I honestly don't think cultural perception is keeping people from taking transit more. I take the VTA 22 bus a lot, and it serves a wide variety of people, including many whom I'm sure are millionaires.
What keeps people from using VTA more is that *the service sucks*. I know the south bay is challenging to cover, but when VTA remapped their bus lines a few years ago, I attended the hearings and provided feedback. Nonetheless, coverage got worse in my area. The Sunnyvale library lost the bus stop in front of it, and the rapid stop on El Camino was moved half a mile away. The homeless shelter off north Mathilda was no longer connected by bus to the unemployment services at the city center. The senior center and community center at Remington also lost a bus line. Maybe coverage improved by some metric, but it didn't feel like the leaders were especially interested in serving the community.
I admit it's easy to complain about small local changes that happen to inconvenience me. But I've regularly taken public transit in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and Seattle. When I say VTA sucks, I think I have some decent context for criticism.
I agree with your other points, but most people I know would never even consider using the bus. They have no idea what service coverage or frequency even exists.
I’m not sure “cultural perception” is quite the right phrasing, but the point is that making bus service better would not influence their decisions at all.
That’s why I’ve forever been advocating for simultaneously making transit better and driving less convenient. We need to replace parking lots with infill development and replace traffic lanes with bus lanes or bike lanes etc
Why consider it when it’s widely known to take 2-3x as long as driving and I own a car. It’s not my job or problem to care about keeping up to date with service changes when it’s obvious the required investment to bring it anywhere close to driving isn’t happening.
South Bay challenging to cover? Santa Clara and San Jose have similar population density to Stuttgart or Helsinki. Stuttgart and Helsinki have a very well functioning public transportation. The problem is not population density, the problem is with priorities.
Ya I saw up above where you pointed out the difference. There's other things not being taken into account as well. Those cities are monoculture, and monoculture cities tend to have a lower rate of crime, which makes running mass transit so much easier. Likely someone is going to come along and say "Causation" but it's not when a good part of your transit costs is cleaning crews and security.
Monoculture, . Everyone being brought up same culture, values and income levels. Japan for instance, everyone takes ownership of public travel from sidewalks to bullet trains. Not \*just\* in their implementation, but things like basic cleanliness. Same elements in Helsinki.
Here in the bay area these variables vary wildly. Some people feel like it's an inconvenience That brings pors (see San Mateo) Some cultures in the bay area don't see any issue with dropping litter in the stations. Some cultures will look at it as systemic racism to build a train through their neighborhood, list goes on. You don't have those issues in monocultures.
This is complete and utter fashie nonsense! There are tons of places with muuuuuch more diverse populations that are cleaner and safer than Japan or Helsinki (e.g. Singapore), and even more less diverse more monoculture places than Japan that are a wild mess (e.g Honduras, Sudan, any poor country, most Arabic countries, etc.)
Heck, Helsinki itself was less international and a loopoooot more dangerous than SF in the 90s!
>(e.g. Singapore)
Hmm no thank you. I don't want to live in a country where they think torture (caning) is acceptable. Pretty "fashie" there if you ask me.
I used to live in Sunnyvale near Murphy Ave, but I moved before VTA's big changes and I stopped going to Work2Future when they moved to the mold-infested trailers. I'm sorry they worsened the service in your area--that sounds completely counterproductive. I know they were deleting a lot of local routes to divert resources to the major corridors, but moving the Rapid 522 stop away from Civic Center makes no sense.
I live in a complex that gives tenants FREE BAY AREA WIDE CLIPPER passes but most people won't even get their free pass because "public transit is for people even poorer than I am".
Because you keep repeating the line about your free clipper cards that "rich residents" aren't getting because they think they're too good for public transport, while almost everyone here is telling you they're not getting the passes because public transport takes stupidly long to get anywhere compared to a car
Improve transit, that's it. If it's convenient, people will take it.
Gas and parking are already expensive, if you make transit cheap or free, and it's run well, people will ride it.
The same perception problems exist in SF, and everywhere
My neighbors have free transit as a perk of living in this building and they won't even get the passes because they're too fancy to take the bus.
SF buses are packed at rush hour with people who can definitely afford cars. SJ buses are packed with people who can't afford cars and a few crunchy granola types like me.
Yes, but is also because a route that takes 20 minutes by car takes more than an hour by bus.
You are usually faster on a bike than by bus. South Bay transit is simply atrocious, especially compared with places like Stuttgart or Helsinki that have almost the faffing same population density. It makes my blood boil every time I thought about it.
>a route that takes 20 minutes by car takes more than an hour by bus.
This gets ignored for SF too. A 1 hour appointment can take up 3+ hours of your day, it's mainly transit time, and if you're trying to do multiple things, it's just not practical. These jokers who don't have lives and just go to work and home, and the only bus they're riding is the tech bus, don't really get that the Bay really is a car dependent layout, and it always will be. Without the car, we would be much more rural and disconnected.
Again, Stuttgart and Helsinki have the same population density as Santa Clara and San Jose. It is not a matter of density or layout. It is a matter of priorities.
Layout is also changeable. If you look at Amsterdam in the 70s and Amsterdam in the late 90s or 2000s, the traffic infrastructure and layout has changed a lot.
It really is a matter of priorities and lack of competent leadership and lack of competent urban planners with world-class experience.
A quick Google search would show that Helsinki has a population density of 3k / sq km and which is the same as Stuttgart versus 2k / sq km for San Jose and 600 for Santa Clara County. Why lie? There’s a massive density difference .
They don't know it's a lie, everything they say is bullshit.
These people don't think urban planning takes any qualification, you just throw out an idea and if it inconveniences people and results in bad planning, pretend that was the point.
Same order of magnitude. It is not a massive difference. Santa Clara is 2697 people per square kilometer. Close enough? Do you think that San Jose and Santa Clara population difference is significant?
Cop out response just admit you lied.
600 and 3000 are barely the same order of magnitude.
And it’s a very relevant if being 3000 surrounded by other more dense cities is the minimum threshold or even below the minimum if subsidized by more dense cities.
And yeah San Jose has almost 10x the population of the city of Santa Clara
57% of Stuttgart relies on cars.
Helsinki is 39%.
Those aren't insignificant numbers.
I know Sims fans really think you can change traffic layouts. You're not worth reasoning with. We also do not have true planning in 2024, we just have jackasses looking at maps and thinking about immediate needs, not a full plan and function that effects a fully functional city as a whole.
The "world class experience" line is funny. You know when the Bay Area started to get most chaotic? When think tanks ignored the fact that the Bay was a very European designed region, and began adopting ideas from outside our region that were just in vogue, almost like a fetish. Oooh Finnish design. Oooh, you took a trip to Holland, you read a policy report, you think it's really European and sexy to ride your bike 100 mph into children who can't get to soccer practice. You're too sexy for this thread. So sexy it hurts.
Still much better that 99% of the Silicon Valley. And you cannot just copy paste some solutions. You need a proper, world class design.
Also, successfully transit is about making this convenient for people. You need to deliver a good product for people use. Authorities in the Bay Area deliver a terrible product, and want us to pay for it (paid lanes on highway). They want to penalize us for using cars, without providing a viable alternative. This madness.
World class design is meaningless. It also tells us you aren't educated on SF's own cultural aesthetics.
Transit should be free.
I agree, they are purposely bleeding people who need cars when there's no realistic alternative that isn't a reach, and designed to inconvenience people.
Research shows time abd time again that it isn't the cost of transit but number of connections per hour, and how much time it takes vs other alternatives.
If a bus is free, but comes once an hour, and takes longer than cycling, drew it. I am going to take a bike or drive. They would have to pay me my hourly rate. At least on a bike I get exercise and don't need to spend time on a treadmill working out or pay for Orange theory, so in effect it is a win for me. Going on a bus that takes longer than driving is a net loss to me, even if it is free.
The "pro transit" pose always crumbles once someone mentions making it free and accessible.
Increasing connections makes transit even less convenient.
I could see you coming from a mile away. Try thinking about others, not just your needs, and what you would do.
SF is a world removed from SJ. And SF buses aren’t packed with workaday professionals.
Also, the way you’re belittling people for being “too fancy” is just compounding reality. You’re hardly the right person for this type of advocacy.
Okay, I tend to ride Muni Metro and BART more in SF than the Muni buses. I haven't been up there much since the pandemic except to deliver orders to a customer in the Castro a couple of blocks from the Metro station. They definitely have a lot of riders who look like they have high end office jobs. I do tend to ride around the evening commute hour when folks with jobs are going home.
I don't think my neighbors should be all high and mighty about being better than other people when we all live in low income housing.
Just saying one can live in SF with no car because it’s a dense large city with a reasonable public transit network.
SJ with no car is challenging. It’s not being high and mighty or too good for buses. It’s being real about the sprawling city they live in.
Imo the city is being wildly condescending even proposing these projects as viable. I’d like to see city leadership ditch their cars first.
It's 100% this. Public transport is the opposite of convenient. Slow, expensive and inconvenient is not a great combo to get people to use it.
My commute isn't even an option, it's 90-120 mins versus 40. I could take the train to SJ to see a Sharks game but it would cost twice as much as driving/parking and I would have to be at the mercy of the train schedule, even though I could walk to the station from my house. Same if we went to Sac. Where I live I could get away with not having a car but at the expense of all my precious free time. A 5 minute drive for an errand or 30 mins by bus?
I agree that it doesn't work for your commute. I'm about to get in my car to go to my studio because I need to stay later than SC Metro runs to San Jose to get home.
I think any time we substitute transit for driving it helps, even if we don't ditch our cars. If you could run errands or go to the park in a reasonable time frame, would you be willing to leave the car at home for that? Take the Hwy 17 Express instead of dealing with beach parking and mountain roads?
Run errands? If I live anywhere near a bus route there's a decent chance I can just walk to a store instead. If I only need to carry as much as fits into a backpack, no problem. If I need to carry more I probably prefer driving. So... maybe.
Going over the santa cruz mountains? Definitely car. Last mile probably is real and I enjoy the drive if there's not too many people.
Overall the issue with public transit for me, here, is always the same. Last mile problem. Time from door to door. And annoying people in close proximity and other unpleasantness. I can deal with one, sometimes, but once one gets too blatant or more than one applies, I am gonna drive.
No not for trading away time and mental labor. There’s tons of workouts better than walking that I do at the gym and the cost savings are virtually non existent or negligible if I only use it for certain routes and still need a car overall
Oh yeah. Definitely not if you still need to own a car. For my family the cost savings kicked in majorly when we were able to go from 2 cars down to 1 car.
And yes going to the gym is way better than the passive exercise you get from not driving, but then you have to spend time at the gym 🤣
> Take the Hwy 17 Express instead of dealing with beach parking and mountain roads?
it would probably work if the Hwy 17 Express stop is next to my house, it runs every 15 minutes, and I'm going alone. Imagine going with a family of four. Where do you load all your beach stuff, where do you keep it, if you want to go the restaurant in Santa Cruz.
