Protesters block Google bus in S.F. Mission
blog.sfgate.com
blog.sfgate.com
Also, is it really the companies fault that the value of housing in the area is going up because they exist? Can you really expect them to get up and leave?
I don't really see what the companies are getting out of this in the first place. They don't have to shuttle their employees in to work, could save a whole lot of money by not renting/buying buses, but they do and it does nothing but positive things for the employees, the city, and the environment.
Even if the pilot program succeeds (maybe some time next year), and Google, et. al., start paying for bus stop permits, there's still the issue of the city turning a blind eye to all the illegal stops that have gone on for the last 5 years or so.
It's great for the city to create a program that encourages mass transportation, but subsidizing it for only a select class of people is a poor use of public funds at best, and discriminatory at worst.
[1] http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/rules-proposed-for-co...
Google & co. did not ask anybody before they started using the public Muni stops. They just used them. To hell with regulations, traffic laws, and the city of San Francisco.
Google & co. are bullying the city. This is the real issue.
This is a highly complex issue and you cannot pick on just one player. It doesn't help anyone.
The private companies have been violating traffic laws, repeatedly, for years.
They know what they are doing is against the law, but they keep on doing it.
Any impact on road traffic or Muni has got nothing do with the above violation of the law.
Or are we only ok with bullying the tech companies back?
When you say something like this you really have to realize that there may be some bias here. I think these protestors feel pretty negative about this, I can't imagine that it's for no reason.
The person I'm responding to seems to believe they have NO REASON to be protesting. I'm simply saying that I don't think a bunch of people went and wasted their AM for no good reason.
This leaves an enormous number of reasons. For example, "Buses are, in reality, evil ghosts" is a reason to protest google buses, even if they are good for the environment, city, and employees.
- AFAIK currently the companies don't pay to stop at the MUNI stops.
- A working public transportation system for everyone would be greatly preferred to a system that's only working for employees of certain companies.
- By offering these shuttles companies contribute to more people living in SF, driving up rents (I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to offer this, but it's an argument one could reasonably have)
- These shuttles might actually make an improved public transportation system less likely since none of the Google (and other companies') employees would most likely use it, even if something better than Caltrain existed.
BTW: I'm not generally against these shuttles, but you were asking for arguments against them and I think there are several.
There's an old wobbly story: A wobbly was riding a freight train across the midwest one summer, in between jobs. The train sided out in the middle of nowhere, and it was scorching hot, so the wobbly got off the train and started walking down a dirt road.
After a couple of miles, the road passed by an apple orchard. The wobbly hopped over the fence, and sat down to rest under the shade of a big apple tree.
The wobbly sat there enjoying the shade for 20 minutes, until a farmer came across him. "You can't be here!" exclaimed the farmer, "This is my land!"
The wobbly looked up at the farmer and asked "Really? What makes it your land?"
"What are you talking about you dirty tramp, I inherited it from my father!" replied the farmer, almost bewildered at such an indignant question.
"Hmm, and what made it his land?" asked the wobbly.
"Why, he inherited it from his father!" replied the farmer, now really angry. "It's been in my family for three generations!"
"And what made it your grandfather's land?" asked the wobbly.
The farmer, now barely able to contain himself, yelled proudly "Why! My grandpappy fought the indians for it!"
The wobbly nodded, stood up, pulled back his sleeves, and replied "Uh huh. Then I'll fight you for it, right now."
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5222540 (Moxie's original post with comments)
People who own housing in an artificially supply constrained environment would think that!
In fact (reasonably sized) private vehicles create very little wear and tear on the roads, where heavy vehicles like trucks and buses create a lot. So much that in many cities the roads at bus stops are specially re-enforced, surely at some not-insignificant cost.
Regardless, as others have pointed out, using the public bus stops is illegal, it can interfere with official transit operations, and it even generates citizen complaints. Which can't be followed up on because the charter bus companies don't identify themselves. Surprise, the companies doing this are not paying permit fees to do their illegal activities.
http://www.metro-magazine.com/channel/motorcoach/article/sto...
