The State of Public Transport

Welcome, mobile reader, as this week I give you some insight into the state of public transport here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We like to make use of public transport as much as we can. Firstly, well, we're European, so we're brought up that way. Secondly, as regular readers will know, I've just finished a 3 month period where technically I didn't have a valid driving licence, so I wasn't supposed to do anything else. There's something to be said for trying to use public transport just to prove that it can be done, in what is traditionally quite a car-centric part of quite a car-centric country.

If there's an appropriately English word to be used to describe public transport here, it's quaint. It's quaint in the same way that using vacuum tubes to move cash around your department store is quaint in 2022. It's quaint in the same way that an open outcry stock exchange is quaint in 2022. It's quaint like writing cheques, or indeed many other things in this country which seem quite old-fashioned compared to life in Europe. Yes, I'm afraid to say that public transport here is hardly state-of-the-art.

One of the genuinely odd things about public transport in the Bay Area is that you'll repeatedly find that it doesn't actually go anywhere useful. The BART (San Francisco's equivalent of the Tube, although riding it is more like going on a badly-maintained rollercoaster) only passes through one central corridor in the City itself; its extension to San Francisco's airport remains bizarrely controversial and oddly under-used. The Valley Transportation Authority's light rail system remains one of the least used in the US, despite the population density, and again this is because it just doesn't really go anywhere useful. About the only time you'll see the light rail full is when the 49ers have a home game, as it does at least stop right outside the football stadium.

Ah, the light rail! It's quaint and charming and basically pointless, but it does conveniently run relatively close to where I work, and connects with CalTrain at the other end, so it's possible to use as a public transport option for commuting. The light rail is basically an overgrown tram system: timing's aren't guaranteed along the route, and the thing just runs roughly when it feels like it. Last week, I learned the hard way that the stops really are request stops: I didn't press the bell, and we failed to stop at my usual stop, sailing on to the next one. This gave me an experience of just how car-centric everything is here: the main road that I needed to walk back along, which is really just a boulevard through an industrial park, had no pavement (that's sidewalk to American readers). A lot of the areas that were built since, say, the 1950s here are essentially an environment that's hostile to pedestrians, and as I often remark, there's not a planning problem here that can't be solved by pouring more concrete.

Caltrain is the exception to the light usage of public transport here: it goes a modicum of useful places, having stations in the middle of many of the major towns and cities on the Peninsula, although its station in San Francisco is a bit out of the way. Caltrain remains resolutely quaint, with its old diesel trains due to be replaced by a modern, electrified service Real Soon Now: the project has been repeatedly delayed and is now slated to complete towards the tail end of 2024.

Overall, public transport here needs investment and integration: it's comprised mostly of localised schemes which don't really make sense without being part of some bigger picture. Even with these flaws, you can call me a European at heart, but I still think it beats driving to work.