Google’s New Private Ferry Won’t Defuse Tension Over Buses | Hacker News Reader

Google’s New Private Ferry Won’t Defuse Tension Over Buses

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24 pointsmaaarghk48 comments

It's simple: Bulldoze Mountain View and de-suburbify it. That, or move the graves out of Colma and turn it into a second Hong Kong, because we don't have many options.

People want to live in the temperate area of the bay. Younger people, in general, aren't interested in the suburbs anymore, and that leaves SF and Oakland.

Parts of Mountain View are actually being bulldozed and re-built with higher density. The shopping center at San Antonio / El Camino for example.

There is plenty of infill redevelopment going on within a few miles of the Googleplex, but of course building housing takes longer than printing job offer letters.

"People want to live in the temperate area of the bay."

The weather in the south bay is better than in SF.

It's not quite so simple. Young male tech workers move to the city because it has more girls. Trying to build a city where the tech industry is isn't going to work because people will know that it will be disproportionately males living there.

Probably not Colma then. Its the foggiest place I have ever been.

This talk of "Google taking from the city without giving anything back" seems bizarre to me. What is Google taking? People are free to live where ever they want, and it's not Google's fault.

And how about all the economic activity that these people bring to the city?

What you say is true but it does not matter to the people who disapprove, or protest. It's not about overall impact, it's about the impact on them specifically and they view it as negative on them. Does not matter that the city is enriched, overall, that restaurants prosper, that niche stores become sustainable, what matters is that these things don't benefit the detractors directly.

> Does not matter that the city is enriched, overall, that restaurants prosper, that niche stores become sustainable, what matters is that these things don't benefit the detractors directly.

Or as Mark Twain put it, "It's not the progress I mind; it's the change I don't like."

This refers to the Google buses using the bus stops which are usually reserved to the Muni buses only.

I see your point but it has to be more than that. These protestors must see that it's better to share these stops than to have extra cars on the street, or more crowding on the already shitty public transit.

The sentiment is that they are taking away housing options from people who have lived in SF for years and not only contributing to the gentrification of the community, but not even giving back or participating in it as well.

And those people that complain are probably google users. I say fuck em! Google owes SF nothing, people live there by their own choosing, not because of anything google did, but just that SF is a great place to live (no polar vortex for one!) As for Oakland, I can only imagine that the injection of wealth by google employes spending some of their income in the east bay would be a good thing, it sure needs it.

That comes back to the idea that people have the right to live where they like.

People who oppose gentrification believe that the government (or the "community") should try to influence who lives where. While it's absolutely true that people impose externalities on one another, this doesn't give the government carte-blanche to determine how people live their lives, or who should live where.

In the case of SF, the reasons range from the plausible (people of differing income levels living together contributes to the overall wellbeing of the city) to the discriminatory (artists are more valuable to the city's social life than tech works) to the downright nasty (tech nerds are bratty privileged rich kids)

In previous stories it was mentioned that the private bus would in some cases stop at the public stop and prevent regular public transit buses from using it for some period of time, forcing people to board the public bus not at the proper position and so forth.

Sharing a system of public bus stations requires some coordination, which it seems is just starting now.

Recent reports suggest that Google is cutting a deal with the city to pay for usage of bus stops. Is that accurate?

Why do people think this has anything to do with the bus protests? Can't Google be trying to find a more efficient way to get their employees to work ergo getting more labor out of their salaried employees?

<code> We certainly don’t want to cause any inconvenience to SF residents, and we’re trying alternative ways to get Googlers to work,” </code>

How about bringing the office closer to them. Put a Google office in Oakland near a Bart station?

http://www.bart.gov/stations

People won't complain if Oakland starts to gentrify, right? Maybe Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc can work out a deal with the city to get tax breaks. It's a win for everyone.

The protests over gentrification that turned into brick-throwing were in Oakland. I can't imagine they'd prefer more people living there because of a short commute.

