15 ms·

Not that it's any more or less tragic, but I've always been astonished that Silicon Valley is so car-dependent. We've concentrated the most brilliant minds in t

Not that it's any more or less tragic, but I've always been astonished that Silicon Valley is so car-dependent. We've concentrated the most brilliant minds in the world in this small area... and then force everyone to pilot two-ton bullets to pick up groceries? Not all workers can demand decent living conditions, but you'd think the competitive draw for workers in Silicon Valley would entice company towns to, I don't know, add segregated bike lanes so programmers' kids can get to school safely. Add public parks and dense housing so you can walk down to the corner coffee store or take your dog for a walk. Ban cars from certain streets to encourage local commerce and nightlife. SOMETHING. Google's at least trying to improve Mountain View with their new campus (and Apple is very much not trying to improve Cupertino). But what the hell. An international group of wealthy geniuses can't get it together enough to demand marginally walkable lifestyles? And people wonder why everyone commutes from San Francisco.

RIMR 12y ago
Redmond, Washington isn't in Silicon Valley...
- Chevalier 12y ago
  I'm using SV as shorthand for the tech industry generally -- and Redmond is very much to Seattle what Silicon Valley is to San Francisco. Car-dependent suburbia that threatens the health, safety, and quality-of-life of everyone forced to be there. San Francisco is as walkable as the West Coast gets, which alone testifies to the disgrace of American urban planning. Ey would have been killed long ago if he dared to ride a bike to work. If Redmond had been planned after Copenhagen's model, he would still be alive to make the world a better place.
  - DiabloD3 12y ago
    I actually agree with this response. Because of Microsoft, Seattle has become Silicon Valley North, just the same as NYC has become the Silicon Alley and Chicago is... whatever they're calling Chicago now. All of them are similar, heavy car usage, not enough walking, and no safety for humans. Google is trying to solve it by making smarter cars. How about we solve it by making our communities smarter instead?
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      We call it the "Silicon Forest." I remember Redmond when it was still just a small town whose claim to fame was a TV production lot for Northern Exposure (I grew up in Bothell just north on 405).
    - eropple 12y ago
      That Boston managed to avoid this is a very big reason why I don't have much interest in living anywhere else. In Somerville and Cambridge, I feel exceptionally safe, even around cars.
    - guiambros 12y ago
      "Heavy car usage", in NYC? After decades living in real car-only cities (Atlanta, Miami, Sao Paulo), I'm glad to live car-free in NYC. And considering family and small child. While gentrification continues to push people away from Manhattan, you still have decent options of public transportation to everywhere around here. We can criticize NY for many things, but being a 'car city' is not one of them. Anyway, I really wish more cities in the world could offer similar life style, allowing people to leave their cars behind and use public transportation. It would save lives, the environment, and increase everyone's happiness. RIP Mike.
      - DiabloD3 12y ago
        I've never been to NYC, but every depiction I've seen of it grid lock and seas of yellow cabs, and cabs have been known to hit people too.
        jpatokal 12y ago
        Grid lock is annoying, but it's not going to kill you violently. And good luck trying to drive 100 mph in Manhattan.
        guiambros 12y ago
        Underneath the sea of yellow cabs you have a very efficient subway system, connecting the entire city to its 5 boroughs. And you also have a decent railroad system, connecting Manhattan to nearby cities. It's true that some areas are not properly served through subway, and you have to rely on bus. But it is still an order of magnitude better than some of the cities mentioned above.
  - techsupporter 12y ago
    I live in Seattle and work in Redmond and do both solely via public transit and walking. Redmond has a large number of bike lane miles (as does Seattle, and many of Seattle's are protected, separated bike lanes) along with fast, frequent, and long span-of-service transit to places like Seattle and Kirkland and Bellevue. Microsoft has even helped with that by funding things like Overlake Transit Center, a street and pedestrian bridge over highway 520, an upcoming pedestrian-only bridge over 520, pushing for light rail to Redmond, and even both providing tap-to-use transit cards to everyone who holds a badge and partially funding the switch to that system (the ORCA card ). Yes, the property improvements benefit Microsoft in addition to the public but Microsoft was under no requirement to help pay for them. People take transit a lot in the Puget Sound region but it, like many places, still has a stigma associated with it. Seattleites voted last year to tax ourselves more to provide over 200,000 hours per year of more transit service; the rest of the county had its chance before that and voted no. It's not that transit doesn't exist, it's that getting people to use it and agree to make the investment in it (beyond billion dollar light rail lines, because buses are apparently "icky") is difficult even if the system does work well for the commuter crowd. I don't even commute regular hours and I can get everywhere I want to go via our transit system.
    - Arainach 12y ago