I agree that more shuttles and fewer cars would almost certainly be a good thing all around, but should the charter bus companies be allowed to break the law with impunity, just because we all think the end goal is a good idea?
Here's the problem in a nutshell.
Google & co. did not ask anybody before they started using the public Muni stops. I repeat, they did not ask anybody, they just did it.
The problem has become so big that the city is now forced to consider a pilot program where Google & co. pay for use of some of the muni stops.
If you or I started running a private shuttle service which made use of public Muni stops we would have been not only ticketed but prosecuted.
Basically, Google and other large corporations are bullying the city. This is the real issue.
I've been wondering what the todo was about, and this explains it, or at least partially helps understand the motivation.
There must be some way for us all to be able to get involved in the right places in the right way to get these arcane regulations changed. Would hosting a daytime bike party during city council meetings with an obligatory stop at city hall help? Are there specific people to write to write to to voice our opinion?
Most people haven't the foggiest clue on how to engage effectively with local city politics.
Anyone have any effective suggestions here?
It's perfectly possible that's the case, but "$/capita" doesn't make the case on its own...
If you would like to propose an intervention targeted at reducing the cost of living in SF, I'll certainly listen though I won't promise I'll agree.
After the 70s California voters voted against raising property tax, the government had to get most of their revenue from income-tax, thus the highest state income tax in the country. Due to this, California government income fluctuates a lot with the economy (as we saw from 2008-2009), but that's a different topic.
One thing about property tax law in California is that it's calculated based on how much one paid for property, not its current worth.
The problem with low property tax is that when combined with federal tax incentive for housing mortgage and a cheap rate, it makes sense to invest in housing, and having the value going up does not punish the home owners like places with higher property taxes or places that calculate property tax based on the current values of the properties.
The end result is that existing homeowners in California are very much against new development since they've got a "I've gotten mine, so fuck you" mentality since they want to keep their existing properties valuable, and this is ESPECIALLY true for owners that own multiple properties that can use it for rental.
Imagine you bought a few apartment complexes in SF right after the recession back in the 90s, the places would be worth multiple times as much now but your property tax has not gone up, but you can charge $3k for a small one bedroom apartment, then you'd vote with all your power to make sure new development and new supply for housing is stalled.
This is one of the reasons why direct democracy doesn't work, since people are very short sighted when voting for important issues that could have long lasting effects. A suggested solution would be lower income tax, but make property tax to be calculated off existing values of properties, thus thwart artificial inflation of property values. Of course things like this will NEVER get passed since no politicians dare to piss off existing homeowners.
To be honest, I am personally pessimistic about this state's ability to change for the better, a big reason being the state's obsession with direct democracy that resulted in many bad policies in the past.
Question 2: If so, what do you propose the people do?
As to one of your questions:
Presumably, the protesters want the city and those companies to sit together and create a public transport system that works for everybody. It's fine to have lines and stops specifically laid out to be beneficial to the primary users, as long as everybody else can ride along. That's what tends to happen over on this side of the pond, and I find it an exceedingly reasonable suggestion, because everybody would win even more.
It's not the case that everyone would win more, IMO.
For example, if the boss has a reserved parking space it's a sign the other parking sucks and he/she doesn't plan to fix that. If the politician puts their kids in private school it's a sign they think public schools don't work, but they don't plan to fix them. If the affluent community installs gates and hires their own guards. In countries with public healthcare, if upper middle class families buy private medical insurance.
When the powerful eat the same dog food as the rest of us, the theory goes, we get better dog food than otherwise.
A person with this view might think Google should use their evident power fix the public transport system instead of putting in place a parallel private system.
Your argument applies to anyone who has ever solved any problem for themselves rather than the common good.
If a politician were doing it, I would understand the inclination towards protest -- a politician who felt that a public transportation system that was inadequate should try to fix it, assuming they had sway over it -- assuming of course that there aren't more pressing matters, like rampant crime, poverty, etc.
Otherwise, I'm having a hard time identifying here. Should I be obligated to fix the train system because I choose to fly? Why not? Am I not rich enough to be held responsible?
There may be some large piece that I'm missing here, I don't know, but there's really very little about this situation that makes sense to me.
