7 ms·

Silicon Valley bets on new transport to counter the rise of remote work

20 points by lxm 4y ago

dekhn 4y ago
This article (https://archive.ph/G6V9m https://archive.ph/G6V9m) is a joke. New transportation in Silicon Valley? Downton SJC and Diridon BART isn't expected completion in 2030 and at best, it opens up commute options for some employees. What I would like to see, impractical as it may be, would be a full BART ring around the bay with trains constantly running (15m interval) 20 hours a day. While we're at it, please take the fentanyl sleepers off the train, thank you.
- WesternWind 4y ago
  Here's a document from 1961 that shows planned bart stops. Not quite a ring, but it's interesting how many of these places ended up as caltrain stops instead. Of course the north bay just noped out on anything like that. https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5057/5423961825_2d5af7cef4_o.jpg https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5057/5423961825_2d5af7cef4_o....
  - junar 4y ago
    Caltrain wasn't created out of thin air. They took over an existing train service that operated well before BART was even contemplated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsula_Commute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsula_Commute
    - dekhn 4y ago
      It's kind of funny to walk around car-saturated streets in Berkeley and think "there was once a streetcar running on this street and another train that crossed the bay bridge" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System
  - FunnyBadger 4y ago
    I grew up in Marin and was a teen when the BART tax referendum occurred in the 1970s to extend BART into Marin. I remember the arguments against it (which carried the election): "We don't want people from Richmond and Oakland being able to come into Marin!" Well back then just like today, there is a distinct ethnic group this obviously refers to. That was the primary argument against it - we don't want blacks in Marin (unless they are "house blacks" living in Marin City which used to 99% black in the 1970s - it's been gentrified a lot since then). Even as a teen I knew exactly what they were really saying and I found it disgusting but it also made me aware of the fact that the most racist people are not Klansmen in white robes - it's progressive liberals and this was only my first experience with that. I've had plenty more since then over the decades. Marin county is full of racists. It's a large part of why I'd never live there despite how I will partially inherit my mother's house there (it will be sold off instead). You can talk to black folks driving through Marin about how they get followed by the police and often get warned to get out of the county ASAP if they want to avoid trouble. It's a large part of why I always lived on the east side of Silicon Valley (East SJ, Milpitas, Fremont, etc. where being "white" made me a minority) instead of the whiter west cities like PA, MV, SV, Cupertino, etc. You still hear to this day comments like I heard in Marin from people in these cities! We don't want "those people" from "over there" around here! It's a large part of why I no longer live in California and have no intention of returning despite being a native born California with all my remaining family still in California.
    - pyinstallwoes 4y ago
      Where did you move to or where abouts? Thinking of getting out of Cali myself. It’s hilarious and sad how true it is re: progressive liberals being racist. Do they not see their hypocrisy? Oh well.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      I'm glad the people in who lived in Berkeley/Albany voted to have BART (although I curse them for not paying to have it undergrounded. The whoosh and squeaky wheels used to wake me up every morning. Speaking of racism, I found out recently that my ex-landlord's grandfather was also a landlord in San Mateo, in the 1950s implemented racial exclusion deeds: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/opinion/sunday/blm-residential-segregation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/opinion/sunday/blm-reside... and as a coincidence, while looking that up, I found: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Bohannon%E2%80%99s_Challenge_to_BART https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Bohannon%E2%80%99s_C... which suggests he may have also opposed BART in San Mateo on racial grounds.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  Trains already run 15-20m interval at peak hours. The issue is not the interval but rather the average speed of the trains. In China the subways run at max speed everywhere. In the Bay NIMBYs complain so the only places it runs at 80mph is in tunnels and in places where nobody lives (like Union City - Milpitas). There's a section in Oakland where the train is next to a freeway and you can literally drive faster than the train because the train is going 25 mph. Agree with you about the fentanyl sleepers though. And take the aggressive beggars and people smoking weed off as well, then it'll be usable for actual transport like the subway is in China.
  - eek2121 4y ago
    What do you have against weed?
    - ceeplusplus 4y ago
      The smell, mostly. I dabble too but in my own home where I'm not stinking up a train car with 20 other people in it.
    - compiler-guy 4y ago
      The same thing I have against tuna salad sandwiches. It’s fine if you want to stink up your own home. Knock yourself out (so to speak). But don’t make others deal with your stench.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Fair point about the speed, but what I care about is minimizing travel time variance, not minimizing total travel time. I thought "setting your watch to a swiss train clock" was a joke and then in Zurich, the train literally stopped in front of my on the second it was supposed to arrive. The leadership in SF has not the will to make such a thing happen.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  What a sad indictment of the situation that your wild fantasy system has 15m headways. 4 Trains Per Hour. That's borderline unusable. 10 TPH is what I'd consider tolerable. 18 TPH is what I expect from first class cities in developed countries.
  - metadat 4y ago
    That's a train every 3 minutes. What country has this? Definitely not USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Spain, France, Italy, or Portugal. EDIT: My mistake, thank you folks! Your experience traveling abroad is different than mine. For a proper train in especially Spain or Italy during off-peak hours, there were often only one per day for many routes. Caltrain and BART are both still utter disgraces.
    - gcharris 4y ago
      The skytrain in Vancouver, Canada has 3 minute frequency at peak.
      - alephxyz 4y ago
        The o-train in Ottawa and the greens and orange lines in Montreal too.
    - jamesmackennon 4y ago
