In what universe is a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week classified as frivolous?
Here are three frequently voiced objections:
1) If the city decided to put a new bus route outside of your house, with a bus every 10 minutes for the morning and evening rush hours, then you would expect there to be public meetings where people can voice concerns about the routing, increase in large traffic, noise, and so on. Why should private companies not be subject to the same sort of democratic decision making on how to use the local public roads and bus stops?
2) Some people moved to the city in part because of the knowledge that the private bus system would be there. Without those buses, they would have chosen somewhere else precisely because the lack of parking would have made the commute impossible. It's hard then to say that each bus replaces a dozen cars, when those people might not be there if there were no buses.
3) If getting cars off the road and reclaiming commuting time were paramount, then why not rezone the areas around Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. for medium density housing, like SF-style row houses, instead of the current preference for suburban detached housing? Then people could walk or bike to work in a matter of minutes. The densities for SF, MV, and C are 17K, 6K, and 5K/sq mile respectively, so there's plenty of opportunity for local population growth. Instead, the local (and democratic) resistance to zoning change in those smaller cities causes increased prices and bus traffic elsewhere, but the people in SF have no way to push back and cause the zoning laws of the smaller cities to change.
1) It may be "frivolous" if the routing is only made based on the needs of the commuters, and has no input from the people who live on those routes. In an extreme case, if a bus goes down a narrow street in order to save one able-bodied person one block of walking, then that part is definitely frivolous even with the overall savings. Without that local input, neither you nor I have an idea of which parts are frivolous and which are not. And that local input has not occurred.
2) You made assumptions which might not be true. If the net effect of adding buses did not reduce car traffic at all, then your presumed advantages don't exist, and hence the effort is "frivolous."
3) If the goal is to reduce commute time and get cars off the streets, then long-distance bus traffic is not the solution. Improved access to nearby housing is the solution. Instead, long-term busing is a frivolous waste of money which should instead go towards zoning changes. But that involves getting into long-term local politics, which business people don't like doing. Instead, they would rather spend money on a technical solution which is achievable in the short-term, even if it doesn't really help your stated goals.
#1: an argument based on the overall goal - reduced car traffic and enhanced used of commute time - is of little weight or importance for those who are locally disadvantaged and when there is an equitable alternative which better balances the different factors.
These people who were left out of the decision making process might also regard the companies as being imperious.
#2: an argument based on the overall goal is of little weight or importance if the premise - that it reduces care traffic and makes more effective use of commute time - is incorrect. (BTW, the NYT reports that one survey of tech workers says that 50% would not move to SF if there wasn't a private bus system, so the benefit of a bus is not simply determined as to count how many cars would be needed instead.)
These people who regard the argument in favor of the buses as being frivolous might also regard the the private bus services as being self-defeating.
#3: the argument is also of little weight or importance to those who see believe the larger underlying problem is that subsidized free parking and other zoning restrictions prevent the free market from operating efficiently. Put medium density housing in Mt. View and there will be no effectively no commute time nor need for cars nor buses.
These people who regard the argument as being frivolous might also believe that it's a short-sighted behavior.
In conclusion, I certainly did use the term "frivolous" correctly.
Now you want me to make a specific judgment about a generic use of your car? Why the topic switch?
My view is that my taxes should not help fund a personal garage for you to store your car. If it's kept on the street then you should pay market rate for it, and the city shouldn't subsidize the cost for everyone with a car.
So, are you paying the real costs for the parking? Then no, it's not frivolous no matter how you want to use it.
Are you driving because you don't feel like walking two blocks every day and would rather drive that distance instead, and you want the city to guarantee that you have free parking on both ends of the trip? Then yes, it's a frivolous reason.
There are other definitions as well. Do you mean one of them?
If you want everyone to have a 99% chance of finding free parking, because you like driving better than walking, then why can't I say that you're making a frivolous argument?
Under a recent agreement, the google buses will pay $1 per use of the public bus stops. On the one hand, this option is not available to the general public, only to large corporations with enough money. On the other hand, if the city strictly enforced the law, large corporations with enough money would just go purchase local businesses with commercial loading zones, and use those for the buses--not an ideal situation either (having commercial real-estate and loading zones tied up for transit).
Also, why the comparison of an "average person" to a private company? Surely the private citizens of San Francisco, as a whole, have invested far more in the city infrastructure than Google has.
My question was how much of San Francisco's street infrastructure - a different city and county - was supported by Google. Did Google pay "a lot more" than the citizens of the city, as SteveGerencser suggested?
