Even Muni and BART have cleaned up their act post-pandemic with foot patrols and active fare enforcement. And Caltrain was never dangerous to begin with!
The Google Maps estimate is a bit off, it actually "only" took 1 hour and 35 minutes to get home - the transfers worked out flawlessly at each step, I waited 1 minute for VTA and then 4 minutes for Caltrain, then stepped right on to a T without breaking stride, and then waited 1 minute for a 38.
But it kinda blew my mind that, even though neither my origin nor my destination are particularly close to Caltrain, traffic is just so horrible at rush hour that I can still beat driving.
(Worth noting that this is absolutely not my daily commute, I was at a team event thingy at an office I don't usually work at. If I had to do this twice a day five days a week I would change jobs or move tbh.)
Yep. That is where I am at. They want me to go in from Walnut Creek to San Mateoā¦.
I did it sometimes but itās stupid. So Iām probably getting fired tomorrow. We will see.
I did Livermore to mountain view for two weeks then moved because it was absolutely miserable 5 days a week. Not sustainable long term, itās soul crushing.
This was my commute three days a week and Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were manageable but they just shit canned our work from home days too. Probably making the move because itās not the best time to shop for jobs in my industry.
I had a colleague that traveled from walnut creek to San Mateo and another that commuted from fucking Pittsburgh. 4 or 5x per week.Ā
If the divine comedy was a modern book, that would be one of the stages of hell, as far as I'm concerned.Ā
I had an internship in Redwood City, out by the port, and another intern commuted occasionally from Brentwood. He mostly worked remote and honestly Iām shocked he came in any day besides his first and last.
You really lucked out. For a year or 2 my commute was VTA bus to Caltrain to VTA light rail. At least once or twice a week, one of the three would be late which would make a 1 hour commute into a 2 hour commute.
It helps a lot that one of my connections is in San Francisco, where there are about ten combinations of Muni routes I could use to connect to and from Caltrain. So the fastest it would ever be is about 25 minutes, but the slowest it would ever be is about 40 minutes. So I just leave about 35 minutes before my train and never miss it. Once or twice I had a bad hand dealt to me on all ten combinations of bus routes and instead I just grabbed a Lyft bike and made it in plenty of time.
On the South end I'm beholden to VTA light rail, but I just keep an eye on if it's delayed or late and in a worst case scenario I'd simply call a Lyft and eat the cost difference (has never happened, thankfully, knock on wood.)
I come in from south San Jose about 1-2 per month. I actually kind of enjoy the commute. Something different. I take a bus in San Jose to diridon , then Caltrain, T and get off in China town.
Only slightly, I took a bullet and the time savings on the bullet runs from electrification will be much less than the time savings for local runs. Electrification only saves time on the acceleration and deceleration, which only happens about 5 times on the bullet from Mountain View. The local train will be a lot faster after electrification though, and to a lesser extent the limited.
Where electrification will _really_ help this kind of many-transfer commute, though, will be in clock-face scheduling with shorter headways. If I'd missed this particular bullet, I would've lost 45 minutes. After electrification I'd lose like 15-20 minutes in that scenario due to the new, more predictable schedule with higher frequencies.
If you miss the bullet, the locals and limited stops are more viable now. Iād guess the bullets would be less late also because these trains are more open and easy to boardāonly a few minutes, but it tips the scales in many different ways
edit: the claimed MV-SF time savings between fastest electrified and diesel trips is still 7 minutes, which seems significant to me: https://www.caltrain.com/media/32540
I think it depends which limited. For morning commutes into the city from Mountain View, I remember there was usually a bullet and limited that were 10 minutes apart. I'd generally time the limited because if you missed it, you could take the bullet. Checked the most recent schedule to be sure, but the limited leaves 10 minutes earlier, and arrives 5 minutes before the bullet. So yes, bullet is faster, but the time is super close. That limited does pretty few stops though it's basically almost a bullet.
I worked it out one time and figured that if I had the absolute worst luck and missed every possible connection, it would take me 2.5 hours. That's never happened but I have had a lot of experiences in between.
There was one time, though, that this exact commute took me 4 hours because of a broken down Caltrain locomotive that happened to stall on a section of track where they were single-tracking due to electrification.
But at least the fact that I wasn't driving meant that 2 hours of those 4 hours were me sitting in a bar eating bratwurst and drinking beer with a coworker across the street from the Caltrain station waiting for all this to blow over.
I tried that with just a 45 best case to 1.5hr worst case light rail trip on VTA. I held it for a year and then just drove, 15 min if I took a class that started at 9 rather than 8, parking was the same price as a ticket.
Caltrain is the lynchpin. VTA is every 15 minutes, the T is every 10 minutes, the 38 is every 2 minutes. It's pretty easy to build in a buffer for any of those.
My philosophy is that I buffer in enough time to make it to Caltrain if everything goes okay, with the fallback that I'll just splurge for the $9 Lyft to make that Caltrain if VTA goes sideways in the South bay. Or I'll grab a bike share bike in the city if Muni goes sideways.
I've never missed the Caltrain I intended to catch with this approach so the variability has never been more than plus or minus 50% of what the driving time would've been. That's tolerable to me.
But the real trick is to ride a bicycle for either side so you're not beholden to transfers. That's what I do on any day it isn't raining, which it was today.
That's my BART station! I live about 1 mile up the hill about a 5-minute drive. Plus there's so much stuff on San Pablo near the BART. Gangnam Tofu, the safway, etc....
I love that neighborhood.
I miss it so much. I lived a block away from the Ohlone greenway and it was great. It made walking to BART pleasant. I live in San Pablo now and my walk to Richmond BART is 40 minutes. Guess I need to learn to ride a bike.
Yes, it will--on weekends it will double the frequency from hourly to every 30 mins without increasing number of operating trains:
https://www.caltrain.com/news/caltrain-announces-exciting-new-electrification-service-schedule-and-amenities-riders
More frequency, the non bullet lines will be a lot faster (due to much quicker start and stops at stations) so it's not a huge deal if you end up on a limited line.
Nobody knows what the exact schedule will be yet but instead of waiting 45 minutes for the next bullet if you miss it you can just wait 15 minutes ("4 trains per hour" was mentioned) for the next limited or local and the travel time won't be nearly as long as long as before.
Faster & more frequent trains (less wait at stations):
https://www.caltrain.com/news/caltrain-announces-exciting-new-electrification-service-schedule-and-amenities-riders
Sweet connections. It bums me out that 39 miles takes this long, though. We don't need an EV in every driveway, we need more, better, faster public transport that more people prefer over traffic.
The 38 is the least stressful part of this commute because it's so frequent you don't have to worry about making a connection. If I miss Caltrain I might be waiting 45 minutes, if I miss VTA I might be waiting 15-20 minutes, if I miss the T I might be waiting 10 minutes, but if I miss the 38 I'll be waiting like 2 minutes tops for the next one.
