SAN FRANCISCO — In the gray glimmer before dawn, engineer Martin Wuest gets into his trusty Volkswagen and drives 82 miles to his job in Silicon Valley.
Wuest and his family fled San Jose for the life of ex-urban "super-commuters" 10 years ago, driven out by housing prices as tens of thousands of people poured in.
Since then, California's population has grown by more than 13%.
Wuest has watched the trend unfold in his rearview mirror.
"I see more people out there. More people are weaving around and driving fast and cutting people off. I see them every day," he says.
It's the California Gold Crush, 2001; with a nip, a tuck--and the occasional angry rip of a busted seam--the nation's most populous state is finding out what it's like to choke on success.
"There's no elbowroom anymore," says super-commuter Jerry Knoester.
In 1950 there were 10.5 million people in California. In 2000: 33.9 million.
Sometimes it feels as though all 33.9 million are trying to get across the bridges to San Francisco at the same time.
"I will never go to the city anymore unless I absolutely have to. It's just unbearable," says John Tangney, a software engineer in Berkeley who has seen the 13-mile drive to San Francisco grow from a breezy half-hour to 90 minutes of bumper boredom.
Brake lights aren't on everywhere in California. Spaces are still wide and open in the bristly heat of the desert southeast. And in the misty reaches of redwood country, logjams involve actual logs.
Elsewhere, the squeeze is on.
In San Francisco, people have taken to parking on the sidewalks in such numbers that there's a move afoot to double fines.
Congestion in Yosemite National Park got so bad that a draft plan proposes eliminating some parking spaces and motel rooms and closing part of a popular road.
In Los Angeles, some schools have switched to year-round schedules to try to accommodate the district's 723,000 students; others have lengthened the time between classes to give students a chance to work their way through crowded corridors.
Reactions to the population augmentation vary.
In San Francisco, hemmed in by sea and hills, Ed Holmes, a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, started noticing "this stress on the fabric of society" in the late 1980s.
"People just seem much tenser than they did," says Sima Misra, a Berkeley mother of two. "Women have yelled at me on the road for not driving fast enough."
