It is entirely unclear what they are protesting, other than 'not working at Google.'
The alleged trespass of using 'public infrastructure for private profit' is unsupported. People pick up and drop off people at the sidewalk (required, no stopping in the middle of the street).
The staged appearance of a guy who is a union organizer (reported elsewhere) added a bit of melodrama.
Looking at the action critically, what is to be gained by calling attention to Google, Facebook, and others providing their own bus fleets?
"The alleged trespass of using 'public infrastructure for private profit' is unsupported. People pick up and drop off people at the sidewalk (required, no stopping in the middle of the street)."
I'm sorry but this is simply wrong. If you tried to pick up and drop off someone in a bus stop everyday, you would get ticketed for it. These buses do not. If you need to make things up to support these people it kind of worries me, especially when you seem to be mocking their opponents. I'm all for criticizing these protestors for certain things, but not so much for made up things.
Muni buses now have cameras and there is a team which looks through all the footage spotting violations, even parking violations, and then they issue tickets.
The city should have enforced the traffic laws right from the start and not allowed these corporate shuttles to fester and develop into a now much bigger problem.
The article says that the city is working on a permitting system, and that one does not currently exist. Which means that these buses are parking illegally everyday and instead of fining them, the city is coming up with a plan to accommodate them. Think they would do that for your parking tickets?
I don't get the objection. It seems to me that while the buses may cause disturbances to transit, they're better than the alternative of having a bunch of private cars on the road.
Think they would do that for your parking tickets?
If those tickets were for behaviors that are actually socially beneficial, shouldn't they? And if they wouldn't anyway, how is it Google's fault?
I mean, how much do you supporters of the google buses want to grasp at straws? It just becomes a series of:
-make argument.
-have someone explain why your argument is wrong.
-make up new argument, disregard whether it is remotely related to the original point you made. Just grasp at straws to seem "right".
I mean, we start with "its not like the buses are doing something illegal" to which the answer is "yes, they certainly are" and then it turns to this assumption that every google employee would drive otherwise, ignoring that many employees moved to these bus stop locations specifically for the buses, or the fact that there is a train that runs from SF to Mountain view. But yeah, these buses should be able to do whatever illegal behavior they want because of the next strawman i've yet to anticipate you all making up...
It's Google's fault because they did not get permission first before using public Muni stops to pick up and drop off passengers. Anybody else doing it would be ticketed and prosecuted for repeat violations.
To anybody who wants to defend Google, think about this - what next? Maybe Google should buy up whole city blocks, demolish them, and build residential apartments for their employees? To hell with eviction laws, zoning laws, right?
Probably because the city realises that having companies bus their employees around is a shitload better than having 20 extra individual cars on the roads?
The buses likely aren't loaded to maximum capacity are they? They also have to drive slightly extra. A car driver would go in a straight line to work, whereas the bus has to travel to all the different bus stops first.
Seems scalable. If we can come up with a hypothetical where companies are actually taking some cars off the road, just let them do illegal stuff in return.
That's because they're not really protesting about the buses using public stops. What they're really protesting is gentrification -- a decreasing amount of affordable housing in the city. Which is another way of saying they are protesting their own collective refusal to add higher density housing in the city.
The picture they took is of the MUNI stop where my 48 bus used to stop, and yes, the Google bus would actually block out the MUNI busses.
I haven't experienced it anywhere else though. I think this is basically just a highly visible spot for these buses, and they do interrupt MUNI service during morning traffic. Though I'm not sure they interrupt service any more than any other piece of traffic..
My guess is that the protests are targeted more generally at gentrification. People of privilege moving to the Mission, mostly ignoring the culture of the neighborhood and it's long-time residents, fueling out of control rent increases, slowly destroying a cultural landmark.
I suspect the damage has more to do with CA property tax and SF's NIMBy zoning laws than silicon valley bussing, but they do have a point that it's a real problem. Not sure what the solution is. This protest doesn't seem to be it, but I applaud them for taking a MVP stab at it. Time to iterate now, protesters!
There is no solution to it, all big cities that I am aware of have a cycle of gentrification of urban renewal. To think SF is some special snowflake where it wouldn't happen is naive, to think that it wouldn't happen in SF when housing is so constrained and the economy is booming is just crazy.
>People of privilege moving to the Mission, mostly ignoring the culture of the neighborhood and it's long-time residents, fueling out of control rent increases, slowly destroying a cultural landmark.
I dunno, just peering at the crime maps for the Mission[1]...Gentrification isn't the worst thing that could happen to the place. Not gentrifying probably is.
This. The Mission is a giant game of musical chairs, and it's weird how anyone thinks the people who have only been there since the 1950s deserve to have it forever.
Looking at the action critically, what is to be gained by calling attention to Google, Facebook, and others providing their own bus fleets?
