6 ms·

Diary: Google Invades

84 points by hoverkraft 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
hoverkraft 14y ago
Interesting point about public transportation -- by creating a private bus system, tech companies are actively suppressing demand for better public transport between SF and the valley.
- jstalin 14y ago
  If public transport were a better option, the google bus wouldn't be needed.
- 3pt14159 14y ago
  So why do we need the public to run mass transit in the first place?
  - lmm 14y ago
    Because it's a natural monopoly.
    - hexis 14y ago
      How can a natural monopoly have competition?
    - scarmig 14y ago
      How are buses a natural monopoly? I could see trains with right of way issues, but buses on publicly accessible roads?
  - Anechoic 14y ago
    You are perfectly welcome to start your own mass transit system (rail, bus, boat, helicopter, etc). Chances are that you'll quickly find that between he high capital investment, highly variable fuel prices, environmental requirements, and demand challenges that it will be really hard to turn a profit. Hence, not very many private entities want anything to do with the market.
    - 3pt14159 14y ago
      Well most cities have subsidised public transit, so it is pretty hard to compete, even if it were legal (in cities like my own it is 100% illegal). Variable fuel prices doesn't really change any of the other private mass transit systems, like air, ship, and train (or even taxi?). Environmental requirements are essentially irrelevant, especially compared the the fuel that will be saved. High capital investment? I could start with a single van and one frequently travelled road. Or provide the service exclusively to one employer (ala Google style). Demand challenges meet multi linear optimization. Our fire stations, electrical grids, gasoline stations, highways, office buildings, and eateries all have demand challenges. Why would the profit be especially lower? If it were too low, entities would leave the market, if it were too high entities would enter the market.
- DannyBee 14y ago
  You do realize, of course, that all of these companies have offered to help pay for new bus routes, or are working on helping to build rail bridges, or helping to propose private/public partnerships on better light rail, or ...
  - hoverkraft 14y ago
    Several people have alluded to this outreach elsewhere in the thread. I'd certainly believe it. Any links/references on what these companies have offered?
    - DannyBee 14y ago
      As I said elsewhere, most of this is known to employees of these companies, and privately mentioned, but not highly public. This is done because otherwise, the towns get yelled at. Heavily. There are lots of interest groups involved in this kind of thing.
      - brown9-2 14y ago
        It's hard to make an argument with private/secret evidence.
        DannyBee 14y ago
        It's not secret, just not very well known. As I said, you can usually find it in mountain view committee meeting minutes (for Google), cupertino council minutes (for Apple), etc.
- danielweber 14y ago
  "Sorry, we can't make things better for you, because we can't make them better for everyone."
- tomkarlo 14y ago
  You're assuming that a large share of those riders would take public transport, but most of them would probably drive, since that's what the large majority of people in SF who don't have access to a corporate bus do. The bus provides an appealing (relative to the Caltrain) option that's appealing to people who could also easily afford to drive. (They're more convenient than the train or driving, to boot, whereas taking the train is much less convenient.) In doing so, they take tens of thousands of cars off the road each morning.
MechaJDI 14y ago
I'm not really buying it...
suyash 14y ago
Not much about bus but other problems in city like rent and housing that we already know about.
WestCoastJustin 14y ago
I was wondering what these "gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us." actually looked like: [0] http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ip2ku-copy.jpg http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ip2ku-c... [1] http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/IMG_0039-copy.jpg http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/IMG_003... [2] http://missionlocal.org/wp-content/themes/calpress/library/extensions/timthumb.php?src=http://missionlocal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/IMG_2133.jpg&w=620 http://missionlocal.org/wp-content/themes/calpress/library/e...
- patmcguire 14y ago
  The bus in the first one almost looks stuck by how sharp the grade change is. Is this common in SF?
  - rdouble 14y ago
    Yes.
  - Falling3 14y ago
    Look at the front of the bus; you can see some towing cables attached to it.
    - rdouble 14y ago
      That's just the MUNI track.
      - coryrc 14y ago
        Look again (the GP is correct).
      - ahlatimer 14y ago
        No, it's actually stuck. http://sfcitizen.com/blog/2012/06/10/noe-valleys-23rd-street-proves-too-much-for-this-google-bus-its-rear-end-gets-stuck-at-the-chattanooga-intersection/ http://sfcitizen.com/blog/2012/06/10/noe-valleys-23rd-street...
decklin 14y ago
> but the passengers were tech people, so withdrawn from direct, abrupt, interventionary communications... Not sure this writer has actually had to deal with many "tech people".
- DannyBee 14y ago
  Don't be silly, i'm sure the author even has one of those shirts that says they are a nerd!
- Jare 14y ago
  My anecdotal experience suggests that the author's point is rather accurate. This was Spain, not SF, but I witnessed a bus filled with 50+ tech people (videogames & CGI) remain completely silent while the driver did the route speeding like mad, eventually hit a car, then refused to stop and assist. I was the only one to ask the driver to stop, the only one to offer assistance to the car dude when he followed the bus to our destination, and the only one to report the bus driver to the company. Everyone else just looked, commented among themselves, and walked away as soon as possible.
baddox 14y ago
Someone doesn't like young people who work in tech.
- jlev 14y ago
  I'm a young person who works in tech in Oakland, and I don't like the young people who work in tech in SF and ride the comfortable google bus every day to their jobs in the valley. Ride public transit. Get out of your tech bubble and experience a sliver of the lives of other people who live in your adopted city. Not everyone owns an iPhone 5 and is downloading the latest app. Work on something that will actually "change the world", not just disrupt a market and make you rich.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Google is making buses work. Good for them.
  - farinasa 14y ago
    Yeah, stop getting paid well for working hard!
  - baddox 14y ago
    That's just a complicated way of saying that you think some people's social choices are inherently worse than some idealized social path that you are advocating. Not everyone is the same as you, or even wants to be the same as you. Not everyone gets social satisfaction from "getting out" and "experiencing the lives of other people" in the way you're talking about, and that doesn't mean there is something wrong with them. Some people derive satisfaction from finding cool phone apps, some don't. Not everyone wants to "change the world," or disrupt a market, or get rich. Et cetera.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  People who live in quirky neighborhoods don't like it when they get gentrified. A few decades ago San Francisco was a quirky small port city with a higher-than-average number of artists, free-thinkers, bohemians, aging hippies, gays, etc. Today it is becoming a large city of hardworking nerds, and the douchebags who feed off them.
