Then I went to Sydney in December. The public transportation system there is super impressive. You have a location-based app where you can tell you want to go from point A to point B (from an address, a click on the map, your favorites), it will instantly provide you with many options, with time, duration and price, showing you where to take it from.

It seems there are buses every 5 minutes. During the route the app will buzz you 2 and 1 stop before your actual stop. Oh, and the bus card allow you to take the light train and the ferry. You can also check your credits directly in the app, even recharge it I think.

It changed my perspective on how to use public transportation. In Los Angeles for example I would check which bus/train I should take, download the timetable to see the frequency and where to stop. In Sydney, I got confident in a way that I would just stop caring about planning first. Just open the app and it'll tell you how to go where you want to go.

Americans have really failed to capture and maintain a civic imaginary.

For the interested: http://data.seoul.go.kr/

It seems like every 5 meters there’s a bus stop, and the busses are not old style clunkers but double deckers like Googles take.

Returning to the US, it's car-culture and lackluster public transport was jarring.

The Transit app is also really useful for this.

It's just the public transit systems that need improvement, but the rider side isn't too bad.

I was excited to try this, but it seems broken. Every pair of locations I give it returns "No routes found", even for stops that are directly connected by a single bus route that I can see in its database.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio

Public transport as it should be, cheap, fast, reliable.

You may laugh but this would probably be a hit.

There were different price classes, though.

https://www.chariot.com/

There's a fashion term for this, essentially "low-end luxury" (that's not the term, I forget it). People that are not fabulously wealthy enough to say, hire a chauffeur, not even impressively wealthy enough to always rely on lyft or uber, are marginally wealthy enough to just not take the bus - so they stratify where and what they can as a metric of success.

High end fashion stores sell pendants, socks, scarves, belt buckles, and other minor mementos of wealth at sub-$100 prices (such as a $50 pair of socks). These are some of the most popular items because millions of consumers, if they so desired, could afford to spend $50 on something.

A single pair of socks with the most coveted luxury brand logo, for people who value such things, is a prized purchase.

edit: designer socks are genuinely 50bp (~$70 us) a pair (http://www.versace.com/gb/en-gb/men/accessories/socks/versac...)

Public transit, at least here in the SF Bay Area, is horribly mismanaged. Google does not have the power to force the 37 independent squabbling agencies here to work together, to force BART to kick obvious criminal activity out of their stations, or to fire anyone when new train stations fall behind schedule fifteen times in a row. Companies that provide good services should not be punished for not being magically omnipotent.

Analogy:

Wife: "Hey let's buy a new toaster!"

Husband: "No way, have you seen how shitty our toaster is?"

Public transportation sucks and will continue to suck, even with more funding. People want to pay for something better than it can be at its best, at least in most urban centers in the US.

That is precisely the point. If they spent some money on it, they would have it.