Buses for Tech Workers in San Francisco Will Pay Fee
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Heck in some industries, they give you a car, and yet I've never seen anything like this before. I've read a whole stack about this issue but still can't seem to make it click.
The protesters are angry that there are relatively prosperous individuals in "their" neighborhoods at all; they would rather it be an affordable slum than be priced out.
There's not a fuss around companies providing transport to their employees. There's a fuss around the employees, who are hated by "locals", living nearby. As described in the linked article, gentrification battles are phrased in other terms, because you lose PR points for saying "get out because, um, we hate you".
Threads about the buses on HN in the past have seen a lot of self-righteous grandstanding about "but the buses are breaking traffic laws!" -- completely disregarding the fact that everyone posting in the thread, San Francisco residents or not, breaks traffic laws every day.
I live in San Diego, so it might be just a clash of cultures. But I honesty would like to know, why does the tech community find SF so appealing. Is it just a function of that's were all the VC money is? Or am I missing something?
At the risk of being a bit flippant, it's not that people find SF so appealing, but that they find everywhere closer to work unbearable. By any measure I can think of SF is a deeply dysfunctional city with incredible failures in basic quality of life - but it is the only city around that even begins to offer a lifestyle that many people want.
And frankly, there are parts of SF that I personally would find difficult to live in without a car (or at least bicycle), because they're far from effective public transit or commercial areas. BART and CalTrain don't serve the western part of SF at all, and muni is often slower than walking.
The south and east bay may not have the same density as San Francisco, but then again, it's far from clear that super-high density is a good idea in a seismically active zone. A lot of people seem to treat the choice as being between super-low density and super-high density. The alternative, medium density, never seems to get much P.R., but it seems like by far the best choice.
Palo Alto is a horrible example IMHO. All of the good stuff is on University Ave and maybe California, the rest of it is just residential and not within walking distance. If you don't live close to University, you definitely need a car.
SF is just absolutely terrible for parking. But I wonder, do tech people dislike cars because they live in SF, or do they live in SF because they dislike cars? Or is it neither?
Of course, cars also have an impact on the environment which many northern Californians dislike. Oddly enough, the same people don't seem to mind flying, even though one or two transatlantic flights can emit as much carbon dioxide per person as an entire year of driving.
Personally, I like walkable neighborhoods. I would not want to live in a place where I couldn't walk or bike to a downtown area. However, I think the focus on "urbaner than thou" is misguided. I've always liked medium density areas the best.
Are you sure about that?
http://www.businessinsider.com/driving-is-actually-less-ener...
A single plane trip from California to Europe is 5,500 miles. Double that for the round trip, and you've got 11,000 miles. Multiply by 3/4 and you've got 8250 miles, which is easily what an average person might drive in a year. If you add another trip (notice I said "one or two" in my post), then you're definitely emitting more CO2 than the average American emits by driving for a year.
Of course, if the car person in question drives a Prius or an electric car (very common in the Bay area), the numbers look even worse for the plane person. Not to mention the fact that the plane efficiency improvements are created by packing more and more people on the plane, which makes for a miserable flight. The car efficiency improvements are generated by newer technology.
Yes, the bay area, but particularly SF is extremely anti-car. This is probably rooted in environmentalism, but in the city it also resonates with many people for health, social, and economic reasons.
The sentiment is so strong among younger people that if people own a car they will often almost apologize for it in friendly conversation. Like "yeah, I still have my odd beater from when I lived in LA... But I have free parking at the office and it's nice for carpooling to burning man".
From a personal perspective, I grew up in orange county, but moved to NYC in early adulthood and SF later. I own a car and a motorcycle. I love riding the motorcycle, but bicycling or walking is frequently more efficient in the city, not to mention pleasurable.
If you have only ever lived in car-centric places like so cal, I rely strongly recommend taking a long vacation in a walkable place like NYC or a European city where you know people who can show you the ropes. You might be surprised how much you enjoy Not driving.
I think a reasonable case could be made that Champaign Illinois (which hosts UIUC) is more of an urban area than those two cities. At the very least, I think it's better than San Mateo.
I agree that San Francisco sucks (and I lived in SOMA and in Noe Valley, both of which have relatively good [for the area] transit), but it is at least an actual city.
The obvious elephant in the room here is San Jose, and it's telling that you didn't mention it, opting instead to pretend that San Mateo was a "dense urban area". San Jose is an urban center. But it's miserable; nobody talks about moving there. The fact is that San Mateo sounds plausible because of its proximity to San Francisco.
