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.