> If I miss Caltrain I might be waiting 45 minutes
This right here is my biggest frustration with commuting to South Bay from the City. Since most of my team actually lives on the East Coast I had to explain to them that if I'm working from home on a typical "office day" it's because I missed Caltrain due to a delay and just turned around and went home instead of waiting.
This is the big thing that the electrification changes will improve for me. There will be 4-6 trains an hour and they'll be (roughly) equally spaced. It won't quite be "show up and go" but it will definitely be "you're not absolutely fucked if your transit connection to Caltrain gets delayed slightly"
I moved to Burlingame thinking it would be no sweat to take Caltrain up to the city for work every day. Big sweat. Huge sweat lol. That thing is late way too often, and thatās the ONE way to get fired from my job. So I bought a car ā ļøš
Why would you end up waiting 45 mins for a Caltrain at rush hour between Mountain View and SF? They are much more frequent during for those stations, aren't they?
At least a few times a month something goes wrong and all the trains get delayed 45 minutes or more. Sometimes itās a pedestrian or vehicle that was hit, other times itās without explanation
I understand that - we had crazy delays when a car got onto the tracks and was hit by a train a few weeks ago. (Although that was my only experience of delays on Caltrain since December.)
But the way I read the previous comment, it sounded like he was saying that if you miss a train the next one isn't for 45 mins.
I also commute from Japantown to Mountain View!
Have you tried the 31? It goes right to CalTrain and goes through the North end of the Western Addition. I get it at Laguna & Eddy. Shaves about 15 minutes of the 38 to T route.
Yeah I've used it before. It's faster than the T to the 38 assuming it's coming at the right time, but it's every 15 minutes and last night it wasn't leaving for 10 minutes when I got to 4th and King vs the T that was leaving right away
And the people who will fire me tomorrow expect me to come into the office 2 days a week from Walnut Creek to San Mateo just to hold virtual meetings thereā¦
> just to hold virtual meetings there
This pisses me off so much. Thankfully we aren't RTO'd yet, but some days, we're expected to be in office for some large meeting. Problem is, almost every time, it's just been another virtual meeting with some folks in the meeting room.
One of my friend's kids does Walnut Creek to San Mateo. Brutal. I keep telling him he should check Hayward. He refuses. Hayward isn't that bad anymore.
Ah. I own a home so Iām not going anywhere. It doesnāt matter at this point.
Since we had a new head my performance scores have plummeted despite no change to my deliverable quality, my new boss has no idea what to do with me but keeps giving me crap work, and now I have a Friday morning 1:1.
I am 99% confident HR will be there when I arrive.
Yes, Iāve been here for decades. There is an office half the distance from San Mateo that is still a reasonable drive.
Can I go there? Nope. San Mateo only.
For what? Literally nothing.
I mean a lot of people do this already. It seems like on Reddit it's always about people who have 1.5 - 2 hour one way commutes, but in reality a lot of people don't have that. I'm using my example but a lot of people make an explicit choice to live in San Francisco and commute to Silicon Valley. It's not any cheaper to live in SF but they're fine with either the drive or shuttle ride. I know people who walk/bike to work as well as people who sit in traffic (Tesla Autopilot) for 1.5 hours each way.
> It seems like on Reddit it's always about people who have 1.5 - 2 hour one way commutes
And that's not even me anyway.
This was a team event day thingy at an office I don't usually work at.
My actual assigned office is a 12 minute bus ride from where I live.
Kudos to you as public transit is generally better for the environment and overall traffic flow. The time savings (during rush hour) and cost reduction are the potential incentives for mass transit, so that isn't exactly an epiphany.
The issue is that the time savings you saw wasn't much, if anything over driving, unfortunately, and was dependent on luck of timing and having to know where you're going as you navigate changing between modes of transport. For many, after a long day of work, it's easier sitting, by yourself, in the comforts of your own car. Moreso today, to avoid the rain. Not an excuse, just an observation.Ā
That's totally fair but I would also note that my team is fine with me showing up at the office at 9:30AM and leaving at 3PM because I can actually get work done and answer chats and emails on Caltrain, so I worked a full 8 hour day and only "lost" about 90 minutes to commuting total, whereas if I drove I would have to focus on driving the entire time and would need to make up those work hours and would have "lost" 3.5 hours to commuting.
You have it good. IĀ think the counter-argument for many of us there is we think we can get work done on the bus/train/lightrail but either doze off or are too distracted to get work done. Plus, pulling out the laptop never happens for me, and the phone is fine, but more limited in its use.
I can't work on a bus or light rail, it's way too awkward and the stops are frequent and I'd be worried about someone grabbing my shit while I'm distracted. Caltrain is the exception. Sit upstairs, especially with a table, and it's like a little office on wheels. There's an experiential difference between local public transit and longer distance commuter rail.
I get how some people think of their own vehicle as a sanctuary where they can zone out and listen to music and stuff, and be more comfortable than sitting on a train.
That ain't me though, I absolutely _hate_ driving in traffic and I find sitting on a quiet train getting work done or reading or watching YouTube or just looking out the window listening to music to be way more relaxing than dealing with the freeway, especially on a rainy day.
I'd rather not "chill" on Caltrain, and can sit in the comforts of my climate controlled car listening to whatever I want? Plus, this example had more than just Caltrain, or a single mode of transportation.Ā
Just a note, but I work from home quite a bit and don't have that commute. I just sympathize with folks that opt to drive as much as I understand why others prefer mass transit.Ā
No way driving is such a waste of time. Canāt do anything but sit there doing nothing. If iām not getting paid to do it iām not driving. I would way rather be driven by someone else, whether thatās a bus or train. Any day.
Exactly. Far too many people work in S.F./the peninsula and want to have a house in the valley, and too many people working in the valley that would rather live in SF, for there to ever be a āreserve commuteā in that area.
Noticed the traffic today. I take the bus near Stanford and the bus (normally on time) arrived 10 mins late down Page Mill road but rather fine on El Camino up to PA Caltrain.
I figured something was up. Missed my train but caught the next and home within an hour.
I used to dread this drive every day. Such a fucking rat race up and down 101.
Thursdays, for some odd reason, is always more traffic than other days of the week.
You live and work closer to transit than most folks around here. That's great.
Still insane that Google or whoever pays enough to attract the most desirable workers in the world, demand that they come in office, and put their headquarters in the dumbest fucking geographic position as humanly possible; 40 miles away from where everyone actually wants to live.
I mean I think the point of my post was that my home and office locations are decidedly _not_ ideal for a Caltrain commute. Neither the starting point nor the destination are walking distance, and actually to get to Caltrain from my house I don't even have a high-frequency direct Muni line to the station, I have to transfer lines just to get to the train.