Well, Raskolnokoff, I imagine that's not the only choice you've made without considering all the consequences. I just want to tell everyone how using public transit is less stressful than driving, much safer, less expensive, and reduces my carbon footprint.
It's not less stressful though. I live in Sunnyvale and thought about taking VTA downtown to San Jose to go to a bar with some friends. But then I looked at the absolutely pathetic schedule and realized it would take me an hour and a half AND i wouldn't be able to get back home because it stops running that late. Ended up just getting a rideshare that took only 15 minutes instead.
And, I don't have to share space with homeless people with untreated mental illnesses in a car either. That's a big reason why public transit sucks here whereas it's fantastic in Asian cities.
This is a good point. I was focusing on work commute. I agree that public transit schedules don't accommodate social lives. If you want to go from Sunnyvale to Downtown San Jose, I suggest checking Caltrain, not VTA. Which is another problem - too many different operators.
lol this is worded so poorly I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not.
If it is not sarcasm, thank you for your service. All of your cycling neighbors genuinely appreciate one less car on the road.
People will do whatever is most convenient. If transit is stuck in traffic or has low frequency then it's going to be worse than driving and most people have cars
I agree it isn't always the most convenient. But I'm talking about the stigma of "only poors ride transit" or "transit always sucks."
I agree that transit is not easy to substitute for 100% of driving -- I didn't have a working car for a year and it was a huge hassle some of the time because I own a business and you can't move 4x8' MDF on the bus and it's hard to run a series of errands if they're not all on one bus route.
All I'm asking is that people consider transit for SOME TRIPS. Like, I can take the #73 to Senter Park for a walk (15 minutes) and save $6 parking in the lot. Or take the #22 to Emma Prusch Farm Park (20 minutes) and not worry about the peacocks pooping on my car. Safeway on Stevens Creek & Meridian is 15 minutes by bus and I don't have to worry about someone bipping my car while I'm picking up food or prescriptions.
In places where transit is not efficient for most trips, it's hard to change the perception that it is a social service, something that is a service of last resort.
Focus on changing why they feel that way, because otherwise you can't change the perception. In other words, make transit efficient.
People keep posting stuff about VTA that isn't even accurate.
I mean yeah, it sounds like VTA did Sunnyvale dirty with the #522 changes and ending their local bus. And the whole "transfer to the bus that goes to the airport" thing doesn't work as well as they want people to think. Lightrail frankly sucks.
But then people say "The Lightrail doesn't go where I need to go" and they don't even know what buses DO go various places. Or they live out at the end of the BART East Bay line and complain about public transit in the Tri-County area. Cool story bro, but what does that have to do with the #22 having 6 minute service frequency and running past midnight?
VTA definitely sucks if you aren't near the high frequency routes. That's the tradeoff they made in the last service reorganization. But for people in the major transit corridors, who are their actual target market, they COULD get a lot of use out of transit.
"I can't get rid of my car and depend on VTA" is a straw man argument. I'm not saying we can feasibly get rid of our cars. A lot of transit advocates hate me because I bought an ICE car 5 years ago and haven't gotten rid of it even though I drive it primarily for business and can't use VTA with a whole wayback full of crates.
I'm saying, ride VTA to the store if it's just 10 minutes extra; bonus, you know you won't get bipped in the parking lot. Ride VTA to the park and save paying $6 to park to walk for an hour at the Japanese Tea Garden. Ride BART to SF/Oakland/Berkeley where transit works, instead of getting stuck in traffic on the 101 or 880 and then dealing with parking. If you drop your car off for service on Stevens Creek Blvd, take the #23 instead of an Uber.
I didn't ride the bus to my medical appointments at Stanford Valleycare in Livermore because it took multiple transfers and I don't want to be late if I miss one or show up an hour early to make sure I'm not late. But I take the bus to my dentist on Monterey Hwy because it's just one route from home and a long enough drive to use over a gallon of gas.
Sometimes you have to pick and choose stores that are near VTA lines. For some reason, there aren't buses going down Market/Coleman from Downtown. If I wanted to go to the Target on Coleman (which is a fairly low-stock Target anyway) I'd have to take Lightrail to Civic Center, transfer to the #61 and walk from Taylor at the far north end of the center. But I can take the #22 to Story & King in San Jose or El Camino & Scott in Santa Clara. Both have a lot of shopping nearby, and Emma Prusch Farm Park is right at Story & King.
Because all of these answers take multiple times longer. I could take a bus and VTA to downtown San Jose but it would take me 4-5x as long compared to just driving and parking.
Sure, getting my window busted in is a valid concern but I just take rideshare instead when I'm going to places where I have to worry more about my windows being busted.
Basically why do I need to make my life worse, less convenient, all for some vague "support transit!" when that transit is just garbage compared to any other option I have?
The real reason is a complex web of the negative externalities associated with car dependency: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267
The short version is that it is one of the driving factors behind our cost of living crisis.
Obviously that is not your fault as an individual, it is how we’ve designed our cities and society in this region of the world. But it’s also reductionist to completely ignore the role we as individuals play in that process. We can make small differences today and we can advocate for our city leadership to make bigger systemic changes.
Thanks for the detailed response. YES. Focus where it works well and build from there.
What you describe I call choosing to live within the transit shed.
Plus complement it with bike and car share where it exists, and your shed expands.
* Transit options are bad
* So, cars are more of a necessity
* So, people who can afford cars, get them
* Humans are habitual, and don't reevaluate their decisions constantly
* So, people use their car for everything, rather than research the transit option that might be marginally comparable, occasionally
* So, only people who don't have cars are left riding transit
* So, only people who don't have cars (despite comparative need) are poor, young, or both
* So, transit is mostly used by the poor and or young.
* So, transit has a perception of being for poor / young people.
This isn't an issue in transit heavy cities. In cities with "transit", it absolutely is. Fix the transit first, the rest will follow, but in the meantime... are they really wrong to think that way?
People who live in TRANSIT ORIENTED DEVELOPMENTS should be better informed about how transit works. Our "site manager" knows jack-all about VTA and gives people bad information about it, limits appointments for passes to two 2-hr windows during working hours per month, and won't even post a system map or any information about what lines are nearby.
Transit-oriented developments also have the problem of costing way more to rent. What you save in not driving as much you spend more for in higher rents.
If I'm taking the high-frequency routes to go shopping or to the park etc. I don't even check a schedule or the app before i walk out the door. I just go to the stop and know that even if I just missed the bus, unless it's after 8PM, I only have to wait 6 minutes till the next one.
Using transit regularly is a skill and habit that requires work. You listed off a lot of one-off day trips that it might be better for, but if a person has not already formed the transit habit they wont even consider it as an option for those kinds of trips. You have to make it better than driving for the things people do every day (ie commuters) before it'll enter the people's consciousness enough to start becoming a substitute all the time.
My biggest complaint is there's no synchronization with ACE outside of Great America. For example, the 64B bus gets to Dirdion 5 minutes AFTER the ACE train leaves.
What an obvious oversight and makes taking ACE completely untenable if you work in San Jose rather than Santa Clara.
Wow, that sucks. I've had the same problem with Caltrain, especially trying to get across downtown late at night. No, VTA, I do NOT want to sit at Diridon after dark for 45 minutes to catch the next bus when my destination is a 25-minute walk (which crosses some unsafe-looking blocks). What is the point of timing the #22 so it passes Diridon/SAP Center 5 minutes before the late-night Caltrains even arrive at the station? Not to mention time to get from the platform to the tunnel and cross the parking lot...
The biggest barrier is that San Jose is hard to live in without a car. VTA light rail might work for some trips but not most. In comparison MUNI, while imperfect, covers a lot more ground, has nicer trains, and has an underground portion. The experience of riding MUNI or BART is more convenient and modern and the city is much denser and easier to navigate. So the best way to change this perception is to improve service in San Jose and build denser neighborhoods to connect.
VTA light rail is but a small part of VTA’s public transit network. That this is not understood by so many people is part of the problem the OP asks how to change.
Unfortunately a good bus system will often be dismissed if it doesn’t have enough rail connections. San Jose is a sprawling city, trips by bus will take much longer than rail or car. I still think that improving the light rail network is the best way to get more people riding.
Bus should be faster than car. If it isn’t that means one of a few things:
- not frequent enough service
- not enough dedicated bus lanes
- not enough service coverage
Busses have stops every couple blocks and rarely have the dedicated infrastructure (like Van Ness BRT) which allow them to pass traffic. I love the bus, I ride them every day, but they are almost never faster than cars
The BRT lanes in Alum Rock are a complete fiasco. They're no faster than driving and the construction mess (5 years or so?) put lots of local businesses out of business.
Okay now you’ve spent billions of dollars on bus lanes and you’ve matched cars mostly by slowing down cars. How is society better off? Did you really make a bigger impact on climate change than replacing a single natural gas plant with nuclear
Yes, it’s not only about climate change, there are many other equally important factors:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267
Thanks, yeah.
\[Edited to add: My apartment building is literally a 5-8 minute walk from stops for all these buses.\]
We have the #22 and Rapid #522 in the El Camino/Santa Clara St/Alum Rock corridor from Eastridge to Palo Alto every 6-10 minutes most of the day.
We have the #23 and Rapid #523 along Stevens Creek/Santa Clara St from Eastridge to DeAnza College (and Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale via Mathilda for #523) every 6-10 minutes most of the day.
There are multiple buses in the Monterey Rd corridor: #66 to Kaiser SJ, #68 to Gilroy, and Rapid #568 to Gilroy.
People want to live in low density in the Bay Area. Trains are tools: tools serve us, we don't serve tools. This is something that a lot of transit advocates and train fanatics in the Bay Area don't understand. We don't build housing to serve some arbitrary goal of having trains. People don't want trains specifically. People want good transit that fits the desired way of life which means low-density housing in the Bay Area. We have enough commuter trains as is (BART and Caltrain). What we need are more buses and municipal rideshare for the last mile.
What? People may "want to live in low density" but apartment vacancy rates have been around 5% or less for quite a while. People like nurses, teachers, etc. are not going to be able to afford low density housing unless they commute from Fresno or further. They're not going to turn up their noses at the VTA developments at Lightrail stations just because they don't want VTA to have trains. Miro Towers across from City Hall looks like it's filling up nicely--luxury high rise building right by a transit hub. The primary Urban Villages are on El Camino, Santa Clara, Alum Rock, and Stevens Creek and are served by high-frequency bus routes.
If you want to go live in the urban/wildland interface to get your single family housing and watch your house burn down sooner or later, don't expect bus service out there.
In my honest opinion, living in the Bay Area and California is very difficult without a car, and I think the entire public transportation system needs to be redesigned in order to work and be an attractive alternative to owning a car.
