[rrdharan]

Disclaimer: I work at Google but the following comments are just based on personal observation and public information.

I think you're talking about the Mountain View campus and I agree it seems superficially to be an example of what you're talking about... I imagine with the benefit of hindsight and with modern (post 2000s :) sensibilities in mind both Google and Facebook would have tilted more heavily towards building up their SF presences back when that would have still been plausible/affordable.

However the parking restrictions are actually enforced by municipal regulation; I believe Google and many other companies (including my previous employer, VMware) would prefer to build campuses with much less parking but they are required to have a certain ratio of parking spaces to employees due to these antiquated regulations.

Meanwhile the other Google campuses are in fact located in large cities, though I believe transit access (Seattle?) is still an issue. One of the main reasons I choose to live in New York and work at the New York office is because I am a huge fan of the set up here where the office is centrally located and highly transit accessible.

[ForrestN]

I think it's more that the fact of having a giant, expensive separate campus is itself not a particularly progressive situation, regulations aside. Just a few common sense examples of the problems with this approach: massive, custom-built complexes are very hard to re-use if and when search advertising revenue declines; tax revenues go to random places that don't need them, instead of cities that could use rich companies headquartered there to better support public services; many employees still have to do business in big cities, so there is a massive amount of unnecessary travel to and from cities and international airports; etc. The issue is "campuses" as much as it has anything specific to do with parking regulations, which I assume all of these companies knew about when they made the decision to build the campuses.

[rrdharan]

Yep, I agree with you to an extent but I was also using "campuses" and "offices" interchangeably.

The Google New York offices follow exactly the model that you are suggesting.

[ForrestN]

Agreed! Here's hoping they cancel the Mountainview expansion and focus on replicating the New York approach.

[cromwellian]

Where would you locate an office for 20,000 people in Northern CA in a city? SF? You'd make housing in the city much worse, and you'd be hard pressed to find the land or permits for it.

[calichoochoo]

Salesforce somehow manages to house 7000 of their employees in San Francisco, and Wells Fargo somehow seats 8000 of theirs. Nobody is suggesting that Google should move all of their people to SF, but I am suggesting they should consolidate into larger offices in the centers of principal cities: San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland.

[kmicklas]

And most importantly, outside the Bay Area.

[cromwellian]

I don't think it's viable to encourage companies to do this unless public transport and other services like schools are improved significantly in these cities. San Francisco isn't NYC.

[calichoochoo]

The "Mountain View" campus now sprawls from Sunnyvale to Redwood Shores. It's a 20-mile bike ride from one to the other. The Redwood Shores office is so unabashedly exurban that you'd have to walk 3.5 miles to the nearest public library, 3.9 miles to the nearest coffee shop, and 4.5 miles to the nearest point of public transportation. These are Google's newest offices, reflecting their current thinking on "sustainability": everybody has to drive everywhere.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/10/23/google-se...

[bduerst]

There's a ton wrong with what you've just said:

- First, the Pac Shores offices that Google acquired is in Redwood City, not Redwood shores, which is further to the north. It's not a 'continuation' of their campus but an entirely new campus.

- Second, Pac Shores was built in the middle of an industrially zoned area on a port. The massive salt ponds separating Pac Shores from RWC have had different proposals to further urbanize the area but they've been repeatedly shot down. The area is developing, give it time.

- Lastly, there are bicycle, walking paths, and caltrain shuttles going into downtown RWC from Pac shores, so it's easily accessible to the public library or a coffee shop if you want to go (I recommend Bliss coffee).

[justicezyx]

What's the point?