My grandmother never drove.
From 1910 to 1994, she never got behind the wheel of a car, not once. After her husband died, the last 20 years of her life saw her being driven by friends, family or maybe some sort of senior van service. Or maybe she just walked, depending. Or caught a taxi. Which is not always easy to do in a town of under 30,000 in the South.
The problem in Silicon Valley right now is traffic, because the traditional forms have been inverted. Instead of bedroom communities surrounding a central city where everyone goes to work, the jobs are spread all along the peninsula from San Francisco down to the South Bay. And instead of relocating as they get bigger, these companies tend to stay put. Which is why the tenth-largest city in America, San Jose (population 1,026,908) is inexplicably considered some kind of backwater afterthought by young millennial techies as they commute from their residences in San Francisco (pop. 870,887) to such business hubs as Mountain View (pop. 77,846), Palo Alto (pop. 66,420), Cupertino (60,189) and Menlo Park (pop. 33,309).
Many people will tell you the problem in Silicon Valley is housing, and that’s true – ordinary people who aren’t filthy rich or making high-tech money are being priced out of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties altogether. But the problem with building more housing – even affordable housing – is that those people then need a way to get to work. Or to the store. Or to church. Or school. Or down the pub. And that means a vehicle. Unless you’re a weightlifter or have one of those huge Dutch cargo bikes or live right over the store, you probably need a car to bring your groceries home. Unless you’re Lance Armstrong, you probably aren’t taking your bike all the way to the office thirty miles every day down jammed streets. (You definitely shouldn’t be taking your bike home from the pub after seven pints. A DUI is a DUI no matter what kind of wheels are under you.)
To make matters worse, people keep building offices. Apple just bulldozed a bunch of empty HP buildings to build Apple Park, which will house far more employees than the HP campus ever did – and they’ll all be taking the same two or three exits off I-280 in a one-mile stretch. Google went through all kinds of shenanigans of dubious ethics to get their huge plot of land on the bay side of 101 in Mountain View, which is served by…101. Facebook took over a bunch of old Sun offices in Menlo Park, right by CA-84 and the Dumbarton bridge. What do these locations have in common? None of them has any kind of rail service; it’s all freeways with one exit right nearby and another to come in the back way if you’re lucky, all on routes that right now don’t have counter-commute at rush hour anymore.
The solution everyone here preaches about is Uber. Or Lyft. Or something else, like the car-share service called Gig whose founder claims takes seven cars off the road for every one of theirs. What he doesn’t seem to have clued in on, unfortunately, is that one car on the road seven times as long isn’t any less traffic than seven cars on the road once – and that his car can only replace one other car at a time. Car-share programs are not new (I had a discount on one when I was still living in greater DC thirteen years ago) and while they and the “ride-share” cab services in disguise (is that why Lyft cars had that mustache?) may eliminate the need for car ownership, they take precious few actual net cars off the road.
So what’s the answer? Part of it is rail, certainly, although this nation’s feeble-minded have ensured that the Caltrain electrification project that would double its capacity is dead in the water, and that doesn’t even directly serve any of those companies. (To make matters worse, a great restaurant in Menlo Park got knocked down so they could build a new high-rise office building right next to the tracks for ease of rail commute. Which might not be such a smart plan for a train system running at 120% capacity at rush hour.) Santa Clara County has light rail that gets weekday ridership around 30,000 but doesn’t go anywhere you need to go outside San Jose other than at rush hour, unless you want to go from Mountain View to San Jose or back in an hour.
The really interesting thing is that you’re starting to see ride-share services built around pooled use by multiple people, running on a scheduled timetable of sorts, operating on a designated route. I’m not trying to be funny, but I’M ALMOST POSITIVE THAT’S JUST A BUS. Which is not necessarily a deal-breaker. Nothing wrong with a bus. It fits a lot more people than a car, it’s easier to power with electricity or natural gas, slap some Wi-Fi on it and you’re as good as sat in your own living room. But the catch there is that a bus has to go on…a road. Which is presumably as jammed up as anything else. The “express” bus down El Camino Real, from the Palo Alto train station to the Whole Foods at the intersection with Showers Drive in Los Altos, will take you 20 minutes in the afternoon during rush hour according to Google Maps. To go four and a half miles. It may be transit, but at 13.5 miles an hour, it sure as hell ain’t rapid transit.
The thing is, when you have this kind of traffic and this kind of headache, it’s usually because of some kind of geographic obstacle. The Bay and the Pacific surrounding the Peninsula even before the mountains hem it in further. The Potomac in DC. The island of Manhattan. Artificial constraints, bridges and tunnels and space squeezed to the point where you can’t move things around at all. But in most places, the city is the central focus, and you can build in some mechanisms. Subways, grid systems, high-rise offices and high-rise tower blocks of apartments and condos and the like. Instead,every peninsula city I mentioned up there has seen population growth of 10% or more just since the dot-com bust – and that’s just population growth with limited or no housing development, never mind the additional volume of job growth. Google was a startup in 2000. Apple was just coming back to life on the back of the iMac. Facebook didn’t exist. The smartphone – the basis of Silicon Valley in 2017 – existed as a weird European concept with no uptake to speak of in America. There is no precedent anywhere else in the world for this caliber of massive, massive industry growth – in suburbs.
And it would be possible to say “look this is growth, this is just how the world is” – except for that tenth-largest city in America right down the road, ten miles from Mountain View, perfectly amenable to high-rise construction and new development, with light rail running right through the middle of it and heavy commuter rail from three different directions and an airport right at the edge of town with direct flights to Tokyo and London. A town that’s been billed for twenty years or more as the Capital of Silicon Valley.
And yet, every flagship company in this stupid valley would rather stay right where it is, in a town one-tenth the size, and force it to play global metropolis with a five-digit population. At least when kids these days stay in their parents’ basement, it’s because they can’t afford to move. What’s Google’s excuse?