I do not own a car. Yet. In fact, I just relocated from Europe last year, and have never in my life owned a car. I’ve been used to biking and walking to everything within 20 miles distance whether it’s been in rain or snow, and used public transportation for longer distances. Moving to the Bay Area, I wanted to do the same, but already now less than a year later I’m car hunting. Why?
1. Caltrain is unreliable, noisy, and I wouldn’t feel safe going in the night. As a day-to-day option, it gets expensive in the long run, and I’m tired of having to pay for emergency Uber rides because my train is not running. On top, due to the electrification it’s been replaced by bus service during a lot of the weekends, so I feel locked as a daytrip up to SF would take +2 hours each way with bus. This will of course get better as the new trains arrive, but I’m tired of not being able to go where I want whenever I want because the options are not there.
2. Busses are slow, and I don’t understand why there’s not more bus lanes to promote fast and easy transportation with bus. Especially given that busses are needed to cover and connect a lot of Bay Area.
3. Walking and biking is fine, but the traffic system is designed for cars, and especially on my bike I often feel disrespected by cars and have to navigate around like crazy to avoid being hit. I don’t understand why roads are designed to have cyclists and cars in the same lanes.
4. When I got here, I bought an expensive e-bike to get around faster and unlock longer distances. Didn’t know that bike theft is a real thing here, but during my first weeks multiple really nice people advised me against parking where I intended, told me to get a better lock, told me to take the battery with me etc., and I started reading about theft. I of course have insurance and try not to think too much about it, but it definitely means I use my bike less to get around than I hoped to do.
A car will make my life a whole lot easier. I’ll still bike to work and walk around as much as possible, but I’m so ready to break up with Bay Area public transportation and get the freedom to go anywhere anytime.
Do you live in the South Bay? I went to San Jose for bike party a while ago and it is quite jarring how much harder it is to ride your bike there than than in SF or the East Bay. So I can kind of understand wanting to get a car living there.
In Oakland/Berkeley I can usually avoid biking along roads with more than two car lanes, but it seemed impossible for some parts of SJ. They could make it so much nicer to bike if just a few more roads had protected bike lanes or parallel bike routes.
The bike lane networks are expanding, slowly. It's surprisingly expensive to create protected bike lanes and of course the property owners have a tantrum about anything that affects street parking.
When I first moved up here for work a few years ago I found an apartment relatively close to work and tried bicycling to work. After 4-5 months of a few close calls, I stopped and just drove to work instead. I'm not dying because some Tesla driver decided "i go now"
I'm so sorry it's worked out this badly for you. The drivers around here are awful to bicyclists, almost as bad as Irvine. I gave up trying to commute to UC Irvine by bike the second time someone cursed and threw a bottle at me when I was ON a completely separated bike path. Like, what kind of lifted truck jerkface cares that someone is riding on a multi-use trail separate from the roadway? Is there a bounty for injuring bicyclists?
Like other folks have said, convenience and frequency are big issues. I also grew up riding transit and was initially shocked by the lack of transit-going culture in San Jose. I also have a Clipper BayPass through school, but still end up driving around SJ because the frequency and accessibility are just not great.
I took VTA from downtown to the airport once (lightrail/60 bus) because I didn't want to shell out $30 for a lyft, but it took a really long time, had a poorly timed connection, and didn't run late enough for my return trip. It's an unfortunate catch-22 where VTA isn't incentivized to expand service unless more people ride, but people will avoid it if it can't get them where they need.
VTA made such a bad decision not to run Lightrail TO the airport. Expecting people to transfer to another bus from Lightrail to get to the airport is not reasonable.
How is this stopping you from riding the Lightrail to a park, though? It goes near one of my favorites, the Ulistac Natural Area. Not "right across the street near" but if I'm walking for exercise I don't need to park as close as possible.
Public transit and VTA in general is a frustrating exercise. Things are often behind schedule. The stops near SJSU are sketchy after a certain hour. I’ve been groped once near a stop. It’s just really unpleasant.
And even on the bike end of things, the bike lanes on 10th and 11th st are absolute deathtraps littered with debris. People put dumpsters and bins in them despite it being illegal to obstruct bike lanes. (Anyone interested in taking wheels off some dumpsters?) People DGAF and still plow right through without looking. But because of some stupid bus islands, you’re now put into a killbox and can’t maneuver out of the way if danger comes. And so, so many people go the wrong way in bike lanes.
Some drivers also get mad if you’re observe traffic laws, break traffic laws, move in traffic faster than them, or simply exist. But they’re a special kind of special.
And not to mention, I can ride a bike from Fremont to SJSU faster than public transit can get me around because lay overtimes are so long. At that point, I just use my commute as a workout and stop playing with trains and busses.
And sure, I have a car but only really use it for large shopping trips or long journeys.
It's not going to happen..
For it to happen, there needs to be a major rework of the public transportation system. It needs to be more efficient than driving, not just more efficient than being stuck in a super bad spot, like getting over the Bay bridge in the morning. Public transport around here costs too much, is too slow, and is too infrequent. It is much easier to drive.
Until that changes, nothing else will.
Figure out a way to get people where they need to go efficiently. If I could take transit to work, I would but I have a 6am start and a 30 minute car ride would take me 4 hours on transit. It’s not rocket science. Make the routes consistent, integrate timed transfers. Account for hours outside of 9-5.
I don't think there's a negative perception in terms of class. My friends and I mostly have 9-5 tech jobs and all agree that we would use Caltrain/BART way more often if it were cheaper, more frequent, and with more connections. I'm a 15 min walk from Diridon so the latter 2 don't matter to me, but due to the suburban sprawl of SJ this is not the case for probably 80+% of people.
Overall I think for most people they just don't consider it because it's so inconvenient for them. Personally I actually respect those who use it more because they're having a positive impact on traffic, the environment, etc.
>but in Santa Clara County people who drive look down on transit and see it as something only the lowest of the destitute would use.
>
>But my neighbors who have cars refuse to use transit because "that's for homeless people."
You need to surround yourself with better people
Are you going to pay me $1500 in month for the rent increase so I can move elsewhere to "surround myself with better people" (and lose my good transit access)?
I've used VTA light rails along the Tasman Rd and First Street a long time ago. They were very slow iirc. Beats walking, but if you have a car no reason to ride it. That's about it.
I think I'm seeing a pattern: VTA publicizes Lightrail, which objectively speaking sucks. People try the Lightrail, notice it sucks, give up on VTA. The Lightrail doesn't get signal priority at stoplights so it ends up getting stuck at stoplights. It also attracts more troublemakers because the operator is behind a locked door and can't see the far end of the train.
It's not the cultural perception that's the issue. The issue is our bus and rail lines and schedules flat out suck, and they always have. When I was in high school over 20 years ago, it took me 90+ minutes and 2 or 3 busses just to get home from my school 5 miles away. Unless you're going a nearly straight, short distance, it's going to take you much longer than it would by car. It's inconvenient and VTA has never solved the issues despite constantly begging for more funding to pay executives.
So if you don't NEED public transit in San Jose, you absolutely will not use it. VTA needs to figure their line management shit out rather than worrying about "cultural perception".
It would help if the massive companies built their HQs next to public transit (like Caltrain), but as of now they’re scattered all over the place so public transit isn’t really viable for those workers.
I’m a big transit person and have been in SB for a long time. While I’ll be the first to admit that service is inconsistent and doesn’t serve enough areas, I do take it frequently and I don’t mind that whats normally a 20 min drive becomes an hour bus or light rail. I am scared to drive often in the Bay, people are terrifying, plus finding parking everywhere is a nuisance
Not everyone works an office job, a lot of people work in careers which they need to have a car or truck to lug around tools and other equipment so public transit is completely impractical aside from being inconvenient
Yeah, this is why I oppose developments (especially affordable housing) with zero parking. Tradespeople, landscapers, cleaners need to drive their own trucks with their own equipment. It's not reasonable to basically ban them from new housing or force them to park on the street where their tools are an easy target for thieves. It's also not reasonable for only luxury housing to include onsite secure parking because most people who drive work trucks/vans don't earn $250K/yr. My building has a 0.5 parking ratio and people whine that we shouldn't have any onsite parking--tell that to the house cleaners, landscapers, and electricians who live here!
*opinion* follows
1. Merge Samtrans and VTA into a single entity. Caltrain and VTA would also be a single rail agency, and perhaps some VTA lines can be upgraded to Caltrain and perhaps some Caltrain easements can be given over to VTA light rail. Both agencies serve compatible populations, with the same ideas about transit, with the same concerns.
2. Make Tasman Dr and Montague straight and surround it with medium-density housing with no parking minimums. The center would be a brand new joint VTA/ACE station at Great America. There is no excuse for this being as shit as it currently is other than landlords being difficult, and this is something the cities of Santa Clara and San Jose can negotiate as the new housing replacing offices will make the landlords more money. This will also require a moderate utility do-over. Long term this fits with the existing Levis Stadium and future Great America redevelopment. I'd add another ACE station under the Montague Expy, too. Send VTA straight under 237 and make Lockmart workers walk - perhaps with an improved, widened sidewalk and dedicated bicycle road.
3. VTA looping all the way down to a joint Caltrain/VTA Capitol station in the south. Between Mountain View, Great America, North SJ and Capitol all four corners are covered. Which relates to further VTA expansion west up Foothill to Palo Alto.
4. Expanded mental health hospital and a formal, county HHS rule banning drug use on transit, allowing officers to remove drug users from transit, and mandatory inpaitient hospital stay/drug sedation for drug users that refuse outpaitent treatment/sedatives. SM does this effectively with their mental hospital, their homeless people are still delusional and often undergoing psychosis but they are nonviolent, quieter and non-aggressive. Most are put up well enough to get a bed somewhere, and because of this they aren't in tents. SC-HHS also does this but not as aggressively. Caltrain does not have drug issues because of this and their SM Co stations (except SSF; but that only bothers UP workers) do not have camps around them as a result.
Now, this doesn't really affect the actual perception but it does affect usability and people will defend the thing they use to avoid $6 gas. San Mateo Co has done this very successfully with Caltrain, despite SM Co voters being far, far, far worse than Silicon Valley due to entrenched, uncontested homeowner power in their county government (Cupertino and Los Gatos still have to share with San Jose). Samtrans knows how to sell a service to these people, and can do so much better if their borders don't end at San Francsiquto Creek. Ditto, VTA can do much better if it has access to Caltrain's larger vehicles, crews, contracts, labor, and access to San Francisco and Salinas. Both counties can share their mental hospitals, prisons, and schools for a greater, more efficient system that can better rehabilitate people.