      To be clear, there are actual costs involved that affect these dynamics. Property values anywhere near a transit line go way up. For many years I rented and biked to work, but when looking for a house it was massively more expensive to get anywhere within a reasonable bus ride of Redmond. I ended up to the north, where it's still not a bad bike commute (an hour, but mostly on dedicated bike trails instead of roads), but the fastest bus ride is to go west above the lake to downtown Seattle and then east back across the lake to Redmond.
      - techsupporter 12y ago
        That wasn't my experience, but I'll grant that maybe I got lucky. I also live where it takes a transfer (a local bus that comes every 15 minutes to downtown and get on the 545) and, at least in the case of my coworkers, a lot of people are vehemently opposed to transferring. A bike commute would be awesome if I could make it up that hill to the IH-90 bridge...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
ocfx 12y ago
This was in Orange County (oculus guy)
VLM 12y ago
This article is being flooded with weird anti-car hate. Yet, my car is perfectly safe and can only kill someone in a hit and run at 100 MPH if, and only if, I get drunk first. Given that I don't drink very much and then only at home (a sixer lasts me about a season, sometimes half a year) that means my car is incredibly safe and will almost certainly never kill anyone. Odd how there's no anti-alcohol hate here on HN, yet its the alcohol doing the actual killing. If you subtract out deaths due to drunkenness, cars kill less people than bathtubs. Perhaps we need a war on bathtubs. Because nothing is ever a drunk's fault.
- Chevalier 12y ago
  ...dude. No, you don't have to be a drunk going 100mph before you kill someone with your car. That you "don't drink very much" doesn't mean that your "car is incredibly safe and will almost certainly never kill anyone." Your car is an extremely heavy, extremely fast machine that will crush anyone unlucky enough to be in its path. That includes not only incompetent/incapacitated/elderly drivers, but also dumb accidents and unaware pedestrians. You will easily kill a child who tries to play in her suburban street even if you go 10mph -- not because you're a drunk, but because American structural design forces everyone to drive two-ton bullets to go anywhere, which inevitably results in lethal wrecks. Compare Denmark's road fatality rate of 3.0 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the US ratio of 11.6 per 100,000. [1] The question is not whether you enjoy driving. The question is why cars are entitled to the vast majority of public space -- not only for parking (often for free or nominal fees), but also for individual transportation that endangers the lives of pedestrians and cyclists. Please take a look at this illustration to get an idea of how much land your car takes from everyone else. [2] Do you really think a kid trying to bike to school should have to risk his life every day... because you feel entitled to barrel through his home town? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... [2] http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestrians-roads http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestrian...
  - ethanhunt_ 12y ago
    "because American structural design forces everyone to drive two-ton bullets to go anywhere, which inevitably results in lethal wrecks. Compare Denmark's road fatality rate of 3.0 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the US ratio of 11.6 per 100,000." Check the per-vehicle-km rate. Denmark isn't safer because they drive less.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mahyarm 12y ago
It's the USA that is car-default. SF, NYC & Chicago are the exceptions, and they have their own special kind of problems too.
- varelse 12y ago
  We've created a national infrastructure that IMO nearly requires driving to be a civil right. That sucks. But I really don't have an answer to this problem when proposals to address this are either voted down or end up ridiculously over budget.
  - dhagz 12y ago
    Considering the sheer vastness of the continental US, it's not surprising to me that there haven't been many good plans to remove our dependence on cars. The only options, really, for good nation-wide transport are trains and planes. Trains have an incredibly expensive infrastructure, especially the high-speed trains needed to traverse the thousands of miles between the East and West coasts. Planes are slightly less expensive, but the pain of needing to show up three hours early for a one hour flight, risk of lost luggage, and general fear now associated with traveling by air make planes a less than attractive option.
    - CalRobert 12y ago
      But people don't commute across the US, just like they don't commute from Brussels to Madrid. Cities in the US are crap for a variety of reasons (racist zoning, defunding of transit, forced car infrastructure in the form of parking minimums, absurd NIMBYism, etc.)
