Apple adds 192-room hotel to plans of Northwest Austin campus
austin.culturemap.com
austin.culturemap.com
Not walkable? That part's accurate though.
The funding rarely has anything to do with it. In nearly all cases road tolls are priced far in excess of what it takes to maintain that stretch of road and the money is then reallocated to other things.
What you're experiencing is that the toll deters other drivers from using that road, so there is less traffic on it. This is quite unegalitarian, because you're essentially creating a road for the upper class and then charging more than its maintenance cost to keep out the proles. Whereas if the tolls only covered maintenance of the toll road then the collection overhead would consume most of the money -- it's already not an insignificant cost even when the tolls are disproportionately high.
They also create a perverse incentive for the government to leave non-toll roads in disrepair to increase their toll revenue by pushing people to the toll road.
As far as un-egalitarian, I respectfully disagree. I’m sure there are people who can’t afford the toll costs, but “pay for what you use” seems perfectly reasonable to me. I guess that may be different if money is taken from the toll road as you described.
The large majority of road maintenance costs are attributable to weather and semi trucks. (Road damage from vehicles is the fourth power of vehicle weight, so one semi does as much damage as thousands of cars.)
Moreover, the problem with allocating the fixed cost (weather) portion of road maintenance to cars, or the cost attributable to large trucks, is then you over-deter use of the road. You don't want an inefficiency where you deter someone from using the road even though they value their use of it more than the cost to the state of allowing them to, because then you waste idle road capacity for which the fixed construction costs must be paid either way. Doing that also requires the amount of the toll to be even higher, because then you have to amortize the fixed costs over fewer vehicles. You end up with tolls much higher than the efficient level per vehicle even if the tolls do only pay for road maintenance, because of the over-deterrence.
The better solution is to pay the fixed cost portion from general taxes and only charge the marginal cost for usage.
But if you charge only the marginal cost for "light" passenger vehicles then the amount is so small as to not even be worth collecting.
https://www.alamy.com/highway-interchange-or-multi-layered-h...
I think the commenters point, was that even if it an employee was staying literally across the highway from the campus, there would be no way to walk.
One you get to understand the road design in Texas, there are many advantages, such as their use of frontage roads and the ability to make u-turns under the highways without a traffic signal. But it generally speaks to the sprawl.
Our freeway system is ridiculous. We have a single interstate, multiple tolls and no 'loop' around the city. Houston and Dallas may be famous for their 8 lane highways but that is not how Austin is designed.
It's a gigantic family-owned plot of land, about 7000 acres (11 square miles, 28 km^2).
The Robinson family could have sold it all off to developers, but so far they have been very limited about that. Mostly they've just allowed stuff with obvious public benefit like a high school.
So the new Apple campus is on a major road, and one side it's suburbs, but on the other side, it's trees, grass, and (this being Texas) a bit of cactus.
More details: https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2018/12/15/a-primer-...
Worth mentioning that unlike Apple's Austin campus, this was in a central district in a major city, so there wasn't a big compromise between a fun neighborhood and being close to the office.
That said, I genuinely find it interesting that they would put a hotel in that location because of a lack of amenities and interesting things to explore (I'm betraying my attitude about the domain and that area in general, but I would not call it interesting/enjoyable/fun to explore unless you like mega malls and top golf, which some folks do, but people visiting from out of town likely would not when they can just as easily get that back home). Maybe they were even debating whether to include the hotel at all until Covid came along and made the decision for them--the suburbs are the new city centers (btw, I realize they're in the city technically).
I used to work for someone who would drive a number of us a bit crazy because he always wanted to do team meeting dinners in the city about an hour from the office where we would meet during the day--which was actually the wrong direction from where many of us lived. (He, somewhat understandably, wasn't crazy about the dining options near the office.)
That said, I'll stand down completely on my knee-jerk comment on this because if you take the total visitors to Apple's Austin campus, some of those folks would not want to stay where the action is and so, to your point, the ones who want action can take an Uber. Everyone wins in that case, I suppose.
Also, if you don't think someone at Apple brought up the benefit of the hotel being at the campus itself and how that might factor into productivity you're less cynical about corporate America than I am (not a stretch; I'm pretty cynical).
I work for an international company that is small in comparison to Apple (15k employees) and Hotels for international travel are a pain.
Having one on-site is probably going to save them some money in the long run.
How close is it, what's the contiguous capacity of it, is it the cheapest, what is our relationship with it (payment methods, we prefer invoicing), does it require a down-payment to be paid by the traveller, if so how do we reimburse that.
In contrast, flights are usually pretty easy; pick an flight and pay.
You can make a reservation at IHG.com with a fake credit card 4111 1111 1111 1111 and they do zero name/address/CVV verification, and the only reason I can tell is because they’re not the ones stuck with dealing with chargebacks and fees.
It’s just SLOW. Hoteliers “love” technology but they are damned SLOW to do anything with it sometimes (I don’t mean implementation here, there can be all sorts of reasons for implementation to take a long time, I mean the decision cycles from directors and executives of chains)
2million sq/ft of glorious open floor plan seating.
