
Google transformed Mountain View, is San Jose next? - objections
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Google-transformed-Mountain-View-is-San-Jose-13515691.php
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danans
Disclosure: Google employee, but opinions are my own.

Did Google really transform Mountain View in the way that it proposes for San
Jose, though? The Google campus in Mountain View still looks like a dressed up
suburban business park to me, far away from public mass transit, just as it
has always been. It relies on a private bus system to get many employees to
work, which most other major Google offices don't need due to the effective
mass transit (NYC, London, Zurich, etc.)

What is proposed for the San Jose campus seems far more urban, sited adjacent
to a _real_ mass transit station, like basically all the other major Google
offices in the world outside of Mountain View.

EDIT: BTW, I'm not disparaging the Mountain View campus and private bus
system. I've used both plenty, and they are a locally optimum solution _for_
_Google_ , given the lack of mass transit access, and the reality there is not
enough parking for Google's high office population density. But a lot of
what's there seems like duct tape and chewing gum workarounds on top of the
mid-century suburban, car-centric model for siting work, housing, and
transportation.

~~~
joe_the_user
Well, given that most mass transit in the US is effectively broken, Google may
still have to pay for it's private transit. San Jose light rail is pretty
worthless, like most light rail installed in the US - light rail is an easy
approach that is guaranteed to always be slower than street traffic.

~~~
romwell
>light rail is an easy approach that is guaranteed to always be slower than
street traffic.

That alone wouldn't have been half bad, but with the ultra-low _coverage_ /
density of this network, it becomes useless for 95% of the people living in
the city.

For example, in North San Jose, my 4.5-mile commute would take 12 minutes by
car, 25 minutes by bicycle, and a whopping _75 minutes_ by public
transportation. At that point, one might as well walk (90 minutes).

~~~
thatoneuser
Coming from a rural area, I’m really appalled at how inefficient public
transit is. It’s clearly only functional enough to be used by people a)
fortuitous enough to live right by public transit centers or b) people without
a choice.

The last time I used transit it turned a 20 minute drive into a 50+ minute bus
ride. I’m not about to trade away an hour+ of every day for the sake of being
green. I had coworkers suggest biking to another route that was quicker, but
that bike ride included an extra 30+ minutes of biking, had me hauling the
bike on and off the bus, risking having my bike stolen (we had an enclosed
cage, but people had bikes stolen occasionally) plus now I’m either a bit
sweaty or have to take a shower at work (and then be sweaty at the end of the
day).

I know this isn’t an easy solution, but from an outsider perspective I see why
people don’t use public transit that much. It disrupts life to the point where
it’s simply not an option for most.

~~~
danans
> Coming from a rural area, I’m really appalled at how inefficient public
> transit is.

A highly utilized public transit system is often far more efficient than cars
when measured in people-miles/hr during hours of peak transit demand, whereas
rural transit is a totally different and non comparable transportation problem
space.

The inefficient bus and rail systems are usually ones in areas where people
mostly commute using cars, places like Silicon Valley.

In these places, the bus and rail lines are sparse relative to the population,
so they take longer to get to any individual's destination.

> It’s clearly only functional enough to be used by people a) fortuitous
> enough to live right by public transit centers or b) people without a
> choice.

It's true that housing with easy transit center access is a privilege for
working and professional class people today, but that is a relatively recent
phenomenon since less than a generation ago, people of some means completely
eschewed transit.

~~~
CalRobert
True, but even better is the fact that in addition to better people-miles per
hour, a well designed system means people don't have to travel so far (by
putting homes near jobs and amenities instead of surrounding everything with
acres of asphalt - crazy idea!) so the <people-things they want to do> per
hour ratio improves.

If a thousand people in point A want to get to point B 2 miles away, obviously
a big train is faster than cars. The next step is to _make point B closer_.
This is what is so often forgotten - when I lived in LA I knew Angelenos who'd
visit London and say how great the tube was, but the same tube network in LA
would be garbage. What makes the tube really work is the fact that those
Angelenos almost never had to go more than a few miles to what they wanted,
instead of saying things like "well it's 30 miles so if it's more than 30
minutes something has gone wrong".

People say things like "it took me 15 minutes to go a mile!!" but the real
problem there is filling a mile of your city with garbage (parking and roads,
mostly).

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40acres
I went to San Jose in 2017 and was surprisingly very bored. Compared to San
Francisco, San Jose seemed like a sprawling, car dense, sleepy mid sized city
in Florida with a little bit of big city characteristics thrown in. It really
confused me. San Jose definitely has room for growth but I won't be surprised
if low-income individuals are not taken into account with how the city council
wants to zone areas and set up transportation. It'll be interesting to track
SJ's growth.

