Wouldn't it be smart for Google and Facebook and Apple et al, to get together and do something about the traffic quagmire in the Bay Area?

They do all these fantastic projects, self-driving cars, virtual reality, curing heart disease, but don't they all get stuck in traffic all the time, trying to get basically anywhere around the Bay? It's got the worst traffic, not only because it's growing so much, and it sprawls instead of building vertically, but also because right in the middle of the metro area, where downtown should be, there's a huge body of water! Almost every car trip has to deal with that. There are only a few ways across the bay, and those are the choke points in the traffic system. (Seattle has this problem too, Lake Washington.)

New York, where I grew up, and where I live now, has a much more rational layout, several big grids, numbered streets and avenues. New York is also more densely packed, so trips tend to be shorter than in California. And where they have limited mass transit, New York is virtually covered with it.