Talk:Bay Area Voyage Tips and guide

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Maj: do you really think Tiburon is a "major city" in the Bay Area? San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Tiburon? It's listed under Marin County, by the way. -- (WT-en) Evan 15:47, 8 Nov 2003 (PST)

It's actually more of a tourist destination than a lot of Bay Area cities. It gets loads of tour buses and day trippers from SF, many of whom have never heard of Marin County. But if it bugs, nix it. (WT-en) Majnoona

Mendocino is already listed on the North Coast (California). I think northern Sonoma County, Mendocino County, Humboldt County and the like are physically and culturally distinct from the Bay Area. If that's not right, we need to amend the regions list on California. --(WT-en) Evan 18:38, 14 Mar 2004 (EST)

OK, I agree. I found it on the orphans list and just wanted to stick it somewhere... I was thinking the "get out" part of SF... I'll nix it from Bay Area... (WT-en) Majnoona 19:06, 14 Mar 2004 (EST)

I'm proposing adding a South Bay (Bay Area) region. Please Talk:Fremont for a discusion. -- (WT-en) Colin 00:42, 2 Apr 2004 (EST)

Instead of East Bay (Bay Area), why not Bay Area/East Bay?

Does Project:Article naming conventions answer this for you, or do you have something else in mind? For South Bay, there are more than one in California which is why it's disambiguated with Bay Area. I'm not sure East Bay needs to be disambiguated with anything more than California, but it's a nice symmetry. -- (WT-en) Colin 02:33, 8 Jul 2004 (EDT)

Seems like Bay Area/East Bay and Bay Area/South Bay are cleaner than the present. Plus they are like districts (see article naming conventions). (WT-en) Goodralph 02:44, 8 Jul 2004 (EDT)

Well, a couple things:

• The East Bay is a sub-region, which has pretty clear guidelines in the current conventions.
• For the most part, only the "East Bay" text should be shown to the user. The disambig part is normally hidden in links. For example: East Bay links to East Bay (Bay Area).
• We want consistency though this guide, so we should follow the conventions.
• If you want to discuss changing the current conventions, the place to take that up is probably Project:Article naming conventions so that we can be consistent throughout the guide.

So really, my only strong opinion here is that we should be consistent, and I'll leave others to decide what makes sense for the conventions to be. -- (WT-en) Colin 03:10, 8 Jul 2004 (EDT)

Goodralph: the East Bay isn't a district in a city; it's a sub-region of the Bay Area region. For articles in the geographical hierarchy, we use disambiguators for everything down to the city level, and sub-pages after that. The point is to make URLs and page names as short as possible while still maintaining uniqueness. It'd be miserable to write out [[North America/United States of America/California/Bay Area/East Bay]] each time you wanted a link to the East Bay. There's some info on this at Project:article naming conventions#Disambiguation. --(WT-en) Evan 10:09, 8 Jul 2004 (EDT)

Okay, I've done it now. South Bay is added. Technically, Silicon Valley should be removed since it duplicates cities already found in other regions. But can we keep it anyway? Traveller's might look for it and be troubled when they don't find it. -- (WT-en) Colin 03:56, 15 Jul 2004 (EDT)

Some stuff moved from User talk:(WT-en) Chipuni:

So how do we categorize Gilroy into the heirarchy? I see you wrote "near Monterey Bay" and included it into Monterey Bay, but it seems kinda fuzzy. We have a few cities I'm not sure what to do with: Gilroy (California), Morgan Hill, Hollister, and San Juan Bautista. The first two I tend to think of as Bay Area (California), but not the second two. Should we stuff em all into Monterey Bay? Should we create Southern Santa Clara Valley in the Bay Area (California) and stick Morgan Hill and Gilroy in? Stick just Morgan Hill into South Bay (Bay Area)? Or what? (Note: Gilroy's city home page describes them as being "a short drive from the Bay Area and Monterey Bay" so maybe it wants to be in a more general page?) -- (WT-en) Colin 01:42, 22 Jul 2004 (EDT)

