If you’re staying in an urban area (SF, Berkeley, Oakland) don’t rent a car while you’re here.  If you’re staying in outlying areas, you might use a car to get to and park at a BART station, but parking and traffic in SF is a headache you don’t need.

Instead:

1.  Get a Clipper card, a debit farecard that works on almost all transit systems in the Bay Area.  Ideally, order one online to be mailed to you (takes 5-7 business days), and you can immediately set up Autoload, which reloads your card from a credit card or bank account so you can “set and forget”.  Unused value never expires (though you cannot get it back as cash).  If you don’t have 5-7 days of lead time, you can buy this card at Walgreens drugstores anywhere in the Bay Area, or at the Muni vending machines in the underground stations at Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell or Civic Center.  Unfortunately you can’t yet buy them at the airports.  Once you have the card, put some money on it at any Add Value machine in the underground stations or at any Walgreens.  Both methods let you use credit cards or cash.  When your trip is over, keep the card for your next visit.  (You’ll surely want to come back.)

Various separate agencies run Bay Area transit, but the Clipper card works on all of them.  BART runs fast trains that connect San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and the outlying suburbs.  Muni runs the buses, trolleys, and “Metro” streetcar/subways in SF.  Other agencies run buses in other counties.

2.  If you have a smart phone (iPhone, Android, …) bookmark NextBus.com, which provides real-time bus arrivals for most Bay Area agencies based on transceivers mounted in the buses.  It uses GPS to detect where you are and give you departures of nearby buses, or you can select a specific route, stop and direction.

3.  Use Google Maps (or the built-in Maps app on the iPhone) to get public transit directions between any two points.  The route and connection info is accurate, but the specific connection times often aren’t because buses may be delayed during peak hours, etc.  The ideal app would combine the directions from Google Maps with bus departure times from NextBus, but as far as I know that app doesn’t exist yet.

4.  Become a member of Zipcar or CityCarShare, both of which have rent-by-the-hour stations all over the Bay Area.  If you’re already a member, everything should just work.

Tips on seeing specific things:

The best way to see the Golden Gate Bridge is to bike across, and take the ferry back from Sausalito or Tiburon.  Bike rentals are available next to the Hyatt Embarcadero Center hotel at the Embarcadero BART station and various locations along the Embarcadero between the Ferry Building and Fishermans Wharf.  The rentals include helmets, locks, and excellent maps.  If you don’t want to bike the bridge, the next best way to see it is to get to the bridge plaza on Golden Gate Transit bus 10 or 70, which is a lot faster than getting there on Muni since the GG Transit buses make very few stops in SF.

The Ferry Building (just outside Embaracadero BART station) was beautifully restored in the early 2000s and now hosts an urban-agriculture farmers market several days/evenings a week.  It is well worth a visit.  Ferries do still sail from here; if the weather is nice, you can joyride the Alameda-Oakland Ferry, which makes a stop at Oakland Jack London Square and another in Alameda before returning to the Ferry Building (whole trip takes about an hour and you get great views of the Bay Bridge and the lay of the land).

Locals tend to steer clear of Fishermans Wharf, but it does have those fascinating sea lions, and other things in its general vicinity are worth visiting, like the Musée Mécanique containing hundreds of really old (some from early 1900s) mechanical amusement devices, the USS Pampanito, Fort Mason Park, the Maritime Museum, the recently-restored Crissy Field, and the Municipal Pier.  Traffic is awful around there, so either bike there from the bike rental at Embarcadero, walk there from the Embarcadero BART (~20 minutes), or take the F-Market aboveground streetcar from in front of the Ferry Building.

The Ferry Building itself, at Embarcadero and Market St. (outside Embarcadero BART and near Transbay bus terminal), is well worth a visit and hosts a local farmers market 4 times a week, at which all products must originate within 150 miles of the building.  Mmmm, fresh.

Outside of SF, Berkeley is well worth a visit, for both the campus and the vaguely funky Telegraph Avenue area just south of the campus’s Sather Gate.  The best way to get there is to take BART to Downtown Berkeley station.

The best way to visit Golden Gate Park or Dolores Park/Mission Dolores is Muni. The Muni “Metro” trams (on rails) serve both—the N-Judah runs the length of the southern edge of Golden Gate Park, the J-Church passes by Dolores Park.  All the tram lines converge on Market St.

For reasons I don’t understand, Google Maps doesn’t seem to know about the Golden Gate Transit buses, even though there’s a whole bunch of them and they are by far the fastest way to get from downtown SF to the Cow Hollow/Fillmore/Presidio area on transit.

