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Parking garages are plentiful but expensive. Parking meters take credit cards which is plus. Uber and Lyft are everywhere in Philly plus a ton of regular cabs. SEPTA public transport is also decent, affordable and extends into suburban areas as well as NJ. You’re almost better off not even driving into the city.

I don’t know how many things I’ve seen that Europe has exclusively that the US doesn’t - one of the other posters here mentioned haggis, but you can get haggis in the US. You just can’t get imported haggis.In terms of Kinder Surprise Eggs, I suppose that’s sort of true, but the reason why these are banned are due to a 1938 FDA rule about non-edible items in candy. And it’s not just Kinder Eggs that are banned: Import Alert 34-02A service that I rarely see in the US is a toilet attendant. You will find them rarely, but generally only in extremely, extremely upscale joints. I think this is because in many parts of Europe you’re expected to pay for the toilet upon use, so there’s somebody in there to ensure that this happens (in the case of toilets that aren’t coin-operated). There are people who go into the toilets to clean them in the US, of course, but they’re not permanently parked there. In some places in Europe, you don’t get any toilet paper unless you pay the attendant first.Bidets. They’re not everywhere in Europe, but they are virtually nowhere in the US. Americans have a very particular aversion to shooting water at their nether regions.Ticket validators. Again, this isn’t everywhere, but it seems to be a reasonably common system in many parts of Europe where you buy a ticket from a machine/the kiosk, and then when you get into the bus/train/tram/whatever, you stamp the ticket in a validator upon entry/on the platform. What this allows you to do is buy multiple tickets at once and then stamp them at your leisure. I’ve used several different public transportation systems in the US, but I’ve not seen any with validators. You either have to buy a card that you top up (DC Metro, NYC subway) or you buy tickets that are pre-stamped (Portland TriMet) or you buy tickets, buy tickets that are then instantly run through a kiosk (Chicago CTA) directly from the driver/have to pay with exact change when you get on (most buses).I can’t remember exactly what I had to do on the BART or the SEPTA or Seattle Light Rail or T but I am quite positive no validator was involved. On the other hand, I’ve encountered validators in Romania, Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany. I haven’t been on every single public transit system in the US though, so there might be validators lurking somewhere.

I’ve lived in both places. There are some similarities. The very obvious dissimilarities are the topography. Twin Peaks in SF gets you a view like this:The Plateau gets you a view like this:The weather is the other big difference. In SF this is pretty much year round attire(below). The lady in the jean jacket is probably coming from Walnut Creek while the woman in the puffy jacket is probably coming from Daly City.In Philly you get 10 weeks of this:which gradually gives way to thisand then there’s 10 weeks of this:which gives way to this:SF is between the ocean and a big bay. Philly is between two rivers and about 55 miles from the ocean.SF is very close to Oakland (10 miles) and San Jose (50) but this is all one metro area in the way that Wilmington (30) or Atlantic City (55) are part of the Philly metro.SF is 88 miles from Sacramento, 218 miles to Reno, and 380 miles to LA.Philly is 88 miles from NYC, 97 miles to Baltimore, 138 to DC, and 305 to Boston and Pittsburgh. San Francisco to Anaheim is about the same distance as Philly to Montreal.In other words, Philly is near other places. When you leave the Bay Area, unless it’s to go to Sacramento, you’re really out there.Most people you meet in Philly and especially in the suburbs are from there. In the last 20 years or so there have been more people moving into the City from outside of the Delaware Valley but they're still vastly outnumbered by people from the region.Most people you meet in SF are not from the Bay Area. It's less the case in the East Bay but there are still a lot of transplants there and I'd put the Peninsula and Silicon Valley as transplant heavy as SF.What’s similar?I always thought it funny that SF had so many street names from Philly. Washington, Lombard, Pine, Walnut, Sansom(e), Chestnut, Market, Filbert. Those are common enough names but to have that many of them seems to have been on purpose.The two cities are similar in size. By that I mean the metro areas so the downtowns of each city are similar in size although I feel like there’s more energy in Philly. It really is “Center City” whereas in SF the energy is more diffused out to the neighborhoods.The transit maps really display this well. In Philly we see most lines converging downtown. The map is not to scale but you can walk from the end of the red line at 16th & Locust up to Suburban Station in about 7 minutes. But getting down to Newark is about 45 miles:The Bay Area isn’t as centralized. You can see the density of service along Market St. in San Francisco but the nodes in Oakland and San Jose are also clear.Both cities have these different grid systems that connect at weird angles. In SF this happens downtown along Market St.In Philly it happens in a few different places but it’s most prominent along Baltimore Ave. where West and Southwest Philly meet. In Philly this is because there were several different towns in the county before 1854 when the City and County merged. Each town had already started it’s own grid before the merger. These other grids were incorporated into the whole at sharp angles. The same thing happened in SF although I’m not sure why as the original jurisdiction of SF incorporates both grids.The Muni Metro is similar to Philly’s Subway/Surface lines (SF’s is more modern but Philly should be undergoing a