Sorry to jump in, but would you mind moving this to Talk:Bay Area (California)? I think it would be of interest to others involved in the Bay Area stuff... it's a good question. I wrote part of the "Best of the Bay" article for the San Jose Metro a few years ago and I was assigned "Southern Santa Clara" which included Morgan Hill, San Martin, and Gilroy. Hollister is trickey too, I'd say it's part of the Coast, but it should probably be mentioned on the "Get out" section for whatever Morgan Hill/Gilroy ends up on... (WT-en) Majnoona 10:35, 22 Jul 2004 (EDT)

Okay, I've moved us here :-). Thanks for pointing out San Martin which I forgot. I could buy Hollister and San Juan Bautista as Central Coast, and everything from San Jose to Gilroy as SFBay. Anyone else have opinions? -- (WT-en) Colin 12:28, 22 Jul 2004 (EDT)

Don't know that part of CA well enough to have an opinion on individual cities, but if there is some ambiguity surely the best thing to do is to accept it and reflect it. In other words include a link to the ambiguous cities in both region's 'Cities' section (with a comment on the ambiguity), and in the header para of the city say something like:

AmbiguousCity is on the borders of Region1 and Region2.

There is no good reason I can see why wikivoyage needs to have absolutely clear cut and precisely defined regional boundaries; we are to large extent describing peoples perceptions not trying to define congressional districts. Thats another good reason for not using sub-pages at this level, to add to the one Evan quotes above. -- (WT-en) Chris j wood 16:34, 22 Jul 2004 (EDT)

According to Mapquest, Gilroy is 32 miles from San Jose, and 40 miles from Monterey. In other words... about as equidistant as you can get. I have no problems with saying that Gilroy is on the borders of Silicon Valley and the Monterey area of California. (I put it in the Monterey area because, at the time, I thought that it was closer to Monterey than it was. I should have checked.) (WT-en) Chip 00:36, 23 Jul 2004 (EDT)

It's certainly closer to Monterey Bay than the SF Bay. Geographically though, the path to the SF Bay is easier, and the commuters tend to go there. I kinda like the idea of putting it into both, but I thought that was against our usual policy. -- (WT-en) Colin 00:59, 23 Jul 2004 (EDT)

Can some local person answer as to whether Vallejo would normally be considered part of the Bay Area. Having just added the Vallejo Baylink ferry to the Get in section of San Francisco, I've just noticed that Vallejo is in Solano County and hence by the current definition within this article, not in the Bay Area. As a visitor to the area, this seems counter-intuitive. -- (WT-en) Chris j wood 05:40, 13 Sep 2004 (EDT)

Ok. Obviously no local knowledge is listening, so I'm going to take the advice of Wikipedia (first paragraph of article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_area) that Solano county is part of the Bay area. I have added Solano and Vellejo.

However I'm also concious that Wikipedia gives a slightly different story in when describing subregions. There it groups all of Marin county with the south of Napa, Solano and Sonoma counties into a North Bay region. This seems to me to be a better approach than ours, as 'North Bay' is a more obvious name for visitors than the county names, and it also expresses the view that only the southern bits of the large Napa/Solano/Sonoma counties are really Bay Area. I'm minded to adopt this, but again I don't know how it plays with the local viewpoint; so I'm inviting discussion again. -- (WT-en) Chris j wood 06:45, 19 Sep 2004 (EDT)

I am an urban planner in the bay area and used to live in Vallejo. I would consider Vallejo part of the bay area and more specifically, part of the "North Bay" as you indicated above. Hope that helps

I'm very new to this wiki, so perhaps I've openened a can of worms (or worse yet an old debate) - but that's why we can revert to an earler version, right?

