Amazon in Rochester

In case anyone is interested, I have uploaded the memo that I sent to Greater Rochester Enterprise recommending how to differentiate their submission.

The two redactions are 1) my cell phone #, and 2) confidentiality language. Many people from outside Rochester were involved in creating the submission, and I did not want my memo used to help other municipalities. When I found out that GRE/IBN were dead set on making a joint submission, I made sure to let them know they could use the memo contents for whichever submission was going to support Rochester.

With the submissions long gone and, I suspect, insights similar to the ones I had to offer already having been disseminated, I think the need for confidentiality has subsided.

 

Rochester is a “boomerang” city (see item #14 on this fun list) – natives of the area often return as adults to raise their families here – and my own family falls into that category. I graduated from Pittsford-Mendon High School in 1988, and my wife and I moved back to the area in 2003, along with two soon-to-be-school-aged kids. Anecdotally, I know many people who headed into the wide world, only to return to Rochester, if possible, when it was time to raise a family. Seeing other parts of the world lends perspective on the high quality of life offered by the Rochester area, bolstered by Rochester’s stellar public school systems.

We moved to Brighton, a Rochester suburb, in 2003, and our kids went to Brighton Central Schools until 2011, when we moved to Seattle so I could work at Amazon. In Seattle, we lived in a suburb called Mercer Island, which has some of the best-rated schools in Washington State. Our kids have attended schools at all levels (primary to high school) in both districts, so we have a good understanding of the similarities, differences, and tradeoffs.

With the dawn of the Internet and aggregation of school-related statistics, families seeking the best education for their children are drawn to sites that “rank” public schools, like niche.com and schooldigger.com. By this metric, Rochester-area public schools fare noticeably better than Seattle-area schools. According to niche.com, the two “best” districts in Washington State are Bellevue (#1) and Mercer Island (#2); in New York, the top Rochester-area districts are Pittsford (#3) and Brighton (#9). But nationally, Pittsford and Brighton are ranked much higher: #32 and #71 to #213 and #323.

I won’t dwell on this point because the methodologies of these “district ranking” sites are, at best, imperfect. Instead, let’s look at private school enrollment. According to this 2014 article, an estimated 22% of Seattle students and shockingly, 16% of Bellevue students are enrolled in private school. Let that sink in for a moment. Bellevue simultaneously has the highest-ranked public schools in Washington (according to niche.com), yet the second-highest rate of private school enrollment. In Monroe County, where Rochester is located, the rate of private school enrollment is under 7%. The privileged suburbs of Brighton and Pittsford echo Bellevue’s support of private schools despite having excellent public schools, but their private school attendance rate is 10%, well below the national average  of 13%. Rochester-area families seem more inclined to entrust their children to public schools.

The implications are twofold. First, private schools impose an additional financial burden on families. Second, they impose an additional commuting burden on families and the surrounding community. This article from a Seattle-area author, which features a student who transferred from Mercer Island public schools to the prestigious Lakeside (Bill Gates’s alma mater), does a good job of capturing families’ angst as they navigate the public/private school landscape, especially the visibility of privilege that comes with sending your child to private school.

Our own experience with Seattle-area schools was mixed. Two of our children were born in Seattle in 1999 and 2001. We were sufficiently dismayed by the private school scene that we moved from Seattle proper to an Eastside suburb (an echo of what our own parents had done in the Rochester area when we were young), but then we moved away. When we moved back to Seattle in 2011, we chose Mercer Island, a suburb whose schools had a sterling reputation. Mercer Island schools are good by the standards of Washington State, but the funding disparities find expression in myriad ways, starting with higher fees to participate in music and sports and fewer services for students in need of extra support. Additionally, for the entire six years we lived on Mercer Island, every physical plant in the School District had portable classrooms (trailers) on site. Mercer Island, one of the wealthiest communities in Washington State, spends about $11,500 per pupil per year, to Brighton’s $20,700, and it shows. When the opportunity to move back to Brighton presented itself, a major reason we welcomed the change was the public school system.

It’s not hard to see why commute times figure into Amazon’s RFP for HQ2. Seattle commutes have been bad, and are getting worse. A recent study ranked Seattle the 10^th worst commute in the nation, with the 3^rd-fastest growing population of “mega-commuters” (90 minutes one-way).

A cursory study of the region reveals a basic reason it is difficult and expensive to address Seattle’s commute challenges: water. Seattle has Puget Sound to the west and Lake Washington to the east. Puget Sound is navigated by ferries, and Lake Washington is traversed by two (2) floating bridges because it is more than 200 feet deep. Alternative routes around those floating bridges are hard to find – too far out of the way. And it’s difficult and expensive to increase the bridges’ capacity. The new Evergreen Point floating bridge cost $4.5B and added capacity for bike/foot traffic, HOV lanes, and light rail, but no new lanes for single-occupancy vehicles. The other bridge had slightly larger capacity, but in 2017 its middle span, which had been used for reversible express lanes, was taken out of commission this year to add light rail capacity.

