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.
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.
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.
"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
Overseen by the city. Huh. Wonder what that structure looks like.
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 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.
Muni is terrible. Full stop.
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.
Public services should be provided by the government. For someone who lives in a country with a NHS, I think you would realize that.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes, there's another private company which does sell generic bus passes. They tend to be extortionately expensive, though.
Sure you can -- its called a grant. Private entities can issue grants with public entities as the recipients -- it happens all the time.