Google employee shouts down protesters as they block private Google shuttle

As you said, you don't know a thing about the man in the video. It could very well be that he spent the past 5 years working a shitty manual job, worked hard to get a CS degree and get a job at Google, and now he's pissed that people are preventing him from going to work.

I certainly know SF tech workers who have a past not too different from this.

The last paragraph of your post is incredibly condescending and doesn't add much to the conversation. In general, making assumptions about other people's intentions/backgrounds is rarely useful to a debate.

Let's all try to raise the bar here.

Your rant really doesn't raise any point. So what if he hasn't had a shitty job? That really is irrelevant.

Humans are, well, human.

Another option (which the city pursues) is regulations like rent control, affordable housing, etc.

I have no experience with SF first-hand, but from what I hear it is extremely, extremely expensive to live in. In Tokyo you can get a 1 room appartment for $600 a month ( a kinda shitty one, but you can find one), and it's easy to find meager jobs (fast food joints or convenience stores) to make $10 an hour (comes out to $1600 a month). The jobs are more or less everywhere too, but the point is even in the downtown-y area you can live where you work.

It's possible to work there because the population density of the special wards of Tokyo (the actual "urban" part, there's a lot of mountain) is 3 times that of SF. I only have a cursory knowledge of what it's like, again, but looking at apartment listings, it seems like San Francisco has a pretty high amount of gigantic apartments. Like, apartments that could be cut into 4 separate apartments-type huge.

From the side of the people who are mad about this stuff, about the rent and the transportation:

Here's a guy who has an apartment that takes up half a floor, who takes his private bus to go work out in the countryside, asking me, the guy making his burgers/checking out his groceries, to go live out in the countryside and bus into work because he couldn't survive having an apartment with 200 sq feet less space.

Even worse, this is next to some of the most technologically advanced companies in the world. We're supposed to be the Jetsons. How is it that we can have a halfway-functioning public transit system in nowheres-bourg, France, population 100k , but we can't seem to get one running in an area with 3 times the density and 10 times the people?

I'm not necessarily agreeing with everything, but the rage is justified. And it can be solved by political means.

>but now there is a trend towards reurbanization, and as more people move back into cities, the natural result of that is an increase in prices unless supply increases.

Supply can be increased pretty easily: by having companies build closer to the city center, thus expanding the radius of "interestingness". I'm sure that if Google had built closer to san francisco proper that the area of interesting things would have increased immensly. Instead they built their own little disneyland way out , with a huge suburb in between it and SF.

Obviously square footage is expensive, but what is money when you're apparently rolling in it? Building the Googleplex closer would've made it smaller but at least it would have helped SF expand its area of interestingness.

Urban areas have a lot more pre-existing transit, and transit that can be used by more people than just work at one company, than the Shoreline Amphitheater area of Mountain View.

If the company has it's offices in downtown, they wouldn't need to run shuttles.

AFAIK, there is no intra-city shuttle for their employees who work in their SF office, only Mountain View.

Some of these companies (Google, Apple, etc) have that sort of capital, but short of going into the public transportation business, the jump from carting around a few (tens of?) thousands of people to making a significant impact on that number is not just "provide some funding".

The same things these people are complaining about are the same thing old Southern white racists complain about -- this becoming a minority majority country. These people wanted America to be a Ollie and Harriet whitebread nuclear family country, and diversity increased and changed the culture.

"Poor culture" is not intrinsically more valuable than "rich tech culture", it's just different, and there's no a priori justification that one groups has a set of preferences and rights that supercedes the others.

The anti - gentrification people are cultural conservatives and don't realize it.

Must that be said?

You can't fight the changing time by stubborning holding onto what you are used to in the past, because in the end, as long as this remains a free country where people can live wherever, the rule of supply vs demand always wins.

Google can't just magic a transportation system out of pocket; the (NYC) MTA's 2012 budget was $14.2 billion; Google's 2012 profit was $10.7 billion. Are you expecting them to cooperate with Facebook and Apple to work something out between themselves?

Do you want Google to just voluntarily send random checks to various city, local, and state governments, with "for mass transit" in the memo line?

The lack of mass transit is the fault of the citizens. Get off your asses, pass some legislation at the appropriate level of government, tax the living daylight out of whatever megacorps and billionaires are in your tax base, and build yourselves some mass transit with it.

UPDATE: Rodriguez writes that the "Google employee" was in fact a union organizer, staging a confrontation.

http://boingboing.net/2013/12/09/tech-worker-to-san-francisc...

