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I've lived half of my adult life in Manhattan and the other half in Silicon Valley in a suburban environment. It's nonsensical to assume that a place like Sili

I've lived half of my adult life in Manhattan and the other half in Silicon Valley in a suburban environment. It's nonsensical to assume that a place like Silicon Valley could ever give up their cars and the parking necessary to go to stores restaurants etcetera. It simply cannot happen. In New York, all of my friends lived in apartments within a quarter-mile of the subway system. If I was living on the upper west side and wanted to meet my friends in the village, a 35 to 40 minute train ride was by far the easiest way to get there. No one owned a car (many of us didn't even have licenses). Before Uber and Lyft, we took taxis if it was the middle of the night or freezing snow; otherwise we took the subway. In Silicon Valley towns, people live a mile or more from the city center. There is absolutely no practical way to get to shops and restaurants other than to take your car and park near the center of town. Once in a while on a whim if the weather is nice, I suppose a family a bit nearer than average to downtown might bike together to brunch on a weekend. But if you need to get a quart of milk to make coffee, or get some food for dinner, you use a car. There's no other option. The future I see plausible would include low carbon impact cars, small electric vehicles, self- driving, like an army of Lyft and Uber at very low cost. I think that's the best future we can hope for without a radical restructuring of Suburbia, which is simply not in the cards.

multiplegeorges 5y ago
Cities and towns can update their zoning to encourage denser town centres that make walking and cycling viable. That doesn't amount to a radical restructuring of life and increasing dependency on cars, EV or not, is not a way out of the problem of spread out, lifeless towns. Suburbs are antithetical to good communities and the faster we can develop away from them, the better.
kijiki 5y ago
My wife and I live in Mountain View, which is arguably the heart of the valley. I had to buy a trickle charger for our car's battery, so we wouldn't have to jump it around once a month whenever we went to drive somewhere.
- danbmil99 5y ago
  Mountain View has a lot of residential housing near Castro street so I can see how it might be different than Palo Alto. But let's be honest. if you live within a half-mile of Downtown Mountain View , you are probably earning in the top 0.1 percentile of income in the world. The houses that are close enough to town centers to live that way are highly prized and unaffordable to almost everyone. By removing the possibility of driving to a town center like Mountain View or Palo Alto, you are actually disadvantaging people who can't afford to live close enough to casually bike to Whole Foods on a Sunday morning. Look, this is a complicated issue. It's hard to get there from here because a lot of things have to change at once; there's a chicken and egg effect here. I can imagine a different Palo Alto or Mountain View, but I can't imagine how neighborhoods could change without drastic social upheaval. And if I have to handicap the NIMBY power of well-to-do homeowners to keep your plans from taking effect, I'm going to bet on them. Not because they're better, but because they're likely to win.
  - kijiki 5y ago
    We're about a mile from downtown, and while rents and house prices have gone up substantially like they have everywhere in the bay area, it is still one of the more affordable areas in Mountain View. But location aside, there is very little of the city that is more than 20 minutes by bike away. I used to commute to Palo Alto, and then later Sunnyvale, both were less than 30 minutes. If I made the mistake of trying to drive to work during rush hour, it took about as long.
    - danbmil99 5y ago
      Just for the record, I did the bicycle/Caltrain commute for years -- with my bike for one job, using city bikes in SF at another. It's doable, even preferable in some scenarios. I'm all for making cities as bikeable as possible. Now I'm older, with kids, and have a health scenario that precludes biking (Getting a trike soon to be able to cycle at all). This area is probably one of the most bike-friendly in the US. But still, are you going to bike a week's shopping for a family of five? Costco? Ikea? Dressed up for dinner? Visiting grandparents 10 miles away? I tried to buck the trend. A full year here with just 1 family car. On good days, it sort of worked, but eventually we had to break down and get a 2nd car. Between rushing to get kids to school, working long hours at a startup, even walking the dog in a nice field so she could run -- we just had too many hiccups with a single car. That is just how CA was conceived and built. I think it would be more productive to accept that there is a demand for the suburban lifestyle, and come up with creative solutions that fit that demand, but also address issues of housing and climate. You could make the analogy to architecture. It doesn't work to look at a city and say "This is all wrong", then build whatever suits your aesthetic. You try to modernize but also blend in. Work with the structure you are given. It never works to say "This sucks, burn it down and start from scratch".

multiplegeorges 5y ago

Cities and towns can update their zoning to encourage denser town centres that make walking and cycling viable. That doesn't amount to a radical restructuring of life and increasing dependency on cars, EV or not, is not a way out of the problem of spread out, lifeless towns. Suburbs are antithetical to good communities and the faster we can develop away from them, the better.

kijiki 5y ago

My wife and I live in Mountain View, which is arguably the heart of the valley. I had to buy a trickle charger for our car's battery, so we wouldn't have to jump it around once a month whenever we went to drive somewhere.

danbmil99 5y ago
Mountain View has a lot of residential housing near Castro street so I can see how it might be different than Palo Alto. But let's be honest. if you live within a half-mile of Downtown Mountain View , you are probably earning in the top 0.1 percentile of income in the world. The houses that are close enough to town centers to live that way are highly prized and unaffordable to almost everyone. By removing the possibility of driving to a town center like Mountain View or Palo Alto, you are actually disadvantaging people who can't afford to live close enough to casually bike to Whole Foods on a Sunday morning. Look, this is a complicated issue. It's hard to get there from here because a lot of things have to change at once; there's a chicken and egg effect here. I can imagine a different Palo Alto or Mountain View, but I can't imagine how neighborhoods could change without drastic social upheaval. And if I have to handicap the NIMBY power of well-to-do homeowners to keep your plans from taking effect, I'm going to bet on them. Not because they're better, but because they're likely to win.
- kijiki 5y ago
  We're about a mile from downtown, and while rents and house prices have gone up substantially like they have everywhere in the bay area, it is still one of the more affordable areas in Mountain View. But location aside, there is very little of the city that is more than 20 minutes by bike away. I used to commute to Palo Alto, and then later Sunnyvale, both were less than 30 minutes. If I made the mistake of trying to drive to work during rush hour, it took about as long.
  - danbmil99 5y ago
    Just for the record, I did the bicycle/Caltrain commute for years -- with my bike for one job, using city bikes in SF at another. It's doable, even preferable in some scenarios. I'm all for making cities as bikeable as possible. Now I'm older, with kids, and have a health scenario that precludes biking (Getting a trike soon to be able to cycle at all). This area is probably one of the most bike-friendly in the US. But still, are you going to bike a week's shopping for a family of five? Costco? Ikea? Dressed up for dinner? Visiting grandparents 10 miles away? I tried to buck the trend. A full year here with just 1 family car. On good days, it sort of worked, but eventually we had to break down and get a 2nd car. Between rushing to get kids to school, working long hours at a startup, even walking the dog in a nice field so she could run -- we just had too many hiccups with a single car. That is just how CA was conceived and built. I think it would be more productive to accept that there is a demand for the suburban lifestyle, and come up with creative solutions that fit that demand, but also address issues of housing and climate. You could make the analogy to architecture. It doesn't work to look at a city and say "This is all wrong", then build whatever suits your aesthetic. You try to modernize but also blend in. Work with the structure you are given. It never works to say "This sucks, burn it down and start from scratch".