The West Coast City Tier List 

S: San Francisco A: Seattle, Portland B: Oakland, Long Beach, Los Angeles C: San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose, Eugene, Tacoma, Santa Ana D: Anaheim, Fresno, San Bernardino F: Bakersfield

Anecdotally, it’s way easier to get around Oakland than Santa Ana because the Bay Area has a bike share program that gets you around very well. I would put it in A

Putting Fresno over San Diego is ACTUALLY ridiculous and insane

Oakland has an incredible diversity of walkable neighborhood, each functioning as their own village, and all connected by heavy rail, ferry, rapid buses or regular bus service. This is due to the fact that, unlike most of the other cities, Oakland has pre-automobile bones. The author is unaware that Oakland is drastically increasing transit oriented housing in many neighborhoods, not just downtown.

Long Beach above Oakland is just not right. Oakland has substantially more rail coverage with both BART and the Capitol Corridor/Amtrak station, very few neighborhoods that aren’t at least somewhat walkable since most of it was built pre-automobile, and a bus network that is nearly as dense in coverage as SF’s. Long Beach has one light rail line and a bunch of suburban sprawl.

Putting Long Beach two tiers ahead of San Diego is pretty insane. LA has the exact same sprawl problem that San Diego has, pound for pound I don't see any way to argue that LA or especially LONG BEACH is more walkable or has better urbanism than San Diego.

I like the sound the San Diego light rail makes.

I'd put Long Beach in B tier along with San Diego and Santa Ana in C tier but I don't have any gripes as I'm not from the West Coast lol.

long beach above Oakland is insane though

As a San Franciscan, i see this as an absolute win. I love our public transit, im able to get just about anywhere in the city just using it. In fact, Market Street, the main artery of the city, recently banned all private vehicles on it, making bus and trolley service even more efficient. I do recognize that SF can stride to go even further. Extensions to CalTrain and the Muni metro are planned at the moment. The L Taraval line has been undergoing extensive remodeling, and the Central Subway is slated to be extended to Fisherman's Wharf in the future. Not to mention, the California High Speed Rail will also run through the city when its finished too, with a terminus at the Salesforce Transit Center.

As a Socal resident, I think you nailed all Southern California cities. However, Seattle 1000% deserves to be in the S tier.

Anaheim has Anaheim Canyon on the IEOC Line as well, so you were right the first time with two! Metrolink also runs an Angels Express for games from Union Station along both OC and IEOC! I think it's also worth mentioning that Disneyland has a dedicated bus area just to the east of the Disneyland esplanade, the East Shuttle Area (shown off to the side at 3:39, served by LA Metro, OCTA, ART, and different hotel shuttles. ART travels between hotels to the Disneyland Resort, the Anaheim Convention Center and other locations throughout the Anaheim Resort. Besides ART, Disneyland is served by the Metro Express Line 460 bus, which runs between downtown LA and Disneyland's East Shuttle Roadway, connecting with different bus and rail lines like Norwalk station on the C Line! For OCTA, Route 50, 43, 46, 83, and 430 all serve Disneyland, with the 430 serving as a link between the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center and the Anaheim Resort district! So for all the people wanting to visit Disneyland, you have different ways of getting to the resort by transit from LA! But of course, transit wise, Disneyland is most famous for its monorail system, which opened in June 1959 and was the first daily operating monorail system in the Western Hemisphere! When it opened, it connected Tomorrowland to the Disneyland Hotel and its parking lot, but now it connects to the Downtown Disney shopping complex instead of just the hotel. The system actually opened with an incident, as Walt abducted then Vice President Nixon without his security! The monorail was designed by famed Imagineer Bob Gurr (who designed most of Disneyland's ride vehicles like Haunted Mansion and Autopia). Up until opening day, the monorail would not cooperate with them. Gurr and a German engineer worked tirelessly each night on sketching replacement parts and rushing them to Burbank so they could be built. The day before on June 13, the monorail ran as intended for the first time, but they were still worried for opening day. Gurr was in the pilot's seat, with Nixon's family and Walt on board, but the secret service agents didn't get on board as Gurr left the moment Walt told him to. He was worried, with Walt staring at him, that the monorail would break down and he accidentally kidnapped Nixon. Thankfully, it ran as intended.

