Now that the local governments will agree to almost anything, why doesn't Apple design a building that could accommodate all of its current and projected Cupertino employees? It's a 150 acre site and five or six stories isn't tall. I think most of Paris is six stories. Apple could then sell or lease its current campus.
Cupertino and the surrounding area is likely to see depressed rents with all of that Apple leased space becoming available in 2015.
Hah! But HAL's tragic flaw was that he was programmed to know everything, and at the same time to keep a secret from the crew about the purpose of the mission. No such discrepancy has been detected at Apple.
Well if you happen to be driving down De Anza when Apple start going home, that is a nightmare now. If all that traffic shifts to Wolfe, which already has it's problems at commute time, the new Apple campus could make things much worse.
I'm sure some sort of solution can be found, but there is no way the road system there is good enough to cope without significant changes.
Actually, It's not so much Apple people going home!
Our main store was in Sunnyvale -- less than a mile North of then Apple headquarters at Stevens Creek and De Anza.
Our home was in Saratoga off of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Rd (Cupertino renamed the part of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Rd that ran through its city limits). Our home was about 6 miles South of Apple headquarters.
For years we could drive the 7 miles (with Apple headquarters in the middle) in 10-15 minutes.
Then, sometime in the 1980s, they completed the missing bits of US 280 -- so you could drive all the way from San Francisco to San Jose and points South.
When this happened, the entire traffic pattern changed as 280 would drain the surrounding communities.
Apple had not significantly enlarged its headquarters staff.
But the 7 mile drive from Saratoga to Sunnyvale jumped to 25-30 minutes (anytime) and 45-60 minutes during rush hour.
There seemed to be a 24-hour per day congested freeway that backed up to the streets of the surrounding cities.
Some said the 24-hour per day congestion was due to:
1) San Francisco Financial District hours 6 AM - 2AM
2) Companies like HP who had lots of employees working Flex Hours
3) The Feds and State not planning and building the 280 freeway in a timely and reasoned fashion
Anyway, travel time more than doubled and it was not due to Apple employees arriving at or leaving work.
The same residents that oppose this project are the same ones that complain loudly about potholes, wondering why the city doesn't have any money to fix them.
Also, keep in mind that residents of Cupertino are trying to close down the Kaiser Cement Plant in the nearby foothills, a plant that has been there for over 40 years; a plant that was there when the residents decided to purchase their homes in the area; a plant that products the concrete rich Cupertino residents use to pave their 10-mile long driveways. I would use the term NIMBY, but that's worn out.
This isn't surprising, given the dismal state of our economy and particularly the business-hostile environment in California. These cities must be delighted that there's one high-tech business that's not packing up and moving out.
It's also a foolish move on Apple's part. Economically, it makes their cost of doing business much higher, giving advantages to competitors elsewhere. Politically, it means that, much like Microsoft in the 1990s, they've only got one state's members of Congress to deal with the federal bureaucracy for them.
With California's schools among the worst in the nation, with rising taxes and chronic budget deficits, with powerful and greedy public worker labor unions, with still-inflated home prices, with collapsing infrastructure, and with tens of thousands of criminals about to be tossed out on the streets, it may also prove hard to attract talented employees. California isn't the magnet it was a generation ago.
I know if I had the choice between Cupertino and Austin, I'd take the latter in a flash. Apple is making a big mistake not diversifying geographically.
No doubt it'll be a striking building, and no doubt Margaret Hamilton will be somewhere in all that glass wringing her claws with glee and cackling "And your little dog, too!"
In the game of archetypes, few things are as fascinating to watch as The Underdog becoming The Evil Empire. Nothing corrupts like winning.
Now that Goliath has become so conspicuous, can David be far away?
Has anyone noticed there are two buildings on the right side of the map (Pruneridge & Tantau) that are not included in either Apple land purchase? But in the future-state drawing with the "UFO" from above, those buildings have been done away with.
If you were currently housed in one of those buildings, wouldn't you feel a bit of oncoming doom right about now?
Yes, and evil dwarves are planning to drag out children off to pits, and there are magical aircars that run on unicorn farts, but our government is plotting against us by keeping them off the market.
So what's next? You go to Austin and start rants about all the Hispanics, the pollution, crime, and environmental problems, a nutbag governor who wants to secede from the union, and an educational system that is rapidly becoming one of the worst jokes in this hemisphere?
Apple decided to stay in its community, rather than bail out. They should be commended for that. A LOT of cities in this country would love to have them headquarter there.
