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Are there any actual critiques to be had against Google busses other than some vague misplaced anger? Here we have private companies using their own capital to

Are there any actual critiques to be had against Google busses other than some vague misplaced anger? Here we have private companies using their own capital to provide a more environmentally friendly way of getting their employees to the South Bay. What exactly is the problem here? Would they prefer if things were more like LA and everyone of these tech employees had their own high priced car? Would that make the wealth disparity less apparent? Then after a few anecdotes of assholes acting like assholes (as if that's representative of anything), Uber is of course targeted. I find this particularly hilarious because I would argue that ride-share companies are exactly the tech companies who are working on real problems. Go ride in a Lyft or Uber X and ask the driver how they feel about the company. Lyft is providing real jobs and making use of resources that would otherwise be notoriously redundant and misused (cars).

eegilbert 13y ago
There is the critique that if that energy and money were instead directed toward Muni and BART, everyone would benefit.
- tolmasky 13y ago
  This is at best an unfair critique. For example, I used to work for Apple and the BART does not get that far. That is because Cupertino decided they didn't want the BART getting there. The reasons for this are varied and complex. The fact of the matter is that buying 10 busses to shuttle your employees is easy, and getting involved in a possibly 20 year boondoggle to extend the BART is hard, probably requires approval from the voters (who will probably yet again vote against it), and even if it does get done it doesn't consider the potential downsides to the communities it brings the BART to. At the end of the day it is completely unfair and unrealistic to essentially assign the responsibility of transportation management to companies simply because they are successful and because government is incompetent (look at SF's budget and you'll see they really shouldn't need anyones help to be making transportation better). The reality is that SF is a completely mismanaged city, where we are spending 5 years extending the light rail from china town to downtown not because anyone actually needs it but because of politics, instead of focusing on the actual transportation issues people face every day. That's where the anger should be focused. Google, et al are doing their best with what they're given and I think they've done pretty well so far.
  - impendia 13y ago
    I don't know the details as specifically as you, but do you really argue that Muni doesn't need improvement? As it is now, there is no efficient way to get to the northeast of the city (Chinatown, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, etc.) and Muni is barely faster than walking. You ask me --- lots of really rich people moving into town? Great! Tax 'em.
- prostoalex 13y ago
  So what's preventing Muni or BART from offering 4th & King - Google Campus route on their own?
  - calbear81 13y ago
    Who would ride that? Google provides the service for free and you get to use WiFi while on board. MUNI operates within city limits, makes no sense to offer a bus outside of the city.
    - prostoalex 13y ago
      If there was a public route, Google would potentially reconsider. My point in response to grandparent was that no matter how much money you throw at BART and Muni, political, jurisdictional and infrastructural issues will block further development.
Tiktaalik 13y ago
My understanding is the main complaints are that they're massive and block traffic and they also often illegally make use of public transportation's bus stops, which can force blocked public transportation into letting out their psssengers onto the street.
- RogerL 13y ago
  They are substantially less massive than the number of cars required to transport all of those workers.
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    Without the buses a lot of those workers might choose to live closer to the office, freeing up space in the city.
    - cbhl 13y ago
      Workers commute both ways on those buses -- there is an office in downtown SF as well.
kenferry 13y ago
I think that dichotomy is not quite right - you're saying that without the buses, the Google and Apple folk would still be in SF, they'd just be polluting more. The other possibility is that far more people would live close to work, in the South Bay. I saw the latter happen. The buses enabled an exodus to SF. This puts pressure on housing cost.
- Domenic_S 13y ago
  And what happens to housing cost when those folks need to live in the south bay?
  - dlitwak 13y ago
    it's evened out because people now live where they work instead of have EVERYONE live one place and work numerous other places. I'm a capitalist whose fine with everything going on in SF to be honest, but I agree that Google is essentially solving a problem it is also helping to create with the buses, so while I don't think they should be criticized I'm also not sitting here cheering them for being environmentally friendly when it was evidently in their best interests to do what they did.
mapgrep 13y ago
I have gone through similar feelings and you raise a great point: The buses from Google, Facebook, etc. are far better than those same companies quietly doing nothing as their employees clog the freeways, which is very common among other companies but basically invisible. So they get crap for doing a good thing. Here's the flipside, although I've never heard anyone actually make the first argument: -Google the company actively dodges taxes, albeit through tactics common in the corporate world. So while it is pampering its own employees, it is undermining public transit by not paying nearly its fair share into the federal (and likely state) pools that help fund the transit for everyone else. Thus, Google is actively exacerbating inequality. -Google's buses use public land intended for public transit to provide "stops" for its employees. Google can clearly afford to compensate for this, but, as far as I know, does not do so. This at a time when Muni and other transit agencies could really use the money. Free rent for large corporations is never going to be popular. -Although there are environmental benefits to the buses, Google, Facebook, etc. are almost certainly not motivated primarily by the environmental benefits but by self interest. In other words, the freeways are full, and getting to South Bay each morning is a nightmare. And yet many desirable engineers etc prefer to live in SF vs South Bay. Hence, the buses, which make it easier for these companies to recruit. This competitive element then puts pressures on other smaller internet companies to run their own buses, even if those buses are not particularly full or if they are driving large distances within SF to pick up only a small number of people or single person at a given stop.
- jswinghammer 13y ago
  Companies don't pay taxes it's the shareholders and the employees who pay taxes. So if Google "avoids" taxes on its' income it will end up being paid (at probably a much higher rate) by the shareholders and employees of the company. That their intentions aren't pure enough for some is not a reason to not celebrate what they're doing for their employees.
  - mapgrep 13y ago
