AHC: An American city like Tokyo

As a native of San Jose, I've aways wondered–is there a way to mold the mostly urban western and south-western Bay Area (say, from Mountain View/Cupertino/Santa Clara up to San Francisco) into a New York-esque borough system for the sake of creating an overarching authority? Admittedly, this would be a novel concept in competition with the County system, but the Bay Area already has precent for that, what with San Francisco existing concurrently as both city and county.
There have been attempts at something like that early in the twentieth century. To quote Wikipedia,
In 1912, there was a movement to create a Greater San Francisco in which southern Marin County, the part of Alameda County which includes Oakland, Piedmont and Berkeley, and northern San Mateo County from San Bruno northwards would have become outer Boroughs of San Francisco, with the City and County of San Francisco functioning as Manhattan, based on the New York City model. East Bay opposition defeated the San Francisco expansion plan in the California legislature, and later attempts at San Francisco Bay Area metropolitan area consolidation in 1917, 1923, and 1928 also failed to be implemented.
 
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