There’s a whole mess of bus routes, but the most interesting for SF residents who don’t need to commute to Marin County are the 10, 70/80/81, and 101/101X.  These run from the Financial District (1st & Mission/Transbay Terminal) to Civic Center, then up Van Ness and west on Lombard.  Because they make limited stops, they’re fairly fast (though at $3.75, more expensive than Muni).  For example, from my neighborhood of Glen Park it would take over 45 minutes to get to the Cow Hollow area on BART+Muni (on the 22-Fillmore), but only around 25 minutes on GG Transit, which is competitive with driving once you factor out the time needed to try to find parking in Cow Hollow (good luck).

And if you have friends in town who want to see or walk across the Golden Gate Bridge without the hassle of driving there, taking these buses from downtown SF is an easy way to do it.

They run pretty late, although outside of commute hours they run infrequently (once an hour for most routes), so you  have to plan ahead a bit.

Downsides: they don’t appear to be on Google Maps, so you can’t get transit trip planning that includes them (511.org has a trip planner that does include them, but it’s horrible and inaccurate); they don’t appear to be on NextBus, so if there’s traffic you won’t have a way to tell how delayed they are.

Still, it’s better than taking the 22-Fillmore all the way out there, and certainly better than trying to park in Cow Hollow.

Since multiple people have asked, here’s the quick-n-easy “getting started with Clipper” for Berkeley folks.  (Total online time: 5 minutes)

1. Get a Clipper card at any Walgreens; you have to put a minimum of $5 on it.  You can add value at any Walgreens and any BART ticket machine.
2. Register the card at clippercard.com.
   Why:  Though not necessary to get the Berkeley benefits, this lets you add value online from a credit card or bank account, setup “autoload” (card reloads itself if balance falls below threshold), and protects your balance if your card is lost or stolen.
3. Register yourself at wageworks.com, which manages UCB’s transit benefits program.  You’ll need your SSN and possibly your UCB employee ID number.
   Why: so you can get $10 of free money on your Clipper card every month, and put additional pre-tax money on it.
4. Once you’re registered at WageWorks and logged in:
   1. click on the Commuter tab
   2. click Place Commuter Order
   3. select Public Transportation (not Parking or Vanpool)
   4. select “Clipper“ as your transit vendor
   5. select “E-cash” as the product
5. Enter the serial # of your Clipper card and select an amount to be loaded onto the card each month.  (You can change the order month to month, or leave it standing.)
   • The first $10 per month is free money (doesn’t affect your paycheck)
   • The next $230 per month is deducted from your pre-tax income on your paycheck
   • Anything beyond that is deducted from your post-tax income
   • $2 of your total monthly transfer amount is taken as a service fee, so if you sign up for just the $10 “free money” option, you really only get $8/month

That’s it.  I recommend setting the pay-with-pretax option based on your estimated usage, and using Autoload on the Clipper site as a backup with a threshold of $20.

Advanced version, to avoid paying $2/month service fee

If you’re OK leaving $24 of free money on the table per year to avoid some hassle, then just use the procedure above.  If you’re cheap or resent that $2 service fee, here is an alternative.

In step 4.5 above, instead of selecting E-cash, select WageWorks Commuter Card.  This will cause your full monthly transfer amount (ie no $2 fee deducted) to be put onto a debit MasterCard that WageWorks will send you, instead of onto Clipper.

You can use this debit MasterCard to:

• add value to your Clipper at BART machines and Muni machines
• add value to Clipper online, including via autoload

The downside is that you have to keep track of two balances—Clipper and debit card.  Especially if you have Autoload setup, if your debit card balance is too low to satisfy Autoload, Autoload fails, etc.  As well, you have to arrange to load your Clipper card as needed.

It would be great if there was a “pay-as-you-go deduction” option for funding Clipper, but so far there isn’t.

Things are bad in California.  In the Bay Area, every major transit provider has recently raised fares, cut service, or is about to (or all three), and Caltrain’s budget crisis is so bad they nearly cut service by 50%.

