I get that they wouldn't be able to build their own little disneyworlds that way, but instead of having Google build an entire ecosystem, they could just have offices and people could just go downtown to eat, or not need laundry services because they don't lose 2 hours a day in a bus.
If offices were built closer to the city, they could be smaller but I'm fairly convinced most people would consider it an upgrade to quality of life in general.
When I did some work in Tokyo, going outside at lunch and just breathing some fresh air during the 10 minutes spent transiting really helped to refresh the mind.
I've never worked in Google-like environment, but the whole closed-off , prison-like state of the campus seems very off-putting. It's basically the business equivalent of gated communities with their own services, to the detriment of services shared with everyone. I can get why people can get mad.
Where is this prison like Google environment you're talking about?
What is this 'solution' solving exactly? These protests are targeting tech workers and tech companies because tech workers want to live in San Fran and thereby drive up the price of housing. How would that change if Google had offices in San Fran?!
The lack of an attractive neighborhood and/or housing near Google HQ is another component of this issue.
I find the protests highly misguided, generally.
So in this way a very remote campus IS a prison - you have no practical choice but to exist in that ecosystem.
To say nothing of the vastly greater transit service (though this is often overwhelmed and/or unreliable), and option to commute by other means (often bicycles).
I like the illusion of an escape hatch.
What were those people thinking? They're subtly but very clearly trying to intimidate that guy. This is like saying "We don't want the likes of you around here."
If those protesters really wanted to do something against surveillance and control they should hold those accountable who are responsible for the NSA disaster and things like Guantanamo. Instead, they chose to pick on an individual who isn't any more responsible for those issues than a factory worker producing weapons is for the war crimes committed with these weapons.
If they want to start a revolution they should be heading to Washington, D.C. instead of starting a petty revolt by bullying some guy who's neither responsible for the issues at hand nor for their own failures in life.
If gentrification helps driving people out of town who display such obnoxious behaviour then we can't have enough of it.
Yes, let's remove every current resident of SF by charging outrageous rent rates and only have rich Google engineers there. Because, that's why. There's no other place they can live, of course, right?
But don't complain then when they don't have anywhere to go for laundry, or the only coffee place is an overpriced Starbucks, or groceries are double what you pay somewhere else.
The only nexus between the story and Google's buses is Google. And if any one in the world is in a better position to spin a story, it wouor constitute an improbable event.
One thing I've done to try and give back is during the holiday season, create some care packages and hand them out to the homeless. Put together basic stuff like dental floss, razors, deodorant, hard candy, socks, pop-corn, etc in a zip-lock bag. As I walked around the city and saw homeless people, I would give them a bag. It was about $400 bucks and about 4 hours of time between two people to make 20 bags. All you have to do is hand them out as you're doing your daily things around the city. You would be surprised at how eloquent, smart, and appreciative some of the people on the street actually are. If you live in San Francisco, you _know_ you're going to run into someone homeless on any given day.
That being said, I realize that I'm not the regular San Francisco transplant and most Engineers can't logically rationalize giving something away for free to someone who has done "nothing" for them.
Next time I'd advise telling your story and avoid the temptation to smear an entire profession.
You're not the only engineer who feels this way. Thanks for your story and a great suggestion on how to help ourselves become better people through service to others.
Solving a technical problem gives me an ephemeral and fleeting feeling of elation, which I admit is nice. The positive feelings I get from assisting someone, however, persist throughout my lifetime.
Maybe Google should consider relocating to a military town in Texas. It seems there is a great convergence between Google's massive (and permanently growing) data collection and the total surveillance efforts of the government.
Even in this specific case, what's wrong with a corporation providing a mass transit option to their workers so they don't have to drive in and needlessly congest the roads and pollute the environment.
The companies aren't in downtown, they're out 40 miles away instead, so not paying local taxes or helping the local economy. Instead you just have the workers who basically just sleep in SF, paying property taxes but not even opting to using the public transportation to make it better.
> San Fran is powered by a real 21st century economy, which many other cities and countries are trying to recreate, and you still find something to complain about?
Based off of complaints from the tech community, it also seems to be a city with a lot of homelessness, really shitty public transportation, and dysfunctional regulations that end up causing rent to be even higher.
If you told anybody of a city where most of the world's innovation happen, you'd at least imagine a city with a functional system of mass transportation, but we can't seem to even get that right. San Fran should be the best city in the world.
The problem isn't that workers are living in the city, it's that they're not working there. People spend a lot of money where they end up working.
The employees live in the city.
>Based off of complaints from the tech community, it also seems to be a city with a lot of homelessness
None of that is caused by having Google in the area. This is a cultural and a government regulatory problem (municipal, and state and federal to lesser extent).
>The problem isn't that workers are living in the city, it's that they're not working there.
