Facebook’s departure was a slow fade, but the final breather came in May 2021, when Ms. Bowen, who has led the project since 2017, left the company. In a farewell email to Mr Slocum and others that day, which was obtained by The Times through a public records request, she wrote that she thought Facebook had “a modest awareness of the mammoth task initially set out” .
The email gave the broad outline of the story and ended on a melancholy but optimistic note. “We moved a rusted 25-year-old needle, revitalized the community and awakened the region to possibilities,” she wrote. “Admittedly, we are stuck in the reality that it takes an average of more than 20 years to build an important bridge in the United States. We have to change that. And we will.”
However, a year and a half later, it seems unlikely that Facebook will be part of that change. In almost every way, including the name, Facebook, now Meta, is a very different company than it was in 2015. Where Facebook was expanding, Meta cuts costs, divests products, disbands entire teams and spends nearly $3 billion to reduce its office footprint. With this change, Meta is delivering on some of its promises to the local community, including its plans for a new 59-acre mixed-use development in Menlo Park called Willow Village. But it seems clear that while the company is cutting both jobs and leases, it’s focusing less on building infrastructure in the physical world and more on luring users to the virtual world.
And yet, while Meta’s priorities may have shifted, the need in his own backyard hasn’t abated. According to Transport Commission data, on March 13, 2020, just before the world went into lockdown, about 30,400 cars crossed the Dumbarton Highway Bridge, which runs alongside the destroyed railway bridge. On September 30, 2022, there were about 30,500.
The commute remains unforgiving for employees who can’t work remotely, including Angelina Sanchez, a janitor at Meta, who told The New York Times via translator in October that she commutes about 90 miles to and from Modesto and at 5 a.m. leaves home in the morning and does not return until 10:30 pm. Ms. Sanchez, a mother of three, said she used to live in nearby East Palo Alto but has moved further and further away to find housing she can afford.
The Dumbarton Rail project alone would not have solved these problems. But maybe it helped. The question is: whose job is it to take on that work?
The public sector, which has the mandate but lacks the resources, or the technology companies, which have exacerbated the problem but ultimately respond to investors?
