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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

There is literally a railroad next to their campus. FB should be offering to pay to modernise it and build stations along it with Caltrain.

Trains are absolutely the solution to Bay Areas traffic problems. Even better, with WiFi/LTE and decent seating/tables (add first class if required for people willing to pay so you get a seat) you can get a lot of work done on the train to and from work.

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Existing passenger train service in the Bay Area is a ridiculous mess, with BART, Caltrain, ACE, Amtrak, VTA all run by different entities. It's a total disgrace. Unsynchronized, disconnected, few good ways to transfer from one to the other, and schedules that don't make sense. I tried commuting on ACE, their trains are pretty nice (WiFi!), but their LAST evening train leaves San Jose at 6:38 PM, which you'd know is useless if you've ever worked at a tech company.

We need expanded and coordinated schedules, trains that actually connect in sensible ways, and a ton more tracks, which is just not going to happen. Look how difficult it is to get BART extended anywhere.

> FB should be offering to pay to modernise it and build stations

I'm sure Facebook pays taxes, why should they be building train stations on top of that?

Google builds internet balloons and self-driving cars, a few train stations wouldn't be too terribly absurd for a big tech company.

I don't think anyone is saying Facebook et al. should be expected or required to undertake municipal improvement programs, but in certain cases it really could be in their own best interest to do so.

California's high speed rail project is estimated to cost $70B. That's like 15% of Google's entire market cap... I'm not sure trains (esp. in the Bay Area) are within the capability of even the largest internet companies. Plus: You'd probably require some level of imminent domain to seize land -- which would be wildly unpopular and generate a lot of bad PR.

I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The original commenter's suggestion was to "modernize" a train route that runs near their campus. My assumption is that the route is currently functional, only missing the required stations and amenities necessary for relatively short-term passenger transport. I don't think high speed is called for in that situation, just anything capable of making a commute more bearable and less costly, therefore a conventional passenger train would likely suffice.

Additionally, it would still be a primarily municipal project, for which Facebook (and perhaps other interested private parties) would only partially contribute to in monetary terms.

Maybe it'll be cheaper than sustaining a private bus fleet in the long run? Maybe it'll be a good PR move for the company to show that they want to give back to the community they're based in? Not to mention, New Balance did it, so it's not exactly an unprecedented corporate move: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/new-bala...

To help them attract and retain talent. I couldn't say if it's a worthwhile investment financially, but there's certainly plenty of reasons why a company may want to improve public services beyond what their tax dollars are capable of.

Precedent: Facebook paid Caltrain a bunch of money to clean up those tracks a few months back.

http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/Projects/Caltrain_Capi...

There's actually a European company that is working with Facebook to do just this. I don't remember the company's name, but I met their CEO a couple months ago at the Pioneer Summit (which had a focus on transportation, among other things).

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