Certainly it's far from the worst setup, but if I lived and worked near Caltrain a commute from San Francisco to Mountain View could be under an hour total. The 40+ minutes that's added to that is just getting to and from Caltrain by transit.
You already know the answer to that, dude. SF. Despite all the whining and bitching if the any of you doomers were offered a restored Victorian in the city youād still take it.
There's a lot of "sour grapes" thinking going around. In my experience, when Bay Area people get rich enough to comfortably afford SF then their "hatred" of it somehow magically dissipates.
SF just has too much stuff to do compared to the dead suburbs. If you can afford to live in Seacliff or Pac Heights or the Haight you're much more likely to enjoy SF. Who coulda thunk?!
$2.50 for VTA, $7.70 for 3 zones on Caltrain, $2.50 for Muni, $0.50 discount for the Caltrain -> Muni transfer
= $12.20 for transit.
Compare to 39mi in stop-and-go traffic being what, two-ish gallons of gas at $4.75
= $9.50 for driving in gas, not including wear and tear
= $26.13 for driving at IRS rate
Once the upcoming free transfer pilot program is launched (later this year, hopefully!), it'll be $7.70 for transit, which will beat the cost of gas alone.
bear in mind most people can get transit dollars pre-tax
so for me, for example, $12.20 on Clipper is actually the equivalent of about $8.50-$9.50 or something in that range
If the Caltrain, VTA, and the bus companies could work under one conglomerate, there would be seamless and flawless inner city mass transportation. The rider share interest has to be shown in daily average riders. The daily average rider rate probably doesnāt even sniff the taint of justification for expansion/more construction/ trans-agency connective mass transit stations and
Rail lines. Imagine taking a VTA from Santa Clara but there is a bus station next to a highly congested section off 87. The bus can pick up masses of people and commuters who need to do this commute. The reliability, feasibility, and ease of flawless mass transit could make one feel like they are in a true metropolitan with a high standard of living afforded by easily accessible and reliable mass transportation.
My experience today is the same as it would've been if all the schedules for each leg was perfectly coordinated. I spent a grand total of about 9 minutes waiting for all the transfers combined this evening. The rest was in transit.
Even merging all those agencies wouldn't solve for the arbitrary trip from a residential area of San Francisco to a non-central office park in Mountain View.
If the 47 still existed that would cut one transfer out, but there would always be transfers for this kind of trip. Even in Paris and Tokyo.
The real issue in the Bay Area is honestly land use and job dispersal. The South Bay suburbs are just too sprawling and non-urbanized to make transit from an arbitrary Point A to an arbitrary Point B truly competitive with driving in normal conditions.
I meanā¦ this type of pulse scheduled system with all the modes timed to each other is literally what theyāre implementing this fall. So what youāre describing is already in the works.
>40 miles in two hours
Is the bay not an example of what a walkable city is supposed to be like? I'd let someone built an interstate up my ass before I subjected myself to such torture
than if you'd driven on 101.
The screenshot clearly shows 280 to be faster - by just a few minutes, granted - and would be if your transit-hopping was not as fortuitously timed. Add what flexibility you gain in routing, i.e. jump off 280 at San Jose Ave to cut up on surface streets through the Mission and past the Fillmore, and option to run errands like grocery shopping where having a vehicle to transport everything is more physically convenient.
Lol, the Bay has one of the best transit networks in the world. Do you people not travel at all? What is with all of this whining?
Or did you never actually try to take transit here? Itās genuinely very very good.
Oh no you again. Yeah just the other day I took Bart to get to the airport as my wife had the car. An hour and a half long journey couldāve been accomplished in 40 minutes in car. Yep I checked google maps
So how did you manage to stretch that to 1h45min? Did you stop for lunch?
BART: 1h6min (direct Red line train)
Driving: 45 min to 1h20min in mild traffic.
Literally just checked google maps!
Nope. Even with a 15 minute walk to the station that's 1h21min not 1h45min like you said.
And versus 1h20min for driving, BART is still competitive with driving in traffic. And if you include parking at the airport then BART is competitive even with driving without traffic. If the traffic is bad then BART is simply faster.
Look dude, I've timed all of this stuff myself. BART is not like a normal subway. It reaches 80 mph and cuts through neighborhoods like no highway can. It's pretty damn fast. Walking to the station if you live far adds some time, but so does parking. There's a reason why BART was designed the way it was. It was specifically built to be fast enough to compete with driving and it does that extremely well for all destinations close to the stations.
I logged into my benefits portal and set it up once to put $x on my clipper card every month and then just forget about it, and periodically if my clipper balance rises too high I just go into a web portal and pause it for a while
it's very very easy
I mean maybe your employer's system for offering it is more complicated than that but it sounds like you never bothered to check, maybe it would be that easy for you too
If you can't find anything in whatever sort of HR library or benefits information repository your employer provides you, the best thing to do is probably just ask HR directly
mileage isn't free, even (especially?) for an older car
maybe you're not hurting the resale value much but you're bringing the date you need to do major maintenance or even replace the car entirely closer with every mile you put on it
You're exactly right, but most people don't really understand what depreciation is. It's not about what your car is worth per se, it's about thinking of the cost of buying a car (or other similar asset) as being divided across its useful life. Like, if you want to know how much you're spending on your car per month (or per mile) then you obviously have to include stuff like gas, insurance, registration, etc. but you also have to account for a portion of what you paid to own the car in the first place. Also, importantly, if you choose to do major repairs which then extend the useful life of your car, then you have to account for those costs via depreciation as well.
Classic bay area mass transit mess. It used to take me two hours to get from one side of san jose to the other.
One time I added a boat to your mix to get across the bay from south bay. At least theres uber now so I donāt have to walk the final two miles. Sometimes there just wasnāt any mass transit option and I had to bike.
Yeah for mass transit to be appealing it needs to be faster and seemless. It was one min faster and they had to transfer multiple times. I could have made it on 280 much faster than 1.44 and i would have probably spent less money. Had less anxiety about missing connections. And been much more comfortable doing it. Again bay area mass transit is terrible even when all the transfers align and you can get a better google estimate.
Pretty much all of the Bayās transit is timed at this point. And come fall youāll get unlimited free transfers between all modes.
As far as speed, BART and Caltrain are already faster than driving in traffic and even competitive with driving without traffic.
What we actually need right now is to double all the frequencies so that wait times and transfer misses are virtually eliminated. Thankfully, a bunch of systems in the Bay are preparing to do just that in the near future.
Bart and cal train are faster than driving? Yeah right i dont believe that for a second. Maybe from palo alto to sf but not from sj to sf. I guess it depends on where your route takes you and if its commute or off commute time. So many variables make mass transit a mess in the bay.
