The new, more extensive Elizabeth line in London was built faster than S.F.’s Central Subway Project.

As we settled into plush, violet-hued seats on the spotless subway train whizzing beneath London, my sons couldn’t quite believe it.

Like their mom, my boys love public transit and ride it often. They wanted to ride as many lines in the city’s famous Tube subway system as possible during our recent trip, and the brand-new Elizabeth line was a must. Named after the queen and decorated with splashes of royal purple, it was everything Muni and BART struggle to be.

It’s so clean, my boys remarked. And quiet. And fast — reaching 60 mph. We rode it on a weekday morning at commute time, and there was no crowding. Train cars stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction.

The trains were also frequent and reliable. If you missed one, no big deal. Another would arrive in a few minutes. It was also easy — with lots of wayfinding signs, helpful staff and the ability to pay your fare with the tap of a credit card at the gates.

Traveling can be fun and adventurous, but it can also be instructive in how some cities seem to be work better than San Francisco. There’s no question that when it comes to public transportation, London and many other cities in Europe and Asia have San Francisco squarely beat.

“You must have been riding the Tube a lot and seeing what it’s like to have a functional transit network,” Hayden Clarkin, a former San Francisco resident who now lives in New York, told me when I described my trip. He’s a transportation engineer and founded TransitCon, an annual gathering devoted to public transportation and the people who love it.

“And San Francisco is one of the best cities in America for transit, so what does that tell you?” he added with a laugh.

Signs for the new Elizabeth Line entrance at Paddington for the new rail route through central London from the commuter towns of Reading in the west and Shenfield in the East, during a media visit in London Wednesday, May 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Always on the hunt for my next column, I did some research. How did London’s new Elizabeth line, which debuted in May, compare to San Francisco’s soon-to-open Central Subway line?

Like seemingly every infrastructure project these days, they both went over budget and saw long delays. Though construction started at about the same time — 2009 for the Elizabeth line and 2010 for the Central Subway — in typical San Francisco fashion, the latter still isn’t open. Staff at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said yet again this week that the subway will open sometime this fall, with nothing more specific.

The Elizabeth line — which is mostly open now and should be fully open in the spring — includes 26 new miles of tunnel and nine new subway stations compared to the Central Subway’s 1.7 new miles of tunnel and three new subway stations. So it took about six months per mile of tunnel to build the Elizabeth and seven years per mile of tunnel to build the Central Subway.

Trains on the Elizabeth line come every five minutes, a gap that will decrease to just two or three minutes when it’s fully operational. The SFMTA’s goal for the Central Subway is for trains to arrive every 10 minutes.

Including above-ground railway and stations, the Elizabeth line will stretch across 62 miles from Heathrow Airport through the heart of London to outlying suburbs, passing through 41 stations, increasing London’s already expansive rail capacity by an astounding 10%.

The Central Subway, which critics said never needed to be built in the first place, will connect to the T-line stretching a few miles south to Visitacion Valley. The SFMTA doesn’t have an estimate for how many people it will carry, its spokesperson said.

Sixty-two miles of track here could zig and zag across San Francisco numerous times. Or stretch from Mill Valley to San Jose. Or Ocean Beach to Tracy.

But that’s just a pipe dream — and that’s a shame. The United States has never invested heavily in public transit, instead prioritizing cars and highways, often slashing right through the centers of cities.

An Elizabeth Line train departs Paddington station during a training journey for the new rail route through central London from the commuter towns of Reading in the west and Shenfield in the East, during a media visit in London Wednesday, May 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

London has one main transit agency — Transport for London — that operates the Tube, light railway lines, the city’s famous double-decker buses, taxis, trams and ferries on the River Thames. The nine-county Bay Area, which has about a million fewer residents than London, has a mind-boggling 27 transit agencies that don’t work very well together and haven’t created a seamless, expansive system for getting around.

“Very few American cities seem to have a really good long-distance, integrated system that has the commuter piece from the suburbs into the central city with a good integration all on the same fare,” said Eric Goldwyn, an assistant professor of transportation at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. “The British, they do a nice job of that.”

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Have you traveled lately to another city in the United States or abroad and noticed what they do better than San Francisco? E-mail me your stories for possible inclusion in an upcoming column: hknight@sfchronicle.com

And the farther we’ve gotten from building major transit projects — BART turns 50 this year — the less we know how to do it, Clarkin argued. He called it a “brain drain” with few universities offering programs related to rail engineering and few factories in this country that make trains. Add in notorious politics and red tape, and it’s a recipe for, well, not much public transit.

“It’s a lot of incompetence and a lack of political will,” he said of America’s approach to building more transit.

To its credit, the SFMTA had restarted several bus lines paused during the pandemic by the time I got back. But then again, it had also implemented a sketchy shuttering of the popular Slow Streets Program on Lake Street and likely faces a ballot measure in November to reopen John F. Kennedy Drive and the Great Highway to traffic.

Two steps forward, one step back, like so much of life in San Francisco.

And, to be clear, San Francisco is better than other cities in some ways, too. It’s still one of the most beautiful cities in the world, prettier than London, in my book. Its airport is much cleaner and easier to get around than Heathrow. And for our first meal back home, we raced to our neighborhood taqueria. Fish and chips are tasty, but nothing beats a great burrito.

Plus, here’s guessing the long-awaited grand opening of the Central Subway will be even cooler than May’s debut of the Elizabeth line. The queen attended that one. My suggestion for ours? Drag queens.

Heather Knight is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf

Heather Knight is a columnist working out of City Hall and covering everything from politics to homelessness to family flight and the quirks of living in one of the most fascinating cities in the world. She believes in holding politicians accountable for their decisions or, often, lack thereof - and telling the stories of real people and their struggles.

She co-hosts the Chronicle's TotalSF podcast and co-founded its #TotalSF program to celebrate the wonder and whimsy of San Francisco.