nefasti 14y ago
TLDR
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
ak217 14y ago
This kind of journalism really bugs me. There are too many ways in which the author strains logic and reason. I think the companies of Silicon Valley are very interested in improving public transportation, but held back by an ineffective transit governance system. I think the comparison to the gold rush is ridiculous, as is the statement that "technology is just another boom" (what?). I think being a technology hub has done more to improve the lives of everyone in the Bay Area than any other human-controlled factor, but authors like this one are too concerned with irrelevant impressions and skin-deep, false comparisons to consider that.
- moultano 14y ago
  If the Caltrain connected to any other public transit system in a reasonable way, I don't think the Google busses would exist. Riding trains is much more pleasant than riding busses, but not if it adds an extra hour to your commute each way. Furthermore, if you want cheaper housing, build more of it. I don't think there's an easier way around it.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    It's a tiny piece of the puzzle. To have a really usable public transit network ala Chicago or New York, you have to coordinate zoning with transit. 1) The terminal transit station should be built so as to exit right into the central business district. The Caltrain station is too far from SOMA and lacks decent public transit. Meanwhile, Chicago's three transit stations exit right at the perimeter of the Loop (within walking distance of nearly any office building, and with a transit ring around the perimeter of the CBD). New York's two transit stations exit right into Midtown. 2) You have to allow high-density construction near the transit stations, so people can live within walking distance of commuter transit. Look at the Menlo Park Caltrain station. There's nothing around it. There are far smaller Westchester towns that have a substantial downtown core around their Metro North stations. With housing prices being what they are in Silicon Valley, there should be 30+ story buildings ringing the Caltrain stations in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc.
    - 14y ago
stephencanon 14y ago
Want cheaper housing? Make it possible to build more. The fact that quaint New England towns have taller apartment buildings than most of the city of SF pretty much tells the entire story. The busses are basically the opposite of government intervention in a free market; instead of the government stepping in to correct for a market failure, private companies are stepping in to correct a public sector failure (to provide usable transit for their employees).
- tomkarlo 14y ago
  This is a classic urban problem: the people who are already in SF and own places don't want more housing built, because the shortage drives up the value of their own homes (and anything that blocked their view would reduce it.) The best solution (which SF is kind of pursuing) is to add more high-density housing in post-industrial areas being converted to residential, where developers have big incentives to construct larger buildings. SF always does a ton of hand-wringing about how white collar workers are driving moderate-income renters out of the city, but it also doesn't make it easy to construct the new housing stock that those white-collar residents would prefer anyway.
rdouble 14y ago
The whole of the US sometimes seems to be a checkerboard of these low-pressure zones with lots of time and space but no money, and the boomtowns with lots of money, a frenzied pace and chronic housing scarcity. Neither version is very liveable. After taking a few extended cross country road trips over the past couple of years, this sentence from the article rang the most true.
- csharpminor 14y ago
  I was about to just make the same comment. I think the "tech boom" has done a lot for SF, but it's a great example of how wealth and investment is highly concentrated in just a few areas of the country. Ideally, startups would look at those costs, do the analysis, and make the decision to locate elsewhere in order to minimize risk. But SF (and NYC) have a kind of legendary status as being where successful tech companies begin. I think that status makes it difficult to consider the value of location based on a cost-benefit analysis. Paradoxically, the sector that has the knowledge and employee base to be geographically independent are also the ones that pay the most for their location. At a gut-check level I feel there is quite a bit of "Irrational Exuberance" going on in the VC/Tech sector right now.
  - thedufer 14y ago
    > the sector that has the knowledge and employee base to be geographically independent are also the ones that pay the most for their location I agree that more tech companies should be okay with remote workers. But its not the trivial thing you make it out to be - it takes work, especially in larger teams. And unless you're going to put that work in and make it a part of your team's identity, you have to be where the talent is. I don't think this concentration of tech companies is nearly as surprising as you make it out to be.
    - csharpminor 14y ago
      Right, it's a self-reinforcing trend. Companies move to locations where talent exists, talented individuals seek those locations out. But my point was that this makes it really difficult for startups (or any tech company) to make a calculated decision about whether or not location is worth the extra expense. I don't think it's surprising that tech companies are located together, but I think the community would do well to investigate whether the costs provide adequate returns in a majority of cases. (TWGS;IHRTS)[Take with a grain of salt; I haven't researched this shit]
raldi 14y ago
The article mentions ways the gold rush was bad. The article mentions ways the tech boom is like the gold rush. But the first set of ways does not intersect the second set. I also found it ironic that the old "Yankee Go Home" sentiment was being expressed by an expat.
- scarmig 14y ago
  How exactly is Solnit an expat? She grew up in Novato and lives in SF and has since well before the '89 earthquake, at least. I suppose she is if you interpret expat as "moved into SF from outside the city limits of SF," but that's an odd usage.
  - raldi 14y ago
    I stand corrected; I guess it's just the traditional old-fashioned form of xenophobia then. In that case, the irony is that she waxes nostalgic about SF's history as a place that welcomed everyone in the same breath as she's making fun of and rejecting the latest newcomers for being different.
Taylorious 14y ago
What a truly terrible article, how on earth did it get published? This is the type of small minded, stereotyping, garbage that should never make it past some hack's crappy blog. I looked up the author on Wikipedia and I find it rather ironic that there are quotes of her priding herself on her critical thinking abilities. Reading the article, I saw very little evidence of critical thinking or thinking of any kind for that matter. As a side note, I see that she has a Masters of Journalism. Why on earth would you need a masters degree in Journalism? Find a story, research it/fact check, write about it. Do you really need to go to a university for 6~ years for that?
