It's impossible to have decent transit in San Diego because of how the city is designed. The car dependency is baked in to the urban design. Apart from the core, San Diego is really a bunch of isolated hilltop neighborhoods separated by scrubby valleys and connected with freeways. So I agree with your assessment.

The important thing is not to design cities like that in the first place. Or if you're stuck with them, gradually work on fixing them by increasing density. Increasing density could work in a place like Toronto, but yeah... it won't work in San Diego.

I live in a suburb of Ottawa, the capital of Canada, metro population about 1.4 million---so a medium-sized city. I can walk about 8 minutes to get to a transit station; there are buses that leave to most parts of the city from there. Getting downtown takes about 35-40 minutes and involves one bus and one train (though in the next few years, the train will come all the way to my neighborhood and reduce the time to 20-25 minutes.)

Driving theoretically takes 20 minutes, but that's if there's no traffic. If there's traffic, it's anywhere from 35-60 minutes. And our transit system is mediocre by Canadian standards and positively awful by European standards. So it's really sad that the USA seems even worse.

I'm a 5'2" woman. I've ridden transit all over the world, including in a bunch of places in the USA: Chicago, New York, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle. The experiences have varied, but I've never really felt unsafe except very late one night in NYC (but I was with a group of friends, so it ended up OK, and it was really just a feeling and not anything concrete.)

The sexual assault issues with Lyft and Uber are another reason I want those companies banned. Regular taxi drivers have to have police background checks (at least where I live) and I suspect the taxi companies take those a lot more seriously than Uber or Lyft do. Taxi companies also interview prospective drivers in person rather than just accepting them over texts or via an app.

Replying to myself... though, I have actually taken transit in San Diego (a bus) and it was fine. It smelled like a normal city bus (ie, diesel) and I felt perfectly safe on it. I think I took it from downtown to get to the Sheraton resort on Harbor Island.

San Diego is an example of some of the worst urban design. Huge sprawling suburbs built on top of scrubby hills, with said suburbs burning down every decade or two because of wildfires. But hey, everyone has a great view from the top of the hill!

Toronto has a huge homeless problem, so yes, there are certainly homeless people there.

And guess what? Sometimes homeless people ride transit. OMG THE HORROR!!!! A while back, I rode the Toronto subway and there was a homeless guy across the aisle from me and ... you won't believe what happened ... he minded his own business. Can you imagine?

I've been to Florida (Tampa, Pensacola, Tallahassee) and hated it there. Car-dependent sprawl, cookie-cutter urban strip malls, bland and gross city design.

San Diego's just as bad. My sister lives near Escondido and it's impossible to live without a car. The sprawl and the traffic is gross and I have no desire to visit ever again.

Your "different problems" are not that different: Unsustainable sprawl and atrocious urban design. Most of Canada and the USA is like that, which is why our cities suck. From my experience, US cities tend to suck more than Canadian cities by most measures, but that doesn't mean Canadian cities are particularly good. The core of Toronto is great for transit, but the suburbs are gross auto-dependent wastelands just like suburban San Diego.

solve last mile problems

The solution for that is called... wait for it... I know your brain will overload... walking.

If you can get a transit stop to within 250 metres to 500 metres of most places in a city, then that's good enough for able-bodied people. For disabled people, you can have additional services, but they are a much smaller population and would cause much less traffic.

The reason so many American and Canadian cities are transit wastelands is because they were designed to be low-density because in the 1950s, everyone thought the car would solve everything. So cities were designed to move cars efficiently, not people. When you optimize for the wrong thing, you get shit.

And now it's difficult and expensive to roll back that urban sprawl, and so the USA is trapped. This is exactly why I said "I've basically written off the USA." You've gone so far down the wrong path that you're fucked. (Though I'd note that other cities that had gone reasonably far down the car-dependent route did successfully reverse that, but it took political will as well as a public that didn't constantly vote against their own best interests... so not Americans.)

If public transit is not the most efficient way to get around a major city, then the city is badly designed.

I live in a mid-sized Canadian city. Our politicians have neglected our transit for decades, and it's really a shame. I still use it, though, if I have to go downtown because it's just the best way to travel. Clean, efficient, cheaper than paying for parking. The fact that the richest society in the world cannot achieve reasonable transit is just an indictment of the priorities of the USA.

Also, I think it's in the afternoon based on the shadows. Park Plaza Victoria is south of Amsterdam Centraal and when the tram heads that way, the Sun is to the right, which means West.

I for one want Uber and Lyft shut down too. And Airbnb and all the other parasitic companies that simultaneously flout regulations and under-pay precarious gig workers. All of those businesses enshittify our cities and our job markets.

Waymo is not allowed to operate in my country and I will certainly fight hard to keep it and any other similar company from being allowed to get a foothold here.

Yes, it's true. But on average, the traffic in Amsterdam pales in comparison to that in many similarly-sized US or Canadian cities.

Isn't it stunning that cities around the world manage to have efficient transit systems that are good at getting people from where they are to where they need to be, even though everyone might be starting and ending at different points?

WHAT IS THIS MAGIC??????

I realize Americans' brains probably explode trying to envision that, so sorry for the mess.

The typical American attitude: "I will do whatever I want to do because it makes my life better!" without thinking one step ahead and realizing it will make your life and everyone else's life worse.

Honestly, I've pretty much written off the USA at this point.

There are great videos of a first-person view of a tram route in Amsterdam. What immediately strikes me is how little traffic there is on the road and how the few cars on the road can drive totally unimpeded by traffic.

This is how a city should work.

The transit in my city does not stink. I guess maybe people up here have better hygiene.

Safety isn't the issue. Traffic congestion is the far bigger problem.