The residents and businesses in SF pay about $1 billion in property taxes. How does that compare to specifically Google's contribution? Who pays more in payroll, corporate income, and gas taxes to San Francisco, Twitter or Google?
If the answer is Twitter, then shouldn't they have a bigger say than Google?
> I thought they didn't pay anything until this January
Now that I've pointed out three ways they pay for SF city infrastructure, you're moving the goalposts.
> Google is primarily located in Mountain View
But they still have thousands of desks in their San Francisco office space.
Also, every employee on those shuttles is either paying SF property tax or paying rent that, in part, goes to paying SF property tax. They also pay state and local sales taxes, which also go towards public infrastructure.
bizjournals.com says 2,500 seats, which is 2nd place after Salesforce at 4,000. Tied for 3rd is Lucasfilm and Twitter, with 1,500 each, and Zynga in 4th with 1,300.
(Take those numbers with a grain of salt. I see others say that Twitter has 2,000 employees in SF.)
Regardless, my questions stand: 1) why compare a company's taxes to an "average person"'s taxes, instead of to the citizenry as a whole, 2) just how much does Google bring into the city in direct taxes, compared to the private citizens? 3) is that sufficient compensation for how the company uses the street infrastructure?
Yes, of course the employees on those shuttles are paying taxes. The full analysis would need to look at who would living there if there were no buses, and the level of taxes they pay in that case.
For example, the buses are subsidized transport that provide an effective untaxable salary increase, which is a tax shift away from the city. Fuel cost alone is $10/day/vehicle, and TCO is $48 using AAA's estimate of $0.6/mile. SuperShuttle charges $17 to get to SFO, so $10/day is deliberately low-balling it.
This means that someone making $80K/year from Google/Mtn View, with subsidized transport, gets an effective $2,500+/year raise, and can outbid someone in the city making $81K/year. In which case, the city ends up with lower taxes.
I never said this wasn't complicated, only that there are reasonable arguments for why some people could consider the "buses are better than ..." thesis "having no sound basis (as in fact or law)".
I also agree with raldi that this line of reasoning is invalid, unless you want Wells Fargo to own & make most of the decisions in SF. (Most of the current SF infrastructure was financed by municipal bonds, many of which were funded by Wells and other Bay-Area financial institutions. My girlfriend used to be a bond-trader at Wells and specifically remembers buying the bonds used to fund construction of the new Bay Bridge.)
But in the U.S., jurisdiction matters a lot. For example, there is (apparently) a Google bus stop at the 18th and Dolores Streets in San Francisco. Dolores Street is a local street, which means it is the responsibility of the City of San Francisco. Maintenance of that street is thus paid for primarily with local and fees taxes collected within the City. Specifically property taxes, business license taxes, local sales taxes, and charges for local services. None of the taxes that you mentioned Google paying would directly fund the maintenance of Dolores Street.
Google does pay some of these local taxes, because they have a small office in San Francisco. But the purpose of these shuttles is primarily to transport people outside of San Francisco. It's the City of Mountain View that benefits (from a tax perspective) from these shuttles. That disconnect is at the heart of the complaint: that San Francisco taxpayers are shouldering the burden, while not accruing the benefits.
350,000 sqft is not small.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/07/google-...
It's small relative to the number of people who commute from SF to Google by private bus. ("more than 3,500" in 2012, says http://www.sfbg.com/2012/04/18/private-bus-problem; I can't find newer numbers in all the noise, but it seems that more commute to MV than work in the SF office.)
It's small relative to the market. That is, there's some 84 million sq. ft. of office space in SF. https://www.cassidyturley.com/DesktopModules/CassidyTurley/D... . The vacancy rate is 8%. So Google has under 0.5% of the occupied office space in SF.
To double check, the biggest employers are the city/county (25,000), UCSF (20,000), Wells-Fargo (8,200), SF school district (8,200), and Gap (6,000). See http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/01/top-5-l... . The Wells Fargo Bank headquarters building alone is 640,000 sq. ft.
I agree that it's mid-size were it a company primarily based in SF, but for most of the relevant metrics, it's small.
And dont forget its the bus riders taxes that help pay for those roads too.
You may object that those are "laws", and different from the views of private citizens in the local neighborhood. But even on that smaller scale, if a company wants to expand into a new building, it will need a building permit, which requires a public hearing. Private citizens have the right to attend the meeting and object or support the change. This is public input on the otherwise internal business decisions of the company, no?
