My friend who came from Tokyo says the transit here (bay area) is horrible. She states that you can't get anywhere you like and the scheduling system isn't always on time. In Japan, people rarely drive because the public system is everywhere and very efficient. You get a train every 5 minutes so you don't have to wait 30 minutes just for your ride.
If VTA (being in the center of the valley) implements some sort of GPS tracker on their trains, I think it give people a better idea when to head for the train station.
Haha, I'd be happy if VTA paid more attention to the time their platforms display. The time on at least half the platforms is off by 3 to 4 minutes from my phone's time (which is set on automatic).
Forget that, when DST stopped in November, the large VTA digital clocks were displaying PDT instead of PST for ONE WHOLE WEEK, and I'm talking about a major station in downtown San Jose.
So yeah, catching the train is basically a guessing game.
Tokyo is certainly more dense than SV for the most part, but it isn't really fantastically dense. It's very large, and has locations ranging from dense urban centers to mountains, but for the most part is rather less dense than you might think based on its reputation. E.g. a lot of Tokyo housing stock is 1-2 story single-family dwellings (high-rise dwellings were pretty rare until fairly recently, in part due to the earthquake risk).
It has absolutely fantastic public transit everywhere, even outside the denser urban cores.
AFAICT, this comes from the way the city is structured: dwellings and businesses tend to cluster around rail lines and stations, increasing their efficiency, which makes it easier to support a large number of rail lines (rail transit is a profitable business in Tokyo), and that in turn increases the effectiveness of the network (the well-known "network effect"). Even though most rail transit is private and run by a huge number of different companies, they well-recognize the importance of the network effect, and so tend to cooperate, trying to make transfers easy and liberally using interlining.
There are also well-developed secondary transit networks (bus and bicycling) that increase the effective coverage of the rail lines.
If VTA (being in the center of the valley) implements some sort of GPS tracker on their trains, I think it give people a better idea when to head for the train station.