Why People Hate the Google Bus
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The article only touches the main point that has caused any real opposition to the private buses: real estate prices in San Francisco.
SF is almost a schizophrenic city. It's a mix of the cultural revolution of the 60s (and the offshoots from that), hipsters and "tech elite" (to use the article's populist label).
A significant portion of SF (and, let's face it, the Valley) wants things to stay the way they've always been. This means no high-density building, they want rent control (a disaster from an overall housing point of view), a desire for the city to remain relatively affordable (that ship has sailed), etc.
Some want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the money the tech sector brings in but they still want nothing to change.
Economics is a bit like water. It'll find the leaks. Terrible public transport to and in SF? Well, that's almost be design to keep people out. The solution? Private bus companies of course.
I couldn't work in the Valley personally. The Valley is expensive suburbia that makes one car-dependent. Living in SF and spending 2-3 hours a day on the bus? No way in hell. I'd go insane.
The Valley's position of tech-dominance is largely historical. This is far from guaranteed. The biggest threat is the difficulty on businesses to grow in size (in or out of SF) and the increasing lack of affordable housing, well, anywhere.
Compare this to NYC where I live in the city and have a 5 minute walk to work. Sure this isn't cheap but if you worked in NYC you could, say, live in Queens/Brooklyn. If you want a house, you can live in NJ, Westchester or Long Island and get to the city in <45 minutes for cheaper than you can buy a house in, Santa Clara or Mountain View. And you'll get good public transport to boot.
Plus if you live in NYC you don't need a car (many still maintain cars from what I see in SF).
IMHO NYC has done a lot of things right. You pay NYC income tax but you get a lot for your money. The MTA which runs 24x7. Cheap cabs. A responsive police force. And total NYC taxes are probably lower than CA taxes now too.
I'd expect no less from Business Insider, barely on this side of tabloids.
My city (and many others) allow private inter-state buses to pick up passengers from certain designated locations late in the evening (so it doesn't cause a traffic jam). When implemented correctly, this is /fair/ because the service is accessible and (more-or-less) useful to everyone. That's taxpayer money (roads, public congestion) being put to good use.
There are also lots of private company buses that pick up passengers from their homes and drop them at their place of work (which is probably a factory very far away), that don't even require explicit permission. If they weren't early morning/ late evening buses, and caused a lot of congestion, the public would certainly complain. The company would have to make amends to make everyone feel more comfortable.
From what I've read, the Google Bus is the worst kind of private bus. It's masked as a public bus, and uses the regular bus stops. Yet, it's designed in a very unfriendly manner and does not indicate where it's going. In other words, it's not easily accessible to everyone. And people naturally complain because of the rift it creates in society.
There are even building rules in every city: one city is so particular that its buildings must look friendly that everything is pink! (look up Jaipur). Good public policy is about using taxpayer money to make public spaces/services as friendly and equitable as possible.
That said, I don't deny that there might be terrible public transport in SF. In which case, the solution is not to throw private buses out the window (I've already stated that they're not fundamentally unworkable), but rather to pick the points of criticism and make amends.
It's pretty simple. These companies are located very far outside of the city, but a substantial portion of their employee base prefer urban lifestyles. So companies run these bus lines into the city in order to attract said employees.
The normal housing demand in San Francisco is proportionate to the number of jobs in San Francisco. Now the housing demand is all the jobs in San Francisco and all the jobs in the Valley - and that's a lot of extra jobs. By running these bus lines Google, Facebook, et al have successfully unloaded a lot of the housing demand from their local areas into the city, raising prices sharply.
It's true that it does use some corners in SF that are also used by public transportation. Those places are guaranteed not to be blocked by parking, and they are usually near subway stops and other public transport hubs. I don't know if they have a deal with the city to allow this, or if they even need one.
My total overall tax rate dropped moving from SF to NYC (I pay the NY City tax). Looking at the enormous difference in infrastructure and services between the two cities, one has to wonder what California does with all that tax money.
My latest theory is that there is a giant tax money incinerator somewhere in the state. It is the only feasible explanation for how one can get so little for so much money.
