A technology writer visits the Bay Area for the first time
IT IS A bit like covering the world’s most powerful financial institutions without ever setting foot in New York. For eight years I have written about the technology industry from London—first as an intern at, then as a tech correspondent at Quartz and eventually, in my spare time, as news editor back at. Yet I did so without ever having visited Silicon Valley, the stretch of land between San Francisco and San Jose that forms the spiritual and economic home of all things tech.
Unlike the great cities of America—New York, Chicago, even flat, suburban Los Angeles—contemporary San Francisco is defined by its enormous hinterland, known as the Bay Area. In most cities, people live in suburbs and commute in to the centre. Finance is headquartered in the streets of downtown Manhattan; Hollywood studios are still in dense neighbourhoods .
Those who cannot bear this commute—generally workers with children—live out in the Valley itself, a bleak, featureless sprawl of American exurbia. It is all office parks, strip malls, single-family homes and highways. Anybody looking for a “there” will be disappointed. Which brings me to driverless cars. The notion of autonomous vehicles navigating the warren of London’s streets elicits only sympathy for those poor, permanently stationary vehicles. But in California, with its runway-like highways, wide lanes and go-kartesque automatic vehicles that practically drive themselves—to say nothing of its lousy to non-existent public transport—it all makes sense. The driverless car is an engineer’s natural reaction to the environment.
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