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kalium comments on How do you approach the problem of social discovery? - Less Wrong Discussion
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SFBA transit is amazing by US standards. Which is still pathetic by yours :/
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 ....
And worse yet, every one of them is full of the sort of people who live in the Bay Area voluntarily. Eep.
(In fairness, the climate is ridiculously nice, and the bulk of the global tech industry living there provides all kinds of benefits. But the politics are just broken beyond repair.)
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.