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.
I'm from the Bay and no longer live there but for how massive the region (functionally: Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz; SF to Antioch+) is the public transit is pretty good. Obviously not perfect and a lot of room for improvement.
I've spoken with old timers who would talk about the days before the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, to name one piece of the puzzle.
Which is a problem in and of itself, at least theoretically. I don't live in SF, but I do live in a highly balkanized area (Atlanta) where the proliferation of local governments is a weight around the neck of the region overall
There are a couple of metro areas that escaped this problem by having regional government, Mpls/St Paul, MN and Portland, OR.
Minnesota has the Metropolitan Council which derives its power from state statute and can supersede the decisions of local governments. The same people that bitch about ‘my tax dollars’ complain about the Met Council but I feel it provides a cohesive regional planing organization and they provide water, sewer, transportation, and regional parks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council_(Minnesot...
You say that, but if your SF tax dollars were paying for VTA you'd probably have stronger complaints... Moreover, public transit isn't evenly distributed even within SF so I don't think the transit agency count is an important variable.
They're all tied together through Clipper, so it doesn't make a difference to end users anyway.
It matters in that it's impossible to reliably and efficiently coordinate routes across that many agencies. Even if a rider can go from South San Jose to Oakland to Petaluma in a single trip on a single fare transferring as they go, okay it's an optimal payment experience but the routing and interlocking between systems surely isn't
Check out the storied history of RM2. Taxpayers literally voted to raise sales taxes to fund a rail corridor, and the money was reallocated to a different county for an unrelated project that did not benefit the counties in question. Never mind that an actual functional Dumbarton Rail could be a huge improvement to life on the Peninsula if done well.
Imagine a genuinely fast transfer between any one of the Caltrain stations (say Palo Alto or Menlo Park) and one of the East Bay BART stations. Of course, getting the western portion past all the expensive neighborhoods in the way sounds like a real mess.
One of these doesn't require a multi-decade approval process for good reason. (Figuring out the logistics and civil engineering planning is a real thing and building it out isn't trivial) . Of course this could change
It is a plain fact that there would be more interest in public transit if it was as clean, as safe, and as reliable (if not cleaner, safer, and more reliable) than driving using personal vehicles.
> 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...
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.
But you can't ignore the financials. SF Muni's $3.62 cost per passenger mile is atrocious. At that price point, it's cheaper to charter a helicopter. I'm not kidding. You could literally charter a 20-seat Airbus H175 helicopter to fly people around for $2.50 per passenger mile. And you'd get there faster.
If public transit is less cost-effective than taking a helicopter, then something is clearly broken.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'.
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.
And of course - funding the build would have been much easier if the landowner didn't want $13.5 million for an empty lot! (or $12 million if you subtract the development costs). So arguably Tillman did more to delay housing than anyone else.
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.
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.
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.
For BART, that number is:
$1.07B operating expense / 892.5M million passenger miles traveled = $1.20 per mile. Then subtract out the fare per mile and the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART.
> 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).
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 numbers aren’t made up. The Federal government publishes these statistics annually, they're widely used by policy analysts, and they're simple to calculate yourself.
The Federal government spends ~$17.5B/year on maintaining and constructing the interstate highway system. Americans drive 852 billion miles/year on it. The cost per Vehicle Mile Traveled (VMT) is 2.1 cents / mile.
If we look at all government spending (Federal, State, Local) on highways, roads, and supporting infrastructure (which includes traffic management systems), that's around $285B/year and 3.28 trillion miles, or 8.7 cents per Vehicle Mile Traveled.
The cost to the government to provide and maintain roads is on the order of several cents per mile traveled per year. Roads are simply much more cost-effective to build and maintain than dedicated public transit infrastructure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Obviously yes, you have to since the vast majority of expenses (>70%) are fixed costs. If you only exclude them and only look at marginal costs, they're profitable.
But you cannot run a transit system on marginal costs, so using that comparison is also misleading.
The usual rule of thumb is that fixed costs of public transit are covered by increased property values. It could mean a private transit company developing the areas around stations (as it often works in Japan), or it could mean the government getting more money from property taxes. Or it could even mean more money from income taxes, if the transit project stimulates economic activity.
If a transit project doesn't increase property values enough to justify the investment, or if the entity funding the project cannot extract that value, the project rarely makes sense.
Do you mean that nobody wants property values go up? The government gets more property taxes, because properties near transit stations are more valuable than in other places.
Yes, if you don't intend to sell, and actually want to live somewhere, higher property values just mean higher taxes (or if constrained like with Prop 13, declining services).
This doesn't have to be true. Washington State, for example defines the amount of property tax revenue to be charged and then divides that in proportion to everyone's taxable value.
So if everyone's value goes up 40% your property tax bill stays the same. If your area climbed faster than others, it goes up but not by 40%.
If property prices increase 40%, then cost of living increases, government needs to collect additional revenue to pay employees a living wage, and that feeds into taxes. Even without higher order effects, the above chain was literally about net increases in property taxes to fund more services and saying it's fine because property values increase (in specific locations, too). But property values are not a tangible thing for anyone who doesn't want to sell.