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      Long-distance and regional transport needs are significantly different from local ones, and different land-use and activity patterns can hugely reduce transportation needs. The fact of a large country doesn't mean that individual urban areas can't be designed for mass transit or walkability. If you can find shopping, school, recreational, and work activities within a few blocks (or at most a few miles) of one another, then a car becomes more a nuisance than a requirement. The exceptions become trips out of town -- the outdoors, visiting friends, etc. Shopping can be dealt with through deliveries (scheduled and bundled, or online). Or local pick-up and a cart, wagon, or bike trailer. Trades and crafts will still likely require transport, but that becomes an outlier exception. Depending on what long-term fuel and economic trends look like, I suspect the US will see either regional high-speed rail or plain-old conventional slow rail. Aviation with expensive fuel becomes an expensive proposition. Roughly half a large jet's take-off weight is fuel, and for an efficient airliner at 40 passenger miles/gallon, a 3,000 mile flight involves 75 gallons of fuel -- at 6.8 pounds per gallon, that's 510 lb. of fuel, 2-4x the weight of a passenger. And while trains can be electrified, the options for doing so to aircraft pose a few larger technical hurdles.
downandout 12y ago
You get a job at Google or Facebook in part so that you can buy a nicer "two ton bullet" than you otherwise could. No one wants to walk out of necessity, and that will not change anytime soon.
coffeemug 12y ago
> Not all workers can demand decent living conditions You're assuming that car-oriented urban planning is synonymous with poor living conditions, which isn't true. A lot of people (most?) in the U.S. actually prefer it -- for many people the perceived convenience of cars beats public transportation and biking.
- dilap 12y ago
  I love driving, but man, it sucks to build a city around it. I'm living in SF right now, carless, and skate a lot. It's fun, but holy shit does it suck constantly having to dodge oblivious drivers, asshole taxis, and homicidal MUNI drivers. I have a fantasy where the whole city is grass and bikepaths. All normal deliveries are by bike, & if you really need to move something big, you get a special permit to rent a truck that goes 10 MPH and beeps.
  - rickdale 12y ago
    Not quite SF, but this might be close to your fantasy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island
  - toast0 12y ago
    Don't worry, SF is terrible for drivers too. I'll just keep my truck in the south bay, where they appreciate it (kind of; why does caltrans forget how to design north of the grapevine?)
  - wanderingstan 12y ago
    Whenever I hear the whirring of hybrid or electric car I realize that times are changing. It may be decades or more away, but I like to imagine what cities of the future will be like. So quiet! So fresh! The rumble of a car engine and its smelly exhaust will seem quaint. Maybe like the feelings now of seeing a horse-drawn carriage, and seeing the horse shit in the street. So much space! My street is walled in by parked cars. The driving lanes are wide to accommodate human error. Perhaps the outer parts of the road will be re-purposed as park space. Only two narrow lanes in the middle for the computer guided vehicles to travel on. Or maybe only one lane, since the cars can coordinate their directions on this rarely-trafficed street. Of course things won't be all rosy, but it IS certain that the feeling of cities will be very different.
jarnix 12y ago
"We've concentrated the most brilliant minds in the world in this small area." Are you serious ?
- sanoli 12y ago
  Well, since software companies are so big and wealthy and seem world-dominating right now, people in this field tend to think of them as the greatest minds ever. I wonder where are all the Silicon Valley Nobel prizes, all the cure for diseases discovered there, etc. There are some great, great minds working there, some geniuses no doubt. But their field isn't the end all for intelligence. Not even close, actually (to me), as I'd rather have advances in many other fields over IT, any day.
  - jamesmishra 12y ago
    UC-Berkeley has enough Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners that they're the only ones that get free parking[1][2]. Some of the smartest people in the world are also at Stanford, NASA Ames, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and similar organizations. [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113883274 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1138832... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_University_of_California,_Berkeley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affilia...
  - jamesmishra 12y ago
    UC-Berkeley has enough Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners that they're the only ones that get free parking[1][2]. Some of the smartest people in the world are also at Stanford, NASA Ames, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and similar organizations. [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113883274 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1138832... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_University_of_California,_Berkeley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affilia...
  - jamesmishra 12y ago
    UC-Berkeley has enough Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners that they're the only ones that get free parking[1][2]. Some of the smartest people in the world are also at Stanford, NASA Ames, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and similar organizations. [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113883274 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1138832... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_University_of_California,_Berkeley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affilia...
jgh 12y ago
Wasn't the Oculus founder in Orange County when he was hit?
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
Honestly, the segway was not a bad idea. Never really caught on, but it was a pretty good solution.