      Hong Kong and Singapore do. It's quite nice, really.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      Popular intracity buslines in bigger Dutch cities drove every 5-10 mins at peak times pre-COVID. It's really not that high of a standard.
    - philbert101 4y ago
      Subways in London, Tokyo and Moscow. Probably not on all lines though and maybe not at all times.
    - 4y ago
- pj_mukh 4y ago
  And Marin, Please! Also is there any reason the 15m can’t be popped down to 5min? Plus regular weekend service. I would dump my car in a heartbeat (voila, traffic problems solved!)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Lammy 4y ago
  > a full BART ring around the bay They took this from you: https://i.imgur.com/hon9nEf.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hon9nEf.jpg (1956)
jmspring 4y ago
The "core" of Silicon Valley really isn't affordable, unless you want to live dorm style, for many. Rents at 3-4k/mo. Families, it's even more challenging. Nearby "bedroom" communities - Morgan Hill out to Fairfield, housing isn't cheap either. Then there is "traffic". When I graduated with my Masters and went to work at Netscape at Middlefield and 237, I could leave downtown Santa Cruz and be there in about 35 minutes. The last time I had to drive to that area for a work thing was near the Google Campus. I was 15 minutes late for a 9:30am meeting and I left at 7:15 in the morning. From Santa Cruz, if I wanted to use "alternative transportation" I could do 17 Express -> Diridon -> light rail/bus in some manner I haven't looked up. Something that would take a couple of hours. Also with BART, parking lots were already saturated on the Peninsula in the late 90s/early 2000s. People need to get to "new transportation" to take advantage of it.
- borroka 4y ago
  Commuting via public transportation from Santa Cruz to over the hill is simply not feasible. The 17 is a trap that used to cause way more deaths than any developed country would tolerate. It is difficult to believe how backwards some parts of the countries are. One would expect that a very liberal town like SC would be strongly in favor of public transportation over the prison of cars, but it is the same old story: residents of SC are liberal when it means ignoring the homeless nightmare that are the downtown and lower ocean areas, but not when it is time to encourage and support public transportation or freeing the most beautiful coastal spots from the private properties of the rich.
  - jmspring 4y ago
    I drove 17 for about 20 years, my parents drove it when there was a suicide lane and no center barrier. I am well aware. Santa Cruz (and other isolated liberal enclaves) will be it's own death. They literally tried a 0.5% sales tax measure (for the city) mentioning basically paying for homeless services. Where, when you count police and first responder budgets, a double digit percentage of the yearly budget (between about 12-20%) deals with issues resulting from homelessness (and drug issues). They have no idea or competence to handle the problem aside from begging for more money. My partner's family has a shitty little bungalow off of West Cliff surrounded by houses that have sold for $4m. The transient issue still propagates into those neighborhoods with attempted breakins. I can go on for days, having been involved at the civic level there and getting burnt out. It's a beautiful place with an inability to cure it's own woes.
semiquaver 4y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html This article is a transparent PR plant full of wishful thinking.
hirundo 4y ago
I lived and worked in Silicon Valley for years. It has a mild climate. That's about the best I can say about it. It's near other places that are nice, so it's tempting to have a long boring frustrating energy sapping commute. I swapped my cubicle for a little slice of heaven in the forest and now phone it in. It would take a lot more than pleasant public transport to get me to go back. "How ya gonna keep 'em Down in Paree (After They've Seen the Farm)?"
- triyambakam 4y ago
  Which area did you move to? I love the bay's climate. It's really keeping me back because pretty much everywhere else is looking way to hot right now
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    The Bay Area doesn’t have ‘a climate’ - it’s got several. Next week it’ll be low 60s in SF, mid 90s in other areas, with some places in between.
    - triyambakam 4y ago
      You're right. I meant SF
throwaway81523 4y ago
It's not about getting to the office, it's about BEING in the office. Noise, useless meetings, and now covid transmission. Ugh.
- dleslie 4y ago
  Yah, but what about all those hyper-productive impromptu meetings where someone interrupts you at your desk, or when you're on the way to the loo, and they spit out something that could've been sent in an email? Super important stuff, that.
- andrethegiant 4y ago
  Don’t forget small talk and shared toilets.
cm42 4y ago
Hear me out: those electric scooters, but in a tunnel and with some kind of blockchain
- triyambakam 4y ago
  And you buy an NFT ticket to ride
  - madboston 4y ago
    Can I put some ads on it to subsidize everything the same time?
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  Instead of “Bird”, we’ll call it “Rat”. 10% off if you pay with your $RatCoin wallet.
atlgator 4y ago
I run a large service contract of over 60 people. We've had really no issues with remote work over the last 2+ years since the pandemic started. Several staff were ousted for performance reasons but they were low performers to begin with. Remote work didn't make them that way. So to me, blaming remote work for lower performance is a reflection on poor management rather than individual contributors.
bogomipz 4y ago
>"“We have a pro-growth mind-set here,” said San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo. >"Developer Westbank Corp., of Vancouver, British Columbia, for example, recently began work on the first phase of a development that calls for 3 million square feet of office space and 2,000 to 2,500 residential units, according to Andrew Jacobson, the firm’s head of U.S. development." Using a generous 200 sq. foot per employee which was roughly the pre-pandemic average would be 5,000 employees for every million square foot of office space.[1] So 3 million sq. foot of office space would be conservatively be about 15,000 employees and they are going to build 2,500 residential units. I think these numbers nicely sum up that "pro-growth mind-set" nicely. Perhaps the mayor could look and see if there is another city close by that had a similar skew of of lots of tech office space and not enough housing and how that worked out for them. [1] https://www.us.jll.com/en/views/how-will-employee-workspace-needs-change-post-coronavirus https://www.us.jll.com/en/views/how-will-employee-workspace-...
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/G6V9m https://archive.ph/G6V9m

