South Bay traffic oddities....can anyone explain?

[rs913]

Originally Posted by Atsuke

Sounds reasonable, again as others said school traffic also counts. But also as an aside, I have family and friends who work in the technology/electronics sector and get off at 3-4PMish (but start at 7-8AMish). Usually heavy traffic at this time is in one direction only with my experience.

Well, that's what I was wondering about, whether there are a bunch of companies out there that let some of their employees work a 7am-3pm shift to "beat traffic". And whether there are so many people doing this that any time saving is negated....or to put it another way, whether they've only succeeded in creating a 2nd rush hour.

[511pf]

Originally Posted by rs913

1) Heavy traffic on some freeways starting at 3pm. Can anyone explain this? Are there that many people getting off work that early or whose shifts end at that time?

2) Lots of traffic every evening on 101/87 from Santa Clara going south towards South San Jose, but almost never in the other direction. Since the Valley is so spread out, shouldn't traffic jams occur both ways rather than just in that one direction all the time?

Take a look at this map: san jose, x - Google Maps

All the big white squares in the north are businesses and all the little stuff in the south are houses. In addition, most of the business are 1 - 4 story, so everything is spread out geographically. For the most part, there is no housing in the business areas and no business in the housing areas. Everyone goes north in the morning and south in the evening.

You're right that people work from home and work alternate hours to try to reduce their exposure to traffic. This makes the commute slightly less horrible over a longer period of time. Instead of, say, 10,000 cars an hour for two hours, you have 6,600 cars an hour for three hours. (Those numbers are strictly for purposes of illustration.) 6,600 is still enough to cause horrendous traffic jams, but it's better than 10,000, which would be complete gridlock.