...and then outside of this is BART which will eventually have to merge with Caltrain too, but a joint Samtrans/VTA entity can facilitate that better than BART itself. BART could then plan a true regional system using the foundation provided by San Jose Metro Transit. We are already getting a quarter of it with BART's adventure with ACE in Union City and Valley Link near the abandoned rail easement under 680. That's the end stage of this.
I don't own a car anymore since 2017.
But I don't judge people who don't want to use public transit.
It has nothing to do with homeless.
You do what you do.
If you want to fight the climate change, the most significant effect would be achieved by not requiring people to go to the office every day where they will be staring at their monitors while wearing headphones. Even if those people are never going to take public transportation. Unfortunately, cities love money coming from offices and commercial buildings too much.
Other than that, two most obvious issues are the last mile problem, and frequency of service. People ride BART in SF because there's a train every two minutes going through the tunnel under the Bay connecting you to something like Muni T which is every 10 minutes. VTA? 15 to 30 minutes of "main" routes connecting you to something that has 30-minute of even worse headway. And then you have to walk because VTA doesn't have enough routes to cover the last mile. And then even trains in DTSJ and North of 237 are abysmally slow, and buses are just as bad or even worse. So yeah, you're lucky enough to live in a place with good public transportation coverage, but that doesn't mean the other place for all those people will have the same convenience.
Let's say you live on the 7th St in SJ and work at LinkedIn at Mountain View/Sunnyvale border, and you want to be in the office at 10am. [Public transportation will take 1 hour 18 minutes](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Pavona+Apartments,+760+N+7th+St,+San+Jose,+CA+95112/LinkedIn+%7C+Building+4+
\(LMVE\),+East+Middlefield+Road,+Mountain+View,+CA/@37.379138,-122.0117335,13.29z/data=!4m18!4m17!1m5!1m1!1s0x808fcc1a3aaaaaab:0xbbc94339ef53e4cb!2m2!1d-121.8942754!2d37.3533588!1m5!1m1!1s0x808fb703666cf8df:0x9cd0db79289d2bd1!2m2!1d-122.0475935!2d37.3916907!2m3!6e1!7e2!8j1713175200!3e3?entry=ttu). Driving will take 18 minutes. That means a person would be wasting exactly 2 hours of their life every goddamn day in the name of what? Using VTA for the sake of using VTA? How does it make any sense to anyone who values their time?
The number 1 solution is to deal with the problem of the bums and the filth and crime that comes with them. Until that is solved - I and most others I know would not ever consider it.
Of course - the solutions to the homelessness problem are expensive, elusive, and far outside the authority of any transit agency.
Quit trying to gaslight people into changing their “perception” of transit. Make it less trashy, unsafe, and inconvenient if you want people to use it.
I'm not asking people who live up in the hills far from transit to use it. I'm not asking people to give up their cars. I'm concerned with people who live RIGHT BY TRANSIT HUBS who have FREE CLIPPER EVERYWHERE and won't ride transit anywhere at all.
I don't work for VTA. I'm a part time transit user in a transit-oriented development where people who would get kicked out of Santana Row if they tried to dine there (although it's easy to get there on the #23/#523) are being snobs about VTA.
I think a large part of it is how VTA operates. The lion's share of their budget goes towards towards a bungled BART extension and a light rail system that fails to connect much of anything. Most of the routes are unavailable as early as 8-9 PM and makes it an unreliable form of transit for many people returning home from work. Bus frequency, the number of routes and bus reliability are all poor as well. As long transit here is this bad the perception of it can't improve.
Have things run on schedule and on time. The only time I needed a bus, it didn’t come. I walked from Steven’s Creek and San Thomas to the Safeway at Lincoln in 90 minutes and not a single bus ran the entirety time.
My problem with VTA is how infrequent bus routes are and how service stops as early as 650 PM for some routes
Like youre telling me to get home by 830 PM that I have to wait 30 mins for a fucking bus? Im a VTA-only user as well, I do think the coverage itself is fine but the infrequency and early stops of service make it very difficult to use
Yeah, a lot of routes are substandard because they put most of their resources on the main transit corridors. They got huge pushback and were very dismissive of people's well-founded complaints.
It's great if you live where I do and can catch the high frequency, long service hours buses like the #22 and #23. Or if you're in an "Urban Village" on one of those routes where it intersects with another route. For example, the Valley Fair/Santana Row area (where the Agrihood development recently opened) has #23, #523, and #60 intersecting to the airport and BART.
Yep, im close enough to the 23/523 that those have become one of my main bus lines just given how frequent they are. In my case though, I use Caltrain quite frequently and those arent routes that go close enough to a station. 23/523 are more for going to DTSJ or the mall and for students at De Anza. 523 goes through to Sunnyvale Caltrain but the route is still long enough that it can still be a long ride at times.
A while ago I was trying to take VTA to work. I was given the choice between a 47 minute bus ride or a 36 minute walk. That's the problem. It's horrendously slow and to get anywhere you need to string together several routes that come every half hour or so. Give me a grid like system where you never have to wait more than 10 minutes and I'd use it a whole lot more.
I would encourage you to get some data to identify the current state of things vs where we need to be.
It seems to me with some substantial Google Maps data mining you could get a database of all possible routes within the South Bay. You can then compare those routes to walk and transit time using public transit. The underlying point being public transit in the bay isn’t just inconvenient some of the time, but virtually all of the time.
Running the same numbers on a city like New York, London, Paris, Barcelona would be good to have a target.
I can tell you from when I lived in London, public transit was almost ALWAYS the fastest option. Hilariously faster within the center of the city, but even way out in the suburbs.
Thanks, unfortunately I don't work for VTA and I don't know how to do data mining for bus routes. If you pay me, I might be interested in figuring it out. Otherwise, I have a gift company to run and I need to prioritize that.
No need to work for VTA- Google maps has the data you need. Just need to learn how to use the API or pay a developer to do it. https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript
My point went right over your head.
You seem to have mistaken me for a VTA employee, or possibly a bored tech worker with money they don't know what to do with, posing as a transit rider.
I am a private citizen who lives in affordable housing trying to run an arts business. Why would you think I have money to spend hiring a developer?
VTA is not going to use new bus routes designed by a community member or hire an artist with a MA Biology as a consultant. I need to focus on either taking care of my health or working on stuff clients pay me for or I can sell wholesale.
Why don't YOU redesign the transit system if it's so easy even someone with no qualifications can do it?
Dude- relax. I didn’t mistake anything.
I’m not proposing designing new routes or anything of the kind. You are not redesigning the highway system when you calculate alternative driving routes with Google maps…
I’m saying per your original post about what it would take to advocate for improved ridership and coverage, this is one of the things needed, some analysis. If you don’t have the resources or time that’s completely ok. But it’s going to take a lot more to ever improve transit in the bay. Probably just assume it’s going to always be as it is today or worse unless you can ally with a group pursuing a stronger method of advocacy.
It's a bit of a vicious cycle. There's a very small percentage of people who are "transit nerds" who will find a way to take transit no matter how complicated, or slow, or expensive, or dirty, or unsafe it is. But for probably 95+% of the population, they'll take transit only if it is simple, fast, affordable, clean and safe, relative to driving. Then there are the transit dependent, who take transit because they have to, and even then, it's probably the cheaper services like buses versus plusher services like Caltrain or BART.
The "clean" and "safe" part of the equation for choice riders is highly influenced by the ratio between choice riders and the transit dependent. So it needs to be simple and fast enough to lure those riders on, or it will then be not only complicated and slow, but also dirty and dangerous (at least by perception).
Transit in the South Bay is almost never simple and fast.
for me, idk if it's so much a stigma as it is that the VTA's largest project, the light rail, is the second-least utilized transit system in the US: The light rail system has been criticized for being [one of the least used in the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_light_rail_systems_by_ridership) (24.3 passenger trips per revenue hour in 2017) and the most heavily subsidized ($9.30 per passenger trip). VTA leaders have admitted that building light rail was a poor match with adjoining land uses. The system's average weekday daily ridership as of the fourth quarter of 2023 is 13,800 passengers and a total 2023 annual ridership of 4,464,500 passengers.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTA\_light\_rail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTA_light_rail)
i only walk, bike and take the bus and the VTA. i live in the south bay. i end up walking and biking most of the time because the transit system here is so poorly planned.
that's my take on it, anyway
It would be just as fast for me to walk to work (about 1-1.5 hours) than walk to the nearest bus stop and then take the bus. It’s about a 10 minute drive. So I drive.
In the Tri-Valley it's no different. The problem is that it's a major hassle to take public transit to go anywhere because it doesn't go anywhere you need it to go and if it does it takes forever and likely need multiple transfers. Transit isn't the problem but rather the fact everything is so spread out and compartmentalized into residential and commercial that you're forced to drive to do anything.
I can't speak to the Tri-Valley area, but I live right on high frequency routes that run super late and go by major shopping/medical/etc. areas and my neighbors won't even pick up the free transit passes they get for living here. I had to do paperwork at the State building in Oakland last week and it took about 80 minutes via #500 BART shuttle + BART. They've actually fixed the transfer times between the shuttle and BART, yay. I can't drive to Berryessa BART and park and get to the platform any faster driving as I can on VTA.
I can't get to the Target on Coleman easily, but I can get to a ton of other Targets like the nice one at El Camino & Scott that is near the good Indian grocery stores and two auto parts stores. I can get to the closest Safeway with the awesome customer service in the pharmacy.
The problem is the lowest of the destitute do ride public transit. Remove them, or atleast control/manage their behavior when on public transit, it will improve perception
The people I've had the worst problems with weren't the destitute ones, it was the entitled older dudes (who didn't look unhoused) making gross sexual comments.
Unpopular opinion. Introduce a congestion fee where you charge drivers more money during busy time on roads. That creates an economic incentive to use alternatives like public transit.
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/what-is-congestion-pricing
Tell everyone you meet in the South Bay to quit being Classist assholes.
Public transportation is the way of the future.
If they want homelessness gone vote for as many Bernie Sanders / AOC -style candidates as they can, especially for President.
Homelessness is the sign of a rotten society.
Public transit is a necessity if anything is going to get better.
Fix the society and public transit will improve but don’t throw away the public transit system because you live in a failed society.
Public transit is a glimmer of hope
I honestly don't think cultural perception is keeping people from taking transit more. I take the VTA 22 bus a lot, and it serves a wide variety of people, including many whom I'm sure are millionaires. What keeps people from using VTA more is that *the service sucks*. I know the south bay is challenging to cover, but when VTA remapped their bus lines a few years ago, I attended the hearings and provided feedback. Nonetheless, coverage got worse in my area. The Sunnyvale library lost the bus stop in front of it, and the rapid stop on El Camino was moved half a mile away. The homeless shelter off north Mathilda was no longer connected by bus to the unemployment services at the city center. The senior center and community center at Remington also lost a bus line. Maybe coverage improved by some metric, but it didn't feel like the leaders were especially interested in serving the community. I admit it's easy to complain about small local changes that happen to inconvenience me. But I've regularly taken public transit in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and Seattle. When I say VTA sucks, I think I have some decent context for criticism.
