The greater Orlando area has a population over 2 million now; I’m not sure that it qualifies as a “large” city. However, its public transportation certainly sucks.
Public transportation in Detroit has to be the worst.
I guess when the majority of the population makes their living from the auto industry (in one way or another), not having a car seems wrong.
Buses arriving in packs happens everywhere. It is a popular theme in NY, and I have a Flanders and Swann song where the intro mentions it.
My objection to SF transit is that there are so many places BART doesn’t go to. I live in Fremont near the end of the line, and it is by far the best way of getting into the city, but if you want to go to Golden Gate Park, for instance, you have to negotiate Muni also. There is hardly any part of Manhattan not in fairly easy walking distance from a subway. You may need a bus to get to the subway in the outer boroughs (I did) but usually only one.
As for a city not yet mentioned, I found the A Bahn and S Bahn in Berlin awesomely good. Clean, frequent, on-time, and all over.
Zurich’s tram system always amazes me.
But BART’s not supposed to be equivalent to the NY subway. Think of it as an equivalent to PATH. Its purpose is to get you from the suburbs into the city, not to get you around the city once you’re there.
On their own, the transit companies here do a decent job, but it’s when you need to go far and use multiple systems that things fall apart. They all operate in their own little bubbles and sometimes it seems like transfer opportunites happen by accident.
There are at least two dozen different transit agencies here. Fortunately, www.511.org does a pretty good job of lashing them all together so if you had some odd burning desire to go from Pacifica to Sun Valley Mall in Concord, it will tell you that the trip will take a bit over three hours, involves three buses, one BART ride and will cost $9.80.
Because there aren’t enough letters, and these days they want to stick to single-digit numbers.
But there is a method to the madness. Part of the madness is routed in the fact that the NYC subway system is an amalgamation of what used to be three (or four, depending on who you ask) entirely separate systems.
The numbered lines are what used to be the IRT system, consisting of the Lexington Ave. line, the 7th Ave. line, the Flushing line and the 42nd Street Shuttle. (Oops, that’s an “S” – well S’es are a special case. There are actually three of them. Internally the 42nd Street Shuttle is designated 8.) These lines now form what’s called Division A.
Division B are the lettered lines, consisting of what used to be the BMT and IND systems. These two systems were built with the same loading gauge, so there are now a few interconnections between them and can now be considered a single system. OTOH, IRT trains never run in revenue service on BMT or IND tracks, but they do use them for maintenance purposes. The reverse is impossible, since Division B trains can’t fit through Division A tunnels.
Now then, what’s with all the colors and letters and numbers and stuff?
Each letter or number designates a “service” which may run over one or more “lines.” For example, the B train starts in Brooklyn and runs along the BMT Brighton Beach line, then across the Manhattan Bridge, then through the IND Chrystie Street Connection, then up the IND 6th Ave. Line to 145th Street. (And further into the Bronx during rush hours.) The B is orange because that is the color of the Manhattan trunk line it uses (6th Ave.) Other orange trains like the D and the F also run on the 6th Ave line, but branch off to other places – in Brooklyn the D follows the West End Line to Coney Island, and so forth.
The BDF (orange) and ACE (blue) groupings may seem pretty arbitrary, until you realize that the A, B, C and D join together on the 8th Ave. line above 59th Street, and the E and the F run together on the Queens Blvd line. And hey, what’s that other thing on Queens Blvd? The mysterious G.
Similarly, take a look at some of the IRT lines. The 1, 2, and 3 (red) are on the 7th Ave. line, and the 4, 5, and 6 (green) are on the Lex. But in Brooklyn, the 2 and the 5 combine on the Flatbush Ave. line, and the 3 and the 4 run together on the New Lots line. After they split in Manhattan on the Lex and 7th Ave., they come together again and run on the White Plains Road line in the Bronx.
This frequent splitting and recombining of services makes the system quite versatile, but difficult to fully comprehend.
Now things have gotten reshuffled a bit over the years, leading to oddities like the V and W trains, the Q which switched back and forth from orange to yellow due to rerouting the Manhattan Bridge, the 9 train disappeared, and so on. But them’s the breaks.
Thanks for the website. As far as SF public transit, does AC transit take you over the bridge from Oakland into SF proper? Is BART the only system that will do that?
Are there any public transit systems that have a monthly fee (rather than a fee everytime you use it like BART) that will take someone from Oakland to SF proper?
I live in Atlanta after living in NYC for most of my life, so I expected much more from public transportation.
A monthly unlimited pass is only $60 - Amazing to me.
The trains (MARTA) are usually clean and on time. My first ride reminded me of a Disneyesque transportation system with the recorded annoying voice announcing each stop and attractions in the area.
There are E,W,N,S lines. To go east from the south, one needs to go to the very center of the map (the only transfer point) and then go east. The same for all directions.
