As it turns out it doesn’t actually cost that much on regular transit, there’s an AIRPORT SURCHARGE because it’s an “airport train”.
No wonder Americans don’t use public transit, even when the system exists it’s ridiculously difficult and expensive to use.
Toronto’s UP express checking in. $12.35 from down town to the airport. Sub way in the city is cheap and affordable but that dam airport thing is in its own world.
https://www.upexpress.com/en/about-up/things-are-looking-up
Next topic is toll roads. 407. Full there and back trip during main business hours. 274km = $173.50
Same in Edinburgh. The buses and trams have a capped fee per day but it doesn’t count if you’re coming from the airport for some reason…
It used to be more. Then someone pointed out it was more expensive than a cab from downtown to the airport.
That’s an expensive fare
Bart is expensive, but some of the best transit in America unfortunately. Why I generally just hop the gate by pushing through before the things close
I hear she’s running for governor of California! That would be amazing. Fuck Newsom.
I’m not a huge fan of Porter. But between her and Kamala fucking Harris, whose big takeaway from the 2024 election seems to be “we didn’t run far enough to the right…”
I’ll admit I don’t know much about her outside of those videos of her grilling CEOs when she was part of the Progressive Caucus. If she’s as pro average citizen as she seems, she’s better than most. What don’t you like about her?
She traveled by airplane to San Francisco – while campaigning against building a HSR system for the state. She also said she lost the CA Senate race because the election was “rigged”. She is not a progressive – just a stupid populist.
Good grief no…Porter is extremely car-brained. Her first run for office was based entirely on opposing the gas tax. She then went on to support some dumb freeway projects:
That’s some light criticism considering the alternative is flirting with fascists. Newsom had Steve Bannon on the first episode of his podcast.
Newsom isn’t running for Governor (he is termed out).
Ohhhh. I didn’t know he couldn’t run again. That certainly explains his recent turn. I really like Katie Porter overall though, and wish her luck. I love watching those clips of her grilling CEOs. She seems like a no nonsense type of person. A little car brained is something we can work with.
Newsom is term limited, he ain’t coming back. That’s also the reason he’s turning right IMO, gearing up for a presidential run and thinks hariss’ biggest mistake wasn’t going on right wing podcasts.
You see, we will become the opposition party by moving to the right of the republicans (fox will still call us communists)
Newsom
I see him angling for senate or a whitehouse run… not succesfully but yeah
Ohhhh I didn’t know that. It certainly explains why he’s taking this turn.
Edit the listed fare in the post is nearly 4x the actual fare.
As it turns out it doesn’t actually cost that much on regular transit, there’s an AIRPORT SURCHARGE because it’s an “airport train”.
If she’s not going to an airport (the pictured station is in SF and not SFO) this is just strait up wrong. As a regular BART rider who’s used transbay service for years BART can’t tell what trains you ride. They bill purely on the entry and exit station. I’ve pulled some transfers that on other systems would be wildly expensive to work around occasional systemwide issues without increased cost.
Within SF it costs the fixed Muni rate which is a lot cheaper. It is disturbingly fast and reliable especially as parts of the system date from the Nixon administration. It can be annoying to get to and from though.
Edit: The furthest fare from Oakland (Coliseum) to the station in the photograph (Montgomery) is 5.20. Using the OAK connector does bring it up to 12.65. Going to SFO from Coliseum is 12.10. Going for some reason airport to airport is 19.55. Not sure where she got $16 from.
Even the listed price is cheaper than cabs or car rentals tho. Cabs charge about 3.50 and then 0.55 for every 5th of a mile. So about $35 for 13 miles.
I think the point is that public transport should be cheaper than driving your own car. That’s the only way to encourage adoption.
Unfortunately our country is being run by the cartoon villain from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”
Well, you also pay for parking in SF.
And a brand new car is like a 5 to 15 year loan. You have to subtract more than just fuel costs.
Still should be free.
BART, Muni and others are staring down the gun of drastic cuts right now due to COVID gutting their finances. The feds won’t help and the state is preparing to have the budget gutted by the Trump administration and is looking for things to cut that won’t hurt (these generally don’t exist). I find more expensive programs unlikely right now.
I’m just hoping BART doesn’t collapse at this point
If it was free, we probably wouldn’t have it because the system would have broken down with no money to fix it.