- jlev 14y ago
  The London Review of Books is not "some hack's crappy blog". Check your critical thinking skills again; you might actually need a Master of Journalism to get published there.
  - Taylorious 14y ago
    I did not say that The London Review of Books was a crappy blog. I said that the article belonged on a crappy blog. Implying that it was like a poor quality rant from a personal blog and not worthy of being published in The London Review of Books.
    - rdouble 14y ago
      It's not really that bad, as far as these types of articles go. The opinion column staff at the NYT churns out a worse article nearly every day.
- icebraining 14y ago
  As a side note, I see that she has a Masters of Journalism. Why on earth would you need a masters degree in Journalism? Find a story, research it/fact check, write about it. Do you really need to go to a university for 6~ years for that? https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
jstalin 14y ago
Public transit, even in the densest of American cities, is a money loser and often pollutes more than if the riders were taking cars. It's badly in need of innovation and revolution. Fixed-route transit is a mess. That's why I can't wait until we have self-driving cars. Most public transit would die on the vine as cars, which typically are utilized perhaps 10% of the day, can increase toward 100% utilization. No more need for inefficient and inconvenient fixed routes and no more need for giant empty buses riding around during non-peak hours.
- lukeschlather 14y ago
  Self-driving cars don't necessarily help. Really, it's more a routing problem. Buses with human drivers would probably be fine if you could come up with a working system to route them on demand. Self-driving might save money in the long run, but cars are probably not as efficient as buses in a big city.
johnny99 14y ago
Forced myself to read to the end so that I would be justified in saying what I had the impulse to howl from the third sentence: Rebecca Solnit, FUCK YOU. It's actually quite well-written, but christ, what a pretentious, clueless, holier-than-thou, pseudo-pious pile of crap. Blamey dirges like this are why people hate liberals. It makes me hate them, and I am one. It's hard to know where to start, so I'll just dig in: Why do you demean and dehumanize tech workers, while glorifying Latinos, homeless people, coal miners, and anyone who's lived in San Francisco since... 2006? 1996? 1976? How long do you have to live in SF to be fully human and deserving of empathy? What do you have against German tourists and "Asian male nerds?" You are a bigot. Why should people "drive themselves?" That's not noble-prole, it's stupid and wasteful. Fewer people should drive, period. Private or public, mass transit is mass transit. It's a Good Thing. Why is capitalism "Janus-headed?" I think you don't understand capitalism. It has one face, with dollar-sign eyes. Which is ok. It's capitalism, not poetry. It's about capital. Are rents being driven up, does growth create problems? Yes of course. Let's deal with those problems. Whining about them is just annoying, and paints you as a bitter person. There's a solution, though. I say this as an erstwhile journalist, now software developer: Rebecca, you should learn Python. Then maybe you can get on the bus too.
- taligent 14y ago
  Wow. Nice working reinforcing the stereotype there of IT workers being callous, selfish assholes indifferent to everyone else.
  - johnny99 14y ago
    I may be an asshole, but I'm not callous or indifferent. Like I said, I think rising rents and other boom dislocations hurt people and are problems to be addressed. But attacking the Asian kid who worked hard, got a job at Google, and takes the bus to work doesn't really do that.
- jimray 14y ago
  I get what you're saying. I think your response captures one part -- the id, if you will -- of a pretty common refrain I've heard about this article amongst my other nerdy, SF dwelling friends. And in that respect, you're right and certainly entitled to that opinion and entitled to express it however you'd like. While her piece has a lot of problems, not the least of them being a tortured metaphor about gold miners, there is still certainly a kernel of truth to what she's saying. The city is growing at a boom-town pace and infrastructure is not keeping up with that growth, which affects everyone, longtime residents who make less money than young tech workers with higher salaries especially. Where I'll emphatically disagree with you is your "solution" -- it isn't to turn every resident of San Francisco into an engineer. Much of the attraction of cities is the diversity of people who live in them, which mean ideally they are places that can support poets and programmers. San Francisco, even with its recent influx of tech workers, is not nearly the industry town that the valley proper of San Jose, Mountain View, Cupertino, and Palo Alto are. This is a good thing. This is why people choose to live here and commute there. This is why we have those buses. This was a frustrating article to read because dealing with the massive, largely tech-fueld growth really is an issue worth exploring. But for all the problems this city has, Google buses ain't even close to the top of the list. Here are some that I think about on my walks home through the city: * Why are there parking lots adjacent to public housing? Furthermore, why are blocks of public housing (walk up Turk from Market to Divis some time, just not at night) amongst the least dense in the city? * How do we allow things like AirBnB to exist but not create loopholes in the housing code, which has the effect of further constricting the already tight supply of housing? * What can the city do to encourage development in the Tenderloin to replace the far-too-many SRO's? * The high-rises going up in SOMA are great and will hopefully provide housing for the influx of young, mostly single, tech workers. What's the city going to do about encouraging more single-family residences, say, between Van Ness/Masonic and Geary/Market? * How does Western Addition avoid becoming the next Hayes Valley?
unholyguy 14y ago
tl;dr "Damn you kids, gettoff my lawn"
DannyBee 14y ago
I stopped reading at " It means that unlike gigantic employers in other times and places, the corporations of Silicon Valley aren’t much interested in improving public transport, and in fact the many corporations providing private transport are undermining the financial basis for the commuter train." This is such complete bullshit i don't even know where to start. Every single company in the area has either offered to help, is helping, or had their help refused when it comes to public transport. It's not even a Google vs Apple vs whoever, they are all trying to help here in any way they can. Of course, since the author cites absolutely no statements or support for any of their claims, i'm just going to file this in the "not even wrong" category
- jstalin 14y ago
  Many people think that limiting "competition" and forcing people to use their preferred method of public transit is a legitimate public policy goal. The intent is not to provide efficient transit that works well for those who need it, the goal is to ensure that Very Large Capital Projects get the federal funding they need to fill the gigantic money-losing gap they create.
