At 11:30 AM 01/30/2003 -0500, Jamie Lawrence wrote:
I lived in San Francisco for 10 years. One job I had required me to have a car so I could get to a data center in San Jose in cases of emergency (never happened), so I bought a cheap beater. Spent $1000 on the car, $400 a year on insurance, and about $3000/yr on parking and parking tickets. It was eventually stolen, and I was incredibly happy when it was. BART is actually not bad - one can work on the ride. MUNI is miserable, but it usually works, at least.
Depending on where you live in the city, cabs can take care of the emergency situations, and renting a car can take care of events that you've got more advance notice about. On the other hand, San Francisco (like New York) has a special program to encourage car ownership and parking consumption, called "taxi medallions", which are designed to make sure there are never as many cabs on the street as the market will bear.
Caltrain was a nice way to commute for the ~5 years I was going in that direction. As Bill Frantz said, you can work on the train, which does make up for the hurry-up-and-wait. Amtrak in most of the US sucks, but from NYC-NewJersey-Washington, it works pretty well - I found it was typically about 15 minutes slower than flying, if I got one of the express trains.
