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Not to mention, New York is relatively clean compared to San Francisco. San Francisco shuts down at 10pm; New York truly is the city that never sleeps, and man

Not to mention, New York is relatively clean compared to San Francisco. San Francisco shuts down at 10pm; New York truly is the city that never sleeps, and many neighborhoods feel busy and alive at all hours of the night. The public transportation in SF (and the larger Bay Area) is a classist, unreliable nightmare. New York has probably the best public transit systems in the country. Owning a car in NY is unusual and unnecessary. In San Francisco, most people own a car, just like any other suburban area in the US. The number and quality of restaurants in NY is unrivaled. New York is unquestionably more diverse. The list goes on and on.

ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
A good part of SF not seeming to be a 24 hour city, is that public transit in SF doesn't run 24 hours-at least not BART, and I don't think MUNI Metro does either. The last SB Caltrain leaves at midnight, I think? EDIT: I'll give you being clean, SF can stand to be cleaned up a bit.
- derwiki 13y ago
  Buses are the only public transit that run all night, but those are limited/different than day routes. Plus many people I know who live here have an unreasonable dislike of the buses, so many just don't consider it an option. I think they're great, except for some passengers who get on in the Tenderloin.
  - wdewind 13y ago
    I don't live in SF but the few times I've been the bus system has been a complete joke. It's like a stereotype of a bad bus system: dirty, unreliable, slow, filled with junkies, loud, doesn't really go anywhere you'd like...there's a reason Uber was founded in SF.
ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
And yes, if we're talking about SF proper, (not the Bay Area as a whole) MUNI can stand to be massively improved.
wyclif 13y ago
The food culture and restaurants in NYC are on a completely different, higher level than SF. Having experienced both, I laugh whenever people in the Bay Area try to claim that SF has the best restaurants. It's not even a race; NY has SF whipped in that regard.
- kenjackson 13y ago
  Eh, I disagree. I've spent time in both and I prefer SF restaurants. I think it may have to do with the fact that local is generally better in California. Also there are some types of food where I just don't prefer the NY style -- in particular I don't like NY pizza. I've tried all the recommended spots and I think I just don't like the style as much. EDIT: Someone mentioned elsewhere about the high quality of food in the Bay once you leave SF. A good example of this is Michael Warring's found in a strip mall in Vallejo (yes, a strip mall in Vallejo) -- just really good food: http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/6/1691241/restaurant/Michael-Warring-Vallejo http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/6/1691241/restaurant/Michael-War...
wdewind 13y ago
> The number and quality of restaurants in NY is unrivaled. NYC native and mostly SF-hater here. Hate to say it but SF has us beat for food. If you want to go have a 5 star meal you're going to pay about the same and get about the same food in both cities (NYC obviously has the edge here, but not hugely), but San Francisco has NYC (especially Manhattan) absolutely dominated at the everyday eating level (ie: burritos, sandwiches, cheaper restaurants). The general ingredient quality just blows NYC away - both meat and produce.
- davidw 13y ago
  To be honest, I ate better day to day when I lived in Portland, Oregon than when I lived in SF. Wouldn't know about NY - I've never been there. And I don't know about 'fine dining' options in either PDX or SF, having been in my early 20ies and not gone in for that sort of thing much. These days, the best eating I do is when the in-laws have a big dinner, with stuff like hand-made tortellini!
  - wdewind 13y ago
    Wouldn't shock me, my experience has been most of the food on the west coast is better. A lot of this has to do with how cheap it is to get quality produce compared to the east coast.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  " The general ingredient quality just blows NYC away - both meat and produce." Well, west coast (meaning: access to Australia and some other selling markets), good climate, etc
  - mike_herrera 13y ago
    SF's neighbor to-the-east, The San Joaquin Valley, is "the nation's salad bowl." Which also happens to be home to many cattle and sheep operations. Access for foreign imports are important for the gourmet scene, but not necessary.
chrismonsanto 13y ago
> The public transportation in SF (and the larger Bay Area) is a classist, unreliable nightmare. I've never been to California, but used to live next to NYC. Could you expand on how the transit is 'classist' ? Is it too expensive? Does it not stop at places other than the suburbs?
- cyclecount 13y ago
