Meanwhile, the 47 Muni bus that connects the Van Ness transit corridor to Caltrain has been “suspended” since 2020, and the extension of Caltrain to the transit center is still unfunded.
I appreciate solutions that meet us where we are, but it’s depressing that we don’t seem to actually have the will to make a sustainable, integrated mass transit plan.
But the Bay Area’s highway networks are at saturation during peak hours. 101 and 280 are at least as bad as before the pandemic.
We have under-utilized transit corridors that could alleviate much of this strain if they weren’t so damn far away from where the people sitting in traffic want to go.
Infrastructure for cars is massively subsidised too. Since tansport is infrastructure it it interacts with everything else (eg less cars in the city => less spending on car infra) and has a lot of positive externalities. The investment pays back in positive outcomes which can also be quantified in terms of money of you like. It's like you've got a balance sheet but you're filtering it to only look at two items.
Cars are also subsidized (roads) - isn't that what taxes are for?
If we could go back to pre-pandemic ridership levels, the subsidy rate would be inverted (fares covered 70% versus 30% now). Public Transit struggles with low utilization. It'll take 10+ years to get back to that ridership level though.
Sure, but cars aren't subsidized at $18 dollars per trip. The cost to the government of providing and maintaining roads is on the order of several cents per vehicle mile traveled.
> the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART
If BART disappeared tomorrow, how much would the government have to pay to build all the additional roads and parking to support that incremental traffic?
And how much for healthcare for all the incremental pollution and collisions?
> several cents per vehicle mile
It's close to a dollar per mile when you include all the externalized costs.
Incremental property damage, injuries and fatalities, incremental chronic illness from pollution, parking land subsidy, fair market value of incremental land use and rights of way, lost tax revenue from that incremental land use, etc.
In general, this is why semi-private or private transport works so much better. If the end user is getting a bunch more value out of working on the train, they will pay more for the train than the road (if they have to pay the full price of the road vs train each time they use each).
If you look at how American cities are laid out, the cost on society of car infrastructure is massive. Roads and parking space use up a very significant percentage of the real estate in an American city. Public transit is far more efficient with space, so it saves society as a whole a lot of money.
Private autonomous transportation will allow that public infrastructure to be tenfold more productive.
Public transportation will never have the incentive to minimize cost and headcount.
Where we do have public transportation, it should always face competition from private offerings - including on the tracks, as they do in Italy, for example.
That's not true. For example, France is rapidly automating its metros. The US is quite unique in viewing public transport as a jobs program rather than a public service.
When someone says incentive in this context, they usually mean the individual incentives of each of the workers to make money for themselves, get promoted to get a share of profit, not the overall fuzzy public pressure.
On the contrary, our biggest cities started as little groups of houses. Letting places increase their density is a natural solution to a lot of this. The core problem is that we need to take away the power of local government to limit development.
The roads and houses are constructed with such separation and space that it is literally impossible without eminent domain of basically every lot. It’s simply not a possibility to turn the suburbs with huge stroads and subdivisions into mixed use high density living.
The separation and space tends to resolve itself slowly and naturally as density increases. You get the pressure from the new people who live there to make crossings shorter and safer. It's slow, but it is effective.
As others are explaining, these calculations are essentially spurious due to all the off-the-books externalities.
In a city the only question that surely matters is: Can the mode of transport be scaled? For private car transit, the answer is no. No city can function if everyone gets around by car. Even Houston has light rail and a bus network. If you can drive and your city somehow remains livable, that is because other people are taking transit.
Citations please? Seriously, you are making up numbers for the cost of cars and the govt subsidies provided. Did you account for the DMV? Did you account for traffic police? Did you account for the installation and maintenance of traffic light systems? Of course you didn't.
The federal government spends ~$17.5B/year on maintaining and constructing the interstate highway system, and Americans drive 852 billion miles/year on them. The cost per vehicle mile traveled (VMT) is about 2.1 cents / mile.
If we look at all government spending (Federal, State, Local) on highways and roads, that's around $285B/year and 3.28 trillion miles, or 8.7 cents / vehicle mile traveled.
Yes, but public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.
BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services - house prices and rents would have increased substantially. Public investment, private profits. Subsidies in the form of low-cost fares like this are just further welfare for the landowners.
Interestingly, about a third of BART's cost was acquiring land - if/when that same land is cleared and sold on market, the project would have operated at an enormous profit. Certainly, BART's current assets would far exceed 'total fares collected'.
That's a minuscule amount of the value it creates. And that's a problem, and a problem we can only fix by privatizing it. But most of the value it creates is for the landowners around it. And that's why successful transit companies are also real estate developers. Even in our own history, that's how private transit worked before we killed it.
That's the value, but not what capture means. If you have to pay $50/week extra rent to get that benefit, then the true value was 'captured' by your landlord. If you owned your house before the trainline was built, you probably captured more of that value yourself.
Looks like the address is 2918 mission, still no apartment complex there according to web maps, though the laundromat building is demolished it seems. So perhaps by 2034, a good 20 years since the start of the project.
Interesting story but it actually is an example of a landowner's massive windfall from the presence of public transport.
Tillman cites $1M of costs, of which $200k were 'city fees' (not itemized) and the rest were presumably normal costs for developers/engineers/architects/etc (of course, these would potentially be smaller if there was less regulation). The development start to approval time of 3.5 years is not crazy for a first time 'accidental developer' working on such a large project.
After approval, there seems to have been a~12 month period of bad faith activists slowing down the project. Tillman filed a lawsuit, did a media campaign, and the project was re-approved later in 2018.
He then sold the pre-approved project to a Cresleigh Homes for $13.5 million in early 2019.
So we've had 6 years of financial delays as Cresleigh tries to fund the build vs maybe 1 year of 'bad faith' development approval delays 2017-2018.
> The reason there's not more public transit is because the economics are terrible.
The reason we don't have roads is because the economics are terrible. The government gets $0 per trip [1], but it costs billions of dollars a year in operating expenses.
Wait, that's not how it works.
[1] Federal gas taxes don't count, because those go to the Highway Trust Fund which funds road construction, which is not an operating expense. State gas taxes may vary. Although toll roads also properly charge people user fees, although for some reason, lots of drivers complain about how expensive tolls are...
But you can't ignore the financials. SF Muni's cost per passenger mile of $3.62 is atrocious. At that price point, you could literally charter a 20-seat Airbus H175 helicopter to fly people around for $2.50 a mile. And you'd get there faster.
If public transit is less cost-effective than taking a helicopter, then something is clearly broken.
The error is completely ignoring the negative economic externalities of NOT having public transportation and the positive economic and environmental externalities of having public transportation.
Doesn’t account for the cost of helicopter landing platforms at every station, for one. Or the cost of building additional helicopters to meet current BART scale, or the cost of the number of accidents you’d have once it scaled, or the cost of having all transit halt whenever there’s an air incident, or literally anything about reality. Like, are you people being serious or just smirking about your spherical helicopters?
His point was that Bart's current cost are HIGHER per passenger mile than the current cost of a helicopter, which is a notoriously expensive form of transportation (and also one of the most convenient).
Note that a 12 seat private jet also costs less per passenger mile than BART does. That's not beacuse jets are cheap, but because BART is currently absurdly expensive.
Of course, this is what happens when there's no profit motive. If we weren't making the marginal cost of using a road zero, and they had to compete with each other, and the people running transit wanted to make money rather than satisfy the requirements of a law, transit would be cheaper. That's how it is in all the places in the world where transit is really good.
NYC's subway system is an amalgamation of three systems, two of them built privately (but both of whom subsequently went bankrupt) and the third built by the city.
They went bankrupt in part because although privately owned, they depended on a city charter to operate, and the City used that charter to force them to keep fares unsustainably low (I believe it was a nickel).
Dude. Public transit can carry hundreds of thousands (millions even). How many helicopters you planning on having? How many landing pads? Where are they going to go? You going to spin up a municipal ATC? This is silly.
I'm not advocating for helicopters at all - it's an analogy that clearly went over your head.
It's about cost comparison: SF Muni's operating costs (in terms of costs per passenger mile) are so bloated they're comparable to chartering a helicopter.
This should not be possible, and it's a strong signal of poor fiscal management. SF Muni operates at $3.62 per passenger mile. For comparison, Transport for London (TfL) operates at around $0.50/passenger mile and Shanghai Metro operates at $0.11/passenger mile.