Secondly, the complaint about the buses being available only for people who work at the tech companies seems unfounded. At my university, they have campus buses for the students to get around; people in the city are not allowed to ride them. I don't see anyone complaining about those. There's something called "company perks" and these buses just happen to be one of them. Yeah, maybe there's a farmer somewhere who is working a lot harder for a lot less pay than an engineer at Google. But if salary should correspond to effort, then the entire job system is screwed up and it doesn't make sense to just single out these Google buses as one example.
For instance, just changing 'sign' to 'symbol' in the title would by itself go a long ways towards making the whole article seem more reasonable.
But I do think it's pretty reasonable to complain about Google's tax avoidance activities. We've got a setup here where large companies pay dramatically less in taxes than small companies; Maybe it's just that I run a small company, but that seems pretty unfair to me.
But not the roads of San Francisco.
During dotbomb 1.0, if you worked in Mountain View or Cupertino, you had to really want to live in San Francisco if you were to stomach the commute. The bus system allows these companies to use SF as a sort of dormitory community and as a result brings in a lot of people who perhaps wouldn't otherwise be here. (Anecdotally, you hear about HR departments setting up new employees up in SF apartments on the bus routes.)
The real issue is that the Valley wants to host all these major corporate headquarters, but absolutely refuses to build housing for their younger workers. Perhaps many Google employees would prefer living in Mountain View if they could.
You can safely blame this on city government. They've flat out refused to allow it any time it's been brought up. One example: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/south_ba...
That is a good point.
>Perhaps many Google employees would prefer living in Mountain View if they could.
Most of the googlers I know live in mountain view; and when 'affordable' is defined by a google programmer salary? there is plenty of affordable local housing in mountain view and further south. If you work at google (I mean, as a full employee, and not a contractor doing menial tasks) living in Mountain View is easy and affordable (especially compared to living in SF.)
>The real issue is that the Valley wants to host all these major corporate headquarters, but absolutely refuses to build housing for their younger workers.
Here, it sounds like you are implying that housing is somehow cheaper or more available in SF than in the south bay. The south bay is building more apartments (mostly medium-density three-story apartments/condos, pretty much perfect for those 'young workers' and priced reasonably, for someone on a google salary.)
I mean, yeah, demand is outstripping the rate we build 'em, but we're trying.
It's worth nothing that many different companies run bus services in SF. The busses aren't prominently labeled so the locals refer to them all as "Google Busses".
But doesn't San Francisco benefit from the tech people who live there? They have lots of spending power to support the local businesses, which creates local jobs. They pay sales taxes and real estate taxes, which supports the city government, schools, etc. Since most of the tech workers are young, they pose only a small burden on the school and health care systems. It would seem like a win for SF to have them there.
It seems to me like this should be in the interest of the employees as well. After all, what if I want to take a bus somewhere else on the weekend, or want to go somewhere with friends?
Maybe these aspects (community integration, public transit in general) are not part of your personal objective function, but that does not make the uproar ridiculous. It just explains why you personally do not care about it.
I don't really buy this argument. That's why all nations have and pay governments and governments should care about providing an overall public transportation system that works. That's why employees and companies pay taxes. I can totally understand that companies want to provide for their employees to do better work, but improving the public on their own is definitely outside of the scope for most companies.
If we wanted companies to fix the infrastructure themselves, we'd get a situation kinda like in Snow Crash.
Google isn't paying for the roads or the right to use the public bus stops. It's taxpayer money; not every taxpayer (an aging lady, for instance) might want their money to go towards making a Google Bus possible.
That gives them right to use the roads. In this case, the Google bus is no different than other private bus or shuttle.
Google and its employees are taxpayers. Google pays corporate income tax to California. The fuel Google buys to run the buses is taxed by California; fuel taxes typically go (or at least are intended to go) towards funding roads. Google employees pay state income tax, sales tax and SF real estate taxes.
And are you sure private companies don't pay to use the public bus stops? These stops are presumably owned by SF, so if they wanted to charge Google to use them they could easily do so.
