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Being from a place in Europe where there's excellent public transportation, this entire discussion is absolutely hilarious. See, if all of you that expressed i

Being from a place in Europe where there's excellent public transportation, this entire discussion is absolutely hilarious. See, if all of you that expressed interest in this idea instead actually took the caltrain, the bart, and the samtrans buses and whatever local bus lines there are, then the companies operating those would see that there is increased demand, and the increased revenues would go to making the system better. There are already people around whose job it is to handle the messy details of moving groups of people around the valley, why make yet another company in parallell? What annoyed me the most when I tried the public transportation in the valley is how fractured it is, there's lots of different companies, no unified payment method, no unified ticketing system, no unified timetables, no unified maps, etc. Figuring out how to get from point A to point B is really hard because there's no coordination at all. And into this mess you want to introduce yet another form of transportation? Madness.

jfb 15y ago
Because the public transit companies are not fully rider supported, they receive heavy subsidies from the various municipalities they service. Thus, they are in many ways constrained from operating optimally; in addition, they are riddled with politics and empire-building -- why do you think that I can't buy the equivalent of an Oyster or a Carte Orange stored value card that will let me take e.g. the Alameda ferry to MUNI to Caltrain to VTA? Let me also remind you that the distances and population densities are very, very different, even in a relatively dense area of the US like the Peninsula.
slewis 15y ago
Its appealing simply because a compute by bus is generally faster. You're right that the public transportation situation sucks, but wrong that people shouldn't want a new solution that works for them personally.
- eru 15y ago
  And more competition can only help. The argument that a fractured industry needs less competition seems strange.

jfb 15y ago

Because the public transit companies are not fully rider supported, they receive heavy subsidies from the various municipalities they service. Thus, they are in many ways constrained from operating optimally; in addition, they are riddled with politics and empire-building -- why do you think that I can't buy the equivalent of an Oyster or a Carte Orange stored value card that will let me take e.g. the Alameda ferry to MUNI to Caltrain to VTA? Let me also remind you that the distances and population densities are very, very different, even in a relatively dense area of the US like the Peninsula.

slewis 15y ago

Its appealing simply because a compute by bus is generally faster. You're right that the public transportation situation sucks, but wrong that people shouldn't want a new solution that works for them personally.

eru 15y ago
And more competition can only help. The argument that a fractured industry needs less competition seems strange.