Oakland and LA beneath Long Beach, and on par with Santa Ana, Sac, and Eugene is completely wild.

lol bakersfield in f tier. not surprised at all

Been waiting on this video for so long I actually tried to make it myself. Thanks for making a better one and saving me the embarrassment though :P

SF at the top is 🔥

Love that you used the gum wall to represent Seattle! The story behind the Seattle gum wall at Pike Place Market is that it started in the 1990s after the theater next door became home to Unexpected Productions' Theatresports and the patrons who came to the theater would stick their gum on the wall before they entered. No matter how many times the local authority tried to clean it, the gum has remained, and the authority later decided to keep it and declare it a tourist attraction in 1999. Pike Place Market itself was created in 1907 when a city councilman took advantage of the precedent of an 1896 Seattle city ordinance that allowed the city to designate tracts of land as public markets! Pretty cool that both Seattle and San Francisco have trolleybuses! The first trolleybus to operate on Seattle's streets was in 1937. It was brought to the city for a demonstration to gain public support for a plan to replace the debt-ridden streetcar and cable car system with a "trackless trolley" system. While a successful demonstration, Seattle voters rejected it in March 1937. In 1939, Seattle received a federal loan that allowed the city to retire the debts from the streetcar and cable car system. Management of the system was turned over to an independent commission, renamed the STS or Seattle Transit System. The commission immediately began construction on overhead wire and ordered many trolleybuses, with the first in revenue service in April 1940. The Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel used to have special dual-mode trolleybuses, but as the tunnel was futureproofed for light-rail, the overhead wire for them was replaced for the light-rail, and so hybrid electric buses were used in the tunnel instead. When the light-rail opened in 2009, the tunnel had shared bus and light-rail operations until March 2019 when tunnel bus service finally ceased after Convention Place station was closed in 2018 for expansion of the Washington State Convention Center.

A moment of silence for all of the following major but unmentioned west coast cities, ordered from highest to lowest population: Honolulu, HI (343k pop, and yes, it's usually counted with west coast cities), Riverside, CA (328k pop); Stockton, CA; Anchorage, AK; Irvine, CA; Chula Vista, CA; Fremont, CA; Spokane, WA; Modesto, CA (all of these have larger populations than Tacoma, WA with 213k pop); Fontana, CA; Santa Clarita, CA; Oxnard, CA; Moreno Valley, CA; Glendale, CA; Huntington Beach, CA; Rancho Cucamonga, CA; Oceanside, CA; Ontario, CA; Vancouver, WA; Santa Rosa, CA; Garden Grove, CA; Elk Grove, CA; Salem, OR (all of these have larger populations than Eugene, OR with 168k pop). (Edit: added Honolulu from @zeroone8800's comment). Honestly, it's a really great video and very well done! While obviously you can't cover every single one of the above-listed cities in a single video, I was a little sad more of them didn't make the cut, such as Riverside, Stockton, Anchorage, Spokane, Modesto, Santa Clarita, Glendale, Vancouver (WA) (though I guess you could lump it in with Portland), Santa Rosa, and Salem. And frankly, Vancouver, Canada, is worth including as it's really the only significant (500k +) West Coast metro area not mentioned in your video, and it's isolated enough to be considered a defacto US City, culturally and economically it's basically just a part of Washington State ; ) I jest... sort of.... (don't hurt me Canadians, I'm innocent). And as @G-546 reminded me below, Tijuana, Mexicali, and Ensenada, Mexico all have populations well over 500k and are equally deserving of coverage if you did expand your rankings to include non-US cities on the west coast of North America. Again, the video really is great as is, I just like it when lesser known but still high population cities can get the transit/urbanist limelight, as the big or more well-known cities tend to get most of the focus on YT. Please keep up the great work!!!

