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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why buses in NYC feel safe, as are subway trains, shoplifting is a very rare sight, and it's pretty hard to find excrement on the streets.

It seems that the problem is not in density, not in the large difference of wealth levels, not in ethnic / cultural composition, etc. Maybe it's somewhere around law enforcement, maintenance of public places, etc. Something that could be even changed by voting.

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Uber subsidized tech/finance employee commute trips for many years. Uber was frequently twice the price of public transportation anywhere in the city for a point to point trip. It was irrational not to use Uber. Many businesses (facebook/google) provided private company only commuter buses, which meant tech employees never had to face the realities of public transportation and could easily avoid it.

NYC has a functioning subway system that can land you 2 blocks from just about anywhere. There are entire areas of San Francisco you have to navigate bus transfers, bus transfers that were not predictable, to get to. Bus transfers nearly always inflate trip time significantly and are subject to the unpredictable force of traffic.

New York benefits greatly from economies of scale by use of NYC transportation. A subway that runs every 5 minutes is vastly vastly different from one that runs every 20 or 30. How much parking does New York provide? Because if you can pay, parking in San Francisco is not too hard.

So while it wasn't difference in wealth levels directly, different wealth levels opted into different forms of transportation, leaving the public options woefully less used, and particularly less used by those with power (those with money).

  NYC has a functioning subway system that can land you 2 blocks from just about anywhere. There are entire areas of San Francisco you have to navigate bus transfers, bus transfers that were not predictable, to get to. Bus transfers nearly always inflate trip time significantly and are subject to the unpredictable force of traffic.

To put it politely: that's a load of crap unless you equate Lower Manhattan with all of New York City. There are huge swaths of New York that are inaccessible via the subway (primarily the outer boroughs). Go to the more suburban parts of Brooklyn or Queens for instance. Here's a Bloomberg article on what they call "subway deserts" or the "plight of the outer boroughs"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-05/mapping-n...

   A subway that runs every 5 minutes

No subway runs every five minutes all day. Late night NY is every 20-30 (same as Muni), there's a wiki page for it. Per Muni's SRTP the light rail headways are b/t 12 and 20 minutes depending on the time of day. And before you complain Muni doesn't meet those standards, the New York subway is subject to human and mechanical delays just like San Francisco.

  Because if you can pay, parking in San Francisco is not too hard.

Eh? There are roughly 500,000 vehicles registered in San Francisco and about 275,000 on street parking spots. There are residential permits in some areas to ensure turnover because, yes, it can be extremely difficult to find a spot.

https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

Large parts of outer NYC boroughs are inaccessible by subway. But other large parts of outer boroughs are very much accessible by subway, mostly those with high enough density to make it economically viable. But even Rockaway Beach is accessible by subway, of all places!

Trains go every 10-15 mins even some time past midnight. They go every 30 minutes at time like 3 am; so do some buses.

Compared to some other large cities around the world where I've been, NYC is pretty well connected, and Manhattan (all of it) is superbly connected.

The NY MTA does an admirable job, the issue I take is pretending that they're perfect. New York is pretty well connected, sure, and I can't think of another city that runs a subway 24x7. Even Tokyo shifts to buses eventually.

  Trains go every 10-15 mins even some time past midnight. They go every 30 minutes at time like 3 am; so do some buses.

Right, but OP was going on about rail service (with some key facts wrong). Buses stuck because they get in traffic… well all Muni Metro routes operate in traffic for most of their length (and one operates entirely in mixed traffic).

Muni schedules Owl (1–5 AM) bus service every 30 minutes. They run some regular bus routes 24x7 (not-Owl), Owl buses along the light rail routes, as well as a couple mega Owl routes to make up for the local routes that don't run late night. Except for Treasure/Yerba Buena Island (and the uninhabited islands), you can get within about 1/4–1/2 mile of anywhere in San Francisco on Muni. Evening rail service is like every 20–30 minutes on each line which equates to 10–15 (or better) underground since five of the lines run along the same subway tracks.

  Compared to some other large cities around the world where I've been, NYC is pretty well connected, and Manhattan (all of it) is superbly connected.

Yeah, New York City is generally well connected if you take into account the bus service. But so is San Francisco. I'd argue that the outer lands are better connected than the outer boroughs, but SF is so much smaller geographically that's not a fair comparo.

And yea I've done the subway bus shuffle in Queens (both because of subway maintenance and because of the distance to the subway) in the middle of winter. It's doable but OP was going on about not needing buses in NY. I've also done the late night subway thing and caught an earful from some natives who were real unhappy about all the transferring they had to do.

It's not that NY transit is bad or that San Francisco transit is particularly good. The idea that public transit in San Francisco is uniquely bad and grimy is just frustratingly wrong. That said, BART really shit the bed today when someone walked into the transbay tube. The mind boggles.

Also lets not forget that the NYC metro moves more people daily than the entire air travel network in the US does. It moves an incredible amount of humans at a scale that cars and airplanes just can't even begin to approach in a million years.

Since I didn't edit it in time, I'll follow up with:

  There are entire areas of San Francisco you have to navigate bus transfers, bus transfers that were not predictable, to get to. Bus transfers nearly always inflate trip time significantly and are subject to the unpredictable force of traffic.

Oh come on. You've identified a great red herring. There are 9 Muni subway stations in San Francisco. The rest of the rail system operates in mixed traffic making it subject to the exact same delays and uncertainty that the buses deal with. In fact because there are no metro lines that run entirely underground (or are otherwise completely grade separated) delays on the street spill over into the subway service.

The best example of this is the 4th and King intersection. SFMTA explicitly prioritizes automobile traffic. During peak hours it's often faster to walk to Market street than to wait in a crowded Muni train while automobile after automobile drives by. Every time you choose to drive you make things like this demonstrably worse. In fact if your only concept of the Muni Metro is the subway that means when you drive your car you're doing so in some of the most densely populated parts of San Francisco and creating the most negative impact.

I can't speak to the NY MTA's standards but in San Francisco Muni's goal is that every resident lives within 1/4 mile of a Muni stop (see the SRTP I linked to in the sibling comment). What's not covered in that SRTP are the finer points. Stops are much closer together on steep grades, and specifically the stops are supposed to be served around 18 hours a day. The standards are a bit more relaxed after hours, but Muni does run 24x7. I lived within a stone's throw of an Owl (1-5AM bus routes) stop and it was great.

New York has an astonishing number of police per capita compared to the west coast. That seems like the biggest, most obvious structural difference.

Yeah you are gonna need to cite your sources on way more cops = increased public safety. Further you are going to need to prove that the astronomical amount of money spent on police departments wouldn't better reduce crime if spent on caring directly for the needy.

At the end of the day the only real correlation between the amount of homeless people in a place I have noticed in my visits to different cities in the US is how easy it is to survive outside without a home. NYC gets incredibly, brutally cold in the winter. Many homeless probably either die (not directly from cold most of time, but the hardship makes other problems way worse) or are forced to move south. Yes there are plenty of homeless in NYC obviously but it must be a brutally hard life trying to get through the really cold nights of the NYC winter (whether thats trying to find a shelter or just holing up on a grate spewing out steam somewhere).

San Francisco you can probably survive in pants and a tshirt for most of the year and be ok.

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