
New Apple headquarters “the greenest building on the planet”. It's not - markbnine
http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/tim-cook-calls-new-apple-headquarters-greenest-building-planet-its-not.html
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ianamartin
So the author argues that this is not the greenest building on the planet by .
. . saying absolutely nothing at all about the green-ness of the building
itself. Gotcha.

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melling
Big complaint is that anything in the suburbs requires cars to get to work.
Several thousand people commuting by car is not green.

Maybe someone can commence Apple to build a maglev up the peninsula to San
Francisco? :-)

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gambiting
I....what? The building is not green because people use energy to commute to
that building?

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peatmoss
Urban planner here. Yeah, basically. This is sort of a huge monolith that just
sort of stands out there separate from everything else. Building this sort of
campus kind of reflects a weird retro-modernist vision of land use that more
recent generations of planners have been actively trying to fix.

In Apple's defense, the Bay Area sounds like a hard place to build a big
campus. In Seattle, Amazon has largely done things less wrong than many other
big tech companies I can think of, but that's partly because there was a big
(arguably) underdeveloped chunk of land sitting at the northern edge of
downtown. South Lake Union definitely feels a little like a mini Amazon
corporate town, but it has also managed to remain a neighborhood with people
and places to house them, shops, restaurants, and even a community garden or
two. Not sure where Apple would find something remotely similar in the BA.

When planners look at Apple's campus with a critical eye, it's because they
know it will now be a big homogenous land use that will need to be _mitigated_
in terms of transportation and other amenities.

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peatmoss
I should also note that the article there casts a negative eye on the private
busses. This is one thing I can't understand. In WA, we have a state-wide
commute trip reduction law that requires employers with more than 100
employees at a worksite to have a plan for cutting single occupant vehicle
trips.

Microsoft, another big suburban campus, has been a role model with respect to
mitigating the transportation-related problems stemming from their big
suburban campus. They subsidize and otherwise support transit and bicycle
commuting to campus, in addition to maintaining their Connector bus service,
which is analogous to the Google / Apple busses that the Bay Area seems to
hate on so much.

Here's the thing. Here in Washington we _told_ companies that they needed to
reduce commute trips. Microsoft's Connector fleet actually does that. I get
that the private busses somehow are symbolic of the gentrification and
techification of the Bay Area, but I view the private mass transit of their
employees as a way in which the companies are helping to lessen impacts for
others. The Bay Area certainly does have a housing affordability problem, and
tech companies are certainly part of the root cause, but it baffles me that
one _positive_ thing they do becomes emblematic of the problem.