The Highway Trust Fund pays primarily for highway capital expenditure projects. It's not just highway construction; things like replacing a bridge or widening a highway are also covered, but these are also capital expenses, not operational expenses. A portion of it goes to funding mass transit capital expenditures.
Yeah I was shocked as well when I learned about the financials. I'll the subsidy per passenger mile to the table as well.
I remember talking to a VC a few years back, and he vehemently explained why he will never ever fund companies related to public transit, for this reason. Public transit was one of the two sectors he would not invest in (the other being materials science).
In my opinion, the primary driver is the astronomical housing prices in the SF bay area (which are 3x the national average), which drives up the cost of all labor. Public transit is infrastructure heavy, very labor intensive, and the high cost of labor makes it very expensive.
In the bay, low-skilled / manual laborers spend >50% of their income on housing. Many can't afford to live here, so they demand higher wages or leave, which drives up the price of labor even further.
If sufficient housing were built and the Bay Area had the same housing prices as the rest of the US, then 1) the supply of labor would go up 2) wages could fall by 30-40% without a quality of life decrease. Businesses could reduce their labor costs by 20%, which would improve the QoL of everyone in the area, including manual laborers.
Then run this process iteratively and you will see massive cost reductions, the cost of everything will go down by 30+ percent.
For the case of BART, they spend ~$800 million / year on labor, so reducing cost here has the highest RoI. They would save hundreds of millions per year.
iirc the NYC subway is only about 40% subsidized by fares. I’m happy to pay more in taxis for it to exist and subsidize lower income residents. There are huge economic benefits to the city that you’re not factoring in.
Not everything has to be directly money making.
If anything, the Bay Area needs significantly more public transit. BART in particular is mostly useful between cities, in my experience. You can’t go from the mission to cow hollow or dog patch to north beach, let alone anywhere to the ocean.
Also, subways don’t have much (if any) marginal cost per passenger. The issue isn’t cost but ridership. Ridership will increase with utility, which requires political will, which does not exist.
For another comparison, Moscow Central Diameters system (electric trains traveling from Moscow to nearby small towns) has 4 lines, 137 stations, 188 miles total length. It uses united fare payment system with buses and subway and transfer from a train to the subway is free of charge. Fare is about $1-$3 depending on the route. To be fair, it goes through Moscow at a slow speed and takes an eternity to get anywhere, and its range is limited [1].
Moscow subway [2] has 17 lines and 309 stations. In newer cars, 2 USB-A sockets are available near every seat, ready for robots.
I mean my own PERSONAL per mile cost for a car is around $1/mi/yr, and it has a low interest rate loan and well below average monthly payment. Accounting for car insurance, gas, and maintenance.
And that’s not even counting for however much I’m subsidized on the highway and road systems I don’t pay anything to use.
Public transit is definitely expensive, but the alternative is also very costly and also regressive. The goal with public transit is to provide a low-cost, high-density way to move people around the city. It’s a public service, it shouldn’t be making profit. Car ownership is more expensive in total and very space-inefficient. Cities don’t have room for space inefficiency.
There is a reason why the US is special - Buy America Act. New Flyer and Gillig would collapse almost immediately if they were exposed to global competition.
Are you arguing that specific past bad economics are somehow indicative of a theoretical hard ceiling for any potential future performance? If so, how are other places in the world then regularly above that ceiling?
Ancient cities in Europe and Asia, and some of the US east coast cities were already very dense and well served by transit before the car was invented.
The US Midwest and West were built out more recently and at lower density, which is enabled by private car ownership.
You are completely ignoring the MASSIVE benefit the transit provides to the city. It allows densification. It allows people to get places without driving (and thus without parking). It frees up roads/traffic for those who do decide to drive.
A lot of people are commenting about "externalities". That's just handwaving.
The real solution is to increase the ridership and the frequency. Public transit must be _reliable_. I live in SF and experience Muni's unreliability first hand.
The reason a person would prefer to drive over taking the Muni is a simple one: she knows the car will be there when she's ready to head back. Muni, on the other hand: one never knows when the next bus will come or if it will come at all. And then the City hands out Muni passes to all homeless people, regardless of behavior. Yesterday I sat down in a Muni train and guess what? A used piece of TP (about a foot long) was blowing around on the floor and everybody was playing dodge-the-TP, trying to jump out of its way. Buses and trains are often not cleaned at the end of the day.
Question is: why doesn't the City subsidize Uber/Waymo etc. also to the tune of $6.37/trip (inside SF)?
What is the amortized cost of all the cars, car infrastructure, driver monitoring and enforcement, parking easements and lots, gasoline, insurance, harm to people inflicted by uninsured drivers?
What would be the cost of turning all those transit trips into car trips? Would rush hour start at 5 am and end at 10 pm?
I wonder if something like this could improve the economics of public transport though. Passengers do the bulk of their travel on the well used train line, and then the last part of their trip is covered by waymo which could be more cost effective than running mostly empty busses.
JR East in Japan makes the majority of its profit from the real estate, malls, and hotels it operates adjacent to its train stations. Hong Kong's MTR Corporation operates in the same way: It buys up land adjacent to a planned future station, then builds the station afterwards.
Did it? I always assumed the US train boom aligned with shipping companies more than land at the destinations, which is why even today cargo gets priority over Amtrak.
Ah yes, the government has never completely botched prime real estate before, nor have they ever botched housing build projects.
Federal and state governments own large parcels of prime NYC, LA, SF, Chicago and other metro land, most of which is underutilized. As an example, they operate or sublease numerous surface level parking lots in those places.
The federal government owns a prime parcel on State Street in Chicago, prime real estate, that is completely abandoned. There are many examples of this.
Your solution is to place this responsibility into the hands of those who have shown complete and utter incompetence across successive administrations?
Yes. My solution is also been shown to work in countries like Switzerland [0], makes the areas around train stations way more livable and return the gains back to the entire populace. I'd even go so far and make the sourrounding area unsellable but leased out for 99 years. Perhaps it's also a mentality difference between EU and US. We guys in the old world aren't (in general) as hypercapitalists or distrustful/follow Reageanismns like “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”
The problem is that personal vehicles inevitably leads to unsustainable traffic. Now, for low traffic areas, driverless cars might be an acceptable solution. But for busy areas, the geometry of transporting 1M people in cars vs buses is simply inescapable.
What they seem to be designing around here is that you take a self driving car through the low density last mile and then a train through the majority of the route.
If there was traffic along the last mile then it would be a good candidate for a regularly scheduled bus route. But for many areas there isn’t really traffic and not enough trips to jusitify all the bus routes it would take to fully cover the area.
And yes this is all a result of atrocious urban planning, but as a way to fix what already exists it seems promising.
This is assuming all or nothing. More likely they will co-exist.
There are good reasons to have choices. Driverless cars will make more sense if you have a lot of luggage or other cargo to schlep. Elderly people might find it easier. There will be routes that are awkward by bus.
Also driverless vans might make sense on some routes.
It will help if incentives encourage the use of whatever is more efficient.
This is why the main train company in the Netherlands has dirt cheap bike rentals at most train stations. Saves a bunch of last-mile headaches, as a traveller.
I always like being the person that points out that cars have on avg 1.5 passangers.
Meaning a bus (avg size of 2 medium cars) with just 4 people is already a better use of space on the road.
So while well utilised infrastructure might look prettier, the current misuse of infra is so vast that even minor use of public transit would already bring benefits.
Cost per passenger mile for a bus containing 4 people is much higher than for 4 cars, and since road wear scales with the 4th power of axle loading, a bus causes about 1,000x more damage to the road than a car.
It seems like the best solution would be to implement registration fees to offset externalities like pollution and road wear, and have congestion fees for when the roads are busy (including for vehicles such as busses). Then let the price signal decide the optimal mix of vehicles on the road. I think if such a system were implemented, the biggest change in behavior would be people taking fewer car trips during peak traffic hours.
> Cost per passenger mile for a bus containing 4 people is much higher than for 4 cars,
Is it? Total cost of buying 4 cars, maintaining 4 cars, potential piece failure across 4 cars, calculating and distributing gas for multiple stations for the gas to be available for all 4 users, parking for 4 vehicles...
you distribute the cost, but lower it is not. Having a single bus depo, where you fill them up, clean and have pieces that can be quickly swapped and repair across a fleet is much much cheaper.
Also in last mile trips or low usage areas, you can use smaller vehicles (like vans) instead of full sized buses. Which increases the advantages over cars in terms of weight and space and usage.
