The car mandate is INSANE. I'll drive somewhere, then figure "the next place I need to go is a five minute walk. I'll walk!"
Then the sidewalk disappears and I'm trudging across lawn next to 60mph traffic.
Another time I wanted to walk to a shop right on the other side of the road. It would have taken 45 minutes.
The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild.
The only way to get to the other side of the road was using a vehicle - there were few hired shuttles that were driving people from hotel to work and back, quite insane.
A week before I was in SF and public transport there was decent, but the vehicles were like from 1950s in comparison what I'm used to use in my country, e.g. if I wanted the bus to stop I had to pull a wire (yes, a wire!) to notify the busdriver that he/she should stop on the next bus stop. That's just one of the issues, and the quality of the bus was no where near the current ones we had in Europe.
On the other hand the bus drivers were very friendly and open.
How else do you signal the bus driver to stop? And why is this an issue?
The NYC MTA years ago used these rubber push strips held in an extruded aluminum profile. They were all over the interior next to each window and ran along the edges of the ceiling for standing passengers. They were frequently broken, cut or pulled from their bases by bored school children. This lead to the button circuit being stuck closed preventing more presses from triggering the bell and annunciator lamp at the front of the bus to notify the driver. People would then miss their stops and start yelling or walk to the driver to ask them to stop. The pull cords are old school but insanely easy to fix and maintain.
In Europe we have buttons. The pull cords and push strips seem weirdly over- and underengineered at the same time.
What's wrong with pulling a wire? Works well, easy to maintain.
A button press is something we use.
Hardly the kind of thing I was expecting in SF. Same for BART, looks like something straight out of the 70s. Or those huge concrete slabs cut with saws, used for sidewalks. In Europe they generally use asphalt.
American infrastructure generally lacks... panache, style, IMHO.
We couldn't afford a car when I was younger so we had to subsist on Translink and Skytrain, and those systems were roughly on par with Muni and VTA. Outside of the Vancouver core, pedestrian infrastructure was weak to nonexistent in suburbs like Richmond, Surrey, South Vancouver, etc or towns/cities like Nanaimo or Abbotsford.
Calgary and Edmonton were worse.
This is one of the major factors I appreciate about the places I've lived in California; for the US it's an exceptionally good environment for pedestrians and cyclists.
Still not great by any means. But whenever I visit friends/fam back in IL where I grew up, I'm teleported back to that cultural hostility in a big way. It doesn't end there though, even as a driver there's rampant aggressive hostility/road-rage behavior to contend with.
It feels like the entire region is full of people fighting for scraps on the streets, just without getting out of their cars. Pedestrians/cyclists are basically just bystander casualties to the mess without infrastructure to isolate them from it.
Friends have lost friends cycling on mixed-mode roads. Drivers don't expect to see cyclists, and the normal traffic speeds involved leave little room for the kind of error that even benevolent humans make all the time, to speak nothing of the many hostile drivers.
I would love to cycle. I love bicycling, and am glad it was an option for you! But I don't believe it's viable where I am without significant structural changes.
Detroit comes to mind, not sure if the rule is still on the books tho.
Business says "put money in the hole. Deliver money to hole with fast wheeled box."
Everything else is disposable, sacrificial.