- scarmig 14y ago
  People are getting mighty touchy from this piece. How is it bullshit? For one, cites on any of Google, Apple, Ebay, Facebook, etc. either offering to help or helping and getting rebuffed? A quick Google doesn't bring anything up, though I suspect I'm missing out on a key word. But even granting that, the saying "the proof's in the pudding" is pretty relevant here. If it were a priority for them in the same way it was for corporations in the past, it would be done. But because of our current economic structure, corporations no longer feel strong incentives to build out public transit.
  - DannyBee 14y ago
    Look at public meeting minutes for various towns and you'll see it. Past that, most of the companies do it smart, and let the towns take the credit, and keep the rest quiet. It is a priority for them, but unlike in the past, if you tell san francisco you want to spend 50 million providing public bus service, their answer isn't "sign us the hell up", it's "sorry, no".
dmm 14y ago
If housing is so expensive why the hell aren't they building more? Lumber(or brick) doesn't cost more in California. It's not a lack of capital. Interest rates are extremely low thanks to the fed. It can't be a lack of labor. I personally know several carpenters and electricians who would happy to work in California for 6 months building apartments. I don't think my experience is that unusual. What is going on?
- jcdavis 14y ago
  Incredible building regulations. Trying to build anything in SF is a giant clusterfuck. Propose anything over 4 stories outside of Fidi/SOMA? People will complain that its "blocking light" or "out of character", or that it blocks their legally unprotected views. Propose too much parking? Pro transit people get mad. Propose too little parking? People with cars will get mad about the increased competition for street spots. It goes on and on...
gee_totes 14y ago
For further reading on the geography and political economy of California, I strongly suggest Mike Davis' City of Quartz, which is a series of essays about LA: http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Angeles-Edition/dp/1844675688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360355406&sr=8-1&keywords=city+of+quartz http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Angeles-Edition... Warning for HN readers: the book is written in the same critical and class conscious vein as this article, so you may not like it.
te_chris 14y ago
Man, people in the tech bubble really don't like being reminded that everything their industry does and the effect it has had on an established community isn't all perfect. This doesn't surprise me in my (anecdotal) experience in the industry I've run into a lot of "those are problems caused by other industries, not us", but the author raises some good points about the effects of booms (and particularly this one) on the people who were established prior but not part of it. Some can't be avoided but some can be mitigated - and some people have been less defensive here and offered some solutions to things like public transport and housing.
frdgr 14y ago
This article raises interesting observations. I find it fascinating to see how technology might be perceived as a distant animal. The tech industry, like most schools of thought, regularly faces the danger of becoming an Ivory tower, disconnected from the real-world. After all, technology bubbles hurt us all in the past. Similarly, technology is hard to understand, it is magical in a way, an alien tool. If you work in tech, don't be offended. Solnit is not claiming an absolute truth. She's raising awareness of potential collateral damage by tech companies.
farinasa 14y ago
This is absolutely ridiculous. I don't live in SF, nor California for that matter, but this comes across as "I was living in SF before it was cool. Money is evil and so is anyone with it. Especially if they are young." Every paragraph includes an insult, but one of my favorites was comparing tech companies to coal mining companies. Wow. Couldn't be further from the mark. The tech industry frees people to work remotely and is even willing to ship them in expenses paid in luxury. The coal mining companies enslaved people, paying pennies in fatally poor conditions. Runner up was: "...but still has a host of writers, artists, activists, environmentalists, eccentrics and others who don’t work sixty-hour weeks for corporations" This insinuates that tech is less honorable than these jobs. Again, missing the mark, assuming that tech can't somehow help these people. Or perhaps people in the industry aren't creative or some other dismissive nonsense. This is borderline bigotry.
abhayb 14y ago
I think the piece illustrates a very good point that the general public would enjoy reading about. Which is that booms can push out diversity and that a tragedy of the commons is occurring in SF with people driving out the character they came to SF to experience. The problem is that: a) It's taking about us. People who are not software developers would brush past the descriptions of developers as mere scene setting. But it's rather insulting to those being described. b) If it is true, it makes us the villains. And we don't like being the villains. We believe our motives and actions are reasonably noble (or at least not harmful). It hurts to be told that their not. c) It's colored with a lot of emotion from the author. I get the sense that this is precipitated by an underlying feeling of: "Does my time in SF mean NOTHING!?" Which is a reasonable emotion, but comes across to the subjects (us) as a sense of superiority. I believe that it conveys it's point much better to a "lay" audience than it does to us because we (rightly) get lost in the details. I'm very luck that I like what I like and that what I like is the "hot" industry right now. I do want to remember that everything isn't roses and sunshine. That this boom does have losers. But I'm still moving to SF because that's where the place I want to work is and because I like the city. And screw you Rebecca Solnit for making me feel like I don't belong. You were new to SF once and you don't have that right. But I might just take the train instead of a shuttle.
zenogais 14y ago
A pretty resentful and bitter piece by someone who seems to feel personally wronged by an industry he is clearly not a part of, but feels above on a moral and personal level.
newman314 14y ago
I've been looking at homes recently and it just depresses the hell out of me. I'm not in my twenties anymore, don't work for the googles etc. although I have a relatively good tech job. A semi decent house on the peninsula is coming in around 1 mil. And that's often for much less than 2000sq feet. And this is for a house that has doubled in value since 1999. Afaik, salary increases are nowhere near that and certainly not mine.
- newman314 14y ago
  Looking around San Carlos, there are entire stretches of houses going for $1.5 to 2mil. This are for houses that in my mind, are the idealization of the American Dream. 3-4 bedroom, nice yard, 2 car garage. Not the McMansions of lore. Taking that same amount of money and going to say Texas, would likely yield a ridiculously large house. But more importantly, I keep wondering, are there really that many people around me that make so much money to be able to afford this without blinking an eye or is it more just keeping up with the Joneses....

