If buses and cars participate in the same road traffic (i.e. the bus doesn't have dedicated lanes), then a bus trip will never be faster than a comparable car trip. This is because you have to walk to/from the bus stop at both ends of the journey, wait for a bus to show up, ride the bus and have it stop for other passengers, transfer between routes, the bus has slower acceleration and turning than a car, etc.

Think about even the most strawman trip possible: A bus rider and a car driver start exactly at the location of a bus stop, the bus shows up exactly at the start time, both contestants ride/drive straight for a few kilometres (which happens to follow exactly one bus route, without changing buses; but the bus might stop a few times along the way for other passengers), and end exactly at a bus stop. The car will win every single time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis

In aggregate, people go the fastest way - no way to stop this from happening. In places where everyone takes public transit, the transit is fast. To make more people take public transit, you make the transit fast.

Reserving lanes as bus lanes can actually speed up car traffic by making more people switch to bus.

The situation we are talking about here involves a bridge with no dedicated bus lane or fast lane.

Easy to solve with a colostomy bag

West Oakland to Embarcadero is great: 7min BART, or 45-60(+) at rush hour on the bridge. No better timesave that I know of with BART.

Every person alive has had to use the restroom. What you mean is that you have a bladder issue.

Clean, comfortable restrooms on buses are possible. There just has to be the will to do it.

It's pure snobbery

We were discussing riding the bus to a place that depending on traffic is a 20 minute car ride from SF, or a 2 hour car ride in the worst case scenario traffic.

There are a few bridges that connect SF to other places across large bodies of water, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. These bridges do not provide a dedicated lane for the buses. These bridges act as a choke point for traffic. As a result, the buses are not reliably on time, because the traffic is hard to predict and it depends on whether or not people have a car accident that evening.

As I mentioned in another comment, these buses do not have bathrooms inside. So you are spending an unpredictable amount of time standing at an unsheltered bus stop, often with no bench to rest on, followed by an unknown amount of time on the bus.

The buses come infrequently enough that if you go find a restroom after waiting a while at the stop, and the bus comes while you are gone, it will be a decent chunk of your life spent waiting for the next bus to come as well.

This might be fine if you're on vacation and you just wanted to explore the Bay Area, but if you live here and work here, this is just too much time!

If you have a car, there is essentially no upside to taking the bus in this situation, which means if you are greedy and choose to drive instead you contribute to traffic by taking up more space on the road.

In contrast, if you choose to take the train, you know exactly how long the trip is going to be, because there's no variable traffic disrupting the schedules. It's predictable. It's convenient. Sometimes the train might get stopped for one reason or another, but the trains come so frequently that this is rarely an issue.

Before your trip, you're also inside a train station, which is sheltered, has seating, and even often has bathrooms.

There's a sign telling you clearly how long until the next train arrives, you don't have to count on something on your phone to find out.

In SF it really depends on which line you're on, and a bit of luck. In my experience the 9 was the worst. I didn't ride that one often, but almost every time I encountered something ridiculous. One time a guy rolled a blunt and started smoking it on the bus. Another time a guy in a wheelchair spilled a bottle of booze that then ran up and down the floor of the bus. I got off early several times when an obviously crazy homeless person got on and started silently staring me down.

But even popular commuter routes like the 38 can get pretty dicey. One time a guy was blasting music out of a bluetooth speaker. He had headphones sitting on his neck, so I asked him to use his headphones instead. His response was to get in my face and start yelling, threatening to beat me up. Everyone around us stepped away and ignored us. Apparently the next stop was his, so he got off while threatening to jump me if he ever saw me again.

If you take public transit in the bay area regularly, you are almost guaranteed to have some very unpleasant experiences.

The buses in SF and NYC suck because of this bipartisan belief of public transit as social welfare rather than a means for the bulk of society to get to their destination. This leads to things like far too many bus stops because granny complained, lack of fare enforcement, high staffing costs, etc. To make the bus as nice as Vancouver, these cities would need to cut stops and do a draconian fare enforcement campaign. For some reason, Canadian bus riders are not ungovernable barbarians like Americans, despite being poorer on average and more diverse.

Where I am, buses are heavily subsidised; cost is about $3 per passenger mile. Fares are much cheaper (so cheap nobody ever really thinks about it, other than worrying if they have quarters for exact change).

They are often empty or have 1 or 2 riders.

They are slow, often show up to a stop late, so you have to plan everything an hour early.

They don’t have amenities like bathrooms and are uncomfortable for long trips, even though that’s the only sensible way to use them.

Due to political pressures, they have many, many stops and few express buses, so they are much slower than a car. The stops usually have nobody at them but the driver still has to slow down and check (sometimes they will just skip a stop they know is almost always empty).

The bus depots are not particularly safe or pleasant after dark and have trouble with attracting antisocial people.

Meanwhile, it would be cheaper to just pay for Ubers for anyone who wants them, and just make the Uber show up randomly late to replicate the experience.

There is a market emerging here often branded as “hood Uber”, “Alicia’s Uber” etc of people who will drive you for $1 a mile (cheaper than Uber) negotiated by text message and paid via CashApp etc. It’s completely unregulated. Some are now offering regular service in a minivan on a fixed route taking people to/from employers every day.