No doubt it'll be a striking building, and no doubt Margaret Hamilton will be somewhere in all that glass wringing her claws with glee and cackling "And your little dog, too!"
+1
And deep in the catacombs you'll see Ive, Schiller, Woz, and Cook standing quaking in front of the face of JOBS with clouds of smoke billowing around it while Toto pulls back the curtains to reveal....Bill Gates....as the face of Jobs says, "Pay no attention to that dork behind the curtain..."
Well if you happen to be driving down De Anza when Apple starts going home, that is a nightmare now. If all that traffic shifts to Wolfe, which already has its problems at commute time, the new Apple campus could make things much worse.
I'm sure some sort of solution can be found, but there is no way the road system there is good enough to cope without significant changes.
Truth.
Not only that, it appears that Pruneridge will deadend at Tantau and not go through to Wolfe. And Tantau has no access to 280. But then perhaps CalTrans will build a new Apple Campus exit/entrance ramp. Imagine going down 280 and seeing an exit sign with just the Apple logo! That'll be something that Google could never top!
The article needs to start using the new names of these cities: CuperChina, SunnyIndia, and Santa Korea. Not to mention Shallow Alto and Google View. San Jose will always be San Jose, always the run-down suburb of San Francisco, always trying to be better than SF, always failing.
Too bad Santa Clara wasn't so forward thinking when the BART was being built and blocked the south route due to San Mateo not having the funds at the time and only Santa Clara stood in the way of helping out.
We got stuck with the CalTrain and the rest is history. To have the BART loop the entire Bay Area [the original plan] should have happened.
Ah, the memories ring false. It was in fact San Mateo County that not only had no funds, it wasn't even going to try to raise the funds. NIMBY at its finest. It took ten years for planners to settle all arguments about where to locate 280 through three miles in Woodside so it took no time at all for SMC to veto any plans for BART to extend beyond Daly City.
Besides, how would BART south to Santa Clara help alleviate traffic on 280?
Besides, why does big-city-wannabe San Jose push so hard to get BART extended from Fremont through East San Jose to Downtown San Jose when no one in Santa Clara County will use it but everyone will pay for it? Sales tax is close to 10% because of this multibillion dollar boondoggle to bring non-residents from Tracy and Livermore to Cisco and others in Mille Putas, I mean Milpitas.
CalTrain has been there since forever so no one was "stuck" with it.
But I certainly emphatically agree that the original loop plan should have happened at the outset.
Then, sometime in the 1980s, they completed the missing bits of US 280 -- so you could drive all the way from San Francisco to San Jose and points South.
Dick, a couple of edits:
It's Interstate 280, not US 280.
I-280 was a complete through route from SF to US 101 near Story Road* in SJ since about 1975. Of course, since then there have been many serial improvement projects giving the impression that the job was never really finished.
*At this point the continuation interstate is designated I-680 and runs up the East Bay to I-80 near Cordelia Junction.
[OT to Dick: Do you remember the support structures that were built at 280/680/101 in the 60s before the actual road surface and connecting ramps were constructed? Remember how one morning commuters were greeted by an old car sitting a couple hundred feet on top of one of those towers?]
Ah, the memories ring false. It was in fact San Mateo County that not only had no funds, it wasn't even going to try to raise the funds. NIMBY at its finest. It took ten years for planners to settle all arguments about where to locate 280 through three miles in Woodside so it took no time at all for SMC to veto any plans for BART to extend beyond Daly City.
Besides, how would BART south to Santa Clara help alleviate traffic on 280?
Besides, why does big-city-wannabe San Jose push so hard to get BART extended from Fremont through East San Jose to Downtown San Jose when no one in Santa Clara County will use it but everyone will pay for it? Sales tax is close to 10% because of this multibillion dollar boondoggle to bring non-residents from Tracy and Livermore to Cisco and others in Mille Putas, I mean Milpitas.
CalTrain has been there since forever so no one was "stuck" with it.
But I certainly emphatically agree that the original loop plan should have happened at the outset.
Cool, that's what we've been lacking, more Bay Area regional planning talk!
I wasn't aware that BART ever included plans for a loop- I though it always was conceived as a commuter feed system from the outlaying regions into SF, with the big holdout being Marin.
I think BART was sort of doomed from the outset as any kind of traffic alleviator, since urban planners in the 60s always assumed that San Francisco was the hub. The growth of the Bay Area as a megapolis requiring a distributed, regional transit network (mesh instead of hub) didn't take off until BART was pretty much cast in stone. As it stands, there are too few tracks and too many choke points to be particularly resilient or to be able to significantly increase capacity.