Subsidies for public goods create economic multiples. It’s not plainly obvious that it’s bad to subsidize a trip by $10. And compared to what? How much is interstate infrastructure subsidized per trip? Or airline infrastructure?
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.
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?
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)?
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.
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 cost of housing in the SF bay area (which is 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. When local businesses cut costs, then everything costs less (food, housing, transport), and QoL goes up.
Then run this process iteratively and you will see massive reductions in prices everywhere, 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.
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.
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.
The best formula for public transit is the Rail plus Property business model. In Hong Kong, the MTR Corporation buys up land adjacent to a planned future station, then builds the station afterwards. Then makes money from renting out the properties adjacent to the station.
JR East in Japan operates in the same way: it makes the majority of its profit from the real estate, malls, and hotels it operates adjacent to its train stations.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Taxis are not efficient or cost-effective for short trips, so they’re not an ideal last-mile solution. I’d rather rent a scooter, personally.
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.
Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train
(Waymo takes $2.85 off your next ride if you take the train)
I live in East Bay, and I often take gratuitous Waymo trips all the way across the city to Embarcadero Station to ride BART back home. I do this because I like seeing the pretty skyscrapers and the bustling city and the pretty townhomes painted interesting colors. They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.
> 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 was gratuitous? Perhaps you had brief business in 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 :).
American busses are infrequent and often don't follow the schedule. This means any trip where you have to be at certain time (work meeting? class? personal meeting? some event? etc...), you have to add 30-60 minutes buffer, and that's on top of bus being already slower than the car.
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.
As a human who sometimes needs to use the restroom, I like my transit rides to take a predictable amount of time.
Sunset on the Bay Bridge is prime rush hour traffic time, and the favorite pasttime of many Bay Area drivers is to get in a traffic accident after work.
As far as I can tell, these double decker buses are not equipped with a restroom for their riders. Even though I'm sure the view is amazing, the red line is less often obstructed by traffic.
No doubt they are possible. One factor that discourages their existence though is that the dregs of society mess them up or go in there to do drugs in private and then conk out. It's the number one pushback to providing restrooms for the public. It sucks, but it's how it is. Most likely the only way around this is to stop subsidizing transit and to be very careful to enforce fares. This is not popular among the people who love transit, who tend to also love the underdogs and root for them.
No bladder issue. Probabilistically, when you load a bus up completely with people (the ideal situation for transit) one of them will have to use the restroom over the course of an hour and a half.
The solution is to make changes so that the bus doesn't take an hour and a half for a short distance. Like a dedicated bus lane during rush hour on a bridge.
> 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.
What would they be able to get by linking the card? I thought that would just facilitate immediate charges/refunds to the card since the card is stored.
Not sure how it works in SF, but many cities across the world have moved to "in-card tickets." You tap your card on the way in, and the bus "knows" that this card number has a valid ticket attached to it. Depending on the particulars of the city and system, you might need to tap out too.
In some cities, this is done entirely offline. For cards which cannot guarantee offline payments (which many low-income / under-age individuals have, and such people are far more likely to use transit), this is done "on trust", with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.
> with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.
At least in the NYC MTA's OMNY, unblocking actually happens automatically in the background, either on a nightly reconciliation job that attempts to collect your fare or triggered by the next tap (which will be unsuccessful once more but trigger the collection attempt, and then you can tap again after your card's blocked status has cleared in the system). They also have a website to manually repay without having to wait at the turnstile.
Ugh, turnstiles. Proof-of-payment systems have so much lower friction. You buy a ticket before getting on; there are no barriers between the street and the train; sometimes there's a ticket inspector team on the train who verifies you have a ticket. If you don't have a ticket you're arrested on the spot.
It will never work in a punishment-oriented society because you're very likely to get away with riding for free if you don't do it regularly, and these societies feel that catching the bad guys is more important than working well for the good guys.
It's compatible with a card payment system but then proving criminal intent to free-ride is harder because the system gets complicated for the user. It's great with a paper concession ticket.
Arresting people on the spot is punishment too, more arbitrary and less effective. It just seems worse?
Also, the experience of riding Bart seems to have improved quite a bit since they installed better turnstiles, and that likely will affect ridership numbers.
The biggest benefit of fare gates is keeping out troublemakers. For whatever reason there is a large overlap between those who don't pay their fare and those who sexually harass other passengers, leave large messes, or vandalize.
The other method of suppressing quality of life crimes and fare evasion is lots of transit cops. It's probably cheaper to install the gates than hire lots of transit cops and arresting people over fare evasion makes the city/transit agency look like bad guys.
BART wasn’t punishment based but before they installed turnstiles, many people simply refused to pay. It doesn’t make sense to run a transit system this way.
Transit is mostly funded by taxes and is meant to be for everyone. I don't understand your insistence that it must have a fare.
Why not fund public works through taxes and let everyone use it freely? Do you prefer toll roads and going through a toll over literally all the other roads that have no fare? Are roads worse because stupid and poor people can use them too?
Oh, and funny note, most toll roads in the US are in a weird system where you paid for it's construction with your taxes and then that infrastructure is basically gifted to a company.
