Now this brings up an interesting question…
Assuming that these hopeful little purple and green lines are actually usable bike routes, and assuming that I could maintain a 15mph start-to-finish average, I could probably make it to the area of Moffett Field from anywhere populated on this map in < 2 hours. But, at least from the sky, the trolley, and from what I remember about riding the commuter trains & buses when I was last down in that neck of the woods more than a decade ago (I worked for Apple, then McAfee, for a while and commuted from Los Angeles, then (briefly) from Portland; I did one other commute job in San Francisco, but that’s 50 miles north) it’s all pretty relentless post-war apartment and densely packed housing (without good mass transit. Oy) which is not exactly my cup of tea (densely packed apartments are good in a place like Chicago, NYC, and the parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle that developed before the United States started to massively subsidize the automobile culture. But 100 years ago the southbay was wall-to-wall crops, not condos.)
The interesting question is whether there’s anyplace on this map that even slightly resembles the east side of Portland, and which is close enough to the edge of the sprawl that I could make it out into the countryside in finite time. I’ve been offered a job down there, and as part of my scheme for deciding whether to accept (and it sounds like it would be a really really interesting job, even though it would cost us a minimum of US$50k/year more to pay for living expenses) I need to figure out whether there’s a place that I could live that would let me ride my bicycle and not plunge me into complete depression. Sure, I could just buy a house with some land up in the mountain range that separates the southbay from the pacific, but my bank account doesn’t have US$5,000,000 in it for just this eventuality (and, even more sadly, I didn’t think ahead and charter myself as an investment banking company so that the US Government would just give me the money I needed) so I’d need to find someplace where the rent (either real rent or a pretend mortgage) would be affordable on whatever (unspecified) salary the prospective employer wants to offer.
Perhaps I will stop at the corner store and buy a lottery ticket while I ponder.
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Both of those were pretty darn pricey when I lived there. Cycling is OK, but traffic is heavy and the cops seemed to have turned unfriendy. A friend of mine tells a tail of riding in a Woodside neighborhood while followed by an officer of the law, who finally pulled him over with the expressed attitude of “I knew you’d do something wrong.” He failed to put his foot down at a stop-sign.
I moved from Cupertino 25 years ago, and haven’t looked back. Maybe it’s better, now…
Oops- that’s “tale”, not “tail”. I’m a product of the California school system…
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Perhaps something in the vicinity of Saratoga or Los Gatos won’t break the bank, but i wouldn’t hold my breath.