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Comment by apsec112 | Hacker News Reader

Apple put its big new headquarters in Cupertino, which doesn't have any housing available for all the people working there. Therefore, the majority will be forced to drive long distances to work, in dirty, CO2-heavy automobiles. Apple could have used its financial leverage - a third of Cupertino's tax revenue - to force the city to stop blocking all new housing construction, reducing commute distances. Alternatively, it could have placed its headquarters somewhere else - somewhere with either more housing, or enough density to support public transit, or a city council that isn't obsessed with enriching homeowners by making a housing shortage as bad as possible (or all three). Apple chose not to do either of those things, so all of those CO2 emissions are its responsibility.

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Apple has free shuttles to pick people up. There are 4 large apartment buildings recently constructed near the new office. Most people don't work in Cupertino. Lastly, many people can telecommute if they want to.

Apple is not perfect, but the energy Tim puts in making this stuff happens is beyond marketing desire.

Shuttles are just more congestion. Need sky trains.

Caltrain has been encouraging shuttles for decades; you're saying that they're wrong? OK, let's cut Caltrain ridership by about 1/3 by ending shuttles, that'll improve things.

Caltrain is sloooowwww, need high speed high density public transit that doesn’t add to rush hour congestion. Each stop should have a massive high rise with grocery, entertainment, etc.

You’ve just described Tokyo. Was that intentional?

That is the plan for Caltrain, yes. Ending shuttles is not the way to get there. Electrification of Caltrain and relaxing zoning restrictions near Caltrain stations, plus keeping shuttles, is the way to get there.

Sky trains are just more congestion. Need teleporters.

To my knowledge, the shuttles all pick people up from San Francisco, which is a) a very long drive and therefore CO2-heavy even in buses, and b) has a huge housing shortage itself. So if workers commute from San Francisco to Cupertino, that creates an even larger gaps between the number of jobs in San Francisco and the number of housing units in San Francisco, forcing those who work in San Francisco to commute in from even farther away.

> if workers commute from San Francisco to Cupertino, that creates an even larger gaps between the number of jobs in San Francisco and the number of housing units in San Francisco

San Francisco's voters and politicians choose to restrict supply. An affordability crisis predictably ensued. Transmutating that into a burden on a non-SF company is incorrect, if still fascinating.

> To my knowledge, the shuttles all pick people up from San Francisco

Your knowledge, and many of your arguments in this thread, are wrong.

I can't speak about Apple, but other tech companies have shuttle buses that run to many different places.

The shuttles go to a ton of different suburbs around Cupertino, not just to SF. So your knowledge is incorrect.

Come on, what kind of utopia are you living in?

Apple's core business is not environment protection, it's development of technology and applications for that tech.

That they're using the vehicle that is Apple to push for green energy is remarkable, putting pressure on the other giants. But this kind of expectation, that they should move away from the Mecka of tech devs. in order to push the envelope further would only lessen the net impact on their environmental work..

It would help if they just moved near a Caltrain station.

See: what Google is doing in SJ.

I'm not sure how frequent these stations are but from the overview of the size of the new Apple campus, it's not too easy finding a lot large enough to just drop it down where it's convenient. Not accounting for zoning laws etc.

There are or were offices at Sunnyvale Caltrain station. They also have shuttles that regularly service Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Diridon stations; the ride should only be 10-15 minutes. However, I do not think Caltrain has the capacity for tens of thousands of new commuters.

There's nothing "remarkable" about a company, especially a Bay Area-based consumer electronics company, saying they like green energy. Everyone says they like green energy, even the oil companies (https://www.total.com/en/commitment/environmental-issues-cha...). What would be "remarkable" is if they made significant changes to how they do business to, at least, avoid making the problem worse, and they are not doing that.

Maybe some day we will see a headline like, "Apple now globally powered by 100 percent renewable energy". Some day.

What does that even mean? Electricity is fungible. Suppose that ten megawatts of coal power and one megawatt of solar power goes into a power grid, and I draw 100 kilowatts out of that grid. I ask the power company to declare that my office is "powered by renewable energy". They can happily write me a piece of paper, saying that my 100 kilowatts of consumption "comes from" the one megawatt of solar input. But it doesn't change the amount of coal that gets burned, it's just moving numbers around.