RIMR 12y ago

Redmond, Washington isn't in Silicon Valley...

Chevalier 12y ago
I'm using SV as shorthand for the tech industry generally -- and Redmond is very much to Seattle what Silicon Valley is to San Francisco. Car-dependent suburbia that threatens the health, safety, and quality-of-life of everyone forced to be there. San Francisco is as walkable as the West Coast gets, which alone testifies to the disgrace of American urban planning. Ey would have been killed long ago if he dared to ride a bike to work. If Redmond had been planned after Copenhagen's model, he would still be alive to make the world a better place.
- DiabloD3 12y ago
  I actually agree with this response. Because of Microsoft, Seattle has become Silicon Valley North, just the same as NYC has become the Silicon Alley and Chicago is... whatever they're calling Chicago now. All of them are similar, heavy car usage, not enough walking, and no safety for humans. Google is trying to solve it by making smarter cars. How about we solve it by making our communities smarter instead?
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    We call it the "Silicon Forest." I remember Redmond when it was still just a small town whose claim to fame was a TV production lot for Northern Exposure (I grew up in Bothell just north on 405).
  - eropple 12y ago
    That Boston managed to avoid this is a very big reason why I don't have much interest in living anywhere else. In Somerville and Cambridge, I feel exceptionally safe, even around cars.
  - guiambros 12y ago
    "Heavy car usage", in NYC? After decades living in real car-only cities (Atlanta, Miami, Sao Paulo), I'm glad to live car-free in NYC. And considering family and small child. While gentrification continues to push people away from Manhattan, you still have decent options of public transportation to everywhere around here. We can criticize NY for many things, but being a 'car city' is not one of them. Anyway, I really wish more cities in the world could offer similar life style, allowing people to leave their cars behind and use public transportation. It would save lives, the environment, and increase everyone's happiness. RIP Mike.
    - DiabloD3 12y ago
      I've never been to NYC, but every depiction I've seen of it grid lock and seas of yellow cabs, and cabs have been known to hit people too.
      - jpatokal 12y ago
        Grid lock is annoying, but it's not going to kill you violently. And good luck trying to drive 100 mph in Manhattan.
      - guiambros 12y ago
        Underneath the sea of yellow cabs you have a very efficient subway system, connecting the entire city to its 5 boroughs. And you also have a decent railroad system, connecting Manhattan to nearby cities. It's true that some areas are not properly served through subway, and you have to rely on bus. But it is still an order of magnitude better than some of the cities mentioned above.
- techsupporter 12y ago
  I live in Seattle and work in Redmond and do both solely via public transit and walking. Redmond has a large number of bike lane miles (as does Seattle, and many of Seattle's are protected, separated bike lanes) along with fast, frequent, and long span-of-service transit to places like Seattle and Kirkland and Bellevue. Microsoft has even helped with that by funding things like Overlake Transit Center, a street and pedestrian bridge over highway 520, an upcoming pedestrian-only bridge over 520, pushing for light rail to Redmond, and even both providing tap-to-use transit cards to everyone who holds a badge and partially funding the switch to that system (the ORCA card ). Yes, the property improvements benefit Microsoft in addition to the public but Microsoft was under no requirement to help pay for them. People take transit a lot in the Puget Sound region but it, like many places, still has a stigma associated with it. Seattleites voted last year to tax ourselves more to provide over 200,000 hours per year of more transit service; the rest of the county had its chance before that and voted no. It's not that transit doesn't exist, it's that getting people to use it and agree to make the investment in it (beyond billion dollar light rail lines, because buses are apparently "icky") is difficult even if the system does work well for the commuter crowd. I don't even commute regular hours and I can get everywhere I want to go via our transit system.
  - Arainach 12y ago
    To be clear, there are actual costs involved that affect these dynamics. Property values anywhere near a transit line go way up. For many years I rented and biked to work, but when looking for a house it was massively more expensive to get anywhere within a reasonable bus ride of Redmond. I ended up to the north, where it's still not a bad bike commute (an hour, but mostly on dedicated bike trails instead of roads), but the fastest bus ride is to go west above the lake to downtown Seattle and then east back across the lake to Redmond.
    - techsupporter 12y ago
      That wasn't my experience, but I'll grant that maybe I got lucky. I also live where it takes a transfer (a local bus that comes every 15 minutes to downtown and get on the 545) and, at least in the case of my coworkers, a lot of people are vehemently opposed to transferring. A bike commute would be awesome if I could make it up that hill to the IH-90 bridge...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

