10 ms·

I'd wish they were a bit more futuristic than having 9000 parking spaces. Why not offer buses from where their employees live or other means of transportation?

I'd wish they were a bit more futuristic than having 9000 parking spaces. Why not offer buses from where their employees live or other means of transportation? It's easy to say that most people drive, but that's only because everyone always make that the most convenient mode of transportation. With some effort something else could be even more convenient.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
It was probably a city requirement to have that parking space.
maxsilver 9y ago
> I'd wish they were a bit more futuristic than having 9000 parking spaces. Apple might argue that their futuristic parking garage is the future - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/technology/apple-self-driving-car-permit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/technology/apple-self-dri...
colonelxc 9y ago
Apple does have buses.
akgerber 9y ago
Because the postwar suburban land use of the surrounding area is designed exclusively around automobiles and makes it nearly impossible and extremely unpleasant to walk for transportation, a prerequisite of functional mass transit. Silicon Valley has chosen to preserve its form of single-family suburban sprawl forever, at the cost of any human with a reasonable income being able to move there.
- plussed_reader 9y ago
  Not forever; the old parts of 'silicon valley' have been being turned under and rebuilt taller. Look north and east of the intersection of 237 & Mathilda Ave. The south SF bay(and most of the bay, really) is similar to Chicago in the run up to the Civil War; it's expanded out as much as possible, the only direction left is up. The gentrifying is pricing families out of the area; you can measure progress with BART, and how it's snaking it's way into the heart of the south bay.
  - akgerber 9y ago
    Except Chicago in the runup to the Civil War had population growth of 274% in a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago Well over 10x what Silicon Valley has experienced during another world-historical boom: http://siliconvalleyindicators.org/special-reports/population-brief-may-2015/population-growth-rates-1996-2015/ http://siliconvalleyindicators.org/special-reports/populatio...
mxfh 9y ago
Apple is building 11,000 parking spaces not because it wants to but because Cupertino, the suburban city where the new headquarters is located, demands it. Cupertino has a requirement for every building. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21720269-dont-let-people-park-free-how-not-create-traffic-jams-pollution-and-urban-sprawl http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21720269-dont-let-peo... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14067658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14067658
- jonknee 9y ago
  Requirements are made to be made exceptions for and Apple had $5b of leverage. They probably just wanted the parking.
  - jimlawruk 9y ago
    Yeah. A simple donation to the local municipality would have gotten this requirement waived. I once heard of a company getting past height restrictions by simply buying the town a few new firetrucks.
    - theparanoid 9y ago
      Intel did that for their Folsom campus.
    - thegranderson 9y ago
      In what way is this "donation" not a bribe? Just because it goes to the government at large vs. an individual?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - wayn3 9y ago
        I guess the difference is that a bribe would go to an individual. As in - an individual would then be doing something that is in conflict with what the organization he's working for would otherwise do. If you just "bribe" the organization, there's no conflict of interest. "We want to build this" "we dont want you to" "heres some money" "ok". Its a bit like negotiating with the CEO vs. bribing a lone DBA about getting access to proprietary data.
mc32 9y ago
It's a bit of damned if they don't and damned if they do. FB, GOOG get flack for their shuttle busses plus if you get there later in the day parking in MTV is dicey. At least if you wanna drive, you can, if you wanna ride the bike, no one's stopping you.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Yea, I don't get it. Office parking is supposedly bad, but when GOOG sends around buses to reduce congestion/parking issues, they are bad as well?
- akgerber 9y ago
  Except that the land use of Silicon Valley makes cycling dangerous and distances often too large to be practical for many.
  - mc32 9y ago
    True to some degree. But that only underscores why Apple was right to build more rather than fewer stalls.
kylec 9y ago
Its employees live all over the South Bay. I don't see how you'd provide bus service that services thousands of residents over hundreds of square miles. Most people would still need to drive, and perhaps even people serviced by Apple buses would still choose to drive. I know I would.
Analemma_ 9y ago
You're underestimating how much people love their cars. I formerly worked at Microsoft (the Redmond campus), which bends over backwards and does pretty much everything possible to keep people from driving to work. They have company shuttle buses, they give you a free card for public transit (and Seattle's is pretty good, compared to the Bay Area's), they pay you a bonus for using carpools/vanpools, and they have bike storage and showers and pay for bike expenses. They still need acres of parking garages, which are full every day. People like driving, and there's only so much the company can do about it.
