Car traffic in Silicon Valley

7/1/2001 English German

Edition # 31
San Francisco, 7-1-2001

Car traffic in Silicon Valley The Silicon Valley Railway The Streets of San Francisco Radar Traps Parking in the City Public Transportation Dogs, Dogs, Dogs! Muni Street Cars and BART Subway News from the President

Car traffic in Silicon Valley

Michael The traffic on the two highways, 101 and 280, which lead from San Francisco to the more southernly located Silicon Valley, has now reached catastrophic proportions. The speed limit of 65 miles per hour (about 100 km/h) on these four-lane highways (per direction!) does mean that everyone drives roughly at the same speed, which is why American highways generally handle much more traffic than German ones, but too much is too much.

Between 7 and 9:30 in the morning and 5 and 7:30 in the evening, you can no longer drive here. Instead of the record 35 minutes it once took me to drive the 60 km from San Francisco to Mountain View (don't try this at home, kids!), now it can take me up to an hour and a half during rush hour to get to the office. And every time, it drives me crazy that Americans can't drive. They can't handle the technical aspects of their oversized cars. Americans also have no sense of what moves the entirety of highway drivers forward. The focus is solely on the individual car--at the slightest delay, they slam on the brakes, causing the biggest traffic jam. Additionally, the plague of SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicles, a mix of delivery and sports car) means that as a driver of a normal low exposure car, you can hardly see anything. Hopefully, the gas price will soon shoot up to five dollars so that these idiots and their monstrosities disappear from my highway!

Figure [1]: A huge (approximately 35 by 15 meters) billboard at the edge of the highway. Zoom in on the image and you'll see the four helmeted workers at the very top, securing the material!

If any drivers is getting bored, they can look at the huge billboards lined up along the edge of the highway. There, companies like Oracle, Microsoft, or sometimes a clothing chain like Gap advertise their products. Traffic planners also come up with the craziest things to regulate traffic: for example, traffic lights at highway on-ramps that turn green for exactly one second and then switch back to red. This way, a car enters every 10 seconds, quickly merging into the constant flow of traffic on the highway without causing anyone to slam on the brake. Although this means a long wait at the entrance, once you're on the highway, the traffic is flowing smoothly. At least in theory.

I have already mentioned the carpool lanes before: During peak hours, only cars with two or more occupants (sometimes the limit is even three) are allowed to drive in the leftmost lane, encouraging people to form carpools. By the way, a child in a car seat also counts as a passenger. A pregnant woman once even tried to argue before the California Supreme Court that she should count as two people -- but she was unsuccessful.

But even the carpool lane is congested in the morning hours. Instead of getting upset pointlessly, I like to hop on my bike -- as I mentioned in an earlier newsletter -- to ride to the train station, and take Silicon Valley railway to commute to work.

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