Well, is there anywhere on the map that is suitable?

http://www.bart.gov/stations

Like I said[1] in another comment here, I think a big source of the problem is that BART doesn't reach enough spots. We need more spots on that map.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7028107

Sure but that'll take a decade, if not two. It takes forever to build these types of systems in America, especially California.

Not for the protesters. The complaint is that tech workers are driving up rents and housing prices in SF, not that they're causing traffic. (As I understand it.) If there was an office anywhere on Bart, people would even more likely to live in SF and Oakland.

People won't complain if Oakland starts to gentrify, right?

I wouldn't hold my breath for that one. People generally complain when any place starts to gentrify.

I can generally empathize with most movements, even if I disagree -- one can take a look at the goal and see the reason, no matter how misguided. This is not one of those times. I sincerely don't get how Google/Tech are the targets of hate. I can understand people upset over them using muni stops, but breaking windows of busses in west Oakland, and getting mad at ferries?

Can someone explain this to me? Why is the anger directed at tech?

Tech employees are the San Francisco equivalent of investment bankers.

Well, like the article says - Google Bus just became the physical target for their anger. What they're upset about is tech workers' wealth raising the cost of living in SF. Google is a big name even outside of tech, so Google's buses in SF are the "low hanging fruit" to vent anger towards.

For the record, I do agree that tech salaries are very high and the fact that most of them like to live in SF displaces everyone before them. I don't know how to fix this problem or even exactly who's at fault, but I definitely see how difficult this would be if I was not in tech trying to live in SF and watching landlords raising rent all around me and my current landlord trying to find ways to get me to leave. I think this problem is worth talking about and a solution should be pursued. I can't help but think a lot of this could be eased by having better public-transportation in the bay-area for everyone, maybe tech companies should all get together and help fund & extend BART faster into areas that may help techies not feel like they have to live in SF. I live in the East Bay because BART is less than 20mins away from my house. So a quick drive, ride on the train while watching Anime on my kindle then suddenly I'm on market-street. Good enough for me. Outside of commute hours, SF is about 45mins away from me by car. Close enough for anything I'd want to do in SF without actually living there.

BART stops at Palo Alto, Mountain View, Redwood/FosterCity, Danville, Milpitas, San Ramon and San Jose might help people spread out more instead of concentrating into SF.

Is that hyperloop project still planned?

Palo Alto and Mountain View would need to 1. Want those BART stops. If they're anything like the suburbs of Boston, however, you will get a ton of pushback from "higher-class" suburbanites not wanting the "riff-raff" from the city, who can't even afford cars, able to easily/cheaply get to their cities. 2. Allow re-development such that they have enough density/low-cost housing to support the number of BART riders needed to justify those new stops. Without this, there won't be any new housing for people to spread out to. 3. Have a consistent enough transit system from the BART stops, so that you can actually access the areas more than a 30 min. walk from the BART stops 4. Build up paths to allow people to walk to and around the BART stops. I've noticed in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, there often aren't sidewalks: if you want to walk on a major East-West route, you'll be doing it in the same lane as cars going 45.

yes, #1 is exactly the reason why BART didn't go very far down the peninsula when it was originally built. the extension to Millbrae and SFO was added decades later and at a huge cost.

The logic as I understand it is quite straightforward. Google could have it employees use public transit to serve the mass transit need. This is what is done in NYC and DC, for the most part. An interesting exception being DoD shuttle buses that run from e.g. the Pentagon metro stop to nearby other military offices (this despite the Arlington bus transit system being arguably superior).

I'm assuming Google's problem with that is that the public transit sucks over there, but it will never get fixed by building out an entirely separate mass transit system. On the other hand I'm not sure how you magically fix their mass transit just by wanting to be on those buses. Even if Google funds it I'm not sure how it's guaranteed those funds go toward fixing mass transit quickly (and sustainably).

TL;DR: They're mad because public transit would be better for everybody if Mr. Moneybags would actually have his cadre of Baby Moneybagses ride the public transit too. They're not Luddites though, they'd be fine with tech if it wasn't making a caste system.