They can check to see whether you took transit! Similarly, when you enter transit with one card, you can exit with another card and they still know it's you.
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?
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).
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 :)
To make it more clear why this would be the case, imagine that everyone in the city behaved as I did, all taking Waymos to this same train station, even if it was far out of their way. Almost all the Waymos would start at that train station after dropping other people off, and they would have to drive to get the next person, so you can think of each trip as a loop. Some of the loops would be very small and fast, for people who happen to be close to that train station, while others would be very long, for the people who started all the way across town. Less cars are needed to accommodate the short loop trips than to accommodate the long loop trips, and since there are a limited amount of cars, people will have to wait longer to complete their trips.
If instead you imagine that each Waymo that's driving around initializes on a grid around the city, with, idk, 10 blocks between each of them, and the people who want a ride, also equally distributed, all instead get a ride to their nearest transit station, the loops are shorter, which means more people can receive service.
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.
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.
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!
I love it. We can argue to death, as usually happens in Waymo threads about public transit but the general truth is mass transit is hard in America where cities are designed mostly around cars. Could it change, sure but most likely not. This seems like such an elegant solution that I hope other cities adopt and use as part of new transit planning.
Things are changing though. LA (arguably the car city) has been heavily investing in public transit options. We have decades of scars from the automobile industry being able to drive transit policy to make up for but I think that age is finally waning. Ofc we're still far behind Europe and China where NYC seems like the bare minimum of public transit
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?
At least in the US, the traditional taxis were terrible - only way to order is via phone call, you have no idea when your car will arrive, nor how much your trip will cost, there is no easy way to send feedback to driver, and there was a good chance for an generally unpleasant experience...
Uber/Lyft changed this all and actually made the car-for-hire services usable. In my circles, this was the real reason why everyone simply stopped using taxis completely the moment any alternatives appeared.
And Waymo has a nice app and clean experience, and won't take you long way so it can charge you more, hence people group it with rideshares, despite it technically being closer to taxi.
(I understand that in other countries, taxis were much better. Before Lyft, I always felt envious while reading about their taxi systems)
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.
I like this idea. A simple bus route that delegates to waymos for the last mile seems like the best of both worlds. And maybe easier to develop public transit routes because they can be simpler.
Also hope it can applied to more rural areas eventually too, where driving is the only realistic option. DUIs, accidents, and whatnot are way higher than they ought to be in these places because there’s few or no alternatives. And you’ll never convince everyone to give up their imbibing.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Yes. Smartphone vendors and CC prefer that you use contactless rather than a physical Clipper card, then they have data on your transit use, also the CC network gets transaction fees.
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'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.
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. That's the same if you use a physical card or one on your phone.
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.
Habit, mostly. I also have several hundred dollars of pre-tax transit money on my Clipper card from when I had that benefit at a previous job (and set the paycheck deduction way higher than I should have at the time), and I still haven't used it up. I assume there's rightly no way to get cash back for this, since then I could keep the tax deduction and spend it on anything. (And even if I could get the cash back, likely it wouldn't be worth the hassle vs. just continuing to use the Clipper card. The card is on my phone, so it's not like the experience would be any different.)
Also I don't mind saving SFMTA a bit on transaction fees. I'm sure the total transaction fees are lower with me periodically topping up my Clipper card, than if I used a credit card for every ride. I expect me doing this is probably only saving a few dollars per year at most, but it makes me feel good to support my local transit authority even in a tiny way like that.
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.
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.
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).
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.
(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.
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, Uber etc., but offer an alternative to owning a car.
This feels backwards to me, as inner-city transit is generally well-served by bus, rail, or walking.
It’s Commuter Rail where this is a net benefit, and honestly the target I’d go after were I Waymo, because selling these vehicles as fleets to large metro services as last-mile for commuter rail service (where busses would travel further with less passenger density) makes a lot of sense compared to huge parking lots.
In the mornings and evenings, the Waymos shuttle commuters to and from the rail station. At all other times, they provide last-mile transit where bus lines can’t reach effectively or consistently. If the cost can be covered by your transit pass, or a transfer can act as a discount, then that’s even better.
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)
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!
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.
Exactly. 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.
> 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.
> Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.
This is pretty normal. LHR charges £5. SYD charges A$5. Airports are often highly congested and pushing more people to take public transit instead of private drop-off/pick-up is a big lever.
> 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.
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
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.
In the Bay Area it's easier to create AGI than reliable, consistent, clean public transit.
The Bay Area has reliable, clean, consistent public transit right now, it's just not evenly distributed
I'm from the Bay and no longer live there but for how massive the region (functionally: Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz; SF to Antioch+) is the public transit is pretty good. Obviously not perfect and a lot of room for improvement.
I've spoken with old timers who would talk about the days before the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, to name one piece of the puzzle.
> The program applies to all 27 San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies that accept contactless Visa tap-to-pay.
Probably has something to do with that. Why on Earth are there 27 different transit agencies in the Bay Area? Probably should be a single digit, no?
The why would be the ~100 municipalities in the bay area.