84 points by hoverkraft 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Interesting point about public transportation -- by creating a private bus system, tech companies are actively suppressing demand for better public transport between SF and the valley.

jstalin 14y ago
If public transport were a better option, the google bus wouldn't be needed.
3pt14159 14y ago
So why do we need the public to run mass transit in the first place?
- lmm 14y ago
  Because it's a natural monopoly.
  - hexis 14y ago
    How can a natural monopoly have competition?
  - scarmig 14y ago
    How are buses a natural monopoly? I could see trains with right of way issues, but buses on publicly accessible roads?
- Anechoic 14y ago
  You are perfectly welcome to start your own mass transit system (rail, bus, boat, helicopter, etc). Chances are that you'll quickly find that between he high capital investment, highly variable fuel prices, environmental requirements, and demand challenges that it will be really hard to turn a profit. Hence, not very many private entities want anything to do with the market.
  - 3pt14159 14y ago
    Well most cities have subsidised public transit, so it is pretty hard to compete, even if it were legal (in cities like my own it is 100% illegal). Variable fuel prices doesn't really change any of the other private mass transit systems, like air, ship, and train (or even taxi?). Environmental requirements are essentially irrelevant, especially compared the the fuel that will be saved. High capital investment? I could start with a single van and one frequently travelled road. Or provide the service exclusively to one employer (ala Google style). Demand challenges meet multi linear optimization. Our fire stations, electrical grids, gasoline stations, highways, office buildings, and eateries all have demand challenges. Why would the profit be especially lower? If it were too low, entities would leave the market, if it were too high entities would enter the market.
DannyBee 14y ago
You do realize, of course, that all of these companies have offered to help pay for new bus routes, or are working on helping to build rail bridges, or helping to propose private/public partnerships on better light rail, or ...
- hoverkraft 14y ago
  Several people have alluded to this outreach elsewhere in the thread. I'd certainly believe it. Any links/references on what these companies have offered?
  - DannyBee 14y ago
    As I said elsewhere, most of this is known to employees of these companies, and privately mentioned, but not highly public. This is done because otherwise, the towns get yelled at. Heavily. There are lots of interest groups involved in this kind of thing.
    - brown9-2 14y ago
      It's hard to make an argument with private/secret evidence.
      - DannyBee 14y ago
        It's not secret, just not very well known. As I said, you can usually find it in mountain view committee meeting minutes (for Google), cupertino council minutes (for Apple), etc.
danielweber 14y ago
"Sorry, we can't make things better for you, because we can't make them better for everyone."
tomkarlo 14y ago
You're assuming that a large share of those riders would take public transport, but most of them would probably drive, since that's what the large majority of people in SF who don't have access to a corporate bus do. The bus provides an appealing (relative to the Caltrain) option that's appealing to people who could also easily afford to drive. (They're more convenient than the train or driving, to boot, whereas taking the train is much less convenient.) In doing so, they take tens of thousands of cars off the road each morning.

MechaJDI 14y ago

I'm not really buying it...

suyash 14y ago

Not much about bus but other problems in city like rent and housing that we already know about.

WestCoastJustin 14y ago

I was wondering what these "gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us." actually looked like: [0] http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ip2ku-copy.jpg http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ip2ku-c... [1] http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/IMG_0039-copy.jpg http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/IMG_003... [2] http://missionlocal.org/wp-content/themes/calpress/library/extensions/timthumb.php?src=http://missionlocal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/IMG_2133.jpg&w=620 http://missionlocal.org/wp-content/themes/calpress/library/e...

patmcguire 14y ago
The bus in the first one almost looks stuck by how sharp the grade change is. Is this common in SF?
- rdouble 14y ago
  Yes.
- Falling3 14y ago
  Look at the front of the bus; you can see some towing cables attached to it.
  - rdouble 14y ago
    That's just the MUNI track.
    - coryrc 14y ago
      Look again (the GP is correct).
    - ahlatimer 14y ago
      No, it's actually stuck. http://sfcitizen.com/blog/2012/06/10/noe-valleys-23rd-street-proves-too-much-for-this-google-bus-its-rear-end-gets-stuck-at-the-chattanooga-intersection/ http://sfcitizen.com/blog/2012/06/10/noe-valleys-23rd-street...

decklin 14y ago

> but the passengers were tech people, so withdrawn from direct, abrupt, interventionary communications... Not sure this writer has actually had to deal with many "tech people".

DannyBee 14y ago
Don't be silly, i'm sure the author even has one of those shirts that says they are a nerd!
Jare 14y ago
My anecdotal experience suggests that the author's point is rather accurate. This was Spain, not SF, but I witnessed a bus filled with 50+ tech people (videogames & CGI) remain completely silent while the driver did the route speeding like mad, eventually hit a car, then refused to stop and assist. I was the only one to ask the driver to stop, the only one to offer assistance to the car dude when he followed the bus to our destination, and the only one to report the bus driver to the company. Everyone else just looked, commented among themselves, and walked away as soon as possible.

baddox 14y ago

Someone doesn't like young people who work in tech.

jlev 14y ago
I'm a young person who works in tech in Oakland, and I don't like the young people who work in tech in SF and ride the comfortable google bus every day to their jobs in the valley. Ride public transit. Get out of your tech bubble and experience a sliver of the lives of other people who live in your adopted city. Not everyone owns an iPhone 5 and is downloading the latest app. Work on something that will actually "change the world", not just disrupt a market and make you rich.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Google is making buses work. Good for them.
- farinasa 14y ago
  Yeah, stop getting paid well for working hard!
- baddox 14y ago
  That's just a complicated way of saying that you think some people's social choices are inherently worse than some idealized social path that you are advocating. Not everyone is the same as you, or even wants to be the same as you. Not everyone gets social satisfaction from "getting out" and "experiencing the lives of other people" in the way you're talking about, and that doesn't mean there is something wrong with them. Some people derive satisfaction from finding cool phone apps, some don't. Not everyone wants to "change the world," or disrupt a market, or get rich. Et cetera.
snowwrestler 14y ago
People who live in quirky neighborhoods don't like it when they get gentrified. A few decades ago San Francisco was a quirky small port city with a higher-than-average number of artists, free-thinkers, bohemians, aging hippies, gays, etc. Today it is becoming a large city of hardworking nerds, and the douchebags who feed off them.

