High speed rail in California
Gary Richards, AKA Mr. Roadshow in the San Jose Mercury newspaper asked readers to weigh in on whether the State of California should continue with the High Speed Train from Northern California to Southern California or should the
massive funds be better spent on road infrastructure. My answer, part of which he published is below.
I
vote for roads rather than the high speed rail. Here is why:
The cost to ride the rails to LA on the high speed train
will likely be as high as an airplane ticket. I say this based on other countries which have good high speed rail lines. They work, but are pretty expensive.
Once the train ride gets a rider to LA they still have to get to their final destination by rental car, taxi, Uber or some other pricy and time consuming way. The same applies to flying to LA.
By driving, they already are at their final destination when they get there.
Driving to LA will be an
even more acceptable option going forward as cars get less expensive to operate due to better gas mileage, hybrid cars, alternate fueled cars, electric cars and even self-driving cars for those that don’t want to drive.
The estimated cost to build the high speed rail line, currently estimated at $68 Billion, is escalating every month. California needs to admit that
it is and always has been a boondoggle and stop the insanity before it starts. Fix and maintain the existing infrastructure.
It is only common sense.
Silicon Valley is strangling on
its success
This piece is not concerning the high speed rail, but with the relatively short commutes
most Silicon Valley workers have every day to and from work.
My commute before I retired in
2014 was 13 miles from home in San Jose to work in the Mission College area of in Santa Clara, unfortunately, pretty much constrained to highway 101. In light traffic times, this took 15 minutes. In commute traffic without an accident in the way,
it took 45 or more minutes. If I had an early morning meeting or conference call, which was often the case as I dealt with companies in Europe, I had to plan on at least 1 hour to get to my office. Getting home was often worse. I tried multiple
alternate routes on surface streets, but they usually didn’t make the commute shorter. This commute was one of the big factors in my decision to retire.
So you might ask what about getting a car that was allowed in the car pool lane? This is the main thrust of this piece.
Car pool lanes, or High Occupancy Vehicle lanes (HOV) were intended to decrease the number of vehicles on the roads by getting one or more cars off the road for every legitimate use of the HOV lane.
However, the State Legislature, in its liberal save-the-earth thinking, decided to make them available to single occupancy drivers if they were driving a low or non-polluting vehicle. Thus, the lanes are clogged with single occupant plug in Prius, Nissan
Leafs, $100,000 Teslas, etc. This is doing no one any good. I say pull the car pool stickers off these non-car pool cars and restore the lanes to what they were originally intended for. Doing this will encourage commuters to car pool to and
from work as it will save them time. A 10% reduction in the number of cars on the road would make an enormous difference in the traffic and commute times. Just look at the differences in traffic when school is out for spring or summer break.
It can’t be more than a 10% reduction in traffic due to no students on the roads, but traffic is way better during these school holidays.
Buying an electric, natural gas, LNG, or other alternate fuel car should be an economic decision that consumers make on their own without governments trying to influence the decision with badly thought out laws, incentives or rules.
When alternate fuel cars cost the same or less than gas or diesel cars and have the same performance and comparable range and support infrastructure, people will buy them.
Silicon Valley Today
Silicon Valley was named by Don Hoefler in his newsletter “Microelectronics News” in 1971. He named it that because there was a significant and growing group of
semiconductor companies in the Santa Clara Valley. Silicon is the basic element that semiconductors are made from. These companies all had factories or fabrication facilities, (fabs) in the Valley where they manufactured their products.
An incomplete list includes Fairchild, Signetics, National, Intel, AMD, LSI, Intersil… There also was a significant number of companies that supplied these companies with equipment, chemicals, and supplies used in the manufacturing process.
Note that there also was a very large other group of electronics companies that catered primarily to the military
in support of the Cold War with the USSR. Notable among these was Lockheed which employed 30,000 people in the mid 1980’s, Westinghouse and Raytheon, (missiles and weapon systems) and GTE Sylvania (electronic warfare). There were big mainframe
companies: IBM, Tandom, Rohm, Sun. There were a significant number of personal computer companies started in the Valley, all of which failed except for Apple.
But it was the semiconductor industry that gave The Valley its name.
It is kind of sad that this industry is no more in the Valley as it once was. For sure there still are semiconductor companies here, but none of them manufacture their products here. They have all
gone fabless or moved their wafer fabrication out of the Valley. Manufacturingis now done primarily in Asia. Note that the design and development, marketing and sales is still here. That is because the talent pool of engineers is still
here. There really are not any exciting semiconductor companies, with the possible exception of Intel, which is the biggest of the batch. Their microprocessors are pretty cool, and are key to the operation of our computers, laptops, and most of
our smart phones although they just announced a layoff of 12,000 people because microprocessors are not selling like they used to. The excitement has transferred to device companies and software companies. Apple is sexy, at least they want us to
see them as such. Tesla is very cool, HP used to be exciting but became big and boring, except in their ongoing board room drama and splits.
Speaking of Tesla, most of the car companies now have development facilities here in Silicon Valley. It is good to know that the Valley still has significance, now even in the old time automobile industry,
since we still have many of the best and brightest minds in the engineering world here. They are hard at work integrating advanced electronics into cars, both in the entertainment and information systems and in the car control systems. And as we
all know, they are all trying to make reliable and safe driverless cars.
Silicon
Valley has also spawned a plethora of software companies that write and supply software to enhance our lives. Facebook is amazing. Facebook – $18 Billion revenue in 2015; Facebook consumes 22% of internet time in the US, its market value
$325B, ~1B people worldwide log onto Facebook every day.
We have Yahoo for content, eBay for buying stuff, Google for finding out things, LinkedIn to help careers, Twitter for
instant communication…
There are all of these serviceware companies that will provide almost any service one could
ask for or even conceive. Hotel pricing, room rental, car pickup, food delivery, pet sitting…
And
it is also a fact that Silicon Valley is full. There used to be only one story buildingcompanies – we used to say that it was impossible to commit suicide by jumping off of a building. (Why would we think about that? When we did have
fabs and the process didn’t work well and or yields were down, it was very scary and depressing as deliveries would be missed.) Now buildings are getting taller, – companies and housing. The Valley really is a valley, constrained
on the east and west by mountains, the north by San Francisco Bay with only the south available for expansion, and that is constrained by zoning and traffic problems. Hang onto your single family dwelling, it will only get more valuable due to
scarcity.
And the commutes are horrible. But it still is a most exciting place to live and work.
Silicon Valley was and still is the epicenter of The Next New Thing.