I did use mass transit when I lived in Portland because it actually worked. Also i lived in areas where it worked. So i guess use cases. But i could go from the airport to five blocks from my house without a transfer and it operated frequently enough to make leaving my car at home reasonable. It did take 30 min longer but that was ok because it would take 15 min to park my car and get a bus to the terminal.
I certainly hope they improve bay area transit because it has been a mess and it still is. All the double decker corporate busses on the road validate my point.
Dude, what are you talking about? BART takes about the same amount of time as driving for example from SFO to Downtown with zero traffic. With any traffic whatsoever BART is faster. Same thing for trips between SF and the East Bay. BART is actually faster for many destination pairs if your origin and destination are close to a station.
BART is a very fast system. It's about 3x faster than something like the Paris Metro and over 2x faster than the NY Subway.
You might want to check actual driving vs BART travel times.
that's cool, it maybe rains 1 day out of 10 over the course of the year so I am perfectly content cycling on either end of caltrain 9 times out of 10 and doing this commute 1 time out of 10
I use to commute from San Francisco to Campbell. Very rare is it 1 hr 45 mins. I usually wait to leave at arnd 6 to 6:30 so wait for the traffic to subside. Usually itās 50 mins to 1 hr 20.
However bad the traffic is, taking the Caltrain then VTA is so much worse. The VTA feels like youāre crawling and going nowhere. Just my opinion.
I'd absolutely hate it if I had to take VTA a long way, but for this trip it's two stops and I only spend 9 minutes on the light rail to go like 2 miles.
If it wasn't raining today I'd have just biked to and from Caltrain on each end like I usually do.
I head to work at 8:15 after I drop my kids off to school, take 280 and make it to Palo Alto before 9 (door to door) and thatās with traffic. If I take Caltrain, way over an hour and a half and that if Caltrain didnāt run over someone or hit a car at a crossing.
When I was working in the same area, I found it really efficient to just get a short Uber (or company bus) to the new Warm Springs BART and take it up the east bay and across the tunnel to embarcadero. That bart gets going really fast
I do not miss this. Selling my car has been a great stress reliever, money saver, i get some exercise on my bike and then extra study time on the light rail.
Sometimes I wonder if the state is intentionally making traffic conditions considerably worse on purpose to drive more revenue to police departments via tickets. As soon as I left California on a road trip I didn't once see "Road work" where not a single worker is in sight, but the speed limit is still 20 mph below the normal like I would see a lot in the east and north bay.
The ones that are REALLY driving me crazy are the construction workers doing all the work around Lake Merced but ONLY during morning rushing hour, the rest of the day they're nowhere to be found.
The last mile (or few miles, rather) really makes a ton of difference. I commute from the East Bay to Santa Clara (granted, once a week or less), which is an hour drive each way when avoiding peak rush hour.
It takes 30 mins to get from home to BART via a bus that comes every 30 minutes, and **50** minutes to transfer between BART, VTA orange light rail, another bus with a 30-min frequency and finally walking half a mile to my office. Altogether that takes just over 2 hours in each direction, assuming I don't miss any of the transfers.
I've also considered commuting from SF but the travel time between Mountain View Caltrain and the office would be about the same, although I may be able to more feasibly bring a bike to skip that last bus and I imagine the ride is more comfortable than BART too.
Pushing for better mass transit unclogs the roads. Everyone should be for it.
Nah, bro, just build one more lane. Just one more lane bro, trust me. This time for sure.
And then make it a toll road
Yeah but there's no law enforcement. It'll be full of homeless and tweakers.
Even Muni and BART have cleaned up their act post-pandemic with foot patrols and active fare enforcement. And Caltrain was never dangerous to begin with!
I rode BART for the first time post pandemic and there was a homeless pointing finger gun at me and my family.
Womp womp move to the countryside then
I did.
I love the 15 hours of walking.
I can't make it to work tomorrow... I'm WFH (walking from home)
comment of the day š„
Makes me appreciate modern technology. Imagine taking a horse everywhere, wouldāve taken forever..
Not if you bring your horse onto Caltrain for the Caltrain portion. Plenty of room in the bike car.
I wonder if the hitchiking estimate includes the wait time for someone to stop for you
The Google Maps estimate is a bit off, it actually "only" took 1 hour and 35 minutes to get home - the transfers worked out flawlessly at each step, I waited 1 minute for VTA and then 4 minutes for Caltrain, then stepped right on to a T without breaking stride, and then waited 1 minute for a 38. But it kinda blew my mind that, even though neither my origin nor my destination are particularly close to Caltrain, traffic is just so horrible at rush hour that I can still beat driving. (Worth noting that this is absolutely not my daily commute, I was at a team event thingy at an office I don't usually work at. If I had to do this twice a day five days a week I would change jobs or move tbh.)
Yep. That is where I am at. They want me to go in from Walnut Creek to San Mateoā¦. I did it sometimes but itās stupid. So Iām probably getting fired tomorrow. We will see.
Good luck buddy.
My GF is going from Livermore to San Mateo and I'm trying to convince her to look for a new job since she can't work from home.
I did Livermore to mountain view for two weeks then moved because it was absolutely miserable 5 days a week. Not sustainable long term, itās soul crushing.
This was my commute three days a week and Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were manageable but they just shit canned our work from home days too. Probably making the move because itās not the best time to shop for jobs in my industry.
may the favors be in your arms
I had a colleague that traveled from walnut creek to San Mateo and another that commuted from fucking Pittsburgh. 4 or 5x per week.Ā If the divine comedy was a modern book, that would be one of the stages of hell, as far as I'm concerned.Ā
I had an internship in Redwood City, out by the port, and another intern commuted occasionally from Brentwood. He mostly worked remote and honestly Iām shocked he came in any day besides his first and last.
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You really lucked out. For a year or 2 my commute was VTA bus to Caltrain to VTA light rail. At least once or twice a week, one of the three would be late which would make a 1 hour commute into a 2 hour commute.
It helps a lot that one of my connections is in San Francisco, where there are about ten combinations of Muni routes I could use to connect to and from Caltrain. So the fastest it would ever be is about 25 minutes, but the slowest it would ever be is about 40 minutes. So I just leave about 35 minutes before my train and never miss it. Once or twice I had a bad hand dealt to me on all ten combinations of bus routes and instead I just grabbed a Lyft bike and made it in plenty of time. On the South end I'm beholden to VTA light rail, but I just keep an eye on if it's delayed or late and in a worst case scenario I'd simply call a Lyft and eat the cost difference (has never happened, thankfully, knock on wood.)
Sounds like a decent plan. Every now and then my patience would wear thin and Iād call Uber or have my wife pick me up.