20 points by lxm 4y ago

This article (https://archive.ph/G6V9m https://archive.ph/G6V9m) is a joke. New transportation in Silicon Valley? Downton SJC and Diridon BART isn't expected completion in 2030 and at best, it opens up commute options for some employees. What I would like to see, impractical as it may be, would be a full BART ring around the bay with trains constantly running (15m interval) 20 hours a day. While we're at it, please take the fentanyl sleepers off the train, thank you.

WesternWind 4y ago
Here's a document from 1961 that shows planned bart stops. Not quite a ring, but it's interesting how many of these places ended up as caltrain stops instead. Of course the north bay just noped out on anything like that. https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5057/5423961825_2d5af7cef4_o.jpg https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5057/5423961825_2d5af7cef4_o....
- junar 4y ago
  Caltrain wasn't created out of thin air. They took over an existing train service that operated well before BART was even contemplated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsula_Commute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsula_Commute
  - dekhn 4y ago
    It's kind of funny to walk around car-saturated streets in Berkeley and think "there was once a streetcar running on this street and another train that crossed the bay bridge" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System
- FunnyBadger 4y ago
  I grew up in Marin and was a teen when the BART tax referendum occurred in the 1970s to extend BART into Marin. I remember the arguments against it (which carried the election): "We don't want people from Richmond and Oakland being able to come into Marin!" Well back then just like today, there is a distinct ethnic group this obviously refers to. That was the primary argument against it - we don't want blacks in Marin (unless they are "house blacks" living in Marin City which used to 99% black in the 1970s - it's been gentrified a lot since then). Even as a teen I knew exactly what they were really saying and I found it disgusting but it also made me aware of the fact that the most racist people are not Klansmen in white robes - it's progressive liberals and this was only my first experience with that. I've had plenty more since then over the decades. Marin county is full of racists. It's a large part of why I'd never live there despite how I will partially inherit my mother's house there (it will be sold off instead). You can talk to black folks driving through Marin about how they get followed by the police and often get warned to get out of the county ASAP if they want to avoid trouble. It's a large part of why I always lived on the east side of Silicon Valley (East SJ, Milpitas, Fremont, etc. where being "white" made me a minority) instead of the whiter west cities like PA, MV, SV, Cupertino, etc. You still hear to this day comments like I heard in Marin from people in these cities! We don't want "those people" from "over there" around here! It's a large part of why I no longer live in California and have no intention of returning despite being a native born California with all my remaining family still in California.
  - pyinstallwoes 4y ago
    Where did you move to or where abouts? Thinking of getting out of Cali myself. It’s hilarious and sad how true it is re: progressive liberals being racist. Do they not see their hypocrisy? Oh well.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I'm glad the people in who lived in Berkeley/Albany voted to have BART (although I curse them for not paying to have it undergrounded. The whoosh and squeaky wheels used to wake me up every morning. Speaking of racism, I found out recently that my ex-landlord's grandfather was also a landlord in San Mateo, in the 1950s implemented racial exclusion deeds: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/opinion/sunday/blm-residential-segregation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/opinion/sunday/blm-reside... and as a coincidence, while looking that up, I found: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Bohannon%E2%80%99s_Challenge_to_BART https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Bohannon%E2%80%99s_C... which suggests he may have also opposed BART in San Mateo on racial grounds.