A bus fleet that works for everybody? You know, the kind of public transportation that is common in industrialized countries that have their act together when it comes to the provision of public services.
As with government-run education, SF's problems with government-run transportation aren't a lack of funding. I imagine you'd find we spend just as much per capita on our mass transit systems as other industrialized countries. Our government institutions just aren't very well-run.
Doesn't that pre-suppose that there would exist a 'public' bus fleet that went between San Francisco and Mountain View (or Menlo Park, or Palo Alto, etc). There are at least three different transit districts covering that region.
Now if you want to argue that we should combine all of the bus transport services, from San Rafael to Morgan Hill, and from Morgan Hill to Livermore into a single huge transportation system (all of those places are served by Gbus and presumably the other guys as well). That is a different conversation (and probably worth having)
That's a zero-sum fallacy. One person being better off doesn't make everyone else worse off. In any case you can make the same argument against any other private service ever.
I don't think this is an actual issue though. The vast majority of people are not using private buses. Even if they were. And if they were, well there would be a decent private system in place and it still wouldn't be such an issue.
Hah, so the woeful state of the Bay Area's public transport system is the result of private buses being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Surely the issue is a bit deeper than that.
Had similar reflex. The SF way seemed very strange to me as an outsider and it would almost appear like the primary 'benefactor' of these confrontations are the city governance who are paid by tax payers to make sure the housing supplies are sufficient and public transportation are efficient.
If Gmail can't keep up with demand and the SF city council just opened 1000 new account, one for each city employee, and Gmail speed slowed to a crawl, would Google and the public say "aha! they're using all the resources, let's protest"?
Somebody wants a piece of the political action. So there will be lots of hoopla, then a big check gets written to a pet PAC, then it all goes away -- until it's time to pay up again.
What I believe is implied is that since Google employees pay more in taxes than the average bloke, they are due more of that public infrastructure (privileged access to bus lanes, in this situation) — which is not how things work.
Nobody implied that, he was simply saying that it's good we have high income residents in the area, since they contribute significantly to the local tax revenue.
As the article states, gentrification and "income inequality" (lol?) were the main reasons for these protestors surrounding the Google bus. I'm sure Google bus is an inconvenience for other busses but that wasn't why these people were protesting.
I recognize it's a real thing I just can't stand the mindset that such a word creates. If income/money is an issue for you, go out and do something to change that, don't sit around and be toxic against people that aren't having income issues.
What do you mean by "be toxic"? And how do you expect people to work against income inequality without calling it what it is?
Your comment ("lol income inequality") is dripping in upper-class privilege, as if you're the one suffering when poor people bring up things like the disappearing middle class & tax breaks for the wealthy -- because they're being "toxic".
One of the problems people face is that those with weaker employment prospects in the first place often have other issues which screw them out of reasonable employment and leave them worse off in terms of pursuing anything better. Anyone who has been subject to factory life (or equivalent employment) knows that no sane person could work a job like that for their entire life.
You're not completely wrong: many of these people have made mistakes, but the nature of how those mistakes get compounded can pretty thoroughly screw someone who was born with a bit of a handicap and who got off to a bad start.
So while it is possible to overcome these setbacks (and people should be encouraged to do so), it's not something one should be glib about.
The problem is not that Google, Facebook, and others are "solving a problem" by providing these bus fleets. They are offering jobs on the peninsula paying more than jobs tend to pay in SF [because SF companies have to pay more for rent and ACTUALLY PAY THEIR FUCKING PAYROLL TAXES TO PAY TO MAINTAIN THE BUS STOPS], with a greater likelihood of becoming filthy rich, to people largely moving from other parts of the country and/or world, with the promise that they can work in one community and live in another.
When such employees are not being recruited from other places, they are being recruited from SF. Google and Facebook have a problem that their offices are in FUCKING BORING monoculture suburbs which young, smart, energetic people do not typically want to live in. And their big, monolithic companies aren't a great match for the culture of SF, though companies like Twitter have been trying to make it work by insisting that SF is doomed without them.
One has to ask, why do people want to live in SF rather than Mountain View or Palo Alto? Is it because those places are FUCKING BORING?
Yes. And they are not FUCKING BORING because they lack craft cocktail places, they have a monoculture that is unattractive to people accustomed to diversity.
That is why these buses are gross, and that is why it is gross that people who just recently moved to SF after rents roughly doubled think that people should just get a better job if they want to live here, because who ever lived in SF except rich people?
How can someone who moved here as a student and began trying to build a life for themselves in the bay area ever fit without basically letting Larry, Sergei, and Zuck declare the sort of job that people who live in SF can have?
How can people ever own a home in this city if the only way is by being [un]lucky and boring enough to be at a behemoth company or a random startup that couldn't easily be predicted to hit, and take a bunch of stock away?
