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>light rail is an easy approach that is guaranteed to always be slower than street traffic.

That alone wouldn't have been half bad, but with the ultra-low coverage / density of this network, it becomes useless for 95% of the people living in the city.

For example, in North San Jose, my 4.5-mile commute would take 12 minutes by car, 25 minutes by bicycle, and a whopping 75 minutes by public transportation. At that point, one might as well walk (90 minutes).

You'd think that over longer distances, it might be faster than biking, but you'd be wrong. Downtown MTV to Campbell takes about 1hr 15m, which is how long it takes you to bike the same route.

I live in Campbell and work in MV. You are right, of course, but the reason is that the light rail route is ridiculously inefficient for that trip. It first goes way northeast, to Milpitas, before heading south. It's so bad that, depending on schedules, you can get from MV to Campbell faster by taking Caltrain to SJ and then switching to light rail at Diridon (but you pay more).

I've actually gotten off at Palo Alto station a couple of times and biked the difference between it and Mountain View, and made it to the office before my coworkers, who were taking the non-baby bullet. Between accel/deaccel and loading the local train is better than traffic, but roughly equal to a good road bike.

What's crazy is that a fit cyclist on a road bike can easily beat a local Caltrain (stops at every station) all the way from San Francisco!

For example, travelling from Google's SF office to the Googleplex in MTV on the weekend will take about 2 hours and 45 mins via Caltrain/buses, and 2.5 hours via SF2G's Bayway route (http://sf2g.com/bayway.html).

I can't think of any light rail systems that beat a reasonably fit cyclist. This is true even when you compare biking to SF's Muni Subway systems.

People just take light rail since few want to bike places, let alone at "workout pace"

This assumes everyone in all weather conditions, would prefer to brave the street traffic routes...and frankly how many 'reasonably fit cyclists' there are commuting, out of the superset of "people going places, including work"

how pointless that the state is spending decades and tens of billions on HSR from SF to LA for a hypothetical sub-3 hour journey, while it still takes 1.5 to 2.5 hours to get between various important locations in the Bay Area by public transit.

If the option was one versus another, then the question may be valid on why that one is chosen (I don't know, I don't have the full background). If you are suggesting that both could be done with the same money, that's a completely different story. What is your point?

For what its worth, the HSR plan includes Caltrain electrification, which will eventually cut down SF to San Jose to ~45 minutes.

And the state is bigger than just the Bay Area :-)

Well, public transit in the rest of the state is in an even worse condition than public transit in the Bay Area. HSR duplicates the functionality now provided by planes. The umpteen billions being demanded for HSR hypothetically could provide decent bus service across the state. But given the current bureaucracy, the situation feels more like "how much money would like us to embezzle and what story would you like to hear while we're doing?"

Which isn't to say I'm pro-car or pro-private-instead-of-public. If anything, a spot light needs to be shown on the clot of public-private corruption apparently controlling US transit decisions.

Long-term, we need to switch from planes to HSR for trips of 400 miles or less, unless someone can come up with a carbon-free alternative to jet fuel. Americans tend to have a warped perspective because our trains are so crappy compared to what is standard in Western Europe or east Asia.

You can always make carbon neutral jet fuel...

You don't need to hypothesize what the alternative to HSR would be. It was well researched. The alternative, expanding highways and airports, was more than 2x the cost of HSR. Of course, the costs of HSR have grown, but so would the highway and airport costs.

The biggest cost to HSR is acquiring and developing property in developed areas. But this is significantly more costly for highways and airports.

The solution to the bloated HSR budget is to improve the process, not to switch to another alternative mid-stream that both theoretically and in practice would be at least as bloated and even more costly.

I'm unusual, but I think it might have been better to focus on better medium speed rail instead of HSR. I still support HSR, but honestly even if a train from SF to DTLA were 6 hours it would be superior to driving or flying, and if the extra funds made it available in 2020 instead of a million years from now, and that we could service Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, etc. (the Coast Starlight route) that would be a pretty huge plus.

Caltrain electrification is a comparatively small project and seems will happen quickly regardless of HSR.

the Bay Area provides 40% of state tax revenue and, even worse, externalizes the costs of its awful development policy on a large chunk of Northern California population in form of increased housing and transportation costs.

In retrospect, putting important locations in the middle of nowhere (i.e. far from transport) wasn't the best idea.

Indeed,

In a lot of ways Buses are a more plausible solution to public transit than the idiot train-tracks nowhere you getting built (here in Sonoma County, we see the SMART train between Santa Rosa and San Rafael running once an hour and costing ~$15, a failure before it hit the ground).

The quandary is if the voters approve a railroad, it will be half-done and run at half-speed but if voters approve buses, they might run right for a year and then get sabotaged down to nothing once public attention has gone elsewhere.

Effectively, long ago, whoever is America's powers-that-be decided cars were for transit and mass-transit was for soaking tax-dollars (back when General Motors destroyed the trolley systems, say). Now that the car model is falling apart, switching directions isn't possible 'cause it would disturb the feeding of too many swine-at-the-trough.