nefasti 14y ago

TLDR

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

ak217 14y ago

This kind of journalism really bugs me. There are too many ways in which the author strains logic and reason. I think the companies of Silicon Valley are very interested in improving public transportation, but held back by an ineffective transit governance system. I think the comparison to the gold rush is ridiculous, as is the statement that "technology is just another boom" (what?). I think being a technology hub has done more to improve the lives of everyone in the Bay Area than any other human-controlled factor, but authors like this one are too concerned with irrelevant impressions and skin-deep, false comparisons to consider that.

moultano 14y ago
If the Caltrain connected to any other public transit system in a reasonable way, I don't think the Google busses would exist. Riding trains is much more pleasant than riding busses, but not if it adds an extra hour to your commute each way. Furthermore, if you want cheaper housing, build more of it. I don't think there's an easier way around it.
- rayiner 14y ago
  It's a tiny piece of the puzzle. To have a really usable public transit network ala Chicago or New York, you have to coordinate zoning with transit. 1) The terminal transit station should be built so as to exit right into the central business district. The Caltrain station is too far from SOMA and lacks decent public transit. Meanwhile, Chicago's three transit stations exit right at the perimeter of the Loop (within walking distance of nearly any office building, and with a transit ring around the perimeter of the CBD). New York's two transit stations exit right into Midtown. 2) You have to allow high-density construction near the transit stations, so people can live within walking distance of commuter transit. Look at the Menlo Park Caltrain station. There's nothing around it. There are far smaller Westchester towns that have a substantial downtown core around their Metro North stations. With housing prices being what they are in Silicon Valley, there should be 30+ story buildings ringing the Caltrain stations in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc.
  - 14y ago

stephencanon 14y ago

Want cheaper housing? Make it possible to build more. The fact that quaint New England towns have taller apartment buildings than most of the city of SF pretty much tells the entire story. The busses are basically the opposite of government intervention in a free market; instead of the government stepping in to correct for a market failure, private companies are stepping in to correct a public sector failure (to provide usable transit for their employees).

tomkarlo 14y ago
This is a classic urban problem: the people who are already in SF and own places don't want more housing built, because the shortage drives up the value of their own homes (and anything that blocked their view would reduce it.) The best solution (which SF is kind of pursuing) is to add more high-density housing in post-industrial areas being converted to residential, where developers have big incentives to construct larger buildings. SF always does a ton of hand-wringing about how white collar workers are driving moderate-income renters out of the city, but it also doesn't make it easy to construct the new housing stock that those white-collar residents would prefer anyway.

rdouble 14y ago

The whole of the US sometimes seems to be a checkerboard of these low-pressure zones with lots of time and space but no money, and the boomtowns with lots of money, a frenzied pace and chronic housing scarcity. Neither version is very liveable. After taking a few extended cross country road trips over the past couple of years, this sentence from the article rang the most true.

csharpminor 14y ago
I was about to just make the same comment. I think the "tech boom" has done a lot for SF, but it's a great example of how wealth and investment is highly concentrated in just a few areas of the country. Ideally, startups would look at those costs, do the analysis, and make the decision to locate elsewhere in order to minimize risk. But SF (and NYC) have a kind of legendary status as being where successful tech companies begin. I think that status makes it difficult to consider the value of location based on a cost-benefit analysis. Paradoxically, the sector that has the knowledge and employee base to be geographically independent are also the ones that pay the most for their location. At a gut-check level I feel there is quite a bit of "Irrational Exuberance" going on in the VC/Tech sector right now.
- thedufer 14y ago
  > the sector that has the knowledge and employee base to be geographically independent are also the ones that pay the most for their location I agree that more tech companies should be okay with remote workers. But its not the trivial thing you make it out to be - it takes work, especially in larger teams. And unless you're going to put that work in and make it a part of your team's identity, you have to be where the talent is. I don't think this concentration of tech companies is nearly as surprising as you make it out to be.
  - csharpminor 14y ago
    Right, it's a self-reinforcing trend. Companies move to locations where talent exists, talented individuals seek those locations out. But my point was that this makes it really difficult for startups (or any tech company) to make a calculated decision about whether or not location is worth the extra expense. I don't think it's surprising that tech companies are located together, but I think the community would do well to investigate whether the costs provide adequate returns in a majority of cases. (TWGS;IHRTS)[Take with a grain of salt; I haven't researched this shit]

raldi 14y ago

The article mentions ways the gold rush was bad. The article mentions ways the tech boom is like the gold rush. But the first set of ways does not intersect the second set. I also found it ironic that the old "Yankee Go Home" sentiment was being expressed by an expat.

scarmig 14y ago
How exactly is Solnit an expat? She grew up in Novato and lives in SF and has since well before the '89 earthquake, at least. I suppose she is if you interpret expat as "moved into SF from outside the city limits of SF," but that's an odd usage.
- raldi 14y ago
  I stand corrected; I guess it's just the traditional old-fashioned form of xenophobia then. In that case, the irony is that she waxes nostalgic about SF's history as a place that welcomed everyone in the same breath as she's making fun of and rejecting the latest newcomers for being different.

