Lovely place to live, great weather, enormous crowds, several fault lines.
Do note that a "one hour radius" could be 50 miles or 5, depending on the time of day and day of the week.
Kramer - makes perfect sense that the commute times are lower. Everyone in the bay area sold their home for $2M and moved to Sacramento for the $500k equivalent homes, then proceed to bitch about the heat
We've all been standing around up here wondering "where the hell are all these people coming from, and did the last person out of San Jose turn the lights off, check the stove and lock the door before they left?"
Seriously though...thats a great area. I really loved the bay area weather, culture, food and places to go/things to do. Its a vacation destination that also makes a fine work locale with lots of opportunities.
What I didnt like was the traffic, multiple hour waits at the good restaurants on prime-time evenings, the hideous real estate prices and the oddball building practices of filling in the bay with unconsolidated soil and then slapping subdivisions on it, or building in the foothills over the hayward fault on top of northridge-like microfaults. Yet people are lined up to pass the front doors of these homes festooned with federal government mandated warnings about inability to insure, mortgage or assure these homes viability for any length of time. But they're only ONE million dollars instead of TWO! :
Renting is a very good idea, especially until you get the lay of the land. Its a fairly peculiar region where one city block houses millionaires and the next is boarded up, features a variety of prostitutes and your risk of carjacking jumps 150%. Have a look at Palo Alto and East Palo Alto crime stats...may be different these days but 10 years ago a highway separated the most high end areas from one of the highest per capita murder areas.
You do get used to the earthquake situation...I finally got into the routine of keeping a very full pantry of canned and dry goods and filling my old bleach bottles with water, and swapping through the food and replacing the dozens of bleach bottles of water periodically. Note that there are several faults in the area, although the region you're looking at is nestled close to the san andreas, the expected-soon-to-go hayward fault lies just up the eastern side of the bay from san jose up through oakland...and a few miles doesnt buy you a whole lot in an earthquake. Hell, people a 3+ hour drive up in Sacramento felt the Santa Cruz based earthquake in '89 a little bit.