All the logic being thrown around here is correct. These buses exist because the municipal governments of the Bay Area, as well as the state itself, has spent decades abdicating their responsibility to develop transportation infrastructure. There was no reasonable way tech giants like Google or Facebook could possibly hope to fix MUNI, Caltrain, etc, and so an exclusive (and inefficient) network of buses was the only solution. It still beats putting cars on the freeway.
The importance of the anti-Google-bus sentiment has to be read between the lines. The newfound tech wealth of the latest SF tech boom has not floated all boats. The techno-elites get richer while everyone else gets poorer. This goes beyond the typical frustrations about gentrification and demographic displacement - this is really just a highly localized version of what HN itself likes to complain about: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
The causes of this are complicated. The protesters are wrong in that tech workers are not the root cause of their misery. The tech workers are also wrong in that this isn't idle whining - this is the beacon around a very large social and political failure that pervades every minute or every day life in San Francisco.
cletus has a better explanation about why this whole thing is screwed up. He's also explained why I GTFO of SF and into NYC instead.
Since moving to San Francisco from NYC, I have realized that almost everyone in SF likes having things their way. It's not just the tech companies, it's a pervasive attitude.
This is why people will wait in line for an hour to get "the best" ice cream.
This is why people complain when it is slightly too chilly to have a completely pleasant bike-ride every single day of the year.
This is why people will wear t-shirts and shorts to business meetings.
This is why people get upset that their neighborhoods are being gentrified, and fight to keep low capacity charming housing.
By comparison, in NYC, I was accustomed to there being a higher level of acceptable shittiness, randomness, and contingency for everyday things.
Don't get me wrong, I actually enjoy the fierceness to which SFers are dedicated to setting up their lives exactly according to preferences.
The negative side arises when people stop getting their way. There have been handful of times that I have seen this happen, and the veneer of California laid-backness peeled away, and people get pissy about things that I would consider an overreaction.
I'm not saying that this is true of everyone in SF. I'm just saying that I've observed this phenomenon more frequently since I moved here.
And the office perks? Why do they care? It's not hurting anyone and it seems to save money and boost productivity, while engaging the local small businesses.
People can complain about anything these days...
The system we're in today doesn't mandate that everyone is the same, and it doesn't mandate that everyone has a right to the same. I'm not commenting on whether the system is a good one or not, just that our current system doesn't support, or even want to support the idea that everyone must be equal in all measures.
What gets me even more is the people who complain that things aren't equal, and that they should be, but who decry the idea of socialism and communism.
And the world might be better if everyone was equal, there's no guarantee to equality. I was reading something earlier today, and there was a statement that implied that being human meant that someone had the right to be a 'full and productive' member of society. I question if that's really a right, and if so, what makes it so that humans have such a right, but not other animals (one could argue intelligence, but the arguments I've seen based on intelligence have only been surface deep, as in 'because intelligence').
Maybe I should read it (I've just put it on my list of things to read at some point). I can't really make a claim for or against arguments put in the book without reading them (and the Amazon reviews don't really want to go into any depth on what the arguments made are).
False. "Wall Street isn't winning - it's cheating."[1]
The issue is that a great deal of the 1% is made up of rent seekers. Look at the leaps and bounds that lobbying has done for big corporations and they're executives. See how it's worked to keep healthcare costs (and associated salaries) sky high. etc.
1. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/owss-bee...
But that's not really Google's fault. People would moan if Google donated buses to the city. People would moan if Google optimised bus routes or traffic signalling or road markings or anything.
Having read about the problems JWZ has just putting a door in I can understand why Google has chosen to not bother grinding through that opaque bureaucracy and has just installed a fleet of buses.
Hmmm, what am I reading?
Of course it's a solution for a problem– the problem is that employees need to get to work every morning. The solution offered by Google (and others) is much better than what large companies in areas other than SV do, which is to not worry about how employees get to work. What those tech companies do is a significantly better solution because a) it's better for than environment (less cars on the road), b) it's better for the employees (driving is stressful), c) it's better for the company (people get work done on the bus).
