There are simply not enough housing units available in Mountain View, etc. Local governments authorized the construction of huge office parks, but deliberately

There are simply not enough housing units available in Mountain View, etc. Local governments authorized the construction of huge office parks, but deliberately kept residential density very low. They want the economic benefits of big business while maintaining the physical characteristics of the quaint small towns that they were a century ago, or at least of the sleepy, low density semi-rural suburbs that they were 50 years ago. Companies like Apple opened shop there precisely because at the time it was much cheaper than San Francisco. Cupertino in 1975 was something like Concord or Vallejo today. As for the shuttles, they are a sign of the profoundly broken nature of the local public transportation infrastructure rather than anything else. If there were a properly functioning integrated regional transport infrastructure, as in, say, Berlin, they would not be necessary at all.