With all respect to the tech industry -- why is the traffic in the Bay Area so awful. Why haven't they done anything about it.

Wouldn't that be a good test before running the whole world? As programmer myself, I wouldn't trust the algorithm without a lot of QA. Seriously. Think about it

It's the strangest configuration for a metropolitan area, the center of the city is in the middle of the bay. (Same as Seattle, btw.)

The best answer the tech industry came up with was Uber, as far as I know.

I lived in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Berkeley, Los Gatos and Woodside over 31 years and I did nothing to fix the problem either. My answer was to move to NYC where the transit system is pretty great. Then I moved to the mountains and got a Tesla.

BTW, the idea that the stars of Silicon Valley should run the world is not new. I first heard about it from Apple top level managers in the 1980s. They were not techno-fascists, but they did hugely underestimate what it takes to run the world, or even a small country in Africa.