Bay Area Flops in 14,000 Respondent Survey on Public Transit Satisfaction | Hacker News Reader

Bay Area Flops in 14,000 Respondent Survey on Public Transit Satisfaction

survata.com

31 pointsckelly30 comments

It's worth noting a key difference between Seattle and San Francisco has to do with gentrification and differences between these areas in terms of where you can work and live. It's much more practical to both live and work in downtown Seattle than it is to both live and work in downtown San Francisco. Because of how San Francisco has avoided building as much new housing downtown as Seattle has, SF has forced lower income workers (that is, most people) outside of the city to live. In short, the residents of Seattle are a lot less dependent on their mass transit to survive, or dependent on it in a much different way than we are here in the SF Bay area.

Seattle's public transportation is definitely in better shape especially since the expansion of the light rail and the constant flow of buses between downtown and the east side (Bellevue). Another big reason is just how convenient it is to ride to the airport from downtown. For $2.75 you can go from any station in downtown right to the airport. Compare that to the ridiculousness of getting to the airport from SF first to Milbrae then pay for a transfer to the airport on another line.

BART goes directly into the SFO airport. If you are taking a flight from the international terminal, it is a direct walk to the check-in counters. Otherwise you connect to the airtrain which is an escalator ride up from the BART platform.

I've found it extremely convenient getting to/from flights from San Francisco, although I'm lucky to be within walking distance to a BART station from my apartment.

One huge problem with this survey is that if you have always lived in the US (outside of NYC and maybe one or two other metros), your expectations are extremely low - so "satisfied" doesn't mean much. You first have to have experienced a city with great public transport to understand what's possible, and what you're not getting.

And I bet that percentage for L.A. accounts for people that answered in the believe the questions were about roads they drive their cars on. As it is the only public transportation the vast majority has ever seen there.

I think this describes me. I'm originally from South Jersey, outside of any big metropolitan area. I'm now living in Palo Alto, and I think Caltrain and VTA are great, but I think that the only reason for that is that I went from no public transit to being able to survive without a car thanks to the train.

Sure, it'd be nice if Caltrain didn't stop running at fricking 10:30 on weekends, but it gets me to work in a reasonable amount of time.

Sure, it'd be nice if Caltrain didn't stop running at fricking 10:30 on weekends

And if it didn't keep running into people or breaking down for hours at a time. Visit NYC or London to experience the awesomeness of a good public transit system.

Pardon my french, but: no shit. The survey was conducted during the BART strikes. I really doubt people would be terribly enthusiastic about how the system functions in the midst of a cessation of service.

Survata co-founder here. You're right, and we mentioned that in the article:

"One obvious caveat is our survey coincided with the BART strike in the Bay Area, and might have reached Bay Area public transportation riders at their most frustrated."

I don't think it's fair to say that SF "flops" on public transit. Look at the map. LA, Houston, Dallas, and Philadelphia are public transit flops. San Francisco is merely mediocre.

And (as pointed out), this is during the BART strike. I fully expect SF's transit system will be considered "good" once everything's settled.

The entire west side of SF has no train service! It is pretty bad, and the cities you mentioned are even worse.

As a former Londoner and current Vancouver resident and transit user who occasionally visits SF for meetings I can attest that SF public transit is really bad.

As someone who's live in both SF and Philly, I'd have to say that while they're both awful in terms of public transit, SF is definitely worse.

I currently live near D.C. and absolutely hate the public transit here. I could list a laundry list of the problems, but honestly, compared to SF it's like a euphoric utopic vision of perfect public transport gifted by a benevolent god.

D.C. has many similar problems like S.F. (NIMBYism, weird property issues, right of way, long commutes) with the added fun of having to work with three different State level territories (VA, MD and DC) to get anything done.

Honestly the gold standard in the U.S. for public transit is NYC, and I love when I'm living/working there (which are far too short and far between), but let's be honest, NYC's public transit isn't really all that nice. What it is is comprehensive and not ridiculously expensive. At least as comprehensive as any major European city and less than half the price of the D.C. system on most days w/r to fares.

But really you can visit any major European city and find a transit system at least as good as D.C.s...which is the second busiest in the U.S. and 3rd by length. Visit Asia and have all sense of what a good system is blown right out of your mind.

The level of quality in the U.S. mass transit system is really inexcusable. A nearby system, Baltimore's, is so bad that, despite living just a couple hours away for most of my life and having visited the city numerous times, I wasn't even aware the city had a subway system until a couple years ago - it's virtually invisible.

If you consider that D.C. is bottom of the barrel then by European and Asian standards, S.F.'s is just a bad joke.

Its not just bart - the whole system sucks. As a daily commuter from alameda to mountain view - it SUCKS:

Bike 2 miles to bart, take either to SF or Millbrea

* If SF; then have to bike to 4th and king to caltrin

* If Millbrea - have to swap trains at balboa park

Take caltrain to mtn view; many times Caltrain says they are "too full" for bikes and wont let me on that morning train.

Get to mountain view, bike 2 miles to office.

Total time: 2.5 hours each way. Total cost: between $20 and $25 per day.

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The services don't connect, the trains schedules don't match up well. Bart is filthy. Bart does a piss poor job of supporting bikes, people don't like bikes on bart.

I work from home as much as possible given how bad this is.

I've gone from Hayward to Mountain View quite a few times and know all about it, so hats off to you for actually taking public transit for that trip! I'm too lazy, so I'd drive, and it's still about an hour each way in traffic.

The difference between NYC and SF was smaller than I expected

Well I know the Bay Area's public transit kind of sucks, but I'm not sure why they're called out here over LA.

Have definitely been considering moving my East Bay rental down to SV. BART has just not been reliable these past few months, and I've used Caltrain before, and even stayed a few months in East Palo Alto which is cheaper than my current Walnut Creek.

Holy cow, how can you live in NYC and never take public transportation?

If the survey was composed of people from all over the entire city, it seems a bit more reasonable. NYC is big.

I'm disappointed to not see Portland in this survey. I visited recently and thought the public transportation was pretty good. It would have been nice to know what the survey revealed.

While not thrilled with the BART strike, it is generally the most reliable of the options in the area. MUNI buses, on the other hand, are frustratingly bad at times.

I guess that depends on how you define reliability.

If we were tracking it like uptime, what does BART look like after the 2 strikes?

Everyone knows that scheduled downtime doesn't count as downtime.

Would you rather a fail fast on bart or a service never reliable and will probably be late holding onto your time.

why include all respondents who said that they "never" used public transportation?

Those would seem to be the most important people to understand why they think transit isn't fitting their needs. It could be that (1) they are wrong and just don't understand the system, or (2) the local transit system actually fails them (doesn't serve close enough, often enough, safe enough, direct enough, late enough, etc.) in a way that can be improved.

Survata co-founder here. The first graph does not include those respondents. As the footnote says, "Respondents who answered that they 'never' use public transportation were excluded."

I want to know how 53 percent of Austinites felt satisfied with the city's public transportation. Outside of the immediate downtown area, it's lackluster at absolute best, and more typically not a viable option for getting where you need to go.

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