Suffice to say… the easiest way to deal with the floating bridges is to rarely traverse them.

You don’t always get to pick where to work, though. My old Amazon team was in Seattle, but has since moved to Bellevue. Personally, I am so averse to commuting to the Eastside that if I were still at Amazon, I would switch teams. Now about Rochester…

 

Rochester’s commutes are a breeze compared to Seattle, and the geography favors Rochester. Using geostat.org for source data, here’s a table contrasting Seattle and Rochester commutes – number of commuters versus length of commute time in minutes.

Time (min)	Seattle	Rochester
<5 min	6541	2771
5-9	22765	10148
10-14	40176	17421
15-19	52310	20710
20-24	56997	13700
25-29	24744	3587
30-34	54093	7081
35-39	10320	970
40-44	15572	976
45-49	22945	2066
60-89	12845	2143
90+	4091	805
Total:	323399	82378

 

Here it is in graph form.

As you can see, Rochester’s peak is both lower (fewer commuters) and peaks to the left (less commute time).

In Rochester, almost 80% of commuters travel for less than 25 minutes. In Seattle, that figure is 55%. In Seattle, 17% of commuters travel at least 40 minutes. In Rochester, that figure is 7%.

Here is another chart that compares percentages of the total – this chart makes it clearer that a higher percentage of Rochester commuters travel for less time.

After living and working in Seattle from 1994-2002 and then 2011-2016, I think this comparison may be too favorable to Seattle!

In fairness, the Seattle area is heavily investing in improving area transit. After decades of putting off light rail, construction began on an extensive light rail system in 2001, opening its first run in 2009 (from Sea-Tac airport to Westlake Center). A November 2016 ballot measure approved ST-3 (“Sound Transit 3”), providing for further expansion for the eye-popping sum of $54B through the year 2041.

 

Rochester’s transit story is admittedly not as strong as some other cities that are vying for Amazon HQ2. Many North American cities, from Washington D.C. to Boston to Chicago, have enviable rail systems that mitigate the need to drive in the city. Rochester built a small subway in the 1920s, but dismantled it in the 1950s, preferring to facilitate access to the downtown core with highways.

Rochester has been investing heavily in reconfiguring its downtown buildings to be residential or mixed-use. This trend dovetails well with Amazonians’ preference to walk to work, as 20% of the Seattle employees do. Amazonians who prefer to live in suburbs will have manageable commutes whether they are using I-390, I-490, I-590, or thoroughfares like East Avenue. With no traffic, it takes less than 10 minutes to drive from my house to the Pont de Rennes bridge  in Rochester – with traffic, it takes 15. Rochester has a lot of headroom for growth before its automobile commutes start to compete with Seattle’s.

In the intermediate to long term, Rochester’s preference for downtown highway access may not be as unfavorable as one might imagine. Jeff Bezos was an early investor in Uber, which has been hard at work developing autonomous vehicle technology, which can increase road capacity by up to 3.7x. (Yes, almost four times as many vehicles per hour.) If shared, autonomous vehicles are the future, Rochester may be able to accommodate HQ2 without spending dozens of billions on light rail infrastructure.

 

Seattle/Rochester: the climate edition.

— Amazon in Rochester (@AMZNinROC) October 18, 2017

1. Seattle basically has a wet season and a dry season. The dry season is about 10 weeks long, July-Aug w/possible bonus time in Sep.
2. Rochester has four honest seasons. Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter. If you don’t like the weather, wait six weeks or so – it will change.
3. Seattle has milder winters. If you miss snow, you can go visit it in the mountains.
4. If it does happen to snow, Seattle shuts down because it is too hilly for people to drive in the snow…
5. …and the snow’s usually gone by noon the next day. Snowmen are an art form that celebrates ephemerality.