Im sorry but A tier for Long Beach!?

I’d probably put Oakland in the A tier! It’s a great city, punches way above its weight culturally, and the transit is on par with Portland at the very least.

A cool fact about the MAX light-rail system in Portland is that it's home to North America's deepest station, Washington Park, which has a depth of 260 ft or around 79 m! It doesn't have long escalators like deep Soviet metro systems but rather elevators. The station has a geological theme, and so to go along with it, the floor indicators outside the elevators refer to its two levels not by floor numbers but by "the present" and "16 million years ago"! The "16 million years ago" refers to the basalt layers the Robertson Tunnel (named for William D. Robertson, who served on the TriMet board of directors and was its president at the time of his death) passes through, and due to variations in the rock composition, the tunnel curves mildly side to side and up and down to follow the best rock construction conditions! You can actually see a sample taken during construction on display at the station as well as a timeline of local geologic history! The station serves the Hoyt Arboretum, Oregon Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Oregon Zoo, and World Forestry Center! The station opened in September 1998 as part of the Westside MAX extension to downtown Hillsboro. The reason the station is so deep is because prior to the start of preliminary engineering efforts, the Portland City Council asked TriMet to consider building a rail tunnel through the West Hills instead of following the Sunset Highway alternative proposal to run tracks on the surface alongside Canyon Road. TriMet's engineers noted that this surface option would carry a steep six- to seven-percent grade as opposed to only two percent in a tunnel. Thus, they went with a tunnel, identified three tunnel options, and chose the one with the option to serve the Oregon Zoo!

I live near Santa Ana and haven't actually spent much time in the city but drove through it a few times. I was looking at the city in Google Maps and found out that they actually have a lot of protected bike lanes now. That is a rarity for Southern California and the only place that I know that has protected bike lanes in Orange County. Also the downtown area has been developed a lot recently and looks very walkable and has a certain charm. So with those developments and the work on the streetcar, I think its place in the list is deserved.

Eugene is where Curbside Classic started because so many people are car-lite that (combined with a lack of road salt) they end up keeping the same car for 30+ years.

Oakland and San Diego both deserve a bump. Especially Oakland. While Oakland could really use a loop line to tie their rail system together, it does have three BART lines converging on downtown and making basically any part of Oakland accessible via BART + bus. BART is in reality Oakland's system, not SF's. Just like Washington DC, Oakland has multiple intersecting S-bahn lines, but no local metro/light rail. Just link DC it could really use a local-duty light rail system. But it's still superior to places like Portland, Seattle, and definitely, definitely Long Beach.

I really liked this video! A quick editing tip - make sure the footage you're working with is all at the same framerate. This will significantly reduce the stuttering that sometimes happens in video when framerates are mismatched. For example, though the difference may seem small, 59.94 is distinctly different from 60 frames per second, and mismatching them will lead to stuttering every few seconds, as certain frames have to be duplicated to match the timing between clips. The same goes for putting your timeline in 60 and using 59.94 clips. Try to see which framerate is more common among your video clips, and make sure your timeline speed matches it. :)

While rents in the Bay Area are undoubtedly higher than Southern California, salaries are higher as well. I went to a public university in California and have friends all over the state, and my anecdotal impression is that roughly the same percentage of income is used on housing between the Bay and LA (at least among young college graduates I guess).

I’ve been waiting for a transit RU-vidr to finally do some kind of coverage on Santa Ana, as I’m routinely impressed by how they’re transforming the city. Finally glad to see it got the recognition it deserves. Watch it closely these next few years, because I can guarantee you it will move another tier up in that time. Otherwise as a So Cal resident who’s lived in many of those cities, I have no complaints with your list. Good stuff!

