We had an amazing time visiting San Francisco recently. It’s a gem of a city with so much
to offer in terms of interesting and vibrant neighbourhoods, culture, history, architecture,
and nature. Before you ask, yes, the city does have a dark side and we’ll talk about what this
means for visitors later in the video, but San Francisco really is so much more than what you
hear about on the news. In this video we’re going to focus on what made San Francisco such
a good trip for us: it’s a pretty good place to visit without a car. (Which is a relief,
because everywhere we looked there was a sign warning us about car break-ins.)
We can enjoy a good road trip here and there, but for cities there’s nothing like exploring
on your own two feet, supplemented by transit and cycling of course.
Other parts of the Bay Area are more suburban, but San Francisco itself is
generally compact and pedestrian-scale. More than that, it’s one of those dense,
lively cities that’s inherently fun to be in and walk around. It’s the kind of place where
you’re not just shuffling around from one discrete tourist destination to another — the city streets
and neighbourhoods are themselves destinations to enjoy. You can walk for hours enjoying the shops,
cafes, and restaurants on the commercial streets and taking in the beautiful townhouses and old
apartments on the nearby residential streets. San Francisco’s housing politics are famously
dysfunctional and hostile to new construction, but as tourists who aren’t saddled with the sky-high
rent, we’re happy to enjoy the historic preservation and aesthetics of the older
buildings. We loved seeing the pastel colours, stucco, mixture of Spanish and Victorian styles,
and hippie history, including the Grateful Dead house. Coming from not-Vancouver Canada,
the palm trees and semi-desert landscape in the Bay Area are also big novelties for us.
One caveat to San Francisco’s walkability is the terrain. It’s pretty well known for
being an extremely hilly city but that doesn’t come through on a map. Two streets connected by
a parklet — maybe that’s traffic calming put in for COVID? Nope, steps for a steep climb. On the
bright side, the extra dimension adds character to the city and provides constant opportunities for
amazing views seemingly everywhere you look. Good enough that on some streets you might be tempted
to walk backwards. Our favourite panoramic view came from the Twin Peaks in the middle of the
city. We climbed a sketchy dirt path but later found one of the roads up the hill closed to car
traffic. So many of the city’s parks are on hills too, which really… elevates the park experience.
We saw some cool urbanism projects (car-free Market Street, JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park,
and miscellaneous slow streets in different neighbourhoods) but it seemed like San Francisco
with its density could easily support at least a half dozen fully pedestrianized commercial streets
in the same vein as Montreal. On our trip we also walked around two other Bay Area cities or towns:
Berkeley and Sausalito. Berkeley to the east of San Francisco has some excellent lookout
points in the hills above the university, and Sausalito across the Golden Gate Bridge to the
north has a nice lively downtown along the water with a surprising amount of cycling.
Transit can also be a great way to see a city, at least when it’s not underground. You can
cover more distance than walking without having to pay attention to driving or parking. We made the
mistake of not taking the cable cars or historic streetcars because we just walked or biked in the
areas they served, but in hindsight it would have been cool to hang off one of these. The
streetcars are a regular transit fare but the cable cars are more expensive. We did take the
bus and light rail within the city — one day we walked from downtown to Ocean Beach but took the
light rail back, which was a good vantage point to see the less dense but not exactly suburban
neighbourhoods on the west side of the city. If San Francisco's hills are an issue, city buses
go up the Twin Peaks and hop-on hop-off tourist buses take you around different neighbourhoods.
Ignoring Caltrain, the other important transit option is BART: Bay Area Rapid Transit. It’s
an urban subway in San Francisco and Oakland that branches off to become suburban commuter rail with
lower frequency and more spaced out stops in the East Bay. BART is the main airport connection and
we also used it every day because for this trip we stayed outside of San Francisco in Berkeley
on one of those suburban branches. Unfortunately this meant trains weren’t super frequent: every
15 minutes on weekdays and 30 minutes on weekends and holidays. One of the stations we used was also
in a highway median, a loud and unpleasant place to wait 23 minutes for a train; even as people who
really prefer transit, we understand why someone might choose a car if they had to wait for a train
here daily. On the plus side, we enjoyed the above ground and elevated portions of the ride,
the new trains have nice screens, trains have dedicated space for bikes, and you can
get transit passes on your phone. We also enjoyed half-price fares due to BART’s 50th anniversary.
After walking up to 20 kilometres a day for the first half of the trip our feet started
to get a little beat up, so we rented bikes to give them some rest and cover more distance.
