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Chronicle columnist Heather Knight, culture critic Peter Hartlaub and route co-creator Hayden Miller (left) return to the Orinda BART Station after skipping a delayed County Connection bus in Orinda.

Hartlaub looks over a BART map on a train to the Union City Station during the attempt to ride all 27 Bay Area transit agencies in one day.

Chronicle columnist Heather Knight and culture critic Peter Hartlaub wait for an AC Transit bus near the corner of Grand and Santa Clara avenues in Alameda during their attempt to ride all of the Bay Area’s 27 transit agencies in one day.

The sky was pitch-black. Nothing stirred except a far-off garbage truck on its early morning run. I sat on a bench in Alameda waiting for an AC Transit bus that would take me to a ferry terminal where I would hitch a boat ride back to San Francisco, the same place I’d left an hour before.

Wait, why was I doing this again?

All in the name of shoe-leather journalism. Well, and for a weird sort of adventure, too. Chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub, photographer Jessica Christian and I wanted to put the Bay Area’s notoriously disjointed 27 transit agencies to the test.

We had a lot of questions on Wednesday, the day we dubbed #TotalTransit2022. How many of the 27 could we ride in a single day? How difficult would it be to navigate between them? Would we have a relatively easy ride, or would we lose our minds along with our time?

Also: Is there a better way forward?

As we huddled in that lonely Alameda bus shelter at 5:50 a.m. — chosen as our starting point for its proximity to Hartlaub’s home — the answers were yet to come. But we knew our mission was worthy when we met Jay Marlette.

Marlette said he has a brand-new truck in his carport, but much prefers to take public transit to his job as a Berkeley housing inspector.

“I can just zone out and let somebody else drive. It’s a complete no-brainer,” he said as headlights appeared down the street. “And here’s your bus!”

Our Clipper cards beeped and it was official: One down, 26 to go.

The first half of our day went surprisingly well. No transit ride can beat the San Francisco Bay Ferry, especially at dawn. We chatted with captain Tony Heeter in his perch atop the boat as the sky turned pink and the morning light made Salesforce Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid sparkle.

“I love my job,” Heeter said, slowing to ensure the ferry’s wake didn’t disturb a construction barge working on the Bay Bridge. “I love the sense of purpose. There’s a good reason for us to be out here early in the morning getting everybody where they need to go.”

As we approached the Ferry Building, we spotted a familiar face: City Attorney David Chiu. As a member of the state Assembly, he pushed a bill to require regional mapping and way-finding, integrated fare structures and other improvements to the sprawling transit system. It died mysteriously in appropriations.

Similar efforts, including one pushed by former state Sen. Quentin Kopp about 30 years ago, have repeatedly failed.

This year, state Sen. Josh Becker, D-San Mateo, took up Chiu’s effort, and the bill died again in appropriations with no reason given or vote taken. (Note to other state legislators: How about a bill changing this opaque process?)

17: transit agencies ridden in one day

25: Buses, trains and ferries ridden (some from the same agency)

$70.05: Cost to circle the bay including $5 on Amtrak and the rest via Clipper

Can you beat our score? How many transit agencies can you ride in one day? Win a BART T-shirt and bragging rights if you can top 17. Details here: sfchronicle.com/totaltransitleaderboard

Chiu joined us for fun — and to highlight the need to better integrate the 27 agencies. He owned no car while on the city’s Board of Supervisors and commuted by bike. But after taking his previous job in the Assembly in Sacramento and buying a home in the Bayview, he bought a car. And with his wife working in San Jose, they now own two.

“We both are tethered to our cars,” Chiu said regretfully. “So many parts of the world have accomplished what we’re still trying to accomplish.”

Chiu mad-dashed across the Embarcadero with us so we could catch the Muni subway to Montgomery Street, then cross the platform and ride right back.

We had just six minutes to sprint back to the Ferry Building to hop another boat to Larkspur. The Ferry Building’s departures board was out of service, and the information sign out back was blank.

We weren’t sure where to find our gate. Fortunately, our route master, software engineer and transit fan Bruce Halperin, shouted at us from the correct gate. We barely made it, sweating and out of breath. Four agencies down and a lesson learned about the importance of clear signage.

“Just imagine somebody with nothing but a Clipper card trying to figure this out on the fly,” Halperin said as we settled into our seats. “We could do so much to improve the way-finding so people know where to go.”

The ride to Larkspur was stunning, with golden clouds above and the Golden Gate Bridge to our left. But the “connection” from the ferry terminal to Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit , better known as the SMART train, was as bad as advertised — a half-mile walk that discourages some people from making the connection at all.

Here was another lesson: If a region wants to encourage people to get out of their cars and onto transit to protect our rapidly deteriorating environment, it needs to make transferring as easy as possible. In the Larkspur case, people wanting to preserve bay views and parking spaces won out in a fight to extend the SMART tracks closer to the ferry terminal.

The SMART train itself, though, is a pleasure — lovely, quiet and clean — and we rode it to Santa Rosa. There, we rode a few local buses and met Erica Herold at one of the stops. She lives in San Francisco and was heading to her final day of work in Santa Rosa, having quit because the commute was so awful. A ferry, a train, a bus ride and lots of walking meant a five-hour round trip.

“It’s a nightmare,” she said.

