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I travel to Japan twice a year for business and for vacation, and coming back to the Bay Area and dealing with its transportation infrastructure is always jarri

I travel to Japan twice a year for business and for vacation, and coming back to the Bay Area and dealing with its transportation infrastructure is always jarring. I find the Bay Area very difficult to get around. The roads are jammed with commuters who live far from their workplaces due to the housing situation. There is not enough housing near job centers, which bids up the prices of available housing to very high levels that requires FAANG-level salaries to clear unless one wants to have an army of roommates. Thus, many people have to commute, some from far-flung exurbs and even from Central Valley cities like Stockton and Modesto. Public transportation in the Bay Area is better than most American cities, but it’s still underpowered for the size of the metro area. Not all residences are served by trains, and bus service is often infrequent and subject to delays. Missing a connection can lead to major inconveniences (such as a long 30-60 minute wait) or even being unable to reach your destination without an über-expensive Uber or Lyft ride. There’s also matters of safety and cleanliness on public transportation; every now and then I smell unpleasant odors like marijuana and urine, and occasionally I see sketchy people. It’s a major step down from Tokyo, where public transportation is ultra-convenient, reliable in non-emergency situations, impeccably clean, and generally safe. The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues. If it were merely technology, we’d have solutions by now.

holmesworcester 1y ago
One way to look at this is that the Bay Area focuses on transportation technology that works and scales regardless of the rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible. And the Bay Area, largely, eats its own dogfood. There is no faster, more powerful public transportation system than a city that allows Uber to offer mototaxi service. Uber was allowed to turned that on in Rio at some point in the last couple years and it puts busses and subways to shame. The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero.
- lazyasciiart 1y ago
  Why is Uber so much better than Grab?
  - paunchy 1y ago
    Because Grab is a copy of Uber and it would not exist without Uber. It may be that Grab is an equal (or perhaps better) implementation right now. But the entire category of app-based ride-sharing was created by Uber.
    - lazyasciiart 1y ago
      That’s totally irrelevant to the argument that cities must have Uber to have good transit.
      - smcin 1y ago
        Ok, clearly GGP generically meant "app-hailed ridesharing" not specifically Uber. We know there are various incumbents in other countries.
- flerchin 1y ago
  The deaths per mile on the subway must be 3 orders of magnitude lower than the skilled motorcyclists.
  - jandrese 1y ago
    Especially if they're lane splitting in a crowded city street to speed through traffic jams. That's incredibly dangerous. https://i.redd.it/rviipp7czy131.jpg https://i.redd.it/rviipp7czy131.jpg And the rail fatalities are only that high because of people using it for suicide.
    - smcin 1y ago
      Divide rail fatalities into ones of non-passengers vs passengers.
- mike_d 1y ago
  The Bay Area is crippled by people who live comfortably within biking distance of Whole Foods, Zeitgeist, and their Apple shuttle bus stop. These people can't fathom why anyone would want to drive a dirty car and blight the city with roads. It costs almost a billion dollars to build a mile of BART, due to political corruption 65% of all MUNI service lines are to/from Chinatown, we keep the "iconic" cable car lines going even though they have the highest rate of accidents per mile and per vehicle in the country. We just need to double or triple down on roads and let things like Waymo and Uber save us from ourselves. Bikebrains rant about things like "induced demand" without actually understanding that building additional infrastructure simply serves pent up demand. They point to things like the Katy Freeway which was expanded to 26 lanes but "traffic got worse" - ignoring the fact that travel speeds increased by 60% for almost a decade until Houston's population ballooned to what it is today.
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    If I wanted to live in Houston, I'd live in Houston. I'm one of those "bike brained" morons that is happy that are getting rid of a lane on Grand Ave because pedestrians keep getting killed.