    >Companies don't pay taxes it's the shareholders and the employees who pay taxes. This is false. What do you mean? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_Sta... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-22/google-joins-apple-avoiding-taxes-with-stateless-income.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-22/google-joins-apple-... >if Google "avoids" taxes on its' income it will end up being paid (at probably a much higher rate) by the shareholders and employees Also not true. Long term capital gains tax is 15%. Dividends are taxed at the same rate, unless you make over $400k per year, at which point you pay 20%. Corporate taxes, in contrast, are 35% at the federal level. Taken with state taxes the effective rate is close to 40% (http://www.kpmg.com/global/en/services/tax/tax-tools-and-resources/pages/corporate-tax-rates-table.aspx http://www.kpmg.com/global/en/services/tax/tax-tools-and-res...). So it's a net loss when Google dodges taxes. (And I didn't even get into shares held abroad or in retirement accounts.) (Edits with slightly less confrontational language.)
alxbrun 13y ago
Yes, but on the other hand if all these private companies used their capital to contribute building a decent public transportation system instead of building parallel ones, that would be far better for everybody. In any other developed country in the world, it would take less than 30 minutes to go from SF to Palo Alto with a modern train.
- newnewnew 13y ago
  SF and California should raise their income taxes further then. There's no way to dodge that.
gms 13y ago
If anything, the presence of company busses is a clear signal that local government has failed to provide adequate public transport (despite happily taking the taxes that these companies and their employees pay), and that is where any anger should be directed.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
I think one big problem is that it allows workers to easily get from the city to the office outside the city. Without the ease of transport a lot of these people might live outside the city freeing up space for people who actually need to live there.
sliverstorm 13y ago
What exactly is the problem here It's just a tipping point. The disparity is becoming much more obvious and in-your-face, and busses some people can ride on and others cannot (while in reality totally reasonable) really serve to highlight the feeling of divisiveness. The funny thing is it seems like this is nothing we haven't seen before- it's gentrification, except some sort of ultra-gentrification where the middle-class are driven out by the upper-middle-class.
- GoNB 13y ago
  Yea, I don't like the article's insinuation that programmers aren't middle-class. Programming is not a upper-class job, like say lawyers or doctors. We are not making that much money. I would definitely say upper-middle-class though. What I don't understand is why people don't go where the jobs are. Historically if there was a market boom in a certain industry, people then sought out those skills and went for those jobs. I realize programming is computers and computers are a foreign language to a lot of people, especially middle-class people, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to learn if you just take the time to learn it and maybe some classes or training. I feel like non-techie middle-class people never even consider a programming job, because it requires doctorate level education or something. It's a total misconception. Anyone can learn Ruby in a couple months if they put their mind to it and get a decent job.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Even lawyering and doctoring is not upper-class. The defining feature of upper-class in America is making money with money, so the only upper-class lawyers or doctors are the ones that (for example) own a practice instead of working day-to-day, much the same way that a programmer who now owns his own billion-dollar tech company would be upper-class.
- walshemj 13y ago
  try London where most of the new property built in central London is owned by rich outsiders as investments / bolt holes in case their country sufferers civil unrest
potatolicious 13y ago
The Google Bus isn't the main issue, it's just a convenient and highly visible lightning rod. The class war that's happening in SF goes much, much deeper and has much more profound impact on people than just a bunch of buses zipping around town. But most of these issues aren't nearly as viscerally visual and high-profile as an exclusive "you can't get on" bus fleet. It's simply an incredibly in-your-face reminder of everything else that is wrong with San Francisco. > "I find this particularly hilarious because I would argue that ride-share companies are exactly the tech companies who are working on real problems." As someone who lived in SF, and now lives in NYC, I find this statement sad yet hilarious. Uber and Lyft exist because of a fundamental dysfunction in Bay Area transit. Lyft isn't even a thing here in NYC, and Uber is barely on anyone's radar - because we have working mass transit. These are only "real problems" because MUNI and BART represent the transit savviness of a wet paper bag. I used to spend more than a NYC subway monthly pass's cost on Ubers when I lived in SF every month, because the transit in that city is so utterly and completely fucked. Even among my social circles of relatively-highly-paid tech-workers, none of us have used Uber more than once or twice. To be blunt, Uber and Lyft are solutions to the problem that San Francisco can't get its shit together to save its life. Others in this thread mention that if the investment made in private company shuttles were poured into the public transit system then everyone could benefit. It would be nice, but I don't think this is actually true - the problem with MUNI, Caltrain, and BART isn't due to lack of funding, it's due to extensive corruption and mismanagement. At the agency level, at the municipality level, and at the regional level. Google could've thrown truckloads of cash at them and it would've disappeared into the ether with little to show for it. I don't blame Google, Facebook, and Apple for running their own shuttles. It was the most rational, least evil choice in response to a fundamental governmental dysfunction. The protest against the growing divide is a red herring - the divide largely exists and is perpetuated by a woefully incompetent and corrupt city government. There is a growing collection of startups whose primary purpose is fixing SF/Bay Area dysfunction - Uber and Lyft being among them. I'm disappointed at how revolutionary people seem to think they are, when they seem more like they're solving problems that shouldn't exist in a competent, working city, in a highly exclusive and upmarket way. Transportation is horrifyingly broken and people can't get around? Solution: upmarket shiny black sedans priced completely out of reach for everyone except the monied techno-elite. It may be necessary, but forgive me if I don't cheer loudly. At the risk of making a crappy analogy, the roof is leaking and you're congratulating the guy who came along and put some buckets on the floor.
cmsmith 13y ago
Aside from the wishy-washy fairness argument, I can see a couple of actual critiques: 1) The busses displace the attention and money of a lot of motivated and well-off tech workers who might otherwise demand improved public transit systems. 2) The busses artificially distort the housing market in SF. Previously the number of people who wanted to live in SF was limited by the number of jobs available in the city - now that number includes anyone with access to a shuttle. And the people with jobs in SF now can't afford to live where they work. I think the fallacy here is that without the busses, you'd have 10,000 (or whatever the number) tech workers driving 1+ hours from North Beach to Mountain View in their own cars. In reality, most of those people would just move closer to where they work.

