I don't think that's quite the word you're looking for.
We took the bus from downtown to UChicago. The express was fine, but on the way back on the regular, going through south side. It was way worse than SF.
That being said, the commuter buses in Chicago and the L were basically as nice as any other respectable public transit option.
> The fact that you compared it to London
In both cities I have lived near the downtown core. In both cities I was able to get mostly where I wanted to go in under an hour, within and immediately surrounding the city. SF is moderately better in that, within an hour and a half on public transit I can not only visit the city, but also wilderness in Marin county.
> Chicago's public transit ranks much, much higher than SF's
I don't buy most 'rankings'. Portland, where I live now, is supposed to have one of the best transit systems on the west coast. We're looking for neighborhoods to live in. From one neighborhood six miles from downtown, it would take me one hour by bus to reach the city. In SF, I have lived in the city, but I've also lived in Silicon Valley (~ 40 miles away, but still only an hour to SF via Caltrain), and in Marin (~15 miles away in San Rafael, but still only an hour to the city). Still, Portland for some reason is ranked higher. Portland is about on par with Los Angeles. The system is slow. Something is wrong with most rankings IMO.
But what would I know, I'm just some guy who's lived in a bunch of cities, and never commuted by car to work, ever.
> Also, not sure if you've used public transportation recently, but man, it SUCKS. Far less time efficient than a car, often crowded during the times you want to use it, and ZERO enforcement of proper etiquette or rules or regulations as far as riders are concerned.
I've been using public transportation for 13 years and it's better than its ever been in terms of speed, reliability, and the crowds.
Where have you experienced public transportation that is worse off today than it was in the past?
> plenty of cities around the world with reliable and effecient public transport, don't write it off completely because NYC's is subpar.
I'm certainly not writing off public transit as a concept. I'd love to be able to step out of my building, step into a magical conveyance that I didn't have to drive myself, and step out next to my destination.
It's great that other cities managed to solve this problem, but I don't live in those other cities. Yes, NYC could right itself, and build more subway/tram/BRT lines, but this tends to take forever. I need to get places now. My life won't wait for the city to sort itself out.
> It sounds like you've never traveled outside the bay area.
It seems to me that many urban areas in the US have better public transit than the Bay Area, and, even moreso, places in the developed world outside of the US tend to be better than the US.
Its true that the Bay Area's public transit is better than pretty much anywhere else in California, but that seems to be setting the bar low enough that you can trip over it.
> Bus routes are not supposed to replace train routes. It is by design that bus routes are longer, buses are meant to service areas not accessible by train.
I agree! I only mean that, when making a map of public transit coverage in a city, it might make sense to recognize that bus transportation is, in many cases, very inconvenient to avoid the impression that everyone is served equally.
I left New York before Bus Time was introduced, but I'm glad to hear it has improved the experience of waiting for a bus.
> its public transportation is third world at best
I come from a country which has a reputation for having top notch public transit, and I have lived in the south of the USA (which does feel like the third world in many ways).
San Francisco's public transit could be better, but it's not that bad ;)
> i have a hard time imagining that that has changed.
Fun trivia, https://www.portauthority.org/system-map/ shows stats on this. It doesn't support deep linking, but I went to the outbound stop just after the bridge, and it says
In FY2021:
Average Weekday Ons: 0.32
Average Weekday Offs: 5.1
Pre-pandemic ridership for CY2019:
Average Weekday Ons: 1.00
Average Weekday Offs: 37.00
It has dropped by quite a bit since the pandemic. The 61A has a daily ridership of 1,643 and the 61B has 1,312.
> I understand that in Los Angeles, where the busses are awful...
This seems to be a common refrain, but it's also outdated. Both the bus and subway networks in LA are massively larger than in San Francisco (which, by the way, has the world's slowest bus fleet at 8.1 mph [1]). LA County is massively larger than San Francisco (including the equivalents of the entire Peninsula, Oakland, and Marin) and has sections of very dense bus service (any of the numbered streets plus Wilshire going west from downtown) and sections of very sparse bus service (Malibu). And it's all 25% cheaper than Muni too (with fewer strikes and many fewer naked people).
