Like, I take the BART every day into work. It's fantastic.
I walk for five to ten minutes to get to the station, a
train comes every 5 minutes so I don't have to worry about
the train schedule, then I walk another five to ten minutes
to get to the office. If the bus experience could match
that, it'd take over a lot of commuting.
For what it's worth, this is only the case if you live near a station with overlap (or live in SF itself). I lived in West Oakland and had a train practically every 3 minutes.
Then I moved to Berkeley. Commute in is every 15 minutes, 50/50 I have to take a transfer on the way in. Commute home is a nightmare: BART has a carriage shortage so they try to shave off cars from longer routes (such as the Richmond line). This means things get really crowded on occasion, and there's a point where a car being crowded begets more crowding, as it takes longer and longer to offboard/onboard people and therefore each subsequent stop has more people to cram on. A majority of the time on my way home when I get a transfer (as there seems to be a Richmond train from SF only for an hour span at the peak of rush hour), the trains are almost an entire cycle late, meaning I've got another 15 minute wait to see two trains come through one after the other.
The point of this is: the problems you raise with busses are also with trains/BART. Some of them are even worse for BART: you have to steeply limit the service area because putting down tracks is stupendously expensive.
This is less a "problem with trains" than it is a "problem with rail in the United States", or maybe just with SF.
Melbourne Metro, for example, has roughly the same amount of weekday riders as BART, 415,000 vs 446,000 respectively, with nearly 5 times(!) the amount of track, at 540mi vs 112mi.
This is, of course, excluding light rail services -- another 150mi of track in Melbourne with some 1,700 stops, and non-Metro heavy-rail services to the other nearby commuter hub cities like Geelong and Ballarat.
Berlin is, from my knowledge, more similar to Melbourne than to SF in this respect.
But y'know what the funny thing is? Everyone in Melbourne hates the bus service. Makes me wonder about what they think about buses in Berlin.
The problem with BART is that it runs 4 out of 5 lines on the same single stretch of track through SF. So even with the most modern signaling, there will still be 1/4th the maximum train frequency after the individual lines split. The Pittsburg-Bay Point line counteracts this during rush hour with trains that come just into the city and then turn around, but it's still only an average of ~7 mins between trains. Compare with the Victoria line in London which I believe runs 36 trains an hour!
Had the same experience when I lived over there too. Was pretty surprised West Oakland was as cheap as it was relative to anywhere North Oakland/Berkeley considering how much more access it had to everything.
The price of places under ten minutes from a BART station further out were sharply different to further out in the same area too. You could shave some time off by cycling but then you're the guy with a bike on the packed train.
Seem to recall 20+ minute waits for trains in Berkeley on weekends too (it'd be handy if they let you know this somewhere in the station before you pass the ticket point, but that's another thing), with a transfer required to get into SF?
SF is far from the worst area for public transport, but it'd never come near my best.
> BART has a carriage shortage so they try to shave off cars from longer routes
This is just crazy. Compared to the cost of new track some additional rolling stock should be almost insignificant. You couldn't come up with a better example of penny wise, pound foolish...
The rolling stock is actually a very significant cost of the system. In DC, they spent $886 million for Kawasaki to build them 428 railcars in one contract, which comes out to just over $2M per car (and a single train normally has 8 cars). According to Wikipedia, they now have 500 of these 7000-series cars in service; that's $1B.
Then I moved to Berkeley. Commute in is every 15 minutes, 50/50 I have to take a transfer on the way in. Commute home is a nightmare: BART has a carriage shortage so they try to shave off cars from longer routes (such as the Richmond line). This means things get really crowded on occasion, and there's a point where a car being crowded begets more crowding, as it takes longer and longer to offboard/onboard people and therefore each subsequent stop has more people to cram on. A majority of the time on my way home when I get a transfer (as there seems to be a Richmond train from SF only for an hour span at the peak of rush hour), the trains are almost an entire cycle late, meaning I've got another 15 minute wait to see two trains come through one after the other.
The point of this is: the problems you raise with busses are also with trains/BART. Some of them are even worse for BART: you have to steeply limit the service area because putting down tracks is stupendously expensive.