California Transportation – BART, GoCar, Ultralight, Waymo and more

We’ve all been travelling. After a year away spent mainly in Taiwan, our son Joe has returned for his next chapter in work, life and study. In true Christie style, he was boarding the plane out of Taipei as Typhoon Gaemi bore down on the island, looking to punish the east coast area of Hualien – the location affected by the terrible earthquake earlier this year. We have a knack for just missing calamities or having them unfold in a country around us with minimal effect on our travels.

Helen too had only just recently returned from Darwin where she spent several weeks enjoying the dry season weather that delivers low humidity and sunny days compared to the sometimes bleak greyness that Melbourne’s winter offers. She had returned to Melbourne the day before I left for San Francisco via Sydney.

The Journey back to Darwin

I missed catching up with Joe on my way back from San Francisco to Darwin via Melbourne where I had a layover of twelve hours and worked from home for the day before getting on my Qantas flight back to Darwin. I normally catch the train and bus out to Tullamarine airport, but this time in order to spend a little extra time with Helen we opted to drive out to the airport.

That decision almost led to me missing my flight. An accident on the Tullamarine Freeway slowed our progress to a crawl and we were just lucky that we had left early enough to get to the airport on time. It sometimes happens like that where the shortest part of the journey can turn out to be the most troublesome. Jetlag caught up with me on the flight and I managed to sleep for most of the four hour flight from Melbourne to Darwin.

Now you might think this is strange, but just like the Kerrigan’s in that iconic movie, “The Castle“, I walk home from the airport. As I only carry a backpack on my travels, the 30 minute walk home is just a bit of exercise after sitting down for four hours.

At 1 o’clock in the morning in Darwin, as long as it isn’t raining, it is a very pleasant walk through the sporting precinct of Darwin. During that time of night the only sounds are those of the large water sprinklers as they irrigate the sporting ovals I walk past and the occaisional eerie cries of the curlew, a bird that resembles in my minds eye a roadrunner with a long gangly legs and its tendency to dart from location to location stopping suddenly as if to say “you can’t see me”.

After my exciting nine-day adventure to San Francisco, San Jose, and Sacramento—visiting iconic sites, attending an Adobe conference, and flying in a classic ultralight aircraft—I returned home filled with incredible experiences.

Our family will be reunited when I return home in August to both work from home and attend this year’s Edutech Show where conference topics and trade show stalls act as a barometer for the desires and directions of many teachers and educators who view this event as an annual mindmeld with fellow educators. I cover this and other education related topics over on my Learnshifting site.

Now, I needed to organize these memories into shareable stories, but I had to park that activity. I was scheduled to deliver a Microsoft Teams training session that day and had to be at the best I could be. I was looking forward to the session, both for the topic and the group I would be working with. I can report that the session went well with the energy of the group making it easy to deliver.

This post is not about the detail of my adventure to San Francisco, I will cover that in subsequent posts as there is much to cover. However here are two thought threads I would like to share.

There’s always something happening in America

Our dates in the US were from the 12th of July until the 21st of July.

The day after we arrived in San Francisco, there was an assassination attempt on ex-President Trump. At the end of our stay was not going to contest the presidential election. At almost the same time, the world experienced the crowd strike outage. Fortunately that did not have an impact on our flights out of San Francisco, however one of our colleagues flying out of Los Angeles spent an uncomfortable night in the LAX airport with his wife waiting for a connecting flight back home.

• 13 July 2024 Attempted assassination of Donald Trump – Wikipedia
• 19 July 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident
• 21 July 2024 Biden will not seek reelection; endorses Harris | CNN Politics

While those three events were definitely newsworthy, our group of four educators from Australia along with Tim Kitchen created our own small adventures. Although they may not have made the front page of CNN our adventures certainly created enough on memories for us to take back and share with our education colleagues back in Australia, not to mention our friends and family.

As a side note, Tim who works for Adobe and is an education powerhouse in his own right in Australia has just launched a new book on creativity in education – check it out.