Also, if SF becomes a place where most people who can afford to live here have to work in another city, it will be largely devoid of employed people during the day. There will be jobs serving coffee in the morning, dinner in the evening, mostly stocked by people who live in the east bay, and we're likely to see some of the crime problems that Oakland has which I believe directly have to do with this, specifically that lots of people who pay rent and mortages in Oakland have to go to another city to do so, on woefully overloaded transit systems that are struggling for funding, leaving the city largely full of unemployed people and violent police officers during the day.
SF is an amazing place and I can't imagine why anyone would only want to work here during the first and last hours of the day, when I do my best to be here as many hours of the day as possible, though I can't afford to live here.
Plus a lot of these assholes don't even like SF. It's like a fancy fucking pair of shoes for them to brag about.
Think about some of the things you've said in the emotion of the moment:
"How can someone who moved here as a student and began trying to build a life for themselves in the bay area ever fit without basically letting Larry, Sergei, and Zuck declare the sort of job that people who live in SF can have?"
When I moved here, those guys were in Jr High probably telling poor taste jokes. So 10 - 15 years from now they may have no say at all in what job you want.
"How can people ever own a home in this city if the only way is by being [un]lucky and boring enough to be at a behemoth company or a random startup that couldn't easily be predicted to hit, and take a bunch of stock away?"
My wife and I bought a home in 1985. We were leveraged to the hilt (loans from the seller, the bank, her parents, and our savings). It wasn't "easy", I didn't see any current run movies, I rarely went out to lunch, but we were focused on getting into the housing market as soon as we could. Over the years I've watched all of my friends buy houses.
They were able to do that because they both saved when they needed too and they benefited from the success of the companies they worked for. Few were made 'rich' by startups, most by putting in their hours at HP or Sun or Oracle, saving money, buying their own company's stock with the employee stock program. Most were married or in committed relationships (it really correlates strongly with house ownership if you can split your living expenses with another person).
The theme in your comment is "I want what I want RIGHT NOW!" but life isn't like that. It plays out over weeks and months and years. Trust me when I tell you that if you did get what everything you wanted without effort, without time, without failure. You would hate it, worse you might despise yourself for having it.
If you evaluate your life based on the lives of others, you won't ever be happy.
There seems to be a lot of anger in your comment, but it all seems to boil down to "my reasons for living in San Francisco are more valid than others'".
The anger is that I'm ashamed to be associated with most people in the tech community lately, wherever I can live, and that so many people who just moved to the bay area think they know so much about how they are obviously not impacting it negatively.
People are becoming bigoted against tech folks and it's not a healthy change for this community, but I can't blame them, and frankly most of the time lately I don't want anything to do with people on either side of the polarized debate.
But the discussion is about how Google and whoever are "solving problems" that would be created by people driving private vehicles when in fact they are commonly recruiting people to work in Mountain View by dangling the ability to live in SF in front of them, which is damaging to the entire community as a whole, from Mountain View to SF to Oakland to Berkeley to wherever.
Also I do not live in SF, FYI, I used to, until my own fucking industry priced me out, simultaneously making it impossible to run a small business here providing tech services as I did for many years.
I came to SF to have it change me, but so many people are intent upon changing it, with complete disregard for how the tech industry left the city a husk after the dot-bomb.
I learned a lot of tough lessons about what makes SF SF and how to play harmoniously with that and most people are just spewing entitlement about how it doesn't matter that they are PERMANENTLY driving the cost of living up due to their TEMPORARY ability to make more money.
The truth is that real estate speculators are profiting off people on both sides of the debate.
People are paying twice the rent that would have been paid a few years ago and in many cases not getting better services.
I just don't feel sorry for a few people who got stuck on a bus. Protests are about showing that you can't change business as usual without interfering in it.
It's not fragility which leads to my offense. I embrace disagreement and figure we would all be better off if there was more of it… but I do not embrace vitriol. There's a toxin in modern culture that leads too many towards this type of emotional nonsense which drives people apart. 'FUCKING BORING' is not a phrase you use when you respect the parties you disagree with, and without that respect moving forward is damn near impossible.
It is a bad thing when such disrespect becomes acceptable in a community.
I thoroughly enjoy living in Mountain View, which is preposterously diverse compared to 99.9% of the country. Anyway, like many other things in life, it's all about what you do with it. Someone living in Antarctica might have some cause to blame their boredom on their surroundings, but generally if someone claims their life is boring because the city they live in is boring, the problem is with them and not the city.
The alleged trespass of using 'public infrastructure for private profit' is unsupported. People pick up and drop off people at the sidewalk (required, no stopping in the middle of the street).
The staged appearance of a guy who is a union organizer (reported elsewhere) added a bit of melodrama.
Looking at the action critically, what is to be gained by calling attention to Google, Facebook, and others providing their own bus fleets?