The topic was if there are any arguments where "a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week [can be] classified as frivolous."

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.