We caught a Golden Gate Transit bus to Petaluma for a loop on a local bus. From there, we caught an Amtrak bus — the most plush, comfortable ride I’d ever taken — to Napa, where we had enough time for a quick lunch and a glass of wine at Oxbow Public Market.

This challenge wasn’t feeling so challenging at all, I gloated to myself while sipping rosé. We were getting paid for this? But like wine turning to vinegar, our trip would soon go bad.

A ride on Napa’s Vine bus to Fairfield went fine, as did a local bus ride there and our trip on the Solano Express to the El Cerrito del Norte BART Station. BART spokesperson Alicia Trost gave us a tour of the newly remodeled station, and we got to meet some true characters.

Station agent Robert Parks has worked there for 16 years, often dressed to the nines. He said he was mortified we caught him on a day he’d left his tie at home. Nearby, falcon handler Ricky Ortiz held Pac-Man on his arm. The two travel from Stockton three times a week so Pac-Man can scare off the station’s prolific pigeons.

As we chatted, Pac-Man projectile-pooped, his droppings barely missing Parks’ spotless attire. Just another day at BART.

Hayden Miller, a 17-year-old junior at Lowell High in San Francisco, joined the eclectic crew in El Cerrito. He helped Halperin make our route and might be the region’s biggest transit fan. He said he can’t remember the last time he went a day without riding public transit and has clocked 3,000 rides already this year.

“It gives me so much freedom,” Miller explained. “I can go to Half Moon Bay or the Russian River on the weekend, and I don’t need to rely on my parents or get an expensive Uber ride. I can just go!”

The people we met were delightful. The rest of our adventure, though, was not.

We caught BART to Orinda to attempt to ride a County Connection bus, but it was running 18 minutes late, stuck in rush-hour traffic. We had to skip it.

That was yet another lesson: requiring buses to sit in traffic defeats the purpose. Just look at Muni, where an investment in transit lanes, signal priority and boarding islands has meant the 14-Mission is moving 31% faster than before the pandemic and the T-Third is moving 28% faster.

It was back to BART for us. While BART is the workhorse of the region, regular riders know mishaps on the 50-year-old system are common. We rode five trains to get between other transit agencies, and three times the doors stayed shut upon arrival, once for so long that Hartlaub joked we’d been kidnapped.

Trost explained that sometimes a train’s antenna doesn’t communicate properly with a platform antenna. The train operator must request permission from the control center to open the doors, verifying the train is in the correct position and it’s safe to release passengers.

Some of our BART trains were behind schedule, and we missed connections to other agencies including Union City Transit and the Altamont Corridor Express. On our BART train from Union City to San Jose, we heard an announcement that a mechanical problem would force us to reverse back to Union City.

After sitting there a while, we instead proceeded to San Jose. Trost said the operator had left the train cab to troubleshoot the issue, finding a brake problem in the second to last car. He performed a “cut and dump” — different from Pac-Man the falcon’s version — which means that car doesn’t move of its own volition but gets pushed and pulled by the others.

Jeffrey Tumlin, director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said he wasn’t surprised by any of our misfortunes — the buses stuck in traffic, the old trains with mechanical problems or the hard time figuring out where we were supposed to go.

He said the agencies are working to improve connections and design unified maps and way-finding systems, but that the biggest missing piece is sustained funding for transit from the state and federal government. The agencies got emergency money during the pandemic, but that’s set to expire.

After that, Tumlin said, “We fall off a financial cliff. These agencies will face existential questions.”

That was perhaps the biggest takeaway of all. If we truly want expansive, easy, up-to-date transit systems like those in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, our country needs to pay for it.

“As they would in any normal country,” Tumlin said. Without state and federal investment, it’s up to local governments to tax their residents. And that can be a hard sell, especially in suburban and rural parts of the region where fewer people ride transit.

In San Jose, we caught a Valley Transportation Authority bus to a nearby Caltrain station and took a slow ride on one of that agency’s oldest trains to San Francisco. By that point, we were too tired and hungry to stick with our plan to ride a SamTrans bus in San Mateo — and called our adventure complete.

We’d ridden 25 vehicles representing 17 transit agencies and circled the bay with no cheating whatsoever. We were nearly certain we’d need to call an emergency Uber at some point, but never relented.

We hopped off Caltrain and caught the end of the Giants game, where friends and family members waited for us in the bleachers with much-needed beer and nachos. The Giants won.

It struck me that the Giants and the Bay Area’s regional transportation system have a lot in common. They’re the heartbeat of the Bay Area. They revolve around BART (catcher Joey Bart in the Giants’ case). They have so much potential, but they’re currently underperforming. And they have a lot of fans hoping for a better future.

We left the stadium to the sound of Tony Bennett crooning “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Unfortunately, I’d left my car in Alameda. One more ferry ride and a late-night drive back across the Bay Bridge, and I was finally home. It was quite the ride.

Heather Knight is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf

Heather Knight is a columnist working out of City Hall and covering everything from politics to homelessness to family flight and the quirks of living in one of the most fascinating cities in the world. She believes in holding politicians accountable for their decisions or, often, lack thereof - and telling the stories of real people and their struggles.

She co-hosts the Chronicle's TotalSF podcast and co-founded its #TotalSF program to celebrate the wonder and whimsy of San Francisco.