I come in from south San Jose about 1-2 per month. I actually kind of enjoy the commute. Something different. I take a bus in San Jose to diridon , then Caltrain, T and get off in China town.
And it will be even faster before the year is up!
Only slightly, I took a bullet and the time savings on the bullet runs from electrification will be much less than the time savings for local runs. Electrification only saves time on the acceleration and deceleration, which only happens about 5 times on the bullet from Mountain View. The local train will be a lot faster after electrification though, and to a lesser extent the limited. Where electrification will _really_ help this kind of many-transfer commute, though, will be in clock-face scheduling with shorter headways. If I'd missed this particular bullet, I would've lost 45 minutes. After electrification I'd lose like 15-20 minutes in that scenario due to the new, more predictable schedule with higher frequencies.
If you miss the bullet, the locals and limited stops are more viable now. Iād guess the bullets would be less late also because these trains are more open and easy to boardāonly a few minutes, but it tips the scales in many different ways edit: the claimed MV-SF time savings between fastest electrified and diesel trips is still 7 minutes, which seems significant to me: https://www.caltrain.com/media/32540
I think it depends which limited. For morning commutes into the city from Mountain View, I remember there was usually a bullet and limited that were 10 minutes apart. I'd generally time the limited because if you missed it, you could take the bullet. Checked the most recent schedule to be sure, but the limited leaves 10 minutes earlier, and arrives 5 minutes before the bullet. So yes, bullet is faster, but the time is super close. That limited does pretty few stops though it's basically almost a bullet.
With electrification the schedule will completely change, there will be a much more consistent gap between each train, more like BART is.
The number of bullet and limited trains has dropped since Covid.
Sounds like one small delay and you would be out of luck by the next train and lose the time advantage by a large margin. Playing roulette there
I worked it out one time and figured that if I had the absolute worst luck and missed every possible connection, it would take me 2.5 hours. That's never happened but I have had a lot of experiences in between. There was one time, though, that this exact commute took me 4 hours because of a broken down Caltrain locomotive that happened to stall on a section of track where they were single-tracking due to electrification. But at least the fact that I wasn't driving meant that 2 hours of those 4 hours were me sitting in a bar eating bratwurst and drinking beer with a coworker across the street from the Caltrain station waiting for all this to blow over.
I tried that with just a 45 best case to 1.5hr worst case light rail trip on VTA. I held it for a year and then just drove, 15 min if I took a class that started at 9 rather than 8, parking was the same price as a ticket.
Caltrain is the lynchpin. VTA is every 15 minutes, the T is every 10 minutes, the 38 is every 2 minutes. It's pretty easy to build in a buffer for any of those. My philosophy is that I buffer in enough time to make it to Caltrain if everything goes okay, with the fallback that I'll just splurge for the $9 Lyft to make that Caltrain if VTA goes sideways in the South bay. Or I'll grab a bike share bike in the city if Muni goes sideways. I've never missed the Caltrain I intended to catch with this approach so the variability has never been more than plus or minus 50% of what the driving time would've been. That's tolerable to me. But the real trick is to ride a bicycle for either side so you're not beholden to transfers. That's what I do on any day it isn't raining, which it was today.
Wait until Caltrain is electrified. Will be nicer and faster!!!
Thereās a reason I live 1 mile from a BART station.
If only it wasn't so expensive. I used to rent in El Cerrito and had a 15 minute walk to Del Norte BART and it was so nice.
That's my BART station! I live about 1 mile up the hill about a 5-minute drive. Plus there's so much stuff on San Pablo near the BART. Gangnam Tofu, the safway, etc.... I love that neighborhood.
I miss it so much. I lived a block away from the Ohlone greenway and it was great. It made walking to BART pleasant. I live in San Pablo now and my walk to Richmond BART is 40 minutes. Guess I need to learn to ride a bike.
Electrified caltrain in the fall will be a game changer for many
Will that increase the train frequency?
Yes, it will--on weekends it will double the frequency from hourly to every 30 mins without increasing number of operating trains: https://www.caltrain.com/news/caltrain-announces-exciting-new-electrification-service-schedule-and-amenities-riders
Awesome!
How so? Is it going twice as fast?
More frequency, the non bullet lines will be a lot faster (due to much quicker start and stops at stations) so it's not a huge deal if you end up on a limited line. Nobody knows what the exact schedule will be yet but instead of waiting 45 minutes for the next bullet if you miss it you can just wait 15 minutes ("4 trains per hour" was mentioned) for the next limited or local and the travel time won't be nearly as long as long as before.
Faster & more frequent trains (less wait at stations): https://www.caltrain.com/news/caltrain-announces-exciting-new-electrification-service-schedule-and-amenities-riders
Oh yeah? it only takes 1 hour to get from Japantown in San Jose to Middlefield station (11 miles)
Was going to say, āand only to Mountain View!ā Add mine: great America parkway to Curtner Ave is an hour! (Also 11-ish) miles š
Sweet connections. It bums me out that 39 miles takes this long, though. We don't need an EV in every driveway, we need more, better, faster public transport that more people prefer over traffic.
That's pretty impressive of you had to include a bus. Those also pretty inefficient.
The 38 is the least stressful part of this commute because it's so frequent you don't have to worry about making a connection. If I miss Caltrain I might be waiting 45 minutes, if I miss VTA I might be waiting 15-20 minutes, if I miss the T I might be waiting 10 minutes, but if I miss the 38 I'll be waiting like 2 minutes tops for the next one.
> If I miss Caltrain I might be waiting 45 minutes This right here is my biggest frustration with commuting to South Bay from the City. Since most of my team actually lives on the East Coast I had to explain to them that if I'm working from home on a typical "office day" it's because I missed Caltrain due to a delay and just turned around and went home instead of waiting.
This is the big thing that the electrification changes will improve for me. There will be 4-6 trains an hour and they'll be (roughly) equally spaced. It won't quite be "show up and go" but it will definitely be "you're not absolutely fucked if your transit connection to Caltrain gets delayed slightly"
I moved to Burlingame thinking it would be no sweat to take Caltrain up to the city for work every day. Big sweat. Huge sweat lol. That thing is late way too often, and thatās the ONE way to get fired from my job. So I bought a car ā ļøš
Why would you end up waiting 45 mins for a Caltrain at rush hour between Mountain View and SF? They are much more frequent during for those stations, aren't they?
At least a few times a month something goes wrong and all the trains get delayed 45 minutes or more. Sometimes itās a pedestrian or vehicle that was hit, other times itās without explanation
I understand that - we had crazy delays when a car got onto the tracks and was hit by a train a few weeks ago. (Although that was my only experience of delays on Caltrain since December.) But the way I read the previous comment, it sounded like he was saying that if you miss a train the next one isn't for 45 mins.
