Perhaps there could be commuter airlines, with airplanes and helicopters, or charters to shuttle people from the central valley and Livermore to our regional public general aviation airports and possibly Moffett. They are close to freeways and employers.
HP has a hangar at San Jose Airport.
Helipads could be placed in the parking lots or atop garages operated by the large employers.
Why not encourage the other large employers to do think about this? It would be faster than the busses they currently operate.
On foul weather days, people could drive, telecommute or take a train.

@Robyn

Or we could build more high-density housing here instead of making everyone commute in by plane and helicopter.

All flippant talk about commuters coming in from outside the Bay Area counties to work within the region is always out of perspective. Four MILLION total jobs in these counties are filled by a measly 150,000 workers making the crazy long commutes from the Central Valley or flying in on airplanes. You have to believe that some of these people have spouses with jobs that keep them elsewhere. Even if the entire 150,000 number were due to housing shortages, it pales into insignificance given the total 4 Million jobs involved. Commute aren't significantly from outside the region--there are apparently 96% of the workers who find homes "locally."

It is apparent that these fabulous commuter shuttles are only available for full time employees of the big tech companies. This means that all of their service providers do not get the perks of utilizing commuter services as do the techies. In a great deal of these companies, almost half of the employees are contractors, some are tech contractors and some are facilities contractors, and these folks are very often excluded from the perks, with commute buses being one of them. I think if these perks were available to all of the employees, that would certainly go a long way in relieving traffic congestion.

High density market housing is THE SOLUTION BUT NOT IN NORTH BAY SHORE ONLY IN THE REST OF MOUNTAIN VIEW AND SURROUNDING COMMUNITIES SUCH AS LOS ALTOS AND LOS ALTOS HILLS.

Keep office concentrated fed by a transportation meca. The old guard City Council got it wrong with housing in North Bay Shore...bad idea.

A study should be done to see actually how many residents in subsidizied housing actually work at meaningful productive jobs. It started with fire fighters and police officers and has shifted to include everyone who wants to live in Mountain View, which is social policy gone astray.

Building housing in North Bayshore is perfectly fine. The problem is they aren't planning on enough of it. Google has only begun to hire. They really have not added many employees in the space in North Bayshore, as nowadays they put 6-7 workers per 1000 square feet of office space. In the old days that number was 4. But right now they are planning, constructing, or almost done making a huge amount of new office space. Some was allowed under the zoning in place back in 2008. The NBS was not yet built out as envisioned even then. Wait till the new buildings come online over the next 5-10 years. Not only is Google's monopoly expanding in NBS, but they are building new office facilities at NASA Ames! Housing up there is essential.

Why is this so? Well, the city put trip caps on Google (originally also LinkedIn who sold out to Google). When they upped the total size of the offices a few years ago, they said it had to be done in such a way as to not have more vehicle trips into NBS. The city added about 3.4 Million square feet of office space BEYOND THE PREVIOUS limits which have still not been reached! That's an allowed addition of 20,000 more workers than the giant number already OKayed way back when. But we still don't have housing for the growth that just builds out to the OLD CAP. Google agreed that even with the margin from already-zoned being built out, there would be no net new vehicle trips into the area.


Pretty much the only way to do this is to have workers living in the same neighborhood. They also need a LOT of housing for the workers employed by Google but located at NASA Ames, another 10,000 maybe.

The city has okayed turning NBS into a dense urban center in its own right. It has to have apartment buildings. There is no way around this.

As for this idea of adding housing in Los Altos or Los Altos Hills, why the heck should they? Mountain View wanted the economic benefits for its shops and tax revenues of having another 50,000 workers north of 101. They set the stage for this. It's forecast to be a windfall of epic proportions for Mountain View. Why should Mountain View look to a city with near-Zero job growth (or even with job contraction) to house the workers Mountain View added to increase their revenue base?

Also consider the Google has restaurants that feed their employees breakfast lunch and dinner. They have dry cleaners, fitness centers, car maintenance, dental care, medical care onsite. It would be much more convenient for the Google cadre to have their beds up by where they get their food! They wouldn't need kitchens! Basically what is needed up by Google is dorms for the designated workers. That's the only way the Google hive can be as busy as Google has indicated it will be in the future.