ceeplusplus 4y ago
Trains already run 15-20m interval at peak hours. The issue is not the interval but rather the average speed of the trains. In China the subways run at max speed everywhere. In the Bay NIMBYs complain so the only places it runs at 80mph is in tunnels and in places where nobody lives (like Union City - Milpitas). There's a section in Oakland where the train is next to a freeway and you can literally drive faster than the train because the train is going 25 mph. Agree with you about the fentanyl sleepers though. And take the aggressive beggars and people smoking weed off as well, then it'll be usable for actual transport like the subway is in China.
- eek2121 4y ago
  What do you have against weed?
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    The smell, mostly. I dabble too but in my own home where I'm not stinking up a train car with 20 other people in it.
  - compiler-guy 4y ago
    The same thing I have against tuna salad sandwiches. It’s fine if you want to stink up your own home. Knock yourself out (so to speak). But don’t make others deal with your stench.
- dekhn 4y ago
  Fair point about the speed, but what I care about is minimizing travel time variance, not minimizing total travel time. I thought "setting your watch to a swiss train clock" was a joke and then in Zurich, the train literally stopped in front of my on the second it was supposed to arrive. The leadership in SF has not the will to make such a thing happen.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
What a sad indictment of the situation that your wild fantasy system has 15m headways. 4 Trains Per Hour. That's borderline unusable. 10 TPH is what I'd consider tolerable. 18 TPH is what I expect from first class cities in developed countries.
- metadat 4y ago
  That's a train every 3 minutes. What country has this? Definitely not USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Spain, France, Italy, or Portugal. EDIT: My mistake, thank you folks! Your experience traveling abroad is different than mine. For a proper train in especially Spain or Italy during off-peak hours, there were often only one per day for many routes. Caltrain and BART are both still utter disgraces.
  - gcharris 4y ago
    The skytrain in Vancouver, Canada has 3 minute frequency at peak.
    - alephxyz 4y ago
      The o-train in Ottawa and the greens and orange lines in Montreal too.
  - jamesmackennon 4y ago
    Hong Kong and Singapore do. It's quite nice, really.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Popular intracity buslines in bigger Dutch cities drove every 5-10 mins at peak times pre-COVID. It's really not that high of a standard.
  - philbert101 4y ago
    Subways in London, Tokyo and Moscow. Probably not on all lines though and maybe not at all times.
  - 4y ago
pj_mukh 4y ago
And Marin, Please! Also is there any reason the 15m can’t be popped down to 5min? Plus regular weekend service. I would dump my car in a heartbeat (voila, traffic problems solved!)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Lammy 4y ago
> a full BART ring around the bay They took this from you: https://i.imgur.com/hon9nEf.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hon9nEf.jpg (1956)

jmspring 4y ago

The "core" of Silicon Valley really isn't affordable, unless you want to live dorm style, for many. Rents at 3-4k/mo. Families, it's even more challenging. Nearby "bedroom" communities - Morgan Hill out to Fairfield, housing isn't cheap either. Then there is "traffic". When I graduated with my Masters and went to work at Netscape at Middlefield and 237, I could leave downtown Santa Cruz and be there in about 35 minutes. The last time I had to drive to that area for a work thing was near the Google Campus. I was 15 minutes late for a 9:30am meeting and I left at 7:15 in the morning. From Santa Cruz, if I wanted to use "alternative transportation" I could do 17 Express -> Diridon -> light rail/bus in some manner I haven't looked up. Something that would take a couple of hours. Also with BART, parking lots were already saturated on the Peninsula in the late 90s/early 2000s. People need to get to "new transportation" to take advantage of it.