~~~
dekhn
I went to San Jose in 1995 (from Santa Cruz, with experience in SF) and was
really surprised. Nothing has changed, it's the same 4-cornered intersection
with 2 housing complexes behind walls, a Chevron, and a strip mall with decent
Korean and Indian food, tiled X times across the valley.

~~~
dekhn
Heck, I should add that I visited Mountain View (Shoreline) in '91, and the
SGI campus which is now Google looks almost exactly the same. Big changes:
more buildings, and the monstrosity which is the PageEgoPlex that is going up
now, but substantially the same. Many people who worked for Adobe, etc, say
they've worked in the same building for 2-3 companies with just minor interior
redecoration.

So, other than making things more congested, Google hasn't really transformed
MTV.

~~~
puzzle
You're forgetting the gBikes abandoned at the MTV Caltrain station or outside
random stores/parks (not always by Google employees or interns). That and the
new restaurants on Castro Street. The former is a net negative, the latter a
positive.

~~~
scruffyherder
> gBikes

bike sharing schemes are such a plague. And people were all shocked when GoBee
up and died. now we have their stupid bikes littered all over the place.

~~~
rossng
Bike sharing schemes aren't all bad. Copenhagen has Donkey Republic[1] which
works well and doesn't seem to cause any issues.

Of course it helps that they city is flat - San Francisco is clearly more
suited to electrically-assisted modes of transport.

[1] [https://www.donkey.bike/cities/bike-rental-
copenhagen/](https://www.donkey.bike/cities/bike-rental-copenhagen/)

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cjensen
That's a really excellent location. Diridion Station has good transit
connections all the way to SF (Caltrain) and Richmond (Capitol Corridor) [1]
in the north, Gilroy (Caltrain) in the south, and Stockton (ACE) in the east.
It's got _enormous_ coverage.

[1] Technically the train goes to Sacramento in the north, but the section
from Richmond to Benicia is very slow.

~~~
mc32
Also, SJ in general is so low density. It would be easy to double, even triple
population without "Manhattanizing" SJ. Now, of course, making sure NIMBYers
don't get in other people's business is a different story.

SJ has so much room to grow. With the airport, soil geology, aquifer
[subsidence], etc., you're not going to see much beyond 6-12 storeys, 20 max,
but just getting that in some key areas like North SJ would allow pop growth
really easily. North SJ (also south of 280 in some areas) was light
industrial, so you won't get so much NIMBYism) and there is no excuse of
"ruins the views" there are no views in SJ.

The surface area where you can build even low-rise, some mid-rise modern
condos in areas where 1960's and 70's poorly built apartment building are in
disrepair and with poor earthquake readiness makes for so much (re)building
opportunity.

~~~
wbl
San Jose doesn't want more housing. Prop 13 is strangling services so now they
want commercial.

~~~
wahern
That wouldn't change with a repeal of Prop 13. Prop 13 also applies to
commercial property. Prop 13 has nothing to do with the dynamic of wanting
more tax revenue without having to pay for the social services--police,
schooling, etc.

Whether residential or commercial, density is far more efficient--more revenue
per acre, fewer expenditures per capita. Not choosing higher density is
budgetary non-sense. Cities reject higher density because of NIMBYism, and
because the costs of sprawl are hidden and delayed, whereas the costs of
density are immediate and obvious. If the costs of sprawl were as transparent
as the costs of density, development would be much more dense.

