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Comment by scotth | Hacker News Reader

Whenever someone says this, I can't help but feel they don't know what truly awful public transport looks like.

Sure, there are plenty of places with worse public transit, even just within the state of California. That doesn't change the fact that the Bay Area has an awful public transportation system that fails to provide services to the majority of commuters.

I guess I don't have enough experience. From what I've seen of San Francisco, buses are frequent and timely.

My friend out there checks her phone, leaves the house accordingly, and catches it every time. To me, that seems like excellent service.

> Muni is the slowest major transit system in America—and among the least reliable and most overcrowded.

http://www.spur.org/publications/article/2010-02-01/learning...

Visit a second day and see if your opinion remains. Muni is the worst major-city public transit system in the nation.

SF is just one part of the Bay Area.

It is always relative for public transport. You get people in New York and London whinging about having to wait 6 minutes for the next train, because they just missed one. Coming from an area where we would have buses every hour if you were lucky, this seemed ludicrous, but I started to feel the same way after 6 months.

Part of the reason is because people in New York treat public transit differently: at least in Manhattan, it's assumed that public transit is "just there", i.e. I don't have to time when I leave for the subway. This means I don't bother checking when the train is leaving, or planning my day around the subway, at all. I just assume, given I want to go somewhere, that how long it's going to take me is about the longest it's ever taken me so far.

In contrast, in Providence or Phoenix (or even when taking the train in NY), when using public transit, I make sure to time everything as well as possible, so that I minimize my wait times. Which means it's a lot more of a big deal when there are delays, because there aren't enough buses/trains to just take the next one available, and I end up waiting for the entire time of the delay.

Yeah, try anywhere in southern CA.

LA's made quite a bit of improvement over the past 20 years. It's not particularly great, but I'm not sure it qualifies as worse than the Bay Area anymore. Depends to some extent on where you are within each metro area and what kind of commute you have. Some LA maps (metro and commuter rail):

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spring-2012-LACMTA-M...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Metrolink_system_dia...

The extension of the Expo Line (light blue on the first map) out to Santa Monica, scheduled to open next year, should improve things further. The Purple Line extension even more, but that's unfortunately some years out.

The bus network is also crazy-extensive, and used by a large portion of the city: http://media.metro.net/riding_metro/maps/images/system_map.g...

Well the silicon valley is based over here so you would expect better.

Wow, completely misunderstood that. Not sure how.

Not sure what that means. Where is here?

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