It’s so clean, my boys noticed. And quiet. And fast – hitting 60 mph. We hiked it on a weekday morning at commute time, and there were no crowds. The wagons stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions.

The trains were also frequent and reliable. If you missed one, that’s okay. Another would arrive in a few minutes. It was also easy – with plenty of wayfinding signs, helpful staff, and the ability to pay for your ride by simply tapping a credit card at the gates.

Traveling can be fun and adventurous, but it can also be instructive on how some cities seem to work better than San Francisco. There’s no doubt that when it comes to public transport, London and many other cities in Europe and Asia beat San Francisco squarely.

“You must have taken the subway a lot and seen what it’s like to have a working public transit system,” Hayden Clarkin, a former San Francisco resident who now lives in New York, told me when I described my trip. He is a transport engineer and founded TransitConan annual meeting devoted to public transport and the people who love it.

“And San Francisco is one of the best cities in America for public transit, so what does that tell you?” he added, laughing.

Still looking for my next column, I did some research. How does London’s new Elizabeth line, which debuted in May, compare to San Francisco’s soon-to-open Central subway line?

Like seemingly all infrastructure projects these days, they both went over budget and experienced long delays. Although construction began around the same time – 2009 for the Elizabeth Line and 2010 for the Central Subway – in typical San Francisco fashion, the latter is still not open. Staff at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency again said this week that the subway will open this fall, but nothing specific.

Even though the Elizabeth line – which is mostly open now and should be fully open in the spring — includes 26 new miles of tunnel and nine new subway stations compared to the 1.7 new miles of central subway tunnel and three new subway stations. So it took about six months per mile of tunnel to build the Elizabeth and seven years per mile of tunnel to build the Central Subway.

Trains on the Elizabeth Line run every five minutes, a gap that will shrink to just two or three minutes when fully operational. SFMTA’s goal for the Central Metro is for trains to arrive every 10 minutes.

Comprising the railway and above-ground stations, the Elizabeth line will run 100km from Heathrow Airport in central London to outlying suburbs, passing through 41 stations, increasing the London’s already substantial rail capacity.

The central metro, which critics say never needed to be built in the first place, will connect to the T line which runs a few miles south to the Visitacion Valley. The SFMTA does not have an estimate of the number of people it will transport, its spokesman said.

Sixty-two miles of track here could zigzag through San Francisco repeatedly. Or stretch from Mill Valley to San Jose. Or Ocean Beach in Tracy.

But that’s just a pipe dream – and that’s a shame. The United States has never invested heavily in public transportation, instead favoring cars and highways, often running through city centers.

London has one main public transport agency — Transport for London — which operates the Underground, light rail lines, the city’s famous double-decker buses, taxis, trams and ferries on the River Thames. The nine-county Bay Area, which has about a million fewer people than London, has a bewildering 27 transit agencies that don’t work very well together and haven’t created a seamless and expansive system to move.

“Very few American cities seem to have a very good integrated long-haul system that has the commuter leg from suburb to downtown with good integration on the same fare,” said Eric Goldwyn, assistant professor of transportation at Marron Institute. of Urban Management from New York University. “The Brits, they’re doing a good job of that.”

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And the further we’ve gotten away from building big transit projects — BART turns 50 this year — the less we know how to do it, Clarkin explained. He called it a “brain drain” with few universities offering railway engineering related programs and few factories in this country making trains. Add to that the notorious politics and bureaucracy, and it’s a recipe for, well, not much public transit.

“It’s a lot of incompetence and a lack of political will,” he said of the US approach to building more public transit.

To its credit, the SFMTA had restarted several bus lines that were halted during the pandemic by the time I returned. But again, he had also implemented a sketchy closure of the popular Slow Streets program on Lake Street and likely faces a November ballot measure to reopen John F. Kennedy Drive and the Great Highway to traffic.

Two steps forward, one step back, like much of life in San Francisco.

And, to be clear, San Francisco is also better than other cities in some ways. It’s still one of the most beautiful cities in the world, prettier than London, in my book. Its airport is much cleaner and easier to get around than Heathrow. And for our first meal at home, we ran to our neighborhood taqueria. Fish and chips are tasty, but nothing beats a good burrito.

Plus, I guess the long-awaited inauguration of the central metro will be even cooler than the May debut of the Elizabeth line. The queen attended that one. My suggestion for ours? drag queen.

Heather Knight is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected]: @hknightsf