We ended up finding a bike rental in the most unlikely of places: the Downtown Berkeley
BART station parking garage has a bike repair shop that does rentals for $35 American a day,
which was absolutely worth not having to constantly worry about docking a bike every
30 minutes with Bay Wheels, the local (more expensive) version of Bixi. Also, as a bonus,
we actually didn’t have to return the bike until the end of the next day.
They offered us helmets which we took because, well, California. These bikes
were full of surprises — bizarrely, they didn’t come with kickstands. That has to be a mistake,
right? Sure, you don’t need a kickstand if you’re racing or mountain biking,
but for normal biking around the city — the kind of thing you do when you rent
a bike from a transit station — kickstands essential. No one wants to lean their bike
against objects or lay it on the ground every time they’re not using it. The second surprise
is that these bikes had airless tires. That’s right, completely solid, no air, no pumping,
and no flat tires. These have downsides but they’re a neat option for rental bikes. The ride
was maybe a little bumpier but we didn’t actually notice them feeling any slower than regular tires.
Unfortunately the cycling experience in the Bay Area wasn’t as good as the walking or transit
experience in many ways. It wasn’t the hills — they’re a challenge, but they’re not everywhere,
and low gears are actually pretty good at their job if you can accept going slow.
The main challenge was, like in most cities, unprotected and disconnected bike infrastructure.
Shoutout to some of the gems we encountered (concrete-protected bike lanes in Berkeley,
a greenway under BART in Albany, sidewalk-level bike lanes in Emeryville, and slow streets in
San Francisco) but overall our experience on both sides of the bay was carefully planning
our routes using Google Maps and Street View and spending way too much time off our
bikes confirming directions. This sharply contrasts with the simplicity of walking,
where you can just go in any direction and basically know that there will be sidewalks
for you. This isn’t to say the walking experience was perfect or anything — any
time you walk near a highway you experience the old, familiar cars-are-king attitude.
A perception exists that San Francisco is overrun by homelesesness and crime. We’re
not experts on the city but we can tell you what we saw in September of
2022. Walking around we definitely noticed the tents and presumably-occupied campers,
a stark reminder that housing is crushingly expensive in the Bay Area,
but they’re not everywhere and they’re not on their own threatening.
We did see some scary behaviour — hard drug use and people acting erratically or
aggressively — but that was mostly localized to the Civic Center / UN Plaza area on the
west end of downtown. We knew to avoid the infamous Tenderloin district nearby but it
happened to spill over to Civic Center and Market Street more than we expected.
It was unpleasant for sure but the vast majority of the city wasn’t like this
at all. Maybe it was more widespread and harder to avoid during the depths of COVID,
but when we were there it did not strike us as a reason not to visit.
One unfortunate exception to this stuff being localized and easy to avoid was transit,
especially BART. It’s not that we never experience sketchy things on transit back in Canada,
but it’s not that common. In one week of taking transit in San Francisco we saw people throwing
glass bottles, punching windows, yelling threats, and spitting. We saw a drug deal.
We saw someone, uhmm, consuming hard drugs on the platform. Once our train stopped in
Oakland for a few minutes as a K9 police unit investigated another car. It wasn’t every ride
but let’s say every second or third ride. A local warned us about theft on BART too.
This didn’t stop us from taking transit, but it kept us on our guard and degraded the experience,
and let’s be real — lots of people will simply not use transit if experiences like this are
too common, and we can’t really blame them. We preferred getting off at Embarcadero station
over Civic Center or Powell Street downtown, and not just because it has a cooler name. If
you’re visiting and worried though, you can just stay in San Francisco itself to avoid daily BART
rides. Theft from parked cars is apparently an issue too, especially at tourist sites.
It was interesting seeing the popularity of eScooters in the Bay Area. We have
these back home too and they’re somewhat popular but not like here. We probably saw
as many eScooters as bikes in day-to-day use, not counting the bike race we saw in
San Francisco or the enormous bike party we came across in Berkeley.
We were surprised on this trip at how expensive groceries and restaurants were.
Canadians are used to going to the U.S. to buy things for cheap and while we knew
California wouldn’t be like the south or midwest, we didn’t expect groceries to be
significantly more expensive than at home. But at least it’s not as bad as housing?
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. We’re not going to pretend the
city doesn’t face some real issues, but all-in-all we can still say that
San Francisco was a great trip for us. It’s an iconic American city and we’re surprised
we hadn’t visited before. Well, aside from it being on the other side of the continent,
4,000 kilometres away. Anyway, a special thanks to our supporters on Patreon.