Antone's Nightclub
Miles and Miles of Arguments Over Miles
RECEIVED Wed., Aug. 10, 2005
To the editor,
Advanced Micro Devices wants to move most of their workforce upstream of the Barton Springs Aquifer. They say the controversial move will save AMD employees commuting distance.
A cross-check of their data, which anyone can perform, in fact shows the opposite. The move to Lantana appears to add distance to the average employee commute. Part of this finding was reported in the Chronicle (“Discrepancies in AMD Lantana Traffic Data?,” News, July 29).
A letter-writer tried to refute this analysis by saying the comparison assumes “everyone flies to work” and therefore it's wrong (“Postmarks,” Aug. 5). Not so.
AMD reports the distances between work and home in two different ways: “as the crow flies,” and in driving distance.
The Chronicle article focused only on problems with “crow-flies” distance. There are 698 instances where AMD's reported “crow-flies” distance to work is further than any point that exists within the employee's ZIP code. This is clearly impossible.
There also seems to be a massive problem with drive distances. Google can measure the driving distance from a ZIP code center point to any address. This offers a way for anyone to find the average employee drive distances for each ZIP.
Double-checking AMD's numbers this way shows that moving from their existing East Austin address, where there is plenty of room to expand, to Lantana (using 7000 W. William Cannon as the address), adds more than 1,000 vehicle miles of travel per day. See www.moveamd.com.
AMD may have some explanation for these discrepancies, but so far none has been provided. Until AMD releases more details about where employees actually live it is impossible to say for sure. They can release street names and block numbers without violating employee privacy. Instead, AMD has stonewalled this information request for several months.
Advanced Micro Devices wants to move most of their workforce upstream of the Barton Springs Aquifer. They say the controversial move will save AMD employees commuting distance.
A cross-check of their data, which anyone can perform, in fact shows the opposite. The move to Lantana appears to add distance to the average employee commute. Part of this finding was reported in the Chronicle (“Discrepancies in AMD Lantana Traffic Data?,” News, July 29).
A letter-writer tried to refute this analysis by saying the comparison assumes “everyone flies to work” and therefore it's wrong (“Postmarks,” Aug. 5). Not so.
AMD reports the distances between work and home in two different ways: “as the crow flies,” and in driving distance.
The Chronicle article focused only on problems with “crow-flies” distance. There are 698 instances where AMD's reported “crow-flies” distance to work is further than any point that exists within the employee's ZIP code. This is clearly impossible.
There also seems to be a massive problem with drive distances. Google can measure the driving distance from a ZIP code center point to any address. This offers a way for anyone to find the average employee drive distances for each ZIP.
Double-checking AMD's numbers this way shows that moving from their existing East Austin address, where there is plenty of room to expand, to Lantana (using 7000 W. William Cannon as the address), adds more than 1,000 vehicle miles of travel per day. See www.moveamd.com.
AMD may have some explanation for these discrepancies, but so far none has been provided. Until AMD releases more details about where employees actually live it is impossible to say for sure. They can release street names and block numbers without violating employee privacy. Instead, AMD has stonewalled this information request for several months.
Sincerely,
Steve Beers
Move AMD Coalition
Steve Beers
Move AMD Coalition
[Rachel Proctor May responds: The AMD traffic study included two separate analyses: as-the-crow-flies distances and actual drive distances. My article failed to make clear that the portion of Beers' analysis I cited was questioning the former, not the latter, and for that I apologize. However, the main point remains: Until AMD releases more detailed data, independent confirmation of their claims is impossible.]