Most of the US has terrible public transit. The reason is simple: America is not densely populated. NYC is one of the few cities where public transit works, because it is so dense. Manhattan has ~70k people / sq mile. Compare this to SF: a measly ~17k people / sq mile [1] [2]. That's more than 4x as dense! The Valley is even worse, with sprawling suburbia.
Honestly, Caltrain is not that terrible. It compares fairly well to Metro-North in NYC when you consider the population density. There's a train every hour to take you up to the city (or back) in an hour. Most cities don't have a direct train you can feasibly take in from the suburbs to the city. Yeah, it sucks that it stops at midnight, but public transit generally doesn't run late anywhere. Even in NYC, transit out to the suburbs stops at ~2:30a.
It's a little annoying to see people commenting here that this is entirely due to politicians and bureaucracy. It isn't. It's just not economically feasible to offer public transit comparable to NYC to the bay area.
I checked the same figures for the two largest cities in my country.
Stockholm and Göteborg have between 7000-12000 / sq mile. That is less than SF, appearently. But the public transit is just like the rest of Europe - much better than the US. I think population density is not the real explanation, it just appears so when you compare between US cities.
CalTrain at the weekend is the stuff of nightmares, stopping at every single stop. Then, because the Highway 17 bus to Santa Cruz is part-funded by Amtrak and not CalTrain, you get to see the bus at the stand as the CalTrain pulls in, then depart before you can get to the stop, and wait an hour for the next one to appear.
The bus will apparently wait for Amtrak trains.
The transit would be passable if they could just find some political will to force the different systems to work together in some reasonable fashion. Instead, a bus driver sees people running off the train in order to get on his bus, and then leaves anyway.
Honestly, Caltrain is not that terrible. It compares fairly well to Metro-North in NYC when you consider the population density. There's a train every hour to take you up to the city (or back) in an hour. Most cities don't have a direct train you can feasibly take in from the suburbs to the city. Yeah, it sucks that it stops at midnight, but public transit generally doesn't run late anywhere. Even in NYC, transit out to the suburbs stops at ~2:30a.
It's a little annoying to see people commenting here that this is entirely due to politicians and bureaucracy. It isn't. It's just not economically feasible to offer public transit comparable to NYC to the bay area.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco