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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

To point 1 - because private citizens do not generally have a democratic voice in the decisions of private companies unless they’re stockholders. You could make the argument that any decision made by any private company could impact the lives of $GROUP, therefore $GROUP should be able to vote on whether that private company should be able to do $THING or not. That’s not how it works, it never has been, and I don’t see why busses changes that. Note: I live on the other side of the country and have no dog in this fight so I totally accept that I could be missing something.

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Well, non-stockholder private citizens do get involved in some of the decisions of private companies. Anti-pollution and workplace safety laws are just two of many such examples.

You may object that those are "laws", and different from the views of private citizens in the local neighborhood. But even on that smaller scale, if a company wants to expand into a new building, it will need a building permit, which requires a public hearing. Private citizens have the right to attend the meeting and object or support the change. This is public input on the otherwise internal business decisions of the company, no?

A neighborhood can complain about commercial trucks going through a street which is a convenient shortcut for a company at the edge of town, but noisy and possibly dangerous to the people on the street. In response, the city might prohibit through truck traffic for that street, causing the company drivers to take a longer route.

Or the other way around, the city passed a law saying that alcohol could not be sold within distance X of a school, unless the parents of the school said otherwise. There was a 3 star restaurant just barely within distance X of my elementary school, who had to ask for, and got, permission to continue to serve alcohol with their meals.

There have always been tradeoffs in how to use shared public resources, so I don't understand why you say "That’s not how it works, it never has been."

In some sense you are right - I do argue that $GROUP = "the citizens" should always "be able to vote whether that private company should be able to do $THING or not." I don't think we should always do so, no, but that's not the issue.

But, busses, really? They are evil now? With all the good they do, I think maybe they should be a protected class or something.

I didn't use the word "evil" though certainly some do. I commented on why one claimed benefit - reducing the number of cars on the street and making more effective use of a commute time - can be reasonably seen as "frivolous" to some.

Everything has good and bad in it. Even buses. There's always a tension. Sometimes there are mechanisms, like public input to planning decisions, which help reduce the tension. Sometimes there aren't. Tension rarely just disappears on its own.

The private company is making use of community owned resources so the community should have a say

Do you not pay for your car/bus and truck licences in the USA.

And dont forget its the bus riders taxes that help pay for those roads too.

Which the private company paid a LOT more than the average person to create. Not sure why so many people seem to think that companies pay nothing fro infrastructure.

How much did Google pay for the SF street infrastructure? I thought they didn't pay anything until this January, and even then it's $1 per each use of a bus stop.

Also, why the comparison of an "average person" to a private company? Surely the private citizens of San Francisco, as a whole, have invested far more in the city infrastructure than Google has.

Street infrastructure is paid for by taxes, including payroll taxes, corporate income taxes, and gas taxes, all of which Google pays.

This is only true in the broadest possible sense, where "taxes", "government" and "streets" are considered collectively without regard to federal, state or local jurisdiction.

But in the U.S., jurisdiction matters a lot. For example, there is (apparently) a Google bus stop at the 18th and Dolores Streets in San Francisco. Dolores Street is a local street, which means it is the responsibility of the City of San Francisco. Maintenance of that street is thus paid for primarily with local and fees taxes collected within the City. Specifically property taxes, business license taxes, local sales taxes, and charges for local services. None of the taxes that you mentioned Google paying would directly fund the maintenance of Dolores Street.

Google does pay some of these local taxes, because they have a small office in San Francisco. But the purpose of these shuttles is primarily to transport people outside of San Francisco. It's the City of Mountain View that benefits (from a tax perspective) from these shuttles. That disconnect is at the heart of the complaint: that San Francisco taxpayers are shouldering the burden, while not accruing the benefits.

> Google does pay some of these local taxes, because they have a small office in San Francisco

350,000 sqft is not small.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/07/google-...

It's small relative to the Googleplex, which has 2 million sq. ft, and will be 3.1 million sq. ft next year.

It's small relative to the number of people who commute from SF to Google by private bus. ("more than 3,500" in 2012, says http://www.sfbg.com/2012/04/18/private-bus-problem; I can't find newer numbers in all the noise, but it seems that more commute to MV than work in the SF office.)

It's small relative to the market. That is, there's some 84 million sq. ft. of office space in SF. https://www.cassidyturley.com/DesktopModules/CassidyTurley/D... . The vacancy rate is 8%. So Google has under 0.5% of the occupied office space in SF.