    - mike_d 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - platevoltage 1y ago
        And what exactly does slowing down traffic on a street in Oakland have to do with returning to office or covid?
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  The transit situation in the bay area is so bad that even the FAANG companies run their own private transit systems of commuter buses. I doubt there's many people paying for an Uber 2x a day from Fremont to Santa Clara with any regularity, but thousands of commuters do that trip daily by car and train.
- bkettle 1y ago
  Why are the socio-political stars aligned in tens of countries across Europe and Asia but not in the US, if such alignment is so rare? I might argue that the bay area focuses on transportation technology that is flashy and gets around existing regulations because it is new, with hardly any regard at all for how it scales.
  - beisner 1y ago
    Unfortunately the problem is literally the way the government is structured from an electoral + mathematical perspective. Particularly heinous failure mode is polarization, which has been the norm for 50+ years (really started after Vietnam). Biased towards inaction and status quo structurally. The last sustainably unifying event was WWII, which doesn’t bode well.
  - linguae 1y ago
    In my opinion, there are two factors at play: (1) social division and (2) it’s easy in America for self-interested people and organizations to block progress by weaponizing due process. I’ll expound on the first point. European countries and East Asian countries generally have a stronger sense of cultural cohesion, while America has many deep divisions such as: 1. Social liberalism versus social conservatism, which also correlates to a secular versus cultural Christian worldview. 2. Racial and ethnic divides with sometimes centuries of bad blood 3. Class divides between the poor, the working class, the middle class, and the wealthy. These divisions make it harder for people to come together to work for the common good. There are some politicians who shamelessly act in the interest of their voter bases with little regard for those outside their bases, and there are also people who are suspicious of even well-intended proposals since there may be hidden motives behind them.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    One thing I wonder about is the extreme localism of US transport. As far as I can see from visiting, the Muni buses and subway/trams cover only SF proper, and kinda abruptly cut off before you get to places that are theoretically other cities, but in practice close enough that they’d be treated as suburbs of SF elsewhere (South San Francisco, say). That seems to have its own independent transport (except for BART and Caltrain) which seems pretty bizarre.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  In Uganda and east africa they call the motorcycle taxis "bodaboda" and they're generally regarded as the only reliable way to get through insane traffic. They're also exceedingly dangerous.
  - ExoticPearTree 1y ago
    You should try taxi bikes in Vietnam, especially in Ho Chi Min City or Hanoi at rush hour. It feels like you get born a second time at the end of the trip.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  > The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero I'd hazard a guess that an experienced cyclist would be able to beat most subway journeys too Top Gear "London Race" episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1140803 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1140803
- smcin 1y ago
  "rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible." is nonsense. EU countries have been building HSR for half a century already. Japan has HSR. China has HSR, nationwide. S Korea has HSR. At national/federal level. BRICS are next. The US is being left behind. Your remark only holds true for US (and in particular California) politics and development laws, NIMBYism and the abuse of environmental process like CEQA [0], and how doing transit (in the US) involves coordinating multiple city govts and agencies - instead of it being a federal/state project. If Eisenhower's 1950s interstate highway system had had to be done like that and rely on permission from multiple local officials and govts and local revenue-raising, it'd be a patchwork mess too, if it had ever even gotten built at all. Eventually results in BART's 2003 Millbrae-SFO extension ($1.5b / only 8.7 