A lot of really-early-stage startup activity (eg. solo engineer working on a project, or 3 guys working out of an apartment) seems to be happening in Oakland and the East Bay generally. It's the last place rents are affordable, so it's naturally attractive to people who need to go without income for a while.
The commute over the bridges is terrible, so with the bulk of investment capital and experienced engineers living on the peninsula (and oftentimes more down by Palo Alto & Menlo Park than in SF), it remains difficult to scale East Bay companies. Unless you're someone like Elon Musk where you can just invest $100M of your own capital and need more semi-skilled manufacturing workers than skilled software engineers. Fremont/Milpitas is coming up as a bedroom community for mid-career engineers though (because if you work at Facebook it's just across the Dumbarton, while if you work at Google/Apple you can take 237 and avoid the bridges), so that may increase the engineering supply along the East Bay BART corridor.
The East Bay really hurts from BART & Caltrain being two separate systems; it's easily BART accessible, but much of the peninsula's population only has Caltrain access, so you need a very time-consuming transfer to get there without dealing with the bridge traffic.
I think tech employment in downtown San Jose is going to blow up for this reason, once the BART tunnel goes in. Combined access from electrictrified Caltrain/BART/ACE/VTA/Amtrak is going to be killer for bringing in people from all over who don’t like being stuck in traffic. Google sees this coming and is building the new campus there. And that will push up prices for homes near any of those rail systems.
It will also be possible to commute from SJ or Santa Clara to Oakland via BART, which may marginally improve recruiting there.
It would be fantastic if Caltrain or somebody rebuilt the burnt-out rail bridge next to the Dumbarton, but that’s wishful thinking. It would be useful to integrate ACE, Caltrain, and Amtrak.
I don’t have any hope for system integration without a major culture shift in the government, but I do think that the expansion projects that are in progress are likely to be completed eventually.
> The commute over the bridges is terrible, so with the bulk of investment capital and experienced engineers living on the peninsula (and oftentimes more down by Palo Alto & Menlo Park than in SF), it remains difficult to scale East Bay companies.
The reverse commute (peninsula to east bay in the morning, east bay to peninsula in the evening) is perfectly fine, as long as you don't have to take 880 anywhere. If you can avoid 880, that reverse commute can be serene and almost surreal (as you whiz past gridlock coming in the other direction every day).
There are a bunch of industrial parks right over the bridge in Newark that seem like great places for a new small company.
Yeah, there are plenty of "good" reverse commutes in the bay area still. The only problem is it only takes one chunk of "bad" road (eg, as you mention, avoid 880, or going the 'wrong' direction on any piece of road, or being near a major interchange) that not THAT many people have a truly 100% reverse commute. Ours is, and yeah, it's pretty funny to cruise at 90 while the traffic coming the other way is stopped.
The commute over the bridges is terrible, so with the bulk of investment capital and experienced engineers living on the peninsula (and oftentimes more down by Palo Alto & Menlo Park than in SF), it remains difficult to scale East Bay companies. Unless you're someone like Elon Musk where you can just invest $100M of your own capital and need more semi-skilled manufacturing workers than skilled software engineers. Fremont/Milpitas is coming up as a bedroom community for mid-career engineers though (because if you work at Facebook it's just across the Dumbarton, while if you work at Google/Apple you can take 237 and avoid the bridges), so that may increase the engineering supply along the East Bay BART corridor.
The East Bay really hurts from BART & Caltrain being two separate systems; it's easily BART accessible, but much of the peninsula's population only has Caltrain access, so you need a very time-consuming transfer to get there without dealing with the bridge traffic.