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Meanwhile, the 47 Muni bus that connects the Van Ness transit corridor to Caltrain has been “suspended” since 2020, and the extension of Caltrain to the transit center is still unfunded.
I appreciate solutions that meet us where we are, but it’s depressing that we don’t seem to actually have the will to make a sustainable, integrated mass transit plan.
In the Bay Area it's easier to create AGI than reliable, consistent, clean public transit.
Computers are easier to program than drug addicts, with fewer rights.
Drug addicts,when treated properly, are alright manageable. Without treatment or support these creations of a dog eat dog world become unpredictable.
Disagree lol.
We could move the entire population of San Francisco into full time care for very little compared to what we're spending on AI.
It'd be illegal.
Excluding the fact that drug addicts are still humans deserving love, care and the opportunity to recuperate - fostering a clean & safe transit environment is practically a solved problem internationally.
Maybe the moral depravity of SF breeds truly irredeemable addicts, but as someone whos met a lot of troubled people and ridden a lot of public transit your statement seems alarmingly and unhelpfully critical
The reason there's not more public transit is because the economics are terrible. Looking at the financials:
Every single ride requires a $6 to $18 subsidy, paid for by tax dollars.
For comparison, federal spending for the interstate highway system is about 2-3 cents per passenger mile.
Are you factoring in fixed costs to that estimate? That may be partially misleading if so.
How is it misleading? Taking the total cost to operate and dividing by the number of rides tells you what it costs per ride.
I’d be more interested to know how so many people are paying less than $1 for a mini trip when the fare is closer to $3.
Subsidies for public goods create economic multiples. It’s not plainly obvious that it’s bad to subsidize a trip by $10. And compared to what? How much is interstate infrastructure subsidized per trip? Or airline infrastructure?
I think most economists would contend that the value of the subsidies is largely captured by landowners. Public investment, private profits.
and that's why property tax exists (land value tax would be better, but anyway).
Because it makes in implicit comparison with a hypothetical transportation mode with zero dollars of government subsidy.
The automobile analogue to fares is gas taxes, so the first crack at a true comparison is to compare the Caltrans budget to gas tax receipts.
They're discarding the cost per mile to a driver. If you add that back (and especially if you add externalities back) driving is more expensive.
Obviously yes, you have to since the vast majority of expenses (>70%) are fixed costs. If you only exclude them and only look at marginal costs, they're profitable.
But you cannot run a transit system on marginal costs, so using that comparison is also misleading.
The usual rule of thumb is that fixed costs of public transit are covered by increased property values. It could mean a private transit company developing the areas around stations (as it often works in Japan), or it could mean the government getting more money from property taxes. Or it could even mean more money from income taxes, if the transit project stimulates economic activity.
If a transit project doesn't increase property values enough to justify the investment, or if the entity funding the project cannot extract that value, the project rarely makes sense.
But the Bay Area’s highway networks are at saturation during peak hours. 101 and 280 are at least as bad as before the pandemic.
We have under-utilized transit corridors that could alleviate much of this strain if they weren’t so damn far away from where the people sitting in traffic want to go.
Infrastructure for cars is massively subsidised too. Since tansport is infrastructure it it interacts with everything else (eg less cars in the city => less spending on car infra) and has a lot of positive externalities. The investment pays back in positive outcomes which can also be quantified in terms of money of you like. It's like you've got a balance sheet but you're filtering it to only look at two items.
Cars are also subsidized (roads) - isn't that what taxes are for?
If we could go back to pre-pandemic ridership levels, the subsidy rate would be inverted (fares covered 70% versus 30% now). Public Transit struggles with low utilization. It'll take 10+ years to get back to that ridership level though.
Sure, but cars aren't subsidized at $18 dollars per trip. The cost to the government of providing and maintaining roads is on the order of several cents per vehicle mile traveled.
For BART, that number is:
$1.07B operating expense / 892.5M million passenger miles traveled = $1.20 per mile. Then subtract out the fare per mile and the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART.