  My view is that in any place where public transportation is not ubiquitous, the ridership often comprises the poorest people in the city. Much of the public transportation system is used only by those who cannot afford better means of transportation. In NY, the norm is that everyone from the poorest classes to the upper-middle class use the Subway and buses for their daily commute, to go out at night, to grocery shop, to visit friends. The Subway is utilized by people from all backgrounds. In SF, the buses are dirty and filled with homeless and mentally ill people. Taking a bus home late at night is the plight of the commoners, the poorest class that work in the service industry and can't afford an Uber or taxi. And this class divide is why a BART strike is possible. The worst affected were those who didn't have a car too fall back on, or who couldn't work from home for a few days. If something so critical as the NYC Subway stops functioning for more than a few hours, the MTA provides alternative buses and advance notice. A multi-day complete system outage would impact everyone, not just the poorest people unfortunate enough not to have other options.
  - ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
    In my experience, the rush hour commute on BART takes quite a bit of white collar people to/from the Market Street stops. Its just that when the BART strikes happened, a lot of people could work from home or drive or whatever. Imagine being a full time student at SFSU or something coming in from the East Bay.
- bane 13y ago
  Yes to all the above. Round-trip on the BART from Rockridge to Montgomery St. is almost $8. Let's say you need to drive to the station, now you're paying for parking also (additional $2/day). So you're a minimum waged fry-cook or whatever in SF, you've blown 1/8th of your workday earnings just getting to-from work. You can get the monthly pass ($76.00/mo), but that's a bitter pill to swallow on those wages. Oh, and you might not be able to take it home anyways since it shuts down at midnight, so don't get a job that does dinner service. Also, IIR, bus transfers to the Muni aren't free. In the meanwhile the highly paid dotcommers might even get free company shuttles with wifi. By comparison, a round trip Subway ride in NYC is what, $5? Goes pretty much everywhere, with good service even into lower income areas, transfers to buses are free. So while minimum wage is lower in NYC, it doesn't even kill 1/8th of your workday's pay to get from home to work and back. Because coverage is so good, it's also unlikely that you'll even need a car, so you can save on all that expense: gas, taxes, registration, insurance, etc.
michaelochurch 13y ago
The issue is this. San Francisco used to be weird, beautiful, edgy, and affordable outside of known rich neighborhoods (Pac Heights) that, like the UES, aren't very interesting places to be, anyway, unless you live there. San Francisco used to have a lot of unique character to recommend it. It still does, to a lesser extent, but it also has douches wearing Glass and paying huge sums of money for crappy apartments, not even because they want to live there, but because they enjoy bullying the poors. When MBA culture infected the Valley, it turned it into a shitty New York: the worst of both worlds between a sleepy, semisuburban (but still beautiful and interesting in its own right) California city and the hypercompetitive pressure-cooker of Manhattan. In 2002 it was still conceivable that a normal person would want to live in San Francisco, just because it was still an interesting place: a genuine big city on the West Coast, with less rain than Seattle and far more character than L.A. Now, all the people I like hate what's happening to Northern California. Even tech workers are marginalized in this brave new world. How many software engineers are there that could buy a house in San Francisco at the market rate? Seven? Twelve? At typical house-buying, setting-down ages the are... zero, plus or minus one engineer who got in early on a ridiculously lucky startup, negotiated well, and over whom the founders are still kicking themselves. It's ridiculous. Of course, that's also the fault of the NIMBYs, who should be squashed with extreme prejudice. They deserve far more hatred than anyone on Sand Hill Road. It'd be better if the insane anger were directed at NIMBYs instead of innocent Google engineers (who are also getting ass-raped by rent, thus victims of the same thing). I don't know what the permanent identity of San Francisco is. I hope the crash will take out the nonsense and flush the entitled, Harvard-MBA culture back into the Stygian reaches from which it came. Let's have the NIMBYs thrown under that bus as well. They're certainly trying to turn San Francisco into a shitty New York knock-off, but they haven't irreversibly won yet.
- sltkr 13y ago
  > [..] douches [..] paying huge sums of money for crappy apartments, not even because they want to live there, but because they enjoy bullying the poors. I find this very hard to believe.
- bane 13y ago