Edit: It's been explained elsewhere that Google is using the municipal stops illegally. Somehow or another, that wasn't clear to me from my reading of the article. This at least helps me understand the motivation.
UPDATE 12:32pm: Various tips have streamed in that this shout-out was staged. Protest organizer Leslie Dreyer talked to us on the phone and verified that this person's identity was Max Bell Alper, a union organizer from Oakland. This person was not a Google employee, and Dreyer was not able to verify if Alper was there in the morning with the group of 20-30 protesters. The Guardian is attempting to contact Alper for comment. Dreyer said she, as an organizer, was unaware that the "performance" had been planned. We are following this as it develops.
When your experience of a big city is a seamless parade of hip restaurants
and privately funded transportation, it's easy to overlook the things that
cities need, like filled potholes and a reliable transit system. San Franciscans
feel resentful about the technology industry's lack of civic and community
engagement, and the Google bus is our daily reminder.
Can't help it that the city is so poorly/corruptly run that it has one of the highest budget in the country yet still can't manage to fix a few potholes before the heat death of the universe.
Commuting by company bus rather than private car or public transit doesn't somehow make a person unaware of the world around them. If anything, I'd wager that the average Google Bus passenger is more attuned to the sorry state of public transit in this city than the average city resident, since not driving to work often goes hand-in-hand with not owning a car.
And no one's experience of the city is "a seamless parade of hip restaurants and privately funded transportation." Regardless of where they work, people who live in the city spend time here. We walk around the neighborhoods, shop at the grocery stores, and play with our dogs (or watch people play with theirs) in the park. We're also aware of the less pleasant aspects of the city: we step over the poop on the sidewalk, we hear the gunshots, our stuff gets stolen. The only aspect of urban life that shuttle commuters are relatively immune from is the snarl of rush hour traffic, but on that front, they're part of the solution more than they're part of the problem.
(And regarding the specific incident in the article that set the writer off, I don't doubt that there are people on the Google bus who push past people as they disembark. But stand next to a Muni bus as it's disgorging passengers, and you'll see the same thing. A significant chunk of the SF population, rich and poor alike, has zero regard for anyone else standing near them.)
The resentment isn't about the "technology industry's lack of civic and community engagement." It's about the rich displacing everyone else. There are more people who want to live in the city than there is housing, so no matter what schemes are in place to assist low income residents, incumbent residents, or people in particular fields, someone will be squeezed out. The rich squeeze out everyone else with their wallet, so some people feel it's appropriate to try and squeeze out the rich by making their lives unpleasant.
Want an affordable San Francisco? Increase the number of housing units.
- low-density - beautiful - affordable
... pick two.
Similar outrage flared after the Sean Parker wedding. Regardless of what he actually did at the site, regardless that he paid a fine after the fact, regardless that it created jobs (I know a guy who worked for the lighting company) he pulled the ask-for-forgiveness-rather-than-permission stunt and did what he wanted to do, community & regulations be damned. He got what he wanted: a magical wedding in a beautiful, protected area of Big Sur.
How dare he donate millions of dollars to conserve and restore Big Sur.
I suppose you could argue that the buses themselves are enabling gentrification, because if they weren't there, more people might stay in the valley instead of living in the city. That's a pretty tenuous connection though because you could argue that it would have happened anyway (I did the commute over ten years ago between Potrero and Palo Alto).
If Google wanted to alleviate some of the vitriol, they could offer to allow non-Googlers to use the bus (like Stanford's Marguerite system) either for free or some kind of nominal charge. I realize that's a headache, but instead of getting bad publicity, they turn it on its head and the "two tier" comments ring pretty hollow.
http://www.makingchangemedia.org/about-the-team/
http://www.gettyimages.no/detail/news-photo/occupy-wall-stre...
Instead of dealing with the hard issues they love to play act.
The guy not mentioned at all in the article?
The alleged trespass of using 'public infrastructure for private profit' is unsupported. People pick up and drop off people at the sidewalk (required, no stopping in the middle of the street).
The staged appearance of a guy who is a union organizer (reported elsewhere) added a bit of melodrama.