What would be your solution to the problem?
"Public transportation" is not a valid option, because first of all in the US it is a travesty; and even if it were amazing, that wouldn't solve the problem. In countries with great public transportation, people who work for companies who don't have offices in deeply urban areas still have to get to work by their own means.
Google (and others) need to bring their employees to work on their massive privately owned campus; it's not the city's preoccupation to get them there. Driving is stressful, therefore Google decides to offer a shuttle service. It doesn't seem like a "kludgey work around" to me, rather like a normal consequence of a free market.
The only other thing I see is to have every employee live within a 5 mile radius of the company so they can walk/bike there. Some companies do that (Foxconn), but surprisingly it goes against the modern era notion of "personal freedom".
And Google haven't solved that problem apart from a very narrow subset of workers, all of whom are Google employees. Thus, it's just a kludge.
I reckon Google is more than capable of designing a better public transit system - they'd have to be allowed to use location data. But there's nothing in it for Google to do this. They'd just have to battle against entrenched industries and they'd end up with something that's not as good for their workers (although better for the planet and for everyone else) than what they have now.
...
"Employees need to eat while on the job, and Apple's cafeteria is only for Apple employees.
They haven't solved that problem apart for a very narrow subset of workers, all of whom are Apple employees. Thus it's just a kludge.
I reckon Apple is more than capable of designing a better meal system– they'd have to be allowed to use dietary preference data. But there's nothing in it for Apple to do this.
They'd just have to battle against entrenched industries and they'd end up with something that's not as good for their workers (although better for the planet and for everyone else) than what they have now."
Google is doing what's best for its employees. If there was a public transportation system capable of doing it instead, I'm sure the stockholders' money could be put to better use.
I'm not making an anti-Google post here. I'm saying that there are a bunch of companies who could be doing interesting stuff but they can't because of entrenched industries and weird regulations.
Plenty of them don't need to get to work every morning, and don't need to live within commuting distance of SV, to do their jobs. That's a company policy decision, not a law of nature.
The only way to avoid the communication overhead is to have one person working on each component. But since coordinating the components involves communication, you can only have one component. So sitting alone typing away is fine if you're working on a one person project, but if you want to do something bigger, it pays to have everyone sitting together with a few hours overlapping. (I'm not a big fan of being awake in the morning :)
Needless to say, I don't really agree with this. First, ‘half communication and half typing code’ leaves no time for individual creative problem solving, which, unless you're stuck writing the nth me-too implementation of the same CRUD form-filler, is essential. Yesterday's ‘open-plan’ discussion <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5767414>; is apropos. Half communication? It wouldn't be half if everyone would just STFU long enough to get some work done for a change.
Second, I dispute the idea that relevant technical communication needs to be, or even can be, done primarily face-to-face or verbally. We have writing and mathematical notations for good reason. Feel free to pop over to a site like Vocaroo and comprehensibly present Tarjan's algorithm, say, or the stdio API, or the VPUNPCKHDQ instruction.
There is a lot of discussion about the morality of the current wealth disparity in the united states. Google will need to decide for themselves if creating their own separate bus system and semi private airport [2] rather than working to improve the one that everybody else shares falls under the motto "don't be evil".
[1] http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2012-13-EN/pdf/Enacted/BudgetSumma... [2] http://paloalto.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/na...
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho... [2] http://dailypicksandflicks.com/2012/04/26/monkey-fairness-ex...
I think the real issue is that people feel especially entitled to a share of Google and its employee's earnings, which still makes no sense to me. If by "neighbors" you mean the local community, then I don't see why Google owes anything in particular to the local community. They already pay local, state and federal taxes. If a rich guy moved next door to me, I wouldn't expect him to contribute more to the local community just because he happened to live near me. Furthermore, trying to extract rent from companies will fail in the long run since they are free to move within the US.