major update in the next 5–10 years.)The shared tunnel under Market Street seals the deal. The only important difference is that in Philly it’s a more traditional 4-track tunnel so the trolleys run alongside the subway while in SF it’s double-decker so the trolleys run on top of the subway. In both cases you have to go up to the mezzanine level and then back down to transfer between them. In Philly it’s always a free transfer because it’s the same agency. In SF you have to exit the Muni system and enter the BART system. You pay a reduced transfer if you use a Clipper card much like if you transfer from PATCO to SEPTA.The transit setup in SF is mind boggling. In Philly there is a transit agency for Southeast PA, one for all of NJ, and one for all of DE. There's also one subway line that's operated by the Port Authority that owns the bridge it runs across. So there are 4 agencies. DE buses don't come into the city and unless you live in NJ you don't really think about PATCO or NJ Transit. I can think of 9 different transit agencies in the Bay Area just off the top of my head. It's difficult to live in SF and never think about BART or Caltrain and almost every county in the Bay Area runs its own bus network.Both Philly and SF have a gritty feel to them. SF hides most of its poverty in Oakland and the rest of the East Bay while in Philly the majority of the regional poverty is in the City. A lot of that has to do with how small SF is - 49 square miles. But a good deal of the poverty in the Bay Area isn’t hidden at all. It’s on the sidewalk, under a bridge, or in a park. Philly has homelessness too but it’s nothing like the scale of what you see in the Bay Area.The outdoors in both places are pretty great. Of course, just north of SF you have Muir Woods:and nearby Mt. TamIn Philly you get some flat water kayaking 30 minutes away in the Pine Barrensor you can head north for about an hour for more of a challengeThe outdoors in Philly are a lot more seasonal. In the winter you head up to the Poconos for skiing. Spring and fall are for more local parks. Summer is at the beach or on the rivers (although some families do head up to the Poconos in the summer.) It’s also a lot more difficult to make weekend plans more than a week in advance - because it can rain any time of year. You always need backup plans or a rain date.In SF, you can make plans in April to go on a hike in August and just know that it’s not going to rain. Mid November to Mid-March can get a little dicey when it comes to making plans more than a week in advance but the rest of the year you’re fine. It also does get a little weird in late summer. It’s never really warm enough to spend a day at the beach but I didn’t like going to the inland parks either because it’s really hot and dry and there’s no water - no lakes or rivers to play in. The other parks in the goldilocks zone along the coast can get really crowded on the weekends.Both cities boomed around the same time so a lot of the older architecture is from the same period. Philly:SFPhillyInterestingly, the oldest parts of Philly are full of workingman’s rowhomes.As you go to the “newer” parts houses get biggerIn San Francisco it’s the opposite. The bigger homes are closer to downtownand the smaller accommodations are closer to the beach.It’s like Philly built a home grown, upper-middle class while in SF a bunch of rich people moved there and then attracted “the help.” Part of this is also that there’s a substantial difference in weather near the beach in SF vs. near the Bay. There’s a premium on real estate in the sunnier/warmer parts of SF whereas in Philly the difference in weather is negligible and doesn’t play a role in real estate prices.Speaking of the working class, in both places you have a substantial number of people who move there from outside the region to be “activists.” Most of them claiming some sort of solidarity with the working class and most of them having no clue about it. In Philly there’s long been a contingent of crazies in West Philly with anarchists being the largest group over the last 30 years. Then there’s this crew who made themselves famous recently - not from West Philly but just west of it - How the Hebrew Israelites who preach on Philly sidewalks are connected to the MAGA confrontation at the Lincoln MemorialThe hippies seem to have settled along the Route 202 corridor in the suburbs from West Chester up to Doylestown and along 309 to include Mt. Airy in the City but they’re an aged demographic at this point. In the Bay Area, to the extent that they’re still around at all, that demo seems to be mostly in the North Bay - Marin/Sonoma/Napa. And speaking of 60s radicals - the East Bay birthed the Black Panthers. West Philly, seemingly seeking to one-up their West Coast, black power brethren, birthed the anarcho-primitivist MOVE. The only thing that’s changed in both places is that the upper class kids have now adopted the language and affect of the middle-class “revolutionaries.”The universities in and outside of both cities make for a highly visible student population. You have your bougie students, mostly at Penn, who get radicalized by the faculty and other students and “take to the streets.” This is the same at Berkeley and it’s why both Berkeley and West Philly have the association with radical activism. The difference is the isolation in the Bay Area. It’s not just a geographic bubble. It’s also a socio-economic bubble. The Delaware Valley has a substantial working class who you can’t escape and who will happily tell you why your bougie ideas are dumb. People from “enlightened” DC and NYC call us trashy and we respond thusly:But It’s also part of the reason you don’t hear as much of it coming from Temple in North Philly or Rutgers-Camden (or even Cal State-East Bay). They’re state schools with a lot of commuters (read: not rich kids) and the kids who go there know where they’re from, know their local history, and have 60 years of bad policy in their face every day.