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What do you mean, you need a car? Now, we have several friends in and around the New York City area. That area is nicely networked with a series of trains, subways, and cabs that will get you virtually anywhere. That means -- if you live in the 'burbs, and you want to party with your friends in the city that night, you don't have to worry about the number of Long Island Iced Teas you sling back, 'cause all you gotta do is amble on over to the train station. And try not to puke all over the conductor. But since we're California, and Sillycon Valley, life has to be much more complex. The train system on one side of the bay doesn't like the people who run the train system on the other side of the bay, so they don't play together well. As it stands now, to get from, say, the peninsula -- let's say Palo Alto -- to Oakland in the East Bay, one has to first take Caltrain to the depot in San Francisco. From there, you will either walk or take the occasional Muni streetcar to the BART station on Market Street, and you can finally catch a BART train that will take you to Oakland. Three different systems between which you need to transfer. (Someone should just buy them all and run them all in sync with each other.) So our New York friends don't quite understand: why do we need cars out here? What's wrong with the train system? I could go on for hours with that one. Someone stop me before I fill the whole page. I'll give the Bay Area a little bit of credit for this one, though: New York has been a well-established 'big city' for a loooong time. The San Francisco Bay Area, on the other hand, recently had the glut of people move in for techie richness. I don't envy the transportation engineers, whose heads likely exploded as they watched population growth. We'll see, in a few decades or so, if the transportation system has caught up with population growth around here. Or if the market crash stabilizes the growth! |
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