"No, they simply have public transit -- it's not great by any means. You often have to supplement with taxi in both places."
Citation needed. 99.9% of the time I was lived in NY, I used public transit instead of taxis. London and France? Underground stops running close to one and so anytime I tried staying out late I needed to walk, take a night bus, or hail a cab (which is near impossible on a Friday night).
I think you should more carefully choose your battles: It's really no contest.
Bart closes at midnight and has four stops in the heart of SF. NY has an OK metro but if you want to go cross-town, better just walk. I've spent time in NYC and lived in SF, Zurich, Berlin, Prague and London. Europe destroys on this topic. A huge percentage of people in Europe, like myself, don't own cars simply because we don't have to.
Saying it's no contest is a huge exaggeration. I won't argue that BART/MUNI is better than other transit systems, but I still get around without a car.
That said, the fact that transit closes in London and Paris while New York doesn't is a major advantage. It's actually precisely the reason why I have been able to not take a taxi or have to walk home in the early morning. And in NYC, a lot of people don't own cars because they don't have to either.
BART and Muni beat most other transit systems in the US, but pale in comparison even to London, let alone Berlin or Frankfurt. If you're heading anywhere west of downtown SF, expect long waits for connecting buses...which often simply fail to appear, NextBus's predictions notwithstanding. As an earlier commenter mentioned, it's not uncommon for SF commuters to finish the last leg of their commute with a cab.
And a lot of people in NYC don't have cars simply because they can't afford to park them, not because available mass transit makes them unnecessary.
Can confirm that for Prague. I'm using bike mostly, sometimes combinded with metro, but whenever I fallback to public transport I feel grateful for how well it works. It's easy to get anywhere at any time, even at night. Last week it took me 40 mins at 4am to get from my home near the centre to the airport outside of city using bus lines that cross the city in 30mins intervals and meet together at hub stations.
On contrary, the bus lines in country were privatized and many useful (but probably not so profitable) lines were cut, and while it got better balanced in time, it's still suboptimal on many places/times and is a living example of where free market actually diverges from being a good public service.
I love BART, but it's a fairly unreliable system with very few stops in San Francisco. MUNI is actually several connected systems, but the majority of them are unreliable, expensive, and not implemented well.
I would not say the Bay Area has great public transit. It just has some public transit, which is more than you can say for a lot of California.
I lived in NYC and SF. Public Transit is far from ideal. When's the last caltrain on sunday? 8pm?? In NYC, I live in midtown east and take a lot of cabs .. mainly for cross town events. Yes .. I tried the bus but I realized my dignity was worth more than 10 bucks.
In London, the night bus route I tend to use (to Walthamstow from central London) runs at a slightly lower frequency overnight - just once every ten minutes. It's about as fast as the tube because of the more limited traffic.
And you use the same old Oyster card as during the day. I assume it's just as cheap - 80p or a pound per ride? Cheap enough that I don't even keep track.
I agree with the GP - the overnight services outside of limited routes in NYC aren't flash, and most of the rest of the US metro areas are appalling.
Citation needed. 99.9% of the time I was lived in NY, I used public transit instead of taxis. London and France? Underground stops running close to one and so anytime I tried staying out late I needed to walk, take a night bus, or hail a cab (which is near impossible on a Friday night).