Yeah, I still remember that when I was in Texas, there were people that stayed in a hotel very close to the HQ of our company - it was just on the other side of a big road (few lanes) - but as Europeans think, they assumed there is a pedestrian crossing, but there was none, there was no sidewalk, nothing.

The only way to get to the other side of the road was using a vehicle - there were few hired shuttles that were driving people from hotel to work and back, quite insane.

A week before I was in SF and public transport there was decent, but the vehicles were like from 1950s in comparison what I'm used to use in my country, e.g. if I wanted the bus to stop I had to pull a wire (yes, a wire!) to notify the busdriver that he/she should stop on the next bus stop. That's just one of the issues, and the quality of the bus was no where near the current ones we had in Europe.

On the other hand the bus drivers were very friendly and open.

I take the bus into my local (INCREDIBLY WEALTHY) downtown out of principle, and I have yet to see a bus where less than half of the seats are ripped and torn and maybe duct taped. The city bus drivers are usually pretty chill, though! The systemic under-funding and under-utilization are certainly not their fault.

Hate to play the one-up game but this is too crazy not to share. I was doing consulting at Travelocity/SABER, which was in the no man's land between Dallas and Fort Worth. The company put me up in the Marriott on the other side of the highway from their campus. Not only were there no sidewalks for the short distance, there were rough rocks covering the shoulder like you'd find along a seawall, so you couldn't even trudge through the weeds and mud to get over to the campus if you were determined to do so. On the good side of things, Google Street View shows that they are now installing sidewalks, but I have to wonder who decided back then that the rocks were a good idea in the first place? It's a rural area, relatively speaking, and unlikely to have been done for anti-camping reasons. At least two decades of people had to take shuttle buses between the hotel and campus regardless of their desire to walk.

> if I wanted the bus to stop I had to pull a wire (yes, a wire!) to notify the busdriver that he/she should stop on the next bus stop. That's just one of the issues,

How else do you signal the bus driver to stop? And why is this an issue?

The NYC MTA years ago used these rubber push strips held in an extruded aluminum profile. They were all over the interior next to each window and ran along the edges of the ceiling for standing passengers. They were frequently broken, cut or pulled from their bases by bored school children. This lead to the button circuit being stuck closed preventing more presses from triggering the bell and annunciator lamp at the front of the bus to notify the driver. People would then miss their stops and start yelling or walk to the driver to ask them to stop. The pull cords are old school but insanely easy to fix and maintain.

> How else do you signal the bus driver to stop?

In Europe we have buttons. The pull cords and push strips seem weirdly over- and underengineered at the same time.

Where I live in Japan half our trams are from the 60's and even those just use push buttons!

> (yes, a wire!)

What's wrong with pulling a wire? Works well, easy to maintain.

Looked to "analog" for Bay Area - center of advanced tech, and for the US, which from my country perspective was way more advanced.

A button press is something we use.

How is a button press significantly better than pulling on a wire? Can you explain how it makes a difference to the person riding on the bus?

I think the answer to this is the same as what leads to terrible things like internet-connected microwaves. Techification for the sake of it because we can, not because it's a good idea.

It's a push button. We've "technified" our homes with light switches 150 years ago. The roof hasn't fallen down, I'm fairly sure a lowly bus can handle buttons.

I'm European. A wire looks archaic :-)

Hardly the kind of thing I was expecting in SF. Same for BART, looks like something straight out of the 70s. Or those huge concrete slabs cut with saws, used for sidewalks. In Europe they generally use asphalt.

American infrastructure generally lacks... panache, style, IMHO.

I remember visiting AMD in Austin for a XenSummit in pre-smartphone and pre-Uber days and staying at a hotel that advertised itself as "just around the corner from AMD". About half an hour before my meeting there I asked the hotel staff for walking directions, and they said "it is only about 3 miles on the highway". I didn't have a car and got stubborn, so I walked, which was one of the craziest experiences of my life, as it involved running across freeway ramps busy with morning traffic and navigating by the randomly cached state of Google Maps on my laptop.

Thanks for this anecdote. It really made me realise I take a lot of infrastructure for pedestrians for granted here in the UK

Not just the UK. The US really is an outlier. Pedestrian infrastructure is better almost everywhere else. Certainly in every country I have visited from Canada to China and a dozen others in between.

In my experience, Canada is similar.

We couldn't afford a car when I was younger so we had to subsist on Translink and Skytrain, and those systems were roughly on par with Muni and VTA. Outside of the Vancouver core, pedestrian infrastructure was weak to nonexistent in suburbs like Richmond, Surrey, South Vancouver, etc or towns/cities like Nanaimo or Abbotsford.

Calgary and Edmonton were worse.

Why not to use a bicycle? I've spent a summer in Fairbanks, AK and it was totally fine to navigate anywhere around the city and suburbs by bike. Almost no bike lanes there, of course.

Safety.

Friends have lost friends cycling on mixed-mode roads. Drivers don't expect to see cyclists, and the normal traffic speeds involved leave little room for the kind of error that even benevolent humans make all the time, to speak nothing of the many hostile drivers.

I would love to cycle. I love bicycling, and am glad it was an option for you! But I don't believe it's viable where I am without significant structural changes.

Cycling on 45mph+ roads (really stroads, or in-town highways) with no separated bike lanes or sidewalk is pretty dangerous. This kind of road is kind of the normal in most American suburban towns or even bigger cities outside the actual downtown area.

In some cities/counties you can't even ride a bike on a road where the speed limit is over 35 (unless it is a county road with implicit limits)

Detroit comes to mind, not sure if the rule is still on the books tho.

> The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild.

This is one of the major factors I appreciate about the places I've lived in California; for the US it's an exceptionally good environment for pedestrians and cyclists.

Still not great by any means. But whenever I visit friends/fam back in IL where I grew up, I'm teleported back to that cultural hostility in a big way. It doesn't end there though, even as a driver there's rampant aggressive hostility/road-rage behavior to contend with.

It feels like the entire region is full of people fighting for scraps on the streets, just without getting out of their cars. Pedestrians/cyclists are basically just bystander casualties to the mess without infrastructure to isolate them from it.

Many parts of California are very bike hostile. From personal expirence it's way worse then Portland or Seattle. A lot of it is cultural though, there in the bay area many drivers dislike bikes and blame them for traffic, etc.

It's dominance by business that's to blame.

Business says "put money in the hole. Deliver money to hole with fast wheeled box."

Everything else is disposable, sacrificial.