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Comment by colin_mccabe | Hacker News Reader

The Bay Area has weather. What it doesn't have is winter.

There is plenty of live music in the Bay. Example: https://thefillmore.com/

Public Transport (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none

Wrong. The South Bay has Caltrain, the East Bay has BART. SF has... a few systems, but mostly Muni.

Variety (or lack thereof): There is a lack of variety, whether it be in the type of people encountered, the conversations, the cities/suburbs, or the scenery.

Very untrue. Try visiting Oakland, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Santa Cruz and see if you think they are the same.

Affordability (or lack thereof): Flimsy, modest houses cost north of a million bucks minimum. Everything that requires human labor is stratospherically expensive.

The situation is the same in NYC. Housing is expensive.

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> Wrong. The South Bay has Caltrain, the East Bay has BART. SF has... a few systems, but mostly Muni.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my guess is that you have never lived for a significant time in a major (or even smaller) European or Asian city? Where I come from, pretty much everyone, everyone, uses public transport all the time. To go to work, to go to any leisure activity, to do some quick shopping. And it's extremely clean, modern, and convenient (yeah, people complain, they do all the time, but they complain that it's 10 minutes late in the deepest winter and then still use it daily).

That's just not feasible in the Bay Area. You are screwed here if you don't have a car, where as when I lived as a fully grown adult in Europe, I and many of my peers did not even have a driver's license (getting one is expensive, time intensive, and usually plain not necessary). Many others had a driver's license but no car. Now I need a car just to go to the supermarket because there isn't any in a walkable distance.

I have to say the subway system in Manhattan is indeed the closest I've seen compared to the European or Asian systems I'm familiar with, even though it still looks pretty "industrial" and somewhat run down.

this isn’t true at all. “everyone” isn’t actually everyone. and it isn’t always “clean and convenient”

all you’re measuring is living closer to a city center. and the larger the city the better the story. if you live in the burbs in either location you get a suburb experience

Does not match my experience of both living and traveling in multiple places. Compared to the Bay Area, I know public transport from for example multiple German and French cities plus Prague (places where I lived), or Tokyo and Hong Kong (places where I traveled), and a few others, as clean and convenient, and the "suburb" experience being much different as well.

There is a dramatic difference between most European & Asian public transport systems and most non-NYC American public transport systems, though.

Once I stayed with my in-laws in Sanxia Taiwan, an exurb of Taipei. When we wanted to get to Taipei 101 (37km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to the historic district (26 km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to Tamsui (a bucolic oceanfront suburb, 42km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to Banqiao (the main shopping district, 16km away), we took public transit.

From the mid-peninsula, this is equivalent to going to San Francisco; going to downtown San Jose; going to Half Moon Bay; and going to Stanford Shopping Center. You can actually get to the first two through Caltrain, but you'll walk about a mile to get to the Caltrain station, rather than half a block to get to a bus that comes every 10 minutes. You can't effectively get to HMB, Stanford Shopping Center, or any of the other non-city-center through public transit in the Bay Area.

That's what foreigners tend to complain about with the walkability of American cities. It isn't the difficulty of getting from dense, built-up city centers to top tourist destinations. It's the difficulty of getting from common, ordinary residences to the next tier of destinations.

there’s actually bus lines that take you to all the places you listed in the bay area

I don’t know how much you have taken the bus but it is truly abysmal in the Bay Area. Not to mention the VTA is cutting a bunch of stops due to low ridership (it’s a chicken and egg problem). Additionally, the buses are slow and rarely go where you want to go.

I just looked on Google Maps. Assuming that I can only walk and take public transport getting to Stanford Shopping Center from where I grew up takes 5x longer than driving, Half-Moon Bay 4x longer. For contrast getting to London from any surrounding area and vice versa is generally faster by public transport when compared to driving (even when that trip involves buses).

It simply isn’t comparable. The infrastructure might exist in theory, but it is not very usable.

> And it's extremely clean, modern, and convenient

For every St Pancras there are lots more Gare du Nord.

Convenient, yes. Modern--sometimes. Clean--occasionally.

If you compare the Bay Area to most of the US, it has significantly better public transportation. That was the point I was making in my comment.

> The South Bay has Caltrain

The Caltrain is literally a single railway line.

I think this reasonably approximates to no public transport system.

On top of that it isn't available all the time (how can last train be at midnight -- that means everyone has to wrap up their thing and head out between 11pm and 11:45pm depending on where they are. So it's impossible to not live in SF, not own a car, and say attend any normal house party. Like even one that ends on the early side, at 12am, you'd have to leave before it's over.

It is entirely accurate to say that there is literally _no_ public transport for major routes, for part of the day.

Also within the city, to access most parts you have no BART or other train, you only have Muni. And if you've ever tried to take it without the help of an app like Transit (or even with the help of the app) it's pretty unreliable and can be difficult to figure out. Compare to Taipei or even NYC where you can more or less jump on a train that arrives at regular intervals, at any time, and get to most parts of the city.

Yeah, it would be nice if their last train was later. To be fair, SF kind of shuts down around midnight anyway. If 24/7 bars and so on are important to you, there isn't any substitute for NYC.

The South Bay also has VTA, the Altamont Corridor Express (ACE), and Amtrak. Caltrain is just the one that goes to the penninsula and to SF.

> There is plenty of live music

This is the lowest expectation one could have for a music scene.

> The South Bay has Caltrain

Damning with faint praise.

>The South Bay has Caltrain, the East Bay has BART. SF has... a few systems, but mostly Muni

Americans are so cute in their assumption that what they have aside from cars is a public transport.

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