Apple's New HQ: Steve Jobs Sure Isn't Thinking About Traffic
Silicon Valley has always wanted to save the world. Sadly, because it's located in the open exurban spaces outside the extremely compact San Francisco Bay Area, saving the world from traffic hasn't really been on its agenda. Now something terrible has happened. Steve Jobs has discovered architecture. And that architecture includes vast amounts of parking.
You can't blame Jobs, really. The new Apple (AAPL) HQ, the details of which Jobs unveiled earlier this month, will be built across the street from Apple's current Cupertino home. If the Norman Foster-designed structure -- basically a huge glass ring that looks as if it might be patterned after an ancient time-travel portal -- gets approved by the Cupertino City Council, it will also feature an immense, multilevel underground parking facility.
Not an innovative cultural change
What are you gonna do, tell thousands of Apple employees who've built their lives around cars that they suddenly can't drive to work anymore? It wouldn't have made good business sense. But then again, any transportation planner worth his or her salt will tell you that abundant parking is the worst thing you can add to a project if you want to encourage alternatives to the automobile.
Silicon Valley traffic is often gnarly, and given the region's role as a cornerstone of the New American Economy, you have to consider the degree to which too many commuters behind the wheel leads to quality-of-life and productivity declines. That's all irrelevant to Apple -- Jobs wants a symbol and at least intends to hide the cars, which after all are so diverse in their aesthetics that they no longer conform to the Apple mono-visuals.
What are the alternatives?
Iconic mega-structures seem rather 20th century, in an age of cloud computing and a creative class of distributed workers. But then again, Apple as a company is more in the vein of, say, Chrysler than an outfit like Chicago's 37 Signals. Apple obviously already has a campus on Infinite Loop -- but to Jobs' eye, a campus is so, so 1987. He wants a Pentagon -- or a Parthenon -- for the 21st century. He wants it to mean something not when you pull into the underground parking garage, but when you fly over it in your flying car.
The alternative would clearly be a cluster of urban buildings that takes vehicles out of the picture and enables walking, cycling, and maybe a certain amount of scootering. But do you expect Apple, or Facebook, or Google (GOOG), or anyone else in Silicon Valley to take the lead on this one? Nope, me neither.
So how do you offset all those cars?
I'd like to see Apple focus as much on encouraging transportation alternatives with its new HQ as it doubtless will on shoring up the structure's green credentials (already, extensive natural landscaping is a preoccupation of the plan). This means charging stations for EVs, biking-friendly features such as showers and lockers, and conceivably some kind of shuttle service from the BART system, assuming it gets extended into Silicon Valley as planned.
Apple will probably get its new mothership. But it should do something in the process to solve Silicon Valley's current and looming transportation problems.
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