6. Interestingly, both cities have skiing about 45 minutes away. Snoqualmie Pass in Seattle, Bristol Mountain in Rochester.
7. In Rochester, the snow falls on your driveway and your sidewalks and your deck and your yard.
8. You can build snowmen and snow forts and have snowball fights and build snow sculptures.
9. And sled. In Rochester, if there is hill nearby, you can sled there. Kids love sledding and it’s always banned at ski resorts.
10. And snow barely slows Rochester down at all. Monroe County keeps its roads clear.
11. When it snows at the airport, Seattle uses equipment from Rochester-based Pro-Tech Sno Pusher. http://www.snopusher.com

Rochester and Seattle have more in common than people realize: A Twitter Thread. #AMZNinROC

— Amazon in Rochester (@AMZNinROC) October 17, 2017

Rochester and Seattle have more in common than people realize: A Twitter Thread. #AMZNinROC
1. Please be patient because I’m a Twitter n00b and have never tweeted a thread before.
2. Both skylines feature vanity elements (Space Needle, Wings of Progress).
3. Both are dramatically influenced by water downtown (Lake Union/Puget Sound, Genesee River/High Falls).
4. Both are home to excellent universities. (Not going to name names lest I offend by omission.)
5. Both have access to recreational water as tame (Lake Sammamish, Irondequoit Bay) or as fierce (Puget Sound, Lake Ontario) as desired.
6. Both are very grey in the wintertime (Rochester and Seattle experience 304 and 308 cloudy days per year, respectively).
7. Both feature unique water engineering projects of epic proportions: the Erie Canal and the Ship Canal.
7a. The canals deserve extra airtime, so here is some exposition.
7b. When the Erie Canal was completed (1825), it was 363 miles long, connecting Lake Erie (Buffalo) to the Hudson River (Albany).
7c. When Lake Union was connected to Puget Sound by the Ship Canal (1917), Lake Washington water level dropped by 9 feet and a river dried up.
8. Both are a bit challenged from a public transit perspective. Too many roads, not enough rails.
9. Both cities have been “company towns” in the past. (Boeing, Kodak.)
So those are some similarities… back later to comment on a few differences!

 

I am writing this post for my fellow Rochesterians, to try to convey the scope of transformation that would envelope the city if Amazon were to site their headquarters here.

When I hired into Amazon in 2011, they were in the midst of constructing their 11-building campus in South Lake Union (SLU). The 2007 press release announcing this development is a remarkable read, because it reads like a recent history looking back from 2011. The proposal undoubtedly began life as a press release, since “working backwards” from fictionalized press releases is endemic to Amazon’s business processes.

When I started at Amazon, I was working at a building on Terry Avenue North and the SLU buildings on Boren Avenue were still under construction. Amazon hadn’t yet expanded into the Denny Triangle – that project was announced in 2012.

When you see construction every day, it’s easy to take for granted. Nevertheless, the scale of transformation was so dramatic that I stopped to snap a picture every once in a while. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I went spelunking in my own Facebook feed to find pictures that I took while I worked at Amazon (2011-2016).

I took many shots from the kitchen in Blackfoot, the building where I spent most of my Amazon career. The kitchens were stacked one on top of the other for 20+ stories (it is a 37-story building), mostly I think to keep the executive assistants and other key decision-makers from fighting over the office space with the best views. Here’s a view of the Space Needle taken from the Blackfoot kitchen, just before the Seahawks won their first Super Bowl:

The construction crane in the foreground is for a new residential building at 8th and Westlake.

I don’t have a picture from the Blackfoot kitchen, but a Facebook post from April 10, 2016 says: “This building is now done and fully occluded the view of the Space Needle.” I did take a few pictures of the progress, though. From September 2013:

From April 9, 2014 – looking down this time:

And courtesy of Google Streetview, here’s a view of the finished building from the intersection of 8th Avenue and Westlake:

(That’s Blackfoot peeking out on the right.)

I wish I had a picture of the ugly little building that was there before this residential tower was built.

I took a few pictures of the South Lake Union campus under construction, too. Here’s a picture of a big hole in the ground on Boren Avenue:

Here’s a shot of another development on Boren where they were taking care to preserve the original buildings’ walls:

This shot of SLU that I took in June 2014 shows five (5) construction cranes in the field of view:

From my office (on the opposite side of the kitchen) in Blackfoot, I had a front row seat of the demolition and early construction of another building on 8th Avenue. The novel manner in which they gutted the interior of the building caught my eye:

The above photo is a closeup of the two buildings featured below:

Finally, I Facebooked “The building is gone”:

And they dug an enormous hole where the building had been, and started using a novel concrete shooting rig from the neighboring plot:

Another picture of the concrete shooter:

While visiting other buildings on campus, I took a few pictures in passing of the incredible $2B+ development codenamed “Rufus 2.0.” The flagship building, called Doppler after the codename of the Amazon Echo, was put into service just before I left Amazon. Here is a picture of the big hole in the ground from June 2014:

And here’s a picture of its elevator core from November 2014:

Here’s a picture of the final product:

Fun fact: The three buildings that constitute the Rufus 2.0 development are each 20% taller than the tallest building in Rochester.

