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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

In the Bay Area it's easier to create AGI than reliable, consistent, clean public transit.

The Bay Area has reliable, clean, consistent public transit right now, it's just not evenly distributed

I'm from the Bay and no longer live there but for how massive the region (functionally: Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz; SF to Antioch+) is the public transit is pretty good. Obviously not perfect and a lot of room for improvement.

I've spoken with old timers who would talk about the days before the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, to name one piece of the puzzle.

> The program applies to all 27 San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies that accept contactless Visa tap-to-pay.

Probably has something to do with that. Why on Earth are there 27 different transit agencies in the Bay Area? Probably should be a single digit, no?

The why would be the ~100 municipalities in the bay area.

Which is a problem in and of itself, at least theoretically. I don't live in SF, but I do live in a highly balkanized area (Atlanta) where the proliferation of local governments is a weight around the neck of the region overall

There are a couple of metro areas that escaped this problem by having regional government, Mpls/St Paul, MN and Portland, OR.

Minnesota has the Metropolitan Council which derives its power from state statute and can supersede the decisions of local governments. The same people that bitch about ‘my tax dollars’ complain about the Met Council but I feel it provides a cohesive regional planing organization and they provide water, sewer, transportation, and regional parks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council_(Minnesot...

Portland, Oregon has a similar organization called Metro that I am not familiar with, other than it is similar to the Metropolitan Council. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(Oregon_regional_governm...

You say that, but if your SF tax dollars were paying for VTA you'd probably have stronger complaints... Moreover, public transit isn't evenly distributed even within SF so I don't think the transit agency count is an important variable.

They're all tied together through Clipper, so it doesn't make a difference to end users anyway.

It matters in that it's impossible to reliably and efficiently coordinate routes across that many agencies. Even if a rider can go from South San Jose to Oakland to Petaluma in a single trip on a single fare transferring as they go, okay it's an optimal payment experience but the routing and interlocking between systems surely isn't

Hahahaha.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbarton_Rail_Corridor

Check out the storied history of RM2. Taxpayers literally voted to raise sales taxes to fund a rail corridor, and the money was reallocated to a different county for an unrelated project that did not benefit the counties in question. Never mind that an actual functional Dumbarton Rail could be a huge improvement to life on the Peninsula if done well.

Imagine a genuinely fast transfer between any one of the Caltrain stations (say Palo Alto or Menlo Park) and one of the East Bay BART stations. Of course, getting the western portion past all the expensive neighborhoods in the way sounds like a real mess.

They haven't created AGI either, they're just applying the CADT development model to money.

can't find what cadt means

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

“Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers“ [0]

[0]. https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

A reminder, never link directly to jwz from hacker news.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260830071400/https://www.jwz.o...

Why? Genuine question, I’m not aware of jwz

If your HTTP referer is hacker news he shows you a funny picture of a testicle in an egg cup. Some people can't handle the humor.

One of these doesn't require a multi-decade approval process for good reason. (Figuring out the logistics and civil engineering planning is a real thing and building it out isn't trivial) . Of course this could change

you know there are jurisdictions outside of California that don't take multiple decades to add a bus line, right?

these aren't "good reasons" or unavoidable laws of nature or understandable tradeoffs. it's just a uniquely dysfunctional political system

If by "good reason" you mean avoiding any perceived slight to drivers, you've accurately described the current state.

It is a plain fact that there would be more interest in public transit if it was as clean, as safe, and as reliable (if not cleaner, safer, and more reliable) than driving using personal vehicles.

While I understand that “plain fact” is highly subjective, I would think downvoting is more appropriate than flagging. (Vouched)

Would it make sense for cities to wait around, and buy huge fleets of autonomous vehicles? Probably.

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