> since road wear scales with the 4th power of axle loading, a bus causes about 1,000x more damage to the road than a car.
Cars keep increasing in weight, with Mercedes G Wagon going over the ton
and also problems like space, parking and pollution are exponentially more worrying than road repairs. Which can even taken a step further and removed as a consideration with Trains over buses, which should be a final, last mile solutions or for lower density populations where trains might be too cumbersome.
> Then let the price signal decide the optimal mix of vehicles on the road.
When you have set up the ENTIRE system around car use, the price signalising would be entirely disregarded. If you have to get to work, and the only option is to use your car because there is no bus, then the price of the road is unavoidable.
The only possible effect is that the price signal is so loud, that they quit their job as their cost to travel is higher than their earnings. In which case businesses would suffer from only being able to hire people who can walk to work.
You would also be at the behest of lobbyist that can (and have) influenced the system to remove externalities that affect them. And oil and car manufacturing would instantly demolish your legislation making the status quo set itself up again.
And for the price signal to work, it should also be available and legible to suers, so the congestion fees should either change like the stock market (to influence real time usage) which means finding out the cost of travel is very difficult. or set up per hours, in which case essential services, and unavoidable commitments (like taking kids to school) become more expensive without a workable alternative. You can use your electronics after the price surge is down from your electric company, but you cant take your kid to school after "Peak Hour congestion charge" has expired.
Taxis are not efficient for short trips, so they won’t be a last-mile solution.
However, if I need to make an appointment on time, or just reduce morning hassles, I take a Waymo, but afterwards, I may be inclined to take public transit in the return direction. Same distance, similar route, but distinct criteria for budgeting time, money, and mental health.
A trick I learned from an east bay friend is that (when possible) the bus across the bridge is way nicer than the BART under the bay, especially around sunset.
I've heard multiple times Americans complaining about being on the bus.
Genuine question, what's up with being on the bus?
I lived in Vancouver BC, I can't see anything wrong with their bus. Not perfect, but yeah... It's a bus, goes from stop to stop. Anything special about bay area buses?
Yeah. I took the bus in NY and SF and I’m also not sure why the complained. Maybe because I’m a tourist but especially in SF I had always nice interactions with the driver. Mind you I took the Bus in the City Centers. Is it that much worse in the outskirts or is it just the concept of taking a Bus with multiple other people the problem?
I don't think so. American buses are ridiculously outdated, while having to compete with some of the most well-equipped cars in the world. If Europe had such buses, they wouldn't be popular either.
Europe isn't the richest place. Some of the western cities surely have nice buses, but there are plenty of old shabby buses there too and people still ride them. Might be that the routing and timing sucks, or the general cultural individualism.
The shitty metro buses in my 3rd rate "city" have air conditioning, wifi, live location tracking to your phone, wheel chair lifts, tap to pay, tap with app to pay, and run on propane because they are old enough to have "features" left over from the last oil crisis.
Can you tell me what a "Not outdated" bus looks like to you?
We were discussing riding the bus to a place that depending on traffic is a 20 minute car ride from SF, or a 2 hour car ride in the worst case scenario traffic.
There are a few bridges that connect SF to other places across large bodies of water, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. These bridges do not provide a dedicated lane for the buses. These bridges act as a choke point for traffic. As a result, the buses are not reliably on time, because the traffic is hard to predict and it depends on whether or not people have a car accident that evening.
As I mentioned in another comment, these buses do not have bathrooms inside. So you are spending an unpredictable amount of time standing at an unsheltered bus stop, often with no bench to rest on, followed by an unknown amount of time on the bus.
The buses come infrequently enough that if you go find a restroom after waiting a while at the stop, and the bus comes while you are gone, it will be a decent chunk of your life spent waiting for the next bus to come as well.
This might be fine if you're on vacation and you just wanted to explore the Bay Area, but if you live here and work here, this is just too much time!
If you have a car, there is essentially no upside to taking the bus in this situation, which means if you are greedy and choose to drive instead you contribute to traffic by taking up more space on the road.
In contrast, if you choose to take the train, you know exactly how long the trip is going to be, because there's no variable traffic disrupting the schedules. It's predictable. It's convenient. Sometimes the train might get stopped for one reason or another, but the trains come so frequently that this is rarely an issue.
Before your trip, you're also inside a train station, which is sheltered, has seating, and even often has bathrooms.
There's a sign telling you clearly how long until the next train arrives, you don't have to count on something on your phone to find out.
My understanding of the initial commend “But then you are on a bus” was a negative one to buses and or public transport in general.
I know the geology of SF and drove both bridges a few times myself but was always lucky to not end up in traffic. I would also always prefer the train over the bus. But currently where I live this also is put to the question. I live in Berlin and we have a great public transport network which at the moment struggles a bit on multiple fronts. This happens every few years at least in my experience.
I like to try out the public transport situation in different cities for my own comparison. Funny enough one of the best times I had was driving the metro in D.C. Met a very energetic metro employee who explained the machines and the system :).
In SF it really depends on which line you're on, and a bit of luck. In my experience the 9 was the worst. I didn't ride that one often, but almost every time I encountered something ridiculous. One time a guy rolled a blunt and started smoking it on the bus. Another time a guy in a wheelchair spilled a bottle of booze that then ran up and down the floor of the bus. I got off early several times when an obviously crazy homeless person got on and started silently staring me down.
But even popular commuter routes like the 38 can get pretty dicey. One time a guy was blasting music out of a bluetooth speaker. He had headphones sitting on his neck, so I asked him to use his headphones instead. His response was to get in my face and start yelling, threatening to beat me up. Everyone around us stepped away and ignored us. Apparently the next stop was his, so he got off while threatening to jump me if he ever saw me again.
If you take public transit in the bay area regularly, you are almost guaranteed to have some very unpleasant experiences.
The buses in SF and NYC suck because of this bipartisan belief of public transit as social welfare rather than a means for the bulk of society to get to their destination. This leads to things like far too many bus stops because granny complained, lack of fare enforcement, high staffing costs, etc. To make the bus as nice as Vancouver, these cities would need to cut stops and do a draconian fare enforcement campaign. For some reason, Canadian bus riders are not ungovernable barbarians like Americans, despite being poorer on average and more diverse.
Buses are widely perceived as signaling low socioeconomic status in the US, to the extent that it's become a self-reinforcing negative spiral. (As soon as a system loses its higher income riders due to real or perceived dangers or inconveniences, political support for tax subsidies and infrastructure investments (bus lanes etc.) tanks, quality then actually declines, rinse and repeat.)
I've taken buses in the Bay Area and New York a bunch of times and personally haven't had negative experiences (at least not compared to rail-based US transit), other than that the comfort of the buses was generally a few decades behind those in Europe. On the other hand, many of them even have Wi-Fi!
Where I am, buses are heavily subsidised; cost is about $3 per passenger mile. Fares are much cheaper (so cheap nobody ever really thinks about it, other than worrying if they have quarters for exact change).
They are often empty or have 1 or 2 riders.
They are slow, often show up to a stop late, so you have to plan everything an hour early.
They don’t have amenities like bathrooms and are uncomfortable for long trips, even though that’s the only sensible way to use them.
Due to political pressures, they have many, many stops and few express buses, so they are much slower than a car. The stops usually have nobody at them but the driver still has to slow down and check (sometimes they will just skip a stop they know is almost always empty).
The bus depots are not particularly safe or pleasant after dark and have trouble with attracting antisocial people.
Meanwhile, it would be cheaper to just pay for Ubers for anyone who wants them, and just make the Uber show up randomly late to replicate the experience.
There is a market emerging here often branded as “hood Uber”, “Alicia’s Uber” etc of people who will drive you for $1 a mile (cheaper than Uber) negotiated by text message and paid via CashApp etc. It’s completely unregulated. Some are now offering regular service in a minivan on a fixed route taking people to/from employers every day.
Service quality is just abysmal, extremely crowded at basically all times, delayed or skips your stop when your standing there, when it isn't crowded there's all sorts of other issues with the service, and this doesn't change the fact that it doesn't really take you where you want to go without transfers.
Truthfully, whenever I'm in the bay area I just find myself walking. There's a reason why e-scooters first found major adoption there.
A bus that gets stuck in traffic is by definition a failure. It will (again by definition) never be a viable alternative to driving, meaning a reinforcing loop where more driving means more traffic for the bus to be stuck on, meaning the bus is even slower and less attractive...