  SF is like the Hippy movement writ large. Weird and experimental and funky a long time ago, got older and realized money is better and now wears turtlenecks and wireframe glasses that are too small and protects their property investment by artificially limiting availability and keeping public transport away (so the riff raff can't get around as easy). A few folks burned out early and couldn't get in on a good investment vehicle, but the weather is too nice to do anything about it and nobody seems to mind when you take a pee in the middle of the street. Plus, it's not too hard to bum a ride every month or two and head north to score some great bud.
yeukhon 13y ago
Not to mention, New York is relatively clean compared to San Francisco. I am a NY resident but I was in SF this past summer. Regarding cleanness it depends on which neighbors you live in. If you live in Richmond or Outer Sunset like I was the neighborhoods should be pretty clean. Where I live now in NY is considered one of the safest neighborhood but with the ever increasing population the neighborhood is getting dirtier. San Francisco shuts down at 10pm; New York truly is the city that never sleeps, and many neighborhoods feel busy and alive at all hours of the night. True. Most local restaurants close around 10. Even those in the city closes early too. Usually I have to drive to Daly City to look for better and bigger restaurant. But that's fine. I wouldn't want to dine too late. Now if you are looking for late night entertainment.... New York has probably the best public transit systems in the country Also one of the dirtiest too. The problem with SF transit (subway) is that it runs on the street so they compete with cars and buses. Also SF subway trains are smaller and shorter so it can't take that many at once. So it's unfair to say SF doesn't have a good transit system. SF's buses are quite on time, unlike NYC. I could check nextbus.com to confirm the next arrival and usually the bus can come within 2 minutes within the estimated arrival time. The only pet peeve I have is there is very few bus sign. Looking for yellow paint mark can be tricky. When I was new to SF I was constantly asking people and looking outside the window to check whether I was approaching my destination. The only clue I had was to look at the street sign (X ave X street) and guess. Or I have to stare nextbus.com to watch for the next bus stop.
- sandipc 13y ago
  NextBus (or NextMuni, specifically) tracks buses and light rail by GPS... so what you're looking at isn't the actual bus schedule, but the estimated arrival time. Bus schedules are published on the Muni website and I doubt that mang of them are followed strictly.
eddieroger 13y ago
Having spent time in both, but living in neither, I think that's fair. Specifically, good observation on the cleanliness of the city. New York is busy, but I never felt it was dirty in the way I immediately felt SF was. I think a large part of it was the uncontrolled panhandling and the fact that there are certain areas that those folks know will be busy, so they go there. I've never seen anyone openly urinate on the streets in New York, where I have twice on the same trip to San Francisco - an anecdotal fact that kind of blew my mind.
- bane 13y ago
  It also helps that it rains more in NYC. NYC is a wonder to behold a few hours after a rainstorm. I've noticed that places that don't get lots of rain just look perpetually more "dirty" and used. NYC also has this weird way of turning filth into part of the set piece of the city that very few places can manage.
  - eddieroger 13y ago
    Yeah - the rain doesn't get enough credit. Contrast that with New Orleans where they literally hose Bourbon Street down every morning and it still feels gross. Crediting the rain starts to get close to blurring the lines between dirty and lived in - they're not necessarily the same.
kenjackson 13y ago
New York has probably the best public transit systems in the country. NY has a very good public transit system. But I think I prefer D.C.'s. Cleaner and more comfortable. But both are quite good. I found London's quite good too.
- deleted 13y ago
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- TheCoelacanth 13y ago
  DC's is a bit more pleasant, but in terms of actually transporting people NYC's is much better. NYC has a much better coverage of the area, longer hours of service and is much cheaper.
- evanb 13y ago
  As a former DC and NYC resident who now lives in SF, I have quite a bit of experience riding the subway, Metro, and BART[0]. Here are my impressions: The SF system is relatively nice, and regularly on time. Timed transfers are great. Shutting down so early, even on Friday and Saturday is a disaster for SF/East Bay interaction, and (on weeknights) people who work the night shift. The coverage is OK, but the fact that there's just one line on the SF side of things is a little crazy, especially given the challenge of walking long distances the hills present. Buses and MUNI are can't replace rail entirely. Finally, the variety of transit authorities makes it daunting to plan your trip or transfer services if (like a tourist might) you don't have a Clipper Card. 511 is pretty good as far as planning goes, but it'd be great to have a single map that showed BART and Muni, for example. The DC system is far