I'm from the other side of the Bay and have only recently gotten to intimately explore Oakland, and even then I have to say you're critically underrating Oakland. It's definitely a notch above LA or Sacramento in terms of how transit effects your day to day. That and so much culture the financialization of Tech has driven out of the SF/Peninsula/South Bay Oakland has held onto better and is doing more to cultivate. I'd call it A and it's not far from being S.

I live in Tacoma and I'm honored to have my city on this list. I don't really care for the local transit here much but the 594 bus to downtown Seattle and the 574 bus to the Seatac Airport are amazing perks.

I will say 1) Oakland has a true BRT Line (Tempo) 2) ART is Anaheim Resort Transit (resort is in the name!). Thid matters becuse ART is pretty useless as local transit and the system is entirely oriented around tourism. A ticket on ART is at least $7! 3) Surfliner not really mentioned for the SoCal cities

12:20 indoor shopping malls are great. Efficient use of space, protection from the weather, great spots for so called Third Places to socialise. There are some nice ones in London, Prague, Paris... The only problem with them is if you attach parking spaces to them, as happens in the US.

I'm in Santa Ana the transit+rents are pretty good :) we also have metrolink lines to all 3 other areas of SoCal - I can get to downtown or IE in under an hour, or San Diego in 2 by train

My only gripe is putting San Diego alongside San Bernardino the two cities aren’t even close I would choose to go care free/car lite ANY day in San Diego over San Bernardino, SD deserves at least C tier

Oakland belongs in the A tier

The SJ rating is pretty accurate. The city is trying and has laid good foundations for future improvement, but the aggressive NIMBYs keep land use bad and VTA's lack of operations funding and lack of light rail expansions (most of their money has gone to building BART for the last 20 years) are big challenges to moving the city forward. The smaller cities' downtowns are pretty great and have good transit connections (Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Campbell).

Infrastructure-wise, I think Oakland is similar to SF if not better when it comes to walking. But it is much flatter and the weather is much nicer, which actually makes it more "walkable"

I was hoping for Glendale, CA, but I appreciate this video.

Nice video! I wish Riverside was here though.

Bakersfield not beating the armpit of California allegations I see..

As someone from Fresno I am so offended by this. The city was basically designed around F-tier urbanism as a guiding principle. I think our only saving grace is that it's such a bland characterless place that people don't know enough about it to know how bad it is Our transit is "average" if by average you mean a bus-only system for a city of half a million people that still only accepts cash in 2024 and stops running at 6pm on Sundays

LA is trying. Despite the ultimate foe...NIMBYs with lots of money

LA Metro really does just keep getting better. Excited to see how it improves in the coming decades. It might end up being one of the best networks in the country if they keep this momentum

5:36 When you said "You know what else belongs in the S tier?" I was half expecting a clip of Muscle Man saying "MY MOM!"

6:51 The Long Beach GP isn't Formula 1, it's Indycar, which is a different open-wheel racing series.

in 10 years, Fresno and Bakersfield will be the only cities in new world with true HSR hahaha

Wondering how Los Angeles will rank after the Olympics! We'll need an update on the rankings afterward lol.

I live in a suburb of Zurich, a metropolitan with about 1’000’000 people living in it. If Zurich would be an S, I don’t think believe any of these cities could be higher than C. Zurich has 16 tramway lines, a very decent S-Bahn network, with 17 lines connecting Zurich to the Suburbs, lots of (trolley) buses, it’s walkable everywhere and extending the bike lanes. Our main station is served by 3000 trains a day (S-Bahn included), providing service every 30 minutes to almost every city and town in the whole country (of course you may have to change a few times) and there are services to 10 different countries every day. A long way to go for the US.

