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Comment by gkop | Hacker News Reader

Specifically on the subject of transportation, many wealthy tech companies have deployed private buses that benefit only their employees and not the community. I don't think it's evil by any means, merely rational (at least in the short-term), but also still a missed opportunity to strengthen the community by covering employees' public transit passes, encouraging employees to live closer to work, or moving work closer to where employees want to live (some companies have done this, but the big, well-known ones have not). The net effect is private buses for tech, and crappy public transit for the rest, breeding resentment toward tech.

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I think if all the Google/FB/Yahoo/Ebay people who are on buses took Caltrain, people would be complaining that they were late to work because there was no space on the train.

Also, none of those places are right next to a Caltrain station so the company would have to have buses shuttling people back and forth at much worse fuel economy than shuttling them from SF.

Google does have a SF office but as mentioned in other comments, real estate in SF is not cheap and it would be a fool's errand to uproar the campus in MTV.

The problem with train and bus systems is generally that, when they have low ridership, they run less frequently, leading to lower ridership, etc. If there's never any space on the train, as long as the fares are reasonably high (which I thought they were when I commuted via Caltrain, although apparently they didn't cover costs) then Caltrain can buy more cars, more trains, and more sidings, and run every ten, eight, or six minutes, instead of about every 12 minutes during rush hour, as now. Every 12 minutes sounds good, but there are only five Baby Bullet runs at present, there are 40-plus minute gaps between them even during rush hour, and you have to get up by 8 AM to catch any of them. So if you miss your Baby Bullet by two minutes, you can easily spend an extra half-hour in transit.

So I think that more people taking Caltrain would make Caltrain more useful, not less.

This is on top of them covering passes and encouraging employees to live closer to work, and just reflects on low quality of Bay Area's of transportation grid.

If Muni, or SAM or VTA ran buses from SOMA/Mission to corporate campuses, those would definitely be used. But after a three-hour one-way commute that involves Muni+BART+Caltrain+city bus (an example would be a Google employee in Mountain View who lives in the Mission) even a die-hard public transport fan would switch to a company bus.

Compare with Seattle, by the way, which just has a Sound Transit stop right on the Microsoft campus, easily accessible from Belltown and Cap Hill. If there's one thing that frustrated me moving from Microsoft to Google, it's the sudden decrease in the quality of inter-city public transit.

Moreover, if public transit to/from SF weren't such a fucking joke, more young techies would choose to live outside the city, knowing they could go in whenever they wanted to.

Well there must have been an underlying reason why companies would go out of their way to invest in their own transportation system than invest in the one that already exists. Maybe they were met with resistance? What is this resistance?

This sounds a bit like asking why anyone buys a Brita pitcher instead of investing in water & sewage sanitation.

The cost and effort involved in chartering a few buses is pretty minor next to re-tooling the Muni, BART & Caltrain systems. The results are also instantaneous. They need to attract employees now, and not in 5-10 years time.

It's worth noting that a public transit commute between SF and SV can involve up to 3 distinct transportation systems. For instance, when I worked for a startup based in Menlo Park I contended with a trifecta fail-fest of Muni (bus) -> Caltrain -> local shuttle, totaling 2 hours each way.

Also, companies locate in places not remotely near public transit-like Facebook's new campus in Menlo Park, its not remotely near Caltrain. I remember taking the light rail along Java Drive every day for two years, wondering why more companies didn't decide to relocate near public transit, instead of in the outer most parts of suburbia.

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