The other day I started thinking about the state of transit in the SF area and found a few articles from the past few years that presented a rather different pi

The other day I started thinking about the state of transit in the SF area and found a few articles from the past few years that presented a rather different picture from the hyperbolic Uberized/company bus/e-scooter/Hyperloop future: that the focus of local transit investment in the near term, and hence the development projects, is most likely to be in the ferry system. A terminal expansion around the SF Ferry Building was recently completed, and SMART to Larkspur is on schedule for this year(replacing a tight bus transfer from San Rafael), opening up the ferry connections to northern cities. Ferry ridership is up massively in the past few years, the system is well-liked even with full rush hour loads, and it's relatively inexpensive, with fast turnarounds - in the tens of millions for this most recent addition - to continue adding capacity. The only major limitation is in choices of destination. The flashier high-speed projects(including hyperloops, whether or not they are worthy tech) serve their purpose best once they're connected to a strong local system. That's a big factor in the unfinished outcome of California HSR being a disappointment: It's not just that the Central Valley cities are "too small," it's that they don't offer much to connect to internally and they aren't doing a lot to develop a core around the new stations. From what I can recall, the proposals were mostly park-and-rides, which is like throwing away the investment.