It seems to me there’s some should-be-low-hanging fruit in terms of where to cut costs and save money without negatively impacting service (in some cases, it could lead to better service).  Here goes, and I hope all the decision makers are reading my authoritative screed:

1. Speed Clipper adoption with discounts and easier purchasing.  Clipper has finally been adopted by every major agency (many years after other leading cities deployed similar systems).  It’s still far from perfect, but like FasTrak, the next step is to create enough user pressure to drive the last round of improvements. To that end, there’s many things SFMTA could do to speed Clipper adoption:
   • Make each BART or bus trip 20 or 25 cents cheaper if Clipper is used.  Washington DC’s Metro already does this with the SmarTrip card.  London does it with a vengeance: the price of a tube ride (subway) with the Oyster card is about £2, but if paid any other way it’s £4.  (That is, you are penalized for not using Oyster, rather than rewarded for using it.)
   • Set up a Clipper sales booth or machine at SFO, SJC and OAK airports, the Transbay Terminal, and any other venue through which visitors might enter the Bay Area.
   • Let hotels sell Clipper cards.
   • (Hard) Make it possible to return your Clipper card and get the $5 deposit back (possibly along with any remaining value, less a processing fee).  Buying an Oyster card in London is a no-brainer because you can always turn it in and get your cash balance plus £5 deposit back.
2. Get rid of paper tickets. There’s no reason for every agency to also maintain its own system for processing fare media, and there are no serious privacy issues now that Clipper can be refilled using cash at any BART machine or Walgreens.
3. Publish data in open formats.  Gavin Newsom had this right with datasf.org.  With open information about transit schedules, delays, planned construction, service disruptions, etc., individual developers would create their own apps and mashups and distribute them free or cheap, probably to the chagrin of contractors used to growing fat on software contracts for things like the “BART mobile app”.
4. Get rid of the 511.org  trip planner, and use Google Maps or mashups. Google Maps for Public Transit works just as well, and with open data, I bet we’d soon see a mashup of trip planning with service disruption info and suggested alternate itineraries.  In fact, between Google Maps, NextBus-with-GPS, and various kinds of traffic and transit alerts delivered by SMS, I can’t remember the last time I visited 511.org for anything.
5. Get rid of agency-specific service alerts, and use Twitter to crowdsource delay information.  Caltrain and Muni riders have already done this on their own.  Twitter has a deployed infrastructure for rapid notification, and one can imagine mashed-up channels catering to (e.g.) riders who take both BART and Caltrain and want to know if they’re at risk of missing a connection at Millbrae.

So you’re visiting my home city…you can go to the touristy stuff, or you can see some things that make New York unique among all US cities—architecturally, historically and culturally.

Things in green are free or super-cheap.

First-time visitors/Planning/Logistics

Trying to get around and find stuff on your first visit can be overwhelming, so have some kind of plan of what things you want to do each day.  The best ways to get around are public transportation and walking, so it’s good to try to do geographically-nearby things on the same day.  Don’t even think of renting a car or driving in Manhattan. Driving is aggressive and can be intimidating if you’re not used to that, parking ranges from astronomically expensive to nonexistent, tickets are frequent and merciless, and you will spend most of your visit sitting in traffic.

The subway is the fastest way to get around. Trains run every few minutes from 6am to midnight and they don’t get stuck in traffic.  When you arrive, get a free subway map from any token booth (or use the mta.info website or iPhone-optimized site), and a multi-day unlimited MetroCard from the vending machines in all stations (they take credit cards) allowing unlimited bus & subway travel.  (Even the 7-day card is only $27, about the same as 12 individual trips.)  The best way to get around: walk if it’s close by; otherwise take the subway if there’s stations nearby (there usually are); otherwise take the bus.  (Buses can get stuck in traffic despite special bus lanes, so the subway is usually faster.)  If you’re in a hurry, taxis are easy to find (except when it’s raining or just before 8pm—theater show time), but expensive, and slow during heavy traffic hours.  The subway runs 24×7; between 6am-midnight, trains come every few minutes.  Google Maps does a good job of overlaying subway stations and lines onto the street map if you select “Transit” from the dropdown menu of things to display.

Airport transfers: Taxis to JFK or Newark are about $60 plus tip.  Or, from JFK, take the $5 AirTrain from any terminal towards Jamaica, where you can transfer to the subway (E, J) or the Long Island Railroad.  From Newark, the free AirTrain takes you to the Newark Airport train station, from which you can take the train to NY Penn Station  ($12, every 15-30 minutes, check timetable at NJTransit.com).  For LaGuardia, taxis are about $40, or take subway (E,V,G,R,7) to 74 St./Roosevelt Ave, then either a local taxi ride (around $15) or the Q33 or Q47 bus ($2.25, about 15 minutes) to the airport.

0. The Usual Suspects

These are all classic tourist attractions and well worth seeing, but they’re obvious choices and well covered by other guides, so  I won’t discuss them further: the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum  of Natural History (though it does have an exceptional dinosaur exhibit recently renamed the “Hall of Birds and their Extinct Ancestors”) and the very kid-friendly and well-done Rose Center for Earth and Space (a/k/a Planetarium) adjacent to it, the Museum of Modern Art, South Street Seaport, Central Park (about the same size as Golden Gate Park in SF).

