alt Hacker NewsYou say that, but if your SF tax dollars were paying for VTA you'd probably have stronger complaints... Moreover, public transit isn't evenly distributed even within SF so I don't think the transit agency count is an important variable.
They're all tied together through Clipper, so it doesn't make a difference to end users anyway.
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Hahahaha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbarton_Rail_Corridor
Check out the storied history of RM2. Taxpayers literally voted to raise sales taxes to fund a rail corridor, and the money was reallocated to a different county for an unrelated project that did not benefit the counties in question. Never mind that an actual functional Dumbarton Rail could be a huge improvement to life on the Peninsula if done well.
Imagine a genuinely fast transfer between any one of the Caltrain stations (say Palo Alto or Menlo Park) and one of the East Bay BART stations. Of course, getting the western portion past all the expensive neighborhoods in the way sounds like a real mess.
It matters in that it's impossible to reliably and efficiently coordinate routes across that many agencies. Even if a rider can go from South San Jose to Oakland to Petaluma in a single trip on a single fare transferring as they go, okay it's an optimal payment experience but the routing and interlocking between systems surely isn't