All good points, and it's quite likely that new riders will appear once the trains start running. But the Bay Area in general, and the North Bay has participated well, has been in a bureaucratic shouting match so long they wouldn't recognize anything else. I do have a suggestion though.

GGBH(&T)D took over Greyhound for 2 reasons: Greyhound was about to simply abandon service entirely (leaving Marin and Sonoma with no transit at all), PUC was going to allow it, and the Bridge District needed some way to add capacity because the traffic was coming to a standstill and there was no practical way to add a second deck. Greyhound's suburban network gave them a way to jack up the seats over the bridge without greatly jacking up the vehicle count. It worked. But they got saddled with the Basic and Local stuff along with the commuters, which turned them into a transit district with no way to generate matching funds (no taxing powers) other than bridge tolls. That required higher tolls, which (economists would agree) did as much to stabilize traffic volumes as the buses did. Later, of course, the Golden Gate Navy came along which required even higher tolls. More recently, people stopped commuting to SF as much as the job market changed. Remember, all this happened back when Marin was still fairly affordable. Anyway...

Why not give all or most of the Basic main-line service that's still needed to SMART and let them be a real, regional trunk-line transit operator, not just a bunch of train people. Something like, perhaps, Foothill Transit with the Gold Line for a rail spine. Let Marin put their local service out to bid again - maybe GGT will still want it, maybe they won't. But once all the dust is settled, GGT would probably be left with what they were really after in the beginning - the commuters, which can be rationalized to work logically with the trains and ferries but otherwise still serve a very useful and supportable function. Given their Navy, GGBH&TD will never be able to shed the "T", but they could subside to a specialty function: cross-Bay transport. And leave the North Bay internal stuff to SMART and the counties. Yeah, it would trigger the political equivalent of a regional nuclear war, but properly coordinated I think it could turn out well.

Ah well, enough dreaming. Time for a Kentucky Coffee (out of Jameson's so can't do Irish) and settle down with the next inch of the Game of Thrones book I'm reading (makes Tolkien in all its glory look like the executive summary of a kids book; Clancy has met his match!).