The best to be done now is extend lines into the areas of outlying growth, as in the relatively recent Pittsburg/Bay Point or Dublin/Pleasanton lines, and of course south down the Peninsula. But in the new cash strapped Bay Area (or US, for that matter) giant infrastructure projects seem like a dim hope. I drive the Bay Bridge every day and look at the modest thing that's going to be the new Eastern span and shake my head at how far we've fallen since we made the Golden Gate.
Funny! What subway are you referring to? What other stations? Curious minds really want to know.
The London underground system naturally, via evacuated tunnels using magnetic levitating trains accelerating at 1g the journey could be accomplished in 30 minutes with a top speed of 9.3 km/s.
Surely Apple can manage that?
Anyway, Apple should clearly be moving their offices to near Mount Kilimanjaro for future orbital commuting via a Space Elevator.
Cool, that's what we've been lacking, more Bay Area regional planning talk!
I wasn't aware that BART ever included plans for a loop- I though it always was conceived as a commuter feed system from the outlaying regions into SF, with the big holdout being Marin.
I think BART was sort of doomed from the outset as any kind of traffic alleviator, since urban planners in the 60s always assumed that San Francisco was the hub. The growth of the Bay Area as a megapolis requiring a distributed, regional transit network (mesh instead of hub) didn't take off until BART was pretty much cast in stone. As it stands, there are too few tracks and too many choke points to be particularly resilient or to be able to significantly increase capacity.
The best to be done now is extend lines into the areas of outlying growth, as in the relatively recent Pittsburg/Bay Point or Dublin/Pleasanton lines, and of course south down the Peninsula. But in the new cash strapped Bay Area (or US, for that matter) giant infrastructure projects seem like a dim hope. I drive the Bay Bridge every day and look at the modest thing that's going to be the new Eastern span and shake my head at how far we've fallen since we made the Golden Gate.
I think another test of success is warranted. When BART was first proposed, while it was under construction, and even for some time after it started running, it was frequently criticized as completely unworkable. Today, I would dare anyone to consider getting around the Bay Area without BART in the mix, whether they are riding the system or driving a car. Many American cities would be grateful to have such a doomed system.
Comments
Knowing Cupertino, the Ranch 99 could use an expansion anyway
Or public transit
.... Jobs said that the company's recent growth had prompted the company to design a building that could hold nearly all of its employees...
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
Now that the local governments will agree to almost anything, why doesn't Apple design a building that could accommodate all of its current and projected Cupertino employees? It's a 150 acre site and five or six stories isn't tall. I think most of Paris is six stories. Apple could then sell or lease its current campus.
Cupertino and the surrounding area is likely to see depressed rents with all of that Apple leased space becoming available in 2015.
Shhh! That place is meant to be a _secret_
The British aren't that good at keeping secrets (this is genuinely true):
This project makes me want to get a job at Apple just so I work in that building.
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that!"
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that!"
Hah! But HAL's tragic flaw was that he was programmed to know everything, and at the same time to keep a secret from the crew about the purpose of the mission. No such discrepancy has been detected at Apple.
Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, though . . .
Well if you happen to be driving down De Anza when Apple start going home, that is a nightmare now. If all that traffic shifts to Wolfe, which already has it's problems at commute time, the new Apple campus could make things much worse.
I'm sure some sort of solution can be found, but there is no way the road system there is good enough to cope without significant changes.
Actually, It's not so much Apple people going home!
Our main store was in Sunnyvale -- less than a mile North of then Apple headquarters at Stevens Creek and De Anza.
Our home was in Saratoga off of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Rd (Cupertino renamed the part of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Rd that ran through its city limits). Our home was about 6 miles South of Apple headquarters.
For years we could drive the 7 miles (with Apple headquarters in the middle) in 10-15 minutes.
Then, sometime in the 1980s, they completed the missing bits of US 280 -- so you could drive all the way from San Francisco to San Jose and points South.
When this happened, the entire traffic pattern changed as 280 would drain the surrounding communities.
Apple had not significantly enlarged its headquarters staff.
But the 7 mile drive from Saratoga to Sunnyvale jumped to 25-30 minutes (anytime) and 45-60 minutes during rush hour.
There seemed to be a 24-hour per day congested freeway that backed up to the streets of the surrounding cities.
