Palo Alto is NOT a 'small town'. . . .
by any stretch of the imagination. It is a large suburb in the middle of an enormous urban area.
shareYeah, not very small. But it's very nice. Very. Such as downtown, University Avenue, etc.
shareThis is funny ... first off Stanford University is not in Palo Alto... Stanford University is in Stanford, CA and is bordered by Palo Alto and Menlo Park . Either way.. who cares. If you enjoy the movie than I say give it some artistic license plus or minus the size of the city.
sharePalo Alto is veryyyyy small in comparison to other places in the bay. Driving by Palo alto on 101 takes less then a min... unless you're in 5 o clock traffic. ;)
shareIf you judge small towns by ease of parking then PA is definitely not small :) Awful, AWFUL parking. And just to qualify my remarks - I work here.
shareI don't know much about PA or this area in the film, but I thought I would comment about "small towns."
I'm from Michigan, and lived in a city of about 18,000 people, and then it's also a college town so it boosted the population up to like 35,000+ during the school year. I considered it a relatively smaller city, but there are other cities around the area with 50,000+, and those I considered medium sized cities.
Anything with 100,000+ in population is large for Michigan, other than the Detroit Metro area, but each of those areas has a lot of people, and then of course Detroit itself has a ton.
I would say anything less than 5,000 people is a "small town," and then up to 20,000 is bordering on a larger town or small city.
Anything with 50,000+ people I consider a decent sized city, and obviously 100,000+ is large.
Michigan has a lot of spread out cities with about 40,000-75,000 people, and those are considered the avearge-medium sized cities. So I don't know how people would call those "small towns" in another state. They're neither small in regard to population or land mass.