miles of track). Address the root-cause, not the symptom. After half a century of piecemeal transit in only some areas, this all causes the chicken-and-egg that US homeowners historically associate proximity to transit with negative property value. As to the comparison to Uber, the non-viability of public transport in post-1950 US urban-planning cities/suburbs/exurbs is due to the low density, like why aren't there a grocery, cafes, services, banks, Amazon lockers, fractional car rental services etc. in/near any major transit node in the US? Amsterdam, Singapore, Barcelona prove you can have pleasant liveable world-class cities based on transit. [0]: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101910935/balancing-need-for-growth-with-environmental-protection-how-will-california-set-environmental-agenda https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101910935/balancing-need-for-...
tveyben 1y ago
Just came back from a vacation in Japan, and completely agree - even compared to the (much better than SF) danish public transport system the Japanese are orders of a magnitude better on so many levels! Nu then - having 37 mio people just in one city, Tokyo, does require you to get the logistics in order (all of Denmark is just around 6 mio…)
dmoy 1y ago
> The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues Well and population / population density. China is similar - the big 15-20m+ metros have crazy good subway systems. But SF bay area is half the low end? 7.5m or so? Harbin is 10m and its subway is kinda meh. Down at 5m metro population in e.g. Changchun or Jinan and it's a pretty piddling subway/city rail system.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  This isn’t a great excuse. The Berlin metro area is smaller than that, and had to contend with _being split in half_ for 40 years, and still has an infinitely better public transport system than SF, say.
  - dmoy 1y ago
    Sure, but even Berlin doesn't have Tokyo level of public transit. By my comment I mean that the things GP list aren't the only things that separate SF public transit and Tokyo public transit. You'd also need crazy high population and density too. I don't disagree with GP's list of things, I just think they're not exhaustive. They might be sufficient to get SF to Berlin level of public transit.
  - fch42 1y ago
    Berlin also invested billions into rebuilding much of its metro system in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, 25y later, with investment having dropped off, it's occasionally creaking. That said, to "beat BART" isn't a milestone for any public transport system anywhere. Except ... in the US, where even BART stands out as great. Hmm. Relatively. (one part of me is kinda curious how the 101 would look like if you didn't do any work on it for 20 years. Mostly because it'd probably be a rather cool setting for some dystopian movie. Anyway ... transport infrastructure, whether public transport or roads, costs a f*ckton of money)
mbac32768 1y ago
They should fly everyone who works at BART to a conference in Tokyo for a week and make them ride the subways until the shame sets in. When they return to their hotel rooms at the end of the week they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.
- BurritoAlPastor 1y ago
  I don’t think BART employees really have any say in where BART stations do and don’t go, or how many trains they get. Try city councils instead, although none of them take BART anyways so they won’t know the difference.
- kelnos 1y ago
  I don't think the problem is BART employees. The problem is twofold: 1. The community doesn't care. Leaving trash and making a mess is acceptable behavior. Or at least, it isn't called out (which I can understand, as there are safety issues around calling out bad behavior in public). This is the biggest factor: the vast majority of Japanese people wouldn't even consider leaving trash or making a mess on transit. 2. I'm sure BART leadership would be happy to combat this problem by cleaning more frequently and removing sketchy people from trains. But where is the funding for this going to come from? > they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor. Even in jest, it's pretty fucked up to insinuate that someone should commit ritual suicide for any reason, let alone because they work for a transit agency that can't keep its trains clean. Please don't do that here. Or anywhere.
  - mbac32768 1y ago
    They should feel deep shame because the Tokyo system is better in like every possible fucking dimension, not just cleanliness.