Some said the 24-hour per day congestion was due to:
1) San Francisco Financial District hours 6 AM - 2AM
2) Companies like HP who had lots of employees working Flex Hours
3) The Feds and State not planning and building the 280 freeway in a timely and reasoned fashion
Anyway, travel time more than doubled and it was not due to Apple employees arriving at or leaving work.
Also, keep in mind that residents of Cupertino are trying to close down the Kaiser Cement Plant in the nearby foothills, a plant that has been there for over 40 years; a plant that was there when the residents decided to purchase their homes in the area; a plant that products the concrete rich Cupertino residents use to pave their 10-mile long driveways. I would use the term NIMBY, but that's worn out.
It's also a foolish move on Apple's part. Economically, it makes their cost of doing business much higher, giving advantages to competitors elsewhere. Politically, it means that, much like Microsoft in the 1990s, they've only got one state's members of Congress to deal with the federal bureaucracy for them.
With California's schools among the worst in the nation, with rising taxes and chronic budget deficits, with powerful and greedy public worker labor unions, with still-inflated home prices, with collapsing infrastructure, and with tens of thousands of criminals about to be tossed out on the streets, it may also prove hard to attract talented employees. California isn't the magnet it was a generation ago.
I know if I had the choice between Cupertino and Austin, I'd take the latter in a flash. Apple is making a big mistake not diversifying geographically.
No doubt it'll be a striking building, and no doubt Margaret Hamilton will be somewhere in all that glass wringing her claws with glee and cackling "And your little dog, too!"
In the game of archetypes, few things are as fascinating to watch as The Underdog becoming The Evil Empire. Nothing corrupts like winning.
Now that Goliath has become so conspicuous, can David be far away?
david here !!! you rang ??
9
The British aren't that good at keeping secrets (this is genuinely true):
good one
9
If you were currently housed in one of those buildings, wouldn't you feel a bit of oncoming doom right about now?
So what's next? You go to Austin and start rants about all the Hispanics, the pollution, crime, and environmental problems, a nutbag governor who wants to secede from the union, and an educational system that is rapidly becoming one of the worst jokes in this hemisphere?
Apple decided to stay in its community, rather than bail out. They should be commended for that. A LOT of cities in this country would love to have them headquarter there.
No doubt it'll be a striking building, and no doubt Margaret Hamilton will be somewhere in all that glass wringing her claws with glee and cackling "And your little dog, too!"
+1
And deep in the catacombs you'll see Ive, Schiller, Woz, and Cook standing quaking in front of the face of JOBS with clouds of smoke billowing around it while Toto pulls back the curtains to reveal....Bill Gates....as the face of Jobs says, "Pay no attention to that dork behind the curtain..."
Well if you happen to be driving down De Anza when Apple starts going home, that is a nightmare now. If all that traffic shifts to Wolfe, which already has its problems at commute time, the new Apple campus could make things much worse.
I'm sure some sort of solution can be found, but there is no way the road system there is good enough to cope without significant changes.
Truth.
Not only that, it appears that Pruneridge will deadend at Tantau and not go through to Wolfe. And Tantau has no access to 280. But then perhaps CalTrans will build a new Apple Campus exit/entrance ramp. Imagine going down 280 and seeing an exit sign with just the Apple logo! That'll be something that Google could never top!
The article needs to start using the new names of these cities: CuperChina, SunnyIndia, and Santa Korea.
Too bad Santa Clara wasn't so forward thinking when the BART was being built and blocked the south route due to San Mateo not having the funds at the time and only Santa Clara stood in the way of helping out.
We got stuck with the CalTrain and the rest is history. To have the BART loop the entire Bay Area [the original plan] should have happened.
Ah, the memories ring false. It was in fact San Mateo County that not only had no funds, it wasn't even going to try to raise the funds. NIMBY at its finest. It took ten years for planners to settle all arguments about where to locate 280 through three miles in Woodside so it took no time at all for SMC to veto any plans for BART to extend beyond Daly City.
Besides, how would BART south to Santa Clara help alleviate traffic on 280?
Besides, why does big-city-wannabe San Jose push so hard to get BART extended from Fremont through East San Jose to Downtown San Jose when no one in Santa Clara County will use it but everyone will pay for it? Sales tax is close to 10% because of this multibillion dollar boondoggle to bring non-residents from Tracy and Livermore to Cisco and others in Mille Putas, I mean Milpitas.
CalTrain has been there since forever so no one was "stuck" with it.