borroka 4y ago
Commuting via public transportation from Santa Cruz to over the hill is simply not feasible. The 17 is a trap that used to cause way more deaths than any developed country would tolerate. It is difficult to believe how backwards some parts of the countries are. One would expect that a very liberal town like SC would be strongly in favor of public transportation over the prison of cars, but it is the same old story: residents of SC are liberal when it means ignoring the homeless nightmare that are the downtown and lower ocean areas, but not when it is time to encourage and support public transportation or freeing the most beautiful coastal spots from the private properties of the rich.
- jmspring 4y ago
  I drove 17 for about 20 years, my parents drove it when there was a suicide lane and no center barrier. I am well aware. Santa Cruz (and other isolated liberal enclaves) will be it's own death. They literally tried a 0.5% sales tax measure (for the city) mentioning basically paying for homeless services. Where, when you count police and first responder budgets, a double digit percentage of the yearly budget (between about 12-20%) deals with issues resulting from homelessness (and drug issues). They have no idea or competence to handle the problem aside from begging for more money. My partner's family has a shitty little bungalow off of West Cliff surrounded by houses that have sold for $4m. The transient issue still propagates into those neighborhoods with attempted breakins. I can go on for days, having been involved at the civic level there and getting burnt out. It's a beautiful place with an inability to cure it's own woes.

semiquaver 4y ago

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html This article is a transparent PR plant full of wishful thinking.

hirundo 4y ago

I lived and worked in Silicon Valley for years. It has a mild climate. That's about the best I can say about it. It's near other places that are nice, so it's tempting to have a long boring frustrating energy sapping commute. I swapped my cubicle for a little slice of heaven in the forest and now phone it in. It would take a lot more than pleasant public transport to get me to go back. "How ya gonna keep 'em Down in Paree (After They've Seen the Farm)?"

triyambakam 4y ago
Which area did you move to? I love the bay's climate. It's really keeping me back because pretty much everywhere else is looking way to hot right now
- happyopossum 4y ago
  The Bay Area doesn’t have ‘a climate’ - it’s got several. Next week it’ll be low 60s in SF, mid 90s in other areas, with some places in between.
  - triyambakam 4y ago
    You're right. I meant SF

throwaway81523 4y ago

It's not about getting to the office, it's about BEING in the office. Noise, useless meetings, and now covid transmission. Ugh.

dleslie 4y ago
Yah, but what about all those hyper-productive impromptu meetings where someone interrupts you at your desk, or when you're on the way to the loo, and they spit out something that could've been sent in an email? Super important stuff, that.
andrethegiant 4y ago
Don’t forget small talk and shared toilets.

cm42 4y ago

Hear me out: those electric scooters, but in a tunnel and with some kind of blockchain

triyambakam 4y ago
And you buy an NFT ticket to ride
- madboston 4y ago
  Can I put some ads on it to subsidize everything the same time?
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Instead of “Bird”, we’ll call it “Rat”. 10% off if you pay with your $RatCoin wallet.

atlgator 4y ago

I run a large service contract of over 60 people. We've had really no issues with remote work over the last 2+ years since the pandemic started. Several staff were ousted for performance reasons but they were low performers to begin with. Remote work didn't make them that way. So to me, blaming remote work for lower performance is a reflection on poor management rather than individual contributors.

bogomipz 4y ago

>"“We have a pro-growth mind-set here,” said San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo. >"Developer Westbank Corp., of Vancouver, British Columbia, for example, recently began work on the first phase of a development that calls for 3 million square feet of office space and 2,000 to 2,500 residential units, according to Andrew Jacobson, the firm’s head of U.S. development." Using a generous 200 sq. foot per employee which was roughly the pre-pandemic average would be 5,000 employees for every million square foot of office space.[1] So 3 million sq. foot of office space would be conservatively be about 15,000 employees and they are going to build 2,500 residential units. I think these numbers nicely sum up that "pro-growth mind-set" nicely. Perhaps the mayor could look and see if there is another city close by that had a similar skew of of lots of tech office space and not enough housing and how that worked out for them. [1] https://www.us.jll.com/en/views/how-will-employee-workspace-needs-change-post-coronavirus https://www.us.jll.com/en/views/how-will-employee-workspace-...

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/G6V9m https://archive.ph/G6V9m