cleaner than NY, but coverage is very bad. Georgetown is devoid of Metro stops for snobby reasons, but the real desert is Northeast, which tends to be poorer and thus needs more public transit to begin with! Not being able to get to Dulles is terrible (although the silver line is nearing completion). SmarTrip works fine, but the lack of a monthly card really drove me crazy. Service is extended to 3 am on weekends, but DC is also far more walkable, and a cab ride isn't going to potentially set you back $80, even if you're in Virginia somewhere, like it would if you were trying to get across the Bay (yes, there are buses, they can get crowded to the point that they fill up and you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour later). The Metro has peak fares, even if you are riding "the wrong way"---I commuted from DC out to College Park via the green line and paid more in the morning, even though I rode trains where everyone could find a seat. This makes no sense to me. The fare was $3.35 (the base fare of $2.65 for that trip is more than a NYC fare)---it was actually cheaper for me to drive, but the extra 40 minutes to read, do the crossword, etc., was worth the difference. If you're going to have me swipe in and swipe out and charge me based on distance, then I think you can figure out that I didn't add to the rush. The NYC system is by far the best with respect to the problems the other two systems have, although coverage in eastern Queens and Brooklyn leave much to be desired, and Staten Island has its own set of problems, and the lack of direct airport service is a serious shortcoming. However, you can always catch a train at any time of night if you are willing to wait 20 minutes. You can buy an unlimited daily, weekly, or monthly metrocard. A fare otherwise costs a flat, time- and distance-traveled-independent $2.50. Coverage is phenomenal, in terms of the number of stations, neighborhoods serviced, express trains, and comparative resilience to service disruptions when there is construction. Finally the scale and usage are incomparable. The Lexington Avenue Line alone (ie. the 4, 5, and 6 trains) carries 1.9 million people a day[1], whereas the entire BART system carries 400,000 and DC Metro 850,000 daily[2]. My point is that the NYC subway is simply massive in a way that those other systems aren't. I understand why NYC's system is so good: age, lack of NIMBY strength and fierce competition between different subway companies when it was first constructed, scale of the city itself, only having to deal with a single authority (now, anyway) and political jurisdiction (again, now, anyway---if the 7 ever gets extended to Hoboken, we'll see what happens). Finally, a flat fare makes sense for a city where the poor tend live far away from "important" areas (like Midtown Manhattan), and this enables logistically simpler unlimited ridership cards, whereas in DC the wealthier people tend to live in the suburbs and the poorer people in the city, so it is less regressive to charge by distance. Not sure if/how SF fits into this idea. [0] I just noticed that the commonly used name for each of these is capitalized differently! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Lexington_Avenue_Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Lexington_Avenue_Line [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_transit_systems_by_ridership http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tra...
rayiner 13y ago
What is truly amazing to me about New York is that you can live in the suburbs and still not have a car. I used to live in Westchester, 20 miles north of midtown, and drove maybe once a month. My commute was amazing, 35 min straight to midtown on trains that ran often and on time. Nothing else in the US comes close.
- joshmlewis 13y ago
  I wouldn't say nothing in the US comes close..there are plenty of mid-sized cities that you can have a less than 5 minute commute in and be in the middle of the cool parts for under $1000 a month for a big apartment.
tzs 13y ago
> Owning a car in NY is unusual and unnecessary 46% of NYC households own a car. I don't think that qualifies as "unusual". Or if it does, then some other things that are unusual in NYC are white people (44%) and males (47%). :-) Even in Manhattan, which has the lowest car ownership within the five boroughs, 23% of households own a car, which is hard to describe as "unusual". Some things that are comparably rare in Manhattan: people who primarily speak Spanish at home (23%), and Black and Asian people (26%). Car ownership in the other boroughs: 44% for Brooklyn, 46% for the Bronx, 64% for Queens, and 84% for Staten Island.
- nextstep 13y ago
  New York City has the highest percent of households without a car for any US city: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_households_without_a_car http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_h... I'd say that makes NY pretty unusual. Your comparisons are intellectually dishonest.
  - tzs 13y ago
    You didn't say that NY was unusual in car ownership. You said owning a car in NY was unusual. Try writing more carefully next time.