You're missing a lot of externalities here.
Also, the cost to a driver of the car is around $0.70 not including cost to the government and cost of externalities.
If BART disappeared tomorrow, how much would the government have to pay to build all the additional roads and parking to support that incremental traffic?
And how much for healthcare for all the incremental pollution and collisions?
It's close to a dollar per mile when you include all the externalized costs.
Incremental property damage, injuries and fatalities, incremental chronic illness from pollution, parking land subsidy, fair market value of incremental land use and rights of way, lost tax revenue from that incremental land use, etc.
If you look at how American cities are laid out, the cost on society of car infrastructure is massive. Roads and parking space use up a very significant percentage of the real estate in an American city. Public transit is far more efficient with space, so it saves society as a whole a lot of money.
Yes, but public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.
BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services - house prices and rents would have increased substantially. Public investment, private profits. Subsidies in the form of low-cost fares like this are just further welfare for the landowners.
Interestingly, about a third of BART's cost was acquiring land - if/when that same land is cleared and sold on market, the project would have operated at an enormous profit. Certainly, BART's current assets would far exceed 'total fares collected'.
The reason we don't have roads is because the economics are terrible. The government gets $0 per trip [1], but it costs billions of dollars a year in operating expenses.
Wait, that's not how it works.
[1] Federal gas taxes don't count, because those go to the Highway Trust Fund which funds road construction, which is not an operating expense. State gas taxes may vary. Although toll roads also properly charge people user fees, although for some reason, lots of drivers complain about how expensive tolls are...
Blew my mind when I learned that about Caltrain. I thought tickets felt a little expensive, then I learned what it really should cost.
You know subsidy per train passenger mile?
Yeah I was shocked as well when I learned about the financials. I'll the subsidy per passenger mile to the table as well.
I remember talking to a VC a few years back, and he vehemently explained why he will never ever fund companies related to public transit, for this reason. Public transit was one of the two sectors he would not invest in (the other being materials science).
Incredible!!! Wow, is this apparent extraordinary cost discrepancy anybody’s fault, or is that just how it has to be?
iirc the NYC subway is only about 40% subsidized by fares. I’m happy to pay more in taxis for it to exist and subsidize lower income residents. There are huge economic benefits to the city that you’re not factoring in.
Not everything has to be directly money making.
If anything, the Bay Area needs significantly more public transit. BART in particular is mostly useful between cities, in my experience. You can’t go from the mission to cow hollow or dog patch to north beach, let alone anywhere to the ocean.
Also, subways don’t have much (if any) marginal cost per passenger. The issue isn’t cost but ridership. Ridership will increase with utility, which requires political will, which does not exist.
SF could be so much more.
Yeah but the cost per passenger is in the hundreds due to private car ownership
For another comparison, Moscow Central Diameters system (electric trains traveling from Moscow to nearby small towns) has 4 lines, 137 stations, 188 miles total length. It uses united fare payment system with buses and subway and transfer from a train to the subway is free of charge. Fare is about $1-$3 depending on the route. To be fair, it goes through Moscow at a slow speed and takes an eternity to get anywhere, and its range is limited [1].
Moscow subway [2] has 17 lines and 309 stations. In newer cars, 2 USB-A sockets are available near every seat, ready for robots.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Central_Diameters
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro
I mean my own PERSONAL per mile cost for a car is around $1/mi/yr, and it has a low interest rate loan and well below average monthly payment. Accounting for car insurance, gas, and maintenance.
And that’s not even counting for however much I’m subsidized on the highway and road systems I don’t pay anything to use.
Public transit is definitely expensive, but the alternative is also very costly and also regressive. The goal with public transit is to provide a low-cost, high-density way to move people around the city. It’s a public service, it shouldn’t be making profit. Car ownership is more expensive in total and very space-inefficient. Cities don’t have room for space inefficiency.