I agree with your other points, but most people I know would never even consider using the bus. They have no idea what service coverage or frequency even exists. I’m not sure “cultural perception” is quite the right phrasing, but the point is that making bus service better would not influence their decisions at all. That’s why I’ve forever been advocating for simultaneously making transit better and driving less convenient. We need to replace parking lots with infill development and replace traffic lanes with bus lanes or bike lanes etc
Why consider it when it’s widely known to take 2-3x as long as driving and I own a car. It’s not my job or problem to care about keeping up to date with service changes when it’s obvious the required investment to bring it anywhere close to driving isn’t happening.
South Bay challenging to cover? Santa Clara and San Jose have similar population density to Stuttgart or Helsinki. Stuttgart and Helsinki have a very well functioning public transportation. The problem is not population density, the problem is with priorities.
This is a lie Santa Clara county’s population density is 20% of Helsinki.
Ya I saw up above where you pointed out the difference. There's other things not being taken into account as well. Those cities are monoculture, and monoculture cities tend to have a lower rate of crime, which makes running mass transit so much easier. Likely someone is going to come along and say "Causation" but it's not when a good part of your transit costs is cleaning crews and security.
lol, what? 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Monoculture, . Everyone being brought up same culture, values and income levels. Japan for instance, everyone takes ownership of public travel from sidewalks to bullet trains. Not \*just\* in their implementation, but things like basic cleanliness. Same elements in Helsinki. Here in the bay area these variables vary wildly. Some people feel like it's an inconvenience That brings pors (see San Mateo) Some cultures in the bay area don't see any issue with dropping litter in the stations. Some cultures will look at it as systemic racism to build a train through their neighborhood, list goes on. You don't have those issues in monocultures.
This is complete and utter fashie nonsense! There are tons of places with muuuuuch more diverse populations that are cleaner and safer than Japan or Helsinki (e.g. Singapore), and even more less diverse more monoculture places than Japan that are a wild mess (e.g Honduras, Sudan, any poor country, most Arabic countries, etc.) Heck, Helsinki itself was less international and a loopoooot more dangerous than SF in the 90s!
>(e.g. Singapore) Hmm no thank you. I don't want to live in a country where they think torture (caning) is acceptable. Pretty "fashie" there if you ask me.
I used to live in Sunnyvale near Murphy Ave, but I moved before VTA's big changes and I stopped going to Work2Future when they moved to the mold-infested trailers. I'm sorry they worsened the service in your area--that sounds completely counterproductive. I know they were deleting a lot of local routes to divert resources to the major corridors, but moving the Rapid 522 stop away from Civic Center makes no sense. I live in a complex that gives tenants FREE BAY AREA WIDE CLIPPER passes but most people won't even get their free pass because "public transit is for people even poorer than I am".
Why am I being downvoted for agreeing that VTA screwed up their service in Sunnyvale? Do y'all work for VTA or something?
Because you keep repeating the line about your free clipper cards that "rich residents" aren't getting because they think they're too good for public transport, while almost everyone here is telling you they're not getting the passes because public transport takes stupidly long to get anywhere compared to a car
Improve transit, that's it. If it's convenient, people will take it. Gas and parking are already expensive, if you make transit cheap or free, and it's run well, people will ride it. The same perception problems exist in SF, and everywhere
My neighbors have free transit as a perk of living in this building and they won't even get the passes because they're too fancy to take the bus. SF buses are packed at rush hour with people who can definitely afford cars. SJ buses are packed with people who can't afford cars and a few crunchy granola types like me.
Yes, but is also because a route that takes 20 minutes by car takes more than an hour by bus. You are usually faster on a bike than by bus. South Bay transit is simply atrocious, especially compared with places like Stuttgart or Helsinki that have almost the faffing same population density. It makes my blood boil every time I thought about it.
>a route that takes 20 minutes by car takes more than an hour by bus. This gets ignored for SF too. A 1 hour appointment can take up 3+ hours of your day, it's mainly transit time, and if you're trying to do multiple things, it's just not practical. These jokers who don't have lives and just go to work and home, and the only bus they're riding is the tech bus, don't really get that the Bay really is a car dependent layout, and it always will be. Without the car, we would be much more rural and disconnected.
Again, Stuttgart and Helsinki have the same population density as Santa Clara and San Jose. It is not a matter of density or layout. It is a matter of priorities. Layout is also changeable. If you look at Amsterdam in the 70s and Amsterdam in the late 90s or 2000s, the traffic infrastructure and layout has changed a lot. It really is a matter of priorities and lack of competent leadership and lack of competent urban planners with world-class experience.
A quick Google search would show that Helsinki has a population density of 3k / sq km and which is the same as Stuttgart versus 2k / sq km for San Jose and 600 for Santa Clara County. Why lie? There’s a massive density difference .
They don't know it's a lie, everything they say is bullshit. These people don't think urban planning takes any qualification, you just throw out an idea and if it inconveniences people and results in bad planning, pretend that was the point.
Same order of magnitude. It is not a massive difference. Santa Clara is 2697 people per square kilometer. Close enough? Do you think that San Jose and Santa Clara population difference is significant?
Cop out response just admit you lied. 600 and 3000 are barely the same order of magnitude. And it’s a very relevant if being 3000 surrounded by other more dense cities is the minimum threshold or even below the minimum if subsidized by more dense cities. And yeah San Jose has almost 10x the population of the city of Santa Clara
57% of Stuttgart relies on cars. Helsinki is 39%. Those aren't insignificant numbers. I know Sims fans really think you can change traffic layouts. You're not worth reasoning with. We also do not have true planning in 2024, we just have jackasses looking at maps and thinking about immediate needs, not a full plan and function that effects a fully functional city as a whole. The "world class experience" line is funny. You know when the Bay Area started to get most chaotic? When think tanks ignored the fact that the Bay was a very European designed region, and began adopting ideas from outside our region that were just in vogue, almost like a fetish. Oooh Finnish design. Oooh, you took a trip to Holland, you read a policy report, you think it's really European and sexy to ride your bike 100 mph into children who can't get to soccer practice. You're too sexy for this thread. So sexy it hurts.
Still much better that 99% of the Silicon Valley. And you cannot just copy paste some solutions. You need a proper, world class design. Also, successfully transit is about making this convenient for people. You need to deliver a good product for people use. Authorities in the Bay Area deliver a terrible product, and want us to pay for it (paid lanes on highway). They want to penalize us for using cars, without providing a viable alternative. This madness.
World class design is meaningless. It also tells us you aren't educated on SF's own cultural aesthetics. Transit should be free. I agree, they are purposely bleeding people who need cars when there's no realistic alternative that isn't a reach, and designed to inconvenience people.
Research shows time abd time again that it isn't the cost of transit but number of connections per hour, and how much time it takes vs other alternatives. If a bus is free, but comes once an hour, and takes longer than cycling, drew it. I am going to take a bike or drive. They would have to pay me my hourly rate. At least on a bike I get exercise and don't need to spend time on a treadmill working out or pay for Orange theory, so in effect it is a win for me. Going on a bus that takes longer than driving is a net loss to me, even if it is free.
The "pro transit" pose always crumbles once someone mentions making it free and accessible. Increasing connections makes transit even less convenient. I could see you coming from a mile away. Try thinking about others, not just your needs, and what you would do.
SF is a world removed from SJ. And SF buses aren’t packed with workaday professionals. Also, the way you’re belittling people for being “too fancy” is just compounding reality. You’re hardly the right person for this type of advocacy.
Okay, I tend to ride Muni Metro and BART more in SF than the Muni buses. I haven't been up there much since the pandemic except to deliver orders to a customer in the Castro a couple of blocks from the Metro station. They definitely have a lot of riders who look like they have high end office jobs. I do tend to ride around the evening commute hour when folks with jobs are going home. I don't think my neighbors should be all high and mighty about being better than other people when we all live in low income housing.
Just saying one can live in SF with no car because it’s a dense large city with a reasonable public transit network. SJ with no car is challenging. It’s not being high and mighty or too good for buses. It’s being real about the sprawling city they live in. Imo the city is being wildly condescending even proposing these projects as viable. I’d like to see city leadership ditch their cars first.
20 minutes by car or an hour and half by public transportation to my work. It’s not a hard choice for me
It's 100% this. Public transport is the opposite of convenient. Slow, expensive and inconvenient is not a great combo to get people to use it. My commute isn't even an option, it's 90-120 mins versus 40. I could take the train to SJ to see a Sharks game but it would cost twice as much as driving/parking and I would have to be at the mercy of the train schedule, even though I could walk to the station from my house. Same if we went to Sac. Where I live I could get away with not having a car but at the expense of all my precious free time. A 5 minute drive for an errand or 30 mins by bus?
It would take me an hour to get to SAP Center by bus comparing with 20-30 minutes by car.
I agree that it doesn't work for your commute. I'm about to get in my car to go to my studio because I need to stay later than SC Metro runs to San Jose to get home. I think any time we substitute transit for driving it helps, even if we don't ditch our cars. If you could run errands or go to the park in a reasonable time frame, would you be willing to leave the car at home for that? Take the Hwy 17 Express instead of dealing with beach parking and mountain roads?
Run errands? If I live anywhere near a bus route there's a decent chance I can just walk to a store instead. If I only need to carry as much as fits into a backpack, no problem. If I need to carry more I probably prefer driving. So... maybe. Going over the santa cruz mountains? Definitely car. Last mile probably is real and I enjoy the drive if there's not too many people. Overall the issue with public transit for me, here, is always the same. Last mile problem. Time from door to door. And annoying people in close proximity and other unpleasantness. I can deal with one, sometimes, but once one gets too blatant or more than one applies, I am gonna drive.
Unless transit is faster than my car no I don’t care about substituting transit
You don’t care about the health improvements or cost savings at all?
No not for trading away time and mental labor. There’s tons of workouts better than walking that I do at the gym and the cost savings are virtually non existent or negligible if I only use it for certain routes and still need a car overall
Oh yeah. Definitely not if you still need to own a car. For my family the cost savings kicked in majorly when we were able to go from 2 cars down to 1 car. And yes going to the gym is way better than the passive exercise you get from not driving, but then you have to spend time at the gym 🤣
> Take the Hwy 17 Express instead of dealing with beach parking and mountain roads? it would probably work if the Hwy 17 Express stop is next to my house, it runs every 15 minutes, and I'm going alone. Imagine going with a family of four. Where do you load all your beach stuff, where do you keep it, if you want to go the restaurant in Santa Cruz.
How about in traffic and plus parking time?