ZanyProgrammer 13y ago

A good part of SF not seeming to be a 24 hour city, is that public transit in SF doesn't run 24 hours-at least not BART, and I don't think MUNI Metro does either. The last SB Caltrain leaves at midnight, I think? EDIT: I'll give you being clean, SF can stand to be cleaned up a bit.

derwiki 13y ago
Buses are the only public transit that run all night, but those are limited/different than day routes. Plus many people I know who live here have an unreasonable dislike of the buses, so many just don't consider it an option. I think they're great, except for some passengers who get on in the Tenderloin.
- wdewind 13y ago
  I don't live in SF but the few times I've been the bus system has been a complete joke. It's like a stereotype of a bad bus system: dirty, unreliable, slow, filled with junkies, loud, doesn't really go anywhere you'd like...there's a reason Uber was founded in SF.

ZanyProgrammer 13y ago

And yes, if we're talking about SF proper, (not the Bay Area as a whole) MUNI can stand to be massively improved.

wyclif 13y ago

The food culture and restaurants in NYC are on a completely different, higher level than SF. Having experienced both, I laugh whenever people in the Bay Area try to claim that SF has the best restaurants. It's not even a race; NY has SF whipped in that regard.

kenjackson 13y ago
Eh, I disagree. I've spent time in both and I prefer SF restaurants. I think it may have to do with the fact that local is generally better in California. Also there are some types of food where I just don't prefer the NY style -- in particular I don't like NY pizza. I've tried all the recommended spots and I think I just don't like the style as much. EDIT: Someone mentioned elsewhere about the high quality of food in the Bay once you leave SF. A good example of this is Michael Warring's found in a strip mall in Vallejo (yes, a strip mall in Vallejo) -- just really good food: http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/6/1691241/restaurant/Michael-Warring-Vallejo http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/6/1691241/restaurant/Michael-War...

wdewind 13y ago

> The number and quality of restaurants in NY is unrivaled. NYC native and mostly SF-hater here. Hate to say it but SF has us beat for food. If you want to go have a 5 star meal you're going to pay about the same and get about the same food in both cities (NYC obviously has the edge here, but not hugely), but San Francisco has NYC (especially Manhattan) absolutely dominated at the everyday eating level (ie: burritos, sandwiches, cheaper restaurants). The general ingredient quality just blows NYC away - both meat and produce.

davidw 13y ago
To be honest, I ate better day to day when I lived in Portland, Oregon than when I lived in SF. Wouldn't know about NY - I've never been there. And I don't know about 'fine dining' options in either PDX or SF, having been in my early 20ies and not gone in for that sort of thing much. These days, the best eating I do is when the in-laws have a big dinner, with stuff like hand-made tortellini!
- wdewind 13y ago
  Wouldn't shock me, my experience has been most of the food on the west coast is better. A lot of this has to do with how cheap it is to get quality produce compared to the east coast.
raverbashing 13y ago
" The general ingredient quality just blows NYC away - both meat and produce." Well, west coast (meaning: access to Australia and some other selling markets), good climate, etc
- mike_herrera 13y ago
  SF's neighbor to-the-east, The San Joaquin Valley, is "the nation's salad bowl." Which also happens to be home to many cattle and sheep operations. Access for foreign imports are important for the gourmet scene, but not necessary.

chrismonsanto 13y ago

> The public transportation in SF (and the larger Bay Area) is a classist, unreliable nightmare. I've never been to California, but used to live next to NYC. Could you expand on how the transit is 'classist' ? Is it too expensive? Does it not stop at places other than the suburbs?