I wonder if something like this could improve the economics of public transport though. Passengers do the bulk of their travel on the well used train line, and then the last part of their trip is covered by waymo which could be more cost effective than running mostly empty busses.
The best formula for public transit is the Rail plus Property business model. In Hong Kong, the MTR Corporation buys up land adjacent to a planned future station, then builds the station afterwards. Then makes money from renting out the properties adjacent to the station.
JR East in Japan operates in the same way: it makes the majority of its profit from the real estate, malls, and hotels it operates adjacent to its train stations.
Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train
(Waymo takes $2.85 off your next ride if you take the train)
I live in East Bay, and I often take gratuitous Waymo trips all the way across the city to Embarcadero Station to ride BART back home. I do this because I like seeing the pretty skyscrapers and the bustling city and the pretty townhomes painted interesting colors. They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.
A trick I learned from an east bay friend is that (when possible) the bus across the bridge is way nicer than the BART under the bay, especially around sunset.
Yeah but then you're on a bus...
It's a double decker.
As a human who sometimes needs to use the restroom, I like my transit rides to take a predictable amount of time.
Sunset on the Bay Bridge is prime rush hour traffic time, and the favorite pasttime of many Bay Area drivers is to get in a traffic accident after work.
As far as I can tell, these double decker buses are not equipped with a restroom for their riders. Even though I'm sure the view is amazing, the red line is less often obstructed by traffic.
Easy to solve with a colostomy bag
Probably quite a few young men with these in California too lol
Why? Can you explain?
West Oakland to Embarcadero is great: 7min BART, or 45-60(+) at rush hour on the bridge. No better timesave that I know of with BART.
Every person alive has had to use the restroom. What you mean is that you have a bladder issue.
I've heard multiple times Americans complaining about being on the bus.
Genuine question, what's up with being on the bus?
I lived in Vancouver BC, I can't see anything wrong with their bus. Not perfect, but yeah... It's a bus, goes from stop to stop. Anything special about bay area buses?
Yeah. I took the bus in NY and SF and I’m also not sure why the complained. Maybe because I’m a tourist but especially in SF I had always nice interactions with the driver. Mind you I took the Bus in the City Centers. Is it that much worse in the outskirts or is it just the concept of taking a Bus with multiple other people the problem?
The NL and other transbay buses are so fantastic. They do get stuck in bridge traffic though.
A bus that gets stuck in traffic is by definition a failure. It will (again by definition) never be a viable alternative to driving, meaning a reinforcing loop where more driving means more traffic for the bus to be stuck on, meaning the bus is even slower and less attractive...
I don’t follow the logic here. Why would a bus (periodically) getting stuck in traffic forever invalidate it in comparison to getting stuck in the same traffic in a car?
I never considered that. But if you dont have to be anywhere else why not.
Make traffic for everyone else worse with this one simple trick
Maybe, but who is Waymo to decide whether your trip was gratuitous? Perhaps you had brief business in Embarcadero and chose the particular mix of modalities for one reason or another (timing; or had to carry something heavy one way but not the other etc).
After you "link your Visa card", yet the reward is in "Waymo cash", which expires in 90 days and can only be used for Waymo. That's just something on your Waymo account, not real money. They must want access to your Visa card data.
What would they be able to get by linking the card? I thought that would just facilitate immediate charges/refunds to the card since the card is stored.
Google probably has the most credit card data already. Maybe even more than Visa since they work with multiple payment networks.
It sounds like Visa is coordinating the transfer data between agencies, and Waymo has just signed up to the existing program as if it were a transit agency.
They want to reduce the friction for next time: then you'll already have a card linked.
OR, if it's Visa only, it's a comarketing stunt.
What's wrong with paying out to you for this, the fact that you'd do it even without this promo?
I would really like a full door to door with one payment. Put in the destination, one price and get a Waymo on each end. React as best as possible to delays, etc.
Ugh, looks like this only works if you pay for the Waymo with a Visa card, and also use that same Visa card to pay for transit. I don't use a credit card for transit in SF; I use my Clipper transit card.