Locals tend to think of the Bay Area in terms of five sub-regions: the City, plus the North Bay, East Bay, South Bay and the Peninsula. I think that as sub-regions, counties are redundant and less informative than the five sub-regions. In my most recent edit, I've pointed out that these are actually aligned pretty closely with county boundaries and telephone area codes. For a traveler to the Bay Area, the county you're in is only relevant for a few things - emergency services, parks and recreation, and some public transportation services.

Lastly, it makes sense to include the nearby areas that are 1) accessible day trips by car from the Bay Area and 2) locales where a substantial number of residents commute into the Bay Area for work or school. These nearby areas would include Pacifica, Half Moon Bay and the coast; Santa Cruz (coast and mountains); Napa and Sonoma; and the nearby locales of the Central Valley (Mt. Diablo, Tracy). More distant towns (Monterey, Stockton/Modesto/Madera/Fresno, and Mendocino) would be too far for inclusion.

If we were to eliminate counties as sub-regions, the 5 sub-regions and nearby areas would give a complete and sufficient organization of the geography of the Bay Area, with no overlap among sub-regions. The list of cities would be longer for each sub-region, but that's a small price. We would still have to address questions of nomenclature, such as what's really in "Silicon Valley", and whether the Sonoma Valley is in "Napa."

This is a fairly substantial change, and I thought some other wikivoyagers would have some good ideas.(WT-en) Rpetersen 09:05, 25 Apr 2005 (EDT)

The problem is the colloquial names for the regions are imprecise. Where does the Penninsula end and the South Bay start? Fremont is categorized in East Bay sometimes (craigslist) and South Bay at other times (most weather forecasts). Also, East Bay is pretty vague since it's fricken huge compared to Penninsula. I'm not saying I have a better idea... but it's nice to get precise like Ryan did with the California regions where he uses the ca.gov maps to define the regions and ca.gov defines them completely and unambiguously. I'm actually leaning towards using Counties just because it's more precise than the language used by the residents. -- (WT-en) Colin 17:20, 5 Aug 2005 (EDT)

It probably wouldn't be too tough to do the same thing with the Bay Area that was done for California, and just create a map that delineates what Wikivoyage defines as the East Bay, South Bay, etc. County articles would still be useful, but since the colloquial names are more commonly used we would then have a way of specifically determing whether Fremont is South Bay or East Bay. -- (WT-en) Wrh2 19:21, 5 Aug 2005 (EDT)

Hi all, I'm a reporter writing about wikis and was hoping to interview you about your contributions on WikiTravel. Could you please contact me at [email protected]? Thank you!

So, with Breadcrumb navigation coming in, we need to make some decisions about the Bay Area. We've got two different sets of regions for this article: counties, and more fuzzy names. I'm in favor of just using counties, since there's less subjectivity in where towns and such go, and most local people know the names. --(WT-en) Evan 00:22, 11 Dec 2005 (EST)

While it won't be perfect, I think the round counties can be pretty much hammered into the square holes of the regions. We have a similar problem with the CA Regions which are also not perfectly aligned along county boundaries. (For example, Solano County contains Rio Vista and Vacaville which are clearly in the Sacramento Valley and Vallejo which most people would put in the Bay Area (California), -- (WT-en) Colin 00:27, 11 Dec 2005 (EST)

Santa Cruz seems to be outside the Bay Area to me. Why was it added? --(WT-en) Evan 23:13, 28 June 2006 (EDT)

See Talk:California -- (WT-en) Colin 23:24, 28 June 2006 (EDT)

For those of us from the East coast were not used to traveling 11 miles and having the temperature be 10 degrees lower, it can leave us unprepared; I was thinking of adding "==Understand== The weather in the Bay Area is affected by microclimates, so certain parts East Bay can be up to 15 degrees warmer than downtown San Francisco, and as much as 20 degrees warmer than the area around the Golden Gate bridge. Generally the closer to the ocean one goes the cooler it is, it is suggested that one keep that in mind when travelling around the area." --65.242.127.130 16:32, 29 June 2006 (EDT)

Go ahead. Upper 50s in Pacifica can happen with 100s in Antioch. -- (WT-en) Colin 16:36, 29 June 2006 (EDT)

Moved from Hollister is bay area by (WT-en) Ryan:

Hollister California is a city in San Benito county of the border of Santa Clara county.It is about 19 to 21 miles to Gilroy For bieng so close to the border they considerite the S.F bay area.It is in the south bay area regoin. Santa Cruz, Hollister,and Watsonville are the towns that are considered the bay area. For geographle reasons and county reasons.