cyclecount 13y ago
My view is that in any place where public transportation is not ubiquitous, the ridership often comprises the poorest people in the city. Much of the public transportation system is used only by those who cannot afford better means of transportation. In NY, the norm is that everyone from the poorest classes to the upper-middle class use the Subway and buses for their daily commute, to go out at night, to grocery shop, to visit friends. The Subway is utilized by people from all backgrounds. In SF, the buses are dirty and filled with homeless and mentally ill people. Taking a bus home late at night is the plight of the commoners, the poorest class that work in the service industry and can't afford an Uber or taxi. And this class divide is why a BART strike is possible. The worst affected were those who didn't have a car too fall back on, or who couldn't work from home for a few days. If something so critical as the NYC Subway stops functioning for more than a few hours, the MTA provides alternative buses and advance notice. A multi-day complete system outage would impact everyone, not just the poorest people unfortunate enough not to have other options.
- ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
  In my experience, the rush hour commute on BART takes quite a bit of white collar people to/from the Market Street stops. Its just that when the BART strikes happened, a lot of people could work from home or drive or whatever. Imagine being a full time student at SFSU or something coming in from the East Bay.
bane 13y ago
Yes to all the above. Round-trip on the BART from Rockridge to Montgomery St. is almost $8. Let's say you need to drive to the station, now you're paying for parking also (additional $2/day). So you're a minimum waged fry-cook or whatever in SF, you've blown 1/8th of your workday earnings just getting to-from work. You can get the monthly pass ($76.00/mo), but that's a bitter pill to swallow on those wages. Oh, and you might not be able to take it home anyways since it shuts down at midnight, so don't get a job that does dinner service. Also, IIR, bus transfers to the Muni aren't free. In the meanwhile the highly paid dotcommers might even get free company shuttles with wifi. By comparison, a round trip Subway ride in NYC is what, $5? Goes pretty much everywhere, with good service even into lower income areas, transfers to buses are free. So while minimum wage is lower in NYC, it doesn't even kill 1/8th of your workday's pay to get from home to work and back. Because coverage is so good, it's also unlikely that you'll even need a car, so you can save on all that expense: gas, taxes, registration, insurance, etc.

michaelochurch 13y ago

The issue is this. San Francisco used to be weird, beautiful, edgy, and affordable outside of known rich neighborhoods (Pac Heights) that, like the UES, aren't very interesting places to be, anyway, unless you live there. San Francisco used to have a lot of unique character to recommend it. It still does, to a lesser extent, but it also has douches wearing Glass and paying huge sums of money for crappy apartments, not even because they want to live there, but because they enjoy bullying the poors. When MBA culture infected the Valley, it turned it into a shitty New York: the worst of both worlds between a sleepy, semisuburban (but still beautiful and interesting in its own right) California city and the hypercompetitive pressure-cooker of Manhattan. In 2002 it was still conceivable that a normal person would want to live in San Francisco, just because it was still an interesting place: a genuine big city on the West Coast, with less rain than Seattle and far more character than L.A. Now, all the people I like hate what's happening to Northern California. Even tech workers are marginalized in this brave new world. How many software engineers are there that could buy a house in San Francisco at the market rate? Seven? Twelve? At typical house-buying, setting-down ages the are... zero, plus or minus one engineer who got in early on a ridiculously lucky startup, negotiated well, and over whom the founders are still kicking themselves. It's ridiculous. Of course, that's also the fault of the NIMBYs, who should be squashed with extreme prejudice. They deserve far more hatred than anyone on Sand Hill Road. It'd be better if the insane anger were directed at NIMBYs instead of innocent Google engineers (who are also getting ass-raped by rent, thus victims of the same thing). I don't know what the permanent identity of San Francisco is. I hope the crash will take out the nonsense and flush the entitled, Harvard-MBA culture back into the Stygian reaches from which it came. Let's have the NIMBYs thrown under that bus as well. They're certainly trying to turn San Francisco into a shitty New York knock-off, but they haven't irreversibly won yet.

sltkr 13y ago
> [..] douches [..] paying huge sums of money for crappy apartments, not even because they want to live there, but because they enjoy bullying the poors. I find this very hard to believe.
bane 13y ago
SF is like the Hippy movement writ large. Weird and experimental and funky a long time ago, got older and realized money is better and now wears turtlenecks and wireframe glasses that are too small and protects their property investment by artificially limiting availability and keeping public transport away (so the riff raff can't get around as easy). A few folks burned out early and couldn't get in on a good investment vehicle, but the weather is too nice to do anything about it and nobody seems to mind when you take a pee in the middle of the street. Plus, it's not too hard to bum a ride every month or two and head north to score some great bud.

