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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

The issue was they're using public bus stops. It's not hard to picture why it's demeaning to be standing at the public infrastructure and see a fancy shuttle come and pick up "Google People" while you're left waiting to ride with the proletariat. Especially demeaning when the shuttle is in the way of the real bus.

Imagine if the NYC subway had a special car for Wall Street workers that was much more comfortable.

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I get that it may be demeaning but that analogy doesn't really work. It would be like the NYC Subway didn't go to Wall Street at all, and the banks built their own subway for their workers which ran from an NYC Subway station.

How is this any different from someone driving a 2017 Lexus versus a 1990 Toyota? Both may be a reflection of the income one receives. Both take up the same public infrastructure of the road and parking spaces.

I'm sorry, but no. Private busses using public bus stops — and blocking public bus traffic — is not an income issue.

Are the private busses in any way holding up public bus service? Is there a serious reported story somewhere establishing this?

SFMTA's most recent evaluation:

https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2015/Eval...

TL;DR: Of an average of ~3000 "stop events" per day, 2.7%, or 80-ish, resulted in a shuttle blocking MUNI.

Shuttles were also seen to block travel and/or bike lanes in some 35% of their stops.

I don't get your point, but if you park your car in a public bus stop you're an asshole regardless of its value.

You seemed to imply in your original comment that taking the Google bus versus not taking the Google bus boils down to a class issue of "haves" and "have nots", so I was trying to illustrate that no matter what that class distinction would still exist.

If the Wall Street workers paid for it, what would it matter? The sense of entitlement is astounding. Whenever someone drives by in a Ferrari I don't suddenly feel entitled to throw rocks just because they aren't letting me drive it.

Want to ride the Google bus? Get a job at Google. If people studied code with as much interest as they study the Kardashians, perhaps more could move up the ladder.

The solution is that everyone at Google should drive their cars one day per week to simply illustrate the value of the Google bus. Perhaps all those workers could just stop buying things for a week and see how badly those people wish they were back.

"If people studied code with as much interest as they study the Kardashians, perhaps more could move up the ladder."

It's really hard to see why people hate techies in SF isn't it?

The point isn't the existence of the shuttle, it's the freeloading on public infrastructure. Google was removing paying transit riders while using public transit infrastructure and inconveniencing the public. Oh and rent near a Google shuttle stop suddenly surged because of demand from Google employees. Quite literally a recipe for creating discontent in a neighborhood.

Google got the message and made a large donation, but like most things the damage was easy to make and hard to recover from.

And the solution is simple--Google (and any other company running a shuttle that uses public stops) should pay for what its using.

SF Muni is subsidized and severely overloaded. Taking some riders away doesn't hurt the system, it helps it cope.

If BART somehow ran a subway out to those neighborhoods, the rent there would be even higher. Having a reliable transit system is a very valuable amenity that most of the city lacks.

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