It’s that the Bay Area is extremely low density compared to other comparable population centers such as New York, London, or you-name-the-city.
It’s just not practical to use conventional forms such as busses and light rail, and this is partly why Uber and Lyft had the leverage to force the state to back down over classifying workers as employees.
Even if you waved that magic wand, beware that it will take two years to even have more than a trivial increase in ridership - trivial - not enough to make it wroth the investment. In 20 years you will see a difference, but who can wait 20 years? And this is a full system up and running at once - in the real world things go incrementally which means it is years before the system can even take you enough of the places you want to go fast enough that you would consider selling the car.
Which is why transport is hard to add. It takes upfront investment and then years of hoping people change their living style.
Though I will point out that if California had any notion of cost control they could have their current high speed rail idea actually running the full route. I'm not sure where the problem is but I know by best in world standards they are spending something like 4x as much as it costs. This only makes it harder for any system to get started and self-reinforces the idea that the bay area doesn't have enough density.
You assert that these attitudinal qualities cause a false perception of inadequate density.
I don’t dispute the attitudes you describe, but I assert that the causality is the other way around.
Individual Bay Area cities - e.g. Mountain View, SF, Oakland. Have plenty of density - comparable with other major cities.
They also actually do have reasonable public transport internally.
The region taken as a whole doesn’t. This is a function of density.
The distance between north and south suburbs of london is about 15-20 miles and can be traversed in about 1 hr - 1 hr 15 minutes by either car or tube.
The shortest route between say, downtown Oakland and the Apple Campus is about 50 miles. It can be traversed on the freeway during low traffic in about 50 minutes. By public transport it’s 2 hrs 47.
That’s because you have to go around the bay. Not because the transport system doesn’t exist.
No, not at all. Getting there is HARD HARD HARD. it would be a bad move to go all at once. However not going all at once is a recipe for failure.
The region has the density to make such a system work. What is lacking is political willingness to make it happen. Caltran runs a poor schedule that only commuters have a chance of finding useful (you still need a car for everything else), BART is a little better, but both ought to be able to do trains every 10 minutes or less all day - this is something every transit advocate has said for years. If the core can't do every 5 minutes, then the rest of the system will fail because it is too much effort to look up the schedule.
How do cars get around the bay in 50 minutes? I'm going to guess a bridge across. There is no reason you can't build a bridge for transit - in fact for the amount of people carried a transit bridge is cheaper than a car bridge. One full bus every 3 minutes is more humans moved than the maximum amount of cars that same lane can move, leaving plenty of room for more buses, thus your bus bridge is much cheaper than a car bridge because only two lanes are needed. (trains are even better)
Poor financial management doesn't help the cause, but the real problem is poor operations on the systems you already have. Fix that and results will show (a little - but remember you will need to accept low ridership on the 2am trains that you need to run anyway just because 2am is assurance that you can always get back home)
Also, no bridge is involved in the 50 minute route. It’s actually quite a straight path.
The difference is that the distance is far because of the low density and the car doesn’t have to stop the way public transport does.
As the distance goes up, the time penalty for stops becomes magnified.
The above is commonly done in the world.
There are no examples in the world of them being used within cities.
I could imagine a high speed loop of some kind around the entire 100 mile bay, with say 10 stops.
A 50 mile segment would take 33 minutes at 150 miles an hour with no stops, but there would be 5 stops in this case. It takes multiple miles to reach 150 mph and multiple miles to slow back down from that speed, plus a typically mandated doors open time of 30 seconds. We can easily estimate an additional 2-3 minutes per stop.
So high speed train portion would alone be in the order of 40-45 minutes.
That leaves 3 legs unaccounted for - getting to and from the high speed terminal at each end, and walking to and from the local transit. Given wait times and walking it would be generous to call those 15 minutes each.
That takes us to 1hr 15. The train cannot get you there faster than the car, unless you live next to the terminal and your destination is next to the terminal.
This is in the situation where we build a completely new kind of local train that accelerated to 150 mph between stops.
Musk’s hyper loop might do it. But no hyperloop has ever been put into production yet.
This shows that the problem is density and lack of available technology, and not anything to do with bad management.