For example, Seattle has a problem where the urbanized area around lake washington support expanding our public transportation - but we're chained down by eastern King County, largely rural citizens who don't want or need subway lines. However, rural districts depend on taxes redistributed from urban areas to fund programs like public education... so it's not clear that breaking up the district is the answer either. Ideally we'd have some type of adaptive democracy, where each issue is regulated by the scope of people impacted by the decisions.
People with long commutes that don't want the corresponding increase in traffic are probably justified. I personally wanted light rail to go out to Redmond, but that seems hung up on three counties (not just King).
I left Seattle just before Capital Hill and the U-District were served by light rail though. Maybe things have changed.
Look at it from space, there's clearly only one damn city in the SF Bay Area, and it goes from San Francisco down to somewhere south of San Jose and back up to Richmond. That's a big city, but not one of the biggest.
But yes, if the San Francisco Bay Area were merged into a single megacity with a unified, powerful municipal government, some of its persistent and increasingly painful issues (imbalance between commercial and residential real estate development, broken public transit system, etc.) might have a better chance of being solved.
I mean you could legally declare that my legs and upper torso are different people, but it would be silly.
I realise there's history and San Francisco wasn't always joined to San Jose by unbroken urbanity, but arbitrary legal structures should keep up with geography.
In that respect places like New York, The (SF) Bay Area, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and Seattle would make a lot more sense; and most of these mostly would be within one state.
Problematically cities spanning state lines would be obvious. DC, Portland (Oregon), Kansas City and St. Louis spring to mind as examples.
I believe it to be unfair for workers to escape the taxes of a city by driving across some human chosen line.
I believe it to be unfair for insular communities to exclude "less desirables" by NIMBY actions.
I believe we could actually solve congestion if these mega-city regions had regional planning and zoning to encourage a range of affordable housing close to the jobs, addressing the commutes instead of trying to fund their expansion.
From an administrative PoV some cities might benefit from being re-organized as prefectural-level cities or even direct-controlled municipalities (though, given W D.C. governance, I'm not sure it would fly in the US)
And Rahm has not improved things in Chicago as far as I can tell. What non "optics-minded" improvements has he made there?