Housing & Commutes to San Jose

Lacey

March 7, 2020 0 Comment

The Rough Commute to San Jose

San Jose California is a booming city leading the Tech Industry. Adobe, Google, Cisco, Apple, and Ebay are all corporate giants in South Bay with thousands of employees. The demand for expanding companies likes these and the cost of living around work has become unrealistic for most employees. This has resulted in employees living in areas with lower housing costs and commuting over 2 hours a day.

Across the Bay Area, workers are spending more time sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic or squeezed into crowded trains and buses. The struggle is real to balance a well-paying job with an affordable place to live. Just the fact that so many people are commuting from these outlying areas and not necessarily from San Jose and San Francisco really demonstrates how severe the housing shortage is in the South Bay.

Housing Crisis in the Bay Area

This past decade, commuters have really felt the impact of the Bay Area’s housing crisis as it magnified more problems with an increase in traffic, commuters, and pollution levels. The booming economy entices a massive amount of new workers into San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and growing mega-regions.

How Commute Time Has Increase in San Jose & San Francisco

The San Francisco metro area, including the East Bay, with nearly 5 percent of commuters enduring super commutes which has more than doubled since 2005. The San Jose area almost doubled its share of super commuters in 2016, with about 3 percent of commuters traveling 90 minutes or more one way. Commute times across Silicon Valley have increased by 17 percent over the past decade, adding an average of 43 minutes weekly per commuter, according to the 2018 Silicon Valley Index by Joint Venture Silicon Valley.

Commuter chaos is leaving passengers and drivers irritated and exhausted, which can ultimately have an impact on both physical and mental health. Common issues include:

• Long commutes can increase stress, higher blood pressure, and BMI. 
• Commuters spend an average of 60 minutes traveling to work each day, which has increased year over year.
• Reduced time available for activities such as cooking, exercising and sleeping
• Sitting for extended periods can cause back pain
• Commuting can reduce mental wellbeing with 33% suffer from depression or 21% likely to be obese
• Inactivity poses a major challenge to the public’s health

Several factors impact the Bay Area’s commute. Millions of commuters are forced to squeeze across just a handful of bridges or use BART, the only rail system that crosses the bay. With public transportation maxed out with passengers and no plans of expanding additional public services the commute for most will become longer and harder on the body.