eegilbert 13y ago

There is the critique that if that energy and money were instead directed toward Muni and BART, everyone would benefit.

tolmasky 13y ago
This is at best an unfair critique. For example, I used to work for Apple and the BART does not get that far. That is because Cupertino decided they didn't want the BART getting there. The reasons for this are varied and complex. The fact of the matter is that buying 10 busses to shuttle your employees is easy, and getting involved in a possibly 20 year boondoggle to extend the BART is hard, probably requires approval from the voters (who will probably yet again vote against it), and even if it does get done it doesn't consider the potential downsides to the communities it brings the BART to. At the end of the day it is completely unfair and unrealistic to essentially assign the responsibility of transportation management to companies simply because they are successful and because government is incompetent (look at SF's budget and you'll see they really shouldn't need anyones help to be making transportation better). The reality is that SF is a completely mismanaged city, where we are spending 5 years extending the light rail from china town to downtown not because anyone actually needs it but because of politics, instead of focusing on the actual transportation issues people face every day. That's where the anger should be focused. Google, et al are doing their best with what they're given and I think they've done pretty well so far.
- impendia 13y ago
  I don't know the details as specifically as you, but do you really argue that Muni doesn't need improvement? As it is now, there is no efficient way to get to the northeast of the city (Chinatown, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, etc.) and Muni is barely faster than walking. You ask me --- lots of really rich people moving into town? Great! Tax 'em.
prostoalex 13y ago
So what's preventing Muni or BART from offering 4th & King - Google Campus route on their own?
- calbear81 13y ago
  Who would ride that? Google provides the service for free and you get to use WiFi while on board. MUNI operates within city limits, makes no sense to offer a bus outside of the city.
  - prostoalex 13y ago
    If there was a public route, Google would potentially reconsider. My point in response to grandparent was that no matter how much money you throw at BART and Muni, political, jurisdictional and infrastructural issues will block further development.

