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SF public transit is pretty disfunctional and Chariot was trying to offer an alternative. - Timeliness - Busses and trains reliability are a joke compared to d

• geofft 8y ago
  A lot of the history of transit-disrupting startups in the SF Bay Area can be attributed to how truly bad public transit in the SF Bay Area is. I understood Uber a lot more after trying to hail a taxi in SF. (Same with Boring Company and LA traffic.) A real disruptive solution for humanity - but a hard one to monetize - would be to figure out why cities with good public transit / shared transit infrastructure managed to build them (off the top of my head, Tokyo, NYC-of-the-past, parts of China, Chicago, etc.) and figure out how to replicate it elsewhere.
  • chrischen 8y ago
    There are many cities that do certain things better than others, but what I don't understand is that most local politicians don't travel there and learn from how others govern their cities and don't accept their own problems have been solved elsewhere.
    • rsynnott 8y ago
      Chicken and egg problem. You can’t have a good transport system if people don’t use it (too expensive) and people won’t use it unless it’s good. Was in San Francisco recently and it really is mostly impressively bad, but one of the major sources of badness is that it’s mostly pretty infrequent. Presumably because people don’t use it. Edit: One thing they could fix, easily; unified, visitor accessible, payment system. And more realtime bus information. Those are simple things that they could borrow off any decent-sized European city. Further edit: looks like the Clipper card is easier to get than I thought. Googled before I went, but must have gotten outdated information.
      • coccinelle 8y ago
        I thought the same (bad transit, people don't use it, it becomes even worse), but after no longer being able to ride my bike, I realized that many buses and Muni trains are packed at least at rush hour. People do use public transit in SF, so its sorry state is even more of a shame.
        • cbhl 8y ago
          My pet theory: the people who use it (immigrants, environmentalists, folks new to town) are not the people who make funding decisions ("san francisco natives").
      • scrumbledober 8y ago
        Doesn't the clipper card allow you to use one payment system for caltrain, bart, and muni? I'm not sure if SamTrans busses are included.
        • silotis 8y ago
          Clipper cards work on SamTrans buses too.
          • wpietri 8y ago
            And they work on all the ferries I have taken recently. Other than the fact that it's one person per Clipper Card, they're great.
            • masonic 8y ago
              Clipper cards even get you a discount on the new Richmond ferry.
        • rsynnott 8y ago
          Huh, I googled before and got the idea you had to get it by post or something. Looks like that’s outdated information.
    • wutbrodo 8y ago
      Follow SF politics for a couple of years, and you'll see that the problem isn't lack of technocratic solutions, it's politics (with some exceptions that tend to be problems larger than a single city's scope). A supervisor can go tour every functional city in the world and when they came back, they wouldn't be any more effective, because knowledge of how to fix things wasn't the blocker.
  • dnautics 8y ago
    Singapore would be easy to monetize, some of the lines are run as for-profit (it's also one of the cheapest systems around)
    • jeffbax 8y ago
      This. Let transit be a business and fix the incentives.
  • blt 8y ago
    old cities: built dense for walking, because cars didn't exist. new cities: built dense for walking and public transit because private car ownership isn't that common in China 20th century USA cities: built for cars. Sprawl makes public transit too expensive because it requires many lines with low ridership. Wide roads, long distances, and cars flying around everywhere makes walking scary. Driving becomes the only attractive mode of transportation. The problem is deeply embedded in the urban layout and the culture. It will take decades of destruction & rebuilding, plus a huge cultural shift, before USA cities can be fixed.
    • brezina 8y ago
      The core of san francisco, probably 30% of the city's 49 sq mile landmass, and where 60%+ of the population lives, was built before cars existed. Most of SF was a walking/horse city, and then a walking/streetcar/cablecar city.
      • lemoncucumber 8y ago
        It's no coincidence that SF is the only part of the Bay Area where it's truly viable to live without a car.
        • usaar333 8y ago
          True, alongside downtown Berkeley, Oakland, and Palo Alto (maybe a few others) Nonetheless, mass transit in SF is still pretty crappy. Muni is notoriously unreliable and slow (it's often faster to jog than take Muni -- to say nothing of biking).
          • api_or_ipa 8y ago
            > Palo Alto As someone who lived in Palo Alto for almost a year without a car... there is so much to be desired for public transit. Outside of the few blocks near University, it quickly becomes a walking wasteland. My bike, on the other-hand, was a divine gift from the heaven and, when combined with CalTrain, enabled a fairly large world-bubble.
  • princekolt 8y ago
    > would be to figure out why cities with good public transit / shared transit infrastructure managed to build them Few NIMBYs and a less-car-focused mentality which is typical of the US.