A neighborhood can complain about commercial trucks going through a street which is a convenient shortcut for a company at the edge of town, but noisy and possibly dangerous to the people on the street. In response, the city might prohibit through truck traffic for that street, causing the company drivers to take a longer route.
Or the other way around, the city passed a law saying that alcohol could not be sold within distance X of a school, unless the parents of the school said otherwise. There was a 3 star restaurant just barely within distance X of my elementary school, who had to ask for, and got, permission to continue to serve alcohol with their meals.
There have always been tradeoffs in how to use shared public resources, so I don't understand why you say "That’s not how it works, it never has been."
In some sense you are right - I do argue that $GROUP = "the citizens" should always "be able to vote whether that private company should be able to do $THING or not." I don't think we should always do so, no, but that's not the issue.
Everything has good and bad in it. Even buses. There's always a tension. Sometimes there are mechanisms, like public input to planning decisions, which help reduce the tension. Sometimes there aren't. Tension rarely just disappears on its own.
Same song, different verse.
Consider, for example, the thesis behind "The High Cost of Free Parking." Here's a summary of the book: https://server1.tepper.cmu.edu/CMUPark/The-High-Cost-of-Free... but in short, there is an "oversupply of free parking" and "parking requirements increase the cost of housing, as well as goods and services."
Someone who believes that thesis is correct is likely to believe that the stated argument for long-distance buses from SF to Mt. View for Google is "frivolous" because it doesn't affect the underlying infrastructure issues. There aren't that many of these people, but they don't agree that it's "proving too much."
However, that thesis is not an objection to letting more people move in. Parking spaces take up space. They are required to exist because of zoning laws, so they can't be replaced by housing. Someone who is against abundant free or subsidized parking in urban areas can still be for more population. It's just that the new residents don't have the economic disincentives to walk, bike, rollerblade, etc. or take mass transit.
Who wants socialized central planning for parking - let the free market decide! ;)
For instance, who blockades a bus, commits violence on the riders and fakes a scene as a rider (pretending to be an entitled Google employee and yelling out the window while having it filmed)? Not somebody annoyed at a bus stop.
It all smells like protester-chic, finding something semiplausible to complain about then faking a protest. They didn't have drones in their neighborhood, but hey! how about the Google busses?
So, #2, the preference is to have no reason to move into the neighborhood? Somebody else would have lived there. That's a baffling argument.
#3 is the fault of the residents, not Google. Maybe its the point of the fake protests, to bring up this issue and make it newsworthy, I don't know. But its not SF's business to change the zoning laws of other cities. So no they don't have a way to 'push back' and rightly so.
I listed three that I considered to be reasonable in that context. They have come up in various discussions I've read about the situation.
I fully realize that my view of "reasonable" is not universally shared. For one, I'm one of those people who think that commuting is a waste of my life, even with on-board wifi. My 10 minute drive from Mt. View to Palo Alto was about the limit of what I wanted to do. (My next job was a joy, at 6 minutes. It then became a horrid 20 minutes, until I complained enough to get my own parking garage space, saving 6 minutes of walking from the city lot.)
Then again, your objection to perceived protester-chic smell is also not universally shared.
Anyway, could you explain your objection to #2? I was objecting to the premise. If the goal is to "get dozens of cars off the road and allow each passenger to reclaim ten working hours as week", then the full analysis would need to look at the people who would have lived there had there not been the private buses. Hypothetically speaking, their commutes could have been shorter and using city buses, bicycles, or walking. Thus, long-distance private buses in that situation does not achieve the purported goal.
I have not done this analysis, nor do I know if one exists, but it's not clearly unreasonable, and thus is a valid reason to classify the private bus system as "frivolous."
I mostly agree with you on #3. That is, after all, my point. If the goal is to "get dozens of cars ...", then funding a private bus system, which is an expensive technical fix to a political problem, is "frivolous" to someone who wants to address the actual underlying social problem, which is the opposition to change away from traditional suburban zoning for those cities. In that case, the inability to push back politically expresses itself as protest.
In this view, it's the fault of Google's for not pushing for more medium density housing in Mountain View and its immediate neighbor cities. For business reasons, I can understand why they want to stay on the good side of the city council, who are in turn guided by their constituents, who mostly have single family detached housing and want to keep their neighborhoods unchanged. In this view, Google is doing the politically expedient thing, not the socially correct thing.
In short, read the article -- lots of sides to the story: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-g...