Finally, I want to share a few pictures of the famous Amazon garden spheres that are at the base of the Rufus 2.0 development. In April 2016, I noticed a Christmas tree on the top of one:

And while visiting a team in another building, I took this picture:

As I write this (November 2017), construction on the spheres is complete and the gardens are being installed, but they are not yet open. My friend Eugene Hsu, still at Amazon (and PMHS class of 1990!), shared this picture of one of the spheres, taken from the cafe floor of the Rufus 2.0 meeting center:

Copyright (C) 2017 by Eugene Hsu. Used with permission.

Amazon has added more than 3 million square feet of office space to Seattle since the South Lake Union project was announced. In soliciting Amazon’s second headquarters, Rochester leaders should emulate the Amazon’s  Leadership Principle embodied by these projects: Think Big.

Copyright(C) 2017 by Nicholas Wilt. All rights reserved.

 

The Web site is a bit waterfall-intensive. The pictures are from a walking tour that I took with my family, from the Lower Falls up to the High Falls and across the Pont de Rennes pedestrian footbridge over the Genesee. (Yes, we had lunch at the Brewery afterward.)

The tour reinforced my opinion that the gorge in the heart of Rochester would be a terrific place for Amazon to site their new development. The waterfalls are modest generators of clean electricity, but they are also picturesque. If Amazon sites their buildings near the gorge, the employees will enjoy spectacular views. Many of Amazon’s buildings in Seattle have beautiful views of Lake Union and the Space Needle, so it’s not a consideration to discount.

Here are the Lower Falls, about 2 miles downstream of the High Falls. The Lower Falls drive a hydroelectric facility that was refurbished about ten years ago:

This shot of the Driving Park Avenue Bridge and the hydroelectric facility was taken from the same vantage, looking northward (downstream).

Here is a distant shot of the Middle Falls, taken from the Lower Falls path a bit upstream:

Finally, we ventured up to the High Falls, which is walking distance to the Kodak Tower. There is a pedestrian footbridge over the Genesee River that gives a beautiful view of the High Falls:

A panoramic shot of the vista from the footbridge provides a tableau in which to reimagine Rochester’s skyline:

Considering Amazon’s Rufus 2.0 development features three buildings that are each 25% taller than the tallest building in Rochester, you can imagine how dramatically such a development would affect the skyline.

 

I was born in Rochester, graduated from Pittsford-Mendon High School in 1988, and moved away to study computer science. My first job was in Boston, but in 1994 I hired into Microsoft and lived and worked in Seattle from 1994-2002.

In 2002, I left Microsoft to work on GPU computing technologies at NVIDIA. But NVIDIA had a strong remoting policy, our family wasn’t enjoying the Bay Area as much as we’d hoped, and all our family was back in Rochester. So in 2003, we moved to Brighton and I worked remotely for NVIDIA until 2010, when I hired into Amazon.

From 2011-2017, I lived and worked at Amazon…in Seattle. But at the beginning of 2017, I took a new job and our family moved back to Brighton. (We had never sold our house.) I really enjoyed my time at Amazon, worked with great people, shipped some awesome products, and left on good terms; but the new opportunity, and the prospect of returning to the Rochester area, were too compelling to pass up.

If you’re keeping track, that means I have spent about 15 years living and working in Seattle, 6 of those years for Amazon; and almost a decade living and working in Rochester. My position at Amazon was fairly senior for an individual contributor (there are about 200 Principal Engineers out of 320,000 Amazon employees worldwide) and I had the opportunity to interact with and learn from senior Amazonians, learn Amazon’s unique business practices, internalize the Leadership Principles and see them in action.

So please take my word when I say that for Amazon HQ2, Rochester shouldn’t be considered a long shot. Rochester has what it takes:  Great universities, diverse and economical housing stock, outstanding public schools, cultural amenities that are outsized for its population, a concrete history of having hosted a 50,000+-employee corporate headquarters.

But there are subtler synergies in play. Amazon prides itself on unconventional thinking – in the words of founder Jeff Bezos, Amazon is “peculiar.” Seattle and Rochester each pride themselves in their peculiarities. While Seattle has the Space Needle, Rochester has the Wings of Progress. Even before Starbucks was founded, Seattle was known for its coffee; Rochester has the Garbage Plate. I firmly believe that in this contest, Rochester’s quirkiness is not a liability – it is a strength.

In closing this post, I will say that arguably the most important Leadership Principle is “Think Big.” From Amazon’s Web site: “Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.”

The western New York leaders who are finalizing the Amazon HQ2 proposal need to Think Big. Reimagine Rochester’s skyline. Account for technology shifts, like continued urbanization and trends toward electrified, shared automobile fleets. Swing for the fences! “Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”