who shamelessly act in the interest of their voter bases with little regard for those outside their bases, and there are also people who are suspicious of even well-intended proposals since there may be hidden motives behind them.

When they return to their hotel rooms at the end of the week they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.

But inside SF, even during rush hour, it'll still nearly always be faster for me to drive (or get an Uber). The reason is because there's precious little transit infra that doesn't share the road to some extent, and even when there are dedicated bus lanes or off-street train tracks, there's still traffic lights, and the buses and trains are slow and make enough stops that any gains are lost. Then on top of that, transfers take time, and if you're even slightly off on your timing, you might have to wait for up to 15 minutes for the next bus at your transfer point.

I agree with your assessment of inter-city trips as well; SFO airport to my house in SF is also so frustrating, because I live a few blocks from a Caltrain station, but having to go from SFO->BART->Caltrain->home... that transfer in the middle is a killer. My home is only a few blocks farther to the freeway than to the train station, so even in rush-hour traffic it's still only a 20 minute drive, while BART+Caltrain will take 30-45 minutes, and that's during a time of day the Caltrain trains run at their most frequent.

I've lived in SF for 15 years, and I think I've only taken BART/Caltrain to or from SFO a handful of times. I can't even remember the last time; it's been at least 10 years (probably before Uber/Lyft was a thing). Nowadays I always take a Lyft, and while I cringe at the price ($30-$50, depending on time of day), it's so worth it when a) I'm worried about not making my flight if transit is slower than I expect, or b) I'm getting back home and just want to be home.

And yeah, I get that I'm privileged enough to be able to afford to take a car. Many people aren't; they have to pay with their time, which just really sucks. We never get that time back.

1. The community doesn't care. Leaving trash and making a mess is acceptable behavior. Or at least, it isn't called out (which I can understand, as there are safety issues around calling out bad behavior in public). This is the biggest factor: the vast majority of Japanese people wouldn't even consider leaving trash or making a mess on transit.

2. I'm sure BART leadership would be happy to combat this problem by cleaning more frequently and removing sketchy people from trains. But where is the funding for this going to come from?

> they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.

Even in jest, it's pretty fucked up to insinuate that someone should commit ritual suicide for any reason, let alone because they work for a transit agency that can't keep its trains clean. Please don't do that here. Or anywhere.

Anyways, maybe if we solve all these issues, things will improve, and I hope it does! Still, I’m with those survey respondents - I really do not care how hard cities work to overcome public transit issues. I’ll never take it. I just have no incentive to do so, and I like my car. It’s private. It’s fast as hell. It’s pretty. It’s comfy. I wouldn’t get even one of those in a bus. I’d be pretty shocked if this wasn’t a standard response.

As an aside: it’s weird and disconcerting that you’re finding a different opinion to be depressing. Is it possible you’re just really disconnected?

I'd hazard a guess that an experienced cyclist would be able to beat most subway journeys too

Top Gear "London Race" episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1140803

is nonsense. EU countries have been building HSR for half a century already. Japan has HSR. China has HSR, nationwide. S Korea has HSR. At national/federal level. BRICS are next. The US is being left behind.

Your remark only holds true for US (and in particular California) politics and development laws, NIMBYism and the abuse of environmental process like CEQA [0], and how doing transit (in the US) involves coordinating multiple city govts and agencies - instead of it being a federal/state project. If Eisenhower's 1950s interstate highway system had had to be done like that and rely on permission from multiple local officials and govts and local revenue-raising, it'd be a patchwork mess too, if it had ever even gotten built at all. Eventually results in BART's 2003 Millbrae-SFO extension ($1.5b / only 8.7 miles of track). Address the root-cause, not the symptom.

After half a century of piecemeal transit in only some areas, this all causes the chicken-and-egg that US homeowners historically associate proximity to transit with negative property value.

As to the comparison to Uber, the non-viability of public transport in post-1950 US urban-planning cities/suburbs/exurbs is due to the low density, like why aren't there a grocery, cafes, services, banks, Amazon lockers, fractional car rental services etc. in/near any major transit node in the US? Amsterdam, Singapore, Barcelona prove you can have pleasant liveable world-class cities based on transit.

[0]: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101910935/balancing-need-for-...

By my comment I mean that the things GP list aren't the only things that separate SF public transit and Tokyo public transit. You'd also need crazy high population and density too.

I don't disagree with GP's list of things, I just think they're not exhaustive. They might be sufficient to get SF to Berlin level of public transit.

That said, to "beat BART" isn't a milestone for any public transport system anywhere. Except ... in the US, where even BART stands out as great. Hmm. Relatively.

(one part of me is kinda curious how the 101 would look like if you didn't do any work on it for 20 years. Mostly because it'd probably be a rather cool setting for some dystopian movie. Anyway ... transport infrastructure, whether public transport or roads, costs a f*ckton of money)