> It will (again by definition) never be a viable alternative to driving
I don’t follow the logic here. Why would a bus (periodically) getting stuck in traffic forever invalidate it in comparison to getting stuck in the same traffic in a car?
If buses and cars participate in the same road traffic (i.e. the bus doesn't have dedicated lanes), then a bus trip will never be faster than a comparable car trip. This is because you have to walk to/from the bus stop at both ends of the journey, wait for a bus to show up, ride the bus and have it stop for other passengers, transfer between routes, the bus has slower acceleration and turning than a car, etc.
Think about even the most strawman trip possible: A bus rider and a car driver start exactly at the location of a bus stop, the bus shows up exactly at the start time, both contestants ride/drive straight for a few kilometres (which happens to follow exactly one bus route, without changing buses; but the bus might stop a few times along the way for other passengers), and end exactly at a bus stop. The car will win every single time.
It's good to have dedicated bus lanes, but the point of a bus isn't to get from point A to point B faster than a car.
It's a part of a transit ecosystem that makes it possible to survive without a car. It fills in the the gaps where it's not economical to add train/metro lines.
Except that many buses broadcast their location, and many cities prioritize green lights for buses over cars.
So the car might need to stop on red multiple times (unless following a bus), while the bus will have most lights automatically turn green in front of it.
Yeah, the car will be faster, unless there are accommodations that benefit the bus only (like dedicated lanes). But the bus doesn’t have to be _faster_ to be viable to many people: there are other things going for the bus like not having to park, often being cheaper especially if it allows you to not own a car, etc. etc.
A big one: no need to find parking! Or to go back to your parked car on the reverse trip. You can do a triangle trip A,B,C,A with public transit. With a car it has to be A,B,C,B,A as you left your car at B.
I do trips like A,B,C,A all the time in a car. Sometimes even A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z,A trips in a car.
If you're sprinkling in little rules like "ah but you couldn't park at C", well, "the bus doesn't go to C" is also a valid restriction I run into often. So often when I take transit, its drive to train station -> take train someplace -> take bus someplace -> walk several blocks to destination -> walk several blocks back to bus stop -> ride bus to train station -> ride train back to train stop -> take car home so a A,B,C,D,C,B,A trip is actually quite common just to do the same as A,D,A with a car.
Caveat: the bus can be a little bit slower and still win, because you don't need to drive. Or the car can be a little bit slower and still win, because people are antisocial. When the difference is more than a little, then you're correct.
In aggregate, people go the fastest way - no way to stop this from happening. In places where everyone takes public transit, the transit is fast. To make more people take public transit, you make the transit fast.
Reserving lanes as bus lanes can actually speed up car traffic by making more people switch to bus.
Bus lanes make a bus a very good alternative to driving, and they are much more efficient space-wise compared to cars (and god forbid, pick-up trucks), which means you can get more throughput...
> They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.
Maybe, but who is Waymo to decide whether your trip is gratuitous? Perhaps you had brief business is Embarcadero and chose the particular mix of modalities for one reason or another (timing; or had to carry something heavy one way but not the other etc).
Indeed. Most people travelling around by taxi or public transport could be considered gratuitous anyway. You're probably not carrying a load of tools to do any work. You're more likely going to a bullshit job, going to meet friends, going to a concert or buying shit you don't need etc.
> Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train
After you "link your Visa card", yet the reward is in "Waymo cash", which expires in 90 days and can only be used for Waymo. That's just something on your Waymo account, not real money. They must want access to your Visa card data.
It sounds like Visa is coordinating the transfer data between agencies, and Waymo has just signed up to the existing program as if it were a transit agency.
I assume Visa is paying some of this from their marketing budget.
I've seen Visa branded ads for some e-payment solution in a South-East Asian country. The solution worked with any credit card, but the flyers were clearly Visa marketing material.
It is Visa only, so there must be some collaboration, also because they must somehow be able to learn about transit payments (which they normally wouldn't have access to as these happen on a third-party merchant account).
The target audience of this offer presumably takes Waymo at least occasionally, so how is a Waymo credit "not real money"? And what does transaction data have to do with this?
Oh, I think it's a great idea to reward people for taking transit because it will help reduce traffic on the road and allow the Waymos to operate in tighter loops, increasing availability to other passengers, and possibly even bringing costs down as a result.
My selfish trip all the way across the city instead of to the nearest convenient transit station makes things worse for everyone except for me :)
I sometimes take the slower and older commuter train back home from the office during "green months" as I call them (May to September) to enjoy the scenery and the ambient clickclacks of the train wheels.
I would really like a full door to door with one payment. Put in the destination, one price and get a Waymo on each end. React as best as possible to delays, etc.
The Transit app is great for this kind of stuff and many cities have integrated their transit options under a single payment system so you could actually do this. It can even take into account if you have a bike or not and you can specify stuff like "avoid busses".
Ugh, looks like this only works if you pay for the Waymo with a Visa card, and also use that same Visa card to pay for transit. I don't use a credit card for transit in SF; I use my Clipper transit card.
I get that integrating with the Clipper system is a lot more difficult, but... c'mon.
I mean it does save the public transit utility a lot of money in transaction fees so I'm happy to deal with it for that. But the main benefit is pre-tax transit benefits if your company offers it. It can go into a clipper card easily.
It's possible to implement weekly/monthly passes on credit/debit cards too via capping, but it's indeed a bit more annoying and unpredictable. For example, NYC MTA weekly capping breaks if you ever remove and re-add your card to your phone. (And I can understand how not all transit agencies want to offer capping.)
Last time I used BART, I had no idea you could use a credit card at the turnstyles. They've changed how this works like 20 times, and it never worked well.
Yes. Smartphone vendors and CC prefer that you use contactless rather than a physical Clipper card, then they have data on your transit use.
FYI there was a very informative recent panel episode of Forum: "KQED Investigates Botched Clipper 2.0 Launch" (8/24/2026, audio + transcript)
> KQED’s Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman joins us to talk about his investigation into what went wrong. Clipper 2.0 – a revamp of the payment system used across the [Bay Area] region’s 22 public transportation systems. The new version was supposed to allow seamless rides between systems and coordinate discounts and other programs. But..."
I do use a contactless Clipper card, on my phone. I don't think this bit is relevant: getting Visa to correlate transactions is probably a lot easier for Waymo to get done than integrating with Clipper to see if you've ridden transit in the past two hours.
I didn't disagree with you. I'm saying the key findings in that Clipper 2.0 postmortem were much bigger than any single incentive program like this Waymo one would have been. Hence I can see why Waymo avoid integrating with Clipper.
It said "one of the most complex fare payment systems in the world: 22 different transit agencies across nine counties in the Bay Area... [with thousands of fare categories]" And it's a single-bidder $500m contract that was 3 years late.
I'm also a fan of dedicated stored-value cards (they're generally much more robust during network or backend system outages), but I can really see the point of offering both in cities like New York or San Francisco.
Tourists trying to tap their credit or debit card and then arguing with the bus driver for a while, holding everyone up, used to be a quite common sight in SF.
> Public transit networks and shared autonomous vehicles are part of a complementary mobility ecosystem. As transit agencies modernize their payment systems to accept tap-to-pay debit and credit cards, multimodal trips are becoming more convenient than ever.
What a tonal shift immediately after the intro paragraph. I have to wonder how many times this went back and forth with PR and Legal to end up with this particular wording and to be the very first thing they stress after the basic facts. Especially the word ‘shared’ in ‘shared autonomous vehicles’ to connect people's thinking to ‘public’ transit. They even make sure to repeat the word ‘shared’ back to back to back in each of the final three paragraphs to make sure you end with that idea in mind. Yet all the cars are owned by Waymo and aren't ‘shared’ like the train and bus fleets which are owned by transit districts that I can vote on.
Translation: Waymo would like to learn how to prioritize their fleet of privately-owned vehicles, like where to have empty cars circling, where to expect them to be sent, and via what routes to send them, in order to replace the transit portion of the trip for as many riders as possible. Who wouldn't choose a single door-to-door trip over a transfer if the wait time is low and if the dollar cost of the private Waymo ride can be set approximately equal to the invisible ‘price’ people assign to the value of their time.
And just in case a reader doesn't pick up on that stuff, they directly tell you how to feel by quoting their very unbiased business partner:
> “San José has always believed innovation should make everyday life work better,” said San José Mayor Matt Mahan. “This partnership does exactly that by using new technology to strengthen public transit, not replace it, making regional travel more seamless and giving people more ways to get where they need to go.”
Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.
Widespread Waymo usage probably wouldn't “replace” the public transit routes we have now, sure, but it would remove the public's shared will to vote for transit expansions that could replace the Waymo portion of people's “““multimodal trips in a complementary mobility ecosystem””” (lmfao) instead of the other way around.
> When riders in the SF Bay Area use their Visa card to take a Waymo trip and public transit within 2 hours of each other, we will automatically issue $2.85 in Waymo Cash, which is the cost of a bus fare in San Francisco.
Great ‘anchoring’ technique in this wording too, to make people feel like $2.85 is getting them something tangible instead of being a pittance to pay for this type of hyper-personal behavior data.
I don't really think it's about the data. I think by Occam's Razor, Waymo (owned by Google) just sees a way for them to put transit directions in Google Maps where the last mile of your trip is a Waymo. By subsidizing part of the transit cost and it all being on one credit card, in the future you could pay for a whole transit + taxi trip only once and not multiple times at each leg
> Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.
That's pretty common, no? Many airports have fees that even traditional taxis have to pay (which is usually passed on to the rider as a part of the fare). It seems reasonable to me: car traffic can be be pretty bad at airports, and extra fees help encourage people to take buses, shuttles, trains, etc.
But overall, I do agree with your worry about this framing/anchoring harming future transit expansion projects. And I'd bet that Waymo would be right there lobbying against any transit expansion that threatened one of their well-established last-mile routes.
I do think transit just needs to be better, though. I could take transit to SFO (either Caltrain+BART or Muni+BART), but my car ride there is 13-16 minutes (via Lyft/Uber; Waymo still can't drop off at SFO proper, and it's a 19-minute walk with luggage from where they will drop off). Best case with Caltrain+BART is 33 minutes (but only with an express train during rush hour), and is more like 45 minutes for the rest of the day (and that's assuming the comparatively-infrequent Caltrain service lines up with my needs). I can take a Muni bus to BART (and actually have several choices there), but the total trip time is 50-70 minutes that way. Then there's the general uncertainty of making the transit connection without issues. (Yes, I'm fortunate that I can afford Lyft whenever I need to go to the airport. I ride transit within the city often, but it just doesn't work for me for airport trips.)
I think of other cities like Tokyo or Taipei, where taking transit from the airport to the city is a reasonable option, and is often faster than getting a taxi (and for Narita to many places in Tokyo, it can be north of USD$200 to take a taxi). Even in NYC it's often faster or at least reasonably convenient to take transit to one of the local airports, even Newark. Don't get me wrong, SF's transit system isn't bad! Even though it's not going to stand with the best in the world, it's still great and I use it often. But it has some very significant gaps.
Yep. I live in SOMA, near both the freeway and a BART station.
Without traffic, a car has me (and a friend) curbside in 12 minutes for $30. Even during rush hour, the southbound traffic between the 7th St onramp and the SFO exit is almost never very slow (while NB is always a standstill).
BART is 30 minutes on the train + however long it takes to walk to the station + the transfer from BART to SFO AirTrain to get to the terminal. Minimum 1 hour. Easily another 30 min if you're unlucky with train arrivals. And by getting off BART at the airport stop, you pay a premium fare of $11.80 per person.
Nice idea. But too many ifs and buts, and it's too little to really change habits. Besides, waymo's main issue seems to be supply right now. I can never get one when I need it.
I wish the government would rather invest in better public last mile connectivity programs or higher frequency trains and buses.
Well, Waymo could be seen as a last mile connectivity program. That's actually the "end goal" for robotaxis: not just replace taxis, Über etc., but offer an alternative to owning a car.
It's depressing what cluster eff we have in the US regarding public transport (NYC and the like don't count :)) Each time I return from Europe, I want to go straight back.
It seems odd that they want you to pay for transit with your visa. That excludes a lot of travelers who might have passes on their transit cards. Less common in the Bay since all our transit providers are different but I used to pay monthly for the Muni + Local BART pass all the time when I lived in SF.
Bc if they cement their status in people's minds as a last mile solution (there are other cheaper ones: bay wheels, lime scooters, etc.) that's an extra fare they didn't get before at a cheap customer acquisition cost ($3/ride)
I use my commuter benefit debit card to pay for public transit. Notably this does not include rideshares like Waymo. In order to
claim the transit reward I could use a personal card to pay for both transit and Waymo, but that leads to considerable friction where I need to collect receipts and submit claims to use my commuter benefit.
Most companies in SF must offer a commuter benefit so it doesn't seem like many people will be getting this Waymo transit reward.
I don't live in California, so maybe I'm misunderstanding something. Uber and Lyft were ostensibly originally meant for people already travelling from point A to point B to share the ride with someone and make some money - and still could be used that way. But Waymo had always been a car-for-hire service with no pretension. So why is it grouped together with "rideshare" and not taxis?
waymo, uber, lyft, etc. are akin to a classic black cab service where you call a number to make a sort of ride appointment. these never needed taxi licenses, as taxis are specifically hailable from the street at will rather than prebooked.
Presumably Visa is subsidizing this in some way, if only by offering data sharing or access to some rewards platform to Waymo (they need to know about your Muni rides somehow to issue the credit, after all).
(Is it given that there's a play? Waymo is culturally a little distinct from Google so from personal experience I can't actually rule out that they're just doing this coz they think it would be good for the world).
I suspect they are fielding complaints that autonomous vehicles increase road traffic, so they want to show that they are encouraging the use of public transit. Uber and Lyft have long been blamed for an increase in overall traffic.
The sad reality is that it is practically impossible to tell a good act apart from one with ulterior motives. It could be just a cross promotion, but it could also aim to be friendly to lawmakers or to grow in ridership with the goal of extinguishing the competition.
You are right and therefore downvoted. No way to tell what's behind this. Once waymo has total market dominance and exists in every city, it's hard to imagine them continuing to support local transit. The thing about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is nobody suspects it during the Embrace phase because good motives and bad motives look exactly the same.
at times I wonder all that money pumped into uber & Lyft to subsidize rides could've been pumped into electric buses that run 24/7
how much cheaper and accessible transportation would be. on the other side uber Lyft etc enabled plenty of people who were perennially unemployed to gain income. while the subsidized rates are gone, seems the ride share companies are making some of their money on food deliveries instead (another place robots could take over ??)
anyways this is a good move from Waymo if only the program can be maintained for 20+ years.
I think of food delivery in urban areas as a good test case for “are people really going to lose their jobs to robots?” I think it’s gonna be a while? Unless it’s the customer doing some of the work by going down to the street to take the food out of the Waymo.
They absolutely will. Zipline (drone delivery) is already successfully operating with FAA approval, and is actively fulfilling daily deliveries in multiple metro areas. They just announced a partnership with Uber Eats, who, according to a podcast with the Zipline CEO, wanted all of their current and near-future planned capacity.
Once you are in the Waymo, why bother getting out just to get on a bus?
In New York, increases in the use of ride services like Uber mostly came from bus and subway riders[1]. If we are being charitable to Google, we might assume that this initiative is intended to reduce the same sort of trend. If we are not being charitable, we might assume that this initiative is intended to encourage current bus riders to expose themselves to the product.
The answer to both of your points is that mass transit is used for most of the travel and the last mile is taxi equivalent. Being unable to do the last mile is a common reason not to take mass transit, so more usable taxi equivalents tends to increase mass transit use. And most directly, taxi equivalents are often significantly more expensive or significantly than mass transit at crossing cities.
Maybe just an artifact of where I live (Los Angeles), but whenever Ive considered taking Waymo to the train station, it's usually easier and often cheaper to take it all the way to my destination. eg right now a Waymo to the train station is $16, then you wait 0-15 minutes to hop on the train, paying an additional $3.50 round trip. I'm pretty pro-transit, but I can't deny that the ipace is a much more pleasant experience than the train (I can play my music, don't have to listen to other people, guaranteed seating, guaranteed AC, fewer undesired encounters with strangers).
Meanwhile, a waymo to a stadium on that same train line is $26. If you're with 1-3 other people, taking Waymo all the way is a no-brainer.
> If you're with 1-3 other people, taking Waymo all the way is a no-brainer.
This is often the case for any mass transit vs personal transit option.
As for home -> taxi -> mass transit -> taxi -> destination; you have to have a pretty short journey on the mass transit for it to reliably work out cheaper to do home -> taxi -> destination, which pretty clearly restricts the pool of people that applies to.