Or out of the U.S., for that matter. IBM is thought to now have more employees in India than in the U.S.:
If you think SF is expensive try London I found that some ex council 2 bed flats near my office in London where going for £3/4 Million Pounds thats over a Million dollars, if you wanted a nice place in a nicer area say Fitzrovia you are looking at 3 or 4 million pounds
I started the process of trying to cut a door in the wall between my restaurant and nightclub in February 2011. It is now February 2012, and we still don't have the necessary permits and have not yet begun construction. If we have a door in that wall -- and are allowed to let people walk through it -- before 2013, we will consider ourselves lucky.
(From: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/02/confiscating-your-ice-cream-...
Also -- about jwz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jwz )
There is no reasonable public transportation from the areas of San Francisco where people live and Google's campus in Mountain View. The reality is that Caltrain mostly goes through residential areas, so any company that wants a public-transportation-friendly location is kind of out of luck without being located in the city. And of course, 4th and King is not very close to where most people in San Francisco live.
I've timed out how long it would take to commute from downtown San Francisco to Google's campus using only public transportation. It's on the order of 2 hours, and only if you go during rush hour and get the Caltrain shuttle and the Baby Bullet train. Outside of rush hour, it takes over 3 hours. Nobody is going to do a 6 hour daily commute; that's insane.
(I've also done the reverse commute -- living in Santa Clara and commuting to Google SFO. By gBus it only takes an hour and a half, since there is a bus from the apartment where I usually stay to the MTV campus, and then a bus from MTV to SFO. If you want to take public transportation, you're out of luck: it's a $20 cab ride to the Santa Clara train station, and then the usual Caltrain + Muni ride to the office.)
So the busses aren't a sign of privilege and elitism and class and exuberant riches and gentrification or whatever "bad" buzz words the leaders of Occupy Wall Street think they are. They're a way of cutting the emissions (and stress) of Googlers' commutes and a way of making practical something many people want: to live in the city but work in the suburbs.
It's true that the real fix would be to nuke the entire San Francisco Bay Area and rebuild it to be less car-centric, but that's not going to happen. (Especially in California, where they envy the timeliness of projects like the Second Avenue Subway and the Big Dig.) You can't undo 100 years of intentional discrimination against non-car-owners overnight. So there are busses instead: they use the infrastructure available frugally, save time, and lower the impact on the environment. If you hate that, it's possible that the problem is you, not some busses.
I work in Seattle. Before I moved there, I lived and worked in Oregon, in the Valley. I grew up with working public transportation, with buses that were affordable and ubiquitous. The school that I went to, Oregon State University, came to an agreement with the city that it was in, and they cooperated to make all buses free within city limits. Yes, even for non-students and non-residents.
Portland's transportation is great, and Seattle's transportation is great. Every time I visit the Bay for work, I cringe, because I know exactly what to expect: Hours of trains and buses if I don't want to rent a car. It's utterly ridiculous.
How do you get to the Microsoft campus from downtown Seattle? Everyone I know at Microsoft does that commute but drives (and complains about how often the bridges over Lake Washington are closed or jammed with traffic).
I'd rather drive myself...
Why People Hate The Microsoft Cafeteria
Why People Hate The Oracle 401(k) Program
Why People Hate The Adobe Workplace Health Insurance Plan
Seriously, this is what people complain about?
I'm not a libertarian. I believe that I have a duty to pay taxes, and I even think tax rates (for me at least) are fair, and I have no problem with redistribution. But I also have rights, for example to live where I like so long as I can pay the rent and can find someone to rent to me. My impact on other people through rent prices is not an externality and does not need to be controlled by the government. A free country is a country where you can engage in private transactions as you please, not a country where everything is done with permission of the community.
Also, a lot of the animosity is fueled by something other than pure economics. If you read these kinds of articles, the complaints tend to morph from "rents are rising" to "they aren't part of the community" to "they are socially awkward white kids". The idea that political action should be taken against a group because other people find them unattractive or dislikable is sickening to me.
Without an understanding of economics, people morally equate private transactions that raise the rent in an area (which causes no externalities) with polluting someone's water supply or running down bicyclists with your giant corporate buses (which are externalities).
