Better public transport would solve a lot of those problems. For such a dense area the current offering is a joke.<p>I live in San Mateo and work in the south bay. By car it takes me 35-40min (with no traffic) but with public transport it would be over 2h. After six there isn't even any option available to go back home. No surprise that so many people choose a car to commute.
Literally everyone I know in the bay area who doesn't already own a house is considering leaving.<p>As extreme as the shortage of housing is the shortage of childcare. 150 person waitlists for 50 kid day-cares are common.
Fortunately, the election's just around the corner, and if you'd like to help solve these problems, you can do so with your ballot.<p><a href="http://www.sfyimby.org/endorsements-nov-2016" rel="nofollow">http://www.sfyimby.org/endorsements-nov-2016</a> Is a good pro-housing voter guide for San Franciscans.
Interesting that there is a claim of ~5% mega commuters in bay area. The 2012 census bureau study (using 2006-2010 data) had that number at about 2% [1].<p>On that note, you'll see that traffic/commute is worse than L.A. in many cities. I think L.A. just gets the publicity but there are a lot of people around the country suffering in silence.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/files/2012/Paper-Poster_Megacommuting%20in%20the%20US.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/files/2012/Paper-Poste...</a>
Oh, from the european perspective, the SV housing / transport seems little... weird.<p>If you look at urban design & public transport it's amazing how well it works despite all obstacles.<p>Public transport doesn't make sense in low population density areas and wide road make the distances even bigger. I mean, some US cities managed to realize a car-utopia Houston with 11 lane highway or Phoenix. The question is, does it make sense?<p>I'm surprised that no one tried to buy a shit lot of land and create a more-cityish city. In this context SFO is city with a city life, especially some older districts.
I live in Livermore, and my commute to the South Bay averages about 2 hours each way. It sucks, but I've gotten used to it and you just have to accept it because there's really nothing you can do about it. There are only a few major road arteries, and the public transit options are a total joke--it takes LONGER because you need to drive to the train station, then bike or take a bus from the other train station to your work.<p>Honestly I have no idea what the solution is. Build more lanes on the highway and more people will choose to commute, quickly using those new lanes up.
As someone in Boston but from California, the lack of commutes comparable to the Bay Area or Silicon Valley always makes me grateful, even if there are other downsides. For example, I split a 2 bedroom apartment in a nice, active neighborhood a few minutes walk from downtown and about a 20 minute walk from work for about $1,200.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned e-bikes. As far as I can tell, that is <i>the</i> answer to the bay area traffic. Since I bought one roughly 5 months ago, I've commuted almost 3000 miles. My commute is the same every day, and it is a lot faster than a bad day of traffic. The bonus is that I don't have to change into bike clothes or shower.<p>Details:<p>12 mile commute<p>40 minutes by ebike, every day<p>25 minutes by car, best day<p>50 minutes by car, average day<p>1 hour 40 minutes by car, average day
It's hard not to see this as a life-and-death struggle between people who think public transportation is the way of the future and people who think cars are the future.<p>I know which way the HN crowd leans, but I feel compelled to point out that while pro-transit folks may feel comfortable being ideologically "correct", in practice this has just not worked out in the US and any argument about why sounds like someone hammering a bell upon which is inscribed "no true scotsman".<p>Either there's been a multi-decade cabal holding the entire country in its grip and preventing us from leaping into our beautiful public transportation future... Or Americans just do not want it, kicking and screaming about sustainability to the contrary.
It would be interesting to understand <i>where</i> they work. Back in the dot com days there were people living in Livermore and driving into San Jose (aka "the South Bay") but now it seems more people with "long" commutes are driving into San Francisco. And one of the people who worked for me (at an office on the peninsula) was thinking about moving to San Francisco, even though they currently lived much closer because they enjoyed the more urban lifestyle offered there.<p>As a result of all these different forces I realized how challenging it is to <i>not</i> have some bad commutes. And in Sunnyvale we're in the midst of a debate started about choices the city council has made to allow more local housing to be developed. There are a lot of apartments and condos being built and some residents are complaining about traffic and change. It will be interesting to see if folks approve additional transit dollars.
