It's still very dangerous to bike in Silicon Valley. Cars are generally bike-hostile and sharing the roads with them is dangerous. Not only that, but bike lanes are often just a symbol painted on the road. We need infrastructure that separates bikers from the cars.
Also, people just simply need to stop driving so dangerously.
The entire basis of city planning in the US has been based on cars for the last 60+ years. I don't see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately.
Cars are also designed (except for hybrids and maybe some electrics) to have jackrabbit-starts which make it intolerable at high speeds. You don't realize this until you drive a hybrid or electric, but it affects your attitude towards not only other cars but bikes and pedestrians as well.
SUVs have specific problems with their high center of gravity and visibility. I used to joke to my friends that, while renting an SUV for a week, I got flipped off about 3 times. Never happened with other rentals or my daily.
Ideally like http://s3.amazonaws.com/lcc_production_bucket/files/8920/in_... but in many places they're more like http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/304/media/images/48375000/jpg...
That second shot shows nicely why that particular solution doesn't work; cyclists take to the sidewalk as the road is too crowded and dangerous.
How much does this depend on where you are in SV?
When I lived and worked in Cupertino, for instance, my job was in a small office park on De Anza near Bollinger. My apartment was near Homestead and Stelling. The layout of Cupertino was basically mostly residential neighborhoods on roughly a grid, with islands of office parks and strip malls, except for a few main streets like De Anza and Stevens Creek that had mostly businesses.
It was pretty easy to bike in such a way as to have most of the trip be on the residential streets, which were generally pretty low traffic, and since things were mostly on a grid that didn't add distance.
That was 25 years ago, but looking at aerial/satellite maps of today's Cupertino, it looks like it is still basically the same.