The real problem is the decades-long reliance of the other six Bay Area counties (including Santa Clara) on imported labor, instead of housing their own workers.

Well ivg is correct, but subsidizing transit is way cheaper and way faster than any kind of housing reform that make a noticeable difference. Probably time to step back and realize that substituting rail for driving is not really the issue, so this is a general fund issue and won't be solved by moving the deck chairs around on the transit/commute titanic. In the meantime we need to get real about affordable plans for creating housing for people who are not high paid knowledge workers and doing it in a reasonable time frame.

I don't follow your point about transit. Can you rephrase it?

Also, there's a lot of great housing reforms out there that would cost no money. (Although, of course, they take a long time to bear fruit.)

Regarding the previous comment, there are no zero-cost housing reforms. Full stop. This is like saying the laws of physics are not real. It might not cost you anything personally, but the indirect costs are going to be substantial.

That said, $9.50 for the bridge is pretty outrageous. Fewer people will travel across the bridge, raising the costs of labor. Is it worth the cost in the end? That's for the economists to debate.

I take exception with the idea that you're wealthy if you live in the Bay Area which is nonsense.

Seth Neumann is absolutely correct when he says, "we need to get real about affordable plans for creating housing for people who are not high paid knowledge workers and doing it in a reasonable time frame."

Over the past 8-year RHNA cycle, ALMOST ALL of new housing units created were expensive, market rate units that are unaffordable to low income and average workers (see “Housing units, built and planned, for 2015 through 2023 in Mountain View.", Web Link ) Nothing has really changed to alter that statistic going forward, which means that ALMOST ALL of new housing units created will continue to be unaffordable to ordinary working people.

We've heard so much talk about the jobs/housing imbalance, but somehow the needs of low income and average workers have been forgotten. Don't they deserve to live near their jobs too? If we don't build affordable housing for these people, of course they will need to commute in order to get to jobs here. And now, to add insult to injury, we are raising their cost of commuting. Being poor is very expensive.

Adjectives matter. We need policies to create AFFORDABLE housing for average workers, instead of policies that encourage the creation of large quantities of market-rate (/UNAFFORDABLE) housing. "More housing of any kind" is not a solution, it is deceptive propaganda to help certain powerful players increase their own profits.