BusMan goes to San Francisco

Yesterday I went to San Francisco. I did not take the bus there (yuck!), nor did I take the bus from my home to the airport. I've actually looked into taking the bus to the airport, and will probably try it some day, but not when I have to catch a 7:00 a.m. flight.

Once I got to San Francisco, though, it was a different story. I took the BART from the Oakland airport to downtown San Francisco, then caught a bus that took me to my meeting at a client's home near the Golden Gate Park panhandle. One bus, very easy. As was getting back to downtown on one bus. Hung out downtown, had lunch with a friend, then caught BART back to Oakland. So easy. So much nicer than renting a stupid car, driving, fighting traffic, finding parking.

San Francisco is definitely more BusMan-friendly than Los Angeles, mainly because the area is more compact and they have a lot more buses, streetcars, and trains. Still, to find my way I used a Trip Planner on the Muni website just like the one for Los Angeles on the MTA website. In conjunction with an old fashioned map, it was no different than making the same arrangements for LA trips. Certainly there are more LA trips than San Francisco trips that actually require a car, but it made me realize that public transportation in LA is not that hard nor that different.