I use ride share singularly for the convenience. I don’t really think about the cost all that much if it’s “reasonable” and no financial incentive they could provide to link multiple forms of transportation would be enough to overcome that single convenience.
Amongst other reasons, I use Waymo for covering the last mile of a trip made by bus or light rail in my city (Houston, TX). Our public transit service is very reasonably priced but it would be awesome to get a discount!
This program is mainly a fig leaf defense that Waymo can trot out when it is criticized by transit proponents. Which is totally fine by me. Train transit as it exists in the US is largely indefensible. We will be better of the sooner we can rip up the tracks and put those right of ways to better use (AV and bike lanes).
I wondered about that too. While correct in Spanish, I am not sure it's appropriate to refer to San Jose, CA with the accent. A positive indicator that AI wrote the article.
Ridership of public transit has grown dramatically in the past 20 years, here in the Phoenix Metro area. I’m excited about this new offering, and I hope it is expanded as described!
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadI appreciate solutions that meet us where we are, but it’s depressing that we don’t seem to actually have the will to make a sustainable, integrated mass transit plan.
We have under-utilized transit corridors that could alleviate much of this strain if they weren’t so damn far away from where the people sitting in traffic want to go.
If we could go back to pre-pandemic ridership levels, the subsidy rate would be inverted (fares covered 70% versus 30% now). Public Transit struggles with low utilization. It'll take 10+ years to get back to that ridership level though.
Also, the cost to a driver of the car is around $0.70 not including cost to the government and cost of externalities.
If BART disappeared tomorrow, how much would the government have to pay to build all the additional roads and parking to support that incremental traffic?
And how much for healthcare for all the incremental pollution and collisions?
> several cents per vehicle mile
It's close to a dollar per mile when you include all the externalized costs.
Incremental property damage, injuries and fatalities, incremental chronic illness from pollution, parking land subsidy, fair market value of incremental land use and rights of way, lost tax revenue from that incremental land use, etc.
Which world cities with widely admired and well used transport systems have this model?
Public transportation will never have the incentive to minimize cost and headcount.
Where we do have public transportation, it should always face competition from private offerings - including on the tracks, as they do in Italy, for example.
In a city the only question that surely matters is: Can the mode of transport be scaled? For private car transit, the answer is no. No city can function if everyone gets around by car. Even Houston has light rail and a bus network. If you can drive and your city somehow remains livable, that is because other people are taking transit.
If we look at all government spending (Federal, State, Local) on highways and roads, that's around $285B/year and 3.28 trillion miles, or 8.7 cents / vehicle mile traveled.
BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services - house prices and rents would have increased substantially. Public investment, private profits. Subsidies in the form of low-cost fares like this are just further welfare for the landowners.
Interestingly, about a third of BART's cost was acquiring land - if/when that same land is cleared and sold on market, the project would have operated at an enormous profit. Certainly, BART's current assets would far exceed 'total fares collected'.
Overpaid transit employees, engineering firms, and construction companies.
Unless you try to build housing.
https://reason.com/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-...
Tillman cites $1M of costs, of which $200k were 'city fees' (not itemized) and the rest were presumably normal costs for developers/engineers/architects/etc (of course, these would potentially be smaller if there was less regulation). The development start to approval time of 3.5 years is not crazy for a first time 'accidental developer' working on such a large project.
After approval, there seems to have been a~12 month period of bad faith activists slowing down the project. Tillman filed a lawsuit, did a media campaign, and the project was re-approved later in 2018.
He then sold the pre-approved project to a Cresleigh Homes for $13.5 million in early 2019.
So we've had 6 years of financial delays as Cresleigh tries to fund the build vs maybe 1 year of 'bad faith' development approval delays 2017-2018.
The reason we don't have roads is because the economics are terrible. The government gets $0 per trip [1], but it costs billions of dollars a year in operating expenses.
Wait, that's not how it works.
[1] Federal gas taxes don't count, because those go to the Highway Trust Fund which funds road construction, which is not an operating expense. State gas taxes may vary. Although toll roads also properly charge people user fees, although for some reason, lots of drivers complain about how expensive tolls are...
If public transit is less cost-effective than taking a helicopter, then something is clearly broken.
Note that a 12 seat private jet also costs less per passenger mile than BART does. That's not beacuse jets are cheap, but because BART is currently absurdly expensive.
* Few take it because it doesn't meet their need [low denominator]
* Let's spend money to make it meet people's need [numerator goes up]
...
?
It's about cost comparison: SF Muni's operating costs (in terms of costs per passenger mile) are so bloated they're comparable to chartering a helicopter.
This should not be possible, and it's a strong signal of poor fiscal management. SF Muni operates at $3.62 per passenger mile. For comparison, Transport for London (TfL) operates at around $0.50/passenger mile and Shanghai Metro operates at $0.11/passenger mile.
Doesn't the Highway Trust Fund pay for road maintenance as well?
instead you need to find the overall economic benefit and related government revenues from each transit trip, not just the cost of the trip alone
You know subsidy per train passenger mile?
I remember talking to a VC a few years back, and he vehemently explained why he will never ever fund companies related to public transit, for this reason. Public transit was one of the two sectors he would not invest in (the other being materials science).
In the bay, low-skilled / manual laborers spend >50% of their income on housing. Many can't afford to live here, so they demand higher wages or leave, which drives up the price of labor even further.
If sufficient housing were built and the Bay Area had the same housing prices as the rest of the US, then 1) the supply of labor would go up 2) wages could fall by 30-40% without a quality of life decrease. Businesses could reduce their labor costs by 20%, which would improve the QoL of everyone in the area, including manual laborers.
Then run this process iteratively and you will see massive cost reductions, the cost of everything will go down by 30+ percent.
For the case of BART, they spend ~$800 million / year on labor, so reducing cost here has the highest RoI. They would save hundreds of millions per year.
Buy America Act makes buses roughly three times more expensive, and then they use decades-old technology due to a lack of competition.
The MTA in NYC has two-person subway crews, which is almost unprecedented in this day and age. BART could be driverless if unions wouldn't revolt.
There's an irony that American unions are strong enough to prevent automatization, but weak enough to fear it (unlike say Denmark or France).
Not everything has to be directly money making.
If anything, the Bay Area needs significantly more public transit. BART in particular is mostly useful between cities, in my experience. You can’t go from the mission to cow hollow or dog patch to north beach, let alone anywhere to the ocean.
Also, subways don’t have much (if any) marginal cost per passenger. The issue isn’t cost but ridership. Ridership will increase with utility, which requires political will, which does not exist.
SF could be so much more.
Moscow subway [2] has 17 lines and 309 stations. In newer cars, 2 USB-A sockets are available near every seat, ready for robots.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Central_Diameters
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro
And that’s not even counting for however much I’m subsidized on the highway and road systems I don’t pay anything to use.
Public transit is definitely expensive, but the alternative is also very costly and also regressive. The goal with public transit is to provide a low-cost, high-density way to move people around the city. It’s a public service, it shouldn’t be making profit. Car ownership is more expensive in total and very space-inefficient. Cities don’t have room for space inefficiency.
The US Midwest and West were built out more recently and at lower density, which is enabled by private car ownership.
A lot of people are commenting about "externalities". That's just handwaving.
The real solution is to increase the ridership and the frequency. Public transit must be _reliable_. I live in SF and experience Muni's unreliability first hand.
The reason a person would prefer to drive over taking the Muni is a simple one: she knows the car will be there when she's ready to head back. Muni, on the other hand: one never knows when the next bus will come or if it will come at all. And then the City hands out Muni passes to all homeless people, regardless of behavior. Yesterday I sat down in a Muni train and guess what? A used piece of TP (about a foot long) was blowing around on the floor and everybody was playing dodge-the-TP, trying to jump out of its way. Buses and trains are often not cleaned at the end of the day.
Question is: why doesn't the City subsidize Uber/Waymo etc. also to the tune of $6.37/trip (inside SF)?
What would be the cost of turning all those transit trips into car trips? Would rush hour start at 5 am and end at 10 pm?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_Un...
This is a part of why there were so many tiny little towns out West which were essentially just a railroad stop and a few buildings.
you can get to hong kong or jspan in hours to days. the train boom is about a century away
Especially if the Waymo data feeds back to the government to plan scheduled PT on the most popular routes.
Federal and state governments own large parcels of prime NYC, LA, SF, Chicago and other metro land, most of which is underutilized. As an example, they operate or sublease numerous surface level parking lots in those places.