- linkregister 9y ago
  It's not like these people are being irrational. If driving is faster, then these folks will do so. Given the property prices in the Seattle area, they are probably as close as possible to work as their budget will allow. They're probably at the edge of their tolerable commute as it is.
  - Fricken 9y ago
    Maybe as self interested individuals they aren't being irrational, but collectively as a civilization, it's irrational. The early proponents of the mechanized garden city were naive, and we've carried on perpetuating that naivete for 80 years now, because that's just the way we do it. What a mess. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      It's totally rational. Mass transit provides transport from points A to points B, C, and maybe D. Cars provide transportation to anywhere from anywhere. You regard this as irrational because you don't value individual liberty. Could cars be more environmentally sound? Yes and we are on our way to making that happen.
      - Fricken 9y ago
        If you conveniently ignore all the negative side effects of cars and sprawl that accomodates them, and start not from first principles but with the clusterfuck we currently inhabit, then I guess over-reliance on cars enhances individual liberty for a privileged few. With less cars you can take the bus, the train, a bike, or you can walk. You can do it whether you're rich or poor, or too old or too young to drive. With cars, you get to drive or else fuck you, and fuck your grandchildren too. Nothing about that fits into my model for individual liberty, quite the opposite.
m0llusk 9y ago
Most of their employees prefer to drive themselves to work. Trying to force that to change is not their agenda.
csomar 9y ago
No offense but I hear this a lot "Why not public transportation?" Well, why not a car if people wanted to have a car? With Tesla and new E.V.s hitting the market, the primary reason (pollution) is gone.
- chx 9y ago
  Cars take a lot of space though in the form of roads and parking lots.
  - csomar 9y ago
    So? Car owners will pay that bill from car taxes, parking tickets, etc... Why does that bother you?
    - giobox 9y ago
      The idea that roads and related infrastructure is paid entirely or even largely from taxes on road users is a huge myth that persists in a large number of western nations. In most of them, car owners merely contribute to the cost of roads via the taxes you mention, the bulk of the monies to pay road related costs still comes from other sources unrelated to roads or cars at all. Last I read on the subject, in the USA the breakdown was supposedly closer to 50% road related taxes, 50% general taxation paying for roads. I'm not that bothered personally, but I can absolutely understand why this might bother some - car owners are effectively subsidized by all tax payers to a large extent.
      - csomar 9y ago
        In that case, I might agree with you. But the parent poster was not complaining about that. You should also be aware that roads are being used for transportation (public or of goods); which practically most people use (though this might mean just direct taxation of these means).
      - sib 9y ago
        While this is true, in most cases, public transportation is funded at an even lower rate by fares / fees and more by general taxes.
bentruyman 9y ago
> Why not offer buses from where their employees live or other means of transportation? Apple, like many other big Bay Area tech companies, has dozens of buses and shuttles that ship people around daily (even all the way up to places like Berkeley).
njarboe 9y ago
Fast, on-demand, point-to-point transportation in the company of your choice, with the option of hauling more stuff than you can carry on your person, will always be attractive. If the cars drive themselves, that would be ideal. I'd say let's figure out a way to let everyone use that system. The Boring Company is a start. It seems to me in the currently ascending culture that a good person is expected to show a dislike for cars. Maybe for the vehicles of the future to be accepted their name needs to change. Pods? Apple could make a version.
microtherion 9y ago
Apple does offer all sorts of alternate commute options: Coaches that run all over the Bay Area, shuttles for the south bay, shuttle service to Caltrain/ACE, carpool arrangements. There even are multiple shuttle service to connect the various Apple buildings in Cupertino. Ultimately, much of the South Bay is not very walkable (I lived there for one year without a car, and 7 years without a driver's license of my own), so it's hard to compete with cars, but I'm pretty sure a large percentage of our SF/Santa Cruz commuters, if not the majority of them, are not taking their own cars.
s73ver 9y ago
Apple already offers busses to their current campus, and I can't imagine those would go away when they move. Still, not being able to find a parking spot in the morning is going to irritate a lot of people, and tank productivity.
patrick_ranjit 9y ago
luckily, that could be converted later on. But it is a good point.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