As a teen who couldn’t drive. San Diego was the best place to get a round from trolley to bus

As someone who lives in downtown Santa Ana I would say in Santa Ana the transit is great for just Santa Ana but because Orange County has so much sprawl and every city relies on neighboring cities you need access to car as your doctor, work, grocery store you might prefer or leisure activity might not be located in Santa Ana and there for a 10-15 minute drive can be a 2 hour bus ride or 1 hour train to bus ride. Because neighboring cities don't care about public transit.

expected to see davis, known for it's biking culture

You should do this for the intermountain west!

Regarding your comment on sprawl around Portland, the city and region are actually governed by a strict "urban growth boundary" that reigns in suburban sprawl better than any other American city. One can find productive farmland just outside the city limits in a number of directions (or just outside the city limits of neighboring cities). The growth boundary was modeled after cities in Europe.

I’m a simple man. I see San Diego Trolley, I click

anaheim has two metro link lines the anaheim canyon station is servered by ie/oc trains

Thanks!

The great advantage of San Diego over Los Angeles is that its urban core is compact enough that a bus ride is often only 10-20 minutes long. For example, I live in Oceanside and my doctor is in North Park. I often go by train, and then transfer to a Route 10 limited-stop bus. Moreover, neighborhoods like University Heights and Adams Avenue have so little parking (paid or free) that I often choose to take the bus from Old Town or Nobel Drive transit center. By comparison, Hollywood, West Hollywood, the Sunset Strip, Westwood, Melrose Ave., etc., are at least an hour from Union Station by transit, whether or not you transfer to the B or D subway lines.

sits self satisfiedly in my mission apartment

I think it's appropriate that only San Francisco is S tier, it along with NYC are basically the urbanist bastions of the country (along with some of the worst housing prices). I'd put LA/Seattle/Portland in the same rank, they all have their pros and cons for each other. As much as I like Long Beach, I don't think you could put it above LA as a whole, it should probably be in a separate category ranking in general because it's more of a mid-size city in the giant suburb that is LA county. Glad to see it get some praise though. I wouldn't put any city in the OC above C tier though unless all you care about artificial safety from homelessness/crime/etc or having a big yard.

I in the process of researching places to relocate to from Los Angeles to buy a home on the west coast. This sort of tracks with my expectations. However I didn't expect Long Beach to be so high. The light rail has a few stops there's and it's buses and water taxi's everywhere else. I used to avoid going to Long Beach because it took too long to get around on public transit. I also give LB demerits for air quality do to the freighters idling at the Port.

Would be curious to see a mountain west version of this. (Specifically, wondering how Denver stacks up with the West Coats cities)

Anaheim does have access to 2 Metrolink lines, Anaheim Canyon is the other station in city limits for IEOC line. Edit: also the IEOC line does directly connect to the ARTIC station for Angel's Express game day trains

I think if you're putting LA in B, you have to put Portland in S. Portland actually has MORE walkable neighborhoods despite being 6x smaller than Los Angeles. And its so clear that so many of the neighborhoods in LA that are technically walkable, are still built car first, you are dodging cars and waiting to cross the street for stop lights. I think I would keep Portland in A, and move LA to C-tier personally. Other than that I agree with the list for the most part.

Fresno is better than San Diego? lol idk about that

I thing Portland is an underrated city that gets to much hate for the drug problems, homeless tents don’t exist in the suburbs and in downtown, it’s mainly in east Portland

San Diego as D tier in insane as a newer resident. I didn't think much of the trolley system until I started using it, like the orbtial loop out in East county where I live. I can travel between many suburbs in 10-15 mins and no necessity for long downtown transfers. You also ignored the many BRT Rapid routes that connects far away places to downtown SD, like Route 225 to Eastlake and Otay Mesa, 235 to Mira Mesa and Escondido, and even the new 227 between Imperial Beach and Otay Mesa

Even though I'm from Texas, I've visited most of the cities on this list. The only cities I have not been to are Fresno, Bakersfield and San Bernadino because why?. I'm just having a hard time imagining Fresno outranking San Diego. That one just didn't sit right with me for some reason lol. Other than that, solid list and great video.

