Initial impressions in the Bay Area

I find it easier to live/visit an area if I have a feel for the way things seem to work there, so naturally now that I live in Palo Alto I feel the need to understand things. I haven't been here nearly long enough to get anything definite, but there are some interesting things that I've noticed.

• While the Bay is very heavily urbanized and quite big (San Jose is almost 50 miles from SF proper, for example, and it's uninterrupted city between those two points), it seems to have managed to avoid L.A.'s devil-may-care sprawling.
  
• Bay traffic is way better than L.A.; there are, I suspect, a similar number of cars on the road, but the drivers don't seem to dive in front of you the way they do in L.A., and most of them are relatively law abiding, save one point.
  
• I'm doing 75 on the 101 and getting passed by people doing 85, 90. Okay, fine. This happens in Santa Barbara or L.A., too. But it doesn't happen constantly like it does here; I'm in the bottom 25% of drivers in terms of speed.
  
• It's a lot easier to get across the Bay than you think; I found the bridge on 84 to Fremont purely by accident, and driving across it I could see plenty of other bridges.
  
• There's a lot of wildlife preserves and other parks in this area; I spent about an hour in one of the local ones, which was free, the girl at the visitor's desk was reasonably cheerful, and all I paid was the $3 toll to get back across the bridge.
  
• Most cities that I've been in have three levels of road: you have freeways, major thoroughfares (think State St., Cathedral Oaks, Haley here, or Sepulveda in L.A.), and teeny little side roads where people live. At least around here, they've added a fourth category, intermediate between freeways and major thoroughfares, called expressways; they behave like freeways with more exits that go slower.
  
• The whole traffic control situation is very strange. They have carpool lanes on the expressways that you seem to need to get into to exit; I presume that's legal. But either the locals are used to it or it's better designed than I thought, because it seems to function reasonably well.
  

From a photographic point of view this promises to be very nice. Of course, I won't see any of my negatives until I get back, but so be it.

Caltrans

I've got mixed feelings about noticing that Caltrans has remained the same up here. On the one hand it's more like home. On the other hand they like to do things like close the 101S for a week between midnight and 5 am. Yes, the entire 101 Southbound. And I saw a sign saying Shoulder Work Next 164 Miles today.