Which is a problem in and of itself, at least theoretically. I don't live in SF, but I do live in a highly balkanized area (Atlanta) where the proliferation of local governments is a weight around the neck of the region overall
There are a couple of metro areas that escaped this problem by having regional government, Mpls/St Paul, MN and Portland, OR.
Minnesota has the Metropolitan Council which derives its power from state statute and can supersede the decisions of local governments. The same people that bitch about ‘my tax dollars’ complain about the Met Council but I feel it provides a cohesive regional planing organization and they provide water, sewer, transportation, and regional parks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council_(Minnesot...
Portland, Oregon has a similar organization called Metro that I am not familiar with, other than it is similar to the Metropolitan Council. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(Oregon_regional_governm...
You say that, but if your SF tax dollars were paying for VTA you'd probably have stronger complaints... Moreover, public transit isn't evenly distributed even within SF so I don't think the transit agency count is an important variable.
They're all tied together through Clipper, so it doesn't make a difference to end users anyway.
It matters in that it's impossible to reliably and efficiently coordinate routes across that many agencies. Even if a rider can go from South San Jose to Oakland to Petaluma in a single trip on a single fare transferring as they go, okay it's an optimal payment experience but the routing and interlocking between systems surely isn't
Hahahaha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbarton_Rail_Corridor
Check out the storied history of RM2. Taxpayers literally voted to raise sales taxes to fund a rail corridor, and the money was reallocated to a different county for an unrelated project that did not benefit the counties in question. Never mind that an actual functional Dumbarton Rail could be a huge improvement to life on the Peninsula if done well.
Imagine a genuinely fast transfer between any one of the Caltrain stations (say Palo Alto or Menlo Park) and one of the East Bay BART stations. Of course, getting the western portion past all the expensive neighborhoods in the way sounds like a real mess.
They haven't created AGI either, they're just applying the CADT development model to money.
can't find what cadt means
“Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers“ [0]
[0]. https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
A reminder, never link directly to jwz from hacker news.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260830071400/https://www.jwz.o...
One of these doesn't require a multi-decade approval process for good reason. (Figuring out the logistics and civil engineering planning is a real thing and building it out isn't trivial) . Of course this could change
you know there are jurisdictions outside of California that don't take multiple decades to add a bus line, right?
these aren't "good reasons" or unavoidable laws of nature or understandable tradeoffs. it's just a uniquely dysfunctional political system
If by "good reason" you mean avoiding any perceived slight to drivers, you've accurately described the current state.
It is a plain fact that there would be more interest in public transit if it was as clean, as safe, and as reliable (if not cleaner, safer, and more reliable) than driving using personal vehicles.
Would it make sense for cities to wait around, and buy huge fleets of autonomous vehicles? Probably.
While I understand that “plain fact” is highly subjective, I would think downvoting is more appropriate than flagging. (Vouched)
The reason there's not more public transit is because the economics are terrible. Looking at the financials:
Every single ride requires a $6 to $18 subsidy, paid for by tax dollars.For comparison, federal spending for the interstate highway system is about 2-3 cents per passenger mile.
> 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...
> Federal gas taxes don't count, because those go to the Highway Trust Fund which funds road construction, which is not an operating expense.
Doesn't the Highway Trust Fund pay for road maintenance as well?
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.
No.
The economics of roads are actually pretty good which is why basically every country has them, even the poorest.
if they are, the equivalent effort of analysis done on public transit also doesnt show it.
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
But you can't ignore the financials. SF Muni's $3.62 cost per passenger mile is atrocious. At that price point, it's cheaper to charter a helicopter. I'm not kidding. You could literally charter a 20-seat Airbus H175 helicopter to fly people around for $2.50 per passenger mile. And you'd get there faster.
If public transit is less cost-effective than taking a helicopter, then something is clearly broken.
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.
Or it wouldn’t exist at all in in this form…
It would look like NYC or Tokyo. Both built privately.
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.
Is it just because of an artificial low denominator?
It's circular:
* 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]
...
?
Good luck scaling that “solution!”
Perhaps what’s broken is your financial analysis.
Please show his error.
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?
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.
Roads are fully paid for by road users (i.e. everyone).
huh? Public transportation is fully paid for by everyone too.
Yes, but most people don't use public transit.
Not really. That’s a tautology anyway.
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.
Additionally, the other poster failed to mention that the unit economics for the marginal rider are much more favorable.
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'.
this is a great example of why we need to shift to land value / Georgist taxes everywhere
>BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services
Unless you try to build housing.
https://reason.com/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-...
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.
And of course - funding the build would have been much easier if the landowner didn't want $13.5 million for an empty lot! (or $12 million if you subtract the development costs). So arguably Tillman did more to delay housing than anyone else.
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.
> public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.
Overpaid transit employees, engineering firms, and construction companies.
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.
Most of the value it creates is for the riders and the non-riders who don't have to deal with more congestion.
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.
For BART, that number is:
$1.07B operating expense / 892.5M million passenger miles traveled = $1.20 per mile. Then subtract out the fare per mile and the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART.
> 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.