Did you read the article? They're specifically investing in building solar farms and other renewable energy sources, as solar becomes more cost efficient it will push back on new developments of coal plants and other dirty energy sources.

This is not about the short term results, this is putting a strategical bet on clean power. And as you can see from Apple's other business, they're all about long term gains.

Total, the huge oil and gas company, also invests in renewable energy. They have a whole list of investments, one can read through them all on Crunchbase:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/total-energy-venture...

Does that mean Total is a "green company"? Of course not.

You could do that, if the one megawatt of solar power came from the roof your building because you built solar panels on it, as Apple has done.

You don't seem to get it, they do not just say that "they like" green energy - the link tells us that they switched over to 100% renewable energy. Even in China and India!

What I'm saying is that it's due to their business success that they can afford to take this investment. The success that made it possible can't just be toyed around with to suit every idealist's short sighted agenda of "Do more!".

Are they disconnected from every power grid in the world, and using their own solar panels and windmills 100% for everything? Of course not. They're drawing from the same grids that have most of their electricity supplied by coal and oil and gas. It's just that the power companies arbitrarily declare that the watts they draw out "come from" the small fraction of solar that gets fed into the grid. See my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16799265

They are also feeding into the electricity grid…

> Come on, what kind of utopia are you living in?

In the past you know, big industrial companies built large-scale residential areas for workers, it's not an utopia.

That was not the point I was trying to make, some of the best developers in the world live in the San Jose area.

To build a new campus in the middle of nowhere and build housing there would never be a valid solution.

Maybe for a second campus, like they're planning. But that one is rumoured to be put in Austin where, you guessed it, the density of a skilled workforce is high.

Apple has an entire department dedicated to incentivizing employees to use environmentally-friendly alternative commute methods: shuttles from the surrounding cities, shuttles within campus, bikes on campus, rental cars to lessen the need to own one, subsidies for public transportation, and for those who still drive, plentiful EV charging spots.

Well they also chose not to put the headquarters in a pot third world country, so let’s blame them for world hunger.

Building a huge amount of new office space in Cupertino is not just "not helping", it's actively making the problem worse.

The site was originally an HP campus, so the office space was already there; they replaced 80% of the former parking lots and office buildings with green space—increasing CO2 absorption.

The new building also allows them to consolidate employees from many of the 100+ other properties they lease within Cupertino and Sunnyvale. This further reduces the need for intercampus transportation. Hopefully these newly unused office buildings can be converted into residential space (edit: but Apple does not own them, so it's not their choice).

You come off as severely misinformed in this whole thread. I would urge you to read the article and do some research on the questions you ask before asking them. The answers are not what you think they are in light of any actual context.

What you are saying is correct, with a few nuances:

- as other commenters have pointed out, many employees who live more than a short drive from the office use shuttles. Not as good as public transit civically, but comparable ecologically.

- the vast majority of Apple’s 140k or so employees work in Apple Stores. Your post remains correct, but it is a fairly small number of employees who are operating in the dysfunctional urban quagmire that is the Bay Area.

Force how?

Simply tell the city, you need to permit enough housing for all of the people working in this huge new office complex, or Apple will leave Cupertino. Apple is such a large company that they pay a major chunk of Cupertino's tax revenues, so they would have a lot of negotiating leverage.

Have you been to Cupertino? I wouldn't want to live there. And if I worked there, I wouldn't want to live within 1 mile of my office. Even if there were housing, many people would prefer to live elsewhere.

Apple also cannot threaten to leave the city every time they want something. How dystopian it would be to have a multibillion dollar company extorting City Hall like that.

> Have you been to Cupertino? I wouldn't want to live there.

Hey now, what's wrong with Cupertino :(

Apple threaten to leave their new spaceship? A comically obvious bluff?

Obviously, this is a decision they would have made before they built the spaceship, not afterwards.

Apple threaten to leave One Infinite Loop?

"Obviously" they would have to make this decision in the early 90s?

I guess in this case we are fine big corporations telling city govt what to do.

Hear hear! They could have used their money to create sky trains to extremely high density housing (high rises). Google and Facebook could do this as well. Win win for all. The fact that they don’t shows they really do not care.

Where exactly would they build this extremely high density housing and sky trains?

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