I’ve actually done that via transit before. I didn’t think it was that bad. I just took BART to one of the downtown stations, probably Powell, then transferred to whatever light rail line runs near Golden Gate Park, then a short walk from there.
I can drive 20 minutes, park and then take a commuter rail into downtown. But that is the middle of the commercial district. If I want to get to the two big art museums, the symphony, the opera or the baseball stadium, I need to take two more subway rides.
And on evenings and weekends the interval between commuter rail trains is 1.5 to 2 hours. And the last train out is at 9:49pm. For many events this cannot work as I would miss the last train or need to leave early from the performance. Because it could take 20-30 minutes to get to the downtown commuter rail station by bus or subway.
Driving and parking is horrible, but still the best alternative. Every attempt to take transit in the last 20 years has ended in misery and recrimination.
Oh, and I live in the metro with some of the best transit in the country. It’s still shit. Mostly because the suburban local governments want it to be shit.
I take the Toronto subway every working day; we deliberately bought a house within walking distance of a station. If I were going to go downtown by myself for leisure, I’d almost certainly take the subway. But for two people the cost of taking the subway is in the same league as the cost of gas and driving gives you more flexibility in terms of destinations; we still use public transit sometimes, depending on the destination (e.g. the ferry terminal to Centre Island or the fairgrounds).
I’ve told this before, but… living and working in London in the early 2000s, I actually spent a fair amount of time in “The City” (aka “The Square Mile”), which is a bustling financial district where I worked as a barman. I lived in Bromley by Bow, which is somewhat dilapidated suburbia - it was cheap.
Here in Cape Town, I pass though “The City” on my way elsewhere, but very rarely stop.
When I was in Zimbabwe, being a tiny country, I lived in the suburbs, but all action was in the city of Harare; either the newer city centre or the older (former city centre) township, Mbare, about 3km away.
When Dad worked in the city, we used to go down there frequently. I can’t remember why, but I remember reading in the library until lights-out, so that would have been on days when he took the car into the city.
I also remember regularly going in by myself (public transport) on Saturday mornings to go the YMCA, or sailing.
Now, I’m a boring old fart, and I’m in “the city” maybe a couple of times per year.
I once had a day when I took seven different public transit legs, on seven different lines. Two buses out to the school on the far end of the city where I was doing field work, two more buses from there to the college in the middle of the city where I was taking classes, a bus and a train from there to my mom’s house to tend to some things while she was away, then another bus back home.
When I lived in Bozeman, MT, the buses each (four or five lines) ran only once per hour, but the bus schedules were coordinated with the university schedule (the town’s major industry), so in the mornings, you could catch your bus and get to campus just before your class started, and in the afternoons, you could get out of class and get to the bus stop to immediately catch a bus. It made for a quite good return of convenience for a minimal investment in infrastructure.
Around here, there’s no one thing to set all of the schedules around, but they do add some extra train runs before and after major events like home sports games.
We live in a rural area of Ohio, in Champaign County. We live in a township, and thus don’t live within the limits of a village or city. The closest village is Saint Paris, or maybe Christiansburg; I’m not sure. The closest cities are Urbana and Springfield. We visit each of the latter probably twice a week, on average. We visit the formers maybe once a week.
I live in a city of 55,000 people, which abuts a city of 74,300 people, which sits at the far, far eastern end of the Greater Los Angeles Metroplex. Not a suburb, but the city has slowly reached out for us. I go into LA as little as possible, so maybe twice a year.