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.
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.
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.