ocfx 12y ago

This was in Orange County (oculus guy)

VLM 12y ago

This article is being flooded with weird anti-car hate. Yet, my car is perfectly safe and can only kill someone in a hit and run at 100 MPH if, and only if, I get drunk first. Given that I don't drink very much and then only at home (a sixer lasts me about a season, sometimes half a year) that means my car is incredibly safe and will almost certainly never kill anyone. Odd how there's no anti-alcohol hate here on HN, yet its the alcohol doing the actual killing. If you subtract out deaths due to drunkenness, cars kill less people than bathtubs. Perhaps we need a war on bathtubs. Because nothing is ever a drunk's fault.

Chevalier 12y ago
...dude. No, you don't have to be a drunk going 100mph before you kill someone with your car. That you "don't drink very much" doesn't mean that your "car is incredibly safe and will almost certainly never kill anyone." Your car is an extremely heavy, extremely fast machine that will crush anyone unlucky enough to be in its path. That includes not only incompetent/incapacitated/elderly drivers, but also dumb accidents and unaware pedestrians. You will easily kill a child who tries to play in her suburban street even if you go 10mph -- not because you're a drunk, but because American structural design forces everyone to drive two-ton bullets to go anywhere, which inevitably results in lethal wrecks. Compare Denmark's road fatality rate of 3.0 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the US ratio of 11.6 per 100,000. [1] The question is not whether you enjoy driving. The question is why cars are entitled to the vast majority of public space -- not only for parking (often for free or nominal fees), but also for individual transportation that endangers the lives of pedestrians and cyclists. Please take a look at this illustration to get an idea of how much land your car takes from everyone else. [2] Do you really think a kid trying to bike to school should have to risk his life every day... because you feel entitled to barrel through his home town? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... [2] http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestrians-roads http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestrian...
- ethanhunt_ 12y ago
  "because American structural design forces everyone to drive two-ton bullets to go anywhere, which inevitably results in lethal wrecks. Compare Denmark's road fatality rate of 3.0 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the US ratio of 11.6 per 100,000." Check the per-vehicle-km rate. Denmark isn't safer because they drive less.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mahyarm 12y ago

It's the USA that is car-default. SF, NYC & Chicago are the exceptions, and they have their own special kind of problems too.

varelse 12y ago
We've created a national infrastructure that IMO nearly requires driving to be a civil right. That sucks. But I really don't have an answer to this problem when proposals to address this are either voted down or end up ridiculously over budget.
- dhagz 12y ago
  Considering the sheer vastness of the continental US, it's not surprising to me that there haven't been many good plans to remove our dependence on cars. The only options, really, for good nation-wide transport are trains and planes. Trains have an incredibly expensive infrastructure, especially the high-speed trains needed to traverse the thousands of miles between the East and West coasts. Planes are slightly less expensive, but the pain of needing to show up three hours early for a one hour flight, risk of lost luggage, and general fear now associated with traveling by air make planes a less than attractive option.
  - CalRobert 12y ago
    But people don't commute across the US, just like they don't commute from Brussels to Madrid. Cities in the US are crap for a variety of reasons (racist zoning, defunding of transit, forced car infrastructure in the form of parking minimums, absurd NIMBYism, etc.)
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Long-distance and regional transport needs are significantly different from local ones, and different land-use and activity patterns can hugely reduce transportation needs. The fact of a large country doesn't mean that individual urban areas can't be designed for mass transit or walkability. If you can find shopping, school, recreational, and work activities within a few blocks (or at most a few miles) of one another, then a car becomes more a nuisance than a requirement. The exceptions become trips out of town -- the outdoors, visiting friends, etc. Shopping can be dealt with through deliveries (scheduled and bundled, or online). Or local pick-up and a cart, wagon, or bike trailer. Trades and crafts will still likely require transport, but that becomes an outlier exception. Depending on what long-term fuel and economic trends look like, I suspect the US will see either regional high-speed rail or plain-old conventional slow rail. Aviation with expensive fuel becomes an expensive proposition. Roughly half a large jet's take-off weight is fuel, and for an efficient airliner at 40 passenger miles/gallon, a 3,000 mile flight involves 75 gallons of fuel -- at 6.8 pounds per gallon, that's 510 lb. of fuel, 2-4x the weight of a passenger. And while trains can be electrified, the options for doing so to aircraft pose a few larger technical hurdles.

