Posts about Silicon Valley

Development

Does Silicon Valley need a new city?

by David Alpert   •   August 6, 2008 9:29 pm

Silicon Valley is not so unlike Fairfax and Montgomery Counties: a mostly very wealthy area, many jobs in addition to housing, and suburban sprawl as the main building form. But around Washington DC, both counties have in recent years (more recently in Fairfax's case) been pushing denser, somewhat walkable, often transit-oriented development, including "town center" style developments in Rockville and Reston.

Photo by cloneofsnake on Flickr.

In Silicon Valley, however, there's very little of that. Mainly, I think, this is because the land is just about all developed; the boom in the '80s and '90s generated apartment complex almost everywhere, and geography constrains the developable area. San Jose, which is much bigger and newer, is building some.

But your typical software engineer or Web startup founder doesn't live in San Jose. Yet many of them would like to live in a walkable place. So many do, in fact, that Google has engineers move to New York just to be in a real city. There's San Francisco, which is pretty good. But San Francisco is really far to commute to Mountain View, even if your company provides shuttles, which most don't. There's downtown Palo Alto, which is walkable, but not very big; downtown Mountain View is even smaller.

Is there unsatisfied demand for a "city" here? Maybe the supposed future Google mixed-use campus, if well-designed (which it looks like it isn't so far)? What would you design?

This came from a discussion I had with an entrepreneur who lamented the lack of a real city nearby. In China (and the Middle East), they're building brand-new ones. If suddenly there were a large tract of land in Silicon Valley that needed redeveloping, what would you put there?

How about a dense grid of streets, with some taller apartment buildings on the ends of the blocks and townhouses in the middle. I'd put pods of market-rate parking, and ample Zipcars, in strategic underground spots. It should have regular shuttles (open to the public) to downtown San Francisco, the airports, and Palo Alto and Stanford. If it were located on Caltrain, that could fill some of the need and better utilize the existing transit network.

While we're thinking about something new in a technological place, how about a network of underground tubes that could deliver goods to each home (so that people can walk to buy groceries or furniture but not have to cart everything home) and take away trash? How about a Web-based system for residents to coordinate rides to work or entertainment destinations (with Zipcars available for those who need to go somewhere nobody else is).

What else? For those of you who know the area, should it have an urban section? Naturally, the bigger the urban area is, the greater the network effects of having enough residents to sustain retail and transit. But the bigger it is, the harder it would be to build. And if we could entertain our pie-in-the-sky ideas for just redesigning, say, Sunnyvale, what could it look like?

Development

Google announces "mixed-use" campus, may be just more sprawl

by David Alpert   •   June 6, 2008 12:31 pm

Google is headquartered in an artistically funky but still fairly ordinary office complex in Mountain View, California. Like every other office park for miles around, there are a few fairly low-rise office buildings surrounded with parking and atop more parking. There's nothing but swamp, an amphitheatre (surrounded by lots of parking) and more office buildings for miles around.

One of Google's sprawlier buildings in Mountain
View, California. Photo by cfinke on Flickr.

There's also a large and mostly unused Federal property, NASA Ames Research Center, located on a former Air Force Base at Moffett Field. Google has been collaborating with NASA on projects; last year the relationship also made news when NASA allowed the Google founders to land their private jet at the base.

Yesterday, Google and NASA announced plans to build a huge new campus on the site starting in 2013. But unlike the typical office park, this project plans "1.2 million square feet of offices, research and development space, company housing, recreation—and possibly even retail shops for Google employees." A local environmental group praised the mixed-use aspect of the project.

Google currently operates a fleet of shuttles to help employees get to work without all using single-passenger vehicles, but actual mixed-use development would be even better. The SF Chronicle wrote back in 2005 that any development on the site would require housing by law. Whether Google is doing this out of obligation or desire—almost surely both—it'll be nice for at least a tiny part of Silicon Valley to become a tiny bit less sprawly.

Update: Commenter Mike points out that the FAR of the complex (floor-area ratio) will be 0.55, which is low. According to Christopher Leinberger, walkable urbanism occurs in areas with an FAR of 0.8 and up; "drivable sub-urban development" usually has an FAR of 0.005 to 0.3. In between is what he calls "neverlands," areas with higher density but little street life, largely found in the United States as depressing mid-twentieth century housing projects.

Valleywag, the Silcon Valley blog whose schtick is never being positive about anything, has a critique of the plan. They don't mention the mixed-use housing at all, but do discuss the inaccessibility to public transit of the site (a sad trait shared by most of the office space in Silicon Valley) and argue Google ought to be expanding in San Francisco instead.

Development

El Camino Bonito

by David Alpert   •   June 21, 2005 4:16 pm

I walked across El Camino Real - once. This road, once the main thoroughfare through Silicon Valley, is now a 50 mile long strip mall of motels, gas stations, mattress stores, car rental places, fast food, and one major university. Every business or shopping center along its length has a parking lot. In the utopia of sprawl, El Camino Real would be Main Street.

I once had to walk across it because I was staying at a hotel on one side, and it so happened that my team at work was having an offsite at the restaurant on the other side. Thinking that getting into my car just to cross El Camino would be the height of ridiculousness, I walked out of the hotel, through the hundred feet or so of landscaped approach areas designed only for cars and lacking a sidewalk, then across the six-lane medianstripped road, and then through another hundred feet on the other side of wide driveway and parking lot designed to help cars easily approach the complex but lacking any consideration for pedestrians.

I was the only person not in a car as far as the eye could see. It was creepy.

But buses do ply El Camino, and many of the train stations are right off the road there. With so many shops and most of the scarce public transit the valley does have, it could actually be a vibrant public way. But I'd never really thought about it, so desolate and unfriendly to humans not ensconced in tons of metal is this road. Fortunately, the Project for Public Spaces and San Mateo County, the northern half of the valley from the San Francisco border to the edge of Stanford University, realized maybe El Camino could be a little bit more.

PPS has an PPS article about this "Peninsula Corridor Plan" in their newsletter and a page touting their experience, but I can't find the actual plan. I could find pieces of the plan for some of the individual cities along the corridor, Belmont and San Carlos, but it'd be nice if PPS actually put their plan on the Web.

Roads

Freeway ramp rush

by David Alpert   •   March 31, 2004 7:43 pm

Even though I work in sales, I'm really an engineer. And one thing many engineers love is transportation systems.

When Robert Moses was building, he employed hundreds of engineers who loved building roads. It wasn't just a matter of doing something people could use, or having a secure job - no, there was a deep pleasure in constructing these elegant systems that flowed into each other, moving people around at high speed. A cloverleaf interchange is a beautiful thing.

Unfortunately, highways are also destructive. We now know that each time a freeway is constructed, people start living farther from their workplaces because they can have more space for equal commute time. Soon traffic on the freeway grows until it chokes the new route, and suddenly commute times are longer and we need a new freeway yet again. Before Moses started building, most of Long Island was country homes. Today Nassau County is full of cookie cutter subdivisions and strip malls. Life out there is no better, it's just farther.

When I visit the Bay Area, I'm constantly reminded of what a suburban wasteland the South Bay is as I drive from huge parking lot outside office complex to hotel situated between strip malls and never actually come face to face with another human being. But on my drive each day I pass the new 85-101 interchange ramps being built in Mountain View, and can't help but think every single time how very beautiful it is.