Tiktaalik 13y ago

My understanding is the main complaints are that they're massive and block traffic and they also often illegally make use of public transportation's bus stops, which can force blocked public transportation into letting out their psssengers onto the street.

RogerL 13y ago
They are substantially less massive than the number of cars required to transport all of those workers.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  Without the buses a lot of those workers might choose to live closer to the office, freeing up space in the city.
  - cbhl 13y ago
    Workers commute both ways on those buses -- there is an office in downtown SF as well.

kenferry 13y ago

I think that dichotomy is not quite right - you're saying that without the buses, the Google and Apple folk would still be in SF, they'd just be polluting more. The other possibility is that far more people would live close to work, in the South Bay. I saw the latter happen. The buses enabled an exodus to SF. This puts pressure on housing cost.

Domenic_S 13y ago
And what happens to housing cost when those folks need to live in the south bay?
- dlitwak 13y ago
  it's evened out because people now live where they work instead of have EVERYONE live one place and work numerous other places. I'm a capitalist whose fine with everything going on in SF to be honest, but I agree that Google is essentially solving a problem it is also helping to create with the buses, so while I don't think they should be criticized I'm also not sitting here cheering them for being environmentally friendly when it was evidently in their best interests to do what they did.

mapgrep 13y ago

I have gone through similar feelings and you raise a great point: The buses from Google, Facebook, etc. are far better than those same companies quietly doing nothing as their employees clog the freeways, which is very common among other companies but basically invisible. So they get crap for doing a good thing. Here's the flipside, although I've never heard anyone actually make the first argument: -Google the company actively dodges taxes, albeit through tactics common in the corporate world. So while it is pampering its own employees, it is undermining public transit by not paying nearly its fair share into the federal (and likely state) pools that help fund the transit for everyone else. Thus, Google is actively exacerbating inequality. -Google's buses use public land intended for public transit to provide "stops" for its employees. Google can clearly afford to compensate for this, but, as far as I know, does not do so. This at a time when Muni and other transit agencies could really use the money. Free rent for large corporations is never going to be popular. -Although there are environmental benefits to the buses, Google, Facebook, etc. are almost certainly not motivated primarily by the environmental benefits but by self interest. In other words, the freeways are full, and getting to South Bay each morning is a nightmare. And yet many desirable engineers etc prefer to live in SF vs South Bay. Hence, the buses, which make it easier for these companies to recruit. This competitive element then puts pressures on other smaller internet companies to run their own buses, even if those buses are not particularly full or if they are driving large distances within SF to pick up only a small number of people or single person at a given stop.

jswinghammer 13y ago
Companies don't pay taxes it's the shareholders and the employees who pay taxes. So if Google "avoids" taxes on its' income it will end up being paid (at probably a much higher rate) by the shareholders and employees of the company. That their intentions aren't pure enough for some is not a reason to not celebrate what they're doing for their employees.
- mapgrep 13y ago
  >Companies don't pay taxes it's the shareholders and the employees who pay taxes. This is false. What do you mean? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_Sta... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-22/google-joins-apple-avoiding-taxes-with-stateless-income.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-22/google-joins-apple-... >if Google "avoids" taxes on its' income it will end up being paid (at probably a much higher rate) by the shareholders and employees Also not true. Long term capital gains tax is 15%. Dividends are taxed at the same rate, unless you make over $400k per year, at which point you pay 20%. Corporate taxes, in contrast, are 35% at the federal level. Taken with state taxes the effective rate is close to 40% (http://www.kpmg.com/global/en/services/tax/tax-tools-and-resources/pages/corporate-tax-rates-table.aspx http://www.kpmg.com/global/en/services/tax/tax-tools-and-res...). So it's a net loss when Google dodges taxes. (And I didn't even get into shares held abroad or in retirement accounts.) (Edits with slightly less confrontational language.)

alxbrun 13y ago

Yes, but on the other hand if all these private companies used their capital to contribute building a decent public transportation system instead of building parallel ones, that would be far better for everybody. In any other developed country in the world, it would take less than 30 minutes to go from SF to Palo Alto with a modern train.

newnewnew 13y ago
SF and California should raise their income taxes further then. There's no way to dodge that.

gms 13y ago

If anything, the presence of company busses is a clear signal that local government has failed to provide adequate public transport (despite happily taking the taxes that these companies and their employees pay), and that is where any anger should be directed.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

I think one big problem is that it allows workers to easily get from the city to the office outside the city. Without the ease of transport a lot of these people might live outside the city freeing up space for people who actually need to live there.

sliverstorm 13y ago

What exactly is the problem here It's just a tipping point. The disparity is becoming much more obvious and in-your-face, and busses some people can ride on and others cannot (while in reality totally reasonable) really serve to highlight the feeling of divisiveness. The funny thing is it seems like this is nothing we haven't seen before- it's gentrification, except some sort of ultra-gentrification where the middle-class are driven out by the upper-middle-class.

