West coast public transportation will absolutely never beat East Coast transportation and I say this as a person who has lived on the West coast my entire life.

West coast public transportation will absolutely never beat East Coast transportation and I say this as a person who has lived on the West coast my entire life. In fact West coast public transportation will always be significantly worse than the east coast. It doesn't matter what initiatives or policies are being implemented on the West coast. It is literally financially and physically unrealistic to have any transportation system even remotely close to what they have in NYC on the West Coast. The reason is the layout of cities. West Coast cities are mostly suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl does not lend well to public transportation. For public transportation to work, you need a high density city. Los Angeles will never be walkable and will never have a subway system that all people use regularly simply because the city is too spread out. Lets put it to numbers: L.A. County has 4,084 square miles. New York City has 304.8 square miles. For LA county to build a network of rails with the same effectiveness of NYC, the size of the NYC subway needs to be replicated approximately 13.4 times. The NYC subway system has about 236.2 mi of rail. AN equivalent system for the same coverage in LA will be 3165 mi. The current longest subway system in the world is the Shanghai Metro at 420 mi. Effective Public transportation will not work on the west coast due to physical limits and impossibilities. If you want to live in a city with great public transportation you need to live in a city of apartments. Any city where you can have your own backyard is a city that is not dense enough.