This is clearly not the real problem. It's supposedly a symbol of the real problem, but I don't understand what that is. Supposedly something to do with entitlement and income disparity.

I was most able to understand this on an emotional level in this article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/12/17/251992...

Perhaps. I'd have to dive waaaay deeper than I have time to to sort our rhetoric from the underlying issues of contention. I'd be interested as to why they fixate on Google in particular for income disparity but it wouldn't surprise me either.

Perhaps a group or an individual fanning the anger towards Google is hinting at a payoff.

Large donations to certain charities or contracting certain builders for building projects "to help the poor" should do.

Protection money from the socialist mafia?

"Nice little team of programmers you have here ... be a pity if anything unfortunate happened to them, huh? Or to the nice buses they ride? How about a donation to the San Francisco Benevolent Society and we make sure that they're all ... safe."

I think the ferry idea is interesting, because the Bay is totally underutilized. I used to live in the Mission and work in Oakland, and I'd just bike to the ferry terminal. Aside from being a relaxing way to spend your morning commute, you have an alternate to BART or driving. Why shouldn't Peninsula and South Bay communities have the same access to ferries?

Ferry idea is pretty inefficient actually since neither Googleplex is by the bay where the ferry can drop off nor do all googlers live near the Piers in the city. Taking bus from Redwood city to MV and then back from Ferry landing to home in SF is a big time waster. I think if the Bus deal works out with the city, that would make most sense.

The Googleplex is by the bay, it's just that the bay is pretty silted in around Mountain View, and there's a nature park where the ferry would come in. Historically, there used to be a boat landing right next to where GOOG is which was built by the Rengstorff family. Here's a link: http://www.ci.mtnview.ca.us/services/learn_about_our_city/ci...

Ferry to MV would be ~30 minutes or less from SF. The Vallejo fairy is nearly twice as long and it takes an hour. Then from Redwood City to MV it's about 20 minutes, depending on traffic.

The 30 minutes is on par with what it would take by bus, and much better than what it would take if there's heavy traffic between SF and RWC.

The location of the piers is pretty good. It's close to BART, SOMA, etc... It's really tricky to navigate the downtown traffic as well between 7 and 9 as well, so you'd save some efficiencies from that.

It's probably roughly on par with a bus, maybe a bit longer than the ideal case but probably better than the average case.

Maybe they could just write a check to electrify the caltrain a few years faster: http://sonic.net/~mly/Caltrain-Electrification/electrificati... . I never got why it has taken CA so long to make this happne.

after protests against ferry, the next mode of transportation will be a private plane i guess, something like Osprey. Or may be submarine.

Personal quadrocopters, flying googlers to and from home?

yep, looking at the prototypes like e-Volo, one can try to imagine the Bay Area skies in 5 years.

I think that a fleet of howdahs would prevent a lot of aggressive attacks on google transport. Wouldn't really quell the accusations of elitism, though...

Or possibly a nuclear-powered drill. That is, until they find a way to lift employees into orbit, and have them perform orbital jumps down to Mountain View.

Of course, all of these would be moot once Google supplies all employees with a private teleporter. I gather that's what the Glass team are working on now.

I think that the only way that these protestors will be happy is if people who work at Google or Facebook just curl up in a ball and die.

defuse? a new superyacht is just going to make this worse. i mean seriously, why can't they take caltrain?

"Improving Bay Area Economy Pushing Caltrain Ridership To Limit" http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/11/29/caltrain-may-be-...

And that's at just ~54,000 daily riders. The big tech companies on the peninsula must have well over 100,000 employees.

Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!

Spoken like someone who has never tried getting from Caltrain in downtown Mountain View to north Bayshore where GOOG is.

Even if Caltrain could handle the increased ridership (which it can't), downtown MTV streets can't support the increased shuttle density that would be required to make this work.

Oh, and good luck getting the MTV city council to approve any kind of public transportation improvements into N. Bayshore.

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