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.
Maybe the moral depravity of SF breeds truly irredeemable addicts, but as someone whos met a lot of troubled people and ridden a lot of public transit your statement seems alarmingly and unhelpfully critical
We could move the entire population of San Francisco into full time care for very little compared to what we're spending on AI.
May you never see progress on such a horrifying goal.
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.
Cost per passenger trip:
BART: $1.07B operating expenses / 59.5M trips = $16.92
SF Muni: $1.13B / 160M trips = $7.06
Caltrain: $225M / 9.1M trips = $24.73
Passenger Fare collected per trip:
BART: $259M / 59.5M trips = $4.35
SF Muni: $111M / 160M trips = $0.69
Caltrain: $58.7M / 9.1M trips = $6.45
Subsidy per trip:
BART: $12.57
SF Muni: $6.37
Caltrain: $18.27
Cost per passenger mile:
BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $1.20/mile
SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.62/mile
Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $1.27/mile
Subsidy per passenger mile:
BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $0.84/mile
SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.26/mile
Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $0.94/mile
For comparison, federal spending for the interstate highway system is about 2-3 cents per passenger mile.
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...
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'.
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.
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.
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.
Also, the cost to a driver of the car is around $0.70 not including cost to the government and cost of externalities.
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.
Moscow subway [2] has 17 lines and 309 stations. In newer cars, 2 USB-A sockets are available near every seat, ready for robots.
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.
But you cannot run a transit system on marginal costs, so using that comparison is also misleading.
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.
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.
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.
You know subsidy per train passenger mile?
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 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.
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.
(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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
OR, if it's Visa only, it's a comarketing stunt.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
> rideshares like Waymo
(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 get that integrating with the Clipper system is a lot more difficult, but... c'mon.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I wish the government would rather invest in better public last mile connectivity programs or higher frequency trains and buses.
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
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.
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.
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.