The most important thing in any city is having connectivity to different locations and even though most of them own one or the other vehicle nowadays, still there are a lot of us who rely on public transport and this brings up an important point which is affordable connectivity to all the places to everyone.

Being an Indian and a Bengaluru-born middle-class guy, I always rely on public transport and we have a lot of good public buses, metro transit, and city and state buses. So eventually when I moved to the Bay area, the first thing I wanted to know was about the connectivity and the options we have.

Transportation

In Bengaluru, we have various government-operated services like BMTC, KSRTC, Namma metro, and private buses.

Similar to that we have a variety of operators in the bay area like VTA, Bart, Muni, Caltrain, and more.

How to buy tickets

In Bengaluru, we had to buy a ticket via cash or daily pass, or monthly pass and if you buy passes you should travel in the respective type of service. It's not difficult here as most of them use BMTC or KSRTC.

In Bay Area, as we saw above, there are a lot of operators and every operator will accept cash, but it may be cheaper if you buy it digitally in their own app. Now the issue is you need to keep tabs on multiple apps and buy different tickets as per your travel path.

Clipper Card

This is where the clipper card comes to the rescue. It not only acts as a universally accepted payment service for transit but also provides users with:

• Discounts

• Ease of loading money

• Ease of use via physical card or digital wallets like apple pay and google pay

...and more

Of course, it will not cover all the operators as of now. But it does cover all the major ones by eliminating the headaches of multiple apps and purchases.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area

https://mybmtc.karnataka.gov.in/english

https://english.bmrc.co.in/

https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/

https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/where-to-use.html