Google's new bus is for the people | Hacker News Reader

Google's new bus is for the people

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41 pointssbilstein61 comments

Isn't this the city's job? I actually think it's kind of creepy that Corporations are taking the role of the City. The general idea is the City collects taxes and uses those to provide services like buses.

Well yes, but Mountain View isn't exactly good at anything like that.

In my anecdotal experience, it seems like at least a few Bay Area cities have a hard time doing that properly. Public transit is terrible here. I'm excited at the prospect of a private company giving it a try as a free service to the public. Of course, it's not pure altruism, there are PR motivations. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

My general impression is not that cities have a hard time doing public transit properly. It's that the politics of it make good public transit damn near impossible. Exclusive bedroom communities don't want to be accessible to carless commuters and Muni is impossible to improve because everything is a racist plot against minorities.

Good public transit is not impossible. It's done in other cities. There's just something about the political process of San Francisco, for example, that makes it difficult to improve MUNI.

In political terms, I suspect perfect has become the enemy of good.

The problem isn't really with public transit, it's with traffic and hipsters on their bikes in the middle of the road.

Almost the entire US has a problem doing public transit properly. They are a variety of reasons, but it mostly boils down to government policies that favor private vehicles and suburban sprawl.

> Public transit is terrible here

It sounds like you've never traveled outside the bay area. Muni + BART + Caltrain is far more than most cities have. What other cities have a system like Caltrain?

I'm not saying it's perfect, far from that. There are plenty of issues, especially with Muni. But it's not terrible.

> It sounds like you've never traveled outside the bay area.

It seems to me that many urban areas in the US have better public transit than the Bay Area, and, even moreso, places in the developed world outside of the US tend to be better than the US.

Its true that the Bay Area's public transit is better than pretty much anywhere else in California, but that seems to be setting the bar low enough that you can trip over it.

Agreed. Many cities on the East Coast have a Caltrain like system in the Amtrak Acela trains. DC, ATL, NYC, Baltimore all crush the system here.

Muni is terrible. Full stop.

> It sounds like you've never traveled outside the bay area.

Or that cmelbye has traveled outside the US.

> There are plenty of issues, especially with Muni. But it's not terrible.

I agree it's not as horrible as people make it out to be, but it is still in a pretty sad state. I've tried moving exclusively with public transport for the last month, but far too many times the Muni bus that was supposed to come just didn't for more than an hour, even though the sign said it would come 3 times in that time. And that's within SF, which is miles better than the rest of the bay area.

> Isn't this the city's job? I actually think it's kind of creepy that Corporations are taking the role of the City. The general idea is the City collects taxes and uses those to provide services like buses.

The article seems to indicate that city is operating them and Google is funding them (EDIT: see the chain of replies, its a bit different structure; I don't think that invalidates the following point, however); while I don't think that it should be the exclusive means, I don't see why you wouldn't want to accept that one way that new public services might be piloted is by having an interested private party who has the funds and thinks the service would be valuable simply contribute support for the service for the period of the pilot project, which is what is happening here.

I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation. To my reading, the article implies the buses are operated by Google.

According to the FAQ [1] you're both wrong :)

"Google has contracted with ALTRANS ... to manage the daily operations and customer service needs for the Mountain View Community Shuttle."

[1] http://www.mountainview.gov/depts/pw/community_shuttle.asp

Thank you!

Overseen by the city. Huh. Wonder what that structure looks like.

In most of the UK, buses are operated by private corps. It's actually fairly annoying as it means a ticket for one bus doesn't work in another, and there is no way to get a generic bus pass... but I don't see why it shouldn't be this way, to be honest.

In switzerland the GA (https://www.sbb.ch/en/travelcards-and-tickets/railpasses/ga....) is valid on most public transportation, including those which are partially or completely private. And the card gives you reduced fare on many of the ski/mountain lifts. Also, I can buy a ticket for most of the participating companies with a single iPhone app (the 'SBB Mobile' app). The SBB btw is state owned.