GoNB 13y ago
Yea, I don't like the article's insinuation that programmers aren't middle-class. Programming is not a upper-class job, like say lawyers or doctors. We are not making that much money. I would definitely say upper-middle-class though. What I don't understand is why people don't go where the jobs are. Historically if there was a market boom in a certain industry, people then sought out those skills and went for those jobs. I realize programming is computers and computers are a foreign language to a lot of people, especially middle-class people, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to learn if you just take the time to learn it and maybe some classes or training. I feel like non-techie middle-class people never even consider a programming job, because it requires doctorate level education or something. It's a total misconception. Anyone can learn Ruby in a couple months if they put their mind to it and get a decent job.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Even lawyering and doctoring is not upper-class. The defining feature of upper-class in America is making money with money, so the only upper-class lawyers or doctors are the ones that (for example) own a practice instead of working day-to-day, much the same way that a programmer who now owns his own billion-dollar tech company would be upper-class.
walshemj 13y ago
try London where most of the new property built in central London is owned by rich outsiders as investments / bolt holes in case their country sufferers civil unrest

potatolicious 13y ago

The Google Bus isn't the main issue, it's just a convenient and highly visible lightning rod. The class war that's happening in SF goes much, much deeper and has much more profound impact on people than just a bunch of buses zipping around town. But most of these issues aren't nearly as viscerally visual and high-profile as an exclusive "you can't get on" bus fleet. It's simply an incredibly in-your-face reminder of everything else that is wrong with San Francisco. > "I find this particularly hilarious because I would argue that ride-share companies are exactly the tech companies who are working on real problems." As someone who lived in SF, and now lives in NYC, I find this statement sad yet hilarious. Uber and Lyft exist because of a fundamental dysfunction in Bay Area transit. Lyft isn't even a thing here in NYC, and Uber is barely on anyone's radar - because we have working mass transit. These are only "real problems" because MUNI and BART represent the transit savviness of a wet paper bag. I used to spend more than a NYC subway monthly pass's cost on Ubers when I lived in SF every month, because the transit in that city is so utterly and completely fucked. Even among my social circles of relatively-highly-paid tech-workers, none of us have used Uber more than once or twice. To be blunt, Uber and Lyft are solutions to the problem that San Francisco can't get its shit together to save its life. Others in this thread mention that if the investment made in private company shuttles were poured into the public transit system then everyone could benefit. It would be nice, but I don't think this is actually true - the problem with MUNI, Caltrain, and BART isn't due to lack of funding, it's due to extensive corruption and mismanagement. At the agency level, at the municipality level, and at the regional level. Google could've thrown truckloads of cash at them and it would've disappeared into the ether with little to show for it. I don't blame Google, Facebook, and Apple for running their own shuttles. It was the most rational, least evil choice in response to a fundamental governmental dysfunction. The protest against the growing divide is a red herring - the divide largely exists and is perpetuated by a woefully incompetent and corrupt city government. There is a growing collection of startups whose primary purpose is fixing SF/Bay Area dysfunction - Uber and Lyft being among them. I'm disappointed at how revolutionary people seem to think they are, when they seem more like they're solving problems that shouldn't exist in a competent, working city, in a highly exclusive and upmarket way. Transportation is horrifyingly broken and people can't get around? Solution: upmarket shiny black sedans priced completely out of reach for everyone except the monied techno-elite. It may be necessary, but forgive me if I don't cheer loudly. At the risk of making a crappy analogy, the roof is leaking and you're congratulating the guy who came along and put some buckets on the floor.

cmsmith 13y ago

Aside from the wishy-washy fairness argument, I can see a couple of actual critiques: 1) The busses displace the attention and money of a lot of motivated and well-off tech workers who might otherwise demand improved public transit systems. 2) The busses artificially distort the housing market in SF. Previously the number of people who wanted to live in SF was limited by the number of jobs available in the city - now that number includes anyone with access to a shuttle. And the people with jobs in SF now can't afford to live where they work. I think the fallacy here is that without the busses, you'd have 10,000 (or whatever the number) tech workers driving 1+ hours from North Beach to Mountain View in their own cars. In reality, most of those people would just move closer to where they work.