

Travel Article: Searching for Silicon Valley - ojbyrne
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/travel/escapes/17Amer.html

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ardit33
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.

~~~
johnrob
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.

~~~
h1bored
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.

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yef
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.

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jgrahamc
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/>

