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Comment by SandersAK | Hacker News Reader

SF and the bay area in general have done an astonishingly bad job of updating mass transit to handle growth. I used to live in NY and thought the MTA was stupid and short sighted, but since moving here, they come off as geniuses compared to BART etc.

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Kind of ironic, that one of the most degenerate and backwards-looking of the first worlds cities when it comes to urban planning and transport, happens to be the location the most forward-looking people in web tech and startups.

What large cities have mass transit that is not astonishingly bad, stupid, and/or short sighted, in your opinion? Maybe it's actually just a really hard problem?

Seoul has a pretty fantastic public transit system. Busses and subways come every 5 to 15 minutes, are clean and fast (you better hold on tight!), and are still expanding year after year to the few underserved areas in Seoul and to the cities surrounded Seoul. There are digital signs giving you the time and location of the coming vehicle, and TVs showing news and entertainment segments. Strong cellular service so you're never without a connection. The busses and subways do stop running around midnight to 1AM, but there is always the choice of taking a taxi, which are also plentiful, fast, and cheap (a ride from the south part of Seoul to the north part is only about $10).

Well, the MTA in New York is certainly stupid and wasteful. But they have slowly started building new lines again (the 7 expansion, the Second Ave subway), so they're not totally short-sighted.

And as much I grumble, NYC is one of the few places in America I feel ok about going all around the city without a car.

I think it's only a hard political problem, but not a hard technical problem at this point.

> What large cities have mass transit that is not astonishingly bad, stupid, and/or short sighted, in your opinion?

I'd guess any European city is better than NYC, which is the best that America has.

It's a hard problem, but BART's issues come down to a bunch of fiefdom infighting among different counties.

Paris and London have pretty fantastic transit.

If you work in SOMA, Bayview and Excelsior don't seem far at all. Why not just bike or walk?

Walking to Excelsior? Are you joking? I work in SoMA and live in Excelsior, and it takes me half an hour to bike each way. And I'm a relatively fast biker, in a good location with major roads near my house. Most of Excelsior is narrow roads on steep hills. Parking is one of my less favorite activities there.

Bayview is not very pleasant. My friend's home was burglarized. My brother was mugged and his G1 stolen, back when that was the only Android phone. There are noisy trains and a smelly sewage treatment plant. There are reasons people aspire not to live there.

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