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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

There are many cities that do certain things better than others, but what I don't understand is that most local politicians don't travel there and learn from how others govern their cities and don't accept their own problems have been solved elsewhere.

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Follow SF politics for a couple of years, and you'll see that the problem isn't lack of technocratic solutions, it's politics (with some exceptions that tend to be problems larger than a single city's scope). A supervisor can go tour every functional city in the world and when they came back, they wouldn't be any more effective, because knowledge of how to fix things wasn't the blocker.

Chicken and egg problem. You can’t have a good transport system if people don’t use it (too expensive) and people won’t use it unless it’s good. Was in San Francisco recently and it really is mostly impressively bad, but one of the major sources of badness is that it’s mostly pretty infrequent. Presumably because people don’t use it.

Edit: One thing they could fix, easily; unified, visitor accessible, payment system. And more realtime bus information. Those are simple things that they could borrow off any decent-sized European city.

Further edit: looks like the Clipper card is easier to get than I thought. Googled before I went, but must have gotten outdated information.

I thought the same (bad transit, people don't use it, it becomes even worse), but after no longer being able to ride my bike, I realized that many buses and Muni trains are packed at least at rush hour. People do use public transit in SF, so its sorry state is even more of a shame.

My pet theory: the people who use it (immigrants, environmentalists, folks new to town) are not the people who make funding decisions ("san francisco natives").

Doesn't the clipper card allow you to use one payment system for caltrain, bart, and muni? I'm not sure if SamTrans busses are included.

Clipper cards work on SamTrans buses too.

And they work on all the ferries I have taken recently. Other than the fact that it's one person per Clipper Card, they're great.

Clipper cards even get you a discount on the new Richmond ferry.

Huh, I googled before and got the idea you had to get it by post or something. Looks like that’s outdated information.

> visitor accessible, payment system. And more realtime bus information

These do exist: purchasing fares via the Muni app is pretty straightforward and services like nextmuni.com and similar apps can tell you when the next bus is coming.

Frequency is definitely subpar though. When I first came to SF, I was supposed to meet with a job interviewer for dinner in a place at mission. The subway train took 30 minutes to show up!

Muni data is not at all accurate.

Schedules aren't accurate, but I find neztmuni to be accurate about 90% of the time. It's the only reason non-metro Muni is even usable for me.

It's accurate insofar as bus drivers check the time as they drive. This is about as accurate as it is in Toronto, which I consider to have a good public transit system. YMMV

The nextmuni predictions are pretty good for buses that are already running on the route. The predictions break down as soon as it has to estimate when the next driver is going to actually start the route.

I used the Muni app to buy fares; it demanded a US zip code, and crashed repeatedly.

The way I handle this in the Bay Area is keep an extra autoload Clipper card for any guests that are coming to visit. hand it off to them when they get here. It's pretty easy to let them know how much to settle up for when they depart.

I'm not sure how most visitors to the bay get in but two desks at SFO and OAK across from baggage claim seem like a good start to implement the same kind of solution.

Or, for an ethical gray-area solution if your guest has only a one way trip (like to the airport): give them a Clipper card with some minimal ($2) balance. They should be able to go to their destination regardless of the fare. The card’s balance will go negative, but they can just throw it away.

The BART gates won't let you out if you don't have enough money on a ticket, so you'd have to jump the gate or add funds at a kiosk (think the same applies for cards, too).

I'm not sure why you got the impression otherwise, but people do use transit in SF, a lot. The 38 Geary is so packed that you frequently can't even get on at major stops like Powell during rush hour.

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