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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.
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.
Workers never get to leave the company's premises.
Not true, they leave for Chinese Newyear. I was listening to an interesting piece of NPR and apparently the entire country shuts down for 2-3 weeks and the backlog of orders carries on for 2 months after that so if you outsource you have to have it built into your timetables. Part of the backlog is apparently caused by 15-20% of the workers failing to return because they found work closer to home or they decided that farming wasn't that bad.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.