~~~
wbl
Prop 13 means commercial activity which pays sales or income taxes is more
lucrative. I agree density is cheaper.

~~~
Apocryphon
There's currently a movement to repeal Prop 13 specifically for commercial
purposes

[https://www.evolve-ca.org](https://www.evolve-ca.org)

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saagarjha
> a tech corporate campus that’s not built with guarded walls and a moat with
> alligators with it, but actually a campus that’s integrated with a public
> urban village

A jab at Apple Park, obviously.

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megaman8
What's crazy is, even with the insanely high rents, they would still need to
go much higher in order to make high-rise construction profitable. I think we
really need to start looking at what exactly is driving all those costs in
these blue states. Other cities in the US are able to build high rise for much
less rent: Chicago, Columbus, Houston, etc.

It would be interesting to see, in a chart, all the costs that go into housing
construction and compare them all city to city. I suspect the answer has a lot
to do with Regulation and the local labor cost (now a self perpetuating
problem).

~~~
NorthOf33rd
Chicago is in a blue state with a rather notorious history of regulation and
local labor.

Also, the cities you list have different seismic realities to contend with.

~~~
Fins
Doesn't seem to prevent Japan from building skyscrapers. And excellent
transit.

~~~
NorthOf33rd
And real estate is very very expensive there too.

~~~
Cyph0n
Actually, it’s not. Here is a great video (from a great channel) that explains
why: [https://youtu.be/iGbC5j4pG9w](https://youtu.be/iGbC5j4pG9w)

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greatscottttt
I grew up in San Jose and still visit my family there at least once a year.
I'm happy that Google is trying to do something in the downtown area instead
of somewhere else in the city, but I'll be surprised if they (or any tech
company) can really make downtown a place where people want to be. I fear it
will continue only to cater to people coming into downtown during the day for
work and leaving in the evening.

This area of San Jose could be a great area for people (other than San Jose
State students) to actually live and spend time. There are actually public
transportation options, and with it's flat landscape, great weather, and
surprisingly good bike infrastructure, it should be a very livable and vibrant
city center.

With Google there it'll certainly be busier there, and there's obvious
benefits for businesses that can cater to those employees. However, it's not
clear to me whether there's a clear plan to also develop the city in a way
that caters to people outside of tech (e.g., low-income housing initiatives,
plans to help reduce traffic, etc.). Long story short, I'm hopeful this
doesn't hurt the city in any way, I'm just skeptical that it'll really help,
outside of economically.

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gamma-male
San Jose is a pretty sad and empty city (look at its downtown) so that would
be great. It can definitely become a tech pole in the next 10 years.

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ggm
"Fordlandia" here we come. I mean sure, we could pray for an Owenite
community, but they all fall apart too. Saltaire in scotland was a housing
paradise for workers but only because the factory owner wanted to reduce drunk
related work absenteeism.

~~~
rcpt
Not sure what you're going for here. Silicon Valley is basically the opposite
of Fordlandia.

~~~
ggm
They're the two extremes. You will notice that the impact google will have on
local rent, non-google related trade and industry, service-sector jobs without
transport burdens, the working poor.. not all the "effects" of google
investing in somewhere will be positive. So.. the alternative model, is to go
clean-build somewhere in the jungle, but that doesn't work either.

Basically, what I am trying to say is that the problem isn't google investing:
the problem is the ICT sector being so completely out of whack with non-ICT
sector norms. In order to make it work, they need to commit to employing
people who already live locally, investing in schools locally, investing in
infrastructure commitments which don't (and cannot) directly benefit google.
We have a mechanism to do that btw. Its called tax.

Tax is the answer.

~~~
kkarakk
google can totally afford to build a dream town, they have fingers in every
pie they would need to be in to build infrastructure for apart from
construction.

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1024core
Now can some tech companies fix Oakland? Why is Oakland always left out?

~~~
usaar333
There's no critical mass of tech workers in the East Bay (unlike SF, peninsula
and South Bay) which limits the appeal of setting up shop there.

~~~
1024core
I disagree. There are tons of techies in WC, Dublin, Pleasanton, Berkeley,
etc.

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ArthurBrussee
Hope so! Never understood* why big tech are so far outside SF / San Jose and
have such long commutes for their employees.

*$$$ I guess

~~~
ben_jones
I wonder how much of it is because the executives live on the Peninsula in
places like Woodside or Portola Valley and would have a short and pleasant
drive to a mountain view office.

~~~
capkutay
also the areas south and east of san jose are far more affordable. if you
actually want to buy a home in the bay area, your best shot is somewhere just
outside of Milipitas.