Armed with the power of a search engine and AI plus the fact that I had been to San Francisco before, I already had a personal list of places I wanted to go to and additional things I wanted to do that I didn’t have a chance to last time we were in San Francisco in 2013. This post though focusses on the forms of transport we used in around Fog City.

The many transport forms of San Francisco

Travelling with people from different parts of Australia who are not your family means that they will have their own planned adventures that we could jointly participate in or chart our own waters. One of the things that was not on my list was to drive in a driverless car. The alphabet or Google backed WayMo driverless car ride hailing service had been launched in San Francisco just a few weeks before our arrival. Seeing these silent white coloured Jaguars with all manner of sensors protruding from each corner and even the top of the vehicle gliding around the streets of Fisherman’s Wharf and beyond certainly caught our eye.

We all quickly added that to the list of things that we wanted to do in San Francisco.

I’m not sure why transport figures highly in my list of things to do and it might have something to do with the fact that being a traveller transport including walking is a key component in reaching your destination.

In addition to the Waymo car, there is another smaller vehicle almost unique to San Francisco called the Gocar. This small yellow open three wheeled vehicle based on a motorcycle driving chassis offered self drive guided tours around San Francisco. It looked like a lot of fun and it was.

The super long slow version of this video in the Gocar is here. It is almost an hour long but it has chapters.

The incredible bicycle paths that run around the Bay in San Francisco lend themselves to renting a bicycle and heading out on an adventure or a picnic. We didn’t get to do that but I would strongly recommend including that if you have time. The hostel I stayed in had special deals for renting bicycles as they are great environmental advocates.

We tried five other forms of public transport, no make that six – maybe seven? I will dot point them below. BART stands for Bay Area rapid transit. When I first entered high school and took up geography, I did a project on the impact of the BART system. To be travelling on this very system from the airport to our hostel in San Francisco 50 years after I completed that project demonstrates the lasting legacy infrastructure projects like this can have.

While talking about trains we also took the CALtrain to San Jose and then after the conference I took the Amtrak train on the capital corridor route to Sacramento. Finally on my last day in San Francisco I took the MUNI light rail train to Ocean Beach.

When I saw the CALtrain and Bart trains as well as the MUNI light rail apparently operating off the same railway track I was impressed. looking closer at the stations I could see that there were actually two track gauges on the same line.

In Australia we have a variety of gauges which leads to challenges for trains moving between states.
As it turns out, CALtrain , light rail and streetcars which I haven’t spoken about yet all use the standard gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches or 1435 mm.

BART trains use a non-standard broad gauge of 5’6″ or 1676 mm. This is wider than the standard gauge used by most rail systems.

Finally cable cars, those beautiful historic carriages that are pulled up and down the many hills of San Francisco by cables hidden underneath the road use a narrower gauge again of 3’6″ or 1067 mm.

For people jumping on and off these various forms of transport, they probably pay no attention to the differing widths of the tracks that the vehicles they are riding in or on use. I am impressed that the stops and platforms intertwined to allow these various gauge transport forms to interoperate and share platforms allowing people easy transfer from one form of transport to another.

Along the wharf esplanade of San Francisco is one of the tramlines which runs heritage streetcars. When I boarded the F Street car to head from Fisherman’s Wharf up to Embarcadero I felt like I was boarding a 1950s diner. These immaculately maintained streetcars were a real experience to travel in.

We even got to see a topless streetcar travelling up and down the same track between Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharf.

Finally after catching one of the MUNI light rail trains to Ocean Beach and then walking back through the park to Strawberry Hill after checking out the windmill and bison park which in fact had a number of live bison resting there, I was going to catch the train (or rather light rail) again but noticed bus number 28 indicating that it was going to Fisherman’s Wharf which was my destination. I jumped on the bus.

If you are staying in San Francisco and want to go for a great tourist ride then I highly recommend taking bus number 28. The driver was super friendly, explained where we were going, so it was like having a tourist guide on a public bus.