In Germany there are different companies operating trains, which is mostly abstracted away from the customer, so tickets are valid on different trains from different companies and can be bought at the same place most of the time. The intentions of this system are good and even if DB bullies its smaller competitors i like the concept. But much like in software, it gets messy, when the abstraction breaks and there is an exception to the rule. Users not knowing the underlying system get confused.

The SBB enjoys a perfect image here. I rose up near the border to Basel, where local trains are operated by the SBB. People mention all the time, how evil Die Bahn is, how perfect it once was, what terrible mistake it was to privatize it and how perfect the state owned SBB is.

Anecdotally i once went from Frankfurt to Milano by train. It arrived in Basel 20 minutes late, went through Switzerland without any incident, arrived in Italy, got stuck in a tunnel for an hour and had to change directions back to Switzerland. The train before us had broke down directly after the Italian border. Was glad to see my prejudices satisfied.

>but I don't see why it shouldn't be this way, to be honest.

Because essential public services shouldn't be reliant on the whim of a company.

This is why we have taxes. If the city doesn't have enough money to be funding such services, it should perhaps look in to why Google pays so little tax.

Because essential public services shouldn't be reliant on the whim of a company.

I'm confused. I'm assuming that the UK uses tax money to hire private companies to provide the transit services. The public services aren't at the whim of a company, they are just provided by a company.

Exactly, and companies are compelled by law to pay the taxes, as compared to companies providing these services out of good corporate citizenship.

Because this is a 2-year pilot program. What happens when after people grow reliant on it, the city buses fall into disuse and disrepair, and then Google decides they don't want to continue it?

Public services should be provided by the government. For someone who lives in a country with a NHS, I think you would realize that.

Governments do pilot programs as well. What happens at the end is the government decides if it wants to continue it. With a privately funded pilot program, nothing stops the city from stepping in if the private sponsor steps out and the value to the public has been demonstrated.

> there is no way to get a generic bus pass

Sometimes, there's another private company which does sell generic bus passes. They tend to be extortionately expensive, though.

This is a widespread problem. As conservatives, many of them wealthy, push for a reduction in government power,[1] that makes the wealthy relatively more powerful.

A similar point was raised about a park in NYC being financed by a wealthy citizen. Do citizens get an equal say in its design, location, rules, etc.? It is literally undemocratic to allocate that power to those with more money. The same applies to funding for scientific research, and more. We become more and more dependent on these people and their influence grows.

That doesn't mean all charity by the wealthy is bad or even ill-intended, it means that reducing our government's power doesn't eliminate the power, it just hands it to another group.

[1] Off-topic: Note that a certain group of conservatives (I'm not sure "Tea Party" corresponds exactly) also push to reduce the power of other competing groups, including unions, the media, "liberals", voters in poor districts, etc. They make arguments for each, but follow the money and power: It leaves business alone on the political battlefield.

But if I want more buses, I can't just give the money to the city. They'd have to make some kind of contorted tax category that only applies to me so they can take my money. That's assuming I can convince them to spend my money on the buses instead of some other project.

> But if I want more buses, I can't just give the money to the city.

Sure you can -- its called a grant. Private entities can issue grants with public entities as the recipients -- it happens all the time.

Huh, that's cool. But since Google is already running buses, how does interposing the city make tings better?

Interesting that's why cities like HOAs so much - they provide some of the services which would otherwise be provided by the city. Things like slow plowing, lighting, garbage pickup, and maintenance of shared areas (which would otherwise be public areas). Yet they still collect taxes from them.

I'd guess that the problem is that multiple cities are involved, and they suck at cooperating amongst themselves.

I'd be pretty disappointed in El Goog, if they weren't taking this opportunity to learn something about providing public transit service--with an eye toward making public transit better.

