Bah. The Bay Area is grossly broken compared to Boston, Portland, or a number of other U.S. cities.
It may well be fine in San Francisco, where Muni buses run everywhere — but across the Bay Area?
Decades ago, Santa Clara County opted out of the BART system, thereby dooming Silicon Valley to a lack of proper connectivity. The VTA Light Rail is a pokey joke that takes literally three times as long as driving to get from the end of the line (in Mountain View) to downtown San Jose. And there's a different bus system for almost every county — Muni, SamTrans, VTA, ACTransit.
BART will be extending from Fremont to Milpitas and San Jose in the current plan, but IIRC there's no plan to encircle the Bay by bringing it up from San Jose through the Valley to complete the circuit at Millbrae.
Portland and Boston have the right idea for mass transit in a mixed city/suburb environment: all the mass transit for the whole metropolitan area under a single agency — buses, subways, trolleys, commuter rail, what-have-you. The schedules work and people know how to get around. TriMet and MBTA make a hell of a lot more sense than the hodge-podge that is the Bay Area's transit system.
But then, the Bay Area isn't one metropolitan area. It's three or four, with several different loci of political and economic power. Which makes these things harder to arrange ....
Yeah, I spaced and forgot about the South Bay. The East Bay is decent, though. Well, the parts I have been to. Which I suppose are only the parts I found it convenient to reach by public transit, so there's a whole lot of sampling bias going on.
When I lived in Boston, I found that there were almost zero situations where it made sense to take transit rather than biking (especially anywhere in the vicinity of the green line!) unless there was a lot of snow, but in SF/Oakland/Berkeley I end up using transit several times a month even ignoring cross-bay trips. This is the source of my gut feeling that (my part of) the SFBA's transit is superior to Boston's.
As in, how do you find ways to meet the right people you talk to? Presumably, they would have personality fit with you, and be high on both intelligence and openness. Furthermore, they would be in the point of their life where they are willing to spend time with you (although sometimes you can learn a lot from people simply by friending them on Facebook and just observing their feeds from time to time).
Historically, I've made myself extremely stalkable on the Internet. In retrospect, I believe that this "decision" is on the order of one of the very best decisions I've ever made in my life, and has made me better at social discovery than most people I know, despite my dual social anxiety and Asperger's. In fact, if a more extroverted non-Aspie could do the same thing, I think they could do WONDERS with developing an online profile.
I've also realized more that social discovery is often more rewarding when done with teenagers. You can do so much to impact teenagers, and they often tend to be a lot more open to your ideas/musings (just as long as you're responsible).
But I've wondered - how else have you done it? Especially in real life? What are some other questions you ask with respect to social discovery? I tend to avoid real life for social discovery simply because it's extremely hit-and-miss, but I've discovered (from Richard Florida's books) that the Internet often strengthens real-life interaction because it makes it so much easier to discover other people in real life (and then it's in real life when you can really get to know people).