The Apple Park project is nearing completion as the city braces for thousands of employees to move into the ring-shaped campus in April.

At a presentation to the South Bay Transportation Officials Association on Feb. 14 at the Quinlan Community Center, Cupertino public works director Timm Borden and senior civil engineer David Stillman gave an update on the project and potential mitigation options.

“The ring, the doughnut, the spaceship–you’ve probably heard it called a lot,” Borden said with a laugh during the presentation. “There’s been a lot of buzz for quite a few years now as we were going through the process working with Apple. It was challenging, but it was really an honor to be able to work on the project.”

Stillman commented on the sheer size and scale of the new property, which is being built where a Hewlett Packard campus once stood.

“It’s about a 10-minute walk from the parking structure to the building,” he said. “The building is about a third of a mile in diameter and about a mile in circumference around the building.”

Besides the 2.8 million-square-foot “doughnut,” the campus includes 600,000 square feet of research facilities, a 100,000-square-foot fitness facility, a corporate auditorium with 1,000 seats–which, according to Borden, cost more than $14,000 apiece–two new parking structures that are more than a quarter-mile long and a visitor’s center along Tantau Avenue, which Borden said will include an Apple store.



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Outside the walls of the campus, Borden and Stillman said traffic issues have been identified in Cupertino and other cities.

“We evaluated 52 intersections and 11 freeway segments in the traffic impact analysis,” Stillman said. “The freeway segments were I-280 Winchester (Boulevard) to Foothill (Expressway) and State Route 85 from Winchester (Boulevard) to Fremont (Avenue), and the intersections, as you can imagine, encompassed many jurisdictions: Santa Clara, San Jose, County, Caltrans, Cupertino. Thirteen of the intersections and 10 freeway segments ended up showing impacts.”

Stillman said the city calculated a “fair share amount” of about $1.3 million that Apple would pay to the Valley Transportation Authority and Caltrans to help mitigate the freeway segment impacts.

So far, $750,000 has been allotted for addressing potential impacts to campus-adjacent neighborhoods in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale.

“We’re going to start doing some neighborhood traffic studies soon in order to have a baseline condition for those,” Stillman said. “We will do follow-up studies every year and if it shows that there are more cars driving through the neighborhoods or parking on the streets, or if speeding is a problem, then we’re kind of relying on the individual cities in terms of what they have within their toolbox for traffic calming and what their residents would like to see.”

Traffic improvements around Tantau Avenue are expected to be completed in May or June and will include bike lanes along a full segment from Homestead Road to Stevens Creek Boulevard.

“Once the campus is done, the bicycle accommodations will be much improved over what you see now with all the construction going on,” Stillman said.

Stillman said Apple is providing 1,000 bicycles on the campus for employees to use on the campus and for going to and from other Apple properties. Upon completion, the campus will boast 2,000 bicycle parking spaces.

Currently, the main Apple campus has a 28 percent transportation demand management rate, which means that 28 percent of employees at that campus use an alternate mode of transportation, other than a single-occupancy vehicle, to get to work, according to the presentation. The city is expecting Apple to keep that same percentage at the new campus, but is hoping to ultimately see it rise to 34 percent, with potential penalties in place if Apple does not comply.

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Borden added that from what they know, the opening of the new campus will not result in other Apple buildings being closed. Other satellite buildings across Cupertino, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, as well as the Infinite Loop headquarters off De Anza Boulevard, will remain open.

Borden also said that Apple is inverting the amount of landscaping that was on site when HP called it home. He said HP had 30 percent landscaping and 70 percent ground coverage by parking and buildings. Apple Park flips that percentage to have 70 percent landscaping and 30 percent ground coverage.