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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

How did anyone get around if you had to wait two hours for a car?

I don't live in SF, but I live in the area. I used to always feel trapped in SF; parking is hard to find and very expensive, car break-ins are common, buses are full of homeless and never on time, subway stations are rare and in awkward places, taxis need to be summoned by phone unless you're in a few really popular spots (even most tourist hotspots don't see taxis passing by on a regular basis) and like they say, good luck actually seeing a taxi show up after you call.

Yeah everybody remembers the worst situations and not the average, but Uber totally changed the game. Little electric scooters are also pretty amazing there, since it's so compact.

I live just over the bridge in Oakland and basically never go to SF for these exact reasons. I've tried a few times and its just too frustrating. BART+bike can work ok.

> I don't live in SF, but I live in the area. I used to always feel trapped in SF

I have the exact same experience. It's to the point where I think SF literally hates anyone from outside the city. You have to live there to understand any of the public transit as it doesn't seem to work like that of anywhere else.

Despite being only an hour away I hate going there as driving and parking is a pain at best and downright dangerous at worst. Taking CalTrain or BART into the city isn't much better thanks to the inscrutable public transit.

You can take SF Muni anywhere you want to go... as long as you want to go to the financial district/Market St. corridor. Seemingly more than other cities, the transit system is built around that particular commute which makes it frustrating if you're an out-of-towner trying to get to shopping/nightlife areas or to a friend's apartment. (And then there's BART which although it has the look and feel of a metro, has a network map more akin to commuter rail.)

tbf, google maps does a great job with using the bus out there. Muni still sucks to be on, it's never on time etc., but at least you can get your route on google maps now. Been that way since at least 2012

Wow really? I grew up in the midwest and when we first moved to SF I was amazed by all the public transit, never having access to anything before. It was definitely intimidating at first, and we somehow managed to take a bus to the port where the driver made us get out b/c he was going on break.

After that mistake it seemed pretty easy, and this was before iPhones

what's so hard abt the bus

Often times you didn’t. I missed at least one flight waiting for taxis that never arrived. Had to wait 30m and take a bus then walk in the rain a few times, etc.

And if you lived in a busy area, and the cab actually showed, sometimes someone on the street would just take it and the drivers clearly didn't care.

You walked to a busy street and hailed one. I remember trying to phone in a cab from Nob Hill pre-lyft, they said one would be there in 45 min and we should be waiting outside because they will not call you.

Also when uber first implemented the uber-taxi option before uber-x, I tried it and would regularly have multiple cabs cancel en-route to me because they just picked up a closer fare.

Late at night, you walked home if you live there - there was one bus that went across the Bay if BART had stopped running. SF isn't that big but definitely has weird sketchy parts and whatever people say, it was much sketchier in the 80s and 90s. SF has never been a 24 city except for certain clubs in certain places. I think taxis would wait outside those clubs if you were lucky.

But pre-Uber, calling a cab was a waste of time.

Had multiple experiences back in the day of walking miles at night to get home while trying to get a cab, on a Friday or Saturday it was very difficult.

In smaller cities, getting a cab was a huge issue prior to Uber/Lyft. When I was younger and went out to bars a lot, my friends and I had the personal number of a local cab driver because it was often the only way to find a ride home at the end of the night.

You drive yourself since you can’t assume they will be there.

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