In transportation planning, we sometimes differentiate between "fixed route" (a.k.a. the busses and trains you're accustomed to) and other specialty forms of public transit that often serve some particular demographic in a more flexible manner. Now, think about Google's self-driving cars for a minute here. What are the big challenges? Well, it appears Google needs to have a LOT of data about the rights-of-way that they drive. New and novel driving environments are handled by way of "pull over and stop."

Could Google perchance see some value in pursuing the "fixed route transit" market? Oh my yes. It's a perfect use-case for their technology more or less as it exists today.

Further, let's think about the economics. It is a fact that labor costs are typically the greatest single cost when providing public transit in the developed world. Busses are relatively cheap compared to the drivers. See where this is going?

Transit typically doesn't manage farebox cost recovery by quite a wide margin (cars don't internalize nearly all their costs either, but that's another story). A lot--enough to have an enormous impact on policy--of transit funding in the US comes from the federal government. Transportation is the second largest appropriations package Congress passes after military, and there is typically a big fight over how much will be allocated to public transit. This tends to break down along party lines as you'd expect: godless, commie pinko scum want public transit; fascist plutocratic narcissists don't.

I can just imagine the appropriations discussions now: Google announces self-driving bus and all of a sudden Republicans have a means by which they can support public transit--provided in large part by private industry--and that hurts a big segment of organized labor in the process (bonus?). And, of course if there is an upset in Congress, selling improved public transit to democrats isn't hard either.

I like that there are good paying jobs for bus drivers currently, but I like good public transit more. So I'm pretty bullish about Google getting into this game... assuming they're getting into the game, which they should be.

Google, if you're getting into this game and looking for transportation planners to shower with money and hot lunches, this humble PhD student bicycles past your Seattle offices daily. Just sayin' ;-)

"It is a fact that labor costs are typically the greatest single cost when providing public transit in the developed world."

Labor costs include maintenance and administration. It's possible that "Busses are relatively cheap compared to the drivers" still holds but I hope you have considered it specifically rather than inferring it from the content of your preceding sentence.

> Labor costs include maintenance and administration.

Yes.

> It's possible that "Busses are relatively cheap compared to the drivers" still holds

Yes. Indeed it does; drivers don't come cheap.

> I hope you have considered it specifically rather than inferring it from the content of your preceding sentence.

Fear not; I have!

Eh, you know, I'm a bit ambivalent about this. On the one hand it sounds nice, on the other it's privatization of a public good.

Maybe Googs will make the system more efficient, I don't know, but it looks a bit like biting away at the responsibility of government. We're going in the other direction with respect to healthcare. Why go towards privatization in this case? What do we privatize next, road maintenance?

Certainly Google could make the court system more efficient, should we let them have a hand at it too?

To be clear it's not the privatization that I'm hot for, it's the cheaper provision of more transit service. That's just one narrative that I think might be compelling the traditional transit opposition. And of course privatization isn't a foregone conclusion there either. Google could simply sell to transit agencies. There are other aspects of fleet management that they might simply not want to get into.

I fully expect to see this dismissed as a stunt that abuses public transit and hurts the poor sometime in the next hour.

Of course it's a stunt. Google gets some good publicity and if people make use of it it will be harder to bash them. It's good for the people but it's still a stunt - Google doesn't just give out buses for no reason :) Nobody does.

Also, let's face it, "the people" in this case are most probably employees of other tech companies in the area. It's not like this is going to improve the life of the average, non-SV-employed, citizen.

I take it you're not very familiar with Mountain View's geography. Google and the vast majority of other SV companies there are to the north of the 101, which is already well served by existing shuttles, and where the bus (rightly) only barely ventures. Most of the route connects shopping centres, the Caltrain station, the hospital etc, which is very useful for eg. senior citizens who can't drive.

Thanks for the clarification. I've only used the Google shuttle going from Caltrain to Charleston/Googleplex, and only on occasion (I work mostly from a different Google office so I go to MTV rarely.)

