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).
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.
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.
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, 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)
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.
One factor in this country is public transit is expected to pay for itself while the automobile is effectively massively subsidized.
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.
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).
People just take light rail since few want to bike places, let alone at "workout pace"
And the state is bigger than just the Bay Area :-)
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.
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.
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.
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).