  • patmcguire 8y ago
    The hard part is how to make it work politically. I don't know if any place has really done it in an environment that was mostly built out already. Manhattan used to have 700k more residents than it does now, and that was when a lot of the island was still farmland - people spread out with the trains. Once you're out of space it's very difficult to develop transit, because that would probably mean a homeowner doesn't get what they want.
  • atombender 8y ago
    I don't know the West coast very well, so I'm curious -- are there any (smaller) cities there where you can actually get by without a car to do grocery shopping, commute to one's office (assuming it's in the same town/city), etc.? I'm thinking something comparable to Amsterdam, Copenhagen or Berlin, where you can get by with a bike and/or subway, or often just walking. Portland? Seattle? I've visited Silicon Valley and SF, and I remember it as being really pedestrian-unfriendly. A friend of mine has a story about visiting San Jose without a car, and not being able to go to a bookstore because, while the map showed it as being a block away and he could clearly see it, there was no way to reach it on foot from where he was.
    • justizin 8y ago
      I have lived in San Francisco for 15 years with no car, both at the bottom of the nation's income brackets and near the top. Some people just don't want to mix with "normal" people and a lot of San Franciscans wish they would fucking leave.
    • Rebelgecko 8y ago
      It's possible on the West Coast, and actually probably easier to do in bigger cities. However you need to be particular about where you live and work, which usually involves paying more money. It also becomes much harder if you have a significant other and kids.
      • atombender 8y ago
        Sure. Looking for specific examples, though! Currently residing in NYC and pretty unhappy about the difficulty of getting out in nature. My ideal town is on the water; not too big; good public transportation; flat enough for biking; forests, mountains and lakes easily reachable by bike/walking/subway; dense urban core for apartment living or small house; decent downtown with some brand name shopping; temperate climate. Plus points for abundant access to public EV charges. My home town is Oslo, Norway, which ticks all the boxes except the climate one, which always bugged me when I was living there. The lack of daylight and sun is something of a dealbreaker. Curious what the situation is elsewhere. I've heard good things about Denver and Raleigh, for example, though those aren't so temperate either.
  • danans 8y ago
    If you're ever in London, I recommend visiting the Museum of Transport in Covent Garden to understand how London's transit system developed.
  • jeffbax 8y ago
    Privatize it and stop letting local politics strangle it https://www.econlib.org/no-more-public-mass-transit-infrastructure/ https://www.econlib.org/no-more-public-mass-transit-infrastr... > In Japan, being in the railway business means being in the real estate business, explained Egon Terplan, SPUR’s regional planning director, at Thursday afternoon’s panel discussion about what the Bay Area can learn from Japanese transit station area development. “They are able to capture the value of the train stations they are building and beyond. One third of the revenue is from retail, services, hotels.” > That’s because rather than contracting out the business opportunities on the real estate around their stations, they own it all–everything from department stores to vending machines on the platforms. That has turned Japan’s six passenger railway companies–Hokkaido Railway Company, East Japan Railway Company, Central Japan Railway Company, West Japan Railway Company, Shikoku Railway Company, and Kyushu Railway Company–into hugely profitable corporations. > “These are companies listed on the stock exchange; they make money,” said Terplan. They also, together, carry nearly a third of the world’s railway passengers. > In Japan, the profit motive of real estate, retail, and office space–in addition to the trains–becomes a bit of a feedback loop. The Japanese railway companies want to maximize the value they derive from space around the stations. So transit oriented development isn’t just about housing. In Japan, it includes department stores, office buildings, shops, and hotels, and housing on different levels directly above and below the stations. Regulation is a serious problem in "free market" USA. Subway construction is 7x the cost in NYC than Paris because of land and labor regulations. It's out of control, nobody cares because most just blame some other thing like funding being insufficient when that's not really the case. Instead they'll try to get more from the gas tax instead of fixing the root problem.
    • tixocloud 8y ago
      It's an interesting concept that I am not sure will work in the North American context. You see far greater numbers of conglomerates that own multiple businesses in Asia than in North America/Europe. North American business schools are all about focusing on one business and one industry.
• maximtheory 8y ago
  It doesn't matter how well you are "solving a pain", when it turns out to be more of a localized pain of a city you reside in. The addressable market reduces to "cities with a dysfunctional transit system".
  • metildaa 8y ago
    Most US cities are lacking a functional transit system. Seattle, Portland and a few others are odd birds in how transit gets dedicated bus jumps/lanes, signal priority, and is generally notably faster than driving during rush hour. In Seattle specifically, the city taxes businesses who don't provide transit passes for their employees. It varies from the urban core to the further flung parts of town, but if you buy every employee a transit pass, its often equal cost or cheaper than the tax you pay per employee. Bikers, people walking to work & those who buy passes elsewhere have to regularly recertify they aren't driving, which is a form that can be a tad annoying to fill out.