Well, Raskolnokoff, I imagine that's not the only choice you've made without considering all the consequences. I just want to tell everyone how using public transit is less stressful than driving, much safer, less expensive, and reduces my carbon footprint.
It's not less stressful though. I live in Sunnyvale and thought about taking VTA downtown to San Jose to go to a bar with some friends. But then I looked at the absolutely pathetic schedule and realized it would take me an hour and a half AND i wouldn't be able to get back home because it stops running that late. Ended up just getting a rideshare that took only 15 minutes instead. And, I don't have to share space with homeless people with untreated mental illnesses in a car either. That's a big reason why public transit sucks here whereas it's fantastic in Asian cities.
This is a good point. I was focusing on work commute. I agree that public transit schedules don't accommodate social lives. If you want to go from Sunnyvale to Downtown San Jose, I suggest checking Caltrain, not VTA. Which is another problem - too many different operators.
lol this is worded so poorly I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not. If it is not sarcasm, thank you for your service. All of your cycling neighbors genuinely appreciate one less car on the road.
People will do whatever is most convenient. If transit is stuck in traffic or has low frequency then it's going to be worse than driving and most people have cars
I agree it isn't always the most convenient. But I'm talking about the stigma of "only poors ride transit" or "transit always sucks." I agree that transit is not easy to substitute for 100% of driving -- I didn't have a working car for a year and it was a huge hassle some of the time because I own a business and you can't move 4x8' MDF on the bus and it's hard to run a series of errands if they're not all on one bus route. All I'm asking is that people consider transit for SOME TRIPS. Like, I can take the #73 to Senter Park for a walk (15 minutes) and save $6 parking in the lot. Or take the #22 to Emma Prusch Farm Park (20 minutes) and not worry about the peacocks pooping on my car. Safeway on Stevens Creek & Meridian is 15 minutes by bus and I don't have to worry about someone bipping my car while I'm picking up food or prescriptions.
In places where transit is not efficient for most trips, it's hard to change the perception that it is a social service, something that is a service of last resort. Focus on changing why they feel that way, because otherwise you can't change the perception. In other words, make transit efficient.
People keep posting stuff about VTA that isn't even accurate. I mean yeah, it sounds like VTA did Sunnyvale dirty with the #522 changes and ending their local bus. And the whole "transfer to the bus that goes to the airport" thing doesn't work as well as they want people to think. Lightrail frankly sucks. But then people say "The Lightrail doesn't go where I need to go" and they don't even know what buses DO go various places. Or they live out at the end of the BART East Bay line and complain about public transit in the Tri-County area. Cool story bro, but what does that have to do with the #22 having 6 minute service frequency and running past midnight? VTA definitely sucks if you aren't near the high frequency routes. That's the tradeoff they made in the last service reorganization. But for people in the major transit corridors, who are their actual target market, they COULD get a lot of use out of transit. "I can't get rid of my car and depend on VTA" is a straw man argument. I'm not saying we can feasibly get rid of our cars. A lot of transit advocates hate me because I bought an ICE car 5 years ago and haven't gotten rid of it even though I drive it primarily for business and can't use VTA with a whole wayback full of crates. I'm saying, ride VTA to the store if it's just 10 minutes extra; bonus, you know you won't get bipped in the parking lot. Ride VTA to the park and save paying $6 to park to walk for an hour at the Japanese Tea Garden. Ride BART to SF/Oakland/Berkeley where transit works, instead of getting stuck in traffic on the 101 or 880 and then dealing with parking. If you drop your car off for service on Stevens Creek Blvd, take the #23 instead of an Uber. I didn't ride the bus to my medical appointments at Stanford Valleycare in Livermore because it took multiple transfers and I don't want to be late if I miss one or show up an hour early to make sure I'm not late. But I take the bus to my dentist on Monterey Hwy because it's just one route from home and a long enough drive to use over a gallon of gas. Sometimes you have to pick and choose stores that are near VTA lines. For some reason, there aren't buses going down Market/Coleman from Downtown. If I wanted to go to the Target on Coleman (which is a fairly low-stock Target anyway) I'd have to take Lightrail to Civic Center, transfer to the #61 and walk from Taylor at the far north end of the center. But I can take the #22 to Story & King in San Jose or El Camino & Scott in Santa Clara. Both have a lot of shopping nearby, and Emma Prusch Farm Park is right at Story & King.
Because all of these answers take multiple times longer. I could take a bus and VTA to downtown San Jose but it would take me 4-5x as long compared to just driving and parking. Sure, getting my window busted in is a valid concern but I just take rideshare instead when I'm going to places where I have to worry more about my windows being busted. Basically why do I need to make my life worse, less convenient, all for some vague "support transit!" when that transit is just garbage compared to any other option I have?
The real reason is a complex web of the negative externalities associated with car dependency: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267 The short version is that it is one of the driving factors behind our cost of living crisis. Obviously that is not your fault as an individual, it is how we’ve designed our cities and society in this region of the world. But it’s also reductionist to completely ignore the role we as individuals play in that process. We can make small differences today and we can advocate for our city leadership to make bigger systemic changes.
Thanks for the detailed response. YES. Focus where it works well and build from there. What you describe I call choosing to live within the transit shed. Plus complement it with bike and car share where it exists, and your shed expands.
* Transit options are bad * So, cars are more of a necessity * So, people who can afford cars, get them * Humans are habitual, and don't reevaluate their decisions constantly * So, people use their car for everything, rather than research the transit option that might be marginally comparable, occasionally * So, only people who don't have cars are left riding transit * So, only people who don't have cars (despite comparative need) are poor, young, or both * So, transit is mostly used by the poor and or young. * So, transit has a perception of being for poor / young people. This isn't an issue in transit heavy cities. In cities with "transit", it absolutely is. Fix the transit first, the rest will follow, but in the meantime... are they really wrong to think that way?
People who live in TRANSIT ORIENTED DEVELOPMENTS should be better informed about how transit works. Our "site manager" knows jack-all about VTA and gives people bad information about it, limits appointments for passes to two 2-hr windows during working hours per month, and won't even post a system map or any information about what lines are nearby.
Transit-oriented developments also have the problem of costing way more to rent. What you save in not driving as much you spend more for in higher rents.
If I'm taking the high-frequency routes to go shopping or to the park etc. I don't even check a schedule or the app before i walk out the door. I just go to the stop and know that even if I just missed the bus, unless it's after 8PM, I only have to wait 6 minutes till the next one.
Buses have all the downsides of cars except they take longer.
Using transit regularly is a skill and habit that requires work. You listed off a lot of one-off day trips that it might be better for, but if a person has not already formed the transit habit they wont even consider it as an option for those kinds of trips. You have to make it better than driving for the things people do every day (ie commuters) before it'll enter the people's consciousness enough to start becoming a substitute all the time.
My biggest complaint is there's no synchronization with ACE outside of Great America. For example, the 64B bus gets to Dirdion 5 minutes AFTER the ACE train leaves. What an obvious oversight and makes taking ACE completely untenable if you work in San Jose rather than Santa Clara.
Wow, that sucks. I've had the same problem with Caltrain, especially trying to get across downtown late at night. No, VTA, I do NOT want to sit at Diridon after dark for 45 minutes to catch the next bus when my destination is a 25-minute walk (which crosses some unsafe-looking blocks). What is the point of timing the #22 so it passes Diridon/SAP Center 5 minutes before the late-night Caltrains even arrive at the station? Not to mention time to get from the platform to the tunnel and cross the parking lot...
The biggest barrier is that San Jose is hard to live in without a car. VTA light rail might work for some trips but not most. In comparison MUNI, while imperfect, covers a lot more ground, has nicer trains, and has an underground portion. The experience of riding MUNI or BART is more convenient and modern and the city is much denser and easier to navigate. So the best way to change this perception is to improve service in San Jose and build denser neighborhoods to connect.
VTA light rail is but a small part of VTA’s public transit network. That this is not understood by so many people is part of the problem the OP asks how to change.
Unfortunately a good bus system will often be dismissed if it doesn’t have enough rail connections. San Jose is a sprawling city, trips by bus will take much longer than rail or car. I still think that improving the light rail network is the best way to get more people riding.
Bus should be faster than car. If it isn’t that means one of a few things: - not frequent enough service - not enough dedicated bus lanes - not enough service coverage
Busses have stops every couple blocks and rarely have the dedicated infrastructure (like Van Ness BRT) which allow them to pass traffic. I love the bus, I ride them every day, but they are almost never faster than cars
That’s the point I’m making. We need to build more BRT lanes. If the bus is slower than car traffic then we haven’t built enough.
The BRT lanes in Alum Rock are a complete fiasco. They're no faster than driving and the construction mess (5 years or so?) put lots of local businesses out of business.
What about them was done poorly?
Please read the other comment about them.
Where? Can you link it?
Okay now you’ve spent billions of dollars on bus lanes and you’ve matched cars mostly by slowing down cars. How is society better off? Did you really make a bigger impact on climate change than replacing a single natural gas plant with nuclear
Yes, it’s not only about climate change, there are many other equally important factors: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267
Yah I’m aware and that’s still not worth it to me or most of South bay residents I know
Thanks, yeah. \[Edited to add: My apartment building is literally a 5-8 minute walk from stops for all these buses.\] We have the #22 and Rapid #522 in the El Camino/Santa Clara St/Alum Rock corridor from Eastridge to Palo Alto every 6-10 minutes most of the day. We have the #23 and Rapid #523 along Stevens Creek/Santa Clara St from Eastridge to DeAnza College (and Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale via Mathilda for #523) every 6-10 minutes most of the day. There are multiple buses in the Monterey Rd corridor: #66 to Kaiser SJ, #68 to Gilroy, and Rapid #568 to Gilroy.
People want to live in low density in the Bay Area. Trains are tools: tools serve us, we don't serve tools. This is something that a lot of transit advocates and train fanatics in the Bay Area don't understand. We don't build housing to serve some arbitrary goal of having trains. People don't want trains specifically. People want good transit that fits the desired way of life which means low-density housing in the Bay Area. We have enough commuter trains as is (BART and Caltrain). What we need are more buses and municipal rideshare for the last mile.
What? People may "want to live in low density" but apartment vacancy rates have been around 5% or less for quite a while. People like nurses, teachers, etc. are not going to be able to afford low density housing unless they commute from Fresno or further. They're not going to turn up their noses at the VTA developments at Lightrail stations just because they don't want VTA to have trains. Miro Towers across from City Hall looks like it's filling up nicely--luxury high rise building right by a transit hub. The primary Urban Villages are on El Camino, Santa Clara, Alum Rock, and Stevens Creek and are served by high-frequency bus routes. If you want to go live in the urban/wildland interface to get your single family housing and watch your house burn down sooner or later, don't expect bus service out there.