It was probably a city requirement to have that parking space.

maxsilver 9y ago

> I'd wish they were a bit more futuristic than having 9000 parking spaces. Apple might argue that their futuristic parking garage is the future - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/technology/apple-self-driving-car-permit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/technology/apple-self-dri...

colonelxc 9y ago

Apple does have buses.

akgerber 9y ago

Because the postwar suburban land use of the surrounding area is designed exclusively around automobiles and makes it nearly impossible and extremely unpleasant to walk for transportation, a prerequisite of functional mass transit. Silicon Valley has chosen to preserve its form of single-family suburban sprawl forever, at the cost of any human with a reasonable income being able to move there.

plussed_reader 9y ago
Not forever; the old parts of 'silicon valley' have been being turned under and rebuilt taller. Look north and east of the intersection of 237 & Mathilda Ave. The south SF bay(and most of the bay, really) is similar to Chicago in the run up to the Civil War; it's expanded out as much as possible, the only direction left is up. The gentrifying is pricing families out of the area; you can measure progress with BART, and how it's snaking it's way into the heart of the south bay.
- akgerber 9y ago
  Except Chicago in the runup to the Civil War had population growth of 274% in a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago Well over 10x what Silicon Valley has experienced during another world-historical boom: http://siliconvalleyindicators.org/special-reports/population-brief-may-2015/population-growth-rates-1996-2015/ http://siliconvalleyindicators.org/special-reports/populatio...

mxfh 9y ago

Apple is building 11,000 parking spaces not because it wants to but because Cupertino, the suburban city where the new headquarters is located, demands it. Cupertino has a requirement for every building. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21720269-dont-let-people-park-free-how-not-create-traffic-jams-pollution-and-urban-sprawl http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21720269-dont-let-peo... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14067658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14067658

jonknee 9y ago
Requirements are made to be made exceptions for and Apple had $5b of leverage. They probably just wanted the parking.
- jimlawruk 9y ago
  Yeah. A simple donation to the local municipality would have gotten this requirement waived. I once heard of a company getting past height restrictions by simply buying the town a few new firetrucks.
  - theparanoid 9y ago
    Intel did that for their Folsom campus.
  - thegranderson 9y ago
    In what way is this "donation" not a bribe? Just because it goes to the government at large vs. an individual?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - wayn3 9y ago
      I guess the difference is that a bribe would go to an individual. As in - an individual would then be doing something that is in conflict with what the organization he's working for would otherwise do. If you just "bribe" the organization, there's no conflict of interest. "We want to build this" "we dont want you to" "heres some money" "ok". Its a bit like negotiating with the CEO vs. bribing a lone DBA about getting access to proprietary data.

mc32 9y ago

It's a bit of damned if they don't and damned if they do. FB, GOOG get flack for their shuttle busses plus if you get there later in the day parking in MTV is dicey. At least if you wanna drive, you can, if you wanna ride the bike, no one's stopping you.

valuearb 9y ago
Yea, I don't get it. Office parking is supposedly bad, but when GOOG sends around buses to reduce congestion/parking issues, they are bad as well?
akgerber 9y ago
Except that the land use of Silicon Valley makes cycling dangerous and distances often too large to be practical for many.
- mc32 9y ago
  True to some degree. But that only underscores why Apple was right to build more rather than fewer stalls.

kylec 9y ago

Its employees live all over the South Bay. I don't see how you'd provide bus service that services thousands of residents over hundreds of square miles. Most people would still need to drive, and perhaps even people serviced by Apple buses would still choose to drive. I know I would.