Caltrain rides allow riders to be productive during the ride and generate income taxes in a way that cars do not.
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).
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 numbers aren’t made up. The Federal government publishes these statistics annually, they're widely used by policy analysts, and they're simple to calculate yourself.
The Federal government spends ~$17.5B/year on maintaining and constructing the interstate highway system. Americans drive 852 billion miles/year on it. The cost per Vehicle Mile Traveled (VMT) is 2.1 cents / mile.
If we look at all government spending (Federal, State, Local) on highways, roads, and supporting infrastructure (which includes traffic management systems), that's around $285B/year and 3.28 trillion miles, or 8.7 cents per Vehicle Mile Traveled.
The cost to the government to provide and maintain roads is on the order of several cents per mile traveled per year. Roads are simply much more cost-effective to build and maintain than dedicated public transit infrastructure.
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.
Of course it has the incentive. Even in this thread people are getting mad about it costing too much.
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.
And low density suburbs in America are never going to get torn up and re-platted so autonomous vehicles is the only way to improve safety.
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.
You're missing a lot of externalities here.
Also, the cost to a driver of the car is around $0.70 not including cost to the government and cost of externalities.
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.
SF could be so much more.
If you think subways have no marginal cost per passenger, you should consider Zeno’s paradox more
If you think there would be zero cost to shutting down the NYC subway and putting everyone riding it into cars...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Central_Diameters
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro
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.
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.
If you think that's bad, you should look at the financial returns on highways and roads! A much grimmer picture
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?
Yeah but the cost per passenger is in the hundreds due to private car ownership
Are you factoring in fixed costs to that estimate? That may be partially misleading if so.
Obviously yes, you have to since the vast majority of expenses (>70%) are fixed costs. If you only exclude them and only look at marginal costs, they're profitable.
But you cannot run a transit system on marginal costs, so using that comparison is also misleading.
Thought experiment: What would happen with total profitability, given positive marginal unit economics, if readership were to greatly increase?
I’d imagine it would get really congested unless massive fixed costs were expended to make the system higher capacity.
The usual rule of thumb is that fixed costs of public transit are covered by increased property values. It could mean a private transit company developing the areas around stations (as it often works in Japan), or it could mean the government getting more money from property taxes. Or it could even mean more money from income taxes, if the transit project stimulates economic activity.
If a transit project doesn't increase property values enough to justify the investment, or if the entity funding the project cannot extract that value, the project rarely makes sense.
Now you’ve created a property tax regime where nobody is going to want to own residential property near a transit station.
typically people want to live nearby transit stations because it means you can get places cheaply.
the property value goes up because of increased demand for it
Do you mean that nobody wants property values go up? The government gets more property taxes, because properties near transit stations are more valuable than in other places.
Yes, if you don't intend to sell, and actually want to live somewhere, higher property values just mean higher taxes (or if constrained like with Prop 13, declining services).
This doesn't have to be true. Washington State, for example defines the amount of property tax revenue to be charged and then divides that in proportion to everyone's taxable value.
So if everyone's value goes up 40% your property tax bill stays the same. If your area climbed faster than others, it goes up but not by 40%.
If property prices increase 40%, then cost of living increases, government needs to collect additional revenue to pay employees a living wage, and that feeds into taxes. Even without higher order effects, the above chain was literally about net increases in property taxes to fund more services and saying it's fine because property values increase (in specific locations, too). But property values are not a tangible thing for anyone who doesn't want to sell.
How is it misleading? Taking the total cost to operate and dividing by the number of rides tells you what it costs per ride.
I’d be more interested to know how so many people are paying less than $1 for a mini trip when the fare is closer to $3.
Because it makes in implicit comparison with a hypothetical transportation mode with zero dollars of government subsidy.
The automobile analogue to fares is gas taxes, so the first crack at a true comparison is to compare the Caltrans budget to gas tax receipts.
Subsidies for public goods create economic multiples. It’s not plainly obvious that it’s bad to subsidize a trip by $10. And compared to what? How much is interstate infrastructure subsidized per trip? Or airline infrastructure?
I think most economists would contend that the value of the subsidies is largely captured by landowners. Public investment, private profits.
and that's why property tax exists (land value tax would be better, but anyway).
They're discarding the cost per mile to a driver. If you add that back (and especially if you add externalities back) driving is more expensive.
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.
And how much do people spend on cars, gas, maintenance, insurance, parking, etc.?
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?
This is the sad truth.
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)?
Looking at the financials outside the US might also be relevant. There are no reasons for the US to be special here in my opinion.
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.
I thought you guys were capitalists? Surely we should let them fail if they can't compete in a real free market
Blew my mind when I learned that about Caltrain. I thought tickets felt a little expensive, then I learned what it really should cost.
You know subsidy per train passenger mile?
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).
Incredible!!! Wow, is this apparent extraordinary cost discrepancy anybody’s fault, or is that just how it has to be?
In my opinion, the primary driver is the astronomical cost of housing in the SF bay area (which is 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. When local businesses cut costs, then everything costs less (food, housing, transport), and QoL goes up.