Coming from a rural area, I’m really appalled at how inefficient public transit is. It’s clearly only functional enough to be used by people a) fortuitous enough to live right by public transit centers or b) people without a choice.

The last time I used transit it turned a 20 minute drive into a 50+ minute bus ride. I’m not about to trade away an hour+ of every day for the sake of being green. I had coworkers suggest biking to another route that was quicker, but that bike ride included an extra 30+ minutes of biking, had me hauling the bike on and off the bus, risking having my bike stolen (we had an enclosed cage, but people had bikes stolen occasionally) plus now I’m either a bit sweaty or have to take a shower at work (and then be sweaty at the end of the day).

I know this isn’t an easy solution, but from an outsider perspective I see why people don’t use public transit that much. It disrupts life to the point where it’s simply not an option for most.

Indeed, but it doesn't have to be that way. Frequent, low cost timely bus-and-light-rail service is possible. It existed in other countries. Portland, OR, a quite spread-out city, once had it (I don't know it still does). BART was once an excellent system and after years of neglect is still better than many.

One factor in this country is public transit is expected to pay for itself while the automobile is effectively massively subsidized.

> Coming from a rural area, I’m really appalled at how inefficient public transit is.

A highly utilized public transit system is often far more efficient than cars when measured in people-miles/hr during hours of peak transit demand, whereas rural transit is a totally different and non comparable transportation problem space.

The inefficient bus and rail systems are usually ones in areas where people mostly commute using cars, places like Silicon Valley.

In these places, the bus and rail lines are sparse relative to the population, so they take longer to get to any individual's destination.

> It’s clearly only functional enough to be used by people a) fortuitous enough to live right by public transit centers or b) people without a choice.

It's true that housing with easy transit center access is a privilege for working and professional class people today, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon since less than a generation ago, people of some means completely eschewed transit.

True, but even better is the fact that in addition to better people-miles per hour, a well designed system means people don't have to travel so far (by putting homes near jobs and amenities instead of surrounding everything with acres of asphalt - crazy idea!) so the <people-things they want to do> per hour ratio improves.

If a thousand people in point A want to get to point B 2 miles away, obviously a big train is faster than cars. The next step is to _make point B closer_. This is what is so often forgotten - when I lived in LA I knew Angelenos who'd visit London and say how great the tube was, but the same tube network in LA would be garbage. What makes the tube really work is the fact that those Angelenos almost never had to go more than a few miles to what they wanted, instead of saying things like "well it's 30 miles so if it's more than 30 minutes something has gone wrong".

People say things like "it took me 15 minutes to go a mile!!" but the real problem there is filling a mile of your city with garbage (parking and roads, mostly).

Coming from a rural area, I’m really appalled at how inefficient public transit is.

Coming from a rural area, you should be more cognizant about how density affects public transit. Compare SF Muni (density=18,000 people per sq mile) and VTA light rail (5700/sq mi)

a) fortuitous enough to live right by public transit centers

many people that live near transit didn't arrive there fortuitously, they made the tradeoff between living farther away in cheaper/larger/nicer housing, and living close to transit. I live in a small condo that's a 10 minute walk from a train station, but I didn't end up there by accident -- I chose between a 3 bedroom single family home a 40 minute drive from work and a much smaller condo, and I chose the condo. Ironically, I don't even take transit, when I bought the place it was a 30 minute bike ride from work (which is poorly served by transit), then I moved to a job that's a 10 minute bike ride away (well served by transit, but too close to make transit worthwhile)

Fortuitous?

It's no more fortuitous than living by a freeway, or on a mountain. Transport is something you should investigate thoroughly before moving to a place.

Unfortunately virtually all home finding tools assume you want to drive everywhere (or at least surface that as the first option). I've worked on one to change this, but not for the US. Apparently it's fairly eye opening to people because it's not the sort of thing presented to them before buying.

4-5 miles seem like a good "run to work" distance every morning, problem is just how to get back... if you are lucky and have showers at work. I tried that a few times but didnt sustain it because of lack of return options.

Cycle? You can cycle in, run back, and reverse the routine every alternate day.

That is a great idea!

That can be cycled in 20-30 minutes, if there are safe routes.

The proposed site is near stations for both Caltrain and BART. Those are significantly more effective transit systems than the VTA light rail (which I agree is terrible).

> light rail is an easy approach that is guaranteed to always be slower than street traffic.

In what way? This seems clear for light rail that shares lanes with traffic, but that’s not always a given. Seattle light rail has quite a bit of right-of-way that is unshared with car traffic and therefore faster than car traffic during peak hours (at least for certain segments).

I lived in Jena, Germany for a while and the light rail there was similar. Most of the railway was dedicated and where it was shared, rail got priority over cars (lights switched rapidly to allow rail through).

Everything in the US is broken, not just the transit.

That's...a shockingly pessimistic view of the world's sole superpower.

That is a fairly fractured statement. Lightrail actually connects DTSJ with several areas people live in (e.g. Sunnyvale, Campbell) and its transit station is Diridon, which also includes Amtrak, CalTrain, several bus lines and a taxi stand. Google picked the only spot in the south bay with an actual transit presence of any real heft.