† For Palo Alto, I mean University; you don't need to point out that El Camino runs through it, I know where to go to find the strip malls. :)
San Mateo, at around 8K/sq.mi., is far more of a "dense urban area" than San Jose, at around 5K/sq.mi.
So who is pretending?
To see how silly population density is as a metric for what 'potatolicious is talking about, consider that your metric says that Berwyn and San Mateo are more like cities than Bellevue Washington, which is so independently urbanized that it stretches the definition of "suburb" but has a density of only 3k/sqm. Look at downtown Bellevue in street view on Google Maps. Now go look at Delaware and 3rd in San Mateo.
The idea that you might think San Mateo is more of an urban area than San Jose --- I mean this without annoying snippiness in my heart though I know it is, characteristically, going to sound that way --- suggests to me that you haven't been to one of those two cities before. San Jose is self-evidently a real city. (I look forward to you embarrassing me by informing me that you've lived in both).
With regard to San Mateo being "a suburb" without "any significant transit," I can't agree. I see people taking the bus all the time. There are a lot of people who work in downtown San Mateo and live nearby.
I'm not trying to say that San Mateo is irredeemable. If I had to move back to the Bay Area (crosses self), I'd probably look at San Mateo before San Francisco, because I have kids, and San Francisco seems like an awful place to raise kids. I'm just saying that it is not a realistic substitute for San Francisco for city dwellers.
The issue was what is a "dense urban area". A city that is a suburb because of its relation to a another city can still be a dense urban area, and a sparsely populated municipality that is not a suburb can fail to be a dense urban area. San Jose is not a dense urban area, by any remotely reasonable standard.
> consider that your metric says that Berwyn and San Mateo are more like cities than Bellevue Washington,
All of those are cities, none of them are "more like cities". The issue was "dense urban areas", and certainly some of them are more "dense urban areas" than others, and that is easily and objectively verifiable.
> The idea that you might think San Mateo is more of an urban area than San Jose
You keep leaving out the key word "dense".
San Mateo is, objectively, more of a "dense urban area" than San Jose. Whether its more of an "urban area", density aside, isn't a entirely a well-defined question, but given that San Jose is basically a giant mass of the type of development referred to as "suburban sprawl" that just happens to be within a single legal jurisdiction that isn't a satellite of a larger municipality, I'd say by most reasonable standards its probably not more an urban area than most Peninsula cities, even if the latter happen to suburbs of San Francisco.)
Though, of colin_mccabe's examples, I'll agree that San Mateo isn't the best (Berkeley probably is).
Oak Park is a village, not a city, and is denser than San Mateo. The city/town designation is arbitrary.
San Jose has a very large downtown area, much better transit, and more diverse retail businesses and restaurants than San Mateo does. It also has a gigantic residential sprawl. So does Houston. Nobody would mistake San Mateo for a urban area of the likes of Houston.
I agree with you about Berkeley, but that's telling too, isn't it? Berkeley is, like San Francisco, a hotbed of anti-Google protests.
The subtext of this thread is 'potatolicious' claim that no place other than San Francisco (and, admittedly, Berkeley and Oakland) offer a "dense urban core" with a "transit-centric" lifestyle that is "commutable" to jobs on the Peninsula. He is right. San Mateo does not in fact offer that. To argue the contrary, you'd need to find a way in which San Mateo offers that lifestyle that, say, Mountain View or Santa Clara or Pleasonton don't; otherwise, you're arguing that the whole Peninsula is urban, and the term doesn't mean anything. Obviously, if you find a job in downtown Pleasanton and are happy to eat out only at the Cheesecake Factory, Pleasanton is livable too.
The protests in San Francisco are very different from the ones in Berkeley. The San Francisco ones are basically concerned about the effect the Google buses are having on the composition of the neighborhood. The idea is that SF is perfect as-is and must not change. There were similar worries when gays started moving into SF in the 70s and 80s.
I think the reason why you're "talking past" me and the other people here is that you haven't really visited most of the neighborhoods outside SF, and you think they're all the same. Hence the apparent non-sequiturs like bringing up Oak Brook, Illinois, or trying to decide whether something is a "city" or a "town." The reality is that different places are different. Berkeley is not SF. San Mateo is not downtown San Jose. And downtown San Jose is not east San Jose.
An "us versus them" mentality, coupled with lack of knowledge of "them," lies behind a lot of ugly things in human nature. Do we really need to have more of it here? Maybe there are places outside of SF that are (gasp) as good as parts of SF. Maybe there are places in SF that kind of suck. Is it possible?
A lot of people do it every day, but I decided it was too much and moved to the Valley. If it weren't for the commute, though, I'd love to live there again.