Then run this process iteratively and you will see massive reductions in prices everywhere, 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.
That's a feature, not a bug. Public transport is viewed as a jobs program in the US.
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).
it's almost like public transport is a service and not a for profit business
That's fine. It's just a matter of how unprofitable it should be. BART taxpayers are getting an absolutely terrible value for their money.
How unprofitable should it be?
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.
> unning mostly empty busses.
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.
The best formula for public transit is the Rail plus Property business model. In Hong Kong, the MTR Corporation buys up land adjacent to a planned future station, then builds the station afterwards. Then makes money from renting out the properties adjacent to the station.
JR East in Japan operates in the same way: it makes the majority of its profit from the real estate, malls, and hotels it operates adjacent to its train stations.
No need to give distant examples - the US train boom used the same strategy.
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.
Outside of the Eastern part of the US, the railroad land grant programs were a major part.
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.
Sound Transit still uses this strategy in Seattle region.
They really don't. They don't build residential or commercial property.
I don't like having more feudalism though. One company owning all the good land - yikes!
The government should own it. All infrastructure like that should be in a nations hand.
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?
And then the government gets to decide who can lease that prime real estate next to the station? Sure, that won’t have any problems with corruption
Sure, that might be the optimal strategy. But to fix what already exists, using self driving cars to feed in to the existing network could work.
Especially if the Waymo data feeds back to the government to plan scheduled PT on the most popular routes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Taxis are not efficient or cost-effective for short trips, so they’re not an ideal last-mile solution. I’d rather rent a scooter, personally.
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.
For completeness isn't there a Muni (streetcar) line that covers this route?
Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train
(Waymo takes $2.85 off your next ride if you take the train)
I live in East Bay, and I often take gratuitous Waymo trips all the way across the city to Embarcadero Station to ride BART back home. I do this because I like seeing the pretty skyscrapers and the bustling city and the pretty townhomes painted interesting colors. They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.
> 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 was gratuitous? Perhaps you had brief business in 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.
???
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.
Did you bother to read the context I was replying to?
The point is if you start getting into what's gratuitous and what isn't then suddenly everything becomes gratuitous.
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.
The NL and other transbay buses are so fantastic. They do get stuck in bridge traffic though.
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?
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis
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.
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.
Bus / carpool lane going into the city at rush hour cuts 15-20 minutes from the drive. Just because it hits traffic doesn't mean it's a failure.
The situation we are talking about here involves a bridge with no dedicated bus lane or fast lane.
I drive over the Bay Bridge into SF regularly. It has a bus/HOV lane past the toll metering, which is where a large amount of the traffic is.
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...
Yeah but then you're on a bus...
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?
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.
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?
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.
I'm really hoping the Waymo initiative can convince them to cut the number of bus stops!
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.
It's pure snobbery
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 places that have outdated buses also have outdated cars. This isn't the case in the US. The outdated buses have to compete with modern cars.
Might want to visit Budapest. The charm are the old trams etc. and they have tons of modern cars.
In my experience, a Nissan Altima/GMC Acadia are about as nice as a Gillig bus.
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?
> American buses are ridiculously outdated
What exactly are we missing with our "ridiculously outdated" busses?
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 :).
American busses are infrequent and often don't follow the schedule. This means any trip where you have to be at certain time (work meeting? class? personal meeting? some event? etc...), you have to add 30-60 minutes buffer, and that's on top of bus being already slower than the car.
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.
I've never been in any public transport that had a bathroom. I've only seen them on long distance buses, trains and planes.
It's a double decker.
As a human who sometimes needs to use the restroom, I like my transit rides to take a predictable amount of time.
Sunset on the Bay Bridge is prime rush hour traffic time, and the favorite pasttime of many Bay Area drivers is to get in a traffic accident after work.
As far as I can tell, these double decker buses are not equipped with a restroom for their riders. Even though I'm sure the view is amazing, the red line is less often obstructed by traffic.
West Oakland to Embarcadero is great: 7min BART, or 45-60(+) at rush hour on the bridge. No better timesave that I know of with BART.
Clean, comfortable restrooms on buses are possible. There just has to be the will to do it.
No doubt they are possible. One factor that discourages their existence though is that the dregs of society mess them up or go in there to do drugs in private and then conk out. It's the number one pushback to providing restrooms for the public. It sucks, but it's how it is. Most likely the only way around this is to stop subsidizing transit and to be very careful to enforce fares. This is not popular among the people who love transit, who tend to also love the underdogs and root for them.
Easy to solve with a colostomy bag
Every person alive has had to use the restroom. What you mean is that you have a bladder issue.
No bladder issue. Probabilistically, when you load a bus up completely with people (the ideal situation for transit) one of them will have to use the restroom over the course of an hour and a half.
The solution is to make changes so that the bus doesn't take an hour and a half for a short distance. Like a dedicated bus lane during rush hour on a bridge.
It takes a truly exceptional jam to make the crossing take an hour and a half. What about all the people in cars?
> 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.
What would they be able to get by linking the card? I thought that would just facilitate immediate charges/refunds to the card since the card is stored.