There are 13 subway stops under construction in LA and the LAX airport connector finally got approved with an actual train stop directly at LAX.
I'm not saying there aren't holes in the LA transport network, but it's better than many visitors realize.
Dont have a lot of experience with US, but Seattle and Redmond (which are on the west coast) had pretty awesome public transport.. I was able to navigate it pretty easily even though it was my first time in US, and it went pretty much everywhere
> some of the buses travel on ferries
That's an interesting that they would do that along an entire route rather than splitting the two. I've never heard of that before.
I also do really like how Seattle has that dedicated busway twice a day. It's one of the avenues downtown right?
> Seattle’s public transit system and transit policy are just plain good. Buses are clean/new, frequent, and on-time; trains (while they don’t yet extend as far as they need to) are reliable and have good coverage along frequented routes...
Did we live in the same city? This is the exact opposite of my experience with Seattle transit.
> Buses have a bad reputation compared to other modes of transit because they're so easily re-routable.
I've always thought that was an advantage for buses. With rail, you have to plan it to go through areas that are not only popular now, but will be popular in 30 years. If some neighborhood suddenly becomes the happening place 10 years from now, you have to build a whole new, expensive line. But with buses, you can just add a new route.
> "Give me a public transportation system that runs on time, doesn't spread disease, doesn't have punk kids who confront you for no reason, is safe, and has sane time schedules and I'll be happy."
The problem is that you live in San Francisco.
The biggest problem in that list (safety/perceived safety) has more to do with the city than the transit system itself. It's not a brokenness in the transportation system (though more can be done to curb it, certainly), it's a brokenness in the society it serves.
It's always a little depressing to think about how so many other cities - both bigger and smaller - on this continent put the transit of San Francisco utter, complete shame.
> CBTC has been an utter shit show in San Francisco
CBTC is used all day, every day by cities all over the world without issue. I've personally taken hundreds, if not thousands, of trips on train systems with this technology and it works perfectly.
If SF is having problems with CBTC it says a lot more about SF than CBTC.
If you couldn't piece it together, I'm tolerating living here for things other than the sake of my enjoyment...
> within ¼ mile of a Muni stop
So is that why half of your bus lines make so many stops that they're practically unusable?
Most of your comment is about detailed improvements and rationale behind that system... I'm not a transportation planner: instead I just look at the reality that getting 2.6 miles from my neighborhood by the Panhandle to the Mission is a 15 minute drive, but a 35 minute bus ride that takes 24 stops.
And it's not that's some unusual thing, I shared the example above, that Marina District to Financial District goes from a 30 minute with ~3 miles of transit a 40 minute ride ~7 mile ride across half the city to skirt around car traffic.
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That's what indicates to me that this city needs more BRT lines: Interruptions are one thing, but you're not going to find yourself needing to travel halfway across most major cities in the wrong direction because traffic messes up the direct route every single day
> I think you're conflating New York with most major cities here. Even the London and Tokyo metros don't run 24x7. Most cities, big or small, tend to shut down at night. New York is very much an outlier.
I think you're misreading the comment: The point is that for most major cities "at 3 am you expect a most things to be closed" is a such an obvious concept. But here in SF 10 pm might as well be "3 am".
> Wrong. The South Bay has Caltrain, the East Bay has BART. SF has... a few systems, but mostly Muni.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my guess is that you have never lived for a significant time in a major (or even smaller) European or Asian city? Where I come from, pretty much everyone, everyone, uses public transport all the time. To go to work, to go to any leisure activity, to do some quick shopping. And it's extremely clean, modern, and convenient (yeah, people complain, they do all the time, but they complain that it's 10 minutes late in the deepest winter and then still use it daily).
That's just not feasible in the Bay Area. You are screwed here if you don't have a car, where as when I lived as a fully grown adult in Europe, I and many of my peers did not even have a driver's license (getting one is expensive, time intensive, and usually plain not necessary). Many others had a driver's license but no car. Now I need a car just to go to the supermarket because there isn't any in a walkable distance.
I have to say the subway system in Manhattan is indeed the closest I've seen compared to the European or Asian systems I'm familiar with, even though it still looks pretty "industrial" and somewhat run down.
Wow. Things must have improved incredibly in the last ten years.
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