- It's a relatively big city with more cultural institutions than other areas around the Bay. You can expect many live music shows, plays, and events on any given night so there's always something to do.
- It's a young city with not a lot of kids in most parts of the city. There's a vibrant bar/nightlife scene and you can get around with public transit easily so DUIs are not an issue.
- The food is ridiculous - there's delicious food EVERYWHERE. Cheap delicious food, Michelin starred delicious food, etc. San Diego has some good restaurants but SF just blows it out of the water.
- It's a beautiful city (sans some shitty parts of downtown). I don't get bored of looking at the bridge from Crissy Field or seeing sailboats on the bay with Alcatraz in the distance.
- Awesome access to the great outdoors - San Diego has great coastal access and some decent forests/desert areas east but consider that just across the bridge is Marin county with hundreds of trails of hiking, biking, etc. all within minutes of San Francisco not counting what's in the city itself.
It is a rather complicated situation that involves a number of factors:
If Google was an SF company (or had a large SF campus that these employees could work at), the city would at least be collecting taxes from them that could be used to support all the public infrastructure that these employees and these buses use.
On top of that, it is horribly inefficient to have people commute 40 miles (~64 km) to their office. There is certainly some animosity towards these kinds of commuters who often spend very little time actually in San Francisco, pay little to no city taxes, but want to live here.
But when it comes right down to it, Google pays people extremely high wages that are a bit out of whack with what local companies pay which drives up rent in San Francisco. The thought goes that if the Google buses end, at least some portion of the employees would find it too big of a hassle to commute and actually move near where their office is.
You hear arguments about gentrification, but there are plenty of fully gentrified neighborhoods in San Francisco with people who would be happy to see these commuters go away. This is about rent prices, housing shortages and a general feeling that these commuters have no skin in the game.
Of course, really we need more housing stock too, but that's a more difficult problem.
This is arguable. Those people probably live in SF because they want to spend their evenings and weekends in the city, therefore spending all their money there (including on basic living expenses, like groceries). Most people don't really spend any money during work hours (except maybe for lunch, but that's a moot point when talking about Google/Apple/Facebook).
Also, the two city taxes I can think of are property taxes (which are rolled into rents anyway) and sales taxes (which are paid whenever they buy something inside the city). I don't see how commuters don't pay city taxes.
I really think this is the big draw. I've heard Googlers complain about how crowded the SF office is on Fridays because of their peers from Mountain View finding excuses to work from their office so they can hit the town in the evening. Even people who live in the valley don't stay there for fun.
One of the things to note is that there is an incredible amount of traffic congestion during commute times on the freeway from SF to Mountain View and within San Francisco itself. We could double the capacity of our freeway system and they'd still be slow. So it can take well over an hour on the freeway each way plus an extra 20+ minutes just driving through SF to drop people off if they are any more than a couple miles from the nearest freeway exit.
So companies have provided the awesome service -- as you mention -- of running busses. The buses sometimes use bus stops reserved for city buses. That itself isn't such a big deal. But within this specific context, the buses have become a symbol of the class strife in the area.
From the perspective of long-time SF residents: Here you have private buses illegally stopping in a zone reserved for the public, paid for by the taxes of the long-time residents quickly getting priced out of their own [rented] homes, which each day take their new neighbors to jobs that pay the wages, inflated by the economies of scale that come with the internet, that are the cause of the meteoric housing price rise.
From the perspective of San Francisco's nouveau riche: real estate is just another market, and SF is a market undergoing rapid change in which there will be winners and losers, and while it sucks to be a loser, that is inevitable as the "rich" and "not rich" zones of housing move around geographically, as they inevitably always will.
The stance of most people on both sides is, of course, somewhere in the middle, empathetic to the situation both sides find themselves in.
The anger isn't about the buses; it's about the evictions. The buses are just a symbol that attracts the activists' attention. (The activists are mostly transplants too, living out some fantasy that they're fighting capitalism, but whatever.) Nevertheless, here's why it's so vivid:
San Francisco is a city of extreme wealth contrasts in a nation of extreme wealth contrasts.
And many young tech workers want to live in places like the Mission, which are gentrifying but traditionally working class, ethnic neighborhoods, with a strong tradition of bohemia too.
So, picture this: a line of zillionaire white kids in geek t-shirts and laptop backpacks, waiting on a street corner that is caked with human filth and stinking in the sunshine. They are surrounded by ethnic (often undocumented) immigrants, and homeless people limping by, sometimes with untreated open wounds. Then a giant black monolith of a bus swoops down on the corner, releasing a whiff of air-conditioned comfort as the doors open, and whisks all those kids far, far away, to their playground offices.