The trip took us not only through the Golden Gate Park which oddly enough is not the park next to the Golden Gate Bridge but through the Presidio of San Francisco which is the park that adjoins the Golden Gate Bridge. Our bus stopped at the Golden Gate Bridge, proceeded to go under the Golden Gate Bridge and then returned us to Fisherman’s Wharf dropping me off literally 40 m from the hotel we were departing from and an International House of pancakes restaurant which I also recommend. I hasten to add that people who turn their nose up to the fact that I stay in hostels also turn their nose up at IHOP. I would try both – you may be pleasantly surprised. More on that later.

The fact that all of these varied forms of transport operate together to move people (and sometimes large dogs) all around the Bay area and beyond in a fairly seamless fashion is quite impressive.

I also thought it was fitting that when we caught our CALtrain down to San Jose, we took a Waymo Jaguar vehicle from the hotel to the train station. The future has arrived.

A short and long video of our Waymo adventure.

Off the tracks

Not on tracks, the ferries in the bay brought us back from Sausalito past the infamous Alcatraz Island in the middle of the bay. Again, connection to the next form of transport, in this case a streetcar was within a few metres of the ferry terminal.

No, we didn’t get to travel on this form of transport.

We also got up close and personal with CHIPS officer guarding an event at the Sausalito end of the Golden Gate Bridge after we walked over it. This caused the older members of our walking group to remember back to the series of the same name where Erik Estrada starred as the gallant highway patrolman on his powerful, yet comfortable police motorcycle.

Ultralight Aircraft Flight

Finally in off the tracks, I got to fly an ultralight called a Quicksilver out east of Lodi, famous for a number of things – one being a song by Creedence Clearwater Revival titled “Stuck in Lodi Again” and another transport fact that Amazon tested and launched its last mile drone delivery solution from Lockeford, a town I flew over on our way back from Camanche Lake to Lodi Airport.

I want to thank Bill Barden of California Sport Aviation for the opportunity to fly with him in his quicksilver. Great guy, great pilot and look forward to catching up again. I will be editing the footage I took of our flight and uploading it.

Other Transportation Methods Observed

Conclusion

I didn’t intend this to be a blog post about transport, but as my musings unfolded the connection between travel, transport types and the experience I had in and around San Francisco with traditional and modern forms of transport led me to include these observations. More to come soon on the exciting adventures we had in these three Californian cities.

Table of Transport Methods

I haven’t included the airlines in and out of San Francisco, but they were both United flights using 787 aircraft. I use the abbreviation SFO for San Francisco City – actually around the Fisherman’s Wharf area where we were staying.

Name	Type	Trip Details	Recommend?
BART	Train	Airport to SFO	Yes, best choice
MUNI Light Rail	Train	SFO to Ocean Beach	Yes, but bus 28 better if coming from or going to Fisherman’s wharf
MUNI Streetcar	Tram	Fisherman’s Wharf “F”	Yes, relaxed and slow, not so many people, pleasant ride
MUNI Cablecar	Tram	Lombard to Wharf	Yes, adventure ride, expensive, long queues, must do
caltrain	Train	SFO to San Jose	Efficient and clean
amtrak	Train	San Jose to Sacramento	Efficient and clean, wish they took clipper
flixbus/greyhound	Bus	Sacramento to SFO	Clean and more times available than train back to SFO
MUNI Bus 28	Bus	Ocean Beach to SFO	Public bus – felt like a tour, great driver. Great experience.
Ferry	Boat	Sausalito to Embarcadaro	Best way to have a quick bay tour past Alcatraz
GoCar	Car	Golden Gate and Lombard Street	Best fun, expensive but must do. Pick a non-weekend day for Lombard St – that was the highlight.
Waymo	Car	Hotel to Golden Gate and Hotel to caltrain station.	Affordable, easy, practical – would do it again. Safe and fun.
Ultralight Aircraft	Plane	Lodi out east to Camanche Reservoir	This was my bucket list item. Exceeded my expectations.
Walking	Walk	A number of long walks around all three cities.	Weather and scenery was great in San Francisco. San Jose and Sacramento were scenic but you needed to hydrate more often. Walking is good and felt safe in all locations.
Bike Riding	Bike	We didn’t do this, but San Francisco’s bay and parks are great for cycling and San Jose has incredible new bike paths.	I would recommend this and the cities are bike friendly.