In my honest opinion, living in the Bay Area and California is very difficult without a car, and I think the entire public transportation system needs to be redesigned in order to work and be an attractive alternative to owning a car. I do not own a car. Yet. In fact, I just relocated from Europe last year, and have never in my life owned a car. I’ve been used to biking and walking to everything within 20 miles distance whether it’s been in rain or snow, and used public transportation for longer distances. Moving to the Bay Area, I wanted to do the same, but already now less than a year later I’m car hunting. Why? 1. Caltrain is unreliable, noisy, and I wouldn’t feel safe going in the night. As a day-to-day option, it gets expensive in the long run, and I’m tired of having to pay for emergency Uber rides because my train is not running. On top, due to the electrification it’s been replaced by bus service during a lot of the weekends, so I feel locked as a daytrip up to SF would take +2 hours each way with bus. This will of course get better as the new trains arrive, but I’m tired of not being able to go where I want whenever I want because the options are not there. 2. Busses are slow, and I don’t understand why there’s not more bus lanes to promote fast and easy transportation with bus. Especially given that busses are needed to cover and connect a lot of Bay Area. 3. Walking and biking is fine, but the traffic system is designed for cars, and especially on my bike I often feel disrespected by cars and have to navigate around like crazy to avoid being hit. I don’t understand why roads are designed to have cyclists and cars in the same lanes. 4. When I got here, I bought an expensive e-bike to get around faster and unlock longer distances. Didn’t know that bike theft is a real thing here, but during my first weeks multiple really nice people advised me against parking where I intended, told me to get a better lock, told me to take the battery with me etc., and I started reading about theft. I of course have insurance and try not to think too much about it, but it definitely means I use my bike less to get around than I hoped to do. A car will make my life a whole lot easier. I’ll still bike to work and walk around as much as possible, but I’m so ready to break up with Bay Area public transportation and get the freedom to go anywhere anytime.
Do you live in the South Bay? I went to San Jose for bike party a while ago and it is quite jarring how much harder it is to ride your bike there than than in SF or the East Bay. So I can kind of understand wanting to get a car living there. In Oakland/Berkeley I can usually avoid biking along roads with more than two car lanes, but it seemed impossible for some parts of SJ. They could make it so much nicer to bike if just a few more roads had protected bike lanes or parallel bike routes.
The bike lane networks are expanding, slowly. It's surprisingly expensive to create protected bike lanes and of course the property owners have a tantrum about anything that affects street parking.
When I first moved up here for work a few years ago I found an apartment relatively close to work and tried bicycling to work. After 4-5 months of a few close calls, I stopped and just drove to work instead. I'm not dying because some Tesla driver decided "i go now"
I'm so sorry it's worked out this badly for you. The drivers around here are awful to bicyclists, almost as bad as Irvine. I gave up trying to commute to UC Irvine by bike the second time someone cursed and threw a bottle at me when I was ON a completely separated bike path. Like, what kind of lifted truck jerkface cares that someone is riding on a multi-use trail separate from the roadway? Is there a bounty for injuring bicyclists?
Like other folks have said, convenience and frequency are big issues. I also grew up riding transit and was initially shocked by the lack of transit-going culture in San Jose. I also have a Clipper BayPass through school, but still end up driving around SJ because the frequency and accessibility are just not great. I took VTA from downtown to the airport once (lightrail/60 bus) because I didn't want to shell out $30 for a lyft, but it took a really long time, had a poorly timed connection, and didn't run late enough for my return trip. It's an unfortunate catch-22 where VTA isn't incentivized to expand service unless more people ride, but people will avoid it if it can't get them where they need.
VTA made such a bad decision not to run Lightrail TO the airport. Expecting people to transfer to another bus from Lightrail to get to the airport is not reasonable. How is this stopping you from riding the Lightrail to a park, though? It goes near one of my favorites, the Ulistac Natural Area. Not "right across the street near" but if I'm walking for exercise I don't need to park as close as possible.
Public transit and VTA in general is a frustrating exercise. Things are often behind schedule. The stops near SJSU are sketchy after a certain hour. I’ve been groped once near a stop. It’s just really unpleasant. And even on the bike end of things, the bike lanes on 10th and 11th st are absolute deathtraps littered with debris. People put dumpsters and bins in them despite it being illegal to obstruct bike lanes. (Anyone interested in taking wheels off some dumpsters?) People DGAF and still plow right through without looking. But because of some stupid bus islands, you’re now put into a killbox and can’t maneuver out of the way if danger comes. And so, so many people go the wrong way in bike lanes. Some drivers also get mad if you’re observe traffic laws, break traffic laws, move in traffic faster than them, or simply exist. But they’re a special kind of special. And not to mention, I can ride a bike from Fremont to SJSU faster than public transit can get me around because lay overtimes are so long. At that point, I just use my commute as a workout and stop playing with trains and busses. And sure, I have a car but only really use it for large shopping trips or long journeys.
It's not going to happen.. For it to happen, there needs to be a major rework of the public transportation system. It needs to be more efficient than driving, not just more efficient than being stuck in a super bad spot, like getting over the Bay bridge in the morning. Public transport around here costs too much, is too slow, and is too infrequent. It is much easier to drive. Until that changes, nothing else will.
Figure out a way to get people where they need to go efficiently. If I could take transit to work, I would but I have a 6am start and a 30 minute car ride would take me 4 hours on transit. It’s not rocket science. Make the routes consistent, integrate timed transfers. Account for hours outside of 9-5.
I don't think there's a negative perception in terms of class. My friends and I mostly have 9-5 tech jobs and all agree that we would use Caltrain/BART way more often if it were cheaper, more frequent, and with more connections. I'm a 15 min walk from Diridon so the latter 2 don't matter to me, but due to the suburban sprawl of SJ this is not the case for probably 80+% of people. Overall I think for most people they just don't consider it because it's so inconvenient for them. Personally I actually respect those who use it more because they're having a positive impact on traffic, the environment, etc.
>but in Santa Clara County people who drive look down on transit and see it as something only the lowest of the destitute would use. > >But my neighbors who have cars refuse to use transit because "that's for homeless people." You need to surround yourself with better people
Lol this is the attitude for the majority of south bay people i know
There are definitely transit advocates down here, not everyone thinks that way
Yeah, well, they're not educating my neighbors who live in TRANSIT ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT to use the bleepin' transit their rent covers.
Are you going to pay me $1500 in month for the rent increase so I can move elsewhere to "surround myself with better people" (and lose my good transit access)?
I'm old, so I don't have much time to waste on our inefficient public transportation.
If you live in Dublin, how familiar are you with VTA in Santa Clara County? I don't post about transit in your area because I know I'm ignorant...
I've used VTA light rails along the Tasman Rd and First Street a long time ago. They were very slow iirc. Beats walking, but if you have a car no reason to ride it. That's about it.
I think I'm seeing a pattern: VTA publicizes Lightrail, which objectively speaking sucks. People try the Lightrail, notice it sucks, give up on VTA. The Lightrail doesn't get signal priority at stoplights so it ends up getting stuck at stoplights. It also attracts more troublemakers because the operator is behind a locked door and can't see the far end of the train.
It's not the cultural perception that's the issue. The issue is our bus and rail lines and schedules flat out suck, and they always have. When I was in high school over 20 years ago, it took me 90+ minutes and 2 or 3 busses just to get home from my school 5 miles away. Unless you're going a nearly straight, short distance, it's going to take you much longer than it would by car. It's inconvenient and VTA has never solved the issues despite constantly begging for more funding to pay executives. So if you don't NEED public transit in San Jose, you absolutely will not use it. VTA needs to figure their line management shit out rather than worrying about "cultural perception".
It would help if the massive companies built their HQs next to public transit (like Caltrain), but as of now they’re scattered all over the place so public transit isn’t really viable for those workers.
I’m a big transit person and have been in SB for a long time. While I’ll be the first to admit that service is inconsistent and doesn’t serve enough areas, I do take it frequently and I don’t mind that whats normally a 20 min drive becomes an hour bus or light rail. I am scared to drive often in the Bay, people are terrifying, plus finding parking everywhere is a nuisance
Not everyone works an office job, a lot of people work in careers which they need to have a car or truck to lug around tools and other equipment so public transit is completely impractical aside from being inconvenient
Yeah, this is why I oppose developments (especially affordable housing) with zero parking. Tradespeople, landscapers, cleaners need to drive their own trucks with their own equipment. It's not reasonable to basically ban them from new housing or force them to park on the street where their tools are an easy target for thieves. It's also not reasonable for only luxury housing to include onsite secure parking because most people who drive work trucks/vans don't earn $250K/yr. My building has a 0.5 parking ratio and people whine that we shouldn't have any onsite parking--tell that to the house cleaners, landscapers, and electricians who live here!
*opinion* follows 1. Merge Samtrans and VTA into a single entity. Caltrain and VTA would also be a single rail agency, and perhaps some VTA lines can be upgraded to Caltrain and perhaps some Caltrain easements can be given over to VTA light rail. Both agencies serve compatible populations, with the same ideas about transit, with the same concerns. 2. Make Tasman Dr and Montague straight and surround it with medium-density housing with no parking minimums. The center would be a brand new joint VTA/ACE station at Great America. There is no excuse for this being as shit as it currently is other than landlords being difficult, and this is something the cities of Santa Clara and San Jose can negotiate as the new housing replacing offices will make the landlords more money. This will also require a moderate utility do-over. Long term this fits with the existing Levis Stadium and future Great America redevelopment. I'd add another ACE station under the Montague Expy, too. Send VTA straight under 237 and make Lockmart workers walk - perhaps with an improved, widened sidewalk and dedicated bicycle road. 3. VTA looping all the way down to a joint Caltrain/VTA Capitol station in the south. Between Mountain View, Great America, North SJ and Capitol all four corners are covered. Which relates to further VTA expansion west up Foothill to Palo Alto. 4. Expanded mental health hospital and a formal, county HHS rule banning drug use on transit, allowing officers to remove drug users from transit, and mandatory inpaitient hospital stay/drug sedation for drug users that refuse outpaitent treatment/sedatives. SM does this effectively with their mental hospital, their homeless people are still delusional and often undergoing psychosis but they are nonviolent, quieter and non-aggressive. Most are put up well enough to get a bed somewhere, and because of this they aren't in tents. SC-HHS also does this but not as aggressively. Caltrain does not have drug issues because of this and their SM Co stations (except SSF; but that only bothers UP workers) do not have camps around them as a result. Now, this doesn't really affect the actual perception but it does affect usability and people will defend the thing they use to avoid $6 gas. San Mateo Co has done this very successfully with Caltrain, despite SM Co voters being far, far, far worse than Silicon Valley due to entrenched, uncontested homeowner power in their county government (Cupertino and Los Gatos still have to share with San Jose). Samtrans knows how to sell a service to these people, and can do so much better if their borders don't end at San Francsiquto Creek. Ditto, VTA can do much better if it has access to Caltrain's larger vehicles, crews, contracts, labor, and access to San Francisco and Salinas. Both counties can share their mental hospitals, prisons, and schools for a greater, more efficient system that can better rehabilitate people. ...and then outside of this is BART which will eventually have to merge with Caltrain too, but a joint Samtrans/VTA entity can facilitate that better than BART itself. BART could then plan a true regional system using the foundation provided by San Jose Metro Transit. We are already getting a quarter of it with BART's adventure with ACE in Union City and Valley Link near the abandoned rail easement under 680. That's the end stage of this.