I get that integrating with the Clipper system is a lot more difficult, but... c'mon.
Why do you use clipper? There is no benefit to clipper anymore over a credit card, right? And just the disadvantage that you need to reload it.
I mean it does save the public transit utility a lot of money in transaction fees so I'm happy to deal with it for that. But the main benefit is pre-tax transit benefits if your company offers it. It can go into a clipper card easily.
The point still stands. Regular transit users don't pay ride per ride, but use monthly passes. Or aren't those a thing in San Francisco?
Habit, mostly. I also have several hundred dollars of pre-tax transit money on my Clipper card from when I had that benefit at a previous job (and set the paycheck deduction way higher than I should have at the time), and I still haven't used it up. I assume there's rightly no way to get cash back for this, since then I could keep the tax deduction and spend it on anything. (And even if I could get the cash back, likely it wouldn't be worth the hassle vs. just continuing to use the Clipper card. The card is on my phone, so it's not like the experience would be any different.)
Also I don't mind saving SFMTA a bit on transaction fees. I'm sure the total transaction fees are lower with me periodically topping up my Clipper card, than if I used a credit card for every ride. I expect me doing this is probably only saving a few dollars per year at most, but it makes me feel good to support my local transit authority even in a tiny way like that.
Last time I used BART, I had no idea you could use a credit card at the turnstyles. They've changed how this works like 20 times, and it never worked well.
Yes. Smartphone vendors and CC prefer that you use contactless rather than a physical Clipper card, then they have data on your transit use, also the CC network gets transaction fees.
FYI there was a very informative recent panel episode of Forum: "KQED Investigates Botched Clipper 2.0 Launch" (8/24/2026, audio + transcript)
https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101915014/kqed-investigates-b...
I do use a contactless Clipper card, on my phone. I don't think this bit is relevant: getting Visa to correlate transactions is probably a lot easier for Waymo to get done than integrating with Clipper to see if you've ridden transit in the past two hours. That's the same if you use a physical card or one on your phone.
I didn't disagree with you. I'm saying the key findings in that Clipper 2.0 postmortem were much bigger than any single incentive program like this Waymo one would have been. Hence I can see why Waymo avoid integrating with Clipper.
It said "one of the most complex fare payment systems in the world: 22 different transit agencies across nine counties in the Bay Area... [with thousands of fare categories]" And it's a single-bidder $500m contract that was 3 years late.
What a tonal shift immediately after the intro paragraph. I have to wonder how many times this went back and forth with PR and Legal to end up with this particular wording and to be the very first thing they stress after the basic facts. Especially the word ‘shared’ in ‘shared autonomous vehicles’ to connect people's thinking to ‘public’ transit. They even make sure to repeat the word ‘shared’ back to back to back in each of the final three paragraphs to make sure you end with that idea in mind. Yet all the cars are owned by Waymo and aren't ‘shared’ like the train and bus fleets which are owned by transit districts that I can vote on.
Translation: Waymo would like to learn how to prioritize their fleet of privately-owned vehicles, like where to have empty cars circling, where to expect them to be sent, and via what routes to send them, in order to replace the transit portion of the trip for as many riders as possible. Who wouldn't choose a single door-to-door trip over a transfer if the wait time is low and if the dollar cost of the private Waymo ride can be set approximately equal to the invisible ‘price’ people assign to the value of their time.
And just in case a reader doesn't pick up on that stuff, they directly tell you how to feel by quoting their very unbiased business partner:
Fun fact: Waymo pay $4 to the San José Department of Airports for every pick-up or drop-off at SJC.
Widespread Waymo usage probably wouldn't “replace” the public transit routes we have now, sure, but it would remove the public's shared will to vote for transit expansions that could replace the Waymo portion of people's “““multimodal trips in a complementary mobility ecosystem””” (lmfao) instead of the other way around.
Great ‘anchoring’ technique in this wording too, to make people feel like $2.85 is getting them something tangible instead of being a pittance to pay for this type of hyper-personal behavior data.