yeukhon 13y ago

Not to mention, New York is relatively clean compared to San Francisco. I am a NY resident but I was in SF this past summer. Regarding cleanness it depends on which neighbors you live in. If you live in Richmond or Outer Sunset like I was the neighborhoods should be pretty clean. Where I live now in NY is considered one of the safest neighborhood but with the ever increasing population the neighborhood is getting dirtier. San Francisco shuts down at 10pm; New York truly is the city that never sleeps, and many neighborhoods feel busy and alive at all hours of the night. True. Most local restaurants close around 10. Even those in the city closes early too. Usually I have to drive to Daly City to look for better and bigger restaurant. But that's fine. I wouldn't want to dine too late. Now if you are looking for late night entertainment.... New York has probably the best public transit systems in the country Also one of the dirtiest too. The problem with SF transit (subway) is that it runs on the street so they compete with cars and buses. Also SF subway trains are smaller and shorter so it can't take that many at once. So it's unfair to say SF doesn't have a good transit system. SF's buses are quite on time, unlike NYC. I could check nextbus.com to confirm the next arrival and usually the bus can come within 2 minutes within the estimated arrival time. The only pet peeve I have is there is very few bus sign. Looking for yellow paint mark can be tricky. When I was new to SF I was constantly asking people and looking outside the window to check whether I was approaching my destination. The only clue I had was to look at the street sign (X ave X street) and guess. Or I have to stare nextbus.com to watch for the next bus stop.

sandipc 13y ago
NextBus (or NextMuni, specifically) tracks buses and light rail by GPS... so what you're looking at isn't the actual bus schedule, but the estimated arrival time. Bus schedules are published on the Muni website and I doubt that mang of them are followed strictly.

eddieroger 13y ago

Having spent time in both, but living in neither, I think that's fair. Specifically, good observation on the cleanliness of the city. New York is busy, but I never felt it was dirty in the way I immediately felt SF was. I think a large part of it was the uncontrolled panhandling and the fact that there are certain areas that those folks know will be busy, so they go there. I've never seen anyone openly urinate on the streets in New York, where I have twice on the same trip to San Francisco - an anecdotal fact that kind of blew my mind.

bane 13y ago
It also helps that it rains more in NYC. NYC is a wonder to behold a few hours after a rainstorm. I've noticed that places that don't get lots of rain just look perpetually more "dirty" and used. NYC also has this weird way of turning filth into part of the set piece of the city that very few places can manage.
- eddieroger 13y ago
  Yeah - the rain doesn't get enough credit. Contrast that with New Orleans where they literally hose Bourbon Street down every morning and it still feels gross. Crediting the rain starts to get close to blurring the lines between dirty and lived in - they're not necessarily the same.

kenjackson 13y ago

New York has probably the best public transit systems in the country. NY has a very good public transit system. But I think I prefer D.C.'s. Cleaner and more comfortable. But both are quite good. I found London's quite good too.