Looking at the action critically, what is to be gained by calling attention to Google, Facebook, and others providing their own bus fleets?
I'm sorry but this is simply wrong. If you tried to pick up and drop off someone in a bus stop everyday, you would get ticketed for it. These buses do not. If you need to make things up to support these people it kind of worries me, especially when you seem to be mocking their opponents. I'm all for criticizing these protestors for certain things, but not so much for made up things.
> If you tried to pick up and drop off someone in a bus stop everyday, you would get ticketed for it.
And I can say, from direct personal experience, that the claim is wrong.
The city should have enforced the traffic laws right from the start and not allowed these corporate shuttles to fester and develop into a now much bigger problem.
Think they would do that for your parking tickets?
If those tickets were for behaviors that are actually socially beneficial, shouldn't they? And if they wouldn't anyway, how is it Google's fault?
-make argument.
-have someone explain why your argument is wrong.
-make up new argument, disregard whether it is remotely related to the original point you made. Just grasp at straws to seem "right".
I mean, we start with "its not like the buses are doing something illegal" to which the answer is "yes, they certainly are" and then it turns to this assumption that every google employee would drive otherwise, ignoring that many employees moved to these bus stop locations specifically for the buses, or the fact that there is a train that runs from SF to Mountain view. But yeah, these buses should be able to do whatever illegal behavior they want because of the next strawman i've yet to anticipate you all making up...
every google employee would drive
The strawman is on your part.
To anybody who wants to defend Google, think about this - what next? Maybe Google should buy up whole city blocks, demolish them, and build residential apartments for their employees? To hell with eviction laws, zoning laws, right?
Those double decker buses hold about 80 people. Assuming a handful of people would carpool, we're still looking at 60+ more cars on the road, per bus.
I haven't experienced it anywhere else though. I think this is basically just a highly visible spot for these buses, and they do interrupt MUNI service during morning traffic. Though I'm not sure they interrupt service any more than any other piece of traffic..
I suspect the damage has more to do with CA property tax and SF's NIMBy zoning laws than silicon valley bussing, but they do have a point that it's a real problem. Not sure what the solution is. This protest doesn't seem to be it, but I applaud them for taking a MVP stab at it. Time to iterate now, protesters!
I dunno, just peering at the crime maps for the Mission[1]...Gentrification isn't the worst thing that could happen to the place. Not gentrifying probably is.
A bus fleet that works for everybody? You know, the kind of public transportation that is common in industrialized countries that have their act together when it comes to the provision of public services.
Now if you want to argue that we should combine all of the bus transport services, from San Rafael to Morgan Hill, and from Morgan Hill to Livermore into a single huge transportation system (all of those places are served by Gbus and presumably the other guys as well). That is a different conversation (and probably worth having)
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If Gmail can't keep up with demand and the SF city council just opened 1000 new account, one for each city employee, and Gmail speed slowed to a crawl, would Google and the public say "aha! they're using all the resources, let's protest"?
FB and Google have a lot of money.
Somebody wants a piece of the political action. So there will be lots of hoopla, then a big check gets written to a pet PAC, then it all goes away -- until it's time to pay up again.
Your comment ("lol income inequality") is dripping in upper-class privilege, as if you're the one suffering when poor people bring up things like the disappearing middle class & tax breaks for the wealthy -- because they're being "toxic".
It's ok, you can call them poor.
You're not completely wrong: many of these people have made mistakes, but the nature of how those mistakes get compounded can pretty thoroughly screw someone who was born with a bit of a handicap and who got off to a bad start.
So while it is possible to overcome these setbacks (and people should be encouraged to do so), it's not something one should be glib about.
When such employees are not being recruited from other places, they are being recruited from SF. Google and Facebook have a problem that their offices are in FUCKING BORING monoculture suburbs which young, smart, energetic people do not typically want to live in. And their big, monolithic companies aren't a great match for the culture of SF, though companies like Twitter have been trying to make it work by insisting that SF is doomed without them.
One has to ask, why do people want to live in SF rather than Mountain View or Palo Alto? Is it because those places are FUCKING BORING?