Just like the roads!
When people say “free” with regards to a public service, they usually take it as understood that maintenance costs should be collectively shared via something like taxes. Better understood as “free at point of usage”.
Exactly what I was thinking of when I made that comment. Highway maintenance is paid for, at least in part, through tolls.
Road maintenance is funded by the people that use them, in the form of tolls, registrations, and gas taxes. Public transport is mostly taxpayers that don’t use it, subsidized by riders. That’s a massive difference.
That’s certainly the theory, but in practice most states don’t actually cover the full cost of roads with use fees and need to get taxpayers to fund most of it.
Public transportation often does better in this regard when you actually look at funding by source.
Additionally the people who have the highest usage, freight shipping, invariably have disproportionate influence on lawmakers and can argue that the fees they see should be proportionally lower than others.
Because gas taxes are paid at the pump, we can’t actually adjust them to exclude low income persons either, making them a regressive tax.Public transportation is able to charge a few dollars per rider per trip. Given the density they can move, they can generate unexpected revenue per trip at lower costs, again due to density. A subway car is more expensive than a car, but also sees higher utilization and holds about 100 times more people on average.
Neither is generally able to afford to be built using only use fees.
In the end, even though I don’t think we should be reliant on cars, the part I’m least upset about is taxpayers funding a public good. Transportation benefits everyone, even if they don’t directly use it. It’s big, it’s expensive, and doing it right has different incentives from making money.
I’d be very curious to see where you pulled those numbers.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-road-taxes-funding/
As for the mass transit data, I just googled the budgets for different major mass transit providers, specifically Chicago, New York, and BART, then looked at the pre-covid funding sources from their public financials.
Assuming those are the numbers you meant. Curious why you found it so implausible that tax money went to road maintenance.
Yeah, roads are insanely expensive, we’d live in a very different world if they weren’t free to use for everyone in most countries and all the money that wouldn’t have ended up in road maintenance (because usage costs of heavy trucks wouldn’t make them cost effective) went to rail and shipping. And let’s not even count the insane networks of high speed roads that most rich countries built after 1945 that cost trillions of dollars globally.
the big thing is that most roads are paved and regularly maintained these days, medieval britain for example had an absurd density of roads (higher than today) but most of them were just shitty tracks for carts to rumble along. Like back then an actually paved road was kind of on the same level as railways are now, a massive investment that makes things so much better
People pay to ride the train?
Some good-two shoes do, most do, but alot of people dont. hence reddit had whole host of people being, caught,evading fares, you got people on there being a know it all, and you should be paying your fare share.
Oh for bay area, there are specific times of the year, that inspectors come out in droves to “ticket” as much people as possible, usually its around summer-to fall, and then maybe winter. there has been discussion how the evasion tickets are much more than TRAFFIC tickets/parking tickets. right now is about 135$ for each violation, and there are all sorts of tricks to avoid that even if yuo get ticketed. there is alot of justification for evading fares.
I pay my taxes, which I’m told goes to public transit, and there was a huge scandal with the transit department in my state a while back where we found out they were fucking everyone over and skimming a fucked up amount of money and the state did pretty much nothing about it, so when the transit department is stealing less from public transit than I am I’ll consider it, but I also feel that public transit should be free, especially if I’m already paying for it.
our taxes pay for it already, only amount to under 20% in fares of the budget. but federal govt decided it wasnt enough to give them money for the budget, so all these underhanded inspections have occured over the years. now with trump in power, the money coming from federal is even less certain.
In Toronto, you get free transfers for 2 hours for $3. I can run an errand across the city and come back for a single fixed price.
Same in nyc. For $2.9.
I actually lived there for most of my life, NY’s metro does not compare. Only in-station transfers are free, one every 2hr. If you need to transfer from the 2 to the C in Brownsville, godspeed. Half the time it charges you anyways when it’s not supposed to. Don’t get me started on the lack of connection between the G and Atlantic, and the non-existent M loop.
Toronto is still about 50 cents cheaper via the exchange rate. Transit is far more reliable, and the average subway station is waaaaay nicer.
Fuck the MTA
You only get unlimited transfers in NYC until you leave a station. You get 1 reentrance or switch to / from a bus per 2 hours.
I’ve never been to Toronto but I’ll be there next week. Parking is a mess where I’m staying near downtown, I may use this!