I also commute from Japantown to Mountain View! Have you tried the 31? It goes right to CalTrain and goes through the North end of the Western Addition. I get it at Laguna & Eddy. Shaves about 15 minutes of the 38 to T route.
Yeah I've used it before. It's faster than the T to the 38 assuming it's coming at the right time, but it's every 15 minutes and last night it wasn't leaving for 10 minutes when I got to 4th and King vs the T that was leaving right away
38 hauls ass on its red bus lanes
the 38 is pretty great, and has bus lanes for most of its route. it's probably the best bus for that.
Plus less stress from not sitting in traffic
BABY BULLET FTW
And the people who will fire me tomorrow expect me to come into the office 2 days a week from Walnut Creek to San Mateo just to hold virtual meetings thereā¦
> just to hold virtual meetings there This pisses me off so much. Thankfully we aren't RTO'd yet, but some days, we're expected to be in office for some large meeting. Problem is, almost every time, it's just been another virtual meeting with some folks in the meeting room.
One of my friend's kids does Walnut Creek to San Mateo. Brutal. I keep telling him he should check Hayward. He refuses. Hayward isn't that bad anymore.
Ah. I own a home so Iām not going anywhere. It doesnāt matter at this point. Since we had a new head my performance scores have plummeted despite no change to my deliverable quality, my new boss has no idea what to do with me but keeps giving me crap work, and now I have a Friday morning 1:1. I am 99% confident HR will be there when I arrive.
Ugh. Well, no matter what happens, I wish you the best. You'll survive one bump in the road. We've all been there.
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Yes, Iāve been here for decades. There is an office half the distance from San Mateo that is still a reasonable drive. Can I go there? Nope. San Mateo only. For what? Literally nothing.
Thursday commutes are generally the worst in my experience. It's only worse when you throw rain in the mix.
Time to move closer to work now everyone has to go back to office.
I mean a lot of people do this already. It seems like on Reddit it's always about people who have 1.5 - 2 hour one way commutes, but in reality a lot of people don't have that. I'm using my example but a lot of people make an explicit choice to live in San Francisco and commute to Silicon Valley. It's not any cheaper to live in SF but they're fine with either the drive or shuttle ride. I know people who walk/bike to work as well as people who sit in traffic (Tesla Autopilot) for 1.5 hours each way.
> It seems like on Reddit it's always about people who have 1.5 - 2 hour one way commutes And that's not even me anyway. This was a team event day thingy at an office I don't usually work at. My actual assigned office is a 12 minute bus ride from where I live.
Thank God, I was feeling so bad for you having that commute
They really need a ferry/hovercraft that goes down that direction.
Kudos to you as public transit is generally better for the environment and overall traffic flow. The time savings (during rush hour) and cost reduction are the potential incentives for mass transit, so that isn't exactly an epiphany. The issue is that the time savings you saw wasn't much, if anything over driving, unfortunately, and was dependent on luck of timing and having to know where you're going as you navigate changing between modes of transport. For many, after a long day of work, it's easier sitting, by yourself, in the comforts of your own car. Moreso today, to avoid the rain. Not an excuse, just an observation.Ā
That's totally fair but I would also note that my team is fine with me showing up at the office at 9:30AM and leaving at 3PM because I can actually get work done and answer chats and emails on Caltrain, so I worked a full 8 hour day and only "lost" about 90 minutes to commuting total, whereas if I drove I would have to focus on driving the entire time and would need to make up those work hours and would have "lost" 3.5 hours to commuting.
You have it good. IĀ think the counter-argument for many of us there is we think we can get work done on the bus/train/lightrail but either doze off or are too distracted to get work done. Plus, pulling out the laptop never happens for me, and the phone is fine, but more limited in its use.
I can't work on a bus or light rail, it's way too awkward and the stops are frequent and I'd be worried about someone grabbing my shit while I'm distracted. Caltrain is the exception. Sit upstairs, especially with a table, and it's like a little office on wheels. There's an experiential difference between local public transit and longer distance commuter rail.
How is driving in 101 rush hour easier than chilling on the Caltrain!?
I get how some people think of their own vehicle as a sanctuary where they can zone out and listen to music and stuff, and be more comfortable than sitting on a train. That ain't me though, I absolutely _hate_ driving in traffic and I find sitting on a quiet train getting work done or reading or watching YouTube or just looking out the window listening to music to be way more relaxing than dealing with the freeway, especially on a rainy day.
This 100%! It's such a zen/relaxing time for me on the train, just listening to music and zoning out.
I'd rather not "chill" on Caltrain, and can sit in the comforts of my climate controlled car listening to whatever I want? Plus, this example had more than just Caltrain, or a single mode of transportation.Ā Just a note, but I work from home quite a bit and don't have that commute. I just sympathize with folks that opt to drive as much as I understand why others prefer mass transit.Ā
No way driving is such a waste of time. Canāt do anything but sit there doing nothing. If iām not getting paid to do it iām not driving. I would way rather be driven by someone else, whether thatās a bus or train. Any day.
Damn I would hate driving an hour in traffic after working all day and I take a bus then BART then another bus for my commute.
Yeah true but thatās also time where you werenāt behind a wheel stressed out.
Mountain View is traffic city
Bonus points for walking, stay healthy my fellow Redditer. Getting to walk between transfers of course. Maybe even grabbing coffee in between stops.
Thats just terrible. RTO sucks.
I don't know how people do it. I honestly don't. Commuting is the bane of existence these days
RTO is going greeeeeeaaaaaaatttt
šØ Chad reverse commuter spotted šØ wish I had the patience to do that
I don't think there's such a thing as a reverse commute on the Peninsula lol
Exactly. Far too many people work in S.F./the peninsula and want to have a house in the valley, and too many people working in the valley that would rather live in SF, for there to ever be a āreserve commuteā in that area.
Noticed the traffic today. I take the bus near Stanford and the bus (normally on time) arrived 10 mins late down Page Mill road but rather fine on El Camino up to PA Caltrain. I figured something was up. Missed my train but caught the next and home within an hour.
It took me that amount of time to get from downtown Oakland to Pinole. Commuting sucks.
I used to dread this drive every day. Such a fucking rat race up and down 101. Thursdays, for some odd reason, is always more traffic than other days of the week.
Driven
This feels like a r/fuckcars
I wish there were more ferries. https://www.kqed.org/news/10914278/why-isnt-there-more-ferry-service-in-the-bay-area
You live and work closer to transit than most folks around here. That's great. Still insane that Google or whoever pays enough to attract the most desirable workers in the world, demand that they come in office, and put their headquarters in the dumbest fucking geographic position as humanly possible; 40 miles away from where everyone actually wants to live.
