HAVING spent a week visiting old friends in Northern California, I am struck by the changes in Santa Clara (or ‘Silicon’) Valley.

Frenetic growth I witnessed there during my 15 years in product planning continues unabated. The difference now is faceless glass buildings marked by the logos of Intel and AMD have been joined by more recent barnstorming successes like Facebook, Google or LinkedIn.

What was once big business is now huge business. When I arrived in 1978, the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area had fewer people than Scotland and Santa Clara county barely 1m. Since then, the metropolitan area has grown 50 per cent to 7.2m and Santa Clara itself doubled to 2m.

Not only have tracts of factories covered what were once salt wetlands and cherry orchards, but urban hubs like Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Jose are crammed with offices for venture capital, financial service and legal firms – plus high-end restaurants and chintzy retail where high local incomes can find suitable disposal. Modest homes go for $1m.

But what, you ask, has this to do with low-tech East Lothian?

Well, while investment in infrastructure has happened here (Route 237 now a proper freeway; Route 85 links the south valley; Valley Transit Authority (VTA) tram extended to Mountain View station), it is deckchairs-on-Titanic stuff.

Despite a dense, logical grid of freeways and expressways, traffic is now a nightmare; four lanes of red tail lights stretch into the distance for most commuters.

The main CalTrain link still runs the same wonky stock from 40 years ago along tracks thick with level crossings that play hell with traffic flows.

This month, Measure ‘B’ to raise $6bn in funds through sales tax passed by 70 per cent.

That should allow such anomalies to be fixed and a $2.9bn extension of BART (from San Francisco) into the county taken the last logical step to link with CalTrain and VTA trams in San Jose. Scaling that to East Lothian means we must invest £400m – or twice ELC’s budget.

Good planning years ago could have avoided such eye-watering costs.

Like East Lothian, Santa Clara is embarrassed by its success in attracting more new residents than anywhere else.

But, like East Lothian and [regional transport partnership] SEStran, it dithered over the supporting infrastructure. Which means once-modest costs prior to development now involve these hugely expensive catch-up projects after the event.

SESplan [the Strategic Development Planning Authority For Edinburgh and South East Scotland] should have reflected this long ago but repeats the same costly mistake.