Parking honestly isn’t terrible but a lot of it is residency based, so yeah it’s harder as a visitor. I think you can get a temporary visitor parking pass at City Hall depending on how long you’re staying for.
For the TTC (titty sea!), download the Presto app ahead of time or buy a Presto card when you get here. Also be sure to check out the PATH!
You picked a lovely time to visit, the weather is wonderful right now! (Aside from the week of rain we just had)
for bart, it charges by the distance, for muni, they recently up thier fees for tickets, they are also have a budget mismangment issue which causes thier budget problems. they waste twice as much as they bring in through fare evasion fees, and transit fees, last i heard they are cutting some services in the summer. and there has some justification for fare evasion(just dont discuss this on reddit, because its mostly been infiltrated by do-gooders conservatives)
caltrain is a seperate agency than, bart, muni.
Pretty sure must of us aren’t going anywhere near Reddit. Muni seems a mess from my perspective, but when I visit there from sac the $8 or whatever it is for all day transit seems reasonable to me. Might have the price wrong, last time I was there was Chinese New Year and I rode the cable cars all day which was totally worth the $8. But I might as well be a tourist so I don’t know just how fucked it all is.
MARTA is fairly nice. It’s a flat $2.50 to get on the train/bus and it includes three bus transfers. Anywhere that makes it just a flat fee is nice. The Chicago L was similar. I don’t remember the individual price but their weekly rate was a great deal.
Missed the point. Public transport should be free.
Yeah, absolutely, I was commenting on the complicated part.
It’s still probably significantly cheaper than Uber/Lyft.
Yeah, payed $30 to get from the airport to downtown sf a couple days ago, so probably closer to $50 to get all the way to oakland.
In case anyone is wondering, a one way trip from Oakland International Airport to the Civic Center station in San Francisco (the stop next to City Hall and the city’s largest open air fent market) is exactly $12.65.
The trip from Oakland to Civic Center is “just” $5.20, but like OP said, there’s a fuckass stupid airport surcharge for the last half mile or so.
Isn’t the idea of such a surcharge to encourage an alternate transit mode?
Apparently they believe they don’t have enough taxis clogging the entrance? Every driver trying to reach my local airport should thank me for taking the airport shuttle.
I don’t know if I used the right term by saying “surcharge”. They built an extraordinarily expensive trolley line from BART to the airport about ten years back and are charging high fees to cover expenses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Airport_Connector
The San Francisco Airport, on the other hand, has an actual surcharge - the main BART line goes direct to SFO but they charge like $5 extra. But SFO also has the same surcharge on taxis and rideshares :/
They built an extraordinarily expensive trolley line from BART to the airport about ten years back and are charging high fees to cover expenses.
‘Extraordinarily expensive’ doesn’t begin to describe the boondoggle that is the OAK airport connector. Local bus service and basic BART maintenance got eviscerated to pay for the $500 million construction cost (BART lost a Federal civil rights lawsuit over this). Prior to the connector, BART ran a dedicated shuttle bus every ten minutes to the airport. That bus was actually faster than the connector and made a small profit despite the tiny $2 fare.
But look on the bright side, I bet some politically connected contractors in Oakland made a whole lot of money off building it. That’s called investing in the local economy 😆
Damn, I just rode the connector and really enjoyed it. Nice engineering in it’s mechanisms too.
But I did note how it’s only got two trains on the whole system…
transit fares are regressive taxes
I had to go through SF a few times this year. I have no idea how much the transit cost, but it was fucking expensive and I just rode a few times per day across town or to the airport.
I love public transit systems and being free to move around a city using them. It’s a truly liberating experience to have real freedom, but damn SF was tough to understand and weird in places. They’ve got to unify the system and start paying for it or it’s going to just keep crushing their downtown areas when no one uses the transit to visit.
Unifying the system might actually hurt it more then help. MUNI the bus and light rail system within the city is relatively cheap, $2.75 fare to ride any where. That’s because it’s funded mostly by the city because people in the city use and value it more. BART, the metro that’s posted in the picture is funded by all the suburban and urban municipalities that it serves in the metro area, and since the suburban cities don’t use/ value it as much it’s hard to get funding for it passed through taxes so they rely more on fares.
If they unified it then the minority of people in the city wouldn’t be able to pass taxes to improve, or at this point maintain, service and we’d get stuck with high fares and low service.
