Best cities on the west coast to live in without a car (rental market, credit)

[Pierre89]

Hello,

I may be relocating to the west coast next year. What are the best cities to live in without a car?

San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma seem to have good public transportation. What do you think of these cities? How do they compare?

My criterias are:
- good public transportation
- being able to go grocery shopping, go to the furniture store, and so on by public transportation
- safe city
- affordable

I'm 32. San Francisco seems very nice but I have heard negative things about it (agressive homeless people on the streets, not very safe at night...).

Thanks for your advice

[MB8abovetherim]

Originally Posted by Pierre89

Hello,

I may be relocating to the west coast next year. What are the best cities to live in without a car?

San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma seem to have good public transportation. What do you think of these cities? How do they compare?

My criterias are:
- good public transportation
- being able to go grocery shopping, go to the furniture store, and so on by public transportation
- safe city
- affordable

I'm 32. San Francisco seems very nice but I have heard negative things about it (agressive homeless people on the streets, not very safe at night...).

Thanks for your advice

San Francisco Compact, dense...a Walkers paradise. Don't worry about the homeless people, it's really not that bad of a problem for most people. SF has great PT and the buses run all night (well that's how I remember it being). But SF is the least affordable big city on the West Coast.

Seattle Compact, dense downtown. If you stay near the core you wont have a problem. But outside of it Seattle still lacks. No city is completely unwalkable, but the further you are from downtown the less convenient not having a car is.

San Diego PT is good, but IMO it's overrated a bit in SD. If you can live downtown (as is always the case) you wont have a problem but San Diego tends to sprawl and meander outside of DT. It's still a driving city, especially out in the canyons.

Los Angeles Much better PT than it is given credit for. You don't need to be downtown but it still depends on where you stay. Midcity, KTown, Hollywood, Santa Monica and other places around the westside are doable. LA has a MASSIVE bus system and they go EVERYWHERE. Heavy Rail is servicable but still needs to expand. Light Rail is something LA has done well, and that is expanding too. I'd say south of the 10 freeway your car dependency will rise, west of downtown above the 10 you can live without one or with little use of it.

[ja1myn]

I vote for Seattle.

[Pierre89]

Thank you, that's very interesting.

How safe are buses and trains in these cities?

In some cities, public transit suffer from a bad image, only unemployed or poor people take the bus. I'd rather live in a city where buses have a good reputation and the average person commute by bus or light rail.

[dalparadise]

San Francisco is very much a pro-public transit city. All walks of life take it. Most prefer it. I have a car that I leave parked in favor of commuting by MUNI. BART is even better, if commuting from outside the city.

[MB8abovetherim]

MUNI needs to be grade seperated. What's the point in taking it if I'm just crawling along with the rest of the traffic?

[uptown_urbanist]

You can cross San Francisco off the list, given that you want "affordable." San Francisco has the most expensive rental market in the country. You could potentially find a decent deal in a walkable, public-transit friendly area somewhere outside of the city (we did, but we were very, very lucky), but why put yourself through that hassle if you can avoid it?

LA isn't on your list, but I found it very good for public transportation. It's significantly cheaper than SF, but probably not in "affordable" territory, either.

I'm not familiar with the NW cities, other than as a visitor. Portland gets all the glory these days. Not sure about prices, though. I'd give it a look.

You may also want to consider smaller west coast cities. Places like Santa Barbara or Monterey, for example, seem pretty good for people without a car (or at least that's from the perspective of a visitor arriving without a car), but you'd likely run into the affordable issue. Not sure about cities like San Luis Obispo, Ventura, etc. They may be worth a look. Or if you don't want right on the coast, maybe cities (big or small) like Sacramento, Davis, etc. Some places might not have a more limited (but still decent) public transportation system, but because they are also smaller places, they make up for that by being more compact and having good walking/biking connections.

Will you be looking for work?

[Pierre89]

Thank you very much.

I will be looking for a software engineering job. Many companies are based in San Francisco, the Bay Area, Portland or Seattle.

Ideally I would like to live and work in the same city in order to have a short commute (I know some people live in San Francisco and work in Palo Alto or San Jose area but I would like to avoid that).

[Chava61]

San Francisco is very good city for getting around on public transportation and not needing a car but as already mentioned it is expensive (like Manhattan on the East Coast).

[Champ le monstre du lac]

If you want an affordable with comprehensive PT and walkable neighborhoods then Portland would be the answer. When I lived in Seattle I took Amtrak down to Portland to visit friends and the downtown/Central City streetcars along with light rail made it very easy to get around without a car. Downtown Portland and its surrounding neighborhoods are very walkable along with some abundant parkland. Many C-D writers call Portland over rated, I think it's earned its merrits. It's a good model for urban planning and the most affordable big city on the West Coast.