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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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...

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