Thoughts on how High Density Housing is Destroying Silicon Valley

If you're on the road these days, you can't help but notice one inescapable fact -- traffic in the Bay Area just keeps getting worse and worse. Increasingly, we're seeing gridlock on our roads. During rush hour, there are times and places where you have to wait through a green light because you can't make it through the intersection -- there isn't any room for your vehicle on the other side. All of these vehicles and increased traffic density means longer drive times, lost productivity, and increased stresses from time pressures, bad drivers, and road rage.

Commuting home the other day, I took a route that was similar to my commute a couple of years ago and I was shocked by where I experienced traffic back-ups, and by how much traffic there was. My rough estimate, based on where I was seeing the back-ups, is that we may have double the number of cars on the road compared to just two or three years ago.

But where did all of these cars come from? Why are there more cars here?

I have one simple answer -- high-density housing. Over the past five years or so, there has been a trend to transform areas of land that once held one and two-story buildings into high-density residential and multi-use/residential structures. In the photo above (that I happened to take about three years ago), what was once a Santa Clara technology campus with about three 2-story buildings was being transformed into a multi-story, high-density multi-use housing facility. The same transformation is also taking place in a couple of blocks in every direction from here.

The big joke with these places is that they make the claim that these high-density residences won't significantly increase traffic because they're close to the train station and public transit. The reality is that, with most of these places, you need to estimate an additional 1.5 cars on the road.

It's surprising to me that so many of these developments have been approved (and continue to be approved) by local city councils. While there are always calls for more affordable housing (and claims that a lack of housing is the problem), these developments are simply eroding any semblance of quality of life in the area. Here's my latest analogy for the problem:

Imagine the Bay Area like an awesome Internet Cafe, good food, nice environment, good Internet connectivity. Then, people start having meetings there and more people keep coming in. Soon, there is no space to sit, all of the tables are occupied and all of the chairs are full. 

Troubled by this, the patrons call for more chairs, more places to sit. Comfy chairs are changed to benches and counters are added to walls, so more people can fit in, but soon there is no place for coffee cups and few places for computers. 

But the worst is that, while the number of patrons has grown significantly, the cafe's Internet connection is still running on the same DSL line that provided reasonable broadband 15 years ago. The Internet Cafe has no Internet.

The Bay Area is collapsing under the weight of too many users while the roads, our broadband connectivity.

It would be one thing if we had the infrastructure to support the human density that they are building for, but we don't. We have no subways, no metro train system. And if you look at San Francisco as an example, we're going on 10 years and they still haven't completed the Muni line from Union Square to the Caltrain station.

And just when you thought they couldn't pack any more in, there's more high-density housing on the way...

San Diego Bike Share - What Happened to the Bikes?

I just spent the week in San Diego for a conference and it made for an interesting comparison to last year's San Diego event.

In San Diego last year, everywhere you went, there were bicycles -- GPS-enabled bike share had taken over the downtown convention center area. There were probably three or four different companies with bikes all around. What was surprising was that  I'd seen a few ride share bikes in the time, but in nowhere near the number that there were there in San Diego. Still, the bikes didn't seem out of place -- between the climate, the beach culture of San Diego and the transportation around the downtown area, the bikes seemed like a great complement to the transportation infrastructure there.

Last year there were only two options for electric scooters, Bird and Lime, and the actual number of scooters you saw was rather limited. While I used the bike share bikes for all of my around-town trips last year, I didn't rent a single scooter. In part, it was because the scooters were kind of hard to find, but some of it had to do with the whole scooter experience itself. For example, if I went for a late night run to the store for water and snacks, the idea of a nighttime ride back to the hotel on a scooter with an imbalanced load of groceries seemed like a good recipe for hitting the pavement. In contrast, most of the bike share bikes have baskets so that you could load a small amount of groceries in them.

This year, I saw only one GPS enabled bike company here, and bikes were few and far between. Instead, there are electric scooters everywhere. Everywhere. I saw scooters from three or four companies, including Lyft (something I hadn't seen before). There are also these little electric things that looks sort of like a mash-up between a bike and a mini-bike -- you sit on a bike seat to ride them, but they have something like 16" tires with bicycle disk brakes. There are no pedals, just foot-pegs. These things seemed to be a bit faster than scooters too.

The wholesale invasion of the electric scooters is kind a mixed bag. When I was getting ready to go to San Diego, I was actually looking forward to getting some bicycle time in, turning the pedals and burning some calories. Instead, there's not much for calorie burn on the electric scooters.

The scooters were okay for making the short trip from the hotel to the convention center faster. If you had your stuff in a backpack, you didn't really notice the load, but I don't know that someone with a briefcase style bag would say the same thing. That being said, the couple of times that I took a scooter out to restaurants in the Little Italy area, it was a ride that bordered on madness. Between the small wheels and the overall condition of the roads, each and every ride had moments when I thought that there was a better than even chance that I was going to crash -- and I would consider myself someone with better skills with my cycling background and decent sense of balance.

When I got off the scooter at the end of a scooter ride between Little Italy and the hotel, not once did I think, "man, that was fun. I can't wait to do that again."

Even more surprising for me were the times when I saw adults taking kids for a ride one of the scooters.

Ultimately, while I understand that the scooter model offers a lower cost element that enables these businesses to scale more easily and that the individual vehicles take up less physical space, I'm not optimistic about any sort of grand scale growth for this transportation alternative. I think it's only a matter of time before something like reports of serious injuries put a damper on the enthusiasm surrounding the whole electric scooter thing. I just wish that they would bring back the bikes.