So, are the people on the bus executives, middle management, or just workers?
The images I have found seem to show people who look completely unremarkable boarding those buses. Attacking the vehicle while it is traveling at highway speed certainly includes the possibility of a deadly, fiery crash. Should that happen, public sentiment and optics would probably go against “the resistance”.
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I hear those things are awfully loud…
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No question they’re massive tax dodgers, but I think that’s a separate discussion.
A tech firm, supplying it’s own bus, can easily offer/get several things:
- Nicer buses with nicer seating.
- Routes planned around where their employees live (shorter commute).
- Routes scheduled around the company work day (shorter commute).
- An opportunity for employees from different parts of the company to socialize, building company loyalty and improving internal communication.
Public transit can’t do any of these things. Even #1, the nicer buses, seems possible if you gave transit enough money. But you can only make the buses so nice until the ridership starts destroying them. But on a company bus accountability to the company itself will stop employees from doing things that damage seats. (just to be clear, it’s not that the riders are fundamentally more responsible, people just tend to be more responsible with employer property than public goods).
It doesn’t matter how much money you give Seattle, these tech firms will always be able to give their employees a much better commute by supplying their own buses.
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Some companies actually are near public transport. Oracle for example is walking distance from a Caltrain stop. HP, SAP and several other companies in Palo Alto are pretty near the train and on several bus routes, plus there are employee shuttles. But Cupertino, where Apple is located, is kind of in a transit hole. There really is not a good way to get there except by car.
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The Silicon Valley tech industry is “starving public spending”? For fuck’s sake, they fund public spending. They pay a huge amount in taxes. Any locality would be delighted to get as much in taxes from local industry as the Bay Area gets from the tech industry. Sure, they should pay even more, but they’re hardly fucking impoverishing their communities or suppressing public services.
Getting a large number of commuters to take buses instead of driving cars is a huge benefit to the community, even if they’re private buses.
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Apple have been there long enough that they could have contributed to better public transport infrastructure.
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Brothers @aluchko and @jnala, you’re clashing with the whole narrative of this thread that everything Google/Apple/Amazon* does is bad.
*(Or any company that doesn’t involve manufacturing a ukulele out of found objects)
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I wonder how long it will be before tech firms start offering VR commuting to their staff, to a virtual office. They could solve all sorts of issues with travel and cost of living.
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Lots of tech employees work from home, though we use slack for communication, not some VR toy.
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The good news is, they already have a bus simulator out there, off the shelf.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/desert-bus-the-very-worst-video-game-ever-created
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Don’t hold your breath on any kind of widespread telecommuting. The HR Culture of control is still so pervasive in corporate America and the impetus to squeeze every extra minute of unpaid work from employees is so great that the tech industry will be requiring a lot of warm bodies at desks for at least another decade, even if they experimented with remote work:
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I know a lot of firms are doing that. But I really do think that an actual physical office, particularly if it is a nice campus, has a lot of benefits. VR can’t replace face-to-face interactions (yet).
Plus, I think there’s a lot of people who don’t do well working from home, having a rigidly segmented work/life balance and a requirement to leave the house can be a good thing.
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No, public employee unions managed to suck all the available money in salaries and benefits in a version of Parkinson’s Law. Many BART janitors make more than the reviled tech employees in those buses.
The tech boom doubled San Francisco’s income in the last decade alone. What SF does with the extra $5B/year is anyone’s guess, but it’s certainly not going into improving services, paying down the debt or supporting a much larger population. The City could solve its housing crisis by buying every homeless person a $1M apartment in just two years, or build a proper subway network.
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…well, that’s if you’re not the nut* who has to sit on shirtless on the whammy bar behind the bus playing Guitar Feu and taking good pics of the incoming sand shots for your Petapixel project.
*Bro points or something. Safer then pooper-scoopering a cougar or biking Cupertino while 30+ing?
they fund public spending.
So that’s why the super-cool can live on the coast, just covering the house in vinyl ad wraps, right?
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It’s not the employees fault that management doesn’t fill positions.
Sure - a janitor making big bucks because he or she works overtime is good copy. But - if their hard work is a problem- either hire staff or live with the filth.
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I was thinking line-dancing buses on the salt flats.
Yee Haw!
That… and this.
For no reason, maybe this is what the buses would dance to…
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BART connects everything to Oakland, which is the natural center of the Bay Area but which inconveniently contains most of the region’s blacks, communists, and other undesirables. Rich people everywhere believe that crime spreads along public transit corridors and that the Wrong Sort of People moving in next door destroy their precious property values.
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It’s not even like that. The problem in large part is the domino effect this creates. It incentivises these largely young and wealthy groups of workers to live further away from work. This further gentrifies the areas they move to and prices locals out making it necessary for them in turn to commute.
While I have no qualms with employer provided transit (in principal at least), I can also see how this creates tensions.
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I agree getting out of the house every day is healthy but I would much rather walk a few blocks to a co-op hackerspace from which I could VR into a workgroup at Google than have to commute for literally hours in a wasteful and dangerous motor vehicle 
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