Yes. And they are not FUCKING BORING because they lack craft cocktail places, they have a monoculture that is unattractive to people accustomed to diversity.
That is why these buses are gross, and that is why it is gross that people who just recently moved to SF after rents roughly doubled think that people should just get a better job if they want to live here, because who ever lived in SF except rich people?
How can someone who moved here as a student and began trying to build a life for themselves in the bay area ever fit without basically letting Larry, Sergei, and Zuck declare the sort of job that people who live in SF can have?
How can people ever own a home in this city if the only way is by being [un]lucky and boring enough to be at a behemoth company or a random startup that couldn't easily be predicted to hit, and take a bunch of stock away?
Also, if SF becomes a place where most people who can afford to live here have to work in another city, it will be largely devoid of employed people during the day. There will be jobs serving coffee in the morning, dinner in the evening, mostly stocked by people who live in the east bay, and we're likely to see some of the crime problems that Oakland has which I believe directly have to do with this, specifically that lots of people who pay rent and mortages in Oakland have to go to another city to do so, on woefully overloaded transit systems that are struggling for funding, leaving the city largely full of unemployed people and violent police officers during the day.
SF is an amazing place and I can't imagine why anyone would only want to work here during the first and last hours of the day, when I do my best to be here as many hours of the day as possible, though I can't afford to live here.
Plus a lot of these assholes don't even like SF. It's like a fancy fucking pair of shoes for them to brag about.
"How can someone who moved here as a student and began trying to build a life for themselves in the bay area ever fit without basically letting Larry, Sergei, and Zuck declare the sort of job that people who live in SF can have?"
When I moved here, those guys were in Jr High probably telling poor taste jokes. So 10 - 15 years from now they may have no say at all in what job you want.
"How can people ever own a home in this city if the only way is by being [un]lucky and boring enough to be at a behemoth company or a random startup that couldn't easily be predicted to hit, and take a bunch of stock away?"
My wife and I bought a home in 1985. We were leveraged to the hilt (loans from the seller, the bank, her parents, and our savings). It wasn't "easy", I didn't see any current run movies, I rarely went out to lunch, but we were focused on getting into the housing market as soon as we could. Over the years I've watched all of my friends buy houses.
They were able to do that because they both saved when they needed too and they benefited from the success of the companies they worked for. Few were made 'rich' by startups, most by putting in their hours at HP or Sun or Oracle, saving money, buying their own company's stock with the employee stock program. Most were married or in committed relationships (it really correlates strongly with house ownership if you can split your living expenses with another person).
The theme in your comment is "I want what I want RIGHT NOW!" but life isn't like that. It plays out over weeks and months and years. Trust me when I tell you that if you did get what everything you wanted without effort, without time, without failure. You would hate it, worse you might despise yourself for having it.
If you evaluate your life based on the lives of others, you won't ever be happy.
People are becoming bigoted against tech folks and it's not a healthy change for this community, but I can't blame them, and frankly most of the time lately I don't want anything to do with people on either side of the polarized debate.
But the discussion is about how Google and whoever are "solving problems" that would be created by people driving private vehicles when in fact they are commonly recruiting people to work in Mountain View by dangling the ability to live in SF in front of them, which is damaging to the entire community as a whole, from Mountain View to SF to Oakland to Berkeley to wherever.
Also I do not live in SF, FYI, I used to, until my own fucking industry priced me out, simultaneously making it impossible to run a small business here providing tech services as I did for many years.
I came to SF to have it change me, but so many people are intent upon changing it, with complete disregard for how the tech industry left the city a husk after the dot-bomb.
I learned a lot of tough lessons about what makes SF SF and how to play harmoniously with that and most people are just spewing entitlement about how it doesn't matter that they are PERMANENTLY driving the cost of living up due to their TEMPORARY ability to make more money.
The truth is that real estate speculators are profiting off people on both sides of the debate.
People are paying twice the rent that would have been paid a few years ago and in many cases not getting better services.
I just don't feel sorry for a few people who got stuck on a bus. Protests are about showing that you can't change business as usual without interfering in it.