1. See a Broadway Show

Why: Experience not only the best production values in the US, but the energy that pervades one of only two really vigorous theater districts in the world (London is the other), with dozens of shows at dozens of theaters playing on any given night.  Most shows are dark on Mondays; some have Sunday evening shows, others only Sunday matinees.

BroadwayBox.com has 25-30% discounts on advance tickets for many performances.  (Full price is typically $90-$125)  If you’re willing to play it by ear, half price tickets for many shows are available the same day (or the day before, for Sunday matinees) at two “TKTS booths”.  The one in Times Square (officially Duffy Square, 47th and Broadway) is well-known and crowded: Tickets go on sale at 3pm  (11am on matinee days for the matinee show) but people line up long before then.  The lesser known one is near South Street Seaport (subway: Fulton St/Broadway/Nassau, lines 2,3,4,5,6,A,C,J,Z, then walk straight east along Fulton St and turn right on Front St).  It opens at 11am and is frequented by Wall Street workers during lunch hour.  Its selection is slightly less than the Duffy Square booth but it’s less crowded, and it’s easy to combine a trip to this with a visit to South Street Seaport or to lower Manhattan, to/from which you can walk along the waterfront.

Note: I’m happy to serve as a recommender/consultant on what to see if you tell me your tastes, so that you don’t end up seeing some of the dreck that passes for theater these days.

Dining and drinking in the theater district: For a pricey drink with a great view before or after the show, go to the View Lounge in the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square (it can get crowded before a show).  For a quieter drink and full dinner menu, the hard-to-find Bar Centrale on 46th St. is great, but reservations a must for dinner.  If it’s full, the Hilton Hotel has a bar that overlooks Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum and a munchies menu.  If you don’t mind if it gets a bit loud, Havana Central on 47th St. near Broadway has live Latin music many nights, and great Cuban food.

2. Take a boat ride

Why: The best views of the Statue of Liberty and the lower Manhattan skyline, all for free.  (But no need to do this if you’re visiting Ellis Island; see below.)

The Staten Island Ferry (subway: South Ferry, 1; Whitehall St, N,R; Bowling Green, 4,5) is still free and runs every 15-30 minutes all day long.  You will get an awesome view of Miss Liberty (secure a place along the starboard railing early) on the way out, and a stunning view of the lower Manhattan skyline (especially at twilight/night) on the way  back.  Allow an hour for the roundtrip, including waiting times.

Combine with a walk around lower Manhattan, including Battery Park and “ground zero” (where you can see the new Freedom Tower going up on the site of the former World Trade Center).

3. Walk the Brooklyn Bridge

Why: one of the great engineering achievements of pre-WWI America, its towers were the tallest structures in America when completed in 1887.  Culturally, it knitted the area together just as the Bay Bridge knitted the East Bay and San Francisco together.

Since cars were not the focus of transportation, the pedestrian walkway is on the UPPER level and away from all the cars, affording a spectacular view all around.  Caution: the walkway has a striped-off bike lane that is VERY heavily used.  Stay out of cyclists’ way.  My favorite route is to take the subway to High St in Brooklyn (A,C), follow the signs/people to walk 2 blocks to the bridge access stairway, and then walk across the bridge into Manhattan, where you’ll end up at City Hall.  Including the subway ride from lower Manhattan, allow about an hour.

4. Experience Immigrant New York

Why: The story of New York, and America, is the story of immigrants.  Every immigration story, and every immigrant-related issue we deal with today, happened here first.  Here are two sites that tell the story vividly.

The little-known Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side takes you on a guided tour through one of the very few remaining tenement buildings in New York (preserved by designation as an historical building). The house has period furniture and fittings, and much of the finishing (paint, wainscotting, etc.) is original.  The tours bring to life the background and lifestyles of the different immigrant groups that came in waves through the Lower East Side.  Tours are about 90 minutes, have limited capacity and are required for entry, and reservations are a must.

Ellis Island (now a National Park) served as the gateway into New York for over 12 million immigrants, and is now an immigration museum.  Because it includes actual artifacts, voice interviews, etc. with people who came through Ellis Island, it’s particularly moving, and you can recreate the experience immigrants would have had as they first stepped off the boat.  There’s also facilities for looking up your own forbears who may have immigrated through Ellis.  The views from the boat ride to Ellis are comparable to those of the Staten Island Ferry, so no need to do both.  Allow 1/2 day.

Note: the same ferry that serves Ellis Island also stops at the Statue of Liberty.  You can enter the Statue’s pedestal for free (as I recall) but have to pay to climb up to the crown.  It is a strenuous climb and in summer it’s like climbing in a copper oven.  You get a beautiful view of the statue from the Staten Island Ferry, and better views of Manhattan from the top of the Empire State Building, so I’d skip this.