For example in the last election a majority of people voted to tax rideshares to pay for the bus in the city, it didn’t pass because another ballot measure that passed had some fine print nullified it, but that kind of measure would never have passed throughout the whole bay area.
Meanwhile here in Germany I can use any bus, tram, U-Bahn, or train (excluding high speed) anywhere in the country for 58€/month
The DeutschlandTicket is the best thing! I love it. I want that with their Steuernummer, baby’s get a DeutschlandTicket. Everybody needs a DeutschlandTicket.
I’ve been wondering why this hasn’t become a thing yet. Probably lobbying from all the Verkehrsverbünde.
No, they really want to keep it as cheap as possible. It’s the Bundesregierung that rather subsidises Diesel privileges and Pendlerpauschalen.
I want that in the Netherlands as well. Much smaller country, so less value for your money. But now you pay even more (€66) for a return ticket from the east border to the west border (Winterswijk - Scheveningen).
But if you don’t have the D-ticket, good luck figuring out how the local ticketing machine works haha
Easy, just buy the ticket in DB Navigator
In SF its a hundred dollars a month, but you can only go to 4 stations in the city, so you end up paying regular fare on top of that all the time, and usless for commuters.
The busses frequently dont exist even though google and the signs say they should be arriving, so youre frequently an hour or more late because you had to get an uber because the bus never came.
If youre going to a connecting train or flight you need to leave hours early to account for delays.
bart is quite expensive, some people cant afford the muni fees, or dont want to so they just fare evade. the inspectors are extra aggressive in giving people the ticket, but many people will give fake details so it doesnt get sent thier house, NEVER give your ID that can identify you r personal details.
as long as there is no peace officer(police) you can just try to walk off the bus and exit on a stop they dont chase you. might be harder on a BART station though.
NYC is much more reasonable
It cost me about £60 for one return rail ticket last week 😭 that’s not including the tube fare to get to the station.
Yep, train tickets are ridiculous here. It kills me on the inside whenever I have to go to London.
Let’s hope nationalisation brings ticket prices down. I was happy to see the South Western is the first to be taken back.
Edit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ceqg73znzzeo
The government cannot guarantee train tickets will get cheaper under renationalisation, as South Western Railway (SWR) was brought into public ownership on Sunday.
Oh well.
Seeing as government has directly set all ticket prices for the past 5 years, that’s not going to happen.
Rail prices in Britain are set largely to manage demand, as there is significant congestion. If tickets were reduced, too many people would try to travel at peak hours.
It’s also been the philosophy of every government since the 1950s that railways should fund themselves as much as possible, so central funding is lower than elsewhere.
FYI, airport surcharges are very common. Across the bay at Oakland has an airport surcharge. Sydney has them too, which I was happy about because Melbourne doesn’t have a train (AU $25 for a bus ticket, which was sold out) nor did Hobart. I recall AREX in Incheon also having a significant fare jump for the airport stops.
For argument purposes, BART is $0.18/mile (19th Oakland <> Berryessa). That’s still pretty high for regional public transit, which is mostly due to BART’s high farebox recovery. That high recovery is now a problem with the whole pandemic and subsequent slow return of ridership.
But in Sydney you will pay the surcharge only when you get off or on at the actual airport station. Just using that line and passing the airport will cost you nothing extra. Usually less than 4 AUD for the whole trip.
It’s the same situation with BART. The surcharge only applies when using the airport stations. No extra charge if you’re passing by.
The Narita Express also costs significantly more than the regular train into Tokyo. Airport trains have to account for travelers with a lot of luggage and thus can carry fewer people than regular trains.
BART trainsets are uniform. No special airport trains.
It has been a long time since I’ve been to Tokyo. Narita trains are nice but I never managed to catch the express. Even so, the local is still really nice. :)
London has a expensive express line from Heathrow to the city and a regular underground line that costs a fraction.
Cool. I’ll be in London in a few months. Are the express trains nicer or are they the same sets as the local, but faster?
You worried about nice train seats instead of just getting to where you’re going lmao
I didn’t use them, so no idea if they are nicer - but they were quite a bit faster, yes.
Pro tip for London: You can swipe your credit card at the entry and exit points of your underground travels and it will cost you much less then any tourist tickets they sell.