"Transport for a breed apart. For a community that is separate but not equal," said Diamond Dave Whitaker, a self-professed beat poet and rabble-rouser.
Not only are we comparing this with racial discrimination, we're actually painting it in a worse light. Yes, "rabble-rouser" is a great word for this person, but what the heck is the point of rousing rabble against this? My goodness, a company providing transportation for its employees?! The injustice, the humanity!
"We feel what we're doing helps make the world a better place. Helping people share information is a force of empowerment for individuals."
That's highly debatable. A good majority of the world lacks internet access, information sharing doesn't sound very empowering considering many companies essentially milk you for your data, and I really don't want to talk about how absurd it is to think that your average arbitrary SV startup is a force for social good.
You know what's empowering? Self-sufficiency. Independence. I'm not talking about homesteading, just being able to provide oneself with a comfortable life with all the basic necessities and then some. Most major tech companies and startups can't really be associated with that form of empowerment unless you really try and fib a little. I have to admit, first thing that came to mind was Airbnb, because it allows ordinary people to collect a little extra income from their home. Anyway, lets continue.
"Software engineering is like building something, like a craft, you become completely absorbed in the task. I really like that."
I can actually agree with our anonymous software engineer on this statement. Most people on HN probably can as well. If you say that to someone with no coding background though, they'll think you're full of it and that you're an entitled jerk.
Yeah, they probably cherry picked this guy's quotes out of plenty of much more boring yet appropriate quotes, but at the same time this mindset seems pretty typical, and probably plays an appreciable role in the grievances of people with more physical professions.
[FWIW, I'm pro-google-bus, I just can see the other side, which I think are misdirected]
Google's buses have been the focal point of much discussion, related to urban development, social equality, civic engagement, taxes, and business culture.
While the point remains contested, many critics believe that Google's buses represent a tech elite, that has "invaded" San Francisco with its high salaries. The critics say this influx is driving up the cost of real estate, and hurting the greater sense of equality in the Bay Area. Critics claim the buses are unfair because they use public infrastructure, like roads and bus stops, but are not public. Critics explain that companies exacerbate the issue by wiggling their way around corporate tax codes, to minimize tax paid to governments.
In contrast, the proponents of Google's buses espouse a general admiration (and at very least, an understanding) of Google's choice to use a private fleet to help its employees commute. The buses replace cars and their emissions, thereby decongesting roads; they enable longer work hours, making employees more productive; and they facilitate a social city-life for many of its young workers. Proponents recognize that an overhaul of public transportation in the Bay Area would indeed lead to greater public good, but concede that this is neither practical, nor Google's responsibility. Further, while not solving the whole problem, proponents claim the private bus fleet at least helps.
The debate over the merits of Google's private bus fleet even expand to a question of social equality, and whether a capitalist nation should expect equality. While it's clear that only a small fraction of Bay Area residents enjoy these perks, the notion of equality is not lost. By some opinions, the magic of American capitalism is not equality of possessions (or abilities), but equality of opportunity. In this sense, Google and its tech-giant siblings need not provide services for the entire community, but merely give each person a fair chance at being hired -- a fair chance at taking part in their employee benefits programs.
Finally, if deemed worthwhile, Google may choose to make more overt gestures of friendliness to the community to soften any ill-will from the public.
That's an obstacle that has very little to do with techie new-comers and a lot to do with soi-disant liberal yuppies who have been in the city for decades and insist that they want to "preserve" San Francisco in a way that totally prices out working class people from life in the city.
The SF planning department is frequently derided for micromanaging sensible projects that would sail through the permitting process in other cities. The prolonged finessing of architectural details and even paint color can delay and kill many projects. Though, IMO, the bigger problem is the perverted process of "community involvement" used by the city. Essentially any permit issued for any project can be appealed by any single person. This unwavering obstruction of change is a large part of what makes San Francisco really expensive.
While the process may be to blame, I think the tech companies should do more to engage with the local government for mutual benefit: anything from campaigning for an improved development process, to funding street improvements that provide space for employee shuttles (so they don't block local Muni bus stops.)