Analemma_ 9y ago

You're underestimating how much people love their cars. I formerly worked at Microsoft (the Redmond campus), which bends over backwards and does pretty much everything possible to keep people from driving to work. They have company shuttle buses, they give you a free card for public transit (and Seattle's is pretty good, compared to the Bay Area's), they pay you a bonus for using carpools/vanpools, and they have bike storage and showers and pay for bike expenses. They still need acres of parking garages, which are full every day. People like driving, and there's only so much the company can do about it.

linkregister 9y ago
It's not like these people are being irrational. If driving is faster, then these folks will do so. Given the property prices in the Seattle area, they are probably as close as possible to work as their budget will allow. They're probably at the edge of their tolerable commute as it is.
- Fricken 9y ago
  Maybe as self interested individuals they aren't being irrational, but collectively as a civilization, it's irrational. The early proponents of the mechanized garden city were naive, and we've carried on perpetuating that naivete for 80 years now, because that's just the way we do it. What a mess. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    It's totally rational. Mass transit provides transport from points A to points B, C, and maybe D. Cars provide transportation to anywhere from anywhere. You regard this as irrational because you don't value individual liberty. Could cars be more environmentally sound? Yes and we are on our way to making that happen.
    - Fricken 9y ago
      If you conveniently ignore all the negative side effects of cars and sprawl that accomodates them, and start not from first principles but with the clusterfuck we currently inhabit, then I guess over-reliance on cars enhances individual liberty for a privileged few. With less cars you can take the bus, the train, a bike, or you can walk. You can do it whether you're rich or poor, or too old or too young to drive. With cars, you get to drive or else fuck you, and fuck your grandchildren too. Nothing about that fits into my model for individual liberty, quite the opposite.

m0llusk 9y ago

Most of their employees prefer to drive themselves to work. Trying to force that to change is not their agenda.

csomar 9y ago

No offense but I hear this a lot "Why not public transportation?" Well, why not a car if people wanted to have a car? With Tesla and new E.V.s hitting the market, the primary reason (pollution) is gone.

chx 9y ago
Cars take a lot of space though in the form of roads and parking lots.
- csomar 9y ago
  So? Car owners will pay that bill from car taxes, parking tickets, etc... Why does that bother you?
  - giobox 9y ago
    The idea that roads and related infrastructure is paid entirely or even largely from taxes on road users is a huge myth that persists in a large number of western nations. In most of them, car owners merely contribute to the cost of roads via the taxes you mention, the bulk of the monies to pay road related costs still comes from other sources unrelated to roads or cars at all. Last I read on the subject, in the USA the breakdown was supposedly closer to 50% road related taxes, 50% general taxation paying for roads. I'm not that bothered personally, but I can absolutely understand why this might bother some - car owners are effectively subsidized by all tax payers to a large extent.
    - csomar 9y ago
      In that case, I might agree with you. But the parent poster was not complaining about that. You should also be aware that roads are being used for transportation (public or of goods); which practically most people use (though this might mean just direct taxation of these means).
    - sib 9y ago
      While this is true, in most cases, public transportation is funded at an even lower rate by fares / fees and more by general taxes.

bentruyman 9y ago

> Why not offer buses from where their employees live or other means of transportation? Apple, like many other big Bay Area tech companies, has dozens of buses and shuttles that ship people around daily (even all the way up to places like Berkeley).

njarboe 9y ago

Fast, on-demand, point-to-point transportation in the company of your choice, with the option of hauling more stuff than you can carry on your person, will always be attractive. If the cars drive themselves, that would be ideal. I'd say let's figure out a way to let everyone use that system. The Boring Company is a start. It seems to me in the currently ascending culture that a good person is expected to show a dislike for cars. Maybe for the vehicles of the future to be accepted their name needs to change. Pods? Apple could make a version.

microtherion 9y ago

Apple does offer all sorts of alternate commute options: Coaches that run all over the Bay Area, shuttles for the south bay, shuttle service to Caltrain/ACE, carpool arrangements. There even are multiple shuttle service to connect the various Apple buildings in Cupertino. Ultimately, much of the South Bay is not very walkable (I lived there for one year without a car, and 7 years without a driver's license of my own), so it's hard to compete with cars, but I'm pretty sure a large percentage of our SF/Santa Cruz commuters, if not the majority of them, are not taking their own cars.

s73ver 9y ago

Apple already offers busses to their current campus, and I can't imagine those would go away when they move. Still, not being able to find a parking spot in the morning is going to irritate a lot of people, and tank productivity.

patrick_ranjit 9y ago

luckily, that could be converted later on. But it is a good point.