Thank God for private tech buses. Imagine how many more cars would flood the already congested bay area highways if they didn't exist. I don't understand the argument against the tech busses, seems pretty irrational to me.
I don't have the silver bullet answer, but if you live anywhere near San Francisco and are not on the road to tech millions, you can see that we have a big livability problem. Every day SF looks more like Santana Row, or the Plaza in Kansas City, plus homeless people.
Don't build terrible, dehumanizing, sprawl-encouraging, traffic-encouraging headquarters out in suburbia.
This isn't my idea - it's what every progressive minded thinker that spends even two minutes thinking about urban/traffic/sprawl ideas arrives at.
If google, facebook, et. al, were in the city, the network and wealth effects would be staggering. How many boats would be lifted by that rising tide ?
SF isn't amenable to new construction, and Google and most these companies could easily be more decentralized then they are now in MV if they had to take up residence in the city.
2. People act like this is a simple matter of getting more money into public transit. This is silly, even if that was the only roadblock (pun intended!), building a new freeway takes a lot of time, and expanding public transportation takes a lot of time, and in the meanwhile makes things even more miserable for everyone. Just look at all the very modest light rail expansions in the city and how they've made those sections nightmares for traffic for years. Google and FB need solutions today, not 5 years from now, and personally paying for shuttling their own employees seems like an incredibly environmentally conscious and fair way to handle it: don't forget, they're decreasing congestion on muni/bart/caltrain for everyone else. Lastly, money isn't the only problem: there's a lot of politics in public transport. For example, the reason the BART doesn't go all the way to Cupertino is because they voted against it there. So when you throw around expanding public transport as if its a defense of poor existing SF residents, realize that it may also be a form of antagonization for people in other communities. Hiring your own bus seems to be the simplest, cheapest, least displacing, and fairest way of solving this problem.
I'm an entrepreneur. I get that. And you can keep repeating it until we turn into India or Brazil or Nigeria or someplace else where the rich ride around in bulletproof cars while the poor beg by the dozen at each intersection.
Or you can work toward a better solution.
Taxing corporations more does not, in any way, fix government corruption. In fact, it actually makes the problem worse, since there's more to steal by corrupt politicians.
The complaint that those buses stop in bus stops illegally is IMHO valid and they should fix it (i.e., stop somewhere where they're allowed to).