Still doesn't solve the very real issue of relationship with SF community however.

It's interesting that the cities with decent public transportation - Boston, NYC, DC - all have strong cultures of public transportation and large percentages of people that don't have a car. It's very likely that the transportation commissioner in NYC takes the subway to work; it's somewhat less likely that whoever runs the buses in SF takes them to work.

I wonder how much the shuttle system costs Google. It's hard to say for certain, but its probably in the millions of dollars a year.

Now, let's contrast that to the BART extension to SFO, which was completed in 2002 and cost $1.5 billion for 8.7 miles of new track. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Bay_Area_Rapid_T...)

Extending BART service to San Jose (which is hardly a politically trivial affair) would cost a few bucks to say the least. There is also the east-side extension which would compete with a west-side extension:

http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx

Unfortunately companies can't really just give money to the government to do their pet projects. It's been tried before and it kind of ends up poorly.

Case in point, the "Green Line Extension" has been talked about for dozens of years now, and funded many times. They keep losing/wasting the money. I don't think Google wants to wait 10-30 years for the Bart system to catch up with their needs (if ever at all).

But I also don't understand why a company providing private shuttles is such a polarizing idea. No one gets bent about hotel shuttles or ones at convention centers, and putting more people in a shuttle is far better than each of them individually driving.

Very different pools of money.

This is often tossed around and is often a canard. SF is currently in one of its biggest building booms in history. Building is likely occurring as fast as it can.

Edit: whoops

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.

I'm annoyed at shuttles (not sure which company) at the Caltrain station which park in the townsend st. bike lane every single evening, making it dangerous for cyclists. This intersection is sufficiently messy as it is.

If you think there should be a law, then that's also a fine discussion.

But from my standpoint, people are complaining about the lack of enforcement of a law that doesn't exist.

That said, what do you think about MegaBUS and the sort which also park and use regular bus route stops and shelters for minutes at a time while passengers board? There are also chartered buses which do the same.

Or are those okay, or are they also problematic?

If people made the Google buses and other private busses more difficult for employers to have, what would happen is people would cram into cars creating a bigger problem. Or businesses could take their employees back to the suburbs and you could have new Detroits at the extreme. And then people decry the flight of wealth out from the cities...

You can't have it both ways.

Now that it's bad enough, maybe people can try to cure the disease instead of treating the symptoms.

I would love to see the solution being Google using Big Data to improve SF traffic.

Breaking down some of them:

> You can't afford it? You can leave. I'm sorry, get a better job

That isn't how it works in the real world. People can't 'just leave'. If you seriously think moving to a more affordable city is an option for everyone you are sadly mistaken. I don't think I really need to go into why "just move" is very naive argument.

> "I'm sorry, get a better job."

Again, this isn't how life works. If it was so easy to 'get a better job' we'd all be out doing it.

> "This is a city for the right people who can afford it."

Who are "the right people"? Who gets to dictate who can and cannot live in a city? Many people being priced out of San Francisco have lived there for generations, far longer than people moving to work in tech. Why are the latter "the right people" but not the former?

I am not saying I totally agree with the protestors, either. Gentrification in general brings many positives and negatives. It's a tricky balance. There are good arguments to be made on either side - "if you don't like it, just move" is not one of them. "You're not the right people" is even worse.

Many people have a lot of attachment to their cities and neighborhoods. They do not just want to move to another city (and that may not be an option at all if there job is fixed to the city being gentrified). They probably have friends and family that are probably also located in San Francisco. They see a new power rising and threatening there way of life and it frustrates them. People don't like change.

Boston has a similar problem. Our science and tech industry is almost as bright as San Francisco's and the workforce has to live somewhere. Traditionally working-class neighborhoods like Southie and Dorchester are being changed and it's forcing rents up and driving long term residents out of the city.

Unfortunately, both long-term Boston and San Francisco residents have done this to themselves through NIMBYism. If these cities had been encouraging developers to build new housing stock at the correct rate over the last 30 years or so rents would have stayed relatively stable. Instead they're skyrocketing up.

Everything is going fine for this Google employee right now, but someday he may be facing the same problem. I only hope his group of peers learns the lessons that the previous generations failed to about continuing to build high-density desirable housing.

The real question is, as David Simon I believe asked in a post over the weekend, are we in it together, or not? If we're not and everyone is off to fend for themselves, then you better be okay with it when you're put in the weaker position.

He might as well have said, "Let them eat cake."