downandout 12y ago

You get a job at Google or Facebook in part so that you can buy a nicer "two ton bullet" than you otherwise could. No one wants to walk out of necessity, and that will not change anytime soon.

coffeemug 12y ago

> Not all workers can demand decent living conditions You're assuming that car-oriented urban planning is synonymous with poor living conditions, which isn't true. A lot of people (most?) in the U.S. actually prefer it -- for many people the perceived convenience of cars beats public transportation and biking.

dilap 12y ago
I love driving, but man, it sucks to build a city around it. I'm living in SF right now, carless, and skate a lot. It's fun, but holy shit does it suck constantly having to dodge oblivious drivers, asshole taxis, and homicidal MUNI drivers. I have a fantasy where the whole city is grass and bikepaths. All normal deliveries are by bike, & if you really need to move something big, you get a special permit to rent a truck that goes 10 MPH and beeps.
- rickdale 12y ago
  Not quite SF, but this might be close to your fantasy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island
- toast0 12y ago
  Don't worry, SF is terrible for drivers too. I'll just keep my truck in the south bay, where they appreciate it (kind of; why does caltrans forget how to design north of the grapevine?)
- wanderingstan 12y ago
  Whenever I hear the whirring of hybrid or electric car I realize that times are changing. It may be decades or more away, but I like to imagine what cities of the future will be like. So quiet! So fresh! The rumble of a car engine and its smelly exhaust will seem quaint. Maybe like the feelings now of seeing a horse-drawn carriage, and seeing the horse shit in the street. So much space! My street is walled in by parked cars. The driving lanes are wide to accommodate human error. Perhaps the outer parts of the road will be re-purposed as park space. Only two narrow lanes in the middle for the computer guided vehicles to travel on. Or maybe only one lane, since the cars can coordinate their directions on this rarely-trafficed street. Of course things won't be all rosy, but it IS certain that the feeling of cities will be very different.

jarnix 12y ago

"We've concentrated the most brilliant minds in the world in this small area." Are you serious ?

sanoli 12y ago
Well, since software companies are so big and wealthy and seem world-dominating right now, people in this field tend to think of them as the greatest minds ever. I wonder where are all the Silicon Valley Nobel prizes, all the cure for diseases discovered there, etc. There are some great, great minds working there, some geniuses no doubt. But their field isn't the end all for intelligence. Not even close, actually (to me), as I'd rather have advances in many other fields over IT, any day.
- jamesmishra 12y ago
  UC-Berkeley has enough Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners that they're the only ones that get free parking[1][2]. Some of the smartest people in the world are also at Stanford, NASA Ames, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and similar organizations. [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113883274 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1138832... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_University_of_California,_Berkeley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affilia...
- jamesmishra 12y ago
  UC-Berkeley has enough Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners that they're the only ones that get free parking[1][2]. Some of the smartest people in the world are also at Stanford, NASA Ames, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and similar organizations. [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113883274 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1138832... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_University_of_California,_Berkeley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affilia...
- jamesmishra 12y ago
  UC-Berkeley has enough Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners that they're the only ones that get free parking[1][2]. Some of the smartest people in the world are also at Stanford, NASA Ames, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and similar organizations. [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113883274 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1138832... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_University_of_California,_Berkeley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affilia...

jgh 12y ago

Wasn't the Oculus founder in Orange County when he was hit?

IndianAstronaut 12y ago

Honestly, the segway was not a bad idea. Never really caught on, but it was a pretty good solution.