From what I remember reading every department is closed off and some are only accessible to those with permission to enter.
According to the article the hardware team managed to avoid it by complaining loud enough that they goy their own building.
One of the many blunders:
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find...
I'd have expected it to be open to Apple employees/contractors/guests travelling on official Apple business, and thus wouldn't carry a chain brand.
(Best hotel name I can come up with is “Energy Saver” in the style of macOS System Preferences. Cute, and comes with a free logo. But I doubt the Apple of today would dare to be so whimsical.)
I guess it's pretty good for the cafeteria staff then, do they get the same health and bonus/stock perks as other staff?
It makes more sense to contract someone else to run it without their brand, unless they're paying for the opportunity to have their brand there.
Austin is a decent-sized city but not a particularly large one, so hotel capacity isn't huge. And there's SXSW, Austin City Limits music festival, a Formula 1 track, the Republic of Texas biker rally (200,000 attendees). Not to mention graduation weekend for the University of Texas, which is a big campus with over 50,000 enrolled.
That same aspect really surprised me about Apple Park: how the building is so futuristic, but then getting there requires you hop in your regressive oil-burning couch on wheels. Personally, I would never again work for a company that made me drive down a highway to a giant parking garage complex. I want transit-oriented development and I want to live and work near transit lines, in walkable areas with mixed-use amenities.
If my choices in 2020 are remote work, suburban car commute, or downtown city office commute watching YouTube on a bus or train, one of these options is the clear last-place option.
My parents told me an anecdote of how they recently drove to the center of town (the old part built for walking) just to get out and walk around, as if this is a normal and not-insane byproduct of our misguided city planning. Their home is so isolated and pedestrian-hostile that they have to drive a vehicle just to find somewhere pleasant to exist. (The same story goes for getting to a park or outdoor recreation area)
Suburbs have all the downsides of a city with none of the upsides of rural life.
Obviously, it’s not Apple’s fault that most American cities happened to make massive city planning mistakes after World War II. But it seems like so many of those mistakes continue to be perpetuated by all parties involved.
It depends where you live. If I drive into my company's suburban office (which I have rarely done for the past few years), I'm about a 25-30 minute drive. If I take the commuter rail into the city to go to another office, I'm about 90 minutes door-to-door between drive to train/train/subway/walk. I don't mind doing the latter now and then, but if I had to make the choice most days, that wouldn't be my pick.
I did commute into the city semi-regularly for about a year once. It really wasn't sustainable over a long period even though I didn't need to do it every day most weeks.
If your suburban office didn’t have a huge parking lot in front of it, adjacent to a grass knoll, adjacent to a four lane highway, which also has a grass strip in between it, with your house set back from your street with a lawn and driveway, with your street hidden in curvy cul-de-sac roads from the main road to alleviate thru traffic, you might have an actual chance at walking, biking, or taking a bus to your suburban office. But it’s all been designed around the car so now you must own your very own car to go anywhere.
Unlike rural areas, cities are dense enough that we could certainly choose to build them in a different way, so that we are not all completely dependent on our cars to go anywhere. For a lot of folks, I think it's definitely a discussion worth having.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-210...
It’s quite common in some countries for companies and other institutions hotels or guest houses on site, especially when ravel is difficult. And even when not it’s very typical for companies to have a with local hotels for their visitors. This is just another case of wiggling the dividing line between in-house/outsourcing that companies do with fungible tasks like cafeterias, cleaning, call center etc.
I interned at a company with 50k employees that's redeveloping their HQ campus. The redevelopment includes a fairly large hotel on site because the company has a decent amount of business travelers coming/going every day. The main office building currently has a room dedicated to storing luggage for employees traveling.
At the time, there weren’t many good hotel options around that part of Austin unless you were willing to stay in a motel or a long drive away. I imagine this was a big obstacle when trying to attract MBA students to the weekend MBA programs (where the students are put up at a hotel every weekend) or trying to get business bigwigs to visit campus for events, so UT just decided to build their own hotel.
Only difference is that while working at CERN you don’t pay tax on your earnings, spending, car etc.
The cool option, the unlikely one, is that this would also be a technological testbed for a well integrated technical living space. A modest small go at a lab, to try out how we might integrate computing & living. As I said: unlikely. ;)
It also definitely had legacy IBM tech. This was before WiFi really took off and the guest rooms all had Token Ring. Which, as I recall, necessitated warning stickers all over the place because you'd fry your Ethernet if you tried to plug in. At some point, I think they redid it but then they offloaded the facility.
Can be. Depends on the circumstances. There are the capital costs and then the company presumably outsources the running of the hotel to a hospitality company that needs to turn a profit on their management.
In general, there's been a long-term trend away from companies owning corporate retreat properties, executive meeting centers, etc. A number of big old-line tech companies I'm familiar with sold off marquee properties over the past 2 or 3 decades.
But if you're building a campus and there aren't great existing lodging options, it may make sense. They can presumably sell it off at some point if they don't want to own it.