The federal government owns a prime parcel on State Street in Chicago, prime real estate, that is completely abandoned. There are many examples of this.
Your solution is to place this responsibility into the hands of those who have shown complete and utter incompetence across successive administrations?
[0] https://sbb-immobilien.ch/en/station-surroundings/
If there was traffic along the last mile then it would be a good candidate for a regularly scheduled bus route. But for many areas there isn’t really traffic and not enough trips to jusitify all the bus routes it would take to fully cover the area.
And yes this is all a result of atrocious urban planning, but as a way to fix what already exists it seems promising.
There are good reasons to have choices. Driverless cars will make more sense if you have a lot of luggage or other cargo to schlep. Elderly people might find it easier. There will be routes that are awkward by bus.
Also driverless vans might make sense on some routes.
It will help if incentives encourage the use of whatever is more efficient.
I always like being the person that points out that cars have on avg 1.5 passangers.
Meaning a bus (avg size of 2 medium cars) with just 4 people is already a better use of space on the road.
So while well utilised infrastructure might look prettier, the current misuse of infra is so vast that even minor use of public transit would already bring benefits.
It seems like the best solution would be to implement registration fees to offset externalities like pollution and road wear, and have congestion fees for when the roads are busy (including for vehicles such as busses). Then let the price signal decide the optimal mix of vehicles on the road. I think if such a system were implemented, the biggest change in behavior would be people taking fewer car trips during peak traffic hours.
is road wear the only cost, or the highest cost to consider of the comparison?
is it even the right comparison, vs a 4 person street car where its running on rails?
is lowest cost even the right thing to optimize for when it might mean people lose jobs?
Is it? Total cost of buying 4 cars, maintaining 4 cars, potential piece failure across 4 cars, calculating and distributing gas for multiple stations for the gas to be available for all 4 users, parking for 4 vehicles...
you distribute the cost, but lower it is not. Having a single bus depo, where you fill them up, clean and have pieces that can be quickly swapped and repair across a fleet is much much cheaper.
Also in last mile trips or low usage areas, you can use smaller vehicles (like vans) instead of full sized buses. Which increases the advantages over cars in terms of weight and space and usage.
> since road wear scales with the 4th power of axle loading, a bus causes about 1,000x more damage to the road than a car.
Cars keep increasing in weight, with Mercedes G Wagon going over the ton
and also problems like space, parking and pollution are exponentially more worrying than road repairs. Which can even taken a step further and removed as a consideration with Trains over buses, which should be a final, last mile solutions or for lower density populations where trains might be too cumbersome.
> Then let the price signal decide the optimal mix of vehicles on the road.
When you have set up the ENTIRE system around car use, the price signalising would be entirely disregarded. If you have to get to work, and the only option is to use your car because there is no bus, then the price of the road is unavoidable.
The only possible effect is that the price signal is so loud, that they quit their job as their cost to travel is higher than their earnings. In which case businesses would suffer from only being able to hire people who can walk to work.
You would also be at the behest of lobbyist that can (and have) influenced the system to remove externalities that affect them. And oil and car manufacturing would instantly demolish your legislation making the status quo set itself up again.
And for the price signal to work, it should also be available and legible to suers, so the congestion fees should either change like the stock market (to influence real time usage) which means finding out the cost of travel is very difficult. or set up per hours, in which case essential services, and unavoidable commitments (like taking kids to school) become more expensive without a workable alternative. You can use your electronics after the price surge is down from your electric company, but you cant take your kid to school after "Peak Hour congestion charge" has expired.
However, if I need to make an appointment on time, or just reduce morning hassles, I take a Waymo, but afterwards, I may be inclined to take public transit in the return direction. Same distance, similar route, but distinct criteria for budgeting time, money, and mental health.
Genuine question, what's up with being on the bus?
I lived in Vancouver BC, I can't see anything wrong with their bus. Not perfect, but yeah... It's a bus, goes from stop to stop. Anything special about bay area buses?
What exactly are we missing with our "ridiculously outdated" busses?
Can you tell me what a "Not outdated" bus looks like to you?
There are a few bridges that connect SF to other places across large bodies of water, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. These bridges do not provide a dedicated lane for the buses. These bridges act as a choke point for traffic. As a result, the buses are not reliably on time, because the traffic is hard to predict and it depends on whether or not people have a car accident that evening.
As I mentioned in another comment, these buses do not have bathrooms inside. So you are spending an unpredictable amount of time standing at an unsheltered bus stop, often with no bench to rest on, followed by an unknown amount of time on the bus.
The buses come infrequently enough that if you go find a restroom after waiting a while at the stop, and the bus comes while you are gone, it will be a decent chunk of your life spent waiting for the next bus to come as well.
This might be fine if you're on vacation and you just wanted to explore the Bay Area, but if you live here and work here, this is just too much time!
If you have a car, there is essentially no upside to taking the bus in this situation, which means if you are greedy and choose to drive instead you contribute to traffic by taking up more space on the road.
In contrast, if you choose to take the train, you know exactly how long the trip is going to be, because there's no variable traffic disrupting the schedules. It's predictable. It's convenient. Sometimes the train might get stopped for one reason or another, but the trains come so frequently that this is rarely an issue.
Before your trip, you're also inside a train station, which is sheltered, has seating, and even often has bathrooms.
There's a sign telling you clearly how long until the next train arrives, you don't have to count on something on your phone to find out.
I know the geology of SF and drove both bridges a few times myself but was always lucky to not end up in traffic. I would also always prefer the train over the bus. But currently where I live this also is put to the question. I live in Berlin and we have a great public transport network which at the moment struggles a bit on multiple fronts. This happens every few years at least in my experience.
I like to try out the public transport situation in different cities for my own comparison. Funny enough one of the best times I had was driving the metro in D.C. Met a very energetic metro employee who explained the machines and the system :).
But even popular commuter routes like the 38 can get pretty dicey. One time a guy was blasting music out of a bluetooth speaker. He had headphones sitting on his neck, so I asked him to use his headphones instead. His response was to get in my face and start yelling, threatening to beat me up. Everyone around us stepped away and ignored us. Apparently the next stop was his, so he got off while threatening to jump me if he ever saw me again.
If you take public transit in the bay area regularly, you are almost guaranteed to have some very unpleasant experiences.
I've taken buses in the Bay Area and New York a bunch of times and personally haven't had negative experiences (at least not compared to rail-based US transit), other than that the comfort of the buses was generally a few decades behind those in Europe. On the other hand, many of them even have Wi-Fi!
They are often empty or have 1 or 2 riders.
They are slow, often show up to a stop late, so you have to plan everything an hour early.
They don’t have amenities like bathrooms and are uncomfortable for long trips, even though that’s the only sensible way to use them.
Due to political pressures, they have many, many stops and few express buses, so they are much slower than a car. The stops usually have nobody at them but the driver still has to slow down and check (sometimes they will just skip a stop they know is almost always empty).
The bus depots are not particularly safe or pleasant after dark and have trouble with attracting antisocial people.
Meanwhile, it would be cheaper to just pay for Ubers for anyone who wants them, and just make the Uber show up randomly late to replicate the experience.
There is a market emerging here often branded as “hood Uber”, “Alicia’s Uber” etc of people who will drive you for $1 a mile (cheaper than Uber) negotiated by text message and paid via CashApp etc. It’s completely unregulated. Some are now offering regular service in a minivan on a fixed route taking people to/from employers every day.
Truthfully, whenever I'm in the bay area I just find myself walking. There's a reason why e-scooters first found major adoption there.
I don’t follow the logic here. Why would a bus (periodically) getting stuck in traffic forever invalidate it in comparison to getting stuck in the same traffic in a car?
Think about even the most strawman trip possible: A bus rider and a car driver start exactly at the location of a bus stop, the bus shows up exactly at the start time, both contestants ride/drive straight for a few kilometres (which happens to follow exactly one bus route, without changing buses; but the bus might stop a few times along the way for other passengers), and end exactly at a bus stop. The car will win every single time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis
It's a part of a transit ecosystem that makes it possible to survive without a car. It fills in the the gaps where it's not economical to add train/metro lines.
So the car might need to stop on red multiple times (unless following a bus), while the bus will have most lights automatically turn green in front of it.
