A VTA bus

Oh look I’m finally writing something for this blog again after not having posted for almost a year. Guess the prediction I made when I started this came true.

I’m an advocate for better transit service. I grew up in Orange County, California, where the only bus route within walking distance from my house came once every 45 minutes and stopped service at about 8:30 PM at night, so I know what it’s like to be car-dependent to get around. Of course, if I really wanted to commit to living on transit only, I should have lived in San Francisco proper. Muni has fantastic bus coverage and frequency (even if it is a bit slow).

But here I am, in Santa Clara County, where I’m reliant on the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA). And VTA’s service level is… let’s be charitable and call it okay. There are a few frequent routes (15 minutes or less) that pass by my apartment, and a few limited-stop Rapid routes as well. I’m not in the core of their service area (East San Jose) where their most frequent routes are clustered, but I’m not necessarily in an area that only has one or two routes pass by. So from mid-September to mid-October of 2024, I figured I’d give it a shot - taking all trips via transit (or walking, if it was more appropriate). I just wanted to see if it was doable in a more car-dependent area like the one I live in. Here’s what I found.

Planning and Time

I’m not unfamiliar with transit by any means. I know the bus routes around here, generally where the go, how frequent they are, etc. I know my way around Bay Area transit too (paying with Clipper, the different agencies in each area, etc.). So this was less of a test of how someone unfamiliar with the system would navigate it, and more of a test of if it would be possible to do in the first place, given enough advance planning. And that’s what struck me the most. I had to alter my travel patterns to account for both transit travel time, and whether it would be possible for me to get back later in the night (of course I could just Uber home, but I felt like that defeated some of the spirit of the challenge if I could reliably rely on rideshare to get where I needed to go).

Planning was easy enough, between Google Maps and the Transit app. These can tell you when the bus comes, where to get on, where to get off, and walking directions to your final destination. You can even plan in advance for future days. VTA’s network isn’t frequent enough to the point where I can consider “not thinking about it” in terms of taking transit - I still have to consider transfer times in some cases, and at any rate some routes are not necessarily frequent enough to just step outside and take a line that comes in 3-5 minutes. Waits can be up to 15 minutes even on frequent lines (as scheduled). There were times when I had to take less frequent (half hourly or even hourly) routes to certain destinations (such as getting my COVID-19 booster shot) and that required a bit more planning. Had to plan out when I needed to wake up in the morning to get to Kaiser on time for when they opened, and still be back at my apartment in time for my first meeting of the day for work. It wasn’t something that I could do with zero thought.

The thing that struck me the most was how much it limited my options late at night. VTA reduces service later at night, with certain routes ending in the evening and all service (more or less) ending at midnight. This basically meant that I couldn’t watch movies at the AMC movie theater closest to me that started after 4-5PM, especially on weekends when service is thinner. That was my number one gripe with this - it really put a constraint on things like that. I’m lucky enough to have a second AMC nearby, and that one was accessible with Caltrain which runs every 30 minutes on weekends until after midnight, but that one has less showings than the AMC I go to primarily. Between those two I made it work, but it was definitely suboptimal compared to just driving there. I had to leave a lot earlier to get to AMC in a timely manner - I can typically leave my apartment ~15 minutes before showtime and get there during the trailers, while with transit the walk from the nearest bus stop alone took 15 minutes.

Not Having to Drive

Driving isn’t unpleasant in Santa Clara County, but there are bits and pieces of it that are. My chief example here is driving up the 101 (yeah, I call it the 101, in the Southern California style, fight me) during rush hour. Traffic on that freeway gets utterly miserable, so on days I go into the office I don’t even bother to drive - I just take Caltrain. But that was something I was already doing prior to this challenge, so it wasn’t new to me. Caltrain is definitely one of the highlights of Bay Area transit - it’s decently frequent for commuter/regional rail at every 30 minutes (or sooner) until midnight, it’s fast (comparable to driving), and comfortable, especially with the new EMUs. They even have Wi-Fi, and it’s fast too. I used to drive to BART in San Bruno to go into San Francisco on the weekends, when Caltrain used to come only hourly and it was a lot slower, but now I don’t see a reason to do that anymore. My work commutes have vastly improved with Caltrain’s electrification, and it was the easiest part of this challenge by far.

The benefit on VTA was less pronounced and street traffic is busy, but a bit more manageable - given how much longer it took to get places, especially if it wasn’t a direct route. It was nice to be able to zone out on some trips, but it wasn’t worth the time penalty, to be honest.

Errands

Running errands with a car is just so much easier. Especially grocery shopping. I’m not a shop weekly person - I live alone and tend to buy enough food to last more or less a month. So that was.. challenging to do this month. I have a Safeway within somewhat reasonable walking distance (15-20 minutes) so I just decided to walk there. Having to drag the groceries with a wheeled cart, though, was something I confirmed to myself that I didn’t want to have to repeat. I felt like I was going to break the cart with the number of bags I piled onto it, and how I stuffed everything in there. I suppose that’s why people like grocery delivery services like Instacart, but I can’t stomach the fees on those services. Either that, or people just go shopping more often - I don’t feel like I want to be spending that much time on grocery shopping.

Another instance was when I had to make several visits in a row - first to the local FedEx to drop something off, then to Whole Foods to return some items to Amazon, then to the Apple Store, before going home. This loop was not great. Getting to FedEx was easy - there’s a frequent and rapid bus route heading there. But still not frequent enough - I just missed the bus heading from there to Whole Foods (which was in the opposite direction). Crossing large roads to get to bus stops is suboptimal, as well. And getting from Whole Foods to the Apple Store was an exercise in inconvenience - either a 15 minute walk + a long wait for the next bus (up to 30 minutes), or I had to run for the Rapid bus that was coming sooner. I chose the former, and I barely made it - I had to sprint. That kind of frequency on a “rapid” route is unacceptable - if it’s not frequent, what’s the point of a limited-stop route?

Conclusions

Yes, I went back to driving when all of this was over. There are a few things that I might take transit for more consistently (i.e. going to downtown Sunnyvale or downtown San Jose) - but apart from going to work via Caltrain which is something I already did previously, VTA still remains something that I have to plan around in order to make trips on it work. It’s doable but I wouldn’t call it an optimal experience by any means. The South Bay is still, unfortunately, designed for cars first and people second.