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232 points ksajadi | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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Buuntu ◴[] No.45141006[source]
Everyone here blaming BART and bureaucracy for being inefficient when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting (and zoning preventing housing/badly needed ridership near transit stops). Yes it's expensive to build transit just like it's expensive to build anything in America, which we should fix but that is not unique to BART.

It's quite possible the system will collapse next year if we don't pass increased taxes to fund it in 2026 https://www.bart.gov/about/financials/crisis.

Just last year we failed to pass a common sense bill to make it so we only need a 51% majority for transit bills in the future, indicative of how opposed we still are to transit in the Bay Area https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-proposi....

Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.

So let's be clear, most of the issues with BART are due to anti-transit and suburban voters starving it of support.

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1. chuckadams ◴[] No.45141340[source]
It's pretty hard to keep from drowning in despair when one realizes that almost everywhere else in the USA except maybe NYC, the situation is worse.
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2. jjice ◴[] No.45141894[source]
Hey, the Boston T runs some of the time!

Jokes aside, I'd like to see a stack ranking of US public transit. I'd assume NYC and DC are top dogs, but I'm curious about other cities.

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3. lokar ◴[] No.45142321[source]
IMO, if LA can maintain its rate of progress from the last 10 years going forward, they will have a better system than SF before long.

It even has direct service from two metro lines to the airport.

4. yunwal ◴[] No.45143730[source]
The BART is better than the DC metro in my experience. The DC Metro is great for commuters into metro center, but it shuts down too early, and is totally impractical for moving around the outside of the city/suburbs. The BART looks visibly in worse shape, but you can quite easily live car-free in SF
5. bc569a80a344f9c ◴[] No.45144079[source]
I don’t have a specific link but I’d be surprised if the CityNerd channel on YouTube didn’t have a (recent) video on it. Just as a disclaimer: Even if you don’t agree with his politics, he does take care to explain his data set sources and methodology, so it’s likely a useful source for this sort of thing.

NYC is definitely the top dog. There was a recent ranking for metro areas ranked by walkability, bike-ability, public transit, and some other urban score, but divided by average rent price for a 1BR apartment. NYC still came out #1 despite the rather large denominator.