It's probably worse than that though as there are quite a few US cities with a bit of light rail plus buses that are at least as good as SF. There's reasonable transport into and out of SF via Caltrain and BART but the transit within the city is pretty limited.
Part of why transit within SF is better than average is simply that SF is very dense by American standards, so even when buses are running slowly for raw speed, the effective distance traveled in terms of possible points of interest is still pretty good. This is important, because it means the number of things reachable within a 10 or 20 or 30 minute "transitshed" is high.
Now, things are skewed a bit by SF being an unusually small principal city relative to its metro population. That pumps up its numbers compared to if the city boundaries included 1.5m or 2m of the metro pop, rather than ~900k.
Still though, 33% puts it near the top, and I can think of no single better metric of how useful transit is than how many people actually use transit to get around.
Fair enough. I was just in Phoenix and, even though the transit system doesn't look bad on paper, in practice you quickly see that everything is so spread out that it's at least somewhat hard to get around in a reasonable time.
Yes, judging by their 2% transit mode share, I'm guessing Phoenix's transit is pretty average for the sunbelt, which is to say absolutely awful, and near-useless for most trips.
Another example of "don't just look at what's on paper": Dallas has more light rail laid down than any city in the country, at 93 miles. Which gives it a massive transit mode share of...2%. Wow. Think about how badly everything must be designed to have so much light rail that hardly anyone actually uses.
For Dallas' case, you can go to Google Maps, turn on satellite mode, and inspect some train stations, and it's pretty obvious what the problem is. The land use is horribly unconducive to walking + transit. E.g. go out a bit from the city center and you'll find stations with exclusively single-family home neighborhoods right beside, meaning almost no one can walk to/from that station to get around.
Such a waste. It's not like the government has to really build anything itself to fix that issue: only a change of rules is necessary to allow denser development in the area adjacent to the station. But America's culture around zoning is so fucked up that this is usually impossible, even after a city has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into infrastructure, we still insist on crippling it.
It does vary but I was in Dallas for an event a few years back. I identified a restaurant about a quarter mile from the hotel/venue. Turned out I literally could not walk there. I've had the same thing happen to me in a couple other places.
Yup, common in the US, either that or "I technically could walk there, but it looks painfully unpleasant and possibly even dangerous to do so".
Now that we live in Munich, my wife and I joke about how we used to drive from one strip mall's parking lot to go to the parking lot for the other strip mall across the street. Except, when we visit the US we still do this, because in those situations, walking across the 'road' (more like a small freeway) is incredibly awkward.
Density is always a bit tricky because it's very affected by political boundaries. But, yes, SF is one of the densest US cities. [1] But people want it to be even denser (or, more accurately, they want their housing to be cheaper).