The system shuts down at about midnight, so the city seems to encourage drunk driving since most clubs and bars operate past 12.
Many communities refused MARTA service to their areas, and bus service in the outer counties is spotty.
The State of Georgia does not subsidize MARTA at all.
I give MARTA a “C+/B-”. The grade is high since many of the stations offer free parking, the escalators and elevators are generally running, and the trains are pretty clean. The stations are decorated in a variety of styles and there is usually seating on the platforms. The fare for one trip is $2 so the montly pass is a great value.
Except the trains stopped running at midnight–I heard from someone that maybe they run until 3 AM these days?
I think Moscow should win the thread (as far as best system is concerned) - it beats the shit out of pretty much every other system I’m familiar with where it concerns price, coverage and cleanliness, plus many of the stations are like huge ballrooms or museum halls; some have chandeliers in them!
Detroit does not have one. The bus routes are difficult and they have been cut back due to the economy. If you can’t drive, you can’t get there.
In Chicago, as noted repeatedly above, the public transportation is about as good as it gets. There are still a lot of folks in cars aimlessly clogging the streets (my cynical assessment). IMO, the main reason most people don’t use public transportation is because they are in love with their cars. You can’t race pell-mell from red light to red light on the bus.
Encyclopedia Dramatica on Chicago’s transit system(NSFW, so no link):
So very true. From what I can remember from summers in high school spent in Boston, their public transit was pretty good, and cheaper than Chicago’s which was a plus. I dunno what it’s like there now. And Miami… Miami was just confusing. The whole street system was confusing, and the bus routes meandered all over the place, except for the Busway. Seriously, who the fuck designs the city grid on a slant of NE/SW;NW/SE, but with numbered streets for both directions? Your safest bet in Miami was to keep to US1, and God help you if you need to go somewhere away from the coast.
When I first moved to Boston, I was somewhat impressed. I used to live in Seattle, where the transit was all street-level buses, except for a short tunnel under the busiest part of downtown. The Boston system is usually seperated from the traffic, is pretty easy to navigate, and it’s been around long enough that the places worth going to have been built near the stations.
But after a few trips to Europe, the scales fell from my eyes. On my first trip to Munich, I had to make a transfer from one U-Bahn train to another. I was wondering how long I’d have to wait, but when we pulled into the station, the other train was waiting for us. The trip back was even better, the two trains pulled into the station on parallel tracks, almost in formation. The trains have a schedule and you could almost set your watch by it. In ten years in Boston, I have never even seen a schedule for the subway.
One of the easiest places to get around was Prague. There’s only three subway lines, but the streetcars cover a lot of territory pretty quickly. I even saw one time one of the track switches must not have closed completely. The driver got out, pulled a big pry bar out from under the tram, stuck it in the switch and just horked it over. No drama, just find a way to make it work.
One thing that seems to work really well there is that the transit is on kind of a semi honor system. You get a ticket at the station, and when you get on the subway or the tram there are little boxes that will stamp the time and date on it. It’s good for 90 minutes, or whatever, which is probably enough to get from one side of the system to the other. There are inspectors who travel the system and check tickets, and if you don’t have one, you can be fined. The result is that when the tram stops, you don’t have to funnel everyone through the front door to show their tickets to the driver. It’s amazing how that speeds things up.
Tokyo, London and Paris, superb. Rome, adequate but lacking - the trains seemed to never go closer than about 6 blocks to any significant place (eg Vatican City); buses were OK.
My hometown of Sydney: patchy. Better than most but could be much much better.
Baltimore does the same thing with their light rail. You buy a ticket that’s good for a set period of time (an hour and a half, maybe – long enough to get from one end of the system to another in plenty of time). Then inspectors board from time to time to check your ticket. No ticket, and you pay a hefty fine.
The major advantage of the NY system over others is that one fare covers everything, and there’s no need to pay anything additional when you leave. That can be a pain on other systems.
I’ve traveled all over Europe, East and West, and if you mention a European city that isn’t in Germany, you’re wrong 
London’s transportation system isn’t even in the same league as Berlin’s!
Slightly OT: the wider German/Austrian/Swiss rail system (they all seem to share the same rolling stock?) is a wonder to behold. I thought Teutonic efficiency was largely a myth until I saw the rail system.
I should have added that public transportation in places like Chicago, New York and DC is great. I’ve been to those cities, and if I lived there I would hardly ever drive my car.
The problem is public transportation in most other parts of the country, especially the South and Midwest (where I currently live and where I grew up respectively), sucks balls. The reason so many people in those areas have a negative view of public transportation is because they’ve only had experience with the subpar systems where they live.
I’ve been to New York, London, and Paris many times, but in my opinion Tokyo beats them all. That system is just mind-blowing.