But I certainly emphatically agree that the original loop plan should have happened at the outset.
Or public transit
Funny! What subway are you referring to? What other stations? Curious minds really want to know.
Then, sometime in the 1980s, they completed the missing bits of US 280 -- so you could drive all the way from San Francisco to San Jose and points South.
Dick, a couple of edits:
It's Interstate 280, not US 280.
I-280 was a complete through route from SF to US 101 near Story Road* in SJ since about 1975. Of course, since then there have been many serial improvement projects giving the impression that the job was never really finished.
*At this point the continuation interstate is designated I-680 and runs up the East Bay to I-80 near Cordelia Junction.
[OT to Dick: Do you remember the support structures that were built at 280/680/101 in the 60s before the actual road surface and connecting ramps were constructed? Remember how one morning commuters were greeted by an old car sitting a couple hundred feet on top of one of those towers?]
Ah, the memories ring false. It was in fact San Mateo County that not only had no funds, it wasn't even going to try to raise the funds. NIMBY at its finest. It took ten years for planners to settle all arguments about where to locate 280 through three miles in Woodside so it took no time at all for SMC to veto any plans for BART to extend beyond Daly City.
Besides, how would BART south to Santa Clara help alleviate traffic on 280?
Besides, why does big-city-wannabe San Jose push so hard to get BART extended from Fremont through East San Jose to Downtown San Jose when no one in Santa Clara County will use it but everyone will pay for it? Sales tax is close to 10% because of this multibillion dollar boondoggle to bring non-residents from Tracy and Livermore to Cisco and others in Mille Putas, I mean Milpitas.
CalTrain has been there since forever so no one was "stuck" with it.
But I certainly emphatically agree that the original loop plan should have happened at the outset.
Cool, that's what we've been lacking, more Bay Area regional planning talk!
I wasn't aware that BART ever included plans for a loop- I though it always was conceived as a commuter feed system from the outlaying regions into SF, with the big holdout being Marin.
I think BART was sort of doomed from the outset as any kind of traffic alleviator, since urban planners in the 60s always assumed that San Francisco was the hub. The growth of the Bay Area as a megapolis requiring a distributed, regional transit network (mesh instead of hub) didn't take off until BART was pretty much cast in stone. As it stands, there are too few tracks and too many choke points to be particularly resilient or to be able to significantly increase capacity.
The best to be done now is extend lines into the areas of outlying growth, as in the relatively recent Pittsburg/Bay Point or Dublin/Pleasanton lines, and of course south down the Peninsula. But in the new cash strapped Bay Area (or US, for that matter) giant infrastructure projects seem like a dim hope. I drive the Bay Bridge every day and look at the modest thing that's going to be the new Eastern span and shake my head at how far we've fallen since we made the Golden Gate.
Funny! What subway are you referring to? What other stations? Curious minds really want to know.
The London underground system naturally, via evacuated tunnels using magnetic levitating trains accelerating at 1g the journey could be accomplished in 30 minutes with a top speed of 9.3 km/s.
Surely Apple can manage that?
Anyway, Apple should clearly be moving their offices to near Mount Kilimanjaro for future orbital commuting via a Space Elevator.
Cool, that's what we've been lacking, more Bay Area regional planning talk!
I wasn't aware that BART ever included plans for a loop- I though it always was conceived as a commuter feed system from the outlaying regions into SF, with the big holdout being Marin.
I think BART was sort of doomed from the outset as any kind of traffic alleviator, since urban planners in the 60s always assumed that San Francisco was the hub. The growth of the Bay Area as a megapolis requiring a distributed, regional transit network (mesh instead of hub) didn't take off until BART was pretty much cast in stone. As it stands, there are too few tracks and too many choke points to be particularly resilient or to be able to significantly increase capacity.
The best to be done now is extend lines into the areas of outlying growth, as in the relatively recent Pittsburg/Bay Point or Dublin/Pleasanton lines, and of course south down the Peninsula. But in the new cash strapped Bay Area (or US, for that matter) giant infrastructure projects seem like a dim hope. I drive the Bay Bridge every day and look at the modest thing that's going to be the new Eastern span and shake my head at how far we've fallen since we made the Golden Gate.
I think another test of success is warranted. When BART was first proposed, while it was under construction, and even for some time after it started running, it was frequently criticized as completely unworkable. Today, I would dare anyone to consider getting around the Bay Area without BART in the mix, whether they are riding the system or driving a car. Many American cities would be grateful to have such a doomed system.