Travel Article: Searching for Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Travel Article: Searching for Silicon Valley

travel.nytimes.com

12 pointsojbyrne5 comments

From a tourist's point of view, I have to say "Silicon Valley" is the biggest disappointment ever. It is a sad failure of urban design. Parking lots, office parks, with some vegetation sprinkled around, and the usual food places. Very like most of the midwest.

I think it is a huge failure of urban design. Everytime I drive down on the always congested 101, I am reminded on how much better this place would have been if it had chosen a more European urban city/village design.

BTW. The majority of googlers are I know, hate the location. They'd love if they could work in SF, but they have to do this soul crushing 1hr commute everyday.

Why wouldn't they live around Mountain View? Simple, if you are single, that place is boring to borderline depressing.

Over the years, I've come to realize that the "quality" of urban design can be approximated by the ease at which one can travel while drunk. Mountain View is an epic fail.

As a first approximation, that's a good metric :-) And yes, it does make the valley an epic fail in general. You can caltrain/vta both ways to a certain extent. Or else its cabs. But really, there's not a decent downtown all the way from morgan hill until you hit san francisco.

I find San Jose downtown to just be a bit depressing.

Also worth reading is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Terman, "the dean of engineering at Stanford, who as early as the 1930s sought to create an industry so his students wouldn’t have to leave the valley for electronics firms in the East".

I wonder how much of the early rise of Silicon Valley was easier due to being in a new, relatively unpopulated area that was eager to build its own identity. I also wonder what the current attitudes among college deans are, whether they're happy to send off their graduates to a good job in another region, or whether they push hard to keep them nearby and even start companies on campus.

In my book [1] (yes, I know that's a blatant plug), I cover a number of interesting places in Silicon Valley that are not covered in this article including the original homes of Fairchild and Shockley Semiconductor.

It's a pity that he mentioned the Tech Museum in San Jose though, it's really very poor IMHO.

[1] http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596523206/

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