Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

Not surprised at all that this trend is starting to get big enough for news outlets to finally notice.

Only once I moved to small town did I realize how much my quality of life was degraded by the long commutes, the over crowding, and the general scramble for access. Now I have 10min commute, up to 20min driving for any errands or shopping, and can't imagine moving back to the traffic jungles of a major city anytime soon. Especially since an average large townhouse in my neighborhood goes for $250K compared to $400-600K in Chicago.

It used to be that in small town America the only decent technology job you could get is by working remotely, or through the local university. Perhaps I got very lucky, but my current company[1] works with the biggest global companies, and I get to ship more software and work with much more diverse technology (most in the mobile space) than in my previous 10 years combined.

All I'm saying is that if are frustrated with Silicon Valley, or any other big city, don't assume that is your only option. I was pleasantly surprised when I landed in Charlottesville, VA.

[1] Its called Willowtree, and we are hiring, but I don't mean this to be recruiting spam, so look it up if you're interested.

But but but you're destroying the Earth by wanting to live in a peaceful small town where you have to drive to go shopping rather than taking public transit everywhere! /sarcasm

To be serious, though, threads about various transit innovations tend to be dominated by people who strongly prefer urban living and can't imagine why anyone would want anything else. Your case study is a nice example of why there are good-natured people (engineers even!) who simply prefer a different style of life. It doesn't prove that there are no externalities to suburban living (nor urban living), but we should all remember to be thoughtful that different people may actually enjoy different lifestyles.

The Silicon Valley lifestyle, and the long commutes it engenders, aren't remotely 'urban living'.

Charlottesville, VA is likewise more of a small city than a small town, where it's perfectly practical for people to walk and bike to commute and do errands in the older neighborhoods. Probably more so than in much of Silicon Valley, in fact. That's because walkability is as much a consequence of development style as urban scale, and much of Charlottesville was built out before than automotive era.

Exactly. The US has virtually no surviving "urban" cities, where one can comfortably walk and bike wherever they need to go. (Much less enjoy the population density to support local coffee shops, niche stores, etc.) We have New York, Boston, DC (sorta)... Philadelphia? Maybe Chicago?

Even San Francisco can barely be called urban. It's absolutely dominated by automobile traffic, especially outside the tiny downtown core. I've never seen such fast-moving traffic on such wide streets in a city ostensibly hailed as walkable. Typical SF buildings are 2-3 stories at most, nearly all have attached garages or parking, and transit is hilariously awful.

Much less Silicon Valley. It's... suburbia. Try to walk from Google's HQ to Apple's. Try to walk anywhere, really, outside of a narrow strip near Stanford. What exactly does the OP feel is urban about Silicon Valley's car-dependent zoning?

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