Taylorious 14y ago

What a truly terrible article, how on earth did it get published? This is the type of small minded, stereotyping, garbage that should never make it past some hack's crappy blog. I looked up the author on Wikipedia and I find it rather ironic that there are quotes of her priding herself on her critical thinking abilities. Reading the article, I saw very little evidence of critical thinking or thinking of any kind for that matter. As a side note, I see that she has a Masters of Journalism. Why on earth would you need a masters degree in Journalism? Find a story, research it/fact check, write about it. Do you really need to go to a university for 6~ years for that?

jlev 14y ago
The London Review of Books is not "some hack's crappy blog". Check your critical thinking skills again; you might actually need a Master of Journalism to get published there.
- Taylorious 14y ago
  I did not say that The London Review of Books was a crappy blog. I said that the article belonged on a crappy blog. Implying that it was like a poor quality rant from a personal blog and not worthy of being published in The London Review of Books.
  - rdouble 14y ago
    It's not really that bad, as far as these types of articles go. The opinion column staff at the NYT churns out a worse article nearly every day.
icebraining 14y ago
As a side note, I see that she has a Masters of Journalism. Why on earth would you need a masters degree in Journalism? Find a story, research it/fact check, write about it. Do you really need to go to a university for 6~ years for that? https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/

jstalin 14y ago

Public transit, even in the densest of American cities, is a money loser and often pollutes more than if the riders were taking cars. It's badly in need of innovation and revolution. Fixed-route transit is a mess. That's why I can't wait until we have self-driving cars. Most public transit would die on the vine as cars, which typically are utilized perhaps 10% of the day, can increase toward 100% utilization. No more need for inefficient and inconvenient fixed routes and no more need for giant empty buses riding around during non-peak hours.

lukeschlather 14y ago
Self-driving cars don't necessarily help. Really, it's more a routing problem. Buses with human drivers would probably be fine if you could come up with a working system to route them on demand. Self-driving might save money in the long run, but cars are probably not as efficient as buses in a big city.

johnny99 14y ago

Forced myself to read to the end so that I would be justified in saying what I had the impulse to howl from the third sentence: Rebecca Solnit, FUCK YOU. It's actually quite well-written, but christ, what a pretentious, clueless, holier-than-thou, pseudo-pious pile of crap. Blamey dirges like this are why people hate liberals. It makes me hate them, and I am one. It's hard to know where to start, so I'll just dig in: Why do you demean and dehumanize tech workers, while glorifying Latinos, homeless people, coal miners, and anyone who's lived in San Francisco since... 2006? 1996? 1976? How long do you have to live in SF to be fully human and deserving of empathy? What do you have against German tourists and "Asian male nerds?" You are a bigot. Why should people "drive themselves?" That's not noble-prole, it's stupid and wasteful. Fewer people should drive, period. Private or public, mass transit is mass transit. It's a Good Thing. Why is capitalism "Janus-headed?" I think you don't understand capitalism. It has one face, with dollar-sign eyes. Which is ok. It's capitalism, not poetry. It's about capital. Are rents being driven up, does growth create problems? Yes of course. Let's deal with those problems. Whining about them is just annoying, and paints you as a bitter person. There's a solution, though. I say this as an erstwhile journalist, now software developer: Rebecca, you should learn Python. Then maybe you can get on the bus too.

taligent 14y ago
Wow. Nice working reinforcing the stereotype there of IT workers being callous, selfish assholes indifferent to everyone else.
- johnny99 14y ago
  I may be an asshole, but I'm not callous or indifferent. Like I said, I think rising rents and other boom dislocations hurt people and are problems to be addressed. But attacking the Asian kid who worked hard, got a job at Google, and takes the bus to work doesn't really do that.
jimray 14y ago
I get what you're saying. I think your response captures one part -- the id, if you will -- of a pretty common refrain I've heard about this article amongst my other nerdy, SF dwelling friends. And in that respect, you're right and certainly entitled to that opinion and entitled to express it however you'd like. While her piece has a lot of problems, not the least of them being a tortured metaphor about gold miners, there is still certainly a kernel of truth to what she's saying. The city is growing at a boom-town pace and infrastructure is not keeping up with that growth, which affects everyone, longtime residents who make less money than young tech workers with higher salaries especially. Where I'll emphatically disagree with you is your "solution" -- it isn't to turn every resident of San Francisco into an engineer. Much of the attraction of cities is the diversity of people who live in them, which mean ideally they are places that can support poets and programmers. San Francisco, even with its recent influx of tech workers, is not nearly the industry town that the valley proper of San Jose, Mountain View, Cupertino, and Palo Alto are. This is a good thing. This is why people choose to live here and commute there. This is why we have those buses. This was a frustrating article to read because dealing with the massive, largely tech-fueld growth really is an issue worth exploring. But for all the problems this city has, Google buses ain't even close to the top of the list. Here are some that I think about on my walks home through the city: * Why are there parking lots adjacent to public housing? Furthermore, why are blocks of public housing (walk up Turk from Market to Divis some time, just not at night) amongst the least dense in the city? * How do we allow things like AirBnB to exist but not create loopholes in the housing code, which has the effect of further constricting the already tight supply of housing? * What can the city do to encourage development in the Tenderloin to replace the far-too-many SRO's? * The high-rises going up in SOMA are great and will hopefully provide housing for the influx of young, mostly single, tech workers. What's the city going to do about encouraging more single-family residences, say, between Van Ness/Masonic and Geary/Market? * How does Western Addition avoid becoming the next Hayes Valley?

unholyguy 14y ago

tl;dr "Damn you kids, gettoff my lawn"