To know that you've used transit.
Not sure how it works in SF, but many cities across the world have moved to "in-card tickets." You tap your card on the way in, and the bus "knows" that this card number has a valid ticket attached to it. Depending on the particulars of the city and system, you might need to tap out too.
In some cities, this is done entirely offline. For cards which cannot guarantee offline payments (which many low-income / under-age individuals have, and such people are far more likely to use transit), this is done "on trust", with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.
> with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.
At least in the NYC MTA's OMNY, unblocking actually happens automatically in the background, either on a nightly reconciliation job that attempts to collect your fare or triggered by the next tap (which will be unsuccessful once more but trigger the collection attempt, and then you can tap again after your card's blocked status has cleared in the system). They also have a website to manually repay without having to wait at the turnstile.
Ugh, turnstiles. Proof-of-payment systems have so much lower friction. You buy a ticket before getting on; there are no barriers between the street and the train; sometimes there's a ticket inspector team on the train who verifies you have a ticket. If you don't have a ticket you're arrested on the spot.
It will never work in a punishment-oriented society because you're very likely to get away with riding for free if you don't do it regularly, and these societies feel that catching the bad guys is more important than working well for the good guys.
It's compatible with a card payment system but then proving criminal intent to free-ride is harder because the system gets complicated for the user. It's great with a paper concession ticket.
Arresting people on the spot is punishment too, more arbitrary and less effective. It just seems worse?
Also, the experience of riding Bart seems to have improved quite a bit since they installed better turnstiles, and that likely will affect ridership numbers.
The biggest benefit of fare gates is keeping out troublemakers. For whatever reason there is a large overlap between those who don't pay their fare and those who sexually harass other passengers, leave large messes, or vandalize.
The other method of suppressing quality of life crimes and fare evasion is lots of transit cops. It's probably cheaper to install the gates than hire lots of transit cops and arresting people over fare evasion makes the city/transit agency look like bad guys.
https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2026/news20260518
BART wasn’t punishment based but before they installed turnstiles, many people simply refused to pay. It doesn’t make sense to run a transit system this way.
Transit is mostly funded by taxes and is meant to be for everyone. I don't understand your insistence that it must have a fare.
Why not fund public works through taxes and let everyone use it freely? Do you prefer toll roads and going through a toll over literally all the other roads that have no fare? Are roads worse because stupid and poor people can use them too?
Oh, and funny note, most toll roads in the US are in a weird system where you paid for it's construction with your taxes and then that infrastructure is basically gifted to a company.
They can check to see whether you took transit! Similarly, when you enter transit with one card, you can exit with another card and they still know it's you.
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?
They want to reduce the friction for next time: then you'll already have a card linked.
OR, if it's Visa only, it's a comarketing stunt.
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).
Company scrib for the 3rd millennium - now with mandatory expiration!
Google probably has the most credit card data already. Maybe even more than Visa since they work with multiple payment networks.
What's wrong with paying out to you for this, the fact that you'd do it even without this promo?
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 :)
To make it more clear why this would be the case, imagine that everyone in the city behaved as I did, all taking Waymos to this same train station, even if it was far out of their way. Almost all the Waymos would start at that train station after dropping other people off, and they would have to drive to get the next person, so you can think of each trip as a loop. Some of the loops would be very small and fast, for people who happen to be close to that train station, while others would be very long, for the people who started all the way across town. Less cars are needed to accommodate the short loop trips than to accommodate the long loop trips, and since there are a limited amount of cars, people will have to wait longer to complete their trips.
If instead you imagine that each Waymo that's driving around initializes on a grid around the city, with, idk, 10 blocks between each of them, and the people who want a ride, also equally distributed, all instead get a ride to their nearest transit station, the loops are shorter, which means more people can receive service.
They don't really care though, the point is to sell more Waymo trips to people who were on the fence about it.
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 never considered that. But if you dont have to be anywhere else why not.
Make traffic for everyone else worse with this one simple trick
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.
[1] https://www.6sqft.com/mta-says-uber-use-is-the-cause-of-nyc-...
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.
That's an artifact of where you live haha
It makes a lot more sense for Bart. You can go places that don’t even have Waymo service.
Last mile simplicity? Yes absolutely it incentives both ways. People taking mass transit and not Waymo and folks taking Waymo only. That’s ideal imo.
Cost, presumably?
Oh man this is brilliant.
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!
I love it. We can argue to death, as usually happens in Waymo threads about public transit but the general truth is mass transit is hard in America where cities are designed mostly around cars. Could it change, sure but most likely not. This seems like such an elegant solution that I hope other cities adopt and use as part of new transit planning.
Things are changing though. LA (arguably the car city) has been heavily investing in public transit options. We have decades of scars from the automobile industry being able to drive transit policy to make up for but I think that age is finally waning. Ofc we're still far behind Europe and China where NYC seems like the bare minimum of public transit
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.
Probably because of UX?
At least in the US, the traditional taxis were terrible - only way to order is via phone call, you have no idea when your car will arrive, nor how much your trip will cost, there is no easy way to send feedback to driver, and there was a good chance for an generally unpleasant experience...