If you're an employee you spend money where you live, not where you work. It would be nice for San Fran if all engineers worked in San Fran as well, but you can't have everything. Plus it wouldn't be so nice for Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, etc. In fact, those municipalities have more to complain about since they can argue they are nothing more than commuter cities.
San Fran should count their blessings.
In the case of San Francisco, this is most definitely not the case. Downtown office space (especially in fashionable areas) is in high demand, rents are high, vacancies low.
Of course, the city is small enough that once you get outside the relatively small historic downtown (the Financial District) and the new downtown (SOMA), there is older and less-featured office space. Even this is under high demand.
And of course there's the push of office space into traditionally industrial areas such as Mission Bay (UCSF, Salesforce.com). These are almost suburban in their single-use planning presently, though that might change.
Though reachable via CalTrain, BART service favors downtown SF and the near SOMA neighborhoods.
And as I've said, the bus protests themselves are really asinine.
That's not what I meant. In the last twenty years, "the downtown" has been rediscovered in most North American cities as a place that people want to work AND live in. Contrast this to the 1950-1990 period in which the thing to do was to live in suburban neighborhoods and commute to work.
In the past, people would move to areas of high employment from areas of low employment, and new housing was built for the economic migrants - this is how cities expanded. Now, restrictions on building new accommodation entrench expensive neighbourhoods, and mean economic migrants can't move nearer to the employment. This leads to both a property bubble market and lower employment overall in the nation.
This was all proposed/explained in this article a few months ago:
"Stay Put, Young Man", http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november_december_...
(discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6563854 )
Private public transport can out compete public transport. But then school buses already do this as well (compared to Europe). Though I did commute using SF buses, and I fully understand why one would not prefer ones kids to travel on them, and even why one would prefer company buses.
As for rents, true, but can that not mostly be blamed on restrictive building regulations? Not so much with regards to standards as well with regards to limits to flats and highrise buildings. As there is an undisputed market demand for more housing in the bay-area.
Imho protesters are a tad misguided in who they are targeting.
Google's buses are solving more traffic problems in MountainView than San Francisco and relieving the congestion that most impacts commuters from San Francisco to their campus. If the service had to meet the requirements for public transportation i.e. meeting public needs, Google would shut it down.
...and be subsidized by tax-payers (because public transit systems in big cities don't break-even on fares - and forget about capital projects, those always need government funds). So this is still a net-win for the city. Googlers subsidize a system they don't use to get to work.
http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/Shuttles/Shoreline_Shuttle... (See the fine print at the bottom for details.)
It's potentially possible that a similar approach could be done for the SF to Mountain View commute, where Google subsidizes the creation of specific public bus lines in exchange for Google employees riding for free, or something like that. That would probably make the community happier about the bus issue, although it wouldn't fix the rent/displacement issue at all.
As for solving traffic problems, they don't necessarily do this more so than public transport would, if Googlers took that.
I think the issue is more that MUNI might have to think about introducing first-class busses, or first-class sections, or something like that. Because many people don't like sharing a bus bench with smelly (homeless) people.
protesters are misguided.
There is a legion of people making six figures, who together have a lot of power if they were to try to do something. I know disruption or even violence won't help at first, but it raises awareness. Maybe then people can start talking about intelligent measures to help those who need it.
I know if I was making 200k I'd be glad to be taxed an extra %, if that money was going towards help for people who've seen the place they lived their whole life slowly push them out, even though they're still needed there.
That's an important point. The big fishes need the small ones to survive, so there's demand, demand for people to do lesser paid activities and being in a constant struggle.
Then again I'm Swiss, and we have a history of voting ourselves tax raises, most of which goes to to the lower classes in some way. We live in a pretty happy and safe society though, infrastructures are great and affordable (mostly free if you don't make much). Seems to me like a good tradeoff for passing on a new TV or some designer clothes once a year.
My biggest concern - though it might just be because I was downtown, or that I've not spent much time in US cities - was the large number of homeless. Maybe the Googles and SalesForces in the area could help those guys out?
edit: Rent prices are crazy though.
The study is here: http://www.danielledai.com/academic/dai-weinzimmer-shuttles....
If those guys were going to a factory job, they'd be ok neighbors. But because they're going to a better job, it's cool to make trouble for them.
Bet they've been using Google Drive to organise.
Still, this is a really interesting clash of interests - between the infrastructural needs of potentially the great city of the 21st century, and its cultural roots. You need a mix of both - you can't just turn SF into a grid of mega-skyscrapers, although that'd open the gates for great companies, and real progress - you need something of the old sense of city and style - but you can't just pretend the city can still function and thrive as a museum of genteel Victorians and arts and craft co-ops, while the future brews down in San Jose... You need capacity and character to build the launchpad of the future.