deleted 13y ago
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TheCoelacanth 13y ago
DC's is a bit more pleasant, but in terms of actually transporting people NYC's is much better. NYC has a much better coverage of the area, longer hours of service and is much cheaper.
evanb 13y ago
As a former DC and NYC resident who now lives in SF, I have quite a bit of experience riding the subway, Metro, and BART[0]. Here are my impressions: The SF system is relatively nice, and regularly on time. Timed transfers are great. Shutting down so early, even on Friday and Saturday is a disaster for SF/East Bay interaction, and (on weeknights) people who work the night shift. The coverage is OK, but the fact that there's just one line on the SF side of things is a little crazy, especially given the challenge of walking long distances the hills present. Buses and MUNI are can't replace rail entirely. Finally, the variety of transit authorities makes it daunting to plan your trip or transfer services if (like a tourist might) you don't have a Clipper Card. 511 is pretty good as far as planning goes, but it'd be great to have a single map that showed BART and Muni, for example. The DC system is far cleaner than NY, but coverage is very bad. Georgetown is devoid of Metro stops for snobby reasons, but the real desert is Northeast, which tends to be poorer and thus needs more public transit to begin with! Not being able to get to Dulles is terrible (although the silver line is nearing completion). SmarTrip works fine, but the lack of a monthly card really drove me crazy. Service is extended to 3 am on weekends, but DC is also far more walkable, and a cab ride isn't going to potentially set you back $80, even if you're in Virginia somewhere, like it would if you were trying to get across the Bay (yes, there are buses, they can get crowded to the point that they fill up and you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour later). The Metro has peak fares, even if you are riding "the wrong way"---I commuted from DC out to College Park via the green line and paid more in the morning, even though I rode trains where everyone could find a seat. This makes no sense to me. The fare was $3.35 (the base fare of $2.65 for that trip is more than a NYC fare)---it was actually cheaper for me to drive, but the extra 40 minutes to read, do the crossword, etc., was worth the difference. If you're going to have me swipe in and swipe out and charge me based on distance, then I think you can figure out that I didn't add to the rush. The NYC system is by far the best with respect to the problems the other two systems have, although coverage in eastern Queens and Brooklyn leave much to be desired, and Staten Island has its own set of problems, and the lack of direct airport service is a serious shortcoming. However, you can always catch a train at any time of night if you are willing to wait 20 minutes. You can buy an unlimited daily, weekly, or monthly metrocard. A fare otherwise costs a flat, time- and distance-traveled-independent $2.50. Coverage is phenomenal, in terms of the number of stations, neighborhoods serviced, express trains, and comparative resilience to service disruptions when there is construction. Finally the scale and usage are incomparable. The Lexington Avenue Line alone (ie. the 4, 5, and 6 trains) carries 1.9 million people a day[1], whereas the entire BART system carries 400,000 and DC Metro 850,000 daily[2]. My point is that the NYC subway is simply massive in a way that those other systems aren't. I understand why NYC's system is so good: age, lack of NIMBY strength and fierce competition between different subway companies when it was first constructed, scale of the city itself, only having to deal with a single authority (now, anyway) and political jurisdiction (again, now, anyway---if the 7 ever gets extended to Hoboken, we'll see what happens). Finally, a flat fare makes sense for a city where the poor tend live far away from "important" areas (like Midtown Manhattan), and this enables logistically simpler unlimited ridership cards, whereas in DC the wealthier people tend to live in the suburbs and the poorer people in the city, so it is less regressive to charge by distance. Not sure if/how SF fits into this idea. [0] I just noticed that the commonly used name for each of these is capitalized differently! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Lexington_Avenue_Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Lexington_Avenue_Line [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_transit_systems_by_ridership http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tra...

rayiner 13y ago

What is truly amazing to me about New York is that you can live in the suburbs and still not have a car. I used to live in Westchester, 20 miles north of midtown, and drove maybe once a month. My commute was amazing, 35 min straight to midtown on trains that ran often and on time. Nothing else in the US comes close.

joshmlewis 13y ago
I wouldn't say nothing in the US comes close..there are plenty of mid-sized cities that you can have a less than 5 minute commute in and be in the middle of the cool parts for under $1000 a month for a big apartment.

tzs 13y ago

> Owning a car in NY is unusual and unnecessary 46% of NYC households own a car. I don't think that qualifies as "unusual". Or if it does, then some other things that are unusual in NYC are white people (44%) and males (47%). :-) Even in Manhattan, which has the lowest car ownership within the five boroughs, 23% of households own a car, which is hard to describe as "unusual". Some things that are comparably rare in Manhattan: people who primarily speak Spanish at home (23%), and Black and Asian people (26%). Car ownership in the other boroughs: 44% for Brooklyn, 46% for the Bronx, 64% for Queens, and 84% for Staten Island.

nextstep 13y ago
New York City has the highest percent of households without a car for any US city: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_households_without_a_car http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_h... I'd say that makes NY pretty unusual. Your comparisons are intellectually dishonest.
- tzs 13y ago
  You didn't say that NY was unusual in car ownership. You said owning a car in NY was unusual. Try writing more carefully next time.