I disagree with the content and the tone of the parent comment, but I like to see the debate and it's an interesting perspective.
It is a bad thing when such disrespect becomes acceptable in a community.
1. Public Transportation: both inter & intra-city transportation is very poor. It's extremely hard to travel between neighborhoods in San Francisco, and it's a huge reason people rely so much on Lyft and other providers in the city. Also, it's really difficult to travel between SF and Oakland (as well as other cities). Creating better / more infrastructure that connects these two should help ease supply constraints that cause these price spikes in the first place. Not sure how feasible this is...especially looking at other cities experience in public transportation (example: bay bridge).
2. More supply. One of the effects of previous legislation to keep the SF "neighborhood feel" was that it constrained new supply coming into the market. Unfortunately, it takes a few years for new units to come into the market, and it's obvious it's not keeping pace with demand. There of course needs to be a balance vs. keeping SF's historic appeal, but maybe the previous compromise leaned too heavily against putting up new units.
3. Government subsidies / rent control to help ease rapid price hikes. I'm not as big of a fan of these, but largely because I don't quite understand all the economic/social effects.
Don't expect to reason with protesters if you're not even willing to talk to them. Way to be the uptight sheltered techies you're being made out to be. That being said, I don't think it's legal to block a vehicle, and protesters would probably be better served doing something productive rather than complaining immaturely in this matter.
Shame on everyone!
What these people are complaining about is a two tiered system, where one set of laws apply to the people who live in the city and another set apply to corporations like Google. Why should that bus get to do something that common citizens are not allowed to, simply because it's owned by a company instead of a person?
What I said is that I'm not obligated to "reason" with someone that illegally demands my attention. Maybe abortion doctors should be obligated to "reason" with pro-life protestors, to open a conversation? Hey, a lot of time those guys aren't even breaking the law.
What the OP calls being an "uptight techie" I call being an ordinary human being in an allegedly civilized country.
It shouldn't, but that's not an issue for a mob to take up. Call the police, or go talk to your local legislators if tech companies are being given unfair perks, but taking justice into your own hands is illegal for a very good reason.
Instead we're rally behind some people who had to sit in a bus for an extra thirty minutes than they normally would. It's a miracle those poor souls managed to last as long as they did- can you imagine what kind of tragedy it would have been if the bus's wifi had broke down?
At the end of the day though, the bus protest is not really about the bus but about the overall situation with housing, power, and inequality.
no, it's like the "open letter"s you see floating about the internet - they don't care one way or another about the protesters, they are actually addressing the people whose opinions on the matter they do care about (in this case, their twitter followers)
Edit: as to why they didn't talk to the protesters, it's because they were busy yelling and there's a bus in between them.
Civil Disobedience is pretty much by definition illegal.
Would you have said the same thing about the Greensboro sit-ins? Not trying to be snarky, curious as to where the line is drawn for being productive or being a nuisance in your opinion.
That's true, and the right solution is to remove public funding from transportation. Then there's no downside to private gains.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Su...
It doesn't take more than the first 40 seconds of an economics class to figure out what's going to happen to the price.
You can either decrease demand or increase supply. And good luck kicking people out of San Francisco.
(As a side note, if I worked for google I'd live as close as possible in Mountain View. But I'm not the nightlife type.)
Looks like that issue is being taken care of.
What if the permits are issued with a retroactive start date (and proportionately large initial issuance fee)? Perhaps one that extends back to when each company started stopping in city bus stops? How would you feel about that?
Kind of. It's not very well enforced by the police for regular citizens either. Lax enforcement all around really...
[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000087239639044398290...
Edit: From their website & flyer: http://www.heart-of-the-city.org/
Tech Industry private shuttles use over 200 SF MUNI stops approximately
7,100 times in total each day (M-F) without permission or contributing
funds to support this public infrastructure. No vehicles other than
MUNI are allowed to use these stops. If the tech industry was fined for
each illegal use for the past 2 years, they would owe an estimated $1
billion to the city.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000087239639044398290...
So Google alone could make up that number. Toss in the other tech companies that are doing this as well and I can see how there are far more than 86 stops a day.