holmesworcester 1y ago

One way to look at this is that the Bay Area focuses on transportation technology that works and scales regardless of the rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible. And the Bay Area, largely, eats its own dogfood. There is no faster, more powerful public transportation system than a city that allows Uber to offer mototaxi service. Uber was allowed to turned that on in Rio at some point in the last couple years and it puts busses and subways to shame. The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero.

lazyasciiart 1y ago
Why is Uber so much better than Grab?
- paunchy 1y ago
  Because Grab is a copy of Uber and it would not exist without Uber. It may be that Grab is an equal (or perhaps better) implementation right now. But the entire category of app-based ride-sharing was created by Uber.
  - lazyasciiart 1y ago
    That’s totally irrelevant to the argument that cities must have Uber to have good transit.
    - smcin 1y ago
      Ok, clearly GGP generically meant "app-hailed ridesharing" not specifically Uber. We know there are various incumbents in other countries.
flerchin 1y ago
The deaths per mile on the subway must be 3 orders of magnitude lower than the skilled motorcyclists.
- jandrese 1y ago
  Especially if they're lane splitting in a crowded city street to speed through traffic jams. That's incredibly dangerous. https://i.redd.it/rviipp7czy131.jpg https://i.redd.it/rviipp7czy131.jpg And the rail fatalities are only that high because of people using it for suicide.
  - smcin 1y ago
    Divide rail fatalities into ones of non-passengers vs passengers.
mike_d 1y ago
The Bay Area is crippled by people who live comfortably within biking distance of Whole Foods, Zeitgeist, and their Apple shuttle bus stop. These people can't fathom why anyone would want to drive a dirty car and blight the city with roads. It costs almost a billion dollars to build a mile of BART, due to political corruption 65% of all MUNI service lines are to/from Chinatown, we keep the "iconic" cable car lines going even though they have the highest rate of accidents per mile and per vehicle in the country. We just need to double or triple down on roads and let things like Waymo and Uber save us from ourselves. Bikebrains rant about things like "induced demand" without actually understanding that building additional infrastructure simply serves pent up demand. They point to things like the Katy Freeway which was expanded to 26 lanes but "traffic got worse" - ignoring the fact that travel speeds increased by 60% for almost a decade until Houston's population ballooned to what it is today.
- platevoltage 1y ago
  If I wanted to live in Houston, I'd live in Houston. I'm one of those "bike brained" morons that is happy that are getting rid of a lane on Grand Ave because pedestrians keep getting killed.
  - mike_d 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - platevoltage 1y ago
      And what exactly does slowing down traffic on a street in Oakland have to do with returning to office or covid?
AlotOfReading 1y ago
The transit situation in the bay area is so bad that even the FAANG companies run their own private transit systems of commuter buses. I doubt there's many people paying for an Uber 2x a day from Fremont to Santa Clara with any regularity, but thousands of commuters do that trip daily by car and train.
bkettle 1y ago
Why are the socio-political stars aligned in tens of countries across Europe and Asia but not in the US, if such alignment is so rare? I might argue that the bay area focuses on transportation technology that is flashy and gets around existing regulations because it is new, with hardly any regard at all for how it scales.
- beisner 1y ago
  Unfortunately the problem is literally the way the government is structured from an electoral + mathematical perspective. Particularly heinous failure mode is polarization, which has been the norm for 50+ years (really started after Vietnam). Biased towards inaction and status quo structurally. The last sustainably unifying event was WWII, which doesn’t bode well.
- linguae 1y ago
  In my opinion, there are two factors at play: (1) social division and (2) it’s easy in America for self-interested people and organizations to block progress by weaponizing due process. I’ll expound on the first point. European countries and East Asian countries generally have a stronger sense of cultural cohesion, while America has many deep divisions such as: 1. Social liberalism versus social conservatism, which also correlates to a secular versus cultural Christian worldview. 2. Racial and ethnic divides with sometimes centuries of bad blood 3. Class divides between the poor, the working class, the middle class, and the wealthy. These divisions make it harder for people to come together to work for the common good. There are some politicians who shamelessly act in the interest of their voter bases with little regard for those outside their bases, and there are also people who are suspicious of even well-intended proposals since there may be hidden motives behind them.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  One thing I wonder about is the extreme localism of US transport. As far as I can see from visiting, the Muni buses and subway/trams cover only SF proper, and kinda abruptly cut off before you get to places that are theoretically other cities, but in practice close enough that they’d be treated as suburbs of SF elsewhere (South San Francisco, say). That seems to have its own independent transport (except for BART and Caltrain) which seems pretty bizarre.
datadrivenangel 1y ago
In Uganda and east africa they call the motorcycle taxis "bodaboda" and they're generally regarded as the only reliable way to get through insane traffic. They're also exceedingly dangerous.
- ExoticPearTree 1y ago
  You should try taxi bikes in Vietnam, especially in Ho Chi Min City or Hanoi at rush hour. It feels like you get born a second time at the end of the trip.
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
> The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero I'd hazard a guess that an experienced cyclist would be able to beat most subway journeys too Top Gear "London Race" episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1140803 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1140803
smcin 1y ago
"rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible." is nonsense. EU countries have been building HSR for half a century already. Japan has HSR. China has HSR, nationwide. S Korea has HSR. At national/federal level. BRICS are next. The US is being left behind. Your remark only holds true for US (and in particular California) politics and development laws, NIMBYism and the abuse of environmental process like CEQA [0], and how doing transit (in the US) involves coordinating multiple city govts and agencies - instead of it being a federal/state project. If Eisenhower's 1950s interstate highway system had had to be done like that and rely on permission from multiple local officials and govts and local revenue-raising, it'd be a patchwork mess too, if it had ever even gotten built at all. Eventually results in BART's 2003 Millbrae-SFO extension ($1.5b / only 8.7 miles of track). Address the root-cause, not the symptom. After half a century of piecemeal transit in only some areas, this all causes the chicken-and-egg that US homeowners historically associate proximity to transit with negative property value. As to the comparison to Uber, the non-viability of public transport in post-1950 US urban-planning cities/suburbs/exurbs is due to the low density, like why aren't there a grocery, cafes, services, banks, Amazon lockers, fractional car rental services etc. in/near any major transit node in the US? Amsterdam, Singapore, Barcelona prove you can have pleasant liveable world-class cities based on transit. [0]: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101910935/balancing-need-for-growth-with-environmental-protection-how-will-california-set-environmental-agenda https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101910935/balancing-need-for-...

