I'm pretty sure that a lot more people are using ride sharing services in the SF Bay Area because all of the public transit systems are overcrowded during peak

I'm pretty sure that a lot more people are using ride sharing services in the SF Bay Area because all of the public transit systems are overcrowded during peak hours and most have additional major issues. BART is too expensive. Muni is prone to unexpectedly large time gaps between buses/trains and doesn't have sufficient subway coverage. Caltrain runs too infrequently. The ferries also seem to run pretty infrequently (though I have less experience with them than the other modes of transit). I don't have any direct evidence for this but it feels pretty obvious: when your public transit systems are already running at full capacity during peak hours and you have people moving into your area, the roads are going to end up completely congested. It certainly isn't the fault of whatever entity is putting cars on the road that the roads are full. After all, people are going to try to live their lives and there really isn't another reasonable way to make more-than-a-few-blocks trips during these hours. I only see a few ways to improve things: a) Increase public transit capacity and then make it more desirable to take public transit (and continually repeat because now your public transit is overcrowded again) and b) Spread out the "peak hours" time over more of the day. Unfortunately, improving public transit can take years or even decades. So we won't get much mileage out of this for a while, but we should still be investing a lot more heavily than we are because this is the only "scalable" fix. It can only be done a limited number of times, but I think we could do a lot better at improving the situation on a shorter timescale with the other option: spreading "peak hours" over more of the day. This can be accomplished by incentivizing companies to shift their workdays so that they start before or after 9 (with a corresponding change at the end of the day). PS: I haven't lived in the peninsula for a couple years at this point, but when I left, Caltrain had just started running a "ridership campaign" while all of its commute-hour trains were standing-room-only. This is ridiculous. The problem is not that not enough people want to take public transit, the problem is that there's not enough capacity!