Not if everyone would only live in densely populated, walkable cities created by the wave of a magic wand because that's what the author would clearly prefer.
Well, it's what we can afford / are capable of making work, given the constraints in California: limited land area (particularly coastal land area with nice weather), large increases in population, an inability to scale freeways to move as many people as necessary, etc.
My point is that doesn't describe the reality of California for all sorts of historical reasons so assuming that's the reality isn't very useful. Perhaps SF and the South Bay should encourage higher density and mixed use communities, but that takes a long time even in the best case. The bottom line is that not everyone can necessarily live in the specific locale they'd prefer. And just making things denser isn't the answer. Marin County isn't Marin County if you make it NYC.
Land area is only a constraint in CA because they have rejected density as a solution to the constraint. The city of San Jose could be home to 13M people at Manhattan levels of density, or 7M people at Brooklyn levels of density. Instead, it is home to 1M people, with freeways that are relatively overbuilt in relative comparison.
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