5.  See Grand Central Terminal

Why: GCT is one of the few Beaux Arts railroad terminals in the US that still serves as an active railroad terminal (45 tracks with 30 more planned for 2015, 286 daily commuter trains, 4 subway lines), and uniquely captures what the golden age of rail travel must have been like.  Allow 30 minutes, and it’s a good meal stop.  Subway: 4,5,6,7 to 42 St./Grand Central, or S (shuttle) from Times Square.

Pre-WWI American architecture, especially Beaux Arts, was buoyed by a civic optimism that justified creating grand public structures, on a scale not seen before or since.  (Other excellent examples of grand civic architecture are the New York Public Library main building, the Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)  It is worth stepping inside GCT just to realize that there was a time when taking a journey made you feel like you were an important person going on an important trip, rather than a potential terrorist to be patted down and then stuffed with bland fast food in a sterile waiting lounge. Ironically, for logistical reasons, most long-distance trains in and out of New York use Penn Station—formerly an even grander terminal than GCT, but reprehensibly destroyed in the 1960s to make room for the unforgivably ugly Madison Square Garden arena, with the station itself relegated to a labyrinthine warren of underground tunnels.  The food court on the lower concourse of GCT is quite good; I’ve never eaten at the famous Oyster Bar, which is featured in the opening credits of Saturday Night Live.

Bonus feature: one of the best places to enjoy a classy, leisurely cocktail is the Campbell Apartment, former office/study of New York Central Board member John Campbell.  It’s physically part of GCT but the entrance is around the outside of the building, facing Vanderbilt Ave.  No sneakers, shorts, or t-shirts.

6.  The New York Public Library

Why: Another amazing Beaux Arts structure from back when the zeitgeist was that a grand public experiment deserved grand public structures.

Just down the street from Grand Central, the main (research, noncirculating) branch of the NYPL, built on the site of the former Croton Reservoir, is a spectacular building housing the NYPL’s research collections and both permanent and rotating exhibits of historical books, maps and literary artifacts.  Admission is free; allow 30 minutes to wander around.  Walk from Grand Central, or subway: B,D,F to 42 St./Bryant Park, 7 to Fifth Ave.

7.  Transit Museum

Why: Step into real subway cars from 1904, the year America’s largest transit system opened for business, and from every decade since then.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a transportation geek but this place is fascinating.  Built around a decommissioned subway station, a highlight of the exhibits is a collection of around a dozen subway cars covering the areas from 1904 to the recent past.  Many of these are still railworthy and are run as regular trains around the holiday season for railfans, and most still have period advertisements posted inside.  The museum itself is a few blocks from downtown Brooklyn.

8. Visit the Steinway factory

Considered by many (including me) to be the makers of the best pianos anywhere, Steinway & Sons was founded by German immigrant Heinrich Steinweg (later Henry Steinway) in New York in 1853, and has been building pianos at the Astoria factory since 1880.  Free factory tours are held two or three times a week but you must reserve in advance. Every Steinway sold in the US is made here, essentially by hand and taking about a year per piano, using largely the same techniques and equipment that were used in 1880.  (Steinways sold in Europe are made in the Hamburg factory, which was established later.)  The Steinway factory is 1 mile from the Ditmars Blvd. subway station (N, Q lines); unfortunately there isn’t a bus that gets you any closer.  Allow 2 hours.

9.  Greenwich Village

Funky food, great bars, varied music scene, home of New York’s “freeway revolt”, site of the “Stonewall Riots” that launched the gay rights movement, home of NYU, it combines the cultural role of SF’s North Beach with the closest New York ever got to bohemia.  The hole-in-the-wall restaurants along Bleecker and especially Macdougal are generally good bets.  The West Village is the nucleus of the gay community.  Subway: A,C,E to W. 4 St., 6 to Bleecker St., N, Q, R to W. 8th St., 1 to Christopher St./Sheridan Square.

10.  Lower Manhattan including Ground Zero

Ground Zero is still a somewhat morbid tourist attraction, but it’s interesting to see the new building going up there.  Lower Manhattan (basically, below Canal St.) is the original New York, and its twisty streets and tucked-away taverns preserve the feel of post-New-Amsterdam.  Join the Wall Street crowd for an after-work drink at the Stone Street alley near Coenties Slip, or drink where George Washington drank at Fraunces Tavern.  Subway: you can’t swing a dead cat in lower Manhattan without having it fall into a subway station.  Walk in a random direction and you’ll soon bump into a station.