Thursday, April 27, 2017

Desperate Commuters: Silicon Valley workers in one occupant vehicles

Large commercial footprint and easy transit:
Box Inc. headquarters, Redwood City


Transportation Oriented Development (TOD)


Transportation + Housing + Jobs
A well planned urban region will efficiently link these elements together to provide and function well for the people, communities, and companies in the region. Good urban planning may be interdependent with these three elements in changing and creating the built environment for continued successes in Silicon Valley.

"...more workers are traveling longer distances on increasingly congested roads. Between 2010 and 2014, the proportion of workers who spent an hour or more getting to their jobs [in core Peninsula cities] jumped from 10 to nearly 15 percent...

Higher Rise + Higher Density + Transit-Oriented-Development
Policy experts argue that the key to bringing commute times under control is to address the underlying housing shortage. By building higher-density apartment buildings and townhouses near worksites and along public transit corridors, planners hope to house more workers on the Peninsula and reduce the need to commute from outlying areas.

That kind of dense housing can be a hard sell in suburban Silicon Valley, where residents often fight new construction they fear will worsen traffic and change the character of their communities...

Still, there are signs the worsening housing crunch is making residents more amenable to growth. Voters in Mountain View elected a pro-housing majority to the city council in 2014, community groups in several Peninsula cities are organizing to support new development, and Redwood City is building a cluster of tall new office and apartment buildings near its downtown Caltrain station...

NO Suburban Sprawl
[HOW]... Silicon Valley cities are willing to grow will affect everything from the region's carbon footprint, to whether it can retain teachers, to whether firefighters... will be around in a disaster.

'The Bay Area traditionally has not been the fastest growing region in the state... so it has been ill-prepared for the influx of new arrivals [with high-pay jobs in Silicon Valley].'"
Source: Peninsula Press, 4.6.2016


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Post No. 265

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