Mapping Silicon Valley's Gentrification Problem Through Corporate Shuttle Routes | Wired Opinion | Wired.com: But when you look at the zoning regulations in Palo Alto, you learn that the tech companies have basically run out of room to build parking lots on their campuses — they can’t grow any further using the model of one parking spot per worker. So it’s logical that the tech companies would need to use shuttles to bring their workers to campus.
Only a map is going to lead you to this kind of thinking.
And where’s the densest place in the Bay Area, the place where the largest numbers of people can use the smallest numbers of buses? By this logic it’s not the youngsters that have chosen San Francisco to gentrify, but the Facebooks and the Googles who are incidentally causing this kind of development through the simple calculus of where they can house the most workers.
That they’re young and educated and lots of them are millionaires is kind of beside the point. Only a map is going to lead you to this kind of thinking. It’s about more than gentrification as we’ve experienced it thus far: It’s about an entirely reconfigured relationship between density and sprawl, and it’s going to need new maps to help us navigate this landscape.