The Vagaries of Public Transit
Saturday I went to an event in a town on the other side of the San Francisco Peninsula. I live in a suburb on the bay side; my destination was a beach town on the ocean side. It isn't particularly far away in a straight line, but there is no direct route across the peninsula (due to a protected watershed where people are not allowed to go), so the trip entails taking one bus about 15 miles to the north, then a second bus that heads back south about 8 miles along a very steep and convoluted route, and finally a 2-mile bike ride. Total travel time was 2.5 to 3 hours each way, which included quite a bit of waiting, since these buses run infrequently. Google Maps says the same trip by car takes 33 minutes. The route is more or less the same except a car would travel almost entirely on freeways instead of surface streets.
Trips like this one really make me wish for better public transit! If I want to visit San Francisco or San Jose, it's easy, but I miss out on a lot of interesting activities in suburbs and outlying towns because it's either impossible or ridiculously time-consuming to get there. Do the rest of you experience things like this? What do you do in those cases?