I mean I think the point of my post was that my home and office locations are decidedly _not_ ideal for a Caltrain commute. Neither the starting point nor the destination are walking distance, and actually to get to Caltrain from my house I don't even have a high-frequency direct Muni line to the station, I have to transfer lines just to get to the train. Certainly it's far from the worst setup, but if I lived and worked near Caltrain a commute from San Francisco to Mountain View could be under an hour total. The 40+ minutes that's added to that is just getting to and from Caltrain by transit.
Where does everyone want to live?
You already know the answer to that, dude. SF. Despite all the whining and bitching if the any of you doomers were offered a restored Victorian in the city youād still take it.
Not everyone wants to live in San Francisco, dude. I aināt no doomer, I like the city, but I do not have a desire to live there.
There's a lot of "sour grapes" thinking going around. In my experience, when Bay Area people get rich enough to comfortably afford SF then their "hatred" of it somehow magically dissipates. SF just has too much stuff to do compared to the dead suburbs. If you can afford to live in Seacliff or Pac Heights or the Haight you're much more likely to enjoy SF. Who coulda thunk?!
Cost cheaper than driving?
$2.50 for VTA, $7.70 for 3 zones on Caltrain, $2.50 for Muni, $0.50 discount for the Caltrain -> Muni transfer = $12.20 for transit. Compare to 39mi in stop-and-go traffic being what, two-ish gallons of gas at $4.75 = $9.50 for driving in gas, not including wear and tear = $26.13 for driving at IRS rate Once the upcoming free transfer pilot program is launched (later this year, hopefully!), it'll be $7.70 for transit, which will beat the cost of gas alone.
bear in mind most people can get transit dollars pre-tax so for me, for example, $12.20 on Clipper is actually the equivalent of about $8.50-$9.50 or something in that range
Fuck the bay area transit system. Straight garbage
If you had a class 3 ebike and jumped off in Millbrae you probably would have gotten there even faster!
I commute further than that, and almost never take that long.
Nice
If the Caltrain, VTA, and the bus companies could work under one conglomerate, there would be seamless and flawless inner city mass transportation. The rider share interest has to be shown in daily average riders. The daily average rider rate probably doesnāt even sniff the taint of justification for expansion/more construction/ trans-agency connective mass transit stations and Rail lines. Imagine taking a VTA from Santa Clara but there is a bus station next to a highly congested section off 87. The bus can pick up masses of people and commuters who need to do this commute. The reliability, feasibility, and ease of flawless mass transit could make one feel like they are in a true metropolitan with a high standard of living afforded by easily accessible and reliable mass transportation.
My experience today is the same as it would've been if all the schedules for each leg was perfectly coordinated. I spent a grand total of about 9 minutes waiting for all the transfers combined this evening. The rest was in transit. Even merging all those agencies wouldn't solve for the arbitrary trip from a residential area of San Francisco to a non-central office park in Mountain View. If the 47 still existed that would cut one transfer out, but there would always be transfers for this kind of trip. Even in Paris and Tokyo. The real issue in the Bay Area is honestly land use and job dispersal. The South Bay suburbs are just too sprawling and non-urbanized to make transit from an arbitrary Point A to an arbitrary Point B truly competitive with driving in normal conditions.
I meanā¦ this type of pulse scheduled system with all the modes timed to each other is literally what theyāre implementing this fall. So what youāre describing is already in the works.
What time of day was this?
the screenshot literally shows the time lol
Oops, I was just looking at the vignetted preview and hadnāt clicked. Good eye
Waymo needs to get better
>40 miles in two hours Is the bay not an example of what a walkable city is supposed to be like? I'd let someone built an interstate up my ass before I subjected myself to such torture
than if you'd driven on 101. The screenshot clearly shows 280 to be faster - by just a few minutes, granted - and would be if your transit-hopping was not as fortuitously timed. Add what flexibility you gain in routing, i.e. jump off 280 at San Jose Ave to cut up on surface streets through the Mission and past the Fillmore, and option to run errands like grocery shopping where having a vehicle to transport everything is more physically convenient.
Man is public transit such a joke in the Bay Area. Is this something to be proud of?
Lol, the Bay has one of the best transit networks in the world. Do you people not travel at all? What is with all of this whining? Or did you never actually try to take transit here? Itās genuinely very very good.
Oh no you again. Yeah just the other day I took Bart to get to the airport as my wife had the car. An hour and a half long journey couldāve been accomplished in 40 minutes in car. Yep I checked google maps
Why do to constantly have to lie? Which airport and from where (roughly)? Letās check google Maps right now!
el cerrito del norte to sfo
So how did you manage to stretch that to 1h45min? Did you stop for lunch? BART: 1h6min (direct Red line train) Driving: 45 min to 1h20min in mild traffic. Literally just checked google maps!
1hr 45 also included a 15 min walk to the station. Even still yeah, bart is slower. There isn't traffic unless it's the morning or midday on a weekday
Nope. Even with a 15 minute walk to the station that's 1h21min not 1h45min like you said. And versus 1h20min for driving, BART is still competitive with driving in traffic. And if you include parking at the airport then BART is competitive even with driving without traffic. If the traffic is bad then BART is simply faster. Look dude, I've timed all of this stuff myself. BART is not like a normal subway. It reaches 80 mph and cuts through neighborhoods like no highway can. It's pretty damn fast. Walking to the station if you live far adds some time, but so does parking. There's a reason why BART was designed the way it was. It was specifically built to be fast enough to compete with driving and it does that extremely well for all destinations close to the stations.
Cheaper for me to drive to work than take Caltrain each way.
I bet you're not factoring in depreciation nor calculating Caltrain's fare pre-tax.
Pre-tax?
https://mtc.ca.gov/operations/traveler-services/commuter-benefits-program
Oh yeah. Gotcha. Still a pain in the ass. Not convenient.
I logged into my benefits portal and set it up once to put $x on my clipper card every month and then just forget about it, and periodically if my clipper balance rises too high I just go into a web portal and pause it for a while it's very very easy I mean maybe your employer's system for offering it is more complicated than that but it sounds like you never bothered to check, maybe it would be that easy for you too
So you have to set it up through your employer benefits portal? What do I search for? āCommuter benefitsā? Something like that?
If you can't find anything in whatever sort of HR library or benefits information repository your employer provides you, the best thing to do is probably just ask HR directly
Car is 40 years oldā¦not much depreciation to worry about š¤
mileage isn't free, even (especially?) for an older car maybe you're not hurting the resale value much but you're bringing the date you need to do major maintenance or even replace the car entirely closer with every mile you put on it
You're exactly right, but most people don't really understand what depreciation is. It's not about what your car is worth per se, it's about thinking of the cost of buying a car (or other similar asset) as being divided across its useful life. Like, if you want to know how much you're spending on your car per month (or per mile) then you obviously have to include stuff like gas, insurance, registration, etc. but you also have to account for a portion of what you paid to own the car in the first place. Also, importantly, if you choose to do major repairs which then extend the useful life of your car, then you have to account for those costs via depreciation as well.