Uber/Lyft changed this all and actually made the car-for-hire services usable. In my circles, this was the real reason why everyone simply stopped using taxis completely the moment any alternatives appeared.
And Waymo has a nice app and clean experience, and won't take you long way so it can charge you more, hence people group it with rideshares, despite it technically being closer to taxi.
(I understand that in other countries, taxis were much better. Before Lyft, I always felt envious while reading about their taxi systems)
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.
I think calling them "rideshare" was always a legal euphemism.
"rideshare" means "taxis" now
I like this idea. A simple bus route that delegates to waymos for the last mile seems like the best of both worlds. And maybe easier to develop public transit routes because they can be simpler.
Also hope it can applied to more rural areas eventually too, where driving is the only realistic option. DUIs, accidents, and whatnot are way higher than they ought to be in these places because there’s few or no alternatives. And you’ll never convince everyone to give up their imbibing.
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 am not sure which rail right-of-ways in the Bay Area could plausibly be justified for AV lane deconversion. Maybe the ailing VTA light rail?
But an "AV lane" will very quickly converge on the traffic characteristics of a regular road.
> 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.
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.
Delivering bombs is much easier, unfortunately.
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.
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.
I think this would be a perfect time to reflect on your financial privilege :)
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".
Took me a while to understand what you meant by "on each end". I'm guessing you mean as a connection to some public transit in the middle?
Yeah. For example, if I lived in Cupertino, have it manage:
Home -> waymo -> Caltrain -> Waymo -> sf concert venue
For me smoothly
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.
Yes. Smartphone vendors and CC prefer that you use contactless rather than a physical Clipper card, then they have data on your transit use, also the CC network gets transaction fees.
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...
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.
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. That's the same if you use a physical card or one on your phone.
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.
Why do you use clipper? There is no benefit to clipper anymore over a credit card, right? And just the disadvantage that you need to reload it.
Daily and monthly passes are only available on Clipper. Credit cards can only be used for full fare single rides.
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/fares
Habit, mostly. I also have several hundred dollars of pre-tax transit money on my Clipper card from when I had that benefit at a previous job (and set the paycheck deduction way higher than I should have at the time), and I still haven't used it up. I assume there's rightly no way to get cash back for this, since then I could keep the tax deduction and spend it on anything. (And even if I could get the cash back, likely it wouldn't be worth the hassle vs. just continuing to use the Clipper card. The card is on my phone, so it's not like the experience would be any different.)
Also I don't mind saving SFMTA a bit on transaction fees. I'm sure the total transaction fees are lower with me periodically topping up my Clipper card, than if I used a credit card for every ride. I expect me doing this is probably only saving a few dollars per year at most, but it makes me feel good to support my local transit authority even in a tiny way like that.
The point still stands. Regular transit users generally don't pay per ride, they use monthly passes. Or aren't those a thing in San Francisco?
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.
Have they? It was hugely delayed, but all you do is tap your credit card like a clipper card. I don’t think they changed it.
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.
There is absolutely no need to have this Visa only.
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).
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.
They want to get on the margin to try transit, not subsidise people who already have passes.
I have a clipper card and take VTA regularly but not enough to make a pass worth it. Commuting 3x a week, I may as well be paying with a Visa.
Does anyone know what the play here is?
(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 would bet it's part of the larger campaign by credit card companies to make contactless payment the only option for as many things as possible.
The more people use it, the easier it is to remove alternatives. Then everyone's movements and spending habits are tracked.
The way they mention the governor immediately made me think this is mainly to gain political capital.
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.
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, Uber etc., but offer an alternative to owning a car.
Rewards are a nice bonus, but reliable, frequent service that actually gets me places on time is the ultimate reward for transit users.
My city tried this, mostly just gave existing riders a few bucks off. Never moved the needle on getting new people out of cars.
Tried a similar app once; the rewards were so minimal it barely incentivized taking the bus over driving. Needs better carrots.
This feels backwards to me, as inner-city transit is generally well-served by bus, rail, or walking.
It’s Commuter Rail where this is a net benefit, and honestly the target I’d go after were I Waymo, because selling these vehicles as fleets to large metro services as last-mile for commuter rail service (where busses would travel further with less passenger density) makes a lot of sense compared to huge parking lots.
In the mornings and evenings, the Waymos shuttle commuters to and from the rail station. At all other times, they provide last-mile transit where bus lines can’t reach effectively or consistently. If the cost can be covered by your transit pass, or a transfer can act as a discount, then that’s even better.
Americans will come up with anything just to avoid learning experience of socialist countries in public transport design.
Why would they do it. Is it for marketing ?
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)
Imagine a decentralized system rewarding actual transit usage with tokens. That could actually work and incentivize more.
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!
As a Bay Area native I think this was the first time I've ever seen the accent over the E in "San José"
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
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
Exactly. 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.
> 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.
> Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.
This is pretty normal. LHR charges £5. SYD charges A$5. Airports are often highly congested and pushing more people to take public transit instead of private drop-off/pick-up is a big lever.
> 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.
I simply don't bother taking the train.
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