LA's public transportation system has one of the largest geographic footprints in the world. Most of the system is buses rather than fixed rail lines, but the rails run from Downtown to Hollywood, Pasadena, Santa Monica/Culver City, and Long Beach. Prior to COVID, more than 1.3 million people used LA Metro each week.

Sure, and it's possible for me to canoe to Antarctica but it's not a reasonable way for anyone to travel.

What an extremely narrow and privileged worldview you have. No wonder people hate techies so much these days...

Every day, more than a million people use CA's public transportation systems to travel between cities for work, even now during COVID. I guess they're all being unreasonable.

I took CA public transportation every working day for 5 years. Compared to the rest of the world, it's unreasonable.

Trains and buses are infrequent and have terrible evening/weekend schedules. Sure, during rush hour they can likely be faster than the incredibly overcrowded Californian roads, but otherwise they're crap. They're also not exactly cheap!

It's no surprise why Uber & friends started in the bay area, and why it's so popular there. They had no competition. The transit in these places is like the bare minimum possible. It doesn't even come close to touching world-class transit systems popular all over the world.

With LA you might have a point. We have it but it's young and still growing and not as convenient as it should be. But SF? Are you kidding me? I can take busses, trains, etc. to get anywhere in that city and out to the valley. It's awesome!

Either you aren’t being serious or you just haven’t lived in a city with real public transport.

You can get to a lot of places in the Bay Area by public transport, but the time penalty for doing and the number of services you have to use is absurd outside of downtown SF. Typically 3x driving and upwards.

Compare this to New York, or London or Amsterdam, where it can be close to parity, or on the 1-2x range. (I mention these because I have), and you’ll realize that Bay Area public transport is effectively non-existent.

Zepto, prior to covid, it was faster to take LA Metro between Santa Monica and LA, or Hollywood and LA, or Pasadena and LA, or Long Beach and LA, than it was to drive those same distances. During rush hour, it was approximately 1 hour faster to take Metrolink between LA and OC destinations than it was to drive the same distance. In the Bay Area, it was at least 1 hour faster to take BART cross-bay than to drive, especially if you were headed to places like Dublin or Pleasanton. Traffic is just that bad in CA.

CA isn't like NY or London. Our cities weren't built to the same level of density as NY or London, and systems that dense would be overkill. Moreover, given that CA's public transportation systems are geographically larger than any other public transportation systems outside of China (in the sense of geographic territory serviced), it would also be prohibitively expensive to build systems that dense in CA. A system as dense as NYC's metro in LA would cost more than a trillion dollars.

I agree with you about rush hour and with central downtown locations only, although even at those times and for those specific routes the Bay Area only approaches parity with the other cities I listed.

I think the point about geographic density is completely fair as an explanation for why the disparity exists, but it mostly serves to confirm the general point.

If you consider the percentage of locations or population addressable in a unit of time - e.g. in 1 hour, by public transport. The Bay Area does terribly.

This is an argument why public transport cannot substitute for ride share or car services in the Bay Area in the way that it can in other cities.

I speak as someone who has personal experience of all of these cities.