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'Google Buses' Are Bad For Cities, Says New York MTA Official
An anonymous reader writes "The Director of Sustainability for New York's MTA is calling out Google, Apple, and Yahoo for 'deliberately' building their campuses away from public amenities like restaurants, and public transportation. 'With very few honorable exceptions like Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, who recently moved his company headquarters from suburban Henderson to downtown Las Vegas, tech companies seem not to have gotten the memo that suburbs are old and bad news,' he writes. Instead of launching their own bus services to ferry people from the city to their campuses, as the tech companies have done, the Googles and Apples of the world should 'locate themselves in existing urban communities. Ideally, in blighted ones,' says Dutta." Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
Would be creating a virtual workplace with seamless interaction with coworkers. Why are we not working on this? We could live wherever we want, no commuting, no traffic pollution, no being forced to lived in high-priced areas where everything - housing, space, schools, parking - is at a premium. But the world seems content to move in the opposite direction: we have the internet, so let's move all the tech companies to one place.
I'm not sure you follow. Google run buses because driving is horrible, time consuming, unproductive, and because even in the suburbs land space for parking is expensive. They provide food because in the suburbs there are few other options.
It's only close to home, because marketers decided every American should have a single family home (detached home in the rest of the world), and planners followed along, emptying city centers of residential accommodation. But then property prices skyrocket around large employers and many employees are still forced to commute to work simply to find property they can afford.
But then property prices skyrocket around large employers and many employees are still forced to commute to work simply to find property they can afford.
Its the ratrace; most employees could choose to live really close to work but it would mean an expensive move (if you own, moving costs tens of thousands of dollars) and higher (but affordable) monthly costs. Most gladly exchange an extra 30-45min on the daily commute for an extra 1000 sq feet in their house or perhaps enough money to take an annual vacation; that's just the way Americans like it.
What's interesting is that this guy is the director for the New York MTA, the company that runs the public transit in NYC. Google has a location in NYC, and it's right in Manhattan, not in the suburbs. It's in the Chelsea district. It's a pretty nice area; their building is right across from the Chelsea Market (basically an old factory converted into a small shopping mall mostly filled with restaurants and other food stores). It's definitely not a dangerous area (like most of Manhattan these days), but it's not anyplace you can live either; the cost of living there is astronomical. There's a reason so many Manhattan workers are moving out to Brooklyn, Queens, and northern New Jersey, or even out to Connecticut or Long Island.
This idea of having workers living and working near the center of a city sounds all well and good from an efficiency perspective, but in reality it never seems to work out, at least in America. Either the downtown is a run-down dump like Detroit where it's extremely dangerous and there's a lot of crime and poverty, or it's "gentrified" like NYC and the cost of living is absolutely astronomical and unaffordable for anyone but the executives of these corporations (which is, of course, why companies like MTA exist, to move people between affordable areas where the live and the unaffordable areas where their jobs are). It'd be nice if it wasn't like this, but it is, though I'm not really sure why to be honest. I guess we just haven't figured out how to build buildings large enough so that it's possible for everyone to live near the workplaces, so there's a lack of supply for living spaces near the good locations, driving up prices.
Foxconn is already doing arcologies. Workers never have to leave the company's premises. I don't know whether they already include graveyards.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
I agree that the buses are a great solution as I support all forms of public transportation but I think you lost me with the inner city squalor. I live in a city. Not SF but another major metro and I live five minutes from the subway in a condo in a restored victorian home. I'm not particularly looking for bars and dance clubs but I did move here for the subway access. 30-min. commute to work, easy to go to a nice restaurant without driving after drinking, lots of jobs, being able to walk to my bank, food store, mechanic etc. Perhaps you consider that squalor but I enjoy it alright.