This is pretty normal. LHR charges £5. SYD charges A$5. Airports are often highly congested and pushing more people to take public transit instead of private drop-off/pick-up is a big lever.
I don't really think it's about the data. I think by Occam's Razor, Waymo (owned by Google) just sees a way for them to put transit directions in Google Maps where the last mile of your trip is a Waymo. By subsidizing part of the transit cost and it all being on one credit card, in the future you could pay for a whole transit + taxi trip only once and not multiple times at each leg
That's pretty common, no? Many airports have fees that even traditional taxis have to pay (which is usually passed on to the rider as a part of the fare). It seems reasonable to me: car traffic can be be pretty bad at airports, and extra fees help encourage people to take buses, shuttles, trains, etc.
But overall, I do agree with your worry about this framing/anchoring harming future transit expansion projects. And I'd bet that Waymo would be right there lobbying against any transit expansion that threatened one of their well-established last-mile routes.
I do think transit just needs to be better, though. I could take transit to SFO (either Caltrain+BART or Muni+BART), but my car ride there is 13-16 minutes (via Lyft/Uber; Waymo still can't drop off at SFO proper, and it's a 19-minute walk with luggage from where they will drop off). Best case with Caltrain+BART is 33 minutes (but only with an express train during rush hour), and is more like 45 minutes for the rest of the day (and that's assuming the comparatively-infrequent Caltrain service lines up with my needs). I can take a Muni bus to BART (and actually have several choices there), but the total trip time is 50-70 minutes that way. Then there's the general uncertainty of making the transit connection without issues. (Yes, I'm fortunate that I can afford Lyft whenever I need to go to the airport. I ride transit within the city often, but it just doesn't work for me for airport trips.)
I think of other cities like Tokyo or Taipei, where taking transit from the airport to the city is a reasonable option, and is often faster than getting a taxi (and for Narita to many places in Tokyo, it can be north of USD$200 to take a taxi). Even in NYC it's often faster or at least reasonably convenient to take transit to one of the local airports, even Newark. Don't get me wrong, SF's transit system isn't bad! Even though it's not going to stand with the best in the world, it's still great and I use it often. But it has some very significant gaps.
Nice idea. But too many ifs and buts, and it's too little to really change habits. Besides, waymo's main issue seems to be supply right now. I can never get one when I need it.
I wish the government would rather invest in better public last mile connectivity programs or higher frequency trains and buses.
Well, Waymo could be seen as a last mile connectivity program. That's actually the "end goal" for robotaxis: not just replace taxis, Uber etc., but offer an alternative to owning a car.
It seems odd that they want you to pay for transit with your visa. That excludes a lot of travelers who might have passes on their transit cards. Less common in the Bay since all our transit providers are different but I used to pay monthly for the Muni + Local BART pass all the time when I lived in SF.
They want to get on the margin to try transit, not subsidise people who already have passes.
I have a clipper card and take VTA regularly but not enough to make a pass worth it. Commuting 3x a week, I may as well be paying with a Visa.
Why would they do it. Is it for marketing ?
Bc if they cement their status in people's minds as a last mile solution (there are other cheaper ones: bay wheels, lime scooters, etc.) that's an extra fare they didn't get before at a cheap customer acquisition cost ($3/ride)
I use my commuter benefit debit card to pay for public transit. Notably this does not include rideshares like Waymo. In order to claim the transit reward I could use a personal card to pay for both transit and Waymo, but that leads to considerable friction where I need to collect receipts and submit claims to use my commuter benefit. Most companies in SF must offer a commuter benefit so it doesn't seem like many people will be getting this Waymo transit reward.
I don't live in California, so maybe I'm misunderstanding something. Uber and Lyft were ostensibly originally meant for people already travelling from point A to point B to share the ride with someone and make some money - and still could be used that way. But Waymo had always been a car-for-hire service with no pretension. So why is it grouped together with "rideshare" and not taxis?