American transit nightmare

How do you get people out of cars when the transit alternatives are bad?

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Hello from Denver! I’m on the last stop of my U.S. tour, which has wound from New York to Baltimore to Washington D.C., to San Francisco, and finally to the great state of Colorado. I haven’t had a car on this trip, so have relied almost entirely on public transportation and the occasional ride-hail service. I’ve been thinking a lot about how hard it is to get by without a car in the U.S., even in major cities.

Let me give you an example. Last Saturday, I took a trip to Berkeley. From where I was staying in San Francisco, downtown Berkeley is about 14 miles by car, a 30-60 minute drive depending on traffic. I didn’t have a car, so I took transit. It was awful.

First, I had to take a bus downtown to connect to the Bart, SF’s version of a subway. It turns out that while all buses in SF accept the local “Clipper” metro card for payment, they are not all operated by the same authority. I learned this after the bus that CityMapper recommended I take turned out to be run by Golden Gate Transit, a regional transit service, rather than the local SFMTA Muni service. On Muni buses you tap in but on Golden Gate you tap in and out—something that is not at all made clear anywhere on the bus. The card reader wasn’t working when I tried to tap out, so the driver told me not to worry and waved me off. This was a mistake. If you don’t tap out on Golden Gate Transit, I learned, they charge you the maximum fare.

At the Bart station, I explained to the agent about the malfunctioning card reader and asked if he could refund me for the bus ride. He, looking entirely unsympathetic, replied that he didn’t know what bus I’d taken and then, after I told him, said that was a different agency and I’d have to contact them directly. Meanwhile, in the time this conversation took, I missed my train, which I didn’t think was a big deal until I got to the platform and learned that Bart on weekends only runs every 30 minutes.

There are two main types of transit schedules: frequency-based and schedule-based. Frequency-based services like the New York City subway and London buses run often enough that passengers show up randomly and expect a small to medium wait before boarding a vehicle. Schedule-based services like many commuter rails publish a timetable that riders need to stick to. In frequency-based services, the time between vehicles is known as “headway.” Planners generally consider services with headways of less than 5 to 15 minutes to be high frequency, while those with waits topping 10 or 15 minutes are considered low frequency. A 30-minute headway is off the charts. Studies have found that waiting time at stops is often the highest cost of transit to travelers, meaning long headways can be a big deterrant even to taking services that otherwise run well.

Put another way: it sucks to get to a metro station expecting semi-regular service, only to discover that the next train isn’t coming for 26 minutes, and you’re stuck in the station until then. It makes you want to stop using the service. The best I can say is that at least the Bart was running normally after stranding riders for two hours in the Transbay Tube on Friday night.

San Francisco consistently ranks among the top U.S. public transport systems. A 2019 U.S. News & World Report list tied it with New York City for no. 1, drawing from ratings by AllTransit. A 2021 list by transit planning firm Remix (now owned by Via) ranked SF third, citing its highly electric, energy-efficient transport lines. It’s true that by the standards of American cities, San Francisco does have great transit. But compared to almost everywhere I’ve traveled outside of the U.S., and certainly to London, where I live on a train line that comes every 100 seconds during peak hours not to mention several ultra-reliable bus routes, transit in SF is somewhere between mediocre and awful. It makes total sense why Uber and Lyft took off in SF, and why the city is so congested: if traveling by car is an option for you, odds are it’s better.

How do you get people out of cars when the transit systems alternatives are subpar? This is a core American problem, one that can’t be solved by ride-hail or bike-share or scooters, no matter how enthusiastically they’re pushed. Micromobility, after all, is typically talked about as a first- and last-mile solution, which is only as useful as the middle mile coverage. It doesn’t matter if you can save 5 minutes commuting to your Bart stop by bike if you then have to wait upward of 15 minutes for a train. Ride-hail at its best also offers a periodic substitute for transit, not a full-time replacement.

From 2010 to 2019, San Francisco’s population grew by 9% but transit ridership increased by just 5%. Meanwhile, vehicular traffic surged 27% and average vehicle speeds fell 23%, from 16.7 mph to 15.9 mph during peak morning hours. As of 2019, 87% of Bay Area residents reported owning or having access to a car in an SFMTA survey, and roughly half said they relied on private cars to get around, compared to just 22% who said they took transit and another 22% who walked. By comparison, the most common travel mode in New York City in 2019 was public transit (32% between subway, bus, and ferry), followed by walking (31%), and then car (30%). In London, public transport in 2019 made up 36% of rides, private transport 37%, and walking 25%.

I didn’t fare much better on my way back from Berkeley later that day. (Don’t even get me started on the walk to the Berkeley botanic gardens, a long hilly route that was made for cars and not humans.) Despite planning for the every-30-minute train schedule this time, I still got stuck waiting 20 minutes in downtown SF for the bus to take me back to where I was staying. All in all, I spent almost four hours slogging back and forth to Berkeley which, while lovely, is not something I’d recommend. As much as I hate to say it, next time I’m driving.