Victoria Makras used to slog through a nearly two-hour commute from her Laurel Heights home to Box’s office in Los Altos. She’d wake up at 6:30 a.m. and board an Uber to the Caltrain station. The fast Baby Bullets weren’t an option, since they didn’t serve the closest station to Box. So she’d walk more than a mile, taking another 15 minutes before reaching her desk.

“It was long,” the 33-year-old senior event marketing manager said. But in late 2015, Box moved its headquarters to Redwood City. Instead of running employee shuttles from San Francisco, the company bought transit passes for employees, cutting transportation costs. And it reduced Makras’ rail commute to just 32 minutes.

“You step off the station and you’re in the office,” said Makras. “I have more time for work, to go to the gym, to see friends and family, or sleep in a little. It’s less stressful.”

SPUR, a San Francisco planning and research organization, is pushing for other companies to follow in Box’s tracks. In a study released Thursday, it cites Box as a rare example of tech companies that have located near public transportation.

Eighty percent of jobs in the Bay Area are concentrated in suburban fringes with little access to regional rail, and three-quarters of Bay Area workers drive alone to work as a result, the study’s authors note.

The report highlights a seeming irony: Despite pioneering innovations in their products and work spaces, they house their lava lamps and free cafes in suburban corporate campuses with seas of parking lots. It’s a form of office that took shape in the middle of the 20th century. Google, Apple and Facebook’s offices are all more than 3 miles from the nearest rail station.

This isn’t going to be good for the companies’ economic vitality in the long run, said Allison Arieff, SPUR’s editorial director. “Something’s gotta give.”

In March, Google said it employed roughly 20,000 people in Mountain View’s North Bayshore area. Google plans to move 6,000 employees to Sunnyvale from Mountain View, partly to address concerns about traffic.

Many tech workers live in San Francisco and commute to offices on the Peninsula or in the South Bay. In 2004, Google began running shuttle buses from the city to its headquarters, a move copied by other employers. But those same shuttles are now snarled in traffic, lengthening commutes. Companies have also offered incentives for employees to carpool, take public transit or ride bikes to work.

At Facebook, nearly half of its Menlo Park employees get there by means other than driving alone, the preferred mode of transportation for most Americans outside congested cities.

Back to Gallery Study calls on big tech companies to move closer to transit 4 1 of 4 Photo: Paul Chinn / Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2 of 4 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 3 of 4 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 4 of 4 Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle







As San Francisco has cut back the spots where tech shuttles can pick up employees, some workers have chosen to drive to work rather than walk to now-distant shuttle stops, a factor Facebook blamed for a rise in its Menlo Park traffic.

Then there’s Tesla, whose Fremont factory has become infamous for its parking problems. For a while, an Instagram account, @teslaparkinglot, documented the sad state of the asphalt where autoworkers stationed their steeds.

The account has disappeared, but the parking problems remain. The opening of the Warm Springs BART station, in view of the factory, has not helped matters: Because of car-centric planning, it’s a 2-mile walk to get there. Tesla is running a shuttle until an overpass is built.

In her book “Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes,” UC Berkeley Professor Louise Mozingo noted how railroads allowed companies to escape polluted, congested city centers in the 19th century. As more employees moved to the suburbs, companies followed them to tap their talent and take advantage of cheaper land. Highways accelerated the trend, allowing offices to move farther away from city centers and rail lines.

In the 1950s and 1960s, low-rise office parks displaced orchards in the Santa Clara Valley, turning it into the Silicon Valley we now know — with spacious clusters of buildings that sprawl far from the Southern Pacific rail line that became Caltrain.

One solution is to build housing closer to offices, so workers can walk, bike or drive short distances. But Silicon Valley cities like Menlo Park, Mountain View and Cupertino — homes to Facebook, Google and Apple — have not been building enough homes to match demand.

Arieff points out that already, there are areas like San Mateo that have offices near public transportation. Fremont is also planning more office space near the Warm Springs BART station.

Evan Wittenberg, Box’s senior vice president of people, said the company was seeing employees drive alone to Los Altos, where they required parking spaces, or riding shuttles. That hit the company’s bottom line.

“It’s hard to find affordable real estate going north, but being on the Caltrain stop was a huge plus,” Wittenberg said. “It saves us money.”

Silicon Valley Leadership Group president Carl Guardino said he agrees with the SPUR study’s conclusion. But, he said, there’s too much demand for office spaces near rail and not enough to accommodate rapidly growing companies. His solution is to extend the lines.

He said the region needs to nail down funding to electrify Caltrain, which plans to upgrade its service with more and faster trains. The effort recently suffered a reversal when the Department of Transportation delayed approval for federal funding. Meanwhile, riders say trains are overcrowded.

BART is planning to add three stations on its extension to San Jose and Santa Clara by 2026.

“All this work needed to be done yesterday,” Guardino said.

“In no way do we think this is going to be easy, but if we keep talking about it, we can outline what the options are that accommodate growth that makes sense,” Arieff said. “Or we could do nothing and watch things get worse.”

San Francisco Chronicle

staff writer Wendy Lee contributed to this report.

Nicholas Cheng is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ncheng@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @nichocheng