True story: in the early days of the Google Bus, the contracting company sometimes ran out of buses. So they would have to dispatch other large vehicles instead.
You cannot imagine the burning looks I got stepping into a stretch limousine on 16th and Mission.
The liberal mentality would be for the companies to back improvements to public transportation. The libertarian approach is private buses.
Private buses are being used because they work environmentally and economically. There is nothing libertarian about this, and Google runs shuttles from the CalTrain station also.
They don't work environmentally. Move the offices closer to where they live or live closer to work. That's like arguing that improving plane efficiency is good for those who want to live in Malibu and commute to Mountain View. Mountain View to SF eats up a LOT of gas. It's that Google and other companies benefit from groups being in the same office.
Edit: the reality is that those buses are a perk because otherwise far fewer people would be able to live in SF since commuting to Mountain View, Cupertino, etc during rush hour takes untenable amounts of time. Thus to compete for tech workers who want to live in SF, companies are choosing to provide these buses.
The fully loaded buses work environmentally on a per-seat/person basis, especially if one group is travelling from one place to the other. It is probably less than if they were living in San Jose and commuting by car. You can always do better, but the buses make the commute environmentally reasonable if not ideal.
> That's like arguing that improving plane efficiency is good for those who want to live in Malibu and commute to Mountain View.
That's like arguing that taking the bus is bad since one could always walk, bike, or sleep in their office instead to reduce their impact even further.
As long as we are exchanging platitudes...
Libertarian techies: Peter Thiel, Marc Andressen, Ron Conway, that VC pushing the division of California. I also don't think that Larry Page is a liberal for good or ill. How is having your own private jet environmentally friendly? One flight on that thing will pollute more than his Prius will in its lifetime.
Prior to the buses very few people were willing to commute from SF to Mountain View. They had to choose to live closer. The buses very greatly expanded the distance. Almost everyone who graduated from Berkeley who went to work in the Valley moved there. Commuting from Emeryville would draw crazed expressions. You're probably pushing 50 miles each way.
Edit: Before the company shuttles picked you up at the Caltrain stop near the office. Now the company shuttle picks you up near your home bypassing Caltrain.
Emission from a jet is significant, but gets diluted over a wider range. The problem with pollution is mainly concentration and failure to disperse, and become absorbed (carbon dioxide and other pollutants occur naturally, but concentrations of them are a big problem, especially when inversions occur).
Those kids at Berkeley would probably never have worked at Google MV if they couldn't live in the city.
How much pollution does a 737 emit on takeoff and landing? That sure isn't being dispersed. Try parking near SJ airport for a few days. You'll find your car coated.
Like I said, it's for economic expediency... A perk to attract workers but with potential environmental cost.
If I live in SF, I have to make a choice: take somewhat undesirable public transportation, drive my car in hellish traffic, or limit where I live (or where I work) to walking distance.
So when there's someone who has a difference choice that is pretty pain-free, of course it pisses people off. There's a feeling that some of these employees would not live in SF if they did not have the partybus, and thus rents are higher, too.
And this type of fee reminds me of a Freakonomics article that talked about how a daycare started charging parents a late fee of $3 and it had an unintended effect of increasing the frequency of late parents, because it rid the parents of moral guilt for being late. In a similar way, despite the fee, the big tech companies are going to continue doing what they're doing, but now they won't feel as bad for it. I don't see how this solves anything.
Freakonomics article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-le...
The purpose is not to discourage the buses. If a person wishes to live in San Francisco, and work at Google, that is their right (assuming they can pay the rent). No one has any moral basis for trying to stop them from exercising that right, any more than I have a right to stop people from paying high prices for caviar so, that I can afford it.
The controversy surrounding these buses is just a symptom of the much larger problem, affordable housing development. If you want this issue to go anywhere, stop worrying so much about these buses full of people headed to work. Getting rid of the buses isn't going to solve the real problem. It's just something that people have latched on to.
SF will always be a second best city until it can face it's true demons: decisions made by ideology, that is, without regard to reality or even common sense. I want the tolerant SF of the late 1960s back - a bunch of dockworkers, businessmen, soldiers, factory workers who were cool enough to let freaks and weirdos take over their city. Now the cultural descendants of those freaks complain if you don't look, talk or get to work like them. This needs to stop.
I've heard it happens on HN but (as only an occasional commenter) I've never noticed it. It just went from #5 to nonexistent.
[1] excuse the IRC lingo
http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...