As someone who doesn't live in the SF bay area, the sheer number of transportation systems confuses and puzzles me. Caltrain, BART, Muni, SamTrans, Golden Gate Transit, etc. Why aren't these systems unified under a single system map and timetable? In the Boston area we have the MBTA, in New York there's the MTA. Why does San Francisco need 5+?
> As someone who doesn't live in the SF bay area, the sheer number of transportation systems confuses and puzzles me. Caltrain, BART, Muni, SamTrans, Golden Gate Transit, etc. Why aren't these systems unified under a single system map and timetable? In the Boston area we have the MBTA, in New York there's the MTA. Why does San Francisco need 5+?
Likely, because New York and Boston are both larger (in population) and more concentrated metropolises, and are also both the principal metropolitan region of their respective states, which states are also the entities responsible for organizing each metropolises transit authority.
(NYC has, in 305 square miles, a population greater than the 9-county San Francisco Bay Area has in nearly 7,000 square miles, and NYC is close to half of New York State's population by itself, whereas even the whole 9-county Bay Area is around 1/5 of California's population.)
The reason is that the Bay Area is far more of a unit than originally, so things grew up independently basically in each county.
San Francisco, the city, has one main municipal system, Muni. Caltrain grew out of commuter rail that's existed for about a century and was originally private I believe.
BART was put together as an East-Bay-centric commuter rail that hoped to kind of unify everyone, but Marin (across the golden gate from SF), Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley/San Jose), and San Mateo County (between Santa Clara and SF) didn't want to pay the taxes required to be part of it.
And then there are other county bus-heavy transit agencies like Samtrans, VTA, AC Transit; it wouldn't make sense for Muni to run these since they're meant to serve other counties.
It's a giant mess, but each one largely sprung up on its own back when it was much less normal for someone to regularly travel all the way between Mountain View and SF.
In New York you have MTA Metro North, PATH, MTA Subway, MTA Select Bus Service, NJ Transit, etc.
Plus things like JFK AirTrain, Amtrak.
It's not confusing though --different names for different things. commuter rail vs intra-city transportation. Metro North doesn't share ticketing with the subway even though they're both MTA
NYC and SF aren't comparable at all since NYC is so much larger. But even then, NYC is more well-organized. The majority of the services you mentioned move commuters between NYC and surrounding areas, so it makes sense that they don't fall under MTA. SF separates its bus system from its train system (at least in labeling), and there's more than one train service within the city alone.
EDIT: Bear in mind it wasn't always this way, and NYC went through a painful process to unify its transportation services - something SF might have to do at some point. Competing train companies (IRT and BMT) were nationalized and folded into the city's separate system (IND). That's why you see numbered vs lettered trains. Those trains have entirely different systems - even the tracks have different widths.
NYC is a single political entity and the primary metropolitan region of the state in which the city is located. The former is true of the City and County of San Francisco -- but that's, by itself, not even a particular big city -- but not the 9-county Bay Area which is smaller, in population, than NYC despite having more than 20 times the land area. And the latter isn't true of SF at all.)
> SF separates its bus system from its train system (at least in labeling), and there's more than one train service within the city alone.
San Francisco's bus and train service are both labelled "Muni".
BART also has stops in San Francisco but is a separate multicounty agency (the Bay Area Rapid Transit District) of which SF happens to be a member, it isn't SF's.
> the 9-county Bay Area which is smaller, in population, than NYC despite having more than 20 times the land area.
LIRR, NJ Transit, Metro-North and the Port Authority easily cover more land than the Bay Area – note that these are all state-run agencies. AFAIK California has never taken an interest in creating its own state level transit agencies? The states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and the city of New York have been able to cooperate perhaps much better than SF and its surrounding counties.
> AFAIK California has never taken an interest in creating its own state level transit agencies?
It has (e.g., through longstanding cooperation with Amtrak, and more recently through the High-Speed Rail Authority), but not of the same style as those centered around New York or Boston, because California doesn't have any metropolitan areas like New York or Boston to support (even like New York or Boston before they had developed their strong coordinated public transit systems.)
California's urban areas are nothing like New York or Boston in density. Sure, the New York-centered services may cover a land area comparable to the Bay Area -- but the reason for an intense transit system in that area is that there are a lot more people there. New York City alone, has more people than the entire 9-county Bay Area has spread out over 7,000 square miles.
And, of course, while New York City is clearly the economically dominant metropolitan area of New York State (and politically dominant in the State, as the City itself has nearly half the State's population) and a considerable center of gravity even for surrounding states, and Boston has a similar role -- that the city itself isn't so much of the state, the metro area is -- in Massachusetts, the Bay Area isn't the dominant region in California, by population, economic power (despite being pretty strong in per capita wealth), or political influence.
What about it? I've never heard it described as a better internal transit system than the Bay Area has, just a better system as part of the multi-authority feeder into the transit system for the New York City metroplex.
If there was an adjacent New York City-scale metroplex into which the Bay Area fed, it would have very different transportation demands and needs -- and likely a very different transit system -- than it does.
Is BART an "internal" transit system and not a feeder system to/from SF?
NJ Transit is not solely a feeder system into NYC (that's what PATH is for), though that's probably most of it: https://www.njtransit.com/pdf/rail/Rail_System_Map.pdf . Is Oakland not analogous to Newark in this system?
Over the centuries New York gained control over neighboring counties. In SF nothing like that ever happened, so SF itself is tiny and surrounded by the edges of many different large counties that do whatever they want.
Also the Bay Area takes anti-development NIMBYism as a sort of state religion – people actually actively try to block development of mass transit, something that would be unthinkably absurd to someone used to NY.
San Francisco, the city itself, only has Muni and Bart unless you count the one or two express SamTrans buses that run to the busiest transit center (the end-of-the-line Caltrain station I believe). So it's actually relatively simple.
But if you're talking about the Bay Area, then you're talking about a pretty massive region composed of some pretty geographically-isolated subregions. You have the city of San Francisco, then the long peninsula, and then finally San Jose. But then wrapping up the other side of the bay you have several other cities and areas. I'm not sure that it would make sense to combine that.
