Personal Dork Assistant

Trafficking Excess

I guess it was just my imagination when I thought the commute was getting worse when I was home for CNY. Turns out that the Bay Area commute has actually improved when compared to year 2000 levels, even in the face of an improving economy (i.e. more commuters). Turns out that all the jobs are also moving out to the suburbs, so now the entire region can smoothly congeal into one mass of stuck traffic rather than being concentrated around the central City. Of course, you're still fucked if you're living way out (e.g. Central Valley) and commuting in, but then whose fault is that?

Another interesting blast from the past paints a grim picture of Bay Area traffic, 50 years ago:

"We are aware that people seem now to tolerate the enormous time and money costs of congestion and inaccessibility. We are confident, however, that before very long these costs will reach the point where they cannot be tolerated."

-- Regional Rapid Transit: A Report to the Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission," 1955

Of course, this was written to sell BART to the voters, but I'm sure people were hating traffic jams even in the good old days:

• San Francisco to Oakland: 43 minutes
• Oakland to Walnut Creek: 50 minutes
• San Mateo to Palo Alto: 26 minutes
• Richmond to Vallejo: 32 minutes.

Maybe we should be glad that it hasn't gotten worse since those numbers were published in 1955. Perhaps it's just the geography of the Bay Area, the bridges and hills creating inevitable choke points. At least that was Mike's reason for leaving in his farewell manifesto to the Bay Area. Well, that and the costs of living. But housing costs is one thing that's definitely never going back to 1955 levels.