This is Valley-specific, but the same applies to a lot of metros in California. Portland is at least somewhat convenient to get around.
For me to get from my apartment in San Jose to my office in Palo Alto requires two train trips, one on VTA, one on Caltrain. Both trains are almost always off-schedule (by a lot) and have the shittiest ticketing systems in existence. Not to mention, the train schedules are totally useless (for my needs, at least) if I want to either get up at a reasonable hour, or make my morning meeting.
San Francisco's BART is a lot better, to be fair, although it's still not better than the trains I've been on in a handful of other countries (Canada, mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea).
And for all of this glory, the state legislature wants an extra 10% of my paycheck? Right.
California schools are their own unique mess, and that's too long of a rant. Water is also pretty lousy in a lot of areas -- the tap water at my office is on a par with the youth hostel I stayed at in Beijing.
I challenge you to find a place 50 miles outside of the center of any major metropolitan area that lives up to your transit expectations. If you travel the equivalent of San Francisco-San Jose from Portland, you'd be in Salem and would be complaining about the Greyhound.
Having lived in the Bay Area and Italy, I'd give the win to Italy's public transportation hands down. Trains aren't great, and are sometimes late, but there are enough of them that unless there's a major problem, you don't have to worry too much about missing one because another will come along soon.
Also, the system is somewhat rational: trains for longer distance trips, busses for cities, and around the countryside. The train station and bus stations are always connected so that even in a city you don't know, it doesn't take long to figure things out and get where you need to go. The Bay Area is a complete mish-mash of systems. The first thing that comes to everyone's mind when they see it is "why doesn't BART go all around the bay?!".
Yes, the various organizational overlaps, competing interest groups, and projects that had bigger plans than they did bankrolls makes the whole system less functional that it needs to be. Up until quite recently if I had wanted to take public transit from my home (south bay) to the Berkeley I would have needed to take VTA light rail to the San Jose caltrain station, Caltrain to SF (4th & King), SF MUNI to a BART station, and then BART to Berkeley; with the Caltrain/BART connection at SFO I can at least cut the MUNI step out of the process but it is still faster and cheaper to just hop in my car and drive there...
There is a map in the San Jose Diridon Caltrain station, placed right next to the door across from the ramps. After some searching I found someone who took a photo of it here:
It is a very interesting map because it contains the lines of most of the transit authorities in the Bay Area(apparently not all because transit.511.org has more). There are so many that they have to reuse similar colors for a few of them. There are agencies that you probably have never heard of on that map.
That is a scary thing and indicates the true scale of the transit problem - so many overlapping interests, no central authority. And looking at the transit agencies alone doesn't even give us perspective on how many other bureaucracies are getting in the way.
> San Francisco's BART is a lot better, to be fair, although it's still not better than the trains I've been on in a handful of other countries (Canada, mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea).
Trains in mainland China is cheap and fast. In Beijing it is just 2 Yuan to get anywhere by subway! I doubt that any other country has trains that are so cheap.