To double check, the biggest employers are the city/county (25,000), UCSF (20,000), Wells-Fargo (8,200), SF school district (8,200), and Gap (6,000). See http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/01/top-5-l... . The Wells Fargo Bank headquarters building alone is 640,000 sq. ft.

I agree that it's mid-size were it a company primarily based in SF, but for most of the relevant metrics, it's small.

Google is primarily located in Mountain View, in Santa Clara county.

My question was how much of San Francisco's street infrastructure - a different city and county - was supported by Google. Did Google pay "a lot more" than the citizens of the city, as SteveGerencser suggested?

The residents and businesses in SF pay about $1 billion in property taxes. How does that compare to specifically Google's contribution? Who pays more in payroll, corporate income, and gas taxes to San Francisco, Twitter or Google?

If the answer is Twitter, then shouldn't they have a bigger say than Google?

FWIW, Google has a SF office that is about as large as Twitter.

I also agree with raldi that this line of reasoning is invalid, unless you want Wells Fargo to own & make most of the decisions in SF. (Most of the current SF infrastructure was financed by municipal bonds, many of which were funded by Wells and other Bay-Area financial institutions. My girlfriend used to be a bond-trader at Wells and specifically remembers buying the bonds used to fund construction of the new Bay Bridge.)

You're backpedaling. Previously, you said:

> I thought they didn't pay anything until this January

Now that I've pointed out three ways they pay for SF city infrastructure, you're moving the goalposts.

> Google is primarily located in Mountain View

But they still have thousands of desks in their San Francisco office space.

Also, every employee on those shuttles is either paying SF property tax or paying rent that, in part, goes to paying SF property tax. They also pay state and local sales taxes, which also go towards public infrastructure.

Indeed! But more out of ignorance than backpedaling. I'm apparently 7 years out of date, since the SF office opened in October 2007.

bizjournals.com says 2,500 seats, which is 2nd place after Salesforce at 4,000. Tied for 3rd is Lucasfilm and Twitter, with 1,500 each, and Zynga in 4th with 1,300.

(Take those numbers with a grain of salt. I see others say that Twitter has 2,000 employees in SF.)

Regardless, my questions stand: 1) why compare a company's taxes to an "average person"'s taxes, instead of to the citizenry as a whole, 2) just how much does Google bring into the city in direct taxes, compared to the private citizens? 3) is that sufficient compensation for how the company uses the street infrastructure?

Yes, of course the employees on those shuttles are paying taxes. The full analysis would need to look at who would living there if there were no buses, and the level of taxes they pay in that case.

For example, the buses are subsidized transport that provide an effective untaxable salary increase, which is a tax shift away from the city. Fuel cost alone is $10/day/vehicle, and TCO is $48 using AAA's estimate of $0.6/mile. SuperShuttle charges $17 to get to SFO, so $10/day is deliberately low-balling it.

This means that someone making $80K/year from Google/Mtn View, with subsidized transport, gets an effective $2,500+/year raise, and can outbid someone in the city making $81K/year. In which case, the city ends up with lower taxes.

I never said this wasn't complicated, only that there are reasonable arguments for why some people could consider the "buses are better than ..." thesis "having no sound basis (as in fact or law)".

This is a bad argument. Should the community have a say in how you use those same resources? They are public goods...it is one thing to set rules that everyone has to abide by, and it is another entirely to focus on how one group uses the good.

Are they using more than the road?

They were and are using the curbside public transit bus stops. There is a local regulation stating that any non-public-transit use of the bus stop (including stopping, standing, and parking) is subject to around $250 in fines (and probably immediate towing for parked vehicles). This should apply to any non-transit vehicle: private passenger car, delivery truck, ride-share (taxis with city-regulated licenses/medallions sometimes get special transit privileges), and obviously a private bus. This is understandable because the efficiency of the transit buses depends on them being able to quickly make stops, which they can't do even if a car is dropping off a passenger in the bus stop. SF residents were complaining that they had received this fine simply for being caught dropping off a passenger with no transit bus nearby. Yet the Google buses continued to use public-transit bus stops at regular times, sometimes hindering the public-transit bus, and never received a fine that I have heard of.

Under a recent agreement, the google buses will pay $1 per use of the public bus stops. On the one hand, this option is not available to the general public, only to large corporations with enough money. On the other hand, if the city strictly enforced the law, large corporations with enough money would just go purchase local businesses with commercial loading zones, and use those for the buses--not an ideal situation either (having commercial real-estate and loading zones tied up for transit).

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