They're the torchbearers for the lawlessness and thuggery of the late-'60s "student revolutions" etc.
I don't know how it is in California, but in Ontario privatized buses can only travel on certain roads.
Democratic decision making is useful for big picture stuff (like choosing representatives for government). Its actually dysfunctionally terrible for small scale stuff. You can't put literally everything to a vote. If you do, then nothing happens.
Why should all systems be designed for growth?
Why did you chose to use an extreme as contrast? That's not the only alternative.
What about if they are replaced with a low-rise, or a mid-rise? These offer higher density than row houses but without the same visual impact as a high rise. Some in Manhattan love their 5-story brownstones. I lived in a city with lots of 4- and 5- story buildings, and think that - if well designed - they have a very nice feel to them.
As to the "why", our economics system says that (in general) when there is demand either prices go up or supply expands. If the prices go up, then people who can't afford the new prices must move.
Our primary economics system isn't really designed with people's emotions in mind, so this can cause stress and turmoil, leading even to protests and violence. One fix is to enforce rent controls, which leads to a different set of issues.
If we don't want to force people to move, then we either must make SF less attractive ("protests and violence" can help!) in order to reduce demand, or build new housing to increase the supply.
Not all systems are designed for growth. As a famous example (at least for beer aficionados) the Trappists breweries only serve the purpose of supporting their monastic way of life. The prices aren't raised to match demand, so some people end up buying and reselling the beer for a much higher price. As a remedy, the monks limit how much a single person can buy in a period of time.
There are other economics models which may fit SF better. For example, in the co-op system, the residents own a share of the organization which owns the row houses, or the apartment. They can decide as a whole if they want to, for example, add a new floor to the building or gut and replace the building. Because it's a larger organization, with its own financials, it can afford to take on a larger task like that. The residents would want this because the larger number of people in the building would likely lead to a lower rent. While with single family ownership it's a lot harder to make this decision.
This is a very different model than SF's row houses. I'm curious about how the choice of economic model affects how a city might transform itself, but can't do more than hypothesize about it like I just did.
I'll tell you how the city will densify: very slowly. The 5-story apartment blocks in mission Bay will gentrify in 20-30 years, and by then decay and/or earthquake will take care of the nice neighborhoods we have now.
I'll end with another question: what is so wrong (I know it's unamerican, but I mean logically and morally wrong) with telling rich employees of faraway companies that others are currently living in and enjoying the neighborhoods that they covet, so they shouldn't move there (by upbidding rents and sales) even if their company provides them the transportation (and saying the company is wrong--or misguided if facesaving is required--for doing so)?
What you see reveals more a lack in my understanding. No, I have no idea how a co-op system would happen. I also have no idea how it happened in the places where it did happen. Researching now, I found http://www.academia.edu/3393216/Gentrification_-_gentle_or_t... which talks about city efforts to promote a co-op housing system. While it worked, it also encouraged the city's efforts to bring in an "economically sustainable population", which excludes the politically and economically less powerful who were able to afford the area before. BTW, there doesn't appear to be a grand architect for this system.
Perhaps you're right, and Haussmann's authoritarian style, or great destruction, are the only ways to get major changes to a city's infrastructure. Certainly though there is much I don't like about the efforts of the American Haussmann, Robert Moses. But many cities have transformed over time, and not all used this imperious style.
Urban evolution is a topic I know little about, but also one where there are many strong feelings and few certainties. I know some of my own feelings: 1) commuting is a waste of human time, 2) the price of petroleum does not reflect its true cost, 3) company subsidies for things like commuting, meals, laundry services, etc. should be counted as personal income, rather than a business expense (at time I think that personal frequent flier miles for business travel should be the same), 4) car travel is dangerous and should not be promoted over other means, and 5) I prefer the "cuddly" Nordic model of capitalism over the "cut-throat" free market capitalism (and think that the Nordic countries have been moving too much in recent years towards equating everything in market terms).
With those in mind, what's "wrong" is a confluence of several factors. The transportation subsidizes should be included as part of the overall employee salary (SF's payroll tax on companies helps unbalance this a bit more), the Bay Area has no well integrated large scale mass transit system (thus Google et al. have a disproportionate influence on precisely which regions will be impacted by their specific choice of transportation routes), and 3) housing is too closely coupled to free market rates, so short term economic booms may break up community and emotional ties that take decades to establish (replacing it certainly with a different set of community and emotional ties, but see "cuddly").