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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

The uproar over this is somewhat ridiculous, in my opinion. As pointed out by one of the engineers in the article, pooling people together for a ride is much better for traffic and the environment.

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.

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This isn't really about the buses themselves. The buses are only a focal point for all the pent-up frustration when it comes to San Francisco and the tech industry. They are a daily and highly visible reminder that everyone in SF who doesn't work in the tech industry is something of an untermensch.

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.

Just wanted to say thanks for such an insightful, nuanced response.

Yeah, complaining about the google bus? that just seems /weird/ - I mean, hey, each one of those probably keeps 10 new BMWs off the road. I think the framing of that part of the article weakens the point of the rest of the article. (I think you could mention the public hatred of the google buses either as an extension of the traditional hatred of the not so socially optimized or as anger at the gentrification that the tech boom has brought. I think the article (probably by accident) kindof made it sound like other people were bitter just 'cause they couldn't ride the google buses, a much less sympathetic viewpoint.)

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.

> probably keeps 10 new BMWs off the road

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.

Younger employees would prefer to live in SF, that is why they are there. They can live in mountain view just fine if they wanted to.

absolutely refuses to build housing for their younger workers

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...

The government is just expressing the will of the citizens -- primarily older people who won the property lotto and want to keep the community in a permanent 1960s time-bubble.

>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

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.

You're right about google programmer salaries.

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".

"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."

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.

You are describing different parts of the elephant. The fact that these buses create a feeling of segregation is indisputable. Those companies do have a choice between providing their own private buses or working within the respective communities to create a better overall public transit system.

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.

> You are describing different parts of the elephant. The fact that these buses create a feeling of segregation is indisputable. Those companies do have a choice between providing their own private buses or working within the respective communities to create a better overall public transit system.

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.

It's a large (mostly private) vehicle masked as public transport that stops at regular public bus stops. There's a reason public buses clearly state where they're going: it's so that _everyone_ has easy access to them. Personal freedom is not the issue at hand here: many of the employees can probably afford BMWs. It's about bad public policy that creates a rift in society.

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.

I don't know about US, but here in Europe, companies and entrepreneurs pay so called "road tax", a compulsory amount for each vehicle in their fleet. For commercial vehicles and buses, it is a pretty nice sum.

That gives them right to use the roads. In this case, the Google bus is no different than other private bus or shuttle.

"Google isn't paying for the roads or the right to use the public bus stops. It's taxpayer money..."

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.

You know what would be even better for traffic and the environment? If Google employees didn't live fifty miles from their Mountain View offices.

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