DannyBee 14y ago

I stopped reading at " It means that unlike gigantic employers in other times and places, the corporations of Silicon Valley aren’t much interested in improving public transport, and in fact the many corporations providing private transport are undermining the financial basis for the commuter train." This is such complete bullshit i don't even know where to start. Every single company in the area has either offered to help, is helping, or had their help refused when it comes to public transport. It's not even a Google vs Apple vs whoever, they are all trying to help here in any way they can. Of course, since the author cites absolutely no statements or support for any of their claims, i'm just going to file this in the "not even wrong" category

jstalin 14y ago
Many people think that limiting "competition" and forcing people to use their preferred method of public transit is a legitimate public policy goal. The intent is not to provide efficient transit that works well for those who need it, the goal is to ensure that Very Large Capital Projects get the federal funding they need to fill the gigantic money-losing gap they create.
scarmig 14y ago
People are getting mighty touchy from this piece. How is it bullshit? For one, cites on any of Google, Apple, Ebay, Facebook, etc. either offering to help or helping and getting rebuffed? A quick Google doesn't bring anything up, though I suspect I'm missing out on a key word. But even granting that, the saying "the proof's in the pudding" is pretty relevant here. If it were a priority for them in the same way it was for corporations in the past, it would be done. But because of our current economic structure, corporations no longer feel strong incentives to build out public transit.
- DannyBee 14y ago
  Look at public meeting minutes for various towns and you'll see it. Past that, most of the companies do it smart, and let the towns take the credit, and keep the rest quiet. It is a priority for them, but unlike in the past, if you tell san francisco you want to spend 50 million providing public bus service, their answer isn't "sign us the hell up", it's "sorry, no".

dmm 14y ago

If housing is so expensive why the hell aren't they building more? Lumber(or brick) doesn't cost more in California. It's not a lack of capital. Interest rates are extremely low thanks to the fed. It can't be a lack of labor. I personally know several carpenters and electricians who would happy to work in California for 6 months building apartments. I don't think my experience is that unusual. What is going on?

jcdavis 14y ago
Incredible building regulations. Trying to build anything in SF is a giant clusterfuck. Propose anything over 4 stories outside of Fidi/SOMA? People will complain that its "blocking light" or "out of character", or that it blocks their legally unprotected views. Propose too much parking? Pro transit people get mad. Propose too little parking? People with cars will get mad about the increased competition for street spots. It goes on and on...

gee_totes 14y ago

For further reading on the geography and political economy of California, I strongly suggest Mike Davis' City of Quartz, which is a series of essays about LA: http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Angeles-Edition/dp/1844675688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360355406&sr=8-1&keywords=city+of+quartz http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Angeles-Edition... Warning for HN readers: the book is written in the same critical and class conscious vein as this article, so you may not like it.

te_chris 14y ago

Man, people in the tech bubble really don't like being reminded that everything their industry does and the effect it has had on an established community isn't all perfect. This doesn't surprise me in my (anecdotal) experience in the industry I've run into a lot of "those are problems caused by other industries, not us", but the author raises some good points about the effects of booms (and particularly this one) on the people who were established prior but not part of it. Some can't be avoided but some can be mitigated - and some people have been less defensive here and offered some solutions to things like public transport and housing.

frdgr 14y ago

This article raises interesting observations. I find it fascinating to see how technology might be perceived as a distant animal. The tech industry, like most schools of thought, regularly faces the danger of becoming an Ivory tower, disconnected from the real-world. After all, technology bubbles hurt us all in the past. Similarly, technology is hard to understand, it is magical in a way, an alien tool. If you work in tech, don't be offended. Solnit is not claiming an absolute truth. She's raising awareness of potential collateral damage by tech companies.

farinasa 14y ago

This is absolutely ridiculous. I don't live in SF, nor California for that matter, but this comes across as "I was living in SF before it was cool. Money is evil and so is anyone with it. Especially if they are young." Every paragraph includes an insult, but one of my favorites was comparing tech companies to coal mining companies. Wow. Couldn't be further from the mark. The tech industry frees people to work remotely and is even willing to ship them in expenses paid in luxury. The coal mining companies enslaved people, paying pennies in fatally poor conditions. Runner up was: "...but still has a host of writers, artists, activists, environmentalists, eccentrics and others who don’t work sixty-hour weeks for corporations" This insinuates that tech is less honorable than these jobs. Again, missing the mark, assuming that tech can't somehow help these people. Or perhaps people in the industry aren't creative or some other dismissive nonsense. This is borderline bigotry.

abhayb 14y ago

I think the piece illustrates a very good point that the general public would enjoy reading about. Which is that booms can push out diversity and that a tragedy of the commons is occurring in SF with people driving out the character they came to SF to experience. The problem is that: a) It's taking about us. People who are not software developers would brush past the descriptions of developers as mere scene setting. But it's rather insulting to those being described. b) If it is true, it makes us the villains. And we don't like being the villains. We believe our motives and actions are reasonably noble (or at least not harmful). It hurts to be told that their not. c) It's colored with a lot of emotion from the author. I get the sense that this is precipitated by an underlying feeling of: "Does my time in SF mean NOTHING!?" Which is a reasonable emotion, but comes across to the subjects (us) as a sense of superiority. I believe that it conveys it's point much better to a "lay" audience than it does to us because we (rightly) get lost in the details. I'm very luck that I like what I like and that what I like is the "hot" industry right now. I do want to remember that everything isn't roses and sunshine. That this boom does have losers. But I'm still moving to SF because that's where the place I want to work is and because I like the city. And screw you Rebecca Solnit for making me feel like I don't belong. You were new to SF once and you don't have that right. But I might just take the train instead of a shuttle.

zenogais 14y ago

A pretty resentful and bitter piece by someone who seems to feel personally wronged by an industry he is clearly not a part of, but feels above on a moral and personal level.

newman314 14y ago

I've been looking at homes recently and it just depresses the hell out of me. I'm not in my twenties anymore, don't work for the googles etc. although I have a relatively good tech job. A semi decent house on the peninsula is coming in around 1 mil. And that's often for much less than 2000sq feet. And this is for a house that has doubled in value since 1999. Afaik, salary increases are nowhere near that and certainly not mine.

newman314 14y ago
Looking around San Carlos, there are entire stretches of houses going for $1.5 to 2mil. This are for houses that in my mind, are the idealization of the American Dream. 3-4 bedroom, nice yard, 2 car garage. Not the McMansions of lore. Taking that same amount of money and going to say Texas, would likely yield a ridiculously large house. But more importantly, I keep wondering, are there really that many people around me that make so much money to be able to afford this without blinking an eye or is it more just keeping up with the Joneses....