Hacker News Reader

Comment by calichoochoo | Hacker News Reader

The office component is such b.s. that it throws the rest of the report into doubt. While solar panels and shuttles are small gestures in the right direction, Google continues to make the wrong large decisions by putting their offices in the middle of nowhere, miles from any real place, surrounded by acres of parking. The sustainable thing would be to put their buildings in cities and adjacent to mass transit so employees can walk and ride to work from their nearby homes.

View on HN

Disclaimer: I work at Google but the following comments are just based on personal observation and public information.

I think you're talking about the Mountain View campus and I agree it seems superficially to be an example of what you're talking about... I imagine with the benefit of hindsight and with modern (post 2000s :) sensibilities in mind both Google and Facebook would have tilted more heavily towards building up their SF presences back when that would have still been plausible/affordable.

However the parking restrictions are actually enforced by municipal regulation; I believe Google and many other companies (including my previous employer, VMware) would prefer to build campuses with much less parking but they are required to have a certain ratio of parking spaces to employees due to these antiquated regulations.

Meanwhile the other Google campuses are in fact located in large cities, though I believe transit access (Seattle?) is still an issue. One of the main reasons I choose to live in New York and work at the New York office is because I am a huge fan of the set up here where the office is centrally located and highly transit accessible.

What's the point?

I think it's more that the fact of having a giant, expensive separate campus is itself not a particularly progressive situation, regulations aside. Just a few common sense examples of the problems with this approach: massive, custom-built complexes are very hard to re-use if and when search advertising revenue declines; tax revenues go to random places that don't need them, instead of cities that could use rich companies headquartered there to better support public services; many employees still have to do business in big cities, so there is a massive amount of unnecessary travel to and from cities and international airports; etc. The issue is "campuses" as much as it has anything specific to do with parking regulations, which I assume all of these companies knew about when they made the decision to build the campuses.

Yep, I agree with you to an extent but I was also using "campuses" and "offices" interchangeably.

The Google New York offices follow exactly the model that you are suggesting.

Agreed! Here's hoping they cancel the Mountainview expansion and focus on replicating the New York approach.

Where would you locate an office for 20,000 people in Northern CA in a city? SF? You'd make housing in the city much worse, and you'd be hard pressed to find the land or permits for it.

Salesforce somehow manages to house 7000 of their employees in San Francisco, and Wells Fargo somehow seats 8000 of theirs. Nobody is suggesting that Google should move all of their people to SF, but I am suggesting they should consolidate into larger offices in the centers of principal cities: San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland.

And most importantly, outside the Bay Area.

I don't think it's viable to encourage companies to do this unless public transport and other services like schools are improved significantly in these cities. San Francisco isn't NYC.

The "Mountain View" campus now sprawls from Sunnyvale to Redwood Shores. It's a 20-mile bike ride from one to the other. The Redwood Shores office is so unabashedly exurban that you'd have to walk 3.5 miles to the nearest public library, 3.9 miles to the nearest coffee shop, and 4.5 miles to the nearest point of public transportation. These are Google's newest offices, reflecting their current thinking on "sustainability": everybody has to drive everywhere.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/10/23/google-se...

There's a ton wrong with what you've just said:

- First, the Pac Shores offices that Google acquired is in Redwood City, not Redwood shores, which is further to the north. It's not a 'continuation' of their campus but an entirely new campus.

- Second, Pac Shores was built in the middle of an industrially zoned area on a port. The massive salt ponds separating Pac Shores from RWC have had different proposals to further urbanize the area but they've been repeatedly shot down. The area is developing, give it time.

- Lastly, there are bicycle, walking paths, and caltrain shuttles going into downtown RWC from Pac shores, so it's easily accessible to the public library or a coffee shop if you want to go (I recommend Bliss coffee).

It would not have been possible for google to put their headquarters in SF. Obtaining that much office space was difficult enough in the middle of nowhere. It would have been completely impossible to do it in SF. The transit impact would have been catastrophic, as many (if not most) employees at google HQ do not live and do not wish to live in SF. They can't all drive there, they can't all ride caltrain (which is basically at or close to max capacity already), and no one seems to want them running even more shuttles into SF.

Yes, the valley is suffering greatly due to 50+ years of horrible planning. No, google hasn't obstinately made a socially harmful decision in the presence of better alternatives.

Google's new headquarters[0] to be built in downtown London is being built parallel to the platform at King's Cross Station. It will have parking space for 686 bikes but only four parking spots for cars.

[0] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-submits-landscraper-...

Yes, and their latest Zurich office is also adjacent to the main station of that city. Clearly there is a schism between USA Google and Europe Google as regards land use.

https://www.nzz.ch/zuerich/zweiter-standort-an-der-europaall...

