Make More Land

Better mass transit needs straight lines to run on more than density. When the bus has to go down every long cul-de-sac nobody will ride because the bus takes so long, when it doesn't few people ride because of the long walk to the bus. If developments has more long straight streets down the middle there wouldn't be a long walk to a bus that runs a reasonable route.

As you said, closer isn't a measure of only distance it is also a measure of time. If the transit system can isn't too far to walk to, runs often enough that people don't worry about when it comes, and doesn't waste time going places the rider don't want to go: people will take it. When transit is inconvenient to get to, doesn't run when/were individuals want to go, or takes too long to get there: people won't take it.

Fixing that isn't easy though. Roads/streets need to be designed for transit. Enough people need to ride that the system isn't mostly empty. It needs to go more or less direct routes to where people want to go, not take long detours to other destinations. Only the middle depends on density at all, if you fail the other two density won't give your transit systems many riders. Pass the other two and you can still get a lot of riders despite not being very dense.

Cheaper solutions;

- High speed rail through the mountains to places like Modesto, Keyes etc.

- More building up in Oakland, Richmond

- Allow more remote work

- Second headquarters in other major cities

Seems to me to be the usual un-environment friendly corporate drivel. We don't need more people in San Francisco. They are the 13th ranked city by density in the USA.

"The world is very large, and cities are a very small portion of it. The land we set aside for animals should be outside of cities, where far more land is available at far less impact to people."

That’s a pretty big project to propose to protect the “character of neighborhoods” for the benefit of the already wealthy!

How about instead just build densely on the land that already exists in cities? And not pave over the bay?

I think we still do these projects all the time, in cities of a certain development level, for the same reason we always did them: industry lobbying. This land was, almost always, reclaimed by heavy industry, for industrial use; and only later, once that industry no longer had need of it (and was being gentrified out of the area entirely) was the land re-zoned for other uses and “finished off” as a public works project.

Residential or commercial developers have never been given authorization to reclaim coastline, AFAIK. And governments very rarely do it themselves, save for when they’re essentially serving the role of an infrastructure provider to some later industry (e.g. an airport.)