San diego transit better Long Beach, Sacramento, Santa Ana, San Jose, Tacoma, Anaheim, and Fresno. To share the category with San Bernardino is ridiculous. The city has expanded its trolley from LA Jolla to the Mexican border. The downtown core including the baseball stadium, convention center, and Gas Lamp district relies on the trolley system for its popularity and easy access. It has many bikeable and walkable neighborhoods, often separated by the canyon geography as well as the freeways. In my five years there the bike, walk, and bus infrastructure has improved dramatically in all the densely populated areas. Rents are high because it is a beautiful city. THe vibe is happy and easy going.

As a San Diegan I think our transit is decent but could be way better. Once you exit downtown walkability goes down. And the trolleys are way less frequent and in less quantity. Plus people don’t feel too safe and rent is wild

The problem with Los Angeles is that the city is too large to be comfortably crossed by bus. A bus ride in L.A. can easily be one hour and more. The extension of the subway to Westwood and the 405 will make major parts of the West Side just a short bus ride from a train station.

I love Seattle and Tacoma with a passion so while I agree with the former’s ranking, I’m a bit biased in favor of the latter. Having been to San Jose, Anaheim, and Fresno, Tacoma is leaps and bounds more enjoyable than any of those cities. However, I do think it is not as good as the B tier cities; it is kind of the “Oakland of Seattle” but Oakland is indeed far superior with transit and neighborhoods. So maybe Tacoma would be a C+ or B- in my book?

What is the lore behind the Long Beach thumbnail with Snoop? Does he actually ride the LA Metro, or was it just a publicity stunt?

Euegene above Tacoma is wild to me tbh

FRESNO MENTIONED

i wonder where would vancouver, canada rank on this list since it's also a typical west coast city

Long beach and Oakland should swap places.

I’m really interested in what you have to say abt Vancouver, could u do a list of Canadian cities (as there’s only like 6 of them)

Should have included Victoria and Vancouver :/

My big gripe with the transit in SF and the Bay area is... price. BART in particular I feel is really overpriced. If it cost much more expensive gas and bridge tolls would be less.

Oakland absolutely belongs on a tier above Long Beach and LA.

San Diego took the hit for sprawl, while Long Beach, Anaheim and Santa Ana didn't get points knocked off. Would bump up SD as a result. (But I'm biased lol)

"San Jose" [Photo of Cupertino] 😭

San Diego slander

I will say that WalkScore is weird and can be inaccurate. Like bike scores are a big one. And often it doesn’t consider things like width of sidewalks or bike lanes etc. particularly with SD there’s streets with large sidewalks and then several streets over with very low quality pedestrian infrastructure will have the same score.

Santa Ana rating should include neighboring Orange, which is a jewel of a college (Chapman University) town.

Stockton?

Lmao the gum wall thumbnail choice for Seattle.

Long beach turns into an indycar track not an F1 track

Need sections/timestamps for each city

Fresno belongs in D/F tier, Oakland in A tier as someone who has lived in both areas

Santa Ana does have some pretty good transit but… 30 - 70 minutes for a bus… 😫

EUGENE MENTIONED!!! 🔥🔥🔥💥💥💥🔥🔥🔥

As a frequent commuter in San Bernardino, its honestly an F

LA is A tier but middle lower A tier class

No way Long Beach is higher than San Diego 😭

In my opinion, I think Tacoma should be a lower rank since their bus coverage isn’t good at all (in my opinion) And Seattle definitely deserves A-tier, maybe even S-tier

Eugene got rated but not Corvallis? Yet another instance of Oregon getting favoritism over Oregon State!! 😠

San Diego B tier

The poop map made the video. Opinion valid

Vibe should be considered in every category. San Diego cannot be bellow San Jose (haven't been to the other C tier cities). Having slightly better transit service or bike infrastructure is irrelevant if there's nowhere interesting you can ride to...

INDYCAR TRACK LONG BEACH IS AN INDYCAR TRACK