If you're sprinkling in little rules like "ah but you couldn't park at C", well, "the bus doesn't go to C" is also a valid restriction I run into often. So often when I take transit, its drive to train station -> take train someplace -> take bus someplace -> walk several blocks to destination -> walk several blocks back to bus stop -> ride bus to train station -> ride train back to train stop -> take car home so a A,B,C,D,C,B,A trip is actually quite common just to do the same as A,D,A with a car.
Reserving lanes as bus lanes can actually speed up car traffic by making more people switch to bus.
Maybe, but who is Waymo to decide whether your trip is gratuitous? Perhaps you had brief business is Embarcadero and chose the particular mix of modalities for one reason or another (timing; or had to carry something heavy one way but not the other etc).
You have a really dim view of humanity </3
People need to get from point A to point B. Traveling to meet up with friends is in no way gratuitous.
The point is if you start getting into what's gratuitous and what isn't then suddenly everything becomes gratuitous.
After you "link your Visa card", yet the reward is in "Waymo cash", which expires in 90 days and can only be used for Waymo. That's just something on your Waymo account, not real money. They must want access to your Visa card data.
I've seen Visa branded ads for some e-payment solution in a South-East Asian country. The solution worked with any credit card, but the flyers were clearly Visa marketing material.
OR, if it's Visa only, it's a comarketing stunt.
My selfish trip all the way across the city instead of to the nearest convenient transit station makes things worse for everyone except for me :)
Home -> waymo -> Caltrain -> Waymo -> sf concert venue
For me smoothly
I get that integrating with the Clipper system is a lot more difficult, but... c'mon.
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/fares
FYI there was a very informative recent panel episode of Forum: "KQED Investigates Botched Clipper 2.0 Launch" (8/24/2026, audio + transcript)
> KQED’s Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman joins us to talk about his investigation into what went wrong. Clipper 2.0 – a revamp of the payment system used across the [Bay Area] region’s 22 public transportation systems. The new version was supposed to allow seamless rides between systems and coordinate discounts and other programs. But..."
https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101915014/kqed-investigates-b...
It said "one of the most complex fare payment systems in the world: 22 different transit agencies across nine counties in the Bay Area... [with thousands of fare categories]" And it's a single-bidder $500m contract that was 3 years late.
Tourists trying to tap their credit or debit card and then arguing with the bus driver for a while, holding everyone up, used to be a quite common sight in SF.
What a tonal shift immediately after the intro paragraph. I have to wonder how many times this went back and forth with PR and Legal to end up with this particular wording and to be the very first thing they stress after the basic facts. Especially the word ‘shared’ in ‘shared autonomous vehicles’ to connect people's thinking to ‘public’ transit. They even make sure to repeat the word ‘shared’ back to back to back in each of the final three paragraphs to make sure you end with that idea in mind. Yet all the cars are owned by Waymo and aren't ‘shared’ like the train and bus fleets which are owned by transit districts that I can vote on.
Translation: Waymo would like to learn how to prioritize their fleet of privately-owned vehicles, like where to have empty cars circling, where to expect them to be sent, and via what routes to send them, in order to replace the transit portion of the trip for as many riders as possible. Who wouldn't choose a single door-to-door trip over a transfer if the wait time is low and if the dollar cost of the private Waymo ride can be set approximately equal to the invisible ‘price’ people assign to the value of their time.
And just in case a reader doesn't pick up on that stuff, they directly tell you how to feel by quoting their very unbiased business partner:
> “San José has always believed innovation should make everyday life work better,” said San José Mayor Matt Mahan. “This partnership does exactly that by using new technology to strengthen public transit, not replace it, making regional travel more seamless and giving people more ways to get where they need to go.”
Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.
Widespread Waymo usage probably wouldn't “replace” the public transit routes we have now, sure, but it would remove the public's shared will to vote for transit expansions that could replace the Waymo portion of people's “““multimodal trips in a complementary mobility ecosystem””” (lmfao) instead of the other way around.
> When riders in the SF Bay Area use their Visa card to take a Waymo trip and public transit within 2 hours of each other, we will automatically issue $2.85 in Waymo Cash, which is the cost of a bus fare in San Francisco.
Great ‘anchoring’ technique in this wording too, to make people feel like $2.85 is getting them something tangible instead of being a pittance to pay for this type of hyper-personal behavior data.
That's pretty common, no? Many airports have fees that even traditional taxis have to pay (which is usually passed on to the rider as a part of the fare). It seems reasonable to me: car traffic can be be pretty bad at airports, and extra fees help encourage people to take buses, shuttles, trains, etc.
But overall, I do agree with your worry about this framing/anchoring harming future transit expansion projects. And I'd bet that Waymo would be right there lobbying against any transit expansion that threatened one of their well-established last-mile routes.
I do think transit just needs to be better, though. I could take transit to SFO (either Caltrain+BART or Muni+BART), but my car ride there is 13-16 minutes (via Lyft/Uber; Waymo still can't drop off at SFO proper, and it's a 19-minute walk with luggage from where they will drop off). Best case with Caltrain+BART is 33 minutes (but only with an express train during rush hour), and is more like 45 minutes for the rest of the day (and that's assuming the comparatively-infrequent Caltrain service lines up with my needs). I can take a Muni bus to BART (and actually have several choices there), but the total trip time is 50-70 minutes that way. Then there's the general uncertainty of making the transit connection without issues. (Yes, I'm fortunate that I can afford Lyft whenever I need to go to the airport. I ride transit within the city often, but it just doesn't work for me for airport trips.)
I think of other cities like Tokyo or Taipei, where taking transit from the airport to the city is a reasonable option, and is often faster than getting a taxi (and for Narita to many places in Tokyo, it can be north of USD$200 to take a taxi). Even in NYC it's often faster or at least reasonably convenient to take transit to one of the local airports, even Newark. Don't get me wrong, SF's transit system isn't bad! Even though it's not going to stand with the best in the world, it's still great and I use it often. But it has some very significant gaps.
Without traffic, a car has me (and a friend) curbside in 12 minutes for $30. Even during rush hour, the southbound traffic between the 7th St onramp and the SFO exit is almost never very slow (while NB is always a standstill).
BART is 30 minutes on the train + however long it takes to walk to the station + the transfer from BART to SFO AirTrain to get to the terminal. Minimum 1 hour. Easily another 30 min if you're unlucky with train arrivals. And by getting off BART at the airport stop, you pay a premium fare of $11.80 per person.
I simply don't bother taking the train.
I wish the government would rather invest in better public last mile connectivity programs or higher frequency trains and buses.
(Is it given that there's a play? Waymo is culturally a little distinct from Google so from personal experience I can't actually rule out that they're just doing this coz they think it would be good for the world).
The more people use it, the easier it is to remove alternatives. Then everyone's movements and spending habits are tracked.
The sad reality is that it is practically impossible to tell a good act apart from one with ulterior motives. It could be just a cross promotion, but it could also aim to be friendly to lawmakers or to grow in ridership with the goal of extinguishing the competition.
The VC playbook heavily suggests the latter
how much cheaper and accessible transportation would be. on the other side uber Lyft etc enabled plenty of people who were perennially unemployed to gain income. while the subsidized rates are gone, seems the ride share companies are making some of their money on food deliveries instead (another place robots could take over ??)
anyways this is a good move from Waymo if only the program can be maintained for 20+ years.
Delivering bombs is much easier, unfortunately.
In New York, increases in the use of ride services like Uber mostly came from bus and subway riders[1]. If we are being charitable to Google, we might assume that this initiative is intended to reduce the same sort of trend. If we are not being charitable, we might assume that this initiative is intended to encourage current bus riders to expose themselves to the product.
[1] https://www.6sqft.com/mta-says-uber-use-is-the-cause-of-nyc-...
Meanwhile, a waymo to a stadium on that same train line is $26. If you're with 1-3 other people, taking Waymo all the way is a no-brainer.
This is often the case for any mass transit vs personal transit option.
As for home -> taxi -> mass transit -> taxi -> destination; you have to have a pretty short journey on the mass transit for it to reliably work out cheaper to do home -> taxi -> destination, which pretty clearly restricts the pool of people that applies to.
Amongst other reasons, I use Waymo for covering the last mile of a trip made by bus or light rail in my city (Houston, TX). Our public transit service is very reasonably priced but it would be awesome to get a discount!
But an "AV lane" will very quickly converge on the traffic characteristics of a regular road.
A regular road loses capacity with increased speed due to increased distances between cars, braking ripple effects etc.
At 75 mph/120 km/h, two seconds distance is 33 meters, likely enough to fit three more autonomous cars into the same lane.