See Talk:California, the discussion about Gilroy (above) and other discussions for reasons why the divisions within California have been drawn as they are. To summarize the arguments, there isn't a breakdown that everyone can agree to, so we've tried to organize the state into useful sub-divisions for travelers that as much as possible match known divisions. For our purposes just about everything south of San Jose is considered Central Coast, which creates a nice division that is reasonably easy to follow for travelers. -- (WT-en) Ryan 16:53, 30 December 2006 (EST)

San Benito, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Mendocino, and Lake Counties are often incorrectly lumped into the Bay Area Grouping. I have always understood the formal Bay Area to be the 9 Counties the physically border the bay. The list in this wiki has Santa Cruz instead of Sonoma which is a mistake. Santa Cruz County is separated from the rest of the Bay Area Counties by the Santa Cruz Mountains and is located on the northern end of the Monterey Bay, and does not touch the San Francisco Bay. Hollister and Watsonville are not part of the South Bay, it ends with Gilroy at the Santa Clara County border. The strict definition is the 9 counties that border the San Francisco (and San Pablo) Bays. The ones listed above share some proximity to the other counties but are not part of the Bay Area. Culturally, Santa Cruz has more in common with Monterrey and the Central Coast cities. Hollister and Watsonville are agricultural communities mostly associated with the Central Coast, not the Bay Area. Gilroy has a lot in common with these cities, but is technically part of Santa Clara County. Culturally and politically, it is more unlike the other Bay Area cities but is part of geographically. Because Hollister and Watsonville are like Gilroy, wouldn't make them proxy Bay Area cities. cities. Trevor 12:42, 26 August 2009

Why is Santa Rosa not included in the Bay Area. Why do you cut off northern from Sonoma county. This makes no sense. Everyone knows that Santa Rosa is the main city in the North Bay 707 region. And by the way Marin is the West Bay, why do you think its 415 just like San Francisco. Whoever made this article is a transplant.

See Talk:California for discussion of the difficult decisions on region breakdown, and why we chose it. Keep in mind that we need a non-overlapping breakdown for organizing articles, and the words people use for geography tend to overlap. -- (WT-en) Colin Jensen 13:46, 10 February 2011 (EST)

All of Somoma County is part of the San Francisco Bay Area, and specifically is part of the North Bay (Bay Area), as shown in that article. Unfortunately, the detailed map in this San Francisco Bay Area article shows only the south part of Sonoma County as being in the San Francisco Bay Area. (The high-level map, showing where the Bay Area is within California, does include all of Sonoma County as part of the Bay Area, so the two maps are inconsistent.)

Splitting Sonoma County is absurd - if nothing else, there is (and should be) a single article about Sonoma County. As importantly, no one that I know (I'm a resident of the county) thinks of the county that way - that the north part of the county - for example, Cloverdale, is in the "North Coast".

If someone would fix the detailed map in this article, it would be greatly appreciated. -- John Broughton 16:28, 26 August 2023 (UTC)Reply

I agree with you. I'll post at Wikivoyage talk:Regions map Expedition and see if anyone can help. —Granger (talk · contribs) 22:53, 24 November 2023 (UTC)Reply

Updated map is up. Cheers -Shaundd (talk) 17:12, 23 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

Thank you! —Granger (talk · contribs) 17:20, 23 December 2023 (UTC)Reply