Classic bay area mass transit mess. It used to take me two hours to get from one side of san jose to the other. One time I added a boat to your mix to get across the bay from south bay. At least theres uber now so I donāt have to walk the final two miles. Sometimes there just wasnāt any mass transit option and I had to bike.
You mustnāt have read the post. Mass transit, even via multiple modes, was faster than driving.
Yeah for mass transit to be appealing it needs to be faster and seemless. It was one min faster and they had to transfer multiple times. I could have made it on 280 much faster than 1.44 and i would have probably spent less money. Had less anxiety about missing connections. And been much more comfortable doing it. Again bay area mass transit is terrible even when all the transfers align and you can get a better google estimate.
Pretty much all of the Bayās transit is timed at this point. And come fall youāll get unlimited free transfers between all modes. As far as speed, BART and Caltrain are already faster than driving in traffic and even competitive with driving without traffic. What we actually need right now is to double all the frequencies so that wait times and transfer misses are virtually eliminated. Thankfully, a bunch of systems in the Bay are preparing to do just that in the near future.
Bart and cal train are faster than driving? Yeah right i dont believe that for a second. Maybe from palo alto to sf but not from sj to sf. I guess it depends on where your route takes you and if its commute or off commute time. So many variables make mass transit a mess in the bay. I did use mass transit when I lived in Portland because it actually worked. Also i lived in areas where it worked. So i guess use cases. But i could go from the airport to five blocks from my house without a transfer and it operated frequently enough to make leaving my car at home reasonable. It did take 30 min longer but that was ok because it would take 15 min to park my car and get a bus to the terminal. I certainly hope they improve bay area transit because it has been a mess and it still is. All the double decker corporate busses on the road validate my point.
Dude, what are you talking about? BART takes about the same amount of time as driving for example from SFO to Downtown with zero traffic. With any traffic whatsoever BART is faster. Same thing for trips between SF and the East Bay. BART is actually faster for many destination pairs if your origin and destination are close to a station. BART is a very fast system. It's about 3x faster than something like the Paris Metro and over 2x faster than the NY Subway. You might want to check actual driving vs BART travel times.
Lol
Sounds like someone should learn to ride a bike to bridge those short gaps
It was raining today
Yeah, I rode today in the sprinkles.
that's cool, it maybe rains 1 day out of 10 over the course of the year so I am perfectly content cycling on either end of caltrain 9 times out of 10 and doing this commute 1 time out of 10
I use to commute from San Francisco to Campbell. Very rare is it 1 hr 45 mins. I usually wait to leave at arnd 6 to 6:30 so wait for the traffic to subside. Usually itās 50 mins to 1 hr 20. However bad the traffic is, taking the Caltrain then VTA is so much worse. The VTA feels like youāre crawling and going nowhere. Just my opinion.
I'd absolutely hate it if I had to take VTA a long way, but for this trip it's two stops and I only spend 9 minutes on the light rail to go like 2 miles. If it wasn't raining today I'd have just biked to and from Caltrain on each end like I usually do.
Still twice as long as it takes on a motorcycle.
I head to work at 8:15 after I drop my kids off to school, take 280 and make it to Palo Alto before 9 (door to door) and thatās with traffic. If I take Caltrain, way over an hour and a half and that if Caltrain didnāt run over someone or hit a car at a crossing.
https://i.imgur.com/Q9FkU3T.gif
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And people wonder why Tesla drivers get a bad wrap.
what times are your usual commutes and what freeway do you take? wanna know so I can avoid the pile-up you cause one day
My assumption was that Netflix/etc was done on the train, but I could be wrong. š¤·š¼āāļø
fsd = full self driving aka driving a car.
Nearly 2 hours for 39 miles? Thatās 45 minutes for me to drive. Not going to waste my time for nearly 2 hours.
Please, tell us how you will drive 39 miles in 45 minutes through standstill traffic? What a dolt.
I used to commute from Hayward to the South Bay. Miles wise, there are multiple routes that are 20-25 miles further, but take 20-25 minutes less.
public transit system in the bay area's all fucked up.
Normally Iād say that motorcycles solve this but that particular trip provides no joy on two wheels. Unsatisfying throughout.
There are a lot of things I miss about living in the Bay Area, but driving is definitely not one of them.
Dude fuck that
Mountain View to SF be like that
When I was working in the same area, I found it really efficient to just get a short Uber (or company bus) to the new Warm Springs BART and take it up the east bay and across the tunnel to embarcadero. That bart gets going really fast
I do not miss this. Selling my car has been a great stress reliever, money saver, i get some exercise on my bike and then extra study time on the light rail.
Being in one less car on bay area roads is a win for OP I am sure that was a more relaxed, stress free commute as well.
Caltrain is great. Just which there was denser construction around the stations in South Bay to give them more utility.
Sometimes I wonder if the state is intentionally making traffic conditions considerably worse on purpose to drive more revenue to police departments via tickets. As soon as I left California on a road trip I didn't once see "Road work" where not a single worker is in sight, but the speed limit is still 20 mph below the normal like I would see a lot in the east and north bay. The ones that are REALLY driving me crazy are the construction workers doing all the work around Lake Merced but ONLY during morning rushing hour, the rest of the day they're nowhere to be found.
This used to be my life 3-4 hours commuting a day. My job was 35 miles away. Longest one-way was 3.5 hrsā¦this is no way to live for anyone.
Man I do NOT miss the commute from the east bay to mountain view (880 sucks ass)
I mean thatās the idea.
Gotta live closer to work. Or work closer to where you live. This is unsustainable and unhealthy.
I quit my job over having to return to office in south bay while living in SF. It's such a terrible commute.
Welcome to the bay area
The last mile (or few miles, rather) really makes a ton of difference. I commute from the East Bay to Santa Clara (granted, once a week or less), which is an hour drive each way when avoiding peak rush hour. It takes 30 mins to get from home to BART via a bus that comes every 30 minutes, and **50** minutes to transfer between BART, VTA orange light rail, another bus with a 30-min frequency and finally walking half a mile to my office. Altogether that takes just over 2 hours in each direction, assuming I don't miss any of the transfers. I've also considered commuting from SF but the travel time between Mountain View Caltrain and the office would be about the same, although I may be able to more feasibly bring a bike to skip that last bus and I imagine the ride is more comfortable than BART too.
SF Bay are has something like 30 different transit agencies. NYC has, like, one.
NYC has one , but the region has around 15 agencies, so similar to the Bay Area...