I'd be curious to know if distance is a factor they accounted for. Traffic in LA is straight-up gridlock (or at least it was when I lived there). You could spend an hour going 10 miles, and that's not even during commute hours.<p>If you spend 90 minutes driving from SF to Mountain View, traffic definitely makes it slower/worse than it would otherwise be, but it'd still be a 45 minute drive without traffic.<p>People may spend more time driving in SF/SV, but that's largely a factor of how far apart desirable housing and jobs are for many people. I wouldn't be surprised if traffic on the Peninsula made commutes 2-3x longer than they'd be without it, but in LA the factor's more like 6x.
Tempting though it is to cry, "Let it burn!", we should be beyond such things, and earnestly desist from anything that might be construed as wishing harm (even indirectly) upon our honoured colleagues in the greater San Francisco Bay area.
> <i>"even worse than LA"</i><p>people in the bay area loves chiding LA like this.<p>but you are quickly starting to understand first hand how exactly LA came to be the way it is. it was/is a mixture of extremely powerful political, economic, and social forces exerted over generations.<p>unfortunately SF/the bay is doing nothing to fix it -- at long last LA is building new housing, mixed-used real estate, and new light rail and other public transit very aggressively.<p>it will probably take the bay area another 2-3 decades to overcome the resistance, just like LA.
Every time I read these articles, I feel like I made the right decision staying in the Northeast and not chasing the startup culture of the West. Sure I make less money on paper, but my office is five minutes away, my large house is only $1200(including the $6000 in escrow taxes!), only 36.5 hours a week, no on call, totally flexible working hours, I get to travel all over the world, and I live like a king. All that free time saved from virtually zero commute, and no overtime required, adds up to A LOT of time for my personal projects, and vacations. As I get older, I'm definitely valuing that over "being in the industry".
I'm wondering specifically about the Warm Springs District in Fremont. This is where:<p>- A new BART station is set to open shortly, and,<p>- Across the street, a new single family housing development with 4,000 (yes, four thousand) new housing units is under construction [0],<p>- And, next door, Tesla will be building 500,000 Model 3s annually with 3,000 additional workers.<p>The AM commutes via I-680 / Pleasanton and I-880 / Oakland are already Hell on Earth. It's going to get much worse before it gets better.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.fremont.gov/1515/Warm-SpringsSouth-Fremont" rel="nofollow">https://www.fremont.gov/1515/Warm-SpringsSouth-Fremont</a>
The article makes disingenuous claims about measure B. The county plans to spend nearly all of that money on freeways, which history has shown will not relieve traffic. Their plan calls for almost nothing for public transit.
I had to sell my house in Berkeley because my commute to San Francisco was eating up 3 hours every day - the time I allocated to side projects.<p>Our politicians have given up, no one even talks about making our transit system better. Total losers.<p>(12 miles)
Remember Scott Collins (of Netscape) commute in 'Code Rush'? He lived in <i>Michigan</i> and commuted via airplane every 2 weeks to Silicon Valley
Just out of curiosity: How's the public transport situation in the same area? (I mean, Public Transport + car pooling would help reduce this issue no?)
Anyone know what the % drag on SF's economy caused by the lack of housing is up to?<p>SF has had a shortage of housing for decades, and it just gets worse and worse. Is there any point at which the NIMBYs will be defeated and zoning policy adjusted to allow real densification? Or is power stacked so much in their favor that it will never happen?
When I was in the Bay Area during the '90s dot-boom, it took me 90-100 minutes to get from Fremont to Palo Alto. During the dot-bust, it was more like 40 minutes. I cannot imagine what it's like now.<p>I regret that I didn't use that time to learn Japanese or something.
After visiting the Palo Alto region for work I don't understand why anyone would drive anywhere. It was so extremely friendly to biking, I could get from Menlo Park to Redwood city and even across the bay to Freemont with no trouble whatsoever.
We need to encourage clustering/density/jobs in more remote areas where housing is cheaper, instead of downtown SF/SJ/Oakland. Wouldn't that help? Or just result in broader sprawl -- I'm picturing LA.
By 2010, the commute in SF was worse than LA. While caltrain & bart do help in SF, when it breaks, you got problems. Bart is pretty reliable but Caltrain seems to break or hit something/someone a few times a month.
Public transportation is not going to come to the rescue. The communities involved won't tolerate the additional taxes, nor will they cooperate in making an efficient system.<p>Can we pin any hopes on fully autonomous vehicles?
Just choose where you live carefully (and pay the big bucks and sacrifice space) and work close. I've never had a bad commute in SV but then I don't live in a palace.