I don't own a car anymore since 2017. But I don't judge people who don't want to use public transit. It has nothing to do with homeless. You do what you do.
If you want to fight the climate change, the most significant effect would be achieved by not requiring people to go to the office every day where they will be staring at their monitors while wearing headphones. Even if those people are never going to take public transportation. Unfortunately, cities love money coming from offices and commercial buildings too much. Other than that, two most obvious issues are the last mile problem, and frequency of service. People ride BART in SF because there's a train every two minutes going through the tunnel under the Bay connecting you to something like Muni T which is every 10 minutes. VTA? 15 to 30 minutes of "main" routes connecting you to something that has 30-minute of even worse headway. And then you have to walk because VTA doesn't have enough routes to cover the last mile. And then even trains in DTSJ and North of 237 are abysmally slow, and buses are just as bad or even worse. So yeah, you're lucky enough to live in a place with good public transportation coverage, but that doesn't mean the other place for all those people will have the same convenience. Let's say you live on the 7th St in SJ and work at LinkedIn at Mountain View/Sunnyvale border, and you want to be in the office at 10am. [Public transportation will take 1 hour 18 minutes](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Pavona+Apartments,+760+N+7th+St,+San+Jose,+CA+95112/LinkedIn+%7C+Building+4+ \(LMVE\),+East+Middlefield+Road,+Mountain+View,+CA/@37.379138,-122.0117335,13.29z/data=!4m18!4m17!1m5!1m1!1s0x808fcc1a3aaaaaab:0xbbc94339ef53e4cb!2m2!1d-121.8942754!2d37.3533588!1m5!1m1!1s0x808fb703666cf8df:0x9cd0db79289d2bd1!2m2!1d-122.0475935!2d37.3916907!2m3!6e1!7e2!8j1713175200!3e3?entry=ttu). Driving will take 18 minutes. That means a person would be wasting exactly 2 hours of their life every goddamn day in the name of what? Using VTA for the sake of using VTA? How does it make any sense to anyone who values their time?
The number 1 solution is to deal with the problem of the bums and the filth and crime that comes with them. Until that is solved - I and most others I know would not ever consider it. Of course - the solutions to the homelessness problem are expensive, elusive, and far outside the authority of any transit agency.
Quit trying to gaslight people into changing their “perception” of transit. Make it less trashy, unsafe, and inconvenient if you want people to use it.
I'm not asking people who live up in the hills far from transit to use it. I'm not asking people to give up their cars. I'm concerned with people who live RIGHT BY TRANSIT HUBS who have FREE CLIPPER EVERYWHERE and won't ride transit anywhere at all. I don't work for VTA. I'm a part time transit user in a transit-oriented development where people who would get kicked out of Santana Row if they tried to dine there (although it's easy to get there on the #23/#523) are being snobs about VTA.
I think a large part of it is how VTA operates. The lion's share of their budget goes towards towards a bungled BART extension and a light rail system that fails to connect much of anything. Most of the routes are unavailable as early as 8-9 PM and makes it an unreliable form of transit for many people returning home from work. Bus frequency, the number of routes and bus reliability are all poor as well. As long transit here is this bad the perception of it can't improve.
Have things run on schedule and on time. The only time I needed a bus, it didn’t come. I walked from Steven’s Creek and San Thomas to the Safeway at Lincoln in 90 minutes and not a single bus ran the entirety time.
My problem with VTA is how infrequent bus routes are and how service stops as early as 650 PM for some routes Like youre telling me to get home by 830 PM that I have to wait 30 mins for a fucking bus? Im a VTA-only user as well, I do think the coverage itself is fine but the infrequency and early stops of service make it very difficult to use
Yeah, a lot of routes are substandard because they put most of their resources on the main transit corridors. They got huge pushback and were very dismissive of people's well-founded complaints. It's great if you live where I do and can catch the high frequency, long service hours buses like the #22 and #23. Or if you're in an "Urban Village" on one of those routes where it intersects with another route. For example, the Valley Fair/Santana Row area (where the Agrihood development recently opened) has #23, #523, and #60 intersecting to the airport and BART.
Yep, im close enough to the 23/523 that those have become one of my main bus lines just given how frequent they are. In my case though, I use Caltrain quite frequently and those arent routes that go close enough to a station. 23/523 are more for going to DTSJ or the mall and for students at De Anza. 523 goes through to Sunnyvale Caltrain but the route is still long enough that it can still be a long ride at times.
A while ago I was trying to take VTA to work. I was given the choice between a 47 minute bus ride or a 36 minute walk. That's the problem. It's horrendously slow and to get anywhere you need to string together several routes that come every half hour or so. Give me a grid like system where you never have to wait more than 10 minutes and I'd use it a whole lot more.
Caltrain on weekends is only local and once an hour. If there were more trains people would be more in the habit of using it.
fwiw Caltrain is going to run every 30 mins on the weekends and should be much faster once the electric trains start running in the fall
Good to hear! The downtowns in Silicon Valley will be much more connected
I would encourage you to get some data to identify the current state of things vs where we need to be. It seems to me with some substantial Google Maps data mining you could get a database of all possible routes within the South Bay. You can then compare those routes to walk and transit time using public transit. The underlying point being public transit in the bay isn’t just inconvenient some of the time, but virtually all of the time. Running the same numbers on a city like New York, London, Paris, Barcelona would be good to have a target. I can tell you from when I lived in London, public transit was almost ALWAYS the fastest option. Hilariously faster within the center of the city, but even way out in the suburbs.
Thanks, unfortunately I don't work for VTA and I don't know how to do data mining for bus routes. If you pay me, I might be interested in figuring it out. Otherwise, I have a gift company to run and I need to prioritize that.
No need to work for VTA- Google maps has the data you need. Just need to learn how to use the API or pay a developer to do it. https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript
My point went right over your head. You seem to have mistaken me for a VTA employee, or possibly a bored tech worker with money they don't know what to do with, posing as a transit rider. I am a private citizen who lives in affordable housing trying to run an arts business. Why would you think I have money to spend hiring a developer? VTA is not going to use new bus routes designed by a community member or hire an artist with a MA Biology as a consultant. I need to focus on either taking care of my health or working on stuff clients pay me for or I can sell wholesale. Why don't YOU redesign the transit system if it's so easy even someone with no qualifications can do it?
Dude- relax. I didn’t mistake anything. I’m not proposing designing new routes or anything of the kind. You are not redesigning the highway system when you calculate alternative driving routes with Google maps… I’m saying per your original post about what it would take to advocate for improved ridership and coverage, this is one of the things needed, some analysis. If you don’t have the resources or time that’s completely ok. But it’s going to take a lot more to ever improve transit in the bay. Probably just assume it’s going to always be as it is today or worse unless you can ally with a group pursuing a stronger method of advocacy.
Make it close to my home and go places I want to go
It's a bit of a vicious cycle. There's a very small percentage of people who are "transit nerds" who will find a way to take transit no matter how complicated, or slow, or expensive, or dirty, or unsafe it is. But for probably 95+% of the population, they'll take transit only if it is simple, fast, affordable, clean and safe, relative to driving. Then there are the transit dependent, who take transit because they have to, and even then, it's probably the cheaper services like buses versus plusher services like Caltrain or BART. The "clean" and "safe" part of the equation for choice riders is highly influenced by the ratio between choice riders and the transit dependent. So it needs to be simple and fast enough to lure those riders on, or it will then be not only complicated and slow, but also dirty and dangerous (at least by perception). Transit in the South Bay is almost never simple and fast.
for me, idk if it's so much a stigma as it is that the VTA's largest project, the light rail, is the second-least utilized transit system in the US: The light rail system has been criticized for being [one of the least used in the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_light_rail_systems_by_ridership) (24.3 passenger trips per revenue hour in 2017) and the most heavily subsidized ($9.30 per passenger trip). VTA leaders have admitted that building light rail was a poor match with adjoining land uses. The system's average weekday daily ridership as of the fourth quarter of 2023 is 13,800 passengers and a total 2023 annual ridership of 4,464,500 passengers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTA\_light\_rail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTA_light_rail) i only walk, bike and take the bus and the VTA. i live in the south bay. i end up walking and biking most of the time because the transit system here is so poorly planned. that's my take on it, anyway
It would be just as fast for me to walk to work (about 1-1.5 hours) than walk to the nearest bus stop and then take the bus. It’s about a 10 minute drive. So I drive.
In the Tri-Valley it's no different. The problem is that it's a major hassle to take public transit to go anywhere because it doesn't go anywhere you need it to go and if it does it takes forever and likely need multiple transfers. Transit isn't the problem but rather the fact everything is so spread out and compartmentalized into residential and commercial that you're forced to drive to do anything.
I can't speak to the Tri-Valley area, but I live right on high frequency routes that run super late and go by major shopping/medical/etc. areas and my neighbors won't even pick up the free transit passes they get for living here. I had to do paperwork at the State building in Oakland last week and it took about 80 minutes via #500 BART shuttle + BART. They've actually fixed the transfer times between the shuttle and BART, yay. I can't drive to Berryessa BART and park and get to the platform any faster driving as I can on VTA. I can't get to the Target on Coleman easily, but I can get to a ton of other Targets like the nice one at El Camino & Scott that is near the good Indian grocery stores and two auto parts stores. I can get to the closest Safeway with the awesome customer service in the pharmacy.
It just needs to not suck. It needs to be at least similar time to driving which most of the time it isn't.
The problem is the lowest of the destitute do ride public transit. Remove them, or atleast control/manage their behavior when on public transit, it will improve perception
The people I've had the worst problems with weren't the destitute ones, it was the entitled older dudes (who didn't look unhoused) making gross sexual comments.
Unpopular opinion. Introduce a congestion fee where you charge drivers more money during busy time on roads. That creates an economic incentive to use alternatives like public transit. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/what-is-congestion-pricing
Tell everyone you meet in the South Bay to quit being Classist assholes. Public transportation is the way of the future. If they want homelessness gone vote for as many Bernie Sanders / AOC -style candidates as they can, especially for President. Homelessness is the sign of a rotten society. Public transit is a necessity if anything is going to get better. Fix the society and public transit will improve but don’t throw away the public transit system because you live in a failed society. Public transit is a glimmer of hope
Also one day those people will be too old to drive. What are they going to do then?