Love that you're holding BART up as a shining example.
For getting to anywhere in the city it's awful. Within the city all lines share the same stops. if you want to go east-ish/west-ish either no you don't, or you have to transfer to a bus (which is an additional fare since MUNI is a different agency).
So would it be better at getting people into the city? Again, no. To go from my school (Cal State East Bay) to 16th and mission, a place that I went to basically weekly took about 58% longer than driving (I'm bad at math, so that may be off, but 40 vs 70 minutes). Additionally, I just did a fare caluclation, and now a round trip fare for that trip is $13.50. If I drove, it's 2 gallons of gas and the $8.50 bridge toll. While driving is slightly more expensive, the save time and "last mile" convenience usually outweighed it for me.
Oh, and the hours were super limiting on week nights (when I would go to the city).
This happens a lot in (US)healthcare. The different “departments” are actually functional different companies, so most of the companies are recording losses because they are nothing but the workers. This is how a bunch of companies went to the us govt during COVID claiming they had no money and were moments from bankruptcy.
One of my favorite things about the night of the pandemic was that though I had to go in to work as an essential worker, the commute was so easy. I put my cruise control on I never had to touch the brake or gas all the way to my exit. It easily cut down my commute time by a third.
My workplace requires everyone within a 50 mile radius to RTO. Because it’s a crowded metro area where a lot of workers had the same mandate at the same time, traffic is now absurd. At the outer ends of that radius, it could take well over 2 hours to drive in (and of course the further out you are, the less likely you are to be able to take public transit it). I bet paying an extra 4 hours a day would shrink that radius real quick.
Partner dancing has been my main hobby for now half of my life (absolutely wild to think about. It’s an amazing thing to drop into flow state and make an ephemeral art piece collaboratively with a friend.
Honestly I like the framing of “driving while impaired”. To be transparent when I was young I never drank, but I would stay up for far too long and end up driving in ways that looking back was probably quite dangerous. I think it’s probably possible to have a reaction time based field test which could address being drunk, being high or being tired.
My three long term hobbies: reading, crochet, partner dancing.
I also have a number of hobbies that I either cycle through or that were a part of my life for a while but I don’t do anymore for whatever reason: other partner dances, knitting, tropical fish tank, paint by numbers, dog sport agility (would love to get back into it but really don’t have the space or time), camping, hiking(in a meandering sort of way), embroidery, letter writing.
ETA: I have a "fermentation" hobby too. I brew beer with my in laws about 3-4 times a year and have a constant kombucha SCOBY in my pantry.
What about your local library/interlibrary loan media collections?