No there isn't. Mountain View is the exception. All of the other big Google offices in the US (New York City, Seattle, San Francisco) are in the heart of downtown cores with great transportation. I'm in the NYC office and have an entrance into the subway from inside the office that goes to the A, C, E, and L lines. The 1, 2, and 3 lines are a block away. We have three bike rooms and hundreds of daily bike commuters (me included). I don't know of anyone who drives to work, and why would you? That's crazy to do in Manhattan.

We have been struggling to use public transport as a country for at least 5 decades. It works in some areas and doesn't work in others. Seeing some of the failures I don't ever see public transit becoming the only (or at least majority of) transit which is what is really required for the kind of sustainability you are talking about.

Wouldn't lots of Electric Vehicles be just about as sustainable as that? And it wouldn't require changing everything about how transit works in all the places public transit doesn't work.

I live in Omaha, so let me use that as an example. Omaha has about 5x the surface area of Manhattan but only about 1m people (Manhattan has about 5m I think). Getting from anywhere to anywhere takes about 20 minutes (most take more like 10), because we have a huge amount interstate style freeways in town. Rush hour adds maybe 5 minutes to that for my current commute for an upper limit for any trip of 25m.

It is a huge waste of gas that we all use our cars, but there simply isn't the population density to make buses work at scale. There aren't enough hubs of activity that would cause a subway to make sense. Even with public transit for the city we still have to deal with all the farmers near the city so we would still need parking accommodations. In order to get anything like the level of convenience cars provide there would need to be a huge amount of them, with 15 minute car rides a bus cannot compete on convenience.

But electric vehicles combined with all the wind farms we have would make it sustainable and not require changing the way a million people live their lives for no benefit. And it looks like EVs are coming in the next decade or so. Waiting just looks practical, our alternative is to rip up our streets move our buildings closer together and hope that a public transport system will make it worth while.

Public Transit is hard to sell in Nebraska the state that invented arbor day, because it is simply impractical. Try selling public transit in Texas where they actively love oil and actively hate the environment (I would too if I had to giant spiders, scorpions and solifuges that are native to Texas).

The problem is that eventually those freeways will get clogged at rush hour unless you continually expand them, which is crazy expensive if you need to rebuild dozens of bridges etc, and suffers from the laws of diminishing returns (adding a 5th lane to a 4 lane high way does not result in a 25% capacity gain).

I'd be surprised in the long run if even Omaha isn't susceptible to this, and electric vehicles don't really do much to help this (perhaps autonomous driving may allow a small %age increase but I am highly sceptical past that).

Houston and Dallas both have fast growing light rail systems, and there is the Texas Central railway project to link the cities with high speed rail so I don't think they're a perfect example - they also have a massive wind power boom going on right now.

> (perhaps autonomous driving may allow a small %age increase but I am highly sceptical past that).

I'm imagining in the future that some roads will be reserved for automated use only except in emergencies. At that point, you greatly increase the trust in individual agents and planning can be communicated ("I plan to move 3 lanes to the right in 1.5 miles, FYI"). Average speed increases, "turbulence" reduces, which improves throughput and speed consistency though doesn't help with exit bottlenecks.

That said, you're right. The law of diminishing returns continues to apply even if it kicks the can down the road a bit (i.e. adding a 5th lane results in a 10% capacity gain without SDVs, 21% gain with SDVs -- numbers are completely made up).

> The problem is that eventually those freeways will get clogged at rush hour unless you continually expand them

Only if density increases. It remains constant because Omaha (and many midwest cities) just gets bigger.

Which offices? Most of the google offices I know about are right in city center.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/locations/?region=north...

I work at Google in the Seattle office which is, as you say, in a city close to mass transit in a very walkable area. (My walk to work is about 25 minutes if I don't take a bus.)

Instead of accolades, many many Seattle residents complain now that we are driving up real estate prices and pushing people out of the cite because we all want to live close to where we work.

You can't win.

This seems to be a mountain view exception.

From a quick google search, it appears 20,000 of Google's 60,000 or so employees are headquartered in Mountain View, and it is widely considered the company's "headquarters." I'm not sure it's apt to think of it as an exception. And it's in the process of being rebuilt, which can be understood as a doubling down on this approach.

Perhaps. However, calichoochoo implied this at least true of one more office, as it "continues to make the wrong large decisions by putting their offices in the middle of nowhere, miles from any real place, surrounded by acres of parking". This seems to only apply to mountain view.

FWIW I agree; I can't think of a place I'd like to work less than the bay area. There's no good option for living there, let alone commuting.

So it's better to pull an Apple and completely cannibalize a city by building a giant spaceship in the middle?

For smaller offices it makes sense to have them in the middle of the city, for something as large as their Mountain View office, it'd be a huge mess inside a city for someone of that scale.

And you're forgetting the fact that the headquarter has been growing naturally over the years, so if they had indeed started in a city, they would've probably had a really hard time expanding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com