The reason I'm personally excited by this is because SV corporations often seem to wash their hands about any significant civic output (other than occasional donations to non-profits) because it should be the responsibility of the government. In the world we inhabit, where companies in some ways can exert much greater power locally (in some specific ways) than a local government can, they should step up and use some of that power to help the general good.

Companies like Google can at the drop of hat move tens of thousands of works into a municipality; if they're choosing to exercise that right they should think about other ways they can make that change responsibly.

Personally, I view this as symptomatic of the NIMBY-ism that pervades SV and SF. Both want all the money that comes from tech and can be relied upon to want the people to go somewhere else.

That a company has to pick up the "civic output" slack says a great deal about the failings of Mountain View and its voters.

I, for one, welcome our new feudal corporate overlords. But seriously, it's great that Google is doing this. I just wish they didn't have to.

> corporations often seem to wash their hands about any significant civic output because it should be the responsibility of the government

Public transit is the responsibility of the government. If you want these companies to contribute more, raise taxes.

Raising taxes is inefficient and indirect. By providing buses, Google (et al.) can quickly address a need in the community. And they don't need to use other people's money to do it.

> Google (et al.) can quickly address a need in the community.

And therein lies the problem. Who are "et al." and "the community"? How much does each of them pay? Where do the buses go? Who's allowed to use them, and how do you keep people who aren't from doing so anyways?

It's almost like you need to create a decision-making body with the ability to raise and spend money, and make and enforce rules. An Alþing? Folkmoot? I'm sure we have a word for this.

The buses are already regulated by the city. The city doesn't need to own them.

This is a 2-year trial with an option for a 3rd.

I agree this is, overall, a good thing for the residents of MV, but it's not equivalent to county-wide transpiration services that spans cities and has been around for decades.

Interested to see if this improves things. Apple would be wise to fund or provide a similar service for Cupertino/Sunnyvale once their Campus2 goes online - can you imagine the amount of traffic congestion that will cause?

Google has no obligation to address any need. And when - surprise - they don't, people get all bent out of shape and protest for months until Google caves and buys some buses.

That's inefficient.

> "They're [Google] responsible for a lot of the pain the area is feeling," said newly inaugurated City Councilman Ken Rosenberg

Can anyone explain this? What "pain" in the area is Google responsible for?

Primarily ludicrous housing prices, I presume. Although the city (and its residents) are IMHO equally responsible for approving every office development in sight while doing all they can to resist building new residential properties.

Just yesterday there where (here at HN) a couple of great articles about just how crazy is housing & real estate over the bay area...

The news hidden away at the end, about a bunch of SV companies getting together to operate a shared shuttle service, is arguably much more interesting. It's a huge waste to have each company operate buses for their own employees only: sharing there costs and making them open to all makes a lot more sense. Now if only they'd start doing this for SFO-MTV as well...

http://www.mvgo.org/maps-and-schedule.html

One thing that can make this difficult is a lot of company shuttles have corporate wifi on them and sometimes people even take meetings during the ride. Obviously this wouldn't work due to security/NDA reasons if you have employees from multiple companies on the same bus.

From Google shuttles you still need VPN, just the same as you need from a Starbucks. And a secure corporate laptop, of course.

It's considered very bad to talk in Google shuttles anyway, meetings or not, folks hate that.

Doesn't matter, people still do that, I always had teammates attending our morning sync-ups while on the bus :)

Apple prohibits most employees from working on their shuttles, interestingly enough -- too much risk that a fellow employee would see something they're not cleared for.

Perhaps the buses could have a few 2-4 person private booths, to support confidential discussions?

It's probably not so much news though since the Shoreline "tech campuses" shuttle up to Google, Intuit, LinkedIn etc was already a thing[1]; this replaces it.

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UZmmOAb...

Next they'll need a way to split the cost among companies. Then they'll want to move the buses off of city streets so they don't conflict with vehicle traffic. They could call it "Bay Area Rapid Transit" ;-).

Seriously, though, any step toward public mass transit rather than redundant company shuttles in the Bay Area is a good thing.

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