tveyben 1y ago

Just came back from a vacation in Japan, and completely agree - even compared to the (much better than SF) danish public transport system the Japanese are orders of a magnitude better on so many levels! Nu then - having 37 mio people just in one city, Tokyo, does require you to get the logistics in order (all of Denmark is just around 6 mio…)

dmoy 1y ago

> The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues Well and population / population density. China is similar - the big 15-20m+ metros have crazy good subway systems. But SF bay area is half the low end? 7.5m or so? Harbin is 10m and its subway is kinda meh. Down at 5m metro population in e.g. Changchun or Jinan and it's a pretty piddling subway/city rail system.

rsynnott 1y ago
This isn’t a great excuse. The Berlin metro area is smaller than that, and had to contend with _being split in half_ for 40 years, and still has an infinitely better public transport system than SF, say.
- dmoy 1y ago
  Sure, but even Berlin doesn't have Tokyo level of public transit. By my comment I mean that the things GP list aren't the only things that separate SF public transit and Tokyo public transit. You'd also need crazy high population and density too. I don't disagree with GP's list of things, I just think they're not exhaustive. They might be sufficient to get SF to Berlin level of public transit.
- fch42 1y ago
  Berlin also invested billions into rebuilding much of its metro system in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, 25y later, with investment having dropped off, it's occasionally creaking. That said, to "beat BART" isn't a milestone for any public transport system anywhere. Except ... in the US, where even BART stands out as great. Hmm. Relatively. (one part of me is kinda curious how the 101 would look like if you didn't do any work on it for 20 years. Mostly because it'd probably be a rather cool setting for some dystopian movie. Anyway ... transport infrastructure, whether public transport or roads, costs a f*ckton of money)

mbac32768 1y ago

They should fly everyone who works at BART to a conference in Tokyo for a week and make them ride the subways until the shame sets in. When they return to their hotel rooms at the end of the week they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.

BurritoAlPastor 1y ago
I don’t think BART employees really have any say in where BART stations do and don’t go, or how many trains they get. Try city councils instead, although none of them take BART anyways so they won’t know the difference.
kelnos 1y ago
I don't think the problem is BART employees. The problem is twofold: 1. The community doesn't care. Leaving trash and making a mess is acceptable behavior. Or at least, it isn't called out (which I can understand, as there are safety issues around calling out bad behavior in public). This is the biggest factor: the vast majority of Japanese people wouldn't even consider leaving trash or making a mess on transit. 2. I'm sure BART leadership would be happy to combat this problem by cleaning more frequently and removing sketchy people from trains. But where is the funding for this going to come from? > they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor. Even in jest, it's pretty fucked up to insinuate that someone should commit ritual suicide for any reason, let alone because they work for a transit agency that can't keep its trains clean. Please